Witch Hunts Over Substance

The fix is in. Congressional Democrats have no legislative agenda to run on for the 2018 midterm elections, so they’ve made a hobby out of Republican witch-hunts instead.

In lieu of discussing any policy reforms of substance, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is urging progressives to make the general theme of “ethics” a rallying cry on the campaign trail. She recently accused the Trump administration of "brazen corruption, cronyism and incompetence," and patted her fellow progressives on the back for working to “restore dignity to our democracy and give power back to the people.”

Now I’ve witnessed some impressive displays of cognitive dissonance during my years in Washington, but this one is truly special.

This is the same former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who tried to gloss over the secret details of Obamacare by telling Americans they had to “pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”

It’s the same former Speaker Pelosi who stood idly by as Obama-era treasury secretary Timothy Geithner lived rent-free in a JPMorgan top executive’s $3.5 million townhouse while overseeing the TARP bailout in 2008. (By the way, JPMorgan ended up receiving $25 billion in federal rescue funds.)

During her speakership, Pelosi herself requested nearly $200 million of luxury private jets to allow Democrat lawmakers and high-level bureaucrats to travel in style. You didn’t hear the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency criticizing Pelosi’s carbon footprint ambitions, probably because they were busy spending $92.4 million to purchase, rent, install, and store high-end office furniture from 2005-2015.

The Democratic Party doesn’t want to keep D.C. honest. When it comes to corruption, they are the worst offenders in Washington. Rep. Pelosi and House Democrats are simply using the concept of corruption as a political strategy to get themselves in a position of power to impeach President Trump.

The only way to truly “drain the Swamp” is to make government smaller. We must reduce the opportunities for truly corrupt politicians like Rep. Nancy Pelosi to pick winners and losers at the expense of the rest of us.

It’s time to take a stand. The American people aren’t being heard by their government because the game is rigged. Washington isn’t broken. It’s “fixed.”

SOURCE 

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David Horowitz Freedom Center Declares Victory Over Censorship Attempt

The David Horowitz Freedom Center won a major battle on Friday afternoon, defeating well-financed leftwing groups trying to run it out of business and suffocate free speech in our country.

Here is what happened.  Last Tuesday the Freedom Center was informed by WorldPay, which handles its online donations, that Mastercard would no longer complete transactions for the Freedom Center because it had been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and a similarly leftist organization called Color of Change.org. This is what we were told by MasterCard: “The organization Color of Change has published an updated website named bloodmoney.org and within it has listed a number of merchants that purport to accept Mastercard and have content which is hateful in nature. .. [and] which may be advocating for violence. We have identified the sites below as belonging to your institution…”

Just as in Alice in Wonderland: the verdict before the trial. The Freedom Center was judged guilty of “hate crimes” without a chance to protest and its online fundraising was blocked.  Because on line fundraising is the lifeblood of our organization, this was an existential threat to our future.  We were mobilizing for a costly legal proceeding against Mastercard when, on Friday afternoon, four days after the attempt to destroy us, WorldPay and MasterCard backed down and informed us they were restoring our online services and donations.

Why this reversal? We believe it was due to the massive support we received across the Internet when the story broke, starting with Breitbart and immediately picked up by the Drudge Report. Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax, OAN, The Daily Caller, Ricochet, Crowder, Gateway Pundit, Volnation, Canada Free Press and a host of other sites, who correctly reported this attack on us as an attack on freedom of speech itself and a calculated effort by networked organizations of the left to pressure corporations like Mastercard and Visa to collaborate in their determined effort to erase conservatism from our national political dialogue.

One thing we know for sure is that despite this defeat, the left will keep up the pressure and the same thing will happen again—if not to the Freedom Center then to other conservative organizations and individuals.  This effort to shut down conservatism’s ability to raise the funds that make its voice heard was not the result of an arbitrary decision by some politically correct middle manager at Mastercard.  It was a decision at the highest corporate levels and the result of an elaborate and carefully designed campaign by leftist to silence conservative voices on the Internet and therefore in America’s national dialogue. This campaign is masterminded by two George Soros-funded organizations-- Media Matters, which has waged a holy war against conservatives in the media for two decades, and The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has managed to get itself taken seriously as an authority on “hate speech” and “hate groups” by a credulous and collaborative mainstream press.  Thus a sort of tape loop has been created in which the SPLC stigmatizes these groups by featuring them on its “hate maps,” associating  them with “neo fascism” and “racism” and putting them on the equivalent of Joseph McCarthy’s subversives list which the mainstream media then obligingly uses in its reporting and activist organizations like Color of Change and bloodmoney.org in lobbying corporations such as Mastercard and social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

There is a method in the madness of this Soros-funded network.  Its constituent parts collaborate in transforming the reasonable policy differences that are actually the health of a democracy into dire examples  of racial hostility and hatred. Thus conservative concerns for federal immigration laws and secure borders become anti-immigrant bigotry and hateful racism. Thus the Freedom Center’s campaign against anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas university groups makes it not only a “hate group,”  according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, but its eponymous CEO  “the Godfather of the anti-Muslim movement in America.”  When these slanders are magnified by the reporting of a liberal press, it is little wonder a corporation like Mastercard feels like it might be next as a target who enables hate speech, and joins the fray.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has gotten away with this hatred masquerading as anti-hate for far too long. The SPLC recently paid a $3.4 million settlement to Majid Nawaz, a devout Muslim and also a fierce critic of Islamic terrorism after it labeled him an “anti-Muslim extremist.”  All the other dozens of conservative groups similarly slandered should be developing their own legal defense funds to go after this reckless and mendacious organization and its enemies list.  The David Horowitz Freedom Center certainly is.

While the Freedom Center is glad to have won this recent battle against the left’s effort to shut it down, as we’ve noted we believe the threat to free speech is greater than our particular case and also very much far from over. The enemies of free speech may have been rebuffed this time, but they feel that they have the winning hand and will continue to play it until America has become a one party state of the politically correct with conservative views ruthlessly suppressed.  Our own Robert Spencer, director of JihadWatch.org  still has two of his funding pages shut down by MasterCard.  Just this past week, David Horowitz’s Twitter page was locked down for the better part of a day, until a direct appeal to Twitter ceo Jack Dorsey reversed the ban. Prager U. was suddenly disappeared from Facebook until protests cause it to relent. Alex Jones and InfoWars are still residing in the darkness imposed by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The censorship powers of Social Media are awesome and historically unprecedented. When they are amplified by the arbitrary financial power of corporations such as Mastercard and Visa, the result is a leviathan willing and able to  crush our basic freedoms and constitutional guarantees without a moment’s remorse. What those of us who care about free speech must do now is form a coalition across party lines and ideologies in defense of free speech. Freed speech is the most basic freedom we have because all our other freedoms are dependent on it. We may disagree with our coalition partners about everything under the sun, except this.

The right to dissent and to disagree is what separates us from countries in which civil wars and coup d’etats are commonplace. Private corporations cannot be the arbiters of free speech.  Ben Wizner, the head of the ACLU’s Free Speech and Technology Project, said exactly that only this week. His sentiment was repeated word for word by the conservative Federalist site. Liberty Counsel is organizing a coalition of 60 mainly religious organizations who have been slandered as “hate groups” by the venomous SPLC (SPLC: Hate Machine). We must contact our representatives and call for a Congressional investigation of the war the left has launched on our freedom to dissent and disagree. If we cannot preserve freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, we cannot defend any of our freedoms, and we will have lost everything.

SOURCE 

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Bolton Confirms That the U.S. Will Defund UN Human Rights Office

National Security Advisor John Bolton on Thursday reaffirmed that the administration’s withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council is being accompanied by an end to U.S. funding for the world body’s human rights office. U.S. taxpayers have long paid the largest share.

Bolton told the Associated Press in Geneva that the U.S. will defund the HRC and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), by reducing by the relevant amount the sum that it pays into the regular U.N. operating budget.

