Fascism in the open



The stranglehold that the Left have on American education strives to ensure that no part of history that might embarrass the Left becomes generally known.  The slogan in the graphic above would never have been used except that a knowledge of Benito Mussolini has been thoroughly anaesthetized.  Mussolini invented the word Fascism to convey exactly what Mrs Clinton is conveying.  He was a scholarly man who knew his history and he knew that the symbol of authority in ancient Rome was a bundle of rods called a Fasces borne by the lictors.  The image was that the bundle was much stronger than any single rod it contains. In historical terms, then, Mrs Clinton is quite explicitly a Fascist. She has chosen as her theme the central message of Italian Fascism.

And in their intolerance of dissent, the Left are getting close to another great Fascist slogan:  Mussolini ha sempre ragione (Mussolini is always right).

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It doesn’t matter what names the mainstream media call Trump – he says exactly what most Americans think, especially when it comes to Islamic terror

By Piers Morgan, who knows Trump well

 Donald Trump’s a monster. A vile, hideous, bigoted, nasty, ignorant, deluded, psychotic, ruthless, preposterous, demented buffoon on a collision course to steal the White House and destroy the planet.

Oh, and he’s a sexist, racist, homophobic, misogynist pig too, and every other word ending in ‘–ist’ you can think of for that matter.

Actually he’s even worse than that; in fact, Trump’s the new Hitler – a man who, you may recall, ordered the slaughter of six million Jews.

I know all this because I’ve been reading those exact descriptions about Trump for weeks in the US media, from a whole phalanx of intelligent, experienced journalists, broadcasters, politicians and pundits.

All of them sounding increasingly like Dr Frankenstein in their desperation to try to put this ‘disgusting’ political creature they helped create, nurture and flourish firmly back in his reality TV box.

Yet despite this unprecedented bombardment of mainstream abuse, Trump’s poll numbers keep rising and his chances of becoming President keep increasing.

The reason, to me, is obvious: tens of millions of Americans just don’t agree with that withering verdict.

They think Trump’s a fiery, flamboyant, super-rich, shoot-from-the-hip buccaneer on a mission to make America great again.

They agree with him about illegal immigration, about big Government corruption, about Wall Street greed, about ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton and most pertinently, about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

They see Trump as standing up for them, the little guys, especially the working class little guys, against the Establishment that’s conspiring to ruin their lives.

To them, he’s a towering, unbelievably self-confident fusion of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck who has decided ‘enough is enough’ and wants to reclaim the American dream from those who’ve abused it and take it back to the way it was, to what it was meant to be.

They like the way he talks, struts and fights. So the more the media whack him, the more they root for their guy. Especially when he whacks the media back with even greater ferocity.

All this came to a head over the past week with the two terrorist attacks by radicalised Muslims in Minnesota and New York. This was a perfect storm for both Trump-haters and Trump-lovers.

The former knew he would benefit politically from the incidents, because they were of the exact type he has been vociferously warning about for the past year.

The latter shared his outrage at the indiscriminate attacks on fellow Americans and the apparent impotence of President Obama in doing anything to stop them.

Hillary Clinton, as she normally does, tried to be all calm and collected.  This is not a war against Islam, she insisted. We can’t blame all Muslims for what’s happened, she declared.

She’s right, it’s not and we can’t. But what neither she nor Obama offers the American people is any kind of plan to combat such attacks.  They talk of how awful it all is, but studiously avoid advocating any real action for fear of upsetting or offending people.

The President doesn’t even like using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, which is utterly absurd given that’s plainly what it is.

In the face of such apparently weak, insipid, mealy-mouthed and frankly meaningless rhetoric, it’s hardly surprising that Trump emerges as a non-PC, no-nonsense voice of reason to many Americans.

His anger is THEIR anger.  It’s real.

I’ve been down to places like Florida and Texas recently and heard with my own ears many people ranting about the abject failure of their government to tackle ISIS.

In Trump, they see someone at least prepared to say the unsayable, even if it ruffles a few feathers.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the New Jersey and New York pipe and pressure cooker bomber, is the perfect illustration of what Trump has been talking about. His family came to the US as asylum seekers in the 1990s, when he was seven years old.  In recent years, Rahami made ‘multiple’ visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Authorities told CNN that he spent a whole year, between 2013 and 2014, in the Pakistan city of Quetta, a hotbed of Islamic extremism. A friend revealed the shocking change in him after these trips.

‘He left to go to Afghanistan,’ said Flee Jones, ‘and two years ago he came back, popped up again and was real religious. It was shocking. I’m trying to understand what made him like this.’

It’s not hard to work out the likely answer: Rahami was radicalised by jihadis.  He then brought his new radicalised views back to America where they festered inside his rage-filled mind until he finally erupted in an orgy of violence.

His story, and his method of attack, bear a striking resemblance to the Russian-born Tsarnaev brothers who terrorised the Boston marathon.

The case of the Minnesota terrorist, Dahir Ahmed Adan, is less clear.  We know he was a 22-year-old student who randomly stabbed ten people in a shopping mall, making ‘some reference to Allah’ and asking at least one victim whether they were Muslim before knifing them.

ISIS gleefully claimed responsibility, as they will for any attack of this nature where there’s even a suggestion of allegiance to or inspiration from their barbarous group.

Who knows what his exact connection might have been? But the FBI seem pretty firmly of the belief Adan was radicalised too.

How many more of these potential killers are out there, ready to strike in the name of their warped view of Islam? We don’t know, nobody does.

That’s the problem. And that’s why Donald Trump is damn right to keep shouting about it, even if some of his comments are unpalatable.  At least he seems to understand the gravity of the situation and is coming up with plans to try to deal with it.

This week, it emerged the Obama administration wrongly granted citizenship to over 800 immigrants awaiting deportation from ‘countries of concern’ because the Department of Homeland Security didn’t have their fingerprints on file.

The Washington and media elite seems more intent on mocking, belittling and abusing Trump himself than on such staggering and dangerous incompetence.

They need to realise he’s not the real enemy here, and that when it comes to Islamic terror, Trump’s been proven absolutely, horribly right.

SOURCE

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Clinton blames Trump for N.Y., N.J. and Minn. terror attacks

“I don’t want to speculate, but here’s what we know, and I think it’s important for voters to hear this and weigh it in making their choice in November. We know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS…”

That was Hillary Clinton’s response to an outlandish question on Sept. 19 by Bloomberg Politics reporter Jennifer Epstein on if Islamic State or Islamic State-inspired terrorists in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota were a part of a foreign plot to influence the presidential election. Epstein even added for good measure, “or really any other group, maybe it’s Russian.”

As if after decades of terrorist attacks aimed at Americans, Islamist terrorists really needed any more excuses to attack the U.S.

In any event, Clinton didn’t want to speculate, but she proceeded to do so anyway. In her view, the terrorists want Trump to win the presidential elections to boost recruitment in response to his calls for a halt to immigration from nations with a history of terrorism. Following her logic, a vote for Trump is a vote for terrorism.

I don’t know, maybe the terrorists just hate us, Secretary Clinton?

Then Clinton accused Trump of treason, attributing her thoughts to the former head of our Counterterrorism Center, Matt Olsen, adding, “[T]he kinds of language and rhetoric Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

Ludicrous. As if taking stances against Islamist terrorism by focusing on border security and immigration from countries where terrorists tend to come from — a proposal of the Trump campaign — are somehow the reason for terrorist attacks.

In the meantime, real terrorist attacks have actually been enabled by U.S. immigration policy. For example, the 9/11 hijackers, who killed more than 3,000 Americans, were in the U.S. legally on student visas. If they hadn’t been issued visas, they probably would not have been able to complete the attacks. Pointing that fact out doesn’t cause terrorist attacks.

The suspect in the most recent New York pressure cooker bombing attack, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was an Afghan-born immigrant who became a naturalized citizen. If he hadn’t been issued his visa, he probably couldn’t have completed his attack either. Pointing this fact out doesn’t cause any more terrorist attacks.

