We will open fire on the immigrant caravan if they throw stones says Trump as he promises to end to catch and release of illegals and put families in 'tent cities' instead

President Donald Trump issued a dire warning to would-be immigrants making their way toward the U.S., warning that thousands of U.S. troops being sent to the border would return fire if caravan members throw rocks at them.

The president once again said the U.S. would build tent cities to manage the problem of would-be asylum seekers, and said: 'We'll be holding the family and the children together' in the tents. 

SOURCE 

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Trump Is Right: Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Constitutional

By legal expert Hans von Spakovsky

President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he is preparing an executive order to end birthright citizenship has the left and even some conservatives in an uproar.

But the president is correct when he says that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution does not require universal birthright citizenship.

An executive order by Trump ending birthright citizenship would face a certain court challenge that would wind up in the Supreme Court. But based on my research of this issue over several years, I believe the president’s view is consistent with the view of the framers of the amendment.

Those who claim the 14th Amendment mandates that anyone born in the U.S. is automatically an American citizen are misinterpreting the amendment in a manner inconsistent with the intent of the amendment’s framers.

Universal birthright citizenship attracts illegal immigration. By granting immediate citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of the legal status of the parents, we reward and encourage illegal and exploitative immigration.

Most countries around the world do not provide birthright citizenship. We do so based not upon the requirements of federal law or the Constitution, but based upon an erroneous executive interpretation. That should be changed.

Many Republicans, Democrats, and independents believe the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, even if their parents are here illegally. But that ignores the text and legislative history of the amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children.

Contrary to popular belief, the 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all people born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.

Critics of the president’s possible action erroneously claim that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself or herself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal immigrants alike.

But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.

The fact that tourists or illegal immigrants are subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws means that they are subject to the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. and can be prosecuted. But it does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States, as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.

This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power,” would be considered citizens.

The amendment was intended to give citizenship only to those who owed their allegiance to the United States and were subject to its complete jurisdiction. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, R-Ill., a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” meant not owing allegiance to any other country.

Universal birthright citizenship attracts illegal immigration. By granting immediate citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of the legal status of the parents, we reward and encourage illegal and exploitative immigration.

Today many people do not seem to understand the distinction between partial, territorial jurisdiction—which subjects all foreigners who enter the U.S. to the jurisdiction of our laws—and complete political jurisdiction, which requires allegiance to the U.S. government as well.

So while a foreign tourist could be prosecuted for violating a criminal statute, he could not be drafted if we had a military draft or otherwise be subject to other requirements imposed on citizens, such as serving on a jury. If a foreign tourist has a baby while in the U.S., her child is a citizen of her home country and owes no political allegiance to the U.S.

In the famous Slaughter-House cases of 1872, the Supreme Court stated that this qualifying phrase was intended to exclude “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.”

This was confirmed in 1884 in another case, Elk vs. Wilkins, when citizenship was denied to an American Indian because he “owed immediate allegiance to” his tribe and not the United States.

American Indians and their children did not become citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. There would have been no need to pass such legislation if the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to all people born in America, no matter what the circumstances of their birth, and no matter the legal status of their parents.

Most legal arguments for universal birthright citizenship point to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. But that decision only stands for the very narrow proposition that children born of lawful, permanent residents are U.S. citizens.

The high court decision says nothing about the children of illegal immigrants or the children of tourists, students, and other foreigners only temporarily present in this country being automatically considered U.S. citizens. Those children are considered citizens of the native countries of their parents, just like children born abroad to American parents are considered U.S. citizens, no matter where the children are born.

The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment as extending to the children of legal noncitizens was incorrect, according to the text and legislative history of the amendment. But even under that holding, citizenship was not extended to the children of illegal immigrants—only permanent, legal residents.

U.S. immigration law (8 U.S.C. § 1401) simply repeats the language of the 14th Amendment, including the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The federal government has erroneously interpreted that statute to provide passports and other benefits to anyone born in the United States, regardless of whether their parents are here illegally and regardless of whether the applicant meets the requirement of being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.

As a result, the president of the United States has the authority to direct federal agencies to act in accordance with the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, and to issue passports and other government documents and benefits only to those individuals whose status as U.S. citizens meets this requirement.

SOURCE 





Roaring Economy Is GOP's Best Election Pitch

If Republicans focus their closing argument this weekend on the roaring American economy, they’ll strengthen their chances of holding Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Today’s jobs report is a particularly strong one — 250,000 jobs added and a headline unemployment rate of 3.7%, the lowest since 1969. The fuller U-6 measure of unemployment dropped to a historically low 7.4%. MarketWatch reports, “The increase in hiring last month was broad based — not a single major industry shed jobs.” And Investor’s Business Daily notes, “Among blacks, the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3% [two years ago] to 6%, and among Hispanics it’s now 4.5%. It was 5.7% two years ago.”

There are more than seven million job openings, which is more than there are people looking for jobs. “Thirty-eight percent of all owners reported job openings they could not fill in the current period, equal to last month’s record high,” reports National Federation of Independent Business Chief Economist William Dunkelberg. That has put upward pressure on wages, which increased at a 3.1% annual rate — the best since 2009.

As President Donald Trump observed, “It’s the best unemployment numbers we have in 50 years. And that’s wonderful, but we actually need workers now. That’s a good thing to be saying because that hasn’t been said for many, many decades. And we want people to come in. You’ve all been reading about the immigration situation with the caravans and all, but the fact is, we want people coming into the country. We want them to come in legally.”

On a final note, consumer confidence once again hit an 18-year high this week. And what is the economy but a monetary measure of consumer confidence? When people perceive that things are good, that perception becomes reality.