CNSNews.com reported on the defunding decision in June, on the same day Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley announced President Trump’s decision to exit the HRC.

Based on gross national income and other factors, U.S. taxpayers account for 22 percent of the regular U.N. budget in “assessed contributions.” From that budget, the OHCHR/HRC draws a little more than 40 percent of its own budget (44 percent in 2017, 45 percent in 2016, 46 percent in 2015).

The rest of the OHCHR/HRC budget is met by “voluntary contributions” by member-states, and some non-governmental sponsors.

Apart from paying more than one-fifth of the regular U.N. budget, the U.S. has also traditionally topped the list of countries when it comes to the amount of those voluntary contributions.

This year, however, U.S. voluntary contributions to the OHCHR have already shown a sharp downward trend – $1 million for the first seven months of 2018, compared to $20.16 million in 2017, $17.05 million in 2016 and $16.25 million in 2015.

As a percentage of the total received in voluntary contribution, the U.S. has this year accounted for just 0.1 percent, compared to 14.1 percent last year, 13.1 percent in 2016 and 12.9 percent in 2015.

For the 2018-2019 biennium the OHCHR will receive $201.6 million from the U.N. regular budget, or about $100.8 million for each year. The defunding decision will therefore save American taxpayers roughly $22.1 million per year in assessed contributions, in addition to the amount already saved in voluntary contributions.

Haley said in June that the decision to leave the HRC followed unsuccessful efforts to fix problems including the presence of rights-abusers in its ranks and a skewed focus on Israel.

She stressed the administration will continue to promote human rights outside that forum, pointing to past U.S. initiatives in the U.N. Security Council, including a first-ever session “dedicated to the connection between human rights and peace and security” last year, and a session last January focused on human rights in Iran.

After its efforts to create a strong and effective HRC were frustrated in 2005-6, the George W. Bush administration – with Bolton as ambassador to the U.N. at the time – chose not to support or join the new body when it began operating.

President Obama reversed that policy in 2009. In overturning that decision last June, the U.S. became the first HRC member to voluntarily surrender its seat.

SOURCE

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Progressives: The Real World vs. Neverland

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child," Cicero astutely observed. For many self-described progressives today, however, this seems not to be a drawback. On the contrary, like adolescents -- insisting that they are grown-ups when their parents get in the way of their fun, but then running home for all their basic needs and creature comforts -- such people seem to give no thought to the past and equally little to the future.

Many people like this are said to suffer from a "Peter Pan Syndrome": the inability or unwillingness to grow up. In thought, they seem to lean to the political left. They want the government to take on the role of parent, even if that involves maxing out the country's "credit cards," so that even for a short time, they can live beyond what they earn.

Possibly in a hurry not to concern themselves with "dreary details," they pressed for a huge health-care bill, passed in 2010, that forever changed how we receive − or do not receive − medical care. It seems the details of the bill were too time-consuming and complex for the world of tweets and sound bites for them to pay attention to what it actually contained. When the bill was being debated, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

Many of these children in adult bodies were told, and actually believed, that better health care for everyone, including an unlimited number of illegal immigrants, would be attainable at a low cost, if only the government were to run it. That Medicare and Medicaid, both of which the U.S. government currently runs -- as well as the UK's National Health Service -- are going broke does not appear to have occurred to them. So they persist in their fantasy that government-controlled health care is not an ill but a cure.

Their fantasy is not restricted to the realm of health care. Many of these children in adult bodies believe that many, if not all, major aspects of the economy would be more efficient if the government ran them. This is in spite of the fact that the facilities currently run by the government -- from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Department of Motor Vehicles -- are inefficient, unhelpful or sometimes even downright hostile -- to the people they are meant to serve.

Many children in adult bodies also seem not to know that Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba, and is now failing in Venezuela. Yet, illogically, they appear to believe that they themselves could make it work. The irrational wish is evidently stronger than rational arithmetic.

These victims of arrested emotional development seem to confuse good motives with good results. They want better health care for a greater number of people at a lesser cost; so they fantasize that they can achieve it without denying care to those who are too old, too sick or too expensive to receive it. They kind-heartedly want a "more equal distribution of wealth"; so they fantasize that they can maneuver it without penalizing and discouraging the productive members of society, while rewarding and encouraging the unproductive ones. Yet this is exactly what has happened wherever the redistribution of wealth was tried.

These people, like all of us, want to be liked; so they fantasize that if they treat others kindly, the behavior will be reciprocated. They refer respectfully to the unelected theocratic leader of Iran as "Supreme Leader," even as oppressed Iranian demonstrators are arrested, beaten, tortured or killed.

Although bullies -- from those who terrorize fellow students in the schoolyard, to those who commit terrorist acts against innocent people across the world -- speak the language of hatred and force, children in adult bodies persist in their fantasy that if they and their government would only project appeasement and weakness, regimes such as that in Tehran would lay down their arms and hate-filled hegemonic aims. Hence, presumably, the support among progressives for the Iran nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama pushed through, without regard to its potential cost of a fully nuclear-capable Iran to America and the rest of the world after the deal expires.

These adults still clinging hard to their wishes seem to believe that crime is caused by poverty or other societal ills, and conclude that criminals are victims of society, such as Kathryn Michelle Steinle, who was shot to death in 2015 by illegal immigrant José Inés García Zárate. Garcia Zarate, a five-time deportee and drug offender. While Steinle met a cruel and untimely death, Garcia Zarate, not only was acquitted of murder and manslaughter, but aroused sympathy on the left.

These adults who apparently do not want to grow up call those who disagree with them "fascists" or "Nazis" -- without knowing the history of either -- yet accept as gospel any statements or actions, no matter how questionable, on the part of those who agree with their romanticized positions.

Like Peter Pan, these children wish to live in Neverland – a place that, in the real word, does not exist. Fictional characters, however, have the advantage of enjoying adventures with imaginary dangers. In the real world, unfortunately, people who never grow up may enjoy themselves for a time, but sooner or later the all-too-real dangers they had ignored, like an overstretched credit card, catch up with them. By the time their future is lost to them, it will be too late to wake up or rectify the situation. This means that the adults among us who acknowledge and take on the responsibilities of adulthood must be even more vigilant in exposing fantasies as child-like and preventing these daydreamers from doing even more damage than they already have done.

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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Vicious Leftist hate again

I have been saying for years now that the basic motivation of the Left is hate -- hate for the world about them and hate for their own country as part of that.  They hate and want to destroy "the system" around them.  Most people probably thought that what I said was a bit much but can anybody doubt it now, after witnessing the flood of hate that the Left have poured out at Mr Trump and his supporters?  There's another instance of it below.

And it's not just a few loonies doing it.  It's across the board -- from restaurant owners to Congresscritters -- with big contributions from Hollywood, the media, the educational system and most of the bureaucracy.  Fortunately, the military is always solidly conservative or else we might have had some sort of coup or revolution by now.

It just took a real conservative to come on the scene for the masks to fall.  Mr Trump's approval among Republican voters is now above 90% so Trumpism now IS American conservatism. The weak-kneed conservatives of the GOP in the past who allowed themselves to be abashed by Leftist flim-flam have now been left behind by history.  We are now looking at a real Left-Right contest and we see that in their motivations the American Left is just as hate-fuelled and murderous as the Left has always been, from the gory French revolution with its busy guillotines, to Stalin to Hitler and to Mao.  The basic psychology of all Leftists is clearly the same.

The  Leftist claim to be tolerant and compassionate was always a mask to enable them to gain dominance over others.  Now that the dominance is being reversed, the resultant rage has caused all such pretences to  be sidelined.  The Left are now revealed as the intolerant thugs and would-be murderers that they are.  America has enemies within its ranks and, as such, conservatives are America's defenders.  They must win or America will gradually become as shackled as any communist country. It was already developing that way until Trump came along and offered liberty from it.