You know what causes terrorist attacks? Terrorists.

And it is undeniable that many of the major attacks on U.S. soil in recent history have been religiously motivated by Islam.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was completed by terrorists who were or whose families were originally from Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, and the West Bank.

The aforementioned 9/11 hijackers were on student visas from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

The Boston Marathon bombing was completed by the Tsarnaev brothers, who were here on refugee status from Chechnya.

The San Bernardino attacks were by U.S. citizen of Pakastani origin and his wife on a fiancé visa from Saudi Arabia.

The Orlando gay night club attack was by a U.S. citizen of Afghan origin.

The New York bomber was from Afghanistan, and the Minnesota stabber, who was shot and killed by a former police chief, was a refugee from Somalia.

Yes, that is not every Islamist terrorist attack. There have been others. And there have also been many other non-Islamist terrorist attacks, including Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, the Unabomber and others.

One can disagree with Trump’s proposed policy that would restrict immigration from areas of the world with a clear history of terrorism, where the vast majority of residents are Muslims. Or argue that it would not stop every attack, which is most certainly true. Those are reasonable objections to be raised.

But to suggest Trump’s proposal — or even noting the Islamic origins of the attackers — is somehow the cause of Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks which go back decades ignores who the real enemy is. And that’s Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.

These were not Trump protestors. Or Russian agents. Or really trying to influence the elections. They were ruthless Islamist killers. They want us dead. Isn’t that enough? This time, it’s a miracle nobody was killed. Here, Clinton politicized the attacks and immediately blamed her opponent for what just as likely could have been a national day of mourning. There’s something sick and twisted about that.

Trump for his part responded to Clinton’s remarks in kind, being far more explicit, “Today, Hillary Clinton showed again that she will say anything — and blame anyone — to shift attention away from the weakness she showed as Secretary of State. The Obama-Clinton doctrine of not taking ISIS seriously enough has emboldened terrorists all over the world. They are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes President so that they can continue their savagery and murder.”

Which, is about the response you’d expect from Trump. What’s good for the goose, as the saying goes. If Clinton wants to blame her opponent for terrorist attacks, that’s fine. For what it’s worth, weakness is provocative. And it is perfectly legitimate to note the Obama administration’s failure to put a stop to Islamic State in Iraq long before the war got to this point as a potential cause for the group’s continued success. That certainly makes more sense than blaming Trump, who as a businessman and politician, has wielded no power to affect policy the past many years.

Here it is Clinton who is missing the mark, and now is sounding rather outlandish in her assessment of the threats facing the country. To hear her tell it, it is not Islamic extremist terrorists who pose a danger, but those who want to keep them out of the country. Nonsense.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Famous last words

DeBlasio would seem to have egg on his face now that Ahmad Khan Rahami has been arrested in connection with the Chelsea bombing.  But Leftists have hides like Rhinoceroses so he is probably untroubled

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, evidently fearing negative optics regarding the latest terror bombing, said, "We ... want to be upfront saying that there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection to this incident. This is preliminary information. It's something we will be investigating very carefully, but there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection." While de Blasio did acknowledge that it was "an intentional act," his claiming there is no "terror connection" is simply asinine. As the investigation unfolds, Americans will learn who is responsible for these acts of terror — jihadis. But Democrats like Obama and de Blasio seem more concerned about Americans' perception of terrorists than actual Islamists and their hateful violence.

SOURCE

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Leftmedia's Racial Bias

According to the Leftmedia, Donald Trump is the modern example of a bigoted racist. Story upon story go after Trump for such things as David Duke’s endorsement, which Trump rejected, or Trump’s call to limit immigration from Islamic countries or his plan to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. But which side is most responsible for injecting racism into the campaign?

On Saturday Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, “There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters, and after we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote!” In other words, if you’re black and you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton because Obama supports her, then you are insulting him. This statement is blatantly racist, yet there are no accusations from the media of Obama being a racist.

The New York Times on Monday ran a story with the following headline: “White Voters Keep Trump’s Hopes Alive in Must-Win Florida.” Once again, the media is fixated on maintaining a carefully crafted image that implies racism because a majority of Trump’s supporters are white.

As Dallas police sergeant Demetrick Pennie has recognized with his lawsuit against Black Lives Matter and other prominent liberal black leaders including Barack Obama for inciting violence against law enforcement, it is not Donald Trump who is responsible for inciting racial polarization but liberals with their obsession on viewing all political perspectives through the lens of race.

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Banks and Banksters: Too Big to Fail or Jail?

There's one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for us "deplorables."

In 2008, when a combination of government mandates severely compounded by Wall Street greed nearly blew up the world’s financial system, Congress and the Bush administration conjured up the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to save institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Ever since, too big to fail has rendered large financial institutions, and the executives that run them, virtually immune from criminal prosecution. And nothing speaks more forcefully to this reality than the latest scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo.

Two weeks ago, federal regulators revealed the country’s third-largest bank spent the last five years opening 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts without customer permission. A staggering 5,300 employees were involved in the scam that included using a customer’s personal information from a legitimate account to open a bogus one and moving money from one to the other. Workers even created fake email addresses and PIN numbers to facilitate the corruption.

The reason? They were trying to meet sales quotas, even though this practice, known as “sandbagging,” resulted in $50 fines for the customer.

Wells Fargo’s punishment? The 5,300 employees were terminated, and the bank paid a $185 million fine levied by officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which boasted that “Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed” since its creation following the financial meltdown.

Yet those officials didn’t mention a despicable reality revealed by The New York Times, which explained the deal “was classic Wall Street.” In short, no matter how egregious the activity, many cases are settled “without a bank having to admit doing anything wrong.”

Enter Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf, who offered the standard faux-mea culpa. “Our goal is to get it right with every customer 100% of the time,” he stated. “When we fall short of that goal, I feel accountable and our leadership team feels accountable — and we want all our stakeholders to know that.”

Feeling accountable? Stumpf and his senior management team have suffered no consequences whatsoever for the bank’s malfeasance. And adding insult to injury, Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who ran the phony accounts unit she resigned from the firm in July, received a $124.6 million golden parachute. At the time, Stumpf referred to Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

Champion sandbagger is more like it.

Moreover, those boastful CFPB officials apparently looked the other way. “Regulators never determined the extent of Tolstedt’s knowledge about the abuse, and she was never named directly in the lawsuits brought over it,” reports the New York Daily News. “But she took over the division in 2008, meaning she oversaw it for the entirety of the racket.”

Even worse, this racket was exposed three years ago by Los Angeles Times reporter E. Scott Reckard, who chronicled the frenzied level of company-pressured “cross-selling” and the concomitant threats of termination that battered employee morale to the point where it led to ethical breaches. “To meet quotas, employees have opened unneeded accounts for customers, ordered credit cards without customers' permission and forged client signatures on paperwork,” he revealed.

Three years later, Americans are supposed to believe this scam was the sole handiwork of middle management and staffers, “some of whom were being paid as little as $10 an hour,” as the Chicago Sun Times put it.

Hopefully it won’t fly. Tomorrow, Stumpf is scheduled to appear at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that will focus on Wells Fargo’s sales practices. While he’s there, maybe he’ll be asked to explain how his insistence there was no incentive to perpetrate this fraud squares with a series of videos — many of which were posted in 2011 — blasting those sales incentives.

Even more important — maybe — the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to Wells Fargo. Maybe because the DOJ has yet to characterize its involvement as a criminal investigation, without which any subsequent penalties will amount to the aforementioned “classic Wall Street” outcome. And maybe because the DOJ’s track record is utterly dismal in that regard. As Fortune revealed in 2013, despite a total of $62.2 billion in fines paid by the nation’s six largest banks over three years, and another $24.7 billion needed to settle pending lawsuits, not a single bank has had to admit any wrongdoing, and not one dollar of these billions in fines has been paid by any bank executive.

It was shareholders who took all the hits.