How good is it? “Pretty much everything you could want in a monthly jobs report,” says … Joe Biden’s economic adviser, Jared Bernstein. Granted, he refuses to credit Trump, but still.

The bottom line: The extraordinary midterm record for Trump and congressional Republicans has the nation better off than we were two years go. Will voters reward the GOP with holding both houses, or has Democrats’ divisive rhetoric really made voters “tired of winning”?

SOURCE 

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43 percent of early voters are Republican and 41 percent are Democrats

Suggesting a narrow GOP win

Six days out from Election Day, over 24 million votes have been counted as early or absentee, a number that exceeds the total nationwide early vote from 2014.

As of Wednesday, 24,024,621 million early and absentee ballots have been counted nationwide in all states with early voting activity.

Six days out from Election Day during the last midterm in 2014, just under 13 million (12,938,596) early or absentee ballots had been counted — a difference of over 11 million — signifying that voters could be shifting more and more toward early voting.

Wednesday's early vote total even surpasses the total nationwide early vote from 2014, which was over 21 million (21,218,015).

Turnout overall is generally lower during midterm elections than presidential elections, but this year the total early vote count six days out is between where it was in 2014 and the over 29 million (29,196,380) early votes that were counted six days out from the presidential election in 2016.

In all of the key states NBC News has been following, early vote counts for so far this year (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas), the six-day-out total is higher in than it was in 2014. The national trend toward early voting has been close between the two parties.

As of Wednesday, 43 percent of early voters are Republican and 41 percent are Democrats. At this point in 2016, 43 percent of early voters were Democrats and 40 percent were Republicans.

SOURCE 




New Voter Fraud Cases Show Need to Secure Our Elections

The midterm elections are less than a week away, and that means that ensuring the integrity of the electoral process is more important than ever.

If Americans cannot say with certainty that their votes will be counted, that the process is free of fraud, and the outcome is valid, what incentive do they have to turn out in the first place?

Unfortunately, the latest news on the election integrity front is less than inspiring.

In August, the Justice Department announced it was prosecuting 19 foreign nationals for illegally voting in North Carolina—some of them in multiple elections. Those prosecutions are ongoing.

A month later, Californians learned—just weeks before a tremendously consequential election—that a “processing error” had led to 1,500 people being improperly registered to vote in their state, including at least one noncitizen.

Unbelievably, this is only the latest in a series of snafus that have plagued the state’s new “motor voter” law. Earlier this year, the state Department of Motor Vehicles botched 23,000 registrations and double-registered potentially tens of thousands more.

Just this week, The Heritage Foundation has added 20 new cases to its online election-fraud database, which now documents 1,165 proven cases of election fraud spanning 47 states. And 1,011 of these cases resulted in criminal convictions.

The new entries run the election fraud gamut, but voters heading to the polls may find one from Philadelphia particularly disturbing.

The members of the election board responsible for administering polling station 43-7 during a March 2017 special election abused their authority to deny voters an opportunity to freely cast their ballots.

According to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Calvin Mattox, Wallace Hill, Thurman George, and Dolores Shaw employed “harassment and intimidation against voters who wanted to vote for candidates of their choice—but not the candidate being pushed by the city’s Democratic Party machine.”

Mattox, Hill, and George pleaded guilty to various election law violations and received probated sentences and a loss of their voting rights. Shaw received an accelerated rehabilitative disposition for “compromising the local election board.”

Meanwhile, in Illinois an entire family—Calvin Borders Jr.; his son, Calvin Borders III; his daughter, Candace; and the son’s girlfriend, Janie Walker—registered to vote using a vacant lot on Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, Illinois. None lived in the city.

The two men pleaded guilty to perjury, while Candice Borders and Walker pleaded guilty to forgery. The Borders were sentenced to probation, and Walker is awaiting sentencing later this year.

In one case of double voting, Jeffrey Hartman, a resident of Westminster, Maryland, illegally registered to vote in both Maryland and Morgan County, West Virginia, and on nine different occasions since 2006 cast ballots in both states.

Hartman pleaded guilty in West Virginia to illegal voting and was given a suspended 30-day jail sentence, was put on probation for one year, and ordered to pay a $100 fine and court costs.

These are just a handful of the more colorful cases from Heritage’s database, which is itself likely only the tip of the election fraud iceberg.

Simply put, the full scope of fraud in U.S. elections is unknown, and many states do not have in place the policies and procedures to detect and deter voter fraud.

Yet efforts at studying the problem, such as President Donald Trump’s thwarted Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, or proactively addressing the issue, like Ohio’s move to clean up voter rolls riddled with errors, are vigorously attacked and opposed by liberal activists and politicians.

They have spent years insisting, despite mounting, incontrovertible evidence—to say nothing of common sense—that election fraud is nonexistent. They claim that “election integrity” is a smokescreen designed to conceal efforts at suppression and disenfranchisement.

What they ignore, or more accurately, seek to bury, are the inconvenient facts that dispel these narratives. Participation rates have increased in states that have adopted voter identification laws.

When states do pass photo identification requirements, they include provisions that ensure that anyone without an acceptable ID can get one for free.

Opponents of election integrity also want to deflect attention away from the broad popularity of the measures they attack. Voter ID, for example, is so uncontroversial that even in our bitterly divided era, a Rasmussen poll found that 70 percent of likely voters favor it.

They also want to deflect attention away from the bitter truth that each illegal ballot that is cast essentially disenfranchises a lawful voter. That is something no American should tolerate.