And it's all so predictable if you know the classic Freudian defence mechanisms.  A major such defence mechanism if you want to deny the existence of something is projection.  You claim to see in others what is really true of yourself.  And Leftists have for  years been accusing conservatives of hate at the drop of a hat.  And you don't even need to drop a hat, usually.  So to see what is true of them you just have to look at what they have long said about conservatives.  They attempt to deflect attention away from their own hate by claiming to see it in others

In speaking of Leftists, I am of course speaking of committed Leftists, not unwary people who are conned into voting for them at election time.


The Democrats have about as much chance of abolishing ICE as they do of abolishing ice — as in, the solid form of water. That would be political suicide.

What about threatening ICE agents and other immigration officers, though? I mean, not just threatening them with the loss of their job or department — I mean literally threatening them. If you’re in a safe enough district and have no respect for yourself or others, why not?

Rep. Ruben Gallego is just such a person. He’s currently the congressman for Arizona’s 7th District, a comfortably Democrat parcel of that desert state where he carries about 135 percent of the vote most years. (Rough estimate.)

The district is centered in a part of Phoenix proper where Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t exactly the most popular entity there is. That’s why Rep. Gallego decided to do something very foolish.

His first mistake was retweeting MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Hayes’ brand of TV journalism is so yellow you actually have to adjust the color balance on your television every time you watch his show. He doesn’t disappoint on Twitter, either:

"Citizens having their papers demanded, then confiscated and then put in detention and ordered into deportation proceedings. The historical resonances here are clear as bell".

The Washington Post story in question has to do with issuing passports to individuals whose documents the state feels are questionable. Here is what is buried several paragraphs deep in the Washington Post’s story:

“The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents."

“Based on those suspicions, the State Department during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.”

This did not find its way into Hayes’ tweet, for reasons which “are clear as bell.” Hayes also didn’t mention the White House’s statement, reported by Fox News, that the number of passport applications declined, for this reason, had actually gone down.

For reasons which are not “clear as bell,” Rep. Gallego thought this was an appropriate response to that tweet:

"If you are a US government official and you are deporting Americans be warned. When the worm turns you will not be safe because you were just following orders. You do not have to take part in illegal acts ordered by this President's administration"

Basically, in case you’re a Chris Hayes-watcher and didn’t get the subtext there, he’s comparing immigration and other government officials to Nazis and threatening them. Solid work there, Rep. Gallego.

SOURCE

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Federal Judge Deals Major Blow to DACA, Sets Stage for Likely Supreme Court Showdown

The future of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program that allows the children of illegal immigrants to remain in the United States moved one step closer to a Supreme Court decision after a federal district court judge said there’s no question in his mind that the program violated federal law.

In a case brought by Texas and supported by other states, Judge Andrew Hanen of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas refused to strike down the program.

Hanen said an injunction to block the program was the wrong step because of the effect an injunction would have while the law’s ultimate fate is still being decided.

He also said that states opposing the program could not show irreparable harm in letting the program continue because they waited too long to bring their suit, Fox News reported.

“Here, the egg has been scrambled,” Hanen wrote, according to CNN. “To try to put it back in the shell with only a preliminary injunction record, and perhaps at great risk to many, does not make sense nor serve the best interests of this country.”

Hanen said the popularity of the program was not relevant, only whether it was legal.

“This court will not succumb to the temptation to set aside legal principles and to substitute its judgment in lieu of legislative action,” he wrote. “If the nation truly wants to have a DACA program, it is up to Congress to say so.”

Hanen agreed with the legal argument made by Texas that the 2012 action taken by the Obama administration to create DACA violated the Administrative Procedure Act and wrongly allows the federal government to ignore immigration law.

As such, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he expects DACA will eventually be quashed.

“We’re now very confident that DACA will soon meet the same fate as the Obama-era Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program, which the courts blocked after I led another state coalition challenging its constitutionality,” Paxton said in a statement.

“President Obama used DACA to rewrite federal law without congressional approval. Our lawsuit is vital to restoring the rule of law to our nation’s immigration system. The debate over DACA as policy is a question for lawmakers, and any solution must come from Congress, as the Constitution requires,” he said.

Hanen set up an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit which is likely to be a stepping stone to the U.S. Supreme Court, where DACA’s legality could finally be decided.

The Justice Department said it supported Hanen’s decision.

SOURCE

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Trump: Google, Facebook, Amazon in a ‘Very Antitrust Situation’

President Donald Trump warned Google, Facebook and Amazon that they are in a “very antitrust situation” in an interview Thursday, stopping short of saying he’d break them up.

“I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s that or Amazon or Facebook,” Trump said, according to Bloomberg. “As you know, many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them. But I just, I won’t comment on that.”

Trump added that “conservatives have been treated very unfairly” by Google, which is owned by Alphabet. “I tell you there are some moments where we say, ‘Wow that really is bad, what they’re doing.'”

The president has been stepping up his attacks on tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter the past few weeks for their censorship of conservatives, on saying Aug. 20 that it’s “very dangerous,” The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

Trump also said they are “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” in an Aug. 18 tweet. “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah called upon the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google for antitrust and anticompetitive behavior Thursday, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

“In the past, Google has offered arguments that its conduct is procompetitive,” Hatch wrote in a news release. “But much has changed since the FTC last looked at Google’s conduct regarding search and digital advertising.”

The FTC began an investigation of Google for anticompetitive behavior, but federal authorities dropped the case in 2013 — even though the FTC Bureau of Competition recommended an antitrust lawsuit be filed against Google.

SOURCE

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Meghan McCain Rips Trump from the Stage at Father’s Funeral

She has been taken in by the one-eyed media campaign that accused Trump of not speaking warmly enough of McCain.  Trump in fact gave the family anything they wanted for the funeral, including full military honours.  Deeds speak louder than words -- or so one would have hoped

The Arizona Republican’s daughter shared memories of her father, who she said was not deterred by his political detractors.

Without mentioning the president directly, McCain went on to include a variation of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan in describing the vision of America embraced by her father.

“The America of John McCain does not need to be made great again, because America was always great,” she said.

Trump was reportedly not invited to McCain’s funeral while his two predecessors — both of whom defeated McCain in presidential races — were among the speakers at Saturday’s event.

The grieving daughter drew what she sees as a deep distinction between her father’s service to his country and the “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly” or the “opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege.”

SOURCE

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Trump at 36 percent approval among African-Americans, new poll finds

Even as cable news networks debate reports of the existence of a recording of President Donald Trump using a racial slur, a new poll from Rasmussen Reports says that the president's approval rating among African-Americans is at 36 percent, nearly double his support at this time last year.

"Today's @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 36%," Rasmussen said in a tweet. "This day last year: 19%."

That is a staggeringly high number for a man who only won 8 percent of the African-American vote in 2016.

It is even more unexpected given the president's rocky history on matters related to race, including his current nasty feud with former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has alleged Trump said "n word" on the set of the reality-TV show "The Apprentice."

Conservatives celebrated the poll as a sign of trouble for Democrats in upcoming elections.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA, cited the poll as evidence that Trump "is breaking the Democrat party as we know it."

SOURCE

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Candace Owens Digs Up Old Obama Quote on Immigration That Goes Viral

Conservative commentator Candace Owens found a quote in former President Barack Obama’s political manifesto “The Audacity of Hope” that appears to fly in the face of current Democratic Party orthodoxy concerning immigration.

Earlier this week, Owens quoted Obama in a tweet from “Audacity” — which was released during Obama’s 2008 presidential run: “…this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole —it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans & put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”

On Sunday’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, Owens praised President Donald Trump for showing the courage to act on his convictions on issues like immigration.

“I think that what he did in this country was the most necessary thing by killing political correctness,” said Owens. “We were losing this country and everyone was too politically correct to tell us we were losing this country. He stood up on a platform and he started telling the truth.”

She elaborated, “It was timely. When you look what is happening in Europe, I think that we would have suffered the same consequences that they’re suffering, if we hadn’t had someone who was tough and willing to take the hits from the media.”

Host Mark Levin asked Owens if she was referring to immigration, which she confirmed she was, but added it included other issues like Trump reaching out to the African American community and asking them point blank during the 2016 race, “What do you have to lose?” by voting for him.