Why? The title of a report prepared by the Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee and issued on July 11 says it all. “Too Big to Jail” reveals the depredation of British banking giant HSBC, which laundered nearly $900 million for drug traffickers and processed transactions for Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma, despite them being subject to U.S. sanctions. HSBC paid a $2 billion fine — and the DOJ granted the bank a “deferred prosecution” arrangement that amounts to a delay, or no prosecution whatsoever, because it promised to change its behavior.

That would be the same HSBC whose clients donated $81 million to the Clinton Foundation. The same HSBC that in 2013 appointed as a Director of HSBC Holdings … current FBI Director James Comey.

“Back in 2008, the smart people said we had to bail out the banks — because if we didn’t, we’d get an economic catastrophe,” writes New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas. “Maybe. We know what we did get: generations of voters, liberal and conservative, who are disillusioned with capitalism. They can see that the chief of Wells Fargo gets $19.3 million annually to preside over systemic fraud, while they get blots on their credit reports.”

We also know what we didn’t get: Not a single resignation required in exchange for the $700 billion taxpayer-funded TARP bailout. Thus, it’s not just the banks the ruling class considers too big to fail. The bankers themselves who ran the system into the ground also remain conspicuously immune from anything resembling genuine accountability.

In an appearance on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Stumpf resisted the suggestion he should resign, telling host Jim Cramer the best thing he could do now is provide leadership for his company.

Really? Stumpf became chairman of Wells Fargo in 2010. Under his “leadership” between then and now, the bank has paid out billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit settlements related to a host of infractions that include fraud, reckless underwriting, improper certification of home loans, and illegal student loan servicing practices.

This nation remains divided over a host of issues. But one suspects an overwhelming majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are thoroughly disgusted with the reality that there appears to be one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for the rest of us “deplorables.” Few things would restore a sense of justice more effectively than tossing the odious concepts of too big to fail and too big to jail on the ash heap of history.

The alternative? Abiding criminal activity mitigated solely by fines. Fines large financial institutions see as little more than the cost of doing business.

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Sanctuary cities kill

Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old San Franciscan women, was murdered by an undocumented immigrant living in the city illegally in July of 2015. Now her family blames more than just her murderer Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, Kate’s family has decided to sue the city for being an “sanctuary city”.

The lawsuit writes that “Kate’s death was both foreseeable and preventable had the law enforcement agencies, officials and/or officers involved simply followed the laws, regulations and/or procedures which they swore to uphold.”

By definition, these sanctuary cities are known to defy the law in order to provide a safe haven for illegal immigrants living in the United States. However, this also provides no protection in situations like Kate’s, where Juan had been a repeat felony offender and deported 5 times after illegal activity aside from his residence.

These safety cities for illegal immigrants have now taken center stage on the immigration debate. The issue was brought to the Senate floor by Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey in July to strip funding from sanctuary cities, however; Democrats united to protect the cities claiming the legislation does not provide a “real solution to our broken immigration system.”

Later, Donald Trump made it one of the pillars of his immigration agenda on the campaign trail. At a Phoenix, Arizona rally on August 31, 2016, Trump discussed the importance of working with Congress to prevent taxpayer money from funding institutions which are not following through on their simple promises to citizens-to enforce the law.

Trump noted “Cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities will not receive taxpayer dollars, and we will work with Congress to pass legislation to protect those jurisdictions that do assist federal authorities… Block funding for sanctuary cities… We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths.”

Sanctuary cities are committing far more than an act against federal law. According to the Washington Post of July 2016, from 2004 to 2012 sanctuary cities generated agreements between local and federal law enforcement to keep illegal immigrants in U.S. prisons after completing time served for crimes in order to provide shelter and resources to stall deportation and provide an opportunity to fight immigration court. Often passing the “prisoners” from prison to prison without providing family notice or legal counsel, only to eventually release the illegal immigrant back into society.

However, this plan has been criticized as an obvious violation of international human rights accords and simply a method to keep and rerelease illegal immigrants. Without consequence for a lack of adherence to federal law, cities were able to commit any number of legal violations they desired.

Federal immigration law becomes absolutely purposeless without state and local adherence to the policies. Even in situations where cities tried to imprison illegal immigrants without warrant to protect against deportation, human rights violations ran rampant. Sanctuary cities must be discovered and punished for their lack of accountability, if they are not any possibility of immigration reform will be a lost cause.

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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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Children born with big heads have higher IQs and thus a better chance of a successful future

The connection between larger head size and higher IQ is well-known but is usually given as a correlation around .3.  But in this very careful research it came out at .5, which is a major effect.  Interestingly, autistic people tend to have big heads too, and they often have quite extraordinary abilities in some field.  The study mentioned below was not confined to head size.  It looked at many physical attributes -- and many were intertwined with IQ and achievement.  IQ is a physical reality and an important one.  All men are not equal

Babies with big heads are more likely to be clever and have successful futures, a study has shown. Research carried out by UK Biobank has strongly linked higher intelligence with large head circumferences and brain volume.

Half a million Brits are being monitored by the charity to discover the connection between their genes, their physical and mental health and their path through life.

The latest evidence is the first finding to emerge from the study that aims to break down the relationship between brain function and DNA.

Researchers in a paper published by the Molecular Psychiatry journal said: 'Highly significant associations were observed between the cognitive test scores in the UK Biobank sample and many polygenic profile scores, including . . . intracranial volume, infant head circumference and childhood cognitive ability.'

Professor Ian Deary, of Edinburgh University, who is leading the research, said gene variants were also strongly associated with intelligence, according to The Times.

The new evidence is so accurate that experts claim it could even predict how likely it was that a baby would go to university based on their DNA.

SOURCE

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House conservatives are winning

If one listens to the narrative advanced by rent-seeking, parasitic Washington political establishment, conservatives were “trounced,” as one publication put it, in Republican congressional primaries this cycle. This narrative could not be further from the truth.

Certainly, there were some disappointments in this election cycle. The loss of Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), one of the most principled conservative members of the House, was a huge blow. Of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other crony special interests spent heavily to boost his moderate Republican primary opponent.

Former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who, rather than be spurned by the conservative members of his conference and lose his the speakership, resigned his House seat. He may have toasted a glass of red wine when Rep. Huelskamp lost, but this old House seat is now in the hands of a member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio).

The House Freedom Caucus’ win in Boehner’s backyard was not the only victory for conservatives in 2016. Principled conservatives like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and Dave Brat (R-Va.) avoided primary challenges by sticking to their limited government, constitutionalist principles.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) won more than 71 percent of the vote against his establishment-backed primary challenger, despite more than $500,000 in outside spending against him, proving that the model that may have worked in one race may not work in another. In Arizona’s 5th District, Andy Biggs won the Republican primary over a challenger favored by the D.C. political elite.

Conservatives are playing the long game, not that the House Republican leadership and the self-important pundit class have noticed. The fact of the matter is, we are winning. Although success may not always be defined by year-by-year primary election results, conservatives are advancing the ball down the field, a few yards at a time.

In the 1990s, there were only a handful of House conservatives -- including Reps. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), Ron Paul (R-Texas), and Steve Largent (R-Okla.) -- who stuck to their principles when under pressure from Republican leadership. Today, we can count on the nearly 40-member House Freedom Caucus, as well as several other conservatives who aren’t members of the group, who consistently stay true to the limited government values.

The influence and importance of conservatives in the House Republican Conference is increasing, and, as the United States’ fiscal challenges continue to grow and the expansive federal bureaucracy strangles entrepreneurs with red tape, the power they wield to move the GOP in a pro-economic growth direction is happening at the right time.

Another definition of success is a shift in the voting habits of Republican incumbents. The very same publication which declared that conservatives were “trounced” during this election cycle noted that conservative challengers are “making [Republican incumbents] think harder about their primaries, and making them work harder to keep their base happy than in the recent past.” Although this particular point was made in reference to current members of the Senate Republican Conference, the same is true of House Republican incumbents.

Evolution is not an overnight process. It takes time. What the evolution of congressional Republicans has showed is that conservatives have more influence than ever before. That doesn’t mean that challenges, both electoral and legislative, won’t arise. And, of course, evolution is a slow process. With every passing moment, the national debt continues to rise, the regulatory state continues to grow, and rent-seeking, parasitic special interests are concocting the next scheme in their playbook to try to defeat principled conservatives in Congress.