With elections, the process matters at least as much as the outcome, and Americans deserve a process they can trust.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Conservative causes uproar in EU Parliament with Nazi comment

The Eurocrats took refuge in the fact that the Nazis were not the only socialists in prewar Germany but that proves nothing.  It is true that the old union-affiliated Left (Social Democrats) did oppose the Nazis to some degree but that was just sibling rivalry, often the bitterest rivalry.

Leftists are very prone to "splits" and sometimes  seem to hate one another more than anyone else. Lenin spoke of other Bolsheviks such as Kautsky describing: "the full extent of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests".  He could scarcely have spoken greater ill of the Tsar.

And Trotsky was a very senior Bolshevik, leader of the Red Army during the revolution, no less.  But he ended up with an icepick in the head, courtesy of Stalin.

So being an anti-Nazi socialist does nothing to deny that Nazis were socialists too.  There are many flavours of socialism, all pretty poisonous and longing to control you

A leading British Conservative in the European Parliament has come under a barrage of criticism after he compared current-day socialist parties with Nazism.

Addressing socialist lawmakers in a debate Wednesday, Syed Kamall said ‘‘you have to remember that Nazis were National Socialists, a strain of socialism, so let’s not pretend. It’s a left-wing ideology.’’

The remarks caused an immediate uproar. and Kamall added ‘‘you don’t like the truth, do you?’’

Kamall later said he ‘‘apologized directly & unreservedly’’ to the leader of the socialist group, but criticism was scathing.

Socialists opposed Nazism and were among the early victims of the extreme-right ideologies of Adolf Hitler.

EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said claims that Nazism is left-wing or socialist have been pushed by the extreme right on the Internet for the past few years, but added ‘‘what is new to me is that the leader in this house of the party of Churchill and Thatcher would appropriate that narrative.’’

‘‘What has happened to the Conservative Party?’’ he asked legislators.

ALDE Liberal leader Guy Verhofstadt, too, was stunned.

Kamall’s words were ‘‘an insult to all the Social Democrats who fought against Nazism and died in concentration camps,’’ Verhofstadt said.

The S&D socialist group said socialists ‘‘throughout Europe resisted Hitler’s regime and paid for it with their lives. With his disgusting comparison, Kamall has mocked these brave people.’’

Kamall tweeted that it was not a comment aimed at anyone and ‘‘I have upmost respect for anyone who stood up & fought against Nazism, Communism & any other kinds of extremism.’’

SOURCE


UPDATE:  A reader has alerted me to a terminological problem in describing the weapon used to kill Leon Trotsky.  Strictly, an ice pick is a rather harmless thing that looks a lot like an office bodkin.  I use one often. The weapon used to kill Trotsky was a sort of pick but it is better described as an ice axe, though the handle had been shortened for concealment purposes.  A picture of it is here, together with a description of how and why it was used


An ice pick.  Not a good murder weapon and NOT the thing used on Trotsky.  Trotsky was a mass murderer who deserved to die as he lived.

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More Leftist racism

Fresh off the disgusting coverage of Pittsburgh’s mass shooting at a synagogue, CNN’s Don Lemon is on the prowl to attack Republicans.

During his show on Monday night, Lemon said the “biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right” followed by “there is no white guy ban. So, what do we do about that?”

It was on television and captured on video, then shared multiple times across social media networks, easily going viral because of what Lemon said.

So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban.

President Donald Trump had recently called for unity among Americans, but Lemon’s choice of words appear to be very divisive in nature.

CNN and many pundits left of center have rejected Trump’s call for unity and resorted to attacking the president after the shooting attack at the Pittsburgh synagogue.

The call for unity was welcomed by many Americans, but seems to have fallen short of acceptance from Trump’s biggest critics.

SOURCE

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Synagogue slayings are NOT a shot in the culture wars

by Alexander Ryvchin

The partisan advantage-taking began before the bodies had even been identified.

To opponents of the US President, the massacre of 11 Jews during a baby naming ceremony at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, was the logical endpoint of President Trump’s refusal to expressly reject an endorsement from former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke; the President’s drawing of moral equivalence between clashing Antifa extremists and white nationalists in Charlottesville; and his incendiary talk on migration and refugees.

To those calling for tougher gun laws, Pittsburgh was another mass shooting event made possible by the easy availability of high-powered assault rifles.

And to those who never miss an opportunity to direct our attention to the supposedly boundless evil of that little Jewish state on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the massacre of Jewish civilians in the US was the result of rage against Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, or poetic justice for Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the State’s capital.

The ideologues simply picked their cause of choice, selected their preferred villain and placed the 11 corpses at their feet.

Hardly mentioned are the facts.

This is not the first mass shooting targeting a Jewish community in the US. In 2014, three people were murdered at a Jewish community centre in Overland Park, Kansas. Barack Obama was president then.

Mass shootings of Jews are common throughout the western world, in countries without the Second Amendment and with low gun ownership. Jews were massacred in a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015; in a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014; in a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; and at a synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015.

Far from acting out of frustration at Middle East politics, the Pittsburgh killer didn’t care a jot for the Palestinians or Israel’s foreign policy. The existence of the State of Israel and its absorption of millions of Jewish refugees from throughout the world has saved countless Jewish lives, not imperiled them.

The common factor in every attack of this sort is not the weapon of choice, the religion of the perpetrator or the commander-in-chief at the time of the attack. It is antisemitism - the irrational, irrepressible, consumptive hatred of the Jewish people that pervades elements of every political ideology and every faith.

It is what shatters gravestones in Jewish cemeteries throughout the United States and Europe with appalling regularity. It is what led Louis Farrakhan, a US Muslim leader embraced by major figures in the Democratic Party, to liken Jews to termites, just weeks ago. It is what lodges knives in the backs of Jews standing at bus-stops in Jerusalem. It is what has prompted 40% of British Jews to consider leaving Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn - a man who hosts Holocaust deniers at Westminster and lays wreaths at the graves of terrorists who have spilled Jewish blood - nears the threshold of No.10 Downing Street.