In a tweet last week, Trump trolled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to point out that the Democrat espoused views similar to his own on illegal immigration not too many years ago.

“People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally,” Schumer said a 2009 speech he gave at Georgetown University Law School. “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple,” the New York senator emphasized during his remarks.

A Harvard-Harris poll conducted in June found that 70 percent of respondents want stricter enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.

In addition, 63 percent of Americans agree with Trump’s Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals compromise that would allow legalized status in exchange for increased border security (most notably a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border), as well as an end of the visa lottery program and chain migration.

In January, Schumer came out in opposition to Trump’s plan, wanting DACA handled as a stand-alone issue.

Other findings of the Harvard-Harris survey include 61 percent agreeing with Trump that border security is inadequate.

Additionally, 76 percent said they oppose “open borders,” which some on the left wing of the Democrat Party have been accused of promoting.

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 president wasn't presidential in honoring John McCain. That's precisely his strength

The recent furor over President Donald Trump’s muted response to the death of John McCain last weekend offers renewed insight into the mind of Trump, as well as evidence as to why, despite nearly universally negative coverage by the press, Trump remains as popular as ever with his base. Moreover, he’s gaining support among independents and even blacks.

Donald Trump was not elected to be presidential. America elected the real-estate tycoon/reality-TV star not because they expected the niceties, decorum, and political correctness that are the stock-in-trade of the DC establishment. He was elected to be a political neutron bomb detonated in the heart of the Swamp.

Rhetorically and stylistically, Trump is the anti-Reagan. Whereas Ronald Reagan was gracious even to his harshest critics, using a folksy humor to counter their attacks, Trump is a street-brawler with a sledge hammer who leaves no attack unanswered.

This blue-collar-billionaire style infuriates the political and Hollywood elites, but endears him to the millions of Americans in “flyover country” who are routinely mocked and dismissed by elites — which is why no scandal, real or imagined, has been able to dent his core support.

With McCain’s passing, Trump did the bare minimum to recognize the event. That’s because McCain, the epitome of the Washington establishment, loathed Trump, and the feeling was mutual.

Trump received enormous criticism for his initial response to the senator’s passing. Instead of an official statement, he merely tweeted, “My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!” Respectful, not effusive, but with the history of feuding between the two, everyone read between the lines. Trump reportedly told advisers he did not want to lavish praise on McCain because everyone would recognize it was not genuine.

After all, it was McCain who infamously and spitefully to Trump cast the deciding (and promise-breaking) vote against the Republican effort to repeal ObamaCare — an effort McCain himself campaigned on. It was also McCain who said of a 2016 Trump rally in Phoenix that Trump had “fired up the crazies.” It was in response to that jab that Trump commented about liking people who “weren’t captured.”

The fires were stoked when the White House returned its flag to full staff after only a day and a half at half-mast (as per official protocol). Enormous pressure to re-lower the flag came from Republicans, veterans groups, and even Democrats like Rep. John Lewis (who now says McCain was a “warrior for peace,” a stark reversal of his 2008 comments about then-Republican presidential nominee McCain, who Lewis claimed was fostering an “atmosphere of hate” and “hostility” like the one that led to a 1963 black church bombing by white supremacists). Soon, Trump issued a proclamation re-lowering the flag to half-staff, stating, “Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment.”

This is the essence of Trump: He heaps superlatives on his friends (or those he is trying to win over), while firing rhetorically brutal and often just plain nasty rebukes to his opponents.

This shunning of cultural norms and presidential courtesies has made him an easy target for his critics. Trump often creates public relations problems for himself with his relentless attacks when a kind word or an ignored slight would win points.

But Trump revels in the role of outcast and pariah. His supporters see every attack on him by the elites as evidence that he is their champion. And if they have to choose between a nice guy who gets steamrolled by the Left and a bare-knuckles brawler who conquers the deep state, well, that’s not even a close call.

After all, the media and Democrats have, since the nomination of Trump, lamented the “good old days” when Republicans nominated nice, respectable men like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney (who couldn’t be more bland and inoffensive if he was a vanilla bean). Yet when these men ran for president, Democrats still accused them of being racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, rich (and for the rich) white guys.

At 72 years old, it is highly unlikely Trump will change. His relentless, bombastic, hard-charging personality made him one of the world’s richest and most famous men. It helped him dispatch 16 highly qualified candidates in the 2016 Republican presidential field. And it helped him achieve one of the most shocking upsets in American political history when he destroyed the Clinton political machine and won an election that, even on Election Day, many pundits and pollsters gave him less than a 10% chance of winning.

In the end, despite his abrasive style and often uncouth rhetoric, Trump has had a remarkable record of success in his first year and a half as president. So we can be appalled at his demeanor or we can accept him for what he is — a street fighter doing whatever it takes to restore American greatness.

SOURCE 

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Elizabeth Warren’s latest attempt to end capitalism

Senator Elizabeth Warren likes to paint herself as a warrior for the little guy and for those that don’t have the money to hire lobbyists in Washington D.C. That may be the image she wishes to portray to the voters ahead of the 2020 election, but her actions scream Stalinist.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The agency has jurisdiction over banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, and other financial companies in the U.S. The agency is considered “off-budget” and therefore does not answer to Congress. The agency gets its funding directly from the Federal Reserve System. The only requirement of the CFPB is to appear and report twice annually before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committee.

Current CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney appeared before the Senate Banking Committee earlier this year lambasting the fact that there is no oversight by Congress of the agency. Mulvaney stated, “while I have to be here by statute, I don’t think I have to answer your questions.” Mulvaney then went on to beg Congress to pass legislation to rein in the unaccountable agency. Mulvaney knows he will not be the director forever and does not want unelected bureaucrats having power that elected representatives can’t even check.

Make no mistake about it, the CFPB and the lack of accountability is the brainchild of Warren. It begs the question, why would a person elected to represent the people be in favor of an agency that has no oversight?

The citizens may have gotten their answer with another piece of legislation the Senator introduced earlier this month. On August 15, Warren introduced S. 3348, the Accountable Capitalism Act.

The bill is an abomination to the word capitalism. The act will create the Office of United States Corporations within the Department of Commerce. It would be the job of this office to decide what is capitalism.

One of Warren’s principal complaints about capitalism is the return on investment. Senior officials in many companies are partially compensated with stock. For this reason, if the company does well, the stock does well, thereby ensuring officials would do what is best for the company. The Senator doesn’t like this and believes it perverts the system. The bill would incentivize officials to ignore stock prices.

What the Senator is forgetting are the profits she decries are also returned to millions of teachers, firefighters, and police officers in the form of dividends into their pensions and 401Ks. In fact, over half of America’s private sector workers are invested in the stock market through retirement plans. Is Warren trying to sabotage the private retirement market with this bill?

One of the more asinine sections of the legislation would require U.S. corporations to have the purpose of “creating a general public benefit.” Unfortunately, no one can define what general public benefit means. Because there is no definition, it would mean unelected bureaucrats would have the ability to direct whether or not a corporation could form. This would put government bureaucrats in charge of the open market. If some GS-15 doesn’t believe Product A from Company B provides a good enough public benefit, it doesn’t happen. Sounds a lot like command-and-control communism.

Senator Warren is revealing who she really is. Between the CFPB and her latest Stalinesque idea, the Senator from Massachusetts is a totalitarian that wants people to have no control over themselves. She wants government bureaucrats controlling the economy and what people do with their lives. It is a good thing Sen. Warren is trying to appeal to the communist base in the Democrat Party; this gives the people plenty of time to see what she is really about: unelected bureaucrats controlling their lives.

SOURCE 

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An excellent speech

Rapper and fashion mogul Kanye West made brand news comments about President Donald Trump on Wednesday, and the media is not going to like them it all.

During an interview with WGCI 107.5 Radio, West boldly predicted that Trump will do whatever it takes to “do the work” to be a great president for black voters.