In order to preserve the Republic, we absolutely must work to defend and strengthen conservatism on Capitol Hill and speed up the evolutionary process.

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Meet the Alt-Left

Alt-right is becoming a term of soft bigotry whereas “alt-left” accurately describes the political ideology of today’s Democratic Party.

A strong offense is the best defense when fighting bullies. Today, our offense is to turn Hillary’s words against her. She and her ilk are the alternative-left. They have fallen away from the pragmatic Democratic ideals of John F. Kennedy and embraced a radical “power at any cost” fringe philosophy of Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers.

Alt-Left Extremist Behavior:

Here are a few examples of the radical measures that today’s Democratic Party supports that indicate they have morphed into a fringe group:


1.) Ignoring Science: “Science-denier” is the modern Democrat’s middle name. Hillary Clinton opposed the construction of the Keystone Pipeline even though her own State Department thrice declared it to be environmentally safe.

2.) Pretending States Don’t Exist: Obama’s administration sued Arizona forexercising its own immigration laws; North Carolina over its bathroom laws. Obama’s administration also used aggressive and excessive measures to challenge California’s state authority on medical marijuana.

3.) Coddling Thugs, Killing Free Speech: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik stormed a gun free zone in San Bernardino, CA last December—fatally shooting 14 individuals and injuring 24.  U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch threatened to prosecute anyone who dared say anything that could be in any way construed as anti-Muslim—despite Farook and Malik being radicalized jihadist Muslims.

4.) Crushing Bakeries and Pizzerias: Obama doesn’t think you can build a layered wedding cake “on your own” let alone open your own bakery. So, it’s not entirely surprising that his administration wouldn’t intervene when alt-left protesters put a bakery out of business when the owner practiced her 1st Amendment right to free speech.

5.) No ID to Vote: You must show an ID to withdraw cash from a bank; buy cigarettes; purchase alcohol; patronize a bar or dance club; buy ammo; or use your credit card at the U.S. Post Office—but the government doesn’t want to know who is voting. Could politicians want to hide their attempts to buy votes from illegal immigrants?

6.) Double Standards: If a Marine had access to classified material, he or she would be Court-Martialed for failing to follow basic security procedures with that material. If that Marine deleted tens of thousands of potentially jeopardized emails before turning over her emails to the FBI, she would likely spend a decade in jail. Not Hillary Clinton! She’s the Queen of the Alt-Left, which means she’s above the law.

7.) Normalizing Child Abuse: “As president, I will always have your back,” Hillary recently told Planned Parenthood. Democrats support using taxpayer dollars to fund the murder of a baby during the final months of pregnancy (partial-birth abortion) despite the baby showing signs of life and viability. In this objectively cruel procedure, the baby’s scull is punctured with a sharp surgical tool and its brain is suctioned, inducing the collapse of the baby’s scull and ultimately the child’s death.

8.) Security Blankets for College Students: Democrats want taxpayers to subsidize “safe spaces” so that students do not encounter intellectual diversity. The alt-left wants us to bankroll silly laws (think California Gov. Jerry Brown’s “Just Say No” law designed to stop rape on college campuses) that prevent students from exercising their 2nd Amendment right to carry concealed. Result: college students cry and stamp their feet when a professor corrects their grammar errors. Yes, this happened at the University of California at Los Angeles.

SOURCE

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12 Hours of Terror: Just Another Weekend in Leftist-run America

We live in a country run by people who tell us that if a man puts on a dress and says he’s a woman we are supposed to take him at his word. But, if a man goes on a murderous rampage in the name of Allah, and ISIS claims responsibility, we shouldn’t draw conclusions.

The weak and ridiculous position in which we find ourselves did not happen on its own. Americans selected this band of leftist fools who have zero aptitude for dealing with terrorism. A quote from King Solomon, the wisest earthly leader to ever grace the planet comes to mind:

 “As dead flies give perfume to a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor. The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left. Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.” (Ecclesiastes 10:1-3)

Thanks to those whose hearts incline “to the left,” the terrorism which was once a rarity in America can happen anytime and anywhere.

And does. In a 12-hour span over the weekend, we saw that it is not safe to shop in a mall in Minnesota, or run a 5k in New Jersey or walk in New York City without risk of terrorism.

“Rest assured,” they tell us, “justice will be served.” Of course, they are always quick to remind us to not make assumptions. Heaven forbid we offend someone’s sensibilities.

Fox News reports ISIS claimed responsibility for the shopping mall stabbing spree saying the attacker “asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim and referenced Allah.” The group posted this public statement on AMAQ, a news agency known for speaking for ISIS: “The executor of the stabbing attacks in Minnesota yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

Apparently, this information wasn’t enough for the FBI to draw conclusions about the motive of the stabber which the Somali-American community in St. Cloud quickly identified as Dahir Adan.

According to the  St. Cloud Times: “Like the police, Minnesota FBI spokesman Kyle Loven declined to say Sunday if investigators believe the attack was a terrorist act.” Nor was it enough for Police Chief William Blair Anderson who  “pointedly declined to call the attacks an act of terrorism, saying the motive isn’t yet known,” reports a local paper.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a pipe bomb-like explosive device detonated along the route of a 5k charity race to help Marines and sailors, and in New York City, 29 people were injured when an improvised explosive device went off in a Manhattan neighborhood.  Business Insider reports that after the explosion, officials later found a “pressure cooker with an apparent mobile phone attached to it and wires protruding.”

And the mayor overly obsessed with controlling what New Yorkers eat immediately called the bombing “a very serious incident.”

Later at a press conference a reporter grilled  Mayor Bill de Blasio asking, “How can you say there is no link to terrorism when the Inspire magazine published instructions on how to build one of these pressure-cooker bombs, like the one used in the Boston Marathon bombing?” De Blasio dug in his heels, saying it was “a very serious incident,” and reiterating “we have a lot more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this…”

Apparently, the mayor couldn’t get his sodium-free tongue to utter the word “terror,” proving to us just how true the Bible verse is: “Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.”

SOURCE

Note

A bearded person known as Ahmad Khan Rahami, is being sought in connection with the Chelsea bombing.  That sounds like an Irish name to me.  What do you think?

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- about Muslims, free speech and IQ

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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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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"Ethical Socialism"

I owe the excerpt from Oswald Spengler below to statistician Briggs.  It is indeed interesting.  Spengler was a popular German thinker of the early 20th century.  He thought that European civilization had just about reached its limit and was bound to fall while some other civilization arose.  The gutless reaction to Islamic hostility in the Western world today certainly does bring Spengler to mind.

And it is notable that Spengler identifies socialism as the power-hungry but ultimately nihilistic force that is destroying the countries it dominates.  His diagnosis of socialism as inherently totalitarian has certainly been borne out by subsequent events in Russia and Germany.

But in an indirect way, Spengler was responsible for the rise of Nazism.  He never was a Nazi and rejected its antisemitism but his diagnosis of his own society  as dying from its own weakness and lack of self-confidence did plant in people's minds  the hope that a strong leader would emerge who would restore the national will and self-confidence  -- make it great again --  and thus rescue European civilization from its decline.  And we all know who came along in Germany to offer just that.

Hitler was of course an idol who had feet of clay but it is not unreasonable to hope that a new leader with fewer flaws could arise.  And that seems to be where we are now.  No matter how often Muslim terrorists murder us, our Left-dominated leaders refuse to do anything about it.  And the rise of Trump has exposed the great discontent among the people about the lack of reaction to Islamic supremacism.

Trump is also far from a perfect saviour but he seems to be the only saviour we've got.  A successful American businessman and an undistinguished Austrian artist are very different people so very different things are to be expected from them.  What we get may not be ideal but it may include what we need.