Antisemitism is a remarkably robust and versatile form of hatred. It finds favour in the political left where the Jews are seen as too privileged, too comfortable, too establishment to be a vulnerable minority or accepted as allies in solidarity. To religious extremists, the Jews are too stiff-necked in their rejection of the later monotheistic teachings of Christianity and Islam, too content with their own beliefs and customs, and therefore deserving of scorn and hatred. While to the hard-right, the speed with which the Jews seem to bounce back from each calamity inflicted upon them, through a combination of resilience and bitter experience, only feeds the paranoid conspiracy theories about Jews secretly controlling everything and sowing our misfortune.

The appropriation of the Pittsburgh dead to fight the latest round of the cultural wars is an affront to the memories of the eleven people murdered as Jews in their place of worship.

Condemnations of Trump’s jingoism and dubious associations, right and necessary as they are, ring hollow unless one is equally reviled by the racism of Farrakhan and the associations of Jeremy Corbyn. The condemnation of antisemitism must be a matter of basic decency and not partisan politics. Otherwise, we will merely entrench the discord and polarization in which violent extremism lives and thrives and await the next bout of violence and the next mass burial of the Jewish dead.

SOURCE

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Look left, look right, but look left again for hate

Comment from Australia

Was the aggressive rhetoric of ­Donald Trump responsible for the horrific murder of innocent Jews in the synagogue in Pittsburgh last week? The answer is no, but the increasingly hostile, bitter political debate is dangerous in the US and to a lesser extent in Australia.

It is not appealing to trivialise these shocking events by reducing them to partisan politics. But too many commentators have made a simplistic connection between these murders and Trump’s rhetoric. The facts don’t support the charge. The Pittsburgh killer, Robert Bowers, did not vote for Trump, has been violent and semi-deranged for a long time, and hates Trump, whom he sees as a globalist rather than a nationalist.

I certainly find some of Trump’s rhetoric exaggerated and offensive. But the development of the new level of deep, quasi-violent toxicity in political debate has many causes. The anonymity of social media and the vile language of tweets and online abuse is affecting the whole culture of politics. So is identity politics and the destructive sense that mere political debate now routinely involves issues of your deepest identity.

But what contribution does exaggerated rhetoric by politicians make to this toxic culture? The extreme Left and the extreme Right are mirror images of each other. Both are filled with hatred, demonising their opponents, violent language and intolerance.

What of more mainstream politicians? Far from Trump being a unique cause of violent language and intolerant thought, it is much more the Centre Left than the Centre Right, in Australia as well as the US, that routinely resorts to violent language and crude, demonising analogies. Very often they do this in the name of tolerance.

Consider: Many leading Democrats in the US refer to themselves as part of the “resistance” to Trump. Resistance is a term from war — the French resistance to Nazi occupation. Sometimes terror groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip refer to themselves as the resistance. So the implication is plain. For Democrats, Trump does not represent an administration they disagree with but an evil, illegitmate “occupying” force.

Former CIA director John Brennan ludicrously accused Trump of treason because of pro-Vladimir Putin remarks Trump made. I thought Trump’s remarks pretty weird and offensive too, but by no stretch of reason could they possibly be described as treason.

The man who shot Republican congressman Steve Scalise and a number of other people at a Virginia Republican event had written on Facebook: “Trump is guilty and should go to prison for treason.” He was also, as Trump himself has pointed out, an admirer of left-wing senator Bernie Sanders.

It is almost always bad manners to let the facts get in the way of a public moral denunciation, especially of Trump, but in terms of language there is a much closer connection between the extreme language of Democrats and that shooter than there is between the language of Trump and any foul right-wing terrorist.

The Democrat and centre-left rhetoric is infused with violence. Hillary Clinton, the perfect if always slightly delayed weather vane, forever blowing with the zeitgeist, explicitly urged her supporters not to be civil to Republicans until after next week’s midterm elections. Former Democratic attorney-general Eric Holder urged Democrats to “kick Republicans”.

There is a natural resort to violent language by what might be called the Centre Left throughout the culture wars. Jimmy Kimmel, a popular US late-night television host with an audience of many millions, said on TV that he wouldn’t mind Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed for the US Supreme Court so long as “we could cut off his pesky penis in public”.

Can you just begin to imagine the outrage if, say, a Fox TV host had said something equivalent about a left-of-centre figure, much less a judge?

Robert De Niro, an Oscar winner and beloved hero of Hollywood, in a considered YouTube video famously said: “I’d like to punch Trump in the face.”

Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters called on her supporters to publicly confront and harass Trump administration figures in restaurants, gasoline stations, department stores and other public places.

This resort to violent language, extreme demonisation of their opponents and the conviction that people who disagree with them are truly evil is common — not universal — in the Centre Left in the US and Australia.

It comes, I think, partly because the way you signal your own moral virtue is by vehemently denouncing something truly evil. When, inconveniently, your opponent is not truly evil, the easiest thing is just to pretend that they are.

One of the great unconscious ironies of our descent into vituperative hatreds is that very often the people who in one breath sincerely argue for greater civility in public debate, in the next breath denounce people they disagree with in the most extravagant and violent terms. This suggests they don’t fundamentally accept the legitimacy of disagreement. They want civility among people who broadly share their world view and silence from everyone else.

There are countless Australian examples.

Nick Cater on Monday on this page pointed to Kevin Rudd’s new volume of memoirs in which Rudd claims he wanted to “restore civility to our national discourse” and then describes Tony Abbott as “borderline violent”, without a skerrick of evidence or justification, and a “professional hater”.