“I know black people that voted for Trump that were scared to say out loud. Now that’s some 1984 thought-control programming shi*,” West said when asked about his support for Trump not being popular in Hollywood.

The rapper said he understands people who “would rather have a female president” and supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but added, “I just don’t agree with it.”

When asked about Trump putting illegal alien children “in cages” and separating them from their families at the U.S. border, West reminded everyone that the president was following the same immigration practices as previous administrations.

 “That was something that was happening through a lot of different president eras — but now we’re seeing it.”

West was then asked about the historic violence in Chicago, where he is from. The rapper said former President Barack Obama had eight years to do something, and never did.

He said Trump winning the election gave black Americans the opportunity “as an entire community to see things that we weren’t seeing when Obama was in office. We as a collective wasn’t woke. Now everybody is woke.”

When asked on Wednesday if he believes Trump cares about black people, West paused and then dropped a bomb:

“I feel that he cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this. And he will do the things that are necessary to make that happen because he’s got an ego like all the rest of us, and he wants to be the greatest president, and he knows that he can’t be the greatest president without the acceptance of the black community. So it’s something he’s gonna work towards, but we’re gonna have to speak to him.”

“I got a direct line to ADIDAS. I got a direct line to the President. So, let’s see what happen with it and how I apply that to the city [of Chicago], because I’m going to apply it.”

His comments on Wednesday are eerily similar to what he said in April, when he boldly stated that “Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed,” adding, “Obama was our opioids. It made us feel like everything was good.”

Earlier this month, he also made headlines during an interview with ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel.

When Kimmel asked about his support for the president, West stared down the liberal host and said he wasn’t going to change his opinion on something because extreme leftists tried to bully him.

“Liberals can’t bully me,” West said, noting that he is tired of leftists like Kimmel always trying to shame and pressure him every time he voices support for Trump.

West has refused to back down for showing his support for Trump, and the rapper claiming that Trump can be the greatest president for black Americans will undoubtedly trigger the liberal media.

SOURCE 

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Trump threatens to intervene in the Justice Department: 'People are angry'

President Trump threatened Thursday night to intervene in the Justice Department if the agency fails to take action against corrupt Democrats, saying “the whole world is watching.”

Speaking at a campaign rally in Evansville, Indiana, the president told thousands of supporters that the heads of the Justice Department and FBI “have to start doing their job.” He mentioned former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was investigated but not charged for having a private email server as secretary of State.

“Look at what she’s getting away with,” Mr. Trump said. “But let’s see if she gets away with it. Let’s see. Our Justice Department and our FBI have to start doing their job and doing it right, and doing it now. People are angry.”

He added, “At some point… I will get involved and I’ll get in there if I have to. The whole world is watching, and the whole world understands exactly what is going on.”

Mr. Trump has a running feud with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and has called on him to investigate Mrs. Clinton and others.

The president has hinted strongly that he might fire Mr. Sessions after the mid-term elections.

During the event for GOP Senate candidate Mike Braun, Mr. Trump said Democrats in Washington who are resisting his agenda “are trying to undermine the verdict of our democracy.”

“The most remarkable thing about the modern Democrat Party is how truly undemocratic they really have become,” he said. “The so-called resistance is mad because their ideas have been rejected by the American people. They’re the old and corrupt globalist ruling class that squandered trillions of dollars on foreign adventures.”

He criticized previous trade deals, saying they have led to “the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world” out of the U.S.

“What we did to our companies and our jobs, we should be ashamed of our leadership,” Mr. Trump said. “When we pledge to work over the corruption in Washington, these are the people we’re talking about. In this election, we can’t let up. We’re going to drain the swamp. We’ve replaced failed Democrat lawmakers with America-first Republicans, and it’s happening.”

The president also pledged to crack down on social media companies that he said are censoring conservative viewpoints.

“My administration is standing up for the free speech rights of all Americans,” he said. “Look at Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants. I’ve made it clear that we as a country cannot tolerate political censorship, blacklisting and rigged search results. You know it can go the other way, also. We will not let large corporations silence conservative voices. It can go the other way too someday. We’re not going let them control what we can and cannot see, read and learn from.”

SOURCE 

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Blue-Collar Optimism Soars

The economy continues to boom as Americans see their wages rise under Trump's leadership.

A new Harris Poll finds that a whopping 85% of blue-collar workers say that their lives are headed “in the right direction.” The high optimism level may have much to do with the booming economy. The latest economic numbers indicate that the surging economy shows no signs of slowing down. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department raised its estimate for second-quarter GDP growth to 4.2%, which means that annual growth for the first half of the year now is above 3%. And with all indications pointing up, it has become increasingly likely that growth for the entire year will be at 3% or better. The country hasn’t seen a year like that since 2005.

On top of the good GDP numbers is news on median household income, which is now up more than 4%. As Investor’s Business Daily reports, “Inflation-adjusted median household incomes in July hit $62,450 according to the latest release from Sentier Research. That’s the highest level since Sentier started tracking this more than 18 years ago. And if you combine Sentier’s numbers with annual Census data, median household income is at all-time highs.”

IBD continues, “More interesting is the fact that median household income has shot up more than 4% in the 19 months since Trump took office. It had been flat over the previous year and a half. Over the course of President Obama’s entire eight years in office, median household income climbed a mere 0.3%, Sentier data show.” Is it any wonder optimism is so high?

Harris also noted that 51% of blue-collar workers believe that the country as a whole is headed in the right direction, and 80% said that they are “very optimistic” about the future. 88% believed that their children would likely attain a better future than they. Needless to say, the large swaths of the country that Hillary Clinton and Democrats maligned and ignored — and then lost in 2016 — are clearly reaping the benefits of their vote. Go ahead and try convincing them that they voted for the wrong candidate.

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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More Than 100 Facebook Employees Unite To Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture

If you are a conservative and use Facebook on a regular basis you have probably observed its, what some would call blatant show of BIAS in regards to conservative content.

Not long ago Facebook squashed its trending section, but before it was done away with it clearly identified a show of BIAS almost mimicking Googles actions which are now front and center, thanks to President Trump.

Regardless of the news cycle, top trending posts for the most part were liberal leaning and dominated Facebook’s trending feed. Although it was open and visually noticed by Conservative leaning news organization, conservatives and even some Democrats; Facebook denied all claims of politically motivated BIAS.

We then saw Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify before congress on these allegations. Watch as he struggles to answer if Facebook is a ‘Neutral Public Forum.’

Now, lets fast forward to late last week. The NY Times has reported:

“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”

Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB’ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group’s page and who were not authorized to speak publicly. The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.

With over 100 Facebook employees now banding together; risking their careers to bring light to Facebook’s internal BIAS regardless of what side of the aisle you represent, this clearly identifies that significant changes need to be made.

SOURCE 

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Mark Levin Blows The ‘Impeachment’ Narrative To Pieces In Epic Interview

Conservative talk radio host and legal expert Mark Levin blew the “impeachment” narrative to pieces on Monday, offering liberals a lesson on how the law actually works.

During an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Levin said President Donald Trump is in “good shape” legally regarding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged “collusion” between Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

The conservative radio host argued that liberals desperately shouting impeachment is “entirely bogus” and that it is highly unlikely to lead to the president being impeached from office.

“The president is actually in great shape when it comes to the law and when it comes to impeachment. On impeachment, all we have to do is vote and make sure the Democrats don’t win and then he won’t be impeached. There’s an idea. The president is in very good shape. You cannot impeach a president on events that occurred before he was president.”

Levin explained that there’s no legal or historical precedent for indicting the president for accusations that occurred before he took office. The conservative host also said that a decades-old court ruling may prevent Mueller from being able to release his grand jury information to the public — meaning hardly anyone would know what the final report says about the investigation.

Levin went on to rip apart main liberal talking points being spewed throughout the media.