But the rescue we need is NOT from Islam.  As Spengler foresaw, it is from the ever more powerful Left.  There is no lack of  patriotic pride and civilizational confidence among ordinary Americans.  It is the Left who are keeping a lid on it rather than proclaiming and defending it.  There is nothing wrong with America and Americans.  It is only the Leftist and Left-dominated parasites riding on its back that are the problem.  Reagan neutered them for a while but they have regrouped.  Trump is our best hope of purging their influence and hitting back at Islam


In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole would take the shape he desires, thus transferring the idea of the Critique of Pure Reason into the ethical field.

This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as thought the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time. It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and Egypt, life only counts insofar as it is deed. And it is mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilized form of Faustian effecting.

Apollian man looked back to a Golden Age; this relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The Socialist feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning.

And here Socialism becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air.

And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had exposed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions of a millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passionate desire to create, the form without the content.

The soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life.

For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the despairing self-deception of a soul that may not and cannot rest. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet motive—and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

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IQ rediscovered yet again.  You can't suppress reality for long

They account for around one per cent of the population and much of their success has been put down to dedication and perseverance.

But new studies are now challenging the notion that extremely intelligent children earn their achievements through hard work.

Instead, they suggest that they may have a genetic advantage from birth, and that success is built on this early head-start.

Two clusters of genes have been found that are directly linked to human intelligence.

Called M1 and M3, these 'gene networks' appear to determine how smart a person is by controlling their memory, attention, processing speed and reasoning.

Crucially, scientists have also discovered that these two networks - which each contain hundreds of genes - are likely to be under the control of master regulator switches.

Researchers from Imperial College London are now keen to identify these switches and explore whether it might be feasible to manipulate them.

The research is at a very early stage, but the scientists would ultimately like to investigate whether it is possible to use this knowledge of gene networks to boost cognitive function.

The investigators analysed thousands of genes expressed in the human brain, and then combined these results with genetic information from healthy people who had undergone IQ tests.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated.

In the US, there are several universities that look out for early talent and have been tracking where high-achieving children end up.  Their results show that those who succeed have an early cognitive advantage.

Johns Hopkins University in Maryland runs a talent programme which is open to adolescents who scored in the top one per cent in maths and English.  Notable alumni include Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, and Lady Gaga.

While many of the children on this programme have gone on to achieve great things, Jonathan Wai, a psychologist in the Talent Identification Programme at Duke University in North Carolina, wanted to test whether childhood aptitude was a guide to success in general.

He looked at five subsets of the US elite – federal judges, billionaires, Fortune 500 chief executives and members of the Senate and House of Representatives. He found that in each subset, those in the top one per cent of ability were over-represented.

While these people could have pushy parents, or have attended top schools, Mr Wai argues that environment factors alone cannot account for success.....

While these studies do suggest that intelligence has a high genetic basis, education and opportunity could still lead to success for those without a strong genetic basis.

SOURCE

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Did the bank bailouts really save the free market system?

Eight years ago, on September 15, Lehman Brothers failed, starting a rapid series of events that resulted in the bank bailouts and the country has not been the same in so many ways.

While President George W. Bush famously said that he, “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system” explaining his decision to bail out Wall Street, General Motors and other failing entities. But did he save it, and if so, for who?

General Motors for its part, emboldened by its debt-free balance sheet invested in new factories in China and is now importing a mid-sized crossover SUV known as the Envision. Meanwhile Flint, Michigan, which used to be known as Buick City, finds itself struggling as a city left behind, more known as a place which messed up its drinking water treatment than for its auto legacy.

The banks have largely pulled out of the tailspin, but after bailing them out, the Obama Justice Department has been busily suing the survivors and winning massive awards with the big winners being local advocacy groups who have been cut into a big piece of the pie, even though they were not harmed in any way. Investor’s Business Daily reports, “Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder’s record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America. Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation’s largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.”

This creation of a well-funded new network of housing advocacy groups, exactly like the discredited ACORN which served as the community organizers who encouraged people with next to no ability to take out loans to buy first or sometimes even bigger homes.

Since the 2008 bailout, the labor participation of workers between the ages of 16-64 has continued to drop and millions more workers have increasingly been shifted to the service economy, or what’s left of it. Those who can’t make it wash out of the economy altogether.

But perhaps most significantly, the banking collapse and subsequent bailout led to eight years of President Obama’s constantly pulling at the threads of America finding the frayed edges and sowing discontent wherever possible.

America today is less confident and surefooted about the future economically and abroad, and while it can’t all be attributed to the bank crisis, it was this seminal event that threw us collectively off balance.  Our economic lives tossed about due to events that were not only out of our control, but were not understandable.

Eight years ago today, Lehman Brothers fell, starting a domino effect which continues to this day with persistent minimal economic growth numbers and unemployment numbers dependent upon people dropping out of the economy to be maintained.

Oh what an eight years it has been.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Ford moving all production of small cars from U.S. to Mexico

This announcement has produced a lot of criticism so I thought I might mention the reason for it.  The reason is that small car production is extremely competitive -- and becoming more so as China enters the market.  So Ford needs a cost saving to compete with the Asian manufacturers.  Otherwise sales of small Fords could nosedive, which would throw American workers out of work anyway.  And the benefit to the consumer of the move is a reduced price for their small car buy.

I agree that there can be social reasons why moving production may be undesirable but in this case no American workers will lose  work so I can't see any reasonable objection to the Ford move.  If Trump does put a tariff on imports from Mexico he will simply be giving the entire small car market to Asian producers, notably China.  Does he really want that?  Ford's profits will mainly go to America.  China's profits will go to China


Ford Motor said Wednesday it is shifting all of its U.S. small car production to Mexico, a development that drew fresh criticism from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Ford's declaration came as CEO Mark Fields sought to appeal to investors.

"Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small car production to Mexico and out of the United States,"   Fields told a meeting in Dearborn, Mich., where the company is based.

But the new development played perfectly for Trump, who was campaigning in Michigan, the traditional home to the nation's auto industry. As recently as April, he blasted Ford's plans to move production to Mexico as an "absolute disgrace." And on Wednesday, he picked up the beat again as he visited Flint, which has been hard hit by the loss of auto worker jobs.

"We shouldn’t allow it to happen. They’ll make their cars, they’ll employ thousands of people, not from this country, and they’ll sell their car across the border," Trump said. "When we send our jobs out of Michigan, we’re also sending our tax base."

In Michigan, Ford's announcement didn't come as a great surprise. Ford has said it continues to invest heavily in its U.S. plants and isn't cutting jobs here. Last fall, the automaker made a commitment to invest $9 billion in U.S. plants, with about half going to 11 facilities in Michigan. The deal created or retained more than 8,500 jobs as part of a new four-year contract with the United Auto Workers union, a net increase in the U.S.

Still, UAW President Dennis Williams has repeatedly blasted Ford and other automakers for investing so much money in Mexico.

"There is no reason, mathematically, to go ahead and run to countries like Mexico, Thailand and Taiwan," Williams said earlier this year. "We all recognize there is a huge problem in Mexico. So we have to address it as a nation. The UAW cannot do it alone. We are not naive."

SOURCE

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Explaining Donald Trump's Penny Plan for Non-Defense Spending

Much of the attention in Thursday's remarks by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has focused on his revised tax plan, but another new policy could have significant effects on the budget: applying the "Penny Plan" to certain domestic spending. This plan would gradually reduce the caps on non-defense discretionary (NDD) spending by shrinking them 1 percent per year (as opposed to allowing them to grow roughly with inflation) and doing the same to certain other mandatory non-defense spending. By our estimates, applying the Penny Plan to the NDD caps alone would save roughly $630 billion but would shrink the NDD budget by roughly one-quarter within a decade.

The Penny Plan has been proposed before, including by Representative Connie Mack (R-FL) and Senate Budget Committee Chair Mike Enzi (R-WY) in Congress and by former presidential candidates Ben Carson and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) during the Republican presidential primary. The basic idea behind the Penny Plan is straightforward: it would reduce spending by 1 percent per year in nominal dollars, so that, for example, $100 billion of spending would decline to $99 billion the next year, then $98.01 billion the following year, and so on. Over time, a 1 percent reduction would represent a significant reduction in spending relative to current law, where average spending is projected to grow by over 4 percent per year. Indeed, the traditional version of the Penny Plan would lead to potentially drastic cuts since it would be working against rising health costs and an aging population.