Benjamin Law in the same-sex marriage debate famously joked that perhaps he would “hate-f..k” Coalition politicians to convince them of the proposal’s merits and later justified this gross and violent language by saying he meant it lightheartedly.

Subsequently he was rewarded with more programs on the ABC because apparently when centre-left people use foul and offensive language, it’s OK.

Dirk Moses, a Sydney University history professor, disagreed with me over the proposal from the Ramsay Centre for a course on Western civilisation and concluded, dishonestly and with no basis in fact, that I oppose racial diversity and support the ideas of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist and mass murderer.

Without pausing to consider whether Moses studies and teaches history with the same extreme indifference to facts, not to mention common sense, which he exhibited in that article, one struggles to find similarly hysterical and dishonest instant rhetorical escalation on the Centre Right.

These are all respectable figures, esteemed in our public culture, who argue for tolerance yet use the most violent, dishonest, uncivil, polarising, emotional and profoundly unfair language about people who disagree with them.

The roots of our political malaise are many. The group decision by many on the Centre Left that anyone who disagrees with them is a monstrous and illegitimate low-life — taken long before Trump came around — is a big part of it.

SOURCE

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

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

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Why Does the Left Hate Prosperity?

Stephen Moore

Here is Moore's rule of modern-day politics: The better the economy performs under President Donald Trump and the more successes he racks up, the more unhinged the left becomes. It's a near linear relationship. And it goes for media as well.

That's why the monthly jobs announcements and the quarterly GDP reports, like the one released Oct. 26, are the unhappiest days of the year for the Trump haters. News of 3.5 to 4 percent growth and 7 million surplus jobs are the bane of the resistance movement's existence.

So with the economy flying high, the pundits who predicted Trump would shut down the world economy have had to continually invent new reasons that Trump is the worst thing to happen to the United States since typhoid fever.

Consider the latest leftist rant: Trump has moved the GOP to the far right and has hijacked the principles of the Republican Party. Whatever happened, they ask, to the good ol' days when moderates in the GOP used to compromise, cut deals with Ted Kennedy and capitulate?

Liberals want a return to the days when the GOP's standard bearers were people like George H.W. Bush, Bob Michel, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and most recently, John Kasich.

Think. What do all these Republicans have in common? Losing.

My intention isn't to disparage these men. I have known all of them and respect them all — especially the noble war heroes. Michel was a Republican minority leader beloved by the left for years and years, precisely because he kept the House Republicans where they belonged — in the minority.

It was only when the mean Newt Gingrich "hijacked" the party with a hard-charging conservative political and economic reform agenda that the GOP blasted out the Democrats with dynamite and won the House for the first time in a half-century.

Or consider Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney. They all lost the White House and now are treated as statesmen and political icons. Lovable losers.

Trump's crime is that he's a winner. Which is why the left now pines for, as The New York Times recently put it, "principled Republicans." The party has "lost its way" and abandoned what it stood for. Nicholas Kristof writes in The Times that "sure, there are still many principled individuals left in the party" — by which the left means people who oppose Trump 00 but "as a national institution the Republican Party is hollow."

Wait a minute. Aren't prosperity and opportunity two of the most cherished Republican principles?

What infuriates Trump haters is that he figured out how to win over tens of millions of disaffected working-class voters with an unapologetic "America First" platform. These voters abandoned the union leaders and the party of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders in favor of an agenda of better trade deals, border enforcement, lower taxes, less regulation and more coal, oil and gas jobs.

Trump found the fault line in the Democratic coalition and exploited it like the bombing of Dresden. He persuaded blue-collar workers that they have nothing in common with people like Tom Steyer, radical environmentalists who have taken over the reins of the Democratic Party and want to destroy manufacturing, mining and energy jobs as a sacrifice to the gods of global warming.

Because Trump has taken on the left's sacred cows of political correctness, victimization, open borders and racial preferences, he's labeled a racist, xenophobic, lslamophobic woman-hater.

It turns out though that a whole lot of voters agree with Trump. If Trump is a bigot for articulating his "America First" paradigm, doesn't that mean the millions of formerly Democratic voters who crossed over to vote for Trump must also be narrow-minded and culturally inferior rednecks?

In other words, liberals really do hold the view that blue-collar voters are a gang of "deplorables." Good luck winning back their votes. Ironically, as Democrats complain that Trump's tax cuts only benefit the rich, the wealthiest counties in America overwhelmingly vote Democratic and the poorest counties and states are more likely to vote Republican.

Politics is a contact sport. There aren't many moral victories in politics. And yes, it really all does come down to winning. As two-time winner Bill Clinton used to say, you can't change the country if you don't win.

The problem for the Trump haters, and the reason they are so spitting angry, is that Trump is changing the country for the better. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 7 of 10 voters rate the economy as good or great. Liberals are doubly angry and frustrated because they were so sure he would fail. Perhaps they are the ones who are intellectually inferior.

SOURCE 

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Sen. Graham To Introduce Legislation To End Birthright Citizenship

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina announced on Tuesday that he will introduce legislation that would end birthright citizenship.

Graham’s announcement comes after President Donald Trump revealed in a recent interview that he was planning to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

“Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship. I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform — and at the same time — the elimination of birthright citizenship,” Graham wrote.

This is a major issue, and has already resulted in liberals threatening lawsuits and to challenge the executive order before the Supreme Court.

Congress is out of session until Nov. 13, so the only thing that might happen before the Nov. 6 midterm elections is that the president will sign an executive order.

Getting the measure passed in Congress may prove to be difficult, especially given the partisan divides.