“I’m going through what they’ve been arguing. The president cannot obstruct justice for firing a subordinate, period. Now what about this new thing they’ve come up, conspiracy to defraud an election? I would like to know, this conspiracy, exactly who did the president conspire with? Who is it? Had they been charged, have they been prosecuted? The big enchilada is that a sitting president cannot be indicted, which I’ve been saying for eighteen months, which makes all of this entirely bogus.”

In a previous interview, Levin also eviscerated leftist talking points that anything with Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney, could harm Trump in any legal way.

Last Tuesday, Cohen pleaded guilty to charges related to campaign finance laws and other fraud. The terms of his plea deal are ever-changing, but he has agreed to spend between three to five years in prison.

Levin explained to everyone why Trump is not in any legal trouble over Cohen’s plea deal.

“I want to help the law professors, the constitutional experts, the criminal defense lawyers, the former prosecutors and of course the professors and I want to help them understand what the law is. The general counsel for the Clinton mob family Lanny Davis, he had his client plead to two counts of criminality that don’t exist.”

“It is a plea bargain between a prosecutor and criminal. A criminal who doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison. That is not precedent. That applies only to that specific case. Nobody cites plea bargains for precedent. That is number one. Number two, just because a prosecutor says that somebody violated a campaign law doesn’t make it so. He is not the judge. He is not the jury. We didn’t adjudicate anything.”

Levin’s point is that if Trump directed Cohen to use his own money to pay off Daniels and McDougal — who allege they were paid as part of a nondisclosure agreement to remain quiet about alleged affairs with Trump years ago — and then Trump paid back Cohen, that is not a crime.

He also made a more than compelling argument on Monday that liberals have no case, evidence, or precedent to impeach Trump. Liberals can hate Trump all they want, but the law is not on their side, Levin argues, in terms of removing him from office.

SOURCE 

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John McCain’s Failed Second Act

Nothing can tarnish the glory of McCain’s first act, but democratic politics is about what comes next.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum about no second acts in American life is only partially true. There are second acts, but those that fail to live up to the promise of the first are far more interesting. An assessment of John McCain’s political career suggests that the Senator from Arizona squandered the immense capital of his five and a half years of bravery and integrity while a captive in Viet Nam.

McCain’s earlier career reminds one of George Armstrong Custer, another “maverick” whose reckless audacity won him plaudits during the Civil War, but ended in failure at the Little Big Horn. McCain was an indifferent student at the Naval Academy, and at times a careless pilot. During flight training he dumped a jet in Corpus Christi Bay, and while flying too low in Spain took out some power lines. At this point he seems to have been, like several Kennedys, a typical feckless scion of a storied American family whose elite connections mitigated his questionable behavior.

But McCain redeemed himself with his heroism during his captivity in Viet Nam. Regularly tortured and abused, enduring disease and solitary confinement, he turned down an offer to be released ahead of other captives who had been there longer. He ended his first act as an iconic American hero, tough in the face of brutal treatment, and committed to the very American sense of fair play that eschewed exploiting for his own gain his father’s status as head of the U.S. Pacific Command. Finally released in 1973, McCain was poised, like many other celebrated military veterans in American history, for a political career likely to end in the White House.

But McCain never quite fully realized that potential. He became a Republican Senator, but his career marked him as an elite insider who, like many of his fellow Republicans, did not understand that the old bipartisan center had been fatally wounded by the Sixties. Particularly after the two terms of George W. Bush, the Democrat Party had moved even farther left, and wasn’t interested in “bipartisanship” or “reaching across the aisle.” As Barack Obama proved, the goal now was the “fundamental transformation” of America into a form of democratic socialism, one lite on the democratic part. “Any means necessary” and the Alinsky playbook, not the Constitution, would be the guides for this project.

McCain’s Senate career before 2008 illustrated his misguided bipartisanship based on a failure to see what the Democrats had become, and how his dubious perception of “principle” carried water for the Democrat opposition. The 2002 McCain-Feingold bill banning unlimited contributions to political parties was a patent violation of the First Amendment, as the Supreme Court later ruled in its Citizens United decision, which overruled a lower court’s use of McCain-Feingold to justify censoring a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps worse, McCain’s outspoken opposition to waterboarding, despite its proven value in gathering intelligence, was given persuasive authority by his personal experience in Vietnam. McCain’s misguided false analogy between the sadistic, pointless torture he suffered, and the carefully controlled and calibrated practice of waterboarding to obtain life-saving information, ultimately led to the banning of this interrogation technique. Obama simply droned to death terrorists rather than interrogating them.

McCain’s failure to understand how the political sands had shifted was evident in his 2008 campaign against Obama. He campaigned as though Obama and the Democrats still embraced the postwar bipartisan consensus on how American politicians ran for office and governed. He thought that despite differences, a critical mass of Democrats still acknowledged America’s exceptionalism and essential goodness. Worse, McCain created the perception that his self-image and “principled” independence were more important than supporting the goals and beliefs of the Party that still believed in America. He never seemed to get that he was the Democrats’ favorite Republican because he often served their interests more than those of conservatives. He reveled in his “maverick” moniker, unaware that the Dems used it because to them it meant “useful idiot.”

The 2008 presidential campaign illustrated McCain’s weakness. Many of us at the time knew that Barack Obama was a one-eyed Jack, a left-wing activist who believed America was deeply flawed and guilty, and needed to do penance so it could function in the world as a “partner mindful of its own imperfections.” The public face was the specious rhetoric like “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America,” a sentiment that his serial racial demagoguery belied.

But McCain took Obama at face value, perhaps unable to look past the usual ruling-class credentials and glib rhetoric. Worse, again like too many Republicans who should have known better, McCain preemptively cringed from exploiting Obama’s sketchy and dubious past, especially his connection with his pastor of 20 years, the race-baiting Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s sermon after 9/11 about “chickens coming home to roost” and his chant of “God damn America” would have ended the career of any other politician. That it didn’t end Obama’s should have alerted McCain that he was in a different political universe than he thought he inhabited.

Instead, McCain explicitly took that damning incident off the table during his campaign. And he did so for the same reason numerous other Republicans did: they were terrified of being labeled “racist.” Thus they ceded to the progressives their dishonest racial tactics simply because as members of the elite, they feared slander from the other side. So too with his dismissal of the “birther” movement.  He was praised as a “maverick” by the Dems for criticizing the “birthers,” but the Dems never reciprocated such magnanimity and attacked their own extremists when they viciously attacked George Bush and now attack Donald Trump. The consequences of this concern for personal image and high-minded rectitude in the end contributed to this country being ruled by one of the worst presidents ever.

McCain’s second political mistake was not taking advantage of the backlash among conservative American against the Democrats’ politicization of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their demonizing of the surveillance and interrogation techniques implemented to meet the demands of the citizens––and the Democrat leadership­­–– that a terrorist attack like 9/11 never happen again. The increasing radicalism of the Democrats was apparent when George W Bush was president and treated with a level of calumny and vicious insult prefiguring the current treatment of Donald Trump.

For a moment McCain seemed to get it, making him a genuine maverick when he selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate in 2008. But he never really bonded with Palin. And when the forces Palin embodied took shape as the Tea Party movement in 2010, McCain still didn’t seem to understand the anti-Republican establishment animus that had been brewing for years. When he called Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz a “wacko-bird” in 2013, and this year in a book wrote he “regretted” choosing Palin, he cheered the hearts of Democrats. Even though the Tea Party helped Republicans take back the House, slowing Obama’s “transformation,” for McCain it seemed more important to receive praise from his fellow members of the political country club that looked with distaste on these uppity “deplorables.”

A few years later that backlash produced Donald Trump, who won the prize denied to two previous establishment Republicans. When Trump during the primaries channeled George S. Patton and dismissed McCain’s heroism because he “like[s] people who weren’t captured,” that gaffe should have ended his run. But what the political wise men didn’t understand was that for the voters, the question is always, “What have you done for us lately?” It’s the spirit of the illiterate Athenian who wanted to ostracize Aristides the Just because he was sick of hearing him called “the Just.”