Unlike the traditional version, Trump's Penny Plan would only apply cuts to a subset of the budget, most of which is already capped and not growing particularly rapidly. Specifically, he would apply the Penny Plan to the NDD caps and select non-defense, non-entitlement, and non-safety net spending. The campaign claims this could save $1 trillion over ten years – a bit higher than our estimates, but not dramatically so.

This year, NDD budget authority (the amount of new obligations federal agencies can make) was capped at $518 billion, and under current law, this cap is scheduled to remain roughly flat for the next two years then increase roughly with inflation each year after that, reaching $627 billion in 2026. Under Trump's plan, spending would instead decline one percent each year to $469 billion by 2026 for total ten-year BA savings of nearly $740 billion. Since the plan affects growth rates, the cuts would grow larger over time so that by 2026, non-defense discretionary spending would be cut by one-quarter relative to current law. It would be cut by somewhat more than one-quarter compared to current spending adjusted for inflation.

As a result of these cuts, the caps would be about $740 billion lower over the next decade than under current law, which would translate into $630 billion of outlay savings over a decade. Scheduling these savings to occur would be relatively easy: it would simply require lowering and extending the existing NDD caps. Meeting those caps, however, would require lawmakers to make tough choices and identify significant cuts to many areas of government spending each year.

Trump's Penny Plan would also apply to some mandatory spending, though it's not exactly clear to which programs. He specifically mentions that he would exempt Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans' programs but otherwise states he would exempt "entitlement" and/or "safety net" programs. The majority of the remaining spending comes from federal retirement programs, but it is not clear whether those would count as entitlement programs or not. Either way, it does not seem likely that applying the Penny Plan to the mandatory spending that Trump does not exempt would yield enough savings to bring the total savings to $1 trillion. Savings of $700 billion to $800 billion over a decade are more likely.

Trump's Penny Plan is a welcome proposal to offset a portion the cost of his tax plan and other proposals. It appears that the savings would fall slightly short of the $1 trillion the campaign claims but would still generate substantial budget savings. Still, implementing the proposal would be quite difficult without eliminating or dramatically scaling back several government functions, and we would encourage the Trump campaign to identify where at least some of these cuts would come from.

In addition, this Penny plan would only pay for a fraction of Trump's tax plan, so significant additional savings – particularly from the fastest growing parts of the budget – will ultimately be necessary.

SOURCE

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Washington’s Wake-Up Call

Mitch Daniels

When I testified on Capitol Hill last week on the subject of the national debt, I found myself in the odd position of hoping our elected representatives would find my testimony of little value because it would strike them as so obvious.

As I told them, they know, or should know, that our federal deficits have been running at historically unprecedented levels, so much so that another half-trillion dollars this year was met with a yawn. They know, or should know, that our national debt has reached a peacetime record, and is heading for territory where other nations have spiraled into default, or into the loss of sovereignty as creditors use their leverage to dictate terms.

They know, or should know, that public debt this large weighs heavily on economic growth, crowding out private investment and discouraging it through uncertainty. And that much faster growth than today’s is the sine qua non of the greater revenues necessary to meet federal obligations, let alone reduce our debt burdens.

They know, or should know, that the unchecked explosion of so-called entitlement spending, coupled with debt service, is squeezing every other federal activity—from the FBI to basic scientific research to our national parks to the defense on which the physical survival of the country depends.

They know, or should know, that the problem is getting worse, and fast. Even if reform began today, past overpromising and demographic realities mean that the entitlement monster is going to devour accelerating amounts of additional dollars, all of which are scheduled to be borrowed rather than funded honestly.

They know, or should know, that official projections of growing indebtedness—even the appalling estimates I just referred to—are built on a foundation of wishful thinking: productivity assumptions are too high, interest rate assumptions too low; growth too high, spending too low. As each of these is proven unduly rosy, more zeros will be added to the bill we hand to the young people of this country. So let me offer an appeal on behalf of those young people and the new Americans not yet with us. The appeal is for a shift in national policy to the growth of the private, productive economy as our all-out, primary priority. And for decisive action soon that begins the gradual moderation of unkeepable promises and unpayable debts that will otherwise be dumped on coming generations.

A national government that, year after year, borrows enormous sums and spends them not on genuine investment in the future but on current consumption, passing the bill down to others, pretending that the problem is smaller than it really is, lacks not only good judgment but integrity. It is not hyperbole to label such behavior immoral. For a long time, people have gone to Congress decrying the intergenerational injustice of this policy, yet things keep getting worse.

A near-decade of anemic growth and the weakest postrecession recovery on record has eroded Americans’ economic optimism. A 2015 Rasmussen survey found that nearly half (48%) of likely voters “think America’s best days are in the past.” As this new pessimism has deepened, it has turned into an ugliness, a meanness, a new cynicism in our national life, with a search for scapegoats on the left and the right.

For nearly two and a half centuries, Americans have shared a resilient determination to be self-governing, to guard against tyranny at home and, on occasion, to resist by force its spread elsewhere. But lately there are alarming signals of a different outlook.

According to the World Values Survey, as reported by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk in the July edition of the Journal of Democracy, in 2011 a record one in four American citizens said that democracy is a “bad way” to run the country, and an even larger number would prefer an authoritarian leader who didn’t have to deal with the nuisance of elections.

When today’s young Americans learn the extent of the debt burden we have left them, they will legitimately question the premises of self-government. When tomorrow’s older Americans finally understand how they have been misled about the nature and the reliability of our fundamental social welfare programs, it may be the last straw breaking the public confidence on which democracy itself depends.

In fairness, a few members in each political party have tried to address the coming crisis. To them, all thanks and credit. To those still in denial, or even advocating steps that would make our debts even higher, please reconsider. Your careers may end happily before the reckoning. Your re-elections may not be threatened by your inaction. But your consciences—and what Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—will be.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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The relationship between conservatism and racism

The nature and extent of the relationship is contested but the Left are quite convinced that it is conservatives who are racist.  That conservatives are generally OPPOSED to the blatant racism that is affirmative action never quite gets into their heads.  Leftists are OBSESSED with race.  They look for racial implications in everything.  "Racist" is their big swear sword. Conservatives just wish they would stop.

What Leftists do to support their suspicion of conservatives is to do survey research in which they ask one series of questions that identifies conservatism and then another that identifies racism.  That such opinion surveys don't predict racial behaviour has been known since the 1930s but let that pass.

They then ask who agrees most with the statements that express conservastism and then ask are they the same people who agree most with statements expressing racism.  And they do generally find some overlap.

An unusually sophisticated study in that mould has just come out that has some interesting results, however.  The new study looked at the social context in which the statements were made.  What do people say when most people around them are conservative and does that differ from when most people around them are Leftish?  And they found that context made a big difference.

What they found was that in a generally conservative society, conservatives were NOT racist.  It was only among Leftists that conservatives agreed with some racist statements.  So Leftism provokes racism.  Who'd a thunk it?  The Leftist obsession with race makes conservatives a bit racist too.  I find that a big laugh.  It certainly torpedoes the conventional Leftist view of conservatives.

In summary:  In a conservative environment, where little is heard of the constant Leftist yammering about race, "negative outgroup attitudes" are rare and likely to come from both Right and Left.  But a Leftist environment is polarizing.  The constant Leftist yammering about the evils of whites and the innocence of minorities causes conservatives to react  against that and make them more likely to express attitudes that are critical of "outgroups".  So it is actually Leftism that causes "negative outgroup attitudes" to be expressed by conservatives.
 
The journal abstract is below. For the statistically-minded, note that restriction of range effects were allowed for:

The Mobilizing Effect of Right-Wing Ideological Climates:  Cross-Level Interaction Effects on Different Types of Outgroup Attitudes

Jasper Van Assche et al.