The South Carolina Republican’s legislation to amend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution would require two-thirds majorities in Congress and it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

Graham’s proposed measure is in response to Trump announcing on Monday to Axios on HBO that he would pursue an executive order to outlaw birthright citizenship just before the midterms.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t. You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order…We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States…with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

As detailed by The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, his executive order will undoubtedly be challenged by the lower courts and more than likely make its way to the Supreme Court — which currently has a 5-4 conservative slant.

The issue at hand is the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

The key phrase here is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Here’s what Ilya Shapiro of CATO Institute points out:

That phrase was originally written to exclude the children of Native American tribes from American citizenship – since those children were subject to the jurisdiction of Native American governance – as well as the children of foreign diplomats and soldiers from abroad fighting on American land. The amendment was specifically written in order to guarantee the citizenship of freed slaves and their children, in order to abrogate the Supreme Court’s despicable Dred Scott ruling. Senator Jacob Howard (R-MI) explained the purpose of the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” provision:

“This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.”

SOURCE 

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Politicizing and Profiting on Hate: From Fake Bomb Threats to Slaughtering Innocents

Last Friday, Cesar Sayoc, a bankrupt Democrat-hating sociopath criminal living in a van plastered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, was arrested in Florida. He is the prime suspect who sent what I noted Thursday were hoax mail bomb packages to 14 Democrat notables. As I wrote, “Given the amateurish construction, packaging, and delivery method, tracking down the threat package maker(s) will be swift.” And it was.

I also noted, “To be clear, whether or not these devices were intended to detonate or disrupt, this is, by definition, an act of terrorism [as was] the case with the envelopes laced with the deadly toxin ricin, sent to the Pentagon and White House three weeks ago.” However, I have confirmed those “bombs” were inert, and it is curious that there has been no confirmation the mail packages a hoax intended to make headlines.

Tragically, over the weekend, there was hateful bloodshed. A self-styled neo-Nazi sociopath, Robert Bowers, murdered 11 mostly elderly innocents during a bris ceremony at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Six people were wounded, including four police officers.

According to confirmed reports, Bowers was inspired, in part, because Donald Trump is the most PRO-Israel president since Ronald Reagan. As you recall, Trump hired prominent Jewish people for his administration, he has Jewish family, and last May Trump boldly made good on a 23-year-old American commitment to move our embassy to Jerusalem.

Bowers reportedly yelled, “All Jews must die!” as he entered the synagogue, reminiscent of the much more frequently heard declaration “Allahu Akbar” when Islamists are slaughtering innocents.

The leftist publication Slate declared, “Bowers made his hatred of Trump clear” — he believed “Trump was under the control of Jews, who are out to destroy Western civilization.” Reuters reported that Bowers “is a registered voter with ‘no affiliation’ who took aim [at] Donald Trump, accusing him of being a ‘globalist’ who did nothing to stop the ‘infestation’ of the United States by Jews.”

“Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers wrote on his social-media page prior to the assault. “There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.” He also wrote, “For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn or even touched a MAGA hat.”

Trump responded to the attack: “This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from the world.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer praised Trump’s condemnation of anti-Semitism, saying, “I’ve been following anti-Semitism all of my adult life. I have never heard a stronger statement than the statement the president of the United States made yesterday.” Dermer added, “One of the reasons why anti-Semitism hits the president close to home; his family — his daughter and his son-in-law, his grandchildren — are Jewish.”

Asked if he blamed anyone other than the assailant, Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said he did not: “Hate does not know religion, race, creed, political party. It’s not a political issue in any way, shape, or form. Hate does not know any of those things.” Despite inflammatory reports to the contrary, when asked if the president would be welcome at his synagogue, Myers responded, “The President of the United States is always welcome. I am a citizen, he is my president. He is always welcome.”

There are on average more than 40 homicides every day in America, disproportionately black-on-black attacks in Democrat-controlled urban centers — the direct result of generations of leftist social policies. And those murder rates continue to rise because of those policies.

But the mass murder of a group of 11 people who have no connection to drug or gang violence, innocents targeted solely because of their faith, should inspire profound and universal righteous indignation in all of us. It should be one of those moments when we come together as a nation to universally condemn such hatred.

That notwithstanding, predictably, before the blood of these precious souls was dry, leftist politicos and their Leftmedia outlets were scheming how to politicize and profiteer from this tragedy. Unfortunately, all the Left has to offer is a platform of fear, hate, and division.“ Typical of those responses was that from former DNC chairman Howard Dean, who declared: "This has now become a struggle about good versus evil. And the President of the United States is evil.”

Beyond the knee-jerk calls for gun control, two political narratives have emerged about the Pittsburgh assailant’s motives.

First is that he is a “right wing” neo-Nazi.

This characterization is correct, except for the commonly misunderstood “right wing” part. Today’s Democrat socialists don’t object to the increasingly violent so-called “antifa movement” of self-proclaimed anti-fascist fascists, but they like to claim that sociopathic Nazis and other seditionist and anarchist groups are “right wing.” That may fit nicely into their politicized sound bites, but seditionists and anarchists, whose primary political goal is to overthrow our government, are by definition “leftist.”

That being said, there is no question that Bowers’s hatred was inspired by Nazism and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

The second political/MSM narrative is an attempt to pivot the motive for his violence to the approaching “caravasion,” the caravan of migrants organized and supported by leftist groups. They are now passing through Mexico, intent on forcing their way across the U.S. border — which is an invasion, despite the fact that most of these migrants are opportunists looking to better their lives. The MSM points to a recent post by Bowers claiming HIAS, a Jewish refugee agency, is behind the march. According to Bowers’s deluded perspective, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

But again, this is not rooted in Bowers’s concern about migrants; it is rooted in his anti-Semitic delusion that the organization of the caravan is a Jewish conspiracy.