It wasn’t so much that people scorned McCain’s heroism, but that they were sick of that experience being used to deflect his bad political decisions and over-fondness for accolades from his bipartisan peers, rather than pursuing policy achievements that could stop the Obama juggernaut.

SOURCE 

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Sheriff Joe’s Comment on John McCain Will Have Every Trump Fan Cheering



I have been a great fan of Sheriff Joe for many years. He was a shining light amid the darkness of Democrat authoritarianism -- JR

Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio gave what some may call the perfect answer when asked about the late Sen. John McCain.

The Arizonan was heading into Tuesday’s primary election for the Republican nomination for a Senate seat — a primary that was won by Arpaio rival Martha McSally. He was interviewed by MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt.

Following McCain’s death from brain cancer on Saturday, many political figures weighed in on McCain’s life and heroic sacrifice during the Vietnam War. In a short transcript of the Arpaio interview segment released on Twitter by Hunt, Arpaio was asked to weigh in with his thoughts, too.

His answer could arguably have had fans of President Donald Trump shouting for joy at how he handled the potential “gotcha” question. Anyone familiar with Arpaio’s outstpoken style might say his answer is also a classic Arpaio thing to say:

Kasie Hunt: “Do you think John McCain is a patriot?”

Arpaio: "Yes.”

Kasie Hunt: “A hero?”

Arpaio: “That's hard for me to answer. Because I never had a hero in my life until several months ago when I woke up after 75 years and I found my hero. You know who that person is? Donald Trump.”

Some have hailed McCain as a hero due to his military service, including a brutal stint as a prisoner of war, prior to becoming first a member of the House of Representatives and then a United States senator.

While McCain had his share of critics, given the animosity between him and Trump, it is understandable that someone like Arpaio might weigh in a little more favorably on the side of the president. The Washington Examiner wrote that “Arpaio was pardoned by Trump in August 2017 after a federal district court judge ruled that he was in criminal contempt of court for not following another judge’s order to cease traffic patrols targeting illegal immigrants.”

That could easily lead Arpaio to view Trump as a “hero,” but he is not alone in holding that viewpoint. It’s not a new reaction to Trump, and it’s not one that’s limited to the United States. Public speaker and Huffington Post UK writer Jean Gasho — a native of Zimbabwe who now lives in England — gave three reasons on her blog in 2016 why Trump was her hero:

* “As a woman who loves children, to me any man who puts the life of unborn babies first has got a good heart. I can not even fathom that people can support partial birth abortions. Donald Trump condemns this evil practice, and for that alone, he won my heart.”

* “He did one thing that no president candidate has ever done, he spoke his mind. He was just real. He did not tell people what they wanted to hear and for that he had the big media houses against him.”

* “He is not a politician. He was more of a family and businessman than politician. He has raised lovely children and he is a firm believer in the institution of marriage. For that he resonated with the people, especially the American Christians. I am not into politics  but I understood his language.”

Also in 2016, Breitbart published a letter in full from “grieving mother” and “legal German immigrant Sabine Durden (who) lost her only son Dominic in 2012 when an unlicensed, illegal alien driver hit and killed him.” In the letter, Durden noted how Trump differed from the other presidential candidates.

After years of trying to draw attention to the problem of illegal immigrant crime, the pain and frustration of feeling unheard and missing her son got to Durden, who planned to end her own life. She wrote that when she heard Trump address the issue, she began “screaming, clapping (her) hands and crying tears of joy.” She credited Trump with saving her life that day and called him her “hero.”

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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Contempt for America Is Normal on the Left

Dennis Prager

The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, did Americans a favor last week. He provided that which is most indispensable to understanding anything: clarity.

“America … was never that great,” he announced. In one sentence, the governor revealed the left’s true view of America. This is rare—because leftists are masters at hiding what they really believe.

For example, the left’s low regard for nonwhites is well-hidden under a mountain of “anti-racist” rhetoric. But people who consistently advocate lowering standards for blacks obviously do not think highly of blacks, and people who believe in separate black dorms and separate black graduation ceremonies obviously believe in a pillar of racism: racial segregation.

Another generally denied—if not hidden—left-wing belief is contempt for America. On a daily basis, the left describes America as xenophobic, misogynistic, imperialist, greedy, and homophobic. And that’s on a slow day at The New York Times, MSNBC, or your local university. Just last week, a New York Times column added “barbaric” to the left’s view of America.

But for some reason, the average American does not see all this as proof of the left’s contempt for America.

So, we have to rely on the occasional unguarded and unambiguous statement to know what the left really thinks.

Michelle Obama provided such a statement when, as her husband began racking up victories in early-voting states in the 2008 primary season, she proclaimed, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.”

Hillary Clinton provided her example during the 2016 election when she described half of her fellow Americans as “deplorables.”

Then-President Barack Obama provided his example in 2015 when he spoke about racism being “part of our DNA.” Now, you might argue that he was merely stating a truth, not expressing contempt. But that argument fails for three reasons.

First, America has developed into the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in history. Those who deny this have contempt for truth as well as for America. So much for DNA.

Second, can Barack Obama or anyone else on the left name a country or group in history that interacted with other races and was free of racism? Of course not. So, singling out America as having racist DNA is an expression of contempt for America specifically.

Third, how would Obama or anyone else on the left react to someone saying, “Islamic civilization has racism in its DNA”? They would not only emphatically deny it; they would charge whoever said it with being Islamophobic.

In other words, if one tells the truth about centuries of horrific treatment of blacks under Islamic rule, one is bigoted against Islam. But if one says America has racism in its very essence, racism that is still being passed unconsciously from one generation to the next, one is not an Ameriphobe?

And now, Cuomo tells an audience that “America … was never that great.”

Cuomo said publicly what virtually every leftist believes. No one—left, right, or center—thinks the comment was idiosyncratic. If Cuomo had said, “America was never a sports-loving nation,” everyone would have assumed this was just an odd comment representing no one but him. The reason this comment hit such a powerful chord in American life is that just about everyone suspects he was saying what all his fellow leftists believe.

After all, we all know what young people are taught from elementary school through graduate school by their left-wing teachers: America is a racist country founded by racists; Americans committed genocide against the American Indians; whites have unique privileges because of America’s “systemic” racism; in the words of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “the hard truth about our criminal justice system: It’s racist … front to back”; police are racist—both white and black cops shoot blacks because of racism; and “American civilization” and “Western civilization” are no more than euphemisms for white supremacy.

Now, why would anyone think the left has contempt for America?

Contempt for America is so central to leftism that there would be no leftism without it. Yet there remains an even more important question: Why?

Why does the left—not liberals, who traditionally revered America—have such disdain for America? I will address this question in a future installment of this series explaining the left. America and the West cannot be saved unless those who cherish them understand what motivates those who wish to see them end.

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A New NAFTA and the Art of the Deal

President Donald Trump announced a tentative trade agreement with Mexico Monday, calling it "one of the largest trade deals ever made" and "much better" than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump was joined by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto via conference call. Nieto also chimed in that it was an "incredible deal for both parties." Is it?

As always with trade, the answer is "yes and no." There are good aspects and bad ones.

Points reached in the agreement include changes to automobile manufacturing. Each car produced would have to be 75% sourced in North America, up from 62.5%, to avoid tariffs when being transported across national borders. Also, 40-45% of each car produced must be manufactured by workers making $16 per hour or more to avoid tariffs. That helps American manufacturers, but it will raise prices for consumers. Additional updates to rules on intellectual property and labor are also part of the agreement.

The deal still must be approved by Congress and the Mexican government. Trump is eager to make this happen before the midterms, and Peña Nieto is likewise hoping to have his government approve the measure before he leaves office on Dec. 1. At this point, there don't appear to be any insurmountable political hurdles to prevent the trade agreement from becoming a reality, but never underestimate the machinations of American Democrats or Mexican Socialists like incoming President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And in any case, time constraints likely mean it isn't going to happen this year.