The present research investigated a multilevel person-context interactionist framework for the relationship between right-wing ideologies and prejudice across two large, representative samples (Study 1: European Social Survey: N 5 56,752; Study 2: World Values Survey: N 5 74,042). Across three different operationalizations of right-wing ideology, two contextual levels (regional and national) of right-wing climate, and three types of outgroup attitudes (i.e., age-, ethnicity-, and gender-based), the analyses consistently revealed cross-level interactions, showing a strong association between right-wing attitudes and negative outgroup attitudes at the individual level in contexts with a low right-wing climate, whereas this relationship is weaker and often even absent in contexts with a high right-wing climate. These cross-level interactions remained significant after controlling for statistical artefacts (i.e., restriction of range and outliers). The authors propose norm setting as the mobilizing mechanism through which a right-wing climate develops and curbs the influence of individual right-wing social-ideological attitudes on outgroup attitudes.

Political Psychology, 2016. doi: 10.1111/pops.12359

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Hillary’s health is a problem, but her lack of honesty could be deadly

“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”

That was former Barack Obama chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s Twitter reaction to Hillary Clinton’s near-collapse as she was entering a van after a September 11 memorial in New York.

Coming from Axelrod, it is a clear shot across Clinton’s bow coming directly from the Democrat Party establishment as rumors begin to swirl about replacing her atop the party’s ticket in November.

The Clinton campaign’s explanation is that she had seasonal allergies leading to a cough, and then pneumonia which led to heat exhaustion at the ceremony on Sunday. But, based on her actions, it is clear that but for the Twitter video showing her wobbling and falling forward into her van amid Secret Service and personal handlers attempting prevent her from hitting the pavement, the American people would almost certainly never have heard about this episode.

How do we know that? Clinton’s destination after her fall was to her daughter Chelsea’s residence, not to a hospital to treat heat exhaustion, which the New York Post reports was to avoid media exposure. The heat exhaustion explanation was only in response to disclosure of the video, and the bout of pneumonia was not included in the official explanation until hours after that. They were going to cover it up. What if it had been a much more serious condition?

That is not a conspiracy theory. That’s what happened. Clinton was comfortable with failing to disclose a major medical episode even as questions on her health and fitness to serve as commander-in-chief were dogging the campaign. And her campaign only came forward when the truth could not be denied.

What else might the campaign be hiding? Did Clinton lose consciousness? Does she have any other ailments? How often does she fall? In 2012, Clinton had another fall and suffered a concussion. Soon thereafter, she had a blood clot in the brain that was treated. Is that everything?

Nowadays, we tend to romanticize past presidents’ ailments — and how the mainstream media tended to cover them up — such as Franklin Roosevelt’s polio or John Kennedy’s battle with extreme pain and anxiety along with the powerful cocktails of drugs he took. The way these are often portrayed is that the illness did not affect the policies or performance of these presidents. But is that really true?

Consider Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919 suffered a severe stroke and was incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. It was covered up, only to be pieced together later by historians, but if the 25th Amendment had been in place then it is highly possible he would have been deposed by his Cabinet for being physically and mentally unable to fulfill his duties of office.

These matters were and are so serious that countermeasures were put in place into the Constitution itself.

So, if the future president was going to have a potentially fatal illness, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

For Clinton, the issue could become a major headache going forward, particularly if voters perceive that she and her campaign sought to mislead the public about her health. In this case, Axelrod is right. Her illnesses can be treated, but the public faith and trust, once lost, will not easily recover.

SOURCE 

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What if Hillary collapsed after winning the election?

Jeff Jacoby 

"CONCEALING ONE'S true medical condition from the voting public," the historian Robert Dallek wrote in a 2002 essay, "is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency." During the presidential campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy went to extreme lengths to hide from voters any hint of his severe medical problems, which ranged from Addison's disease to crippling spinal degeneration. By comparison, Hillary Clinton's recent dissembling over pneumonia and fainting spells is small potatoes.

Hillary Clinton staggered and apparently fainted after leaving a 9/11 memorial ceremony early on Sunday. Her campaign later acknowledged that she often suffers from dehydration, and had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier.

Kennedy's deception succeeded not only because disclosure standards were so different in his time — public figures were accorded far more privacy than they are now — but also because he was a young man, just 42 when he ran for president. Candidates today can't expect to keep their medical problems secret, especially not candidates as old as Clinton (almost 69) and Donald Trump (70). Last month, the Clinton campaign snorted that Republicans questioning her health were peddling "deranged conspiracy theories." That won't fly anymore.

Already Democratic Party insiders are talking about having a Plan B ready in case Clinton's health problems become insurmountable. On Monday, former Democratic Party chairman Don Fowler urged the party to quickly set up a contingency plan to replace Clinton in case a medical crisis forces her from the race. "It's something you would be a fool not to prepare for," he told Politico.

No major-party presidential candidate has ever been forced by illness, or anything else, to quit the race after winning the nomination. But in 1972, the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had to drop out after it became known that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy. The DNC quickly regrouped, naming Sargent Shriver to take Eagleton's place. Now as then, it would be the responsibility of the party to fill any pre-election vacancy in its national ticket — regardless of whether the vacancy were caused by sickness, scandal, death, or mental debility. (Or, for that matter, by party leaders belatedly coming to their senses and realizing that a disastrous nominee was steering the Titanic straight for the iceberg.)

But suppose a vacancy materialized after the November election. Then the power to choose a replacement would no longer belong to the parties, but to the Electoral College.

Presidents are not elected directly by the people, but by state-based slates of electors. Under the Constitution, it is up to the states to appoint electors "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." Legislatures need not defer to the popular vote. They can, if they choose, name their state's electors directly, with instructions to vote for someone other than the candidate who won the most votes on Election Day.

Thomas Eagleton (L) was nominated by the 1972 Democratic convention to be George McGovern's running mate. But he was forced to leave the ticket once it became known that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy.

Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11 was quickly treated, and only a churl would wish her anything but a full recovery. But anything can happen. So far no president-elect has died, become incapacitated, or voluntarily withdrawn in the month and a half between the November election and the convening of the electors. It probably won't happen this year, either.

Yet if the 2016 cycle has taught us anything, it is to rule nothing out. With 70-year-old candidates, it isn't hard to imagine a serious medical crisis, such as a stroke or a massive heart attack, occurring just days after the election. Nor is it that hard — considering how ethically tainted the major-party nominees are — to imagine some devastating post-election revelation (perhaps via WikiLeaks) of wrongdoing or corruption that would make it unthinkable to allow the popular-vote winner to take the oath of office.

The Electoral College is routinely disparaged as undemocratic and archaic, but it exists for the excellent reason that mass democracy can go wrong. The people can be led wildly astray. Or they can make a choice that suddenly turns unviable. Or disaster can strike. Clinton's late-in-the-campaign illness may prove a mere blip. Still, it's a good opportunity to remind ourselves that the Framers built an escape hatch into the presidential election process. Even if voters screw the pooch on Nov. 8, the Electoral College can undo the damage.

SOURCE 

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Stop Big Government, Seek Bigger Growth

Seventeen years ago, near the close of the 20th century, the typical American household had a higher income than it did in 2015.

The Census Bureau's annual report on income and poverty in the United States, released this week, did not focus on that fact. But it did note that real median household income was higher in 2015 than in 2014.

"Median household income was $56,516 in 2015, an increase in real terms of 5.2 percent from the 2014 median of $53,718," the report said in its "Highlights" section.

"This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2007, the year before the most recent recession," the report said.

In 2007 — nine years ago — real median household income (in constant 2015 dollars) was $57,423, according to Table A-1 in the report. America has not gotten back there yet.

In the nearly five decades between 1967 and 2015, according to that table, real median household income peaked in 1999 at $57,909. It has never been that high in the 21st century.

But the Census Bureau data also shows — as it has shown in the past — that some types of households tend to have higher incomes than others.

To modern American liberals, this would be evidence of a class war, where rich and evil people exploit the poor.