Both of these narratives more closely reflect the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Democrat Party allies, including anti-semite leaders of the “Women’s March,” Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour. Nor would they share a stage with consummate Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, as Bill Clinton recently did.

Regarding Farrakhan, who recently compared Jews to “termites,” John Kass wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “Few if any Democratic voices are being raised against Farrakhan. The Congressional Black Caucus certainly won’t condemn him. And white Democrats aren’t demanding condemnation either. They don’t want to risk losing votes. This silence is dangerous.”

In fact, if Democrats were really concerned about anti-semitism, they would not have made his friend, Islamic Rep. Keith Ellison, Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Currently, Bowers has been charged with numerous federal crimes, including 11 counts of Obstruction of Exercise of Religious Beliefs Resulting in Death, 11 counts of Use of a Firearm to Commit Murder During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence, and four counts of Obstruction of Exercise of Religious Beliefs Resulting in Bodily Injury to a Public Safety Officer.

President Trump and federal prosecutors are calling for his execution if found guilty. The Left will likely object…

A final note on the hate profiteers, those other than the MSM profiteers whose market share and ad revenues depend on sensationalism. As I anticipated when first hearing about the Bowers assault Saturday, within hours, a reflexive fundraising response hit my inbox from the left-wing SPLC, the nation’s most profitable hate-hustling “civil rights” group. In its fundraising “special edition,” the SPLC regurgitated more of its leftist rhetoric.

SPLC has an “endowment” of $320 million and in the most recent year of record, the organization listed revenue in excess of $58 million. So my question for the SPLC: The Pittsburgh assailant had a long history of racist rhetoric and activities — did the SPLC spend one dime of its endowment and revenues identifying this hater and reporting him to law enforcement authorities? Of course not.

SOURCE 

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

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

**************************

DHS Secretary Nielsen: 'Caravan Is Not Getting In'; Trump: 'Military Is Waiting for You'

As thousands of Central Americans continue marching north, President Trump reportedly plans to make a major immigration speech on Tuesday.

According to the Washington Post, he is expected to announce that he is invoking emergency powers, on national security grounds, to stop those people and others from entering the United States.

Trump on Monday had a message for the thousands of Central Americans heading to the Southwest border:

"Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border," he tweeted. "lease go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!"

"I think what the president has been saying and will continue to say, and certainly what I have been saying, is, this caravan is not getting in," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told "Fox News Sunday."

"There is a legal way to enter this country. Those who choose to enter illegally will be stopped."

Nielsen said her message to the caravan is, "Do not come. You will not be allowed in. There is a right way to immigrate to the United States and this is not it."

What we're really talking about is the flow of people that are headed towards United States. They have chosen to break laws along the way. You saw some of them, frankly overwhelm and burst through the border between Guatemala and the country of Mexico.

Mexico has offered them asylum. In some cases, they have refused. Mexico has offered them work permits. In some cases, they have refused.

And I think what the president and I are both saying, and we want to be clear on this is, if you seek asylum, do so in the first place, country, Mexico has offered you refuge.

If you want a job, that is not asylum. If you want to be reunited with your family, that is not asylum. If you want to just come live in the United States, that is not asylum; there are legal ways to do that.

But this is about the rule of law. This is about understanding who is in the flow. And Chris, I cannot tell you as Secretary of Homeland Security, that I know every person in this flow.

Nielsen described the daily Southwest border breaches as a "crisis": "We are stopping between 1,500 and 1,700 people a day, trying to cross illegally into this country. This caravan is one iteration of that but frankly we essentially see caravans every day with these numbers.

"So I think what the president is making clear is every possible action, authority, executive program, is on the table to consider, to ensure that it is clear that there is a right and a legal way to come to this country and no other ways will be tolerated."

Host Chris Wallace asked Nielsen how women and children "threaten national security."

"Well I think there's a couple ways to look at this," Nielsen responded. She said the caravan "isn't a ticketed event," and it may include terrorists who blend in with the crowd. "In general, we stopped -- across United States -- 10 known or suspected terrorists a day from getting into the United States."

Last week, Trump tweeted: "To those in the Caravan, turnaround, we are not letting people into the United States illegally. Go back to your Country and if you want, apply for citizenship like millions of others are doing!"

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, issued a statement last week, commenting on Trump's reported plan to block asylum-seekers and immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border:

“It’s disgraceful the Trump administration would even consider what’s being reported. It would mean refusing to protect people who can prove they are fleeing persecution. That would be a huge moral failure and any plan along these lines will be subject to intense legal scrutiny.”

SOURCE 

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Politicizing and Profiting on Hate: From Bomb Threats to Slaughtering Innocents

Last Friday, Cesar Sayoc, a Democrat-hating sociopath who drives a vehicle plastered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, was arrested in Florida. He is the prime suspect who sent what I noted Thursday were likely inert mail bomb packages to 14 Democrat notables. As I wrote, "Given the amateurish construction, packaging, and delivery method, tracking down the threat package maker(s) will be swift." And it was.

As I also noted, "To be clear, whether or not these devices were intended to detonate or disrupt, this is, by definition, an act of terrorism [as was] the case with the envelopes laced with the deadly toxin ricin, sent to the Pentagon and White House three weeks ago." It is curious that there has been no information about whether the mail packages were intended to harm or a hoax intended to make headlines.