It's important to note that this is a strictly bilateral trade agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. What will become of Canada, the third member of NAFTA, is yet to be determined, though clearly Trump means to use this as leverage with our northern neighbors. Trump told reporters that negotiations with Canada would start back up immediately, and Peña Nieto voiced his hope that the U.S. and Canada would be able to come to an agreement. Chrystia Freeland, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, said separately Monday that her country was encouraged by the optimism shown by the U.S.-Mexico agreement. "Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement."

Trump, of course, says he's prepared to scrap NAFTA altogether, insisting that the very name has bad connotations. He has repeatedly referred to NAFTA as a historically bad trade deal for the U.S. — a "disaster" — and thus he would rather this deal be referred to simply as the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. Moreover, Trump has signaled his comfort with cementing two separate bilateral deals with Mexico and Canada, though those two nations still hold out hope that NAFTA can be renegotiated and salvaged.

Trump's strategy is simple: The U.S.-Mexico deal puts pressure on Canada, which was sidelined while Trump pursued a divide-and-conquer approach to negotiating better deals with America's biggest trading partners.

Markets reacted favorably to the news, with major U.S.-based auto manufacturers seeing bumps in their stock price and equity markets across North America also getting a boost.

A few months ago, Democrats, business leaders, and international trade groups cried that Trump was going to wreck the world economy and crash America's economic rebound with his tariffs and his America-first approach to new trade deals. None of this has come to pass. In fact, little by little, the very nations that claimed they were prepared to engage in a trade war with the United States have started changing their tune.

Earlier this summer, the EU came to an agreement with the U.S. that will allow us to export more produce and liquid natural gas to Europe. The door was also left open to work toward a zero-tariff trade deal between the U.S. and EU.

The new deal with Mexico and the positive signs for an agreement between the U.S. and Canada suggest that Trump will continue scoring points on trade. The more victories he lines up, the stronger will be his bargaining position with tougher nations like China.

As we have said frequently, never underestimate the art of the deal.

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Newt Gingrich: Democrats have no idea what demons they are unleashing

New York Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on 'The Daily Show' with Trevor Noah and stood by her polarizing label of 'democratic socialist.'

A few weeks ago, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote an article for Vox explaining the movement’s goals – to end capitalism and radically change America.

In normal times, the declarations of a fringe party and ideology in America would not merit much attention. However, these are not normal times. A new Gallup poll shows that 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism – while only 47 percent view capitalism positively.

This pattern has been building for a while. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took socialism mainstream in the party during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Since then, Democratic Party candidates have been increasingly attaching themselves to the ideology.

Most notably, a telegenic young member of the Democratic Socialists of America named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated a senior Democrat in New York City’s 14th Congressional District and has since been on a whirlwind media tour, spreading the gospel of socialism.

So the Vox article (or manifesto) is worth taking seriously. Reading it, I was struck by how remarkably honest it was.

The writer, Meagan Day, a member of the East Bay Chapter of DSA, explicitly debunks the apologists in the mainstream media trying to paper over the group’s radicalism.

Day quotes several prominent news “analysts” who argue that Democratic Socialism is just New Deal liberalism rebranded. She then dumps a bucket of cold water on them, writing that “in the long run, Democratic Socialists want to end capitalism.”

In fact, she writes that the liberal, big-government reforms the movement has chosen to rally behind in partnership with the Democratic Party are simply steppingstones to this eventual goal.

“Social democratic reforms like Medicare-for-all are, in the eyes of DSA, part of the long, uneven process of building that support, and eventually overthrowing capitalism,” she writes.

This explicit goal of ending capitalism makes clear what Ocasio-Cortez meant when she said cryptically in a recent interview, that “capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world.”

This is a clear threat to the system which has made us prosperous and the envy of the world, but I appreciate the honesty. Ultimately, the United States is a democratic republic.

If Day, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders want to try and convince most Americans to end capitalism and embrace a planned, totally redistributionist economy, they are welcome to use the democratic process to do so. It is up to those of us who know better to convince Americans of socialism’s folly.

However, the second notable item in Day’s article suggests that Democratic Socialists don’t value democracy all that much. Day also identified herself as a staff writer at a New York-based, socialist magazine called Jacobin. In fact, several members of the Democratic Socialists of America are writers and editors at Jacobin magazine.

A magazine that would enthusiastically embrace this title is signaling that, like socialist movements of the past, the DSA is willing to drop the “democratic” part of its moniker and instead rely on the traditional method for socialist revolution – bloodshed, violence and tyranny.

The Jacobins were the most violent and radical political group of the French Revolution. Led by Maximilien Robespierre, the group responded to a growing backlash against the revolution by executing anyone their so-called Committee of Public Safety deemed insufficiently loyal.

The Jacobin clubs located throughout the country were used as a secret police force to root out dissent among politicians and the general populace alike.

Historian Timothy Tackett estimates that almost 40,000 people were killed under the Jacobin control of the French government. Many were beheaded by guillotine in a grotesque public spectacle after a show trial, and others were brutally executed with firearms.

In the case of one period in the city of Lyon, people were executed en masse by cannon fire. This period of carnage was known as the Reign of Terror.

A few years ago, Callista and I saw “Dialogues of the Carmelites” at the Washington National Opera. It is a moving, true story of the Carmelite nuns who refused to denounce Christ at the peak of the Reign of Terror. (The French Revolution was virulently anti-Catholic – many churches were closed and reopened as “Temples of Reason.”)

The nuns were beheaded for their unwillingness to denounce their faith. Moments before the guillotine dropped, they displayed the power of God’s love by singing hymns and renewing their vows.

A few years later we visited the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. It holds the graves of the martyred nuns and more than 1,300 victims of the Terror in a six-week period of 1794. It is a very sober reminder of what the Jacobins did during the Reign of Terror. It is not a record for which any American should advocate.

Christopher Hibbert’s “The French Revolution” contains more vivid details of the horrors the Jacobins inflicted upon the people of France. In one instance, he writes, “a woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.”

Make no mistake: This is the history of violent revolution, religious oppression, and dictatorship that Jacobin magazine, the DSA, and opportunistic Democrats are embracing – whether they know it or not.

Sen. Sanders, and more have recently shared articles from Jacobin magazine on their social media accounts. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., once sent a Jacobin piece to everyone in Congress.

It is hard to imagine a modern-day Reign of Terror happening in America. But consider the recent phenomenon of outrage mobs on social media demanding people be fired and ostracized for expressing un-PC points of view.

Think about the left-wing activists taking over classrooms to prevent conservative voices from speaking. Think about the rash of people being attacked for wearing MAGA hats. Think about the violence of Antifa.

Perhaps it is not so difficult to imagine.

While I do not know Ocasio-Cortez, I have interacted with Bernie Sanders numerous times in my career. He is an earnest guy, and I seriously doubt he would countenance violence in pursuit of his socialist goals.

Sanders should keep in mind, however, that the Jacobins eventually turned on Robespierre (in fact they executed him). So perhaps Sanders and Democrats rushing to embrace Democratic Socialism should be a little more careful about the demons they are unleashing to win elections.

SOURCE 

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Walmart Age-Discriminated Against Woman Who Tried to Legally Buy Gun, Oregon Rules



Hannah Brumbles tried to buy her first firearm at Walmart in Oregon when she turned 18 and could legally exercise her Second Amendment right, but the store refused, because she wasn’t 21. On Tuesday, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries ruled that Walmart had violated Oregon’s laws against discrimination.

Now, Brumbles wants the same settlement – $130,000 – from Walmart that an Oregon baker was fined for refusing to bake a gay wedding cake, Willamette Week reports

“Hannah Brumbles, an 18-year-old Deer Island woman, filed a civil rights complaint with BOLI in April. BOLI investigators found that Walmart had violated state nondiscrimination laws and filed formal charges against the company on Aug. 21.”

Hannah’s father, Chris, says that purchasing a gun when turning 18 is a family tradition. He describes his daughter as an experienced hunter and gun-user who has taken multiple gun safety classes.

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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