But the Census Bureau's Table FINC-01, which shows median household income by "characteristics of families," demonstrates something else.

In 2015, according to this table, "married couple families" had a median household income of $84,324. By contrast, families with a male householder and "no wife present" had a median income of only $49,895. Families with a female householder and "no husband present" had a median income of $34,126.

Families where the householder had a bachelor's degree had a median income of $103,224. By contrast, families where the householder had a high school degree had a median income of $52,906, and families where the householder had attended high school but not graduated had a median income of $32,906.

One lesson from the Census Bureau data: If you want to do better financially in the United States, earn a degree, get married, have kids and work. Another lesson: America needs a new era of economic growth.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Is Hillary epileptic?



Those strange blue "sunglasses" Hillary has been wearing lately have now been identified as Zeiss f133 glasses, designed to prevent epileptic seizures.  Can America afford an epileptic as Commander in Chief?  Others are writing a lot on this (e.g. here) but you can be sure that vast efforts are being made to prevent any hard information getting out.

Even so, I think Hillary is finished.  Her age has caught up with her. Those old bones can't hack it anymore -- unless she has a body double of course.

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Deconstructing "inclusivity"

Inclusivity is something of a buzzword on the Left these days.  It has always seemed complete nonsense to me.  You don't include golf players in football games or vice versa.  Far from being a good thing, inclusivity would seem to create one big muddle.  Different people need to be treated differently, not herded into one big corral.  It only makes sense if you believe the absurd Leftist doctrine that all men are equal.  They may all be equal in the sight of God -- to quote a famous political compromise -- but God's optometrical difficulties are not widely shared.

I regard myself  as having had a blessed life and at age 73 still laugh my way through the day.  I don't sound very jolly in my writing a lot of the time but who could be jolly in discussing the slimy con-men of the Left?

Yet, as I have previously set out at some length,  I have lived most of my life in a state of great exclusion.  And I am delighted that I was able to separate myself from uncongenial company.  Because "inclusivity" was not forced down my throat, I was free to go my own way and do my own thing.  When most of my fellow pupils at school were running around chasing balls, I was reading books. From infancy on, chasing balls is clearly one of humanity's greatest pleasures but I much preferred books.  And I could do that.  I could separate myself from other people.  I lived happily outside the big Corral.  And to this day I have quite a small social circle.

So the great good to me seems to be discrimination.  Each of us is very discriminatory in choosing things as diverse as our wine and our life partners so being discriminatory in choosing our company should be optimal for our life satisfaction.  We do best by excluding the unsuitable, not by including it.

I suppose at this stage I must seem like a bit of a moron.  I have been treating the desirability of inclusion as a general proposition.  I think one does need to look at it in such an  objective way but, in reality, it is a very particular policy goal hiding behind a generally good-sounding name -- in the usual Leftist style.  Candy-coating their destructive proposals is what Leftists do.

What inclusion is all about was brought home to me by this article.  The language was inclusion but the starting point of the article was was outrage at the occasional deaths of unco-operative black criminals at the hands of the police.  Voila!  Being inclusive means being nicer to blacks!  That is the whole meaning and purpose of the  doctrine concerned.  I am all in favour of everybody being nice to everyone else but being permissive towards criminals of any skin color seems grossly maladaptive to me.  They should be excluded, not included.

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A defence of Trump

 Trump is not the statesman I would have chosen for this moment. My preferences run toward Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, Reagan, and the like. Trump doesn’t measure up to any of them. But his flaws are overstated. One of the dumber things often said about Trump is that “you can’t trust him with the nuclear codes.” This statement, first, betrays a complete lack of understanding of nuclear command and control. More important, it’s an extraordinary calumny, one that accuses the man of a wish or propensity to commit mass murder on the scale of Pol Pot. On what basis does anyone make such an accusation? Can Trump be erratic, obnoxious, and offensive? Of course, he can be all that and more. But while these qualities are not virtues, they may well have helped him punch through the Overton Window, in which case I am willing to make allowances.

For this objection to be decisive, Trump’s personal immoderation would have to be on a level that aspires to tyrannical rule. I don’t see it. Not even close. The charge of “buffoon” seems a million times more apt than “tyrant.” And even so, one must wonder how buffoonish the alleged buffoon really is when he is right on the most important issues while so many others who are esteemed wise are wrong. Hillary Clinton launched the Libya war, perhaps the worst security policy mistake in US history—which divided a country between two American enemies and anarchy, and took a stream of refugees into Europe and surged it into a flood. She pledges to vastly increase the refugee flow from the Middle East into our communities (and, mark my words, they will be Red State communities). Trump by contrast promises not to launch misguided wars, to protect our borders, and to focus immigration policy on the well-being of the currently-constituted American people. Who is truly more moderate: the colorful loudmouth with the sensible agenda or the corrupt, icy careerist with the radical agenda?

Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. The current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify, the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that wants not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

If the Constitution has any force or meaning, then “We the People” get to decide not merely who gets to run the administrative state—which, whatever the outcome, will always continue on the same path—more fundamentally, we get to decide what policies we want and which we don’t. Apparently, to the whole Left and much of the Right, this stance is immoderate and dangerous. The people who make that charge claim to do so in defense of Constitutional principle. I can’t square that circle. Can you?

(To those tempted to accuse me of advocating a crude majoritarianism, I refer you to what I said above and will say below on the proper, Constitutional operation of the United States government as originally designed and improved by the pre-Progressive Amendments.)

One must also wonder what is so “immoderate” about Trump’s program. As noted, it’s to the left of the last several decades of Republican-conservative orthodoxy. “Moderate” in the modern political (as opposed to the Aristotelean) sense tends to be synonymous with “centrist.” By that definition, Trump is a moderate. That’s why National Review and the rest of the conservatives came out of the gate so strongly against him. I admit that, not all that long ago, I probably would have too. But I have come to see conservatism in a different light. To oversimplify (again), the only “eternal principle” is the good. What, specifically, is good in a political context varies with the times and with circumstance, as does how best to achieve the good in a given context. The good is not tax rates or free trade. Those aren’t even principles. In the American political context, the good is the well-being of the physical America and its people, well-being defined (in terms that reflect both Aristotle and the American founding) as their “safety and happiness.” That’s what conservatism should be working to conserve.

Trump seems to grasp that the best way to do so in these times is to promote more solidarity and unity. The “conservatives” by contrast think it means more individualism. Neither of these, either, is an eternal principle. Prudence calls for a balance. Few would want the maximized (and forced) unity of ancient Sparta or modern North Korea. Only fool libertarians seek the maximized individualism of Ayn Rand. No unity means no nation. No individualism means no liberty. In an actual republic, a balance must be maintained, which can require occasional course corrections. In 1980, after a decade of stagnation, we needed an infusion of individualism. In 2016, we are too fragmented and atomized—united for the most part only by being equally under the thumb of the administrative state—and desperately need more unity.

Which means that Trump, right now, is right and the conservatives are wrong. His moderate program of secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy—all things that liberals and conservatives alike used to take for granted, if they disagreed on implementation—holds the promise of fostering more unity. But today, liberals are apoplectic at the mere mention of this program—controlling borders is “extreme” but a “borderless world” is the “ultimate wisdom”—and the Finlandized conservatives aid them in attacking the candidate who promotes it. Conservatives claim to deplore the way the Democrats slice and dice the electorate, reduce it to voting blocks and interest groups, and stoke resentments to boost turnout. But faced with a candidate explicitly running on a unity agenda they insist he is too extreme to trust with the reins of power. One wants to ask, again: which is it, conservatives? Is Trump to be rejected because he is too moderate or because he is too extreme? The answer appears to be that it doesn’t matter, so long as Trump is rejected.

So that’s my “immoderate” case for Trump: do things that are in the interests of lower, working, and middle class Americans in order to improve their lives and increase unity across all swaths and sectors of society. And in so doing, reassert the people’s rightful, Constitutional control of their government. “Dangerous.” “Extreme.” “Radical.” “Poison.” “Authoritarian.”

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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