Tragically, over the weekend, there was hateful bloodshed. A self-styled neo-Nazi sociopath, Robert Bowers, murdered 11 mostly elderly innocents at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. According to reports, he may have been inspired in part because Donald Trump is the most PRO-Israel president since Ronald Reagan. As you recall, in May Trump boldly made good on a 23-year-old American commitment to move our embassy to Jerusalem.

Bowers reportedly yelled, "All Jews must die!" as he entered the synagogue, reminiscent of the much more frequently heard declaration "Allahu Akbar" when Islamists are slaughtering innocents.

The leftist publication Slate declared, "Bowers made his hatred of Trump clear" — he believed "Trump was under the control of Jews, who are out to destroy Western civilization." Reuters reported that Bowers "is a registered voter with 'no affiliation' who took aim [at] Donald Trump, accusing him of being a 'globalist' who did nothing to stop the 'infestation' of the United States by Jews."

"Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist," Bowers wrote on his social-media page prior to the assault. "There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation." He also wrote, "For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn or even touched a MAGA hat."

There are on average more than 40 homicides every day in America, disproportionately black-on-black attacks in Democrat-controlled urban centers — the direct result of generations of leftist social policies. And those murder rates continue to rise because of those policies.

But the mass murder of a group of 11 people who have no connection to drug or gang violence, innocents targeted solely because of their faith, should inspire profound and universal righteous indignation in all of us. It should be one of those moments when we come together as a nation to universally condemn such hatred.

That notwithstanding, predictably, before the blood of these precious souls was dry, leftist politicos and their Leftmedia outlets were scheming how to politicize and profiteer from this tragedy. Unfortunately, all the Left has to offer is a platform of fear, hate, and division."

Beyond the knee-jerk calls for gun control, two political narratives have emerged about the Pittsburgh assailant's motives.

First is that he is a "right wing" neo-Nazi.

This characterization is correct, except for the commonly misunderstood "right wing" part. Today's Democrat socialists don't object to the increasingly violent so-called "antifa movement" of self-proclaimed anti-fascist fascists, but they like to claim that sociopathic Nazis and other seditionist and anarchist groups are "right wing." That may fit nicely into their politicized sound bites, but seditionists and anarchists, whose primary political goal is to overthrow our government, are by definition "leftist."

That being said, there is no question that Bowers's hatred was inspired by Nazism and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party.

The second political/MSM narrative is an attempt to pivot the motive for his violence to the approaching "caravasion," the caravan of migrants organized and supported by leftist groups. They are now passing through Mexico, intent on forcing their way across the U.S. border — which is an invasion, despite the fact that most of these migrants are opportunists looking to better their lives. The MSM points to a recent post by Bowers claiming HIAS, a Jewish refugee agency, is behind the march. According to Bowers's deluded perspective, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

But again, this is not rooted in Bowers's concern about migrants; it is rooted in his anti-Semitic delusion that the organization of the caravan is a Jewish conspiracy.

Both of these narratives more closely reflect the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Democrat Party allies, including anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour and Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan. Regarding the latter, John Kass wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "Few if any Democratic voices are being raised against Farrakhan. The Congressional Black Caucus certainly won't condemn him. And white Democrats aren't demanding condemnation either. They don't want to risk losing votes. This silence is dangerous."

Bowers has been charged with numerous federal crimes, including 11 counts of Obstruction of Exercise of Religious Beliefs Resulting in Death, 11 counts of Use of a Firearm to Commit Murder During and in Relation to a Crime of Violence, and four counts of Obstruction of Exercise of Religious Beliefs Resulting in Bodily Injury to a Public Safety Officer.

President Trump and federal prosecutors are calling for his execution if found guilty. The Left will likely object...

A final note on the hate profiteers, those other than the MSM profiteers whose market share and ad revenues depend on sensationalism. As I anticipated when first hearing about the Bowers assault Saturday, within hours, a reflexive fundraising response hit my inbox from the left-wing SPLC, the nation's most profitable hate-hustling "civil rights" group. In its fundraising "special edition," the SPLC regurgitated more of its leftist rhetoric.

SPLC has an "endowment" of $320 million and in the most recent year of record, the organization listed revenue in excess of $58 million. So my question for the SPLC: The Pittsburgh assailant had a long history of racist rhetoric and activities — did the SPLC spend one dime of its endowment and revenues identifying this hater and reporting him to law enforcement authorities? Of course not.

SOURCE 

**************************************

While know-it-alls lecture on tariffs against China, Trump dials up new trade deals with UK, Europe and Japan

While President Donald Trump continues to bring the pressure to China, so far with 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods shipped to the U.S., rising to 25 percent in Jan. 2019, which comes atop another 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods from China, he is dialing up new trade deals with traditional U.S. allies.

Trade agreements with South Korea, Mexico and Canada are already going to Congress, accounting for a combined $1.4 trillion in trade with the U.S.

And now, Trump has notified Congress of his intent to negotiate deals with the UK, Europe and Japan, with whom the U.S. carried on a combined $1.7 trillion in trade.

These were supposed to be mutually exclusive things, according to all the experts. Trump could either put up more trade barriers or lower them, but he could not do both. Instead, Trump is proving that the U.S. can walk and chew gum at the same time as it pursues the Trump trade agenda.

If nations act fairly and reciprocally with the U.S. to lower trade barriers, they can get a good deal. If not, like China, then they face tariffs.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we will continue to expand U.S. trade and investment by negotiating trade agreements with Japan, the EU and the United Kingdom,” said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in a statement.

“Today’s announcement is an important milestone in that process. We are committed to concluding these negotiations with timely and substantive results for American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses,” Lighthizer added.

It’s the ultimate carrot and stick. By acting tough, and levying across the board tariffs, Trump gave the U.S. room to negotiate and incentive for other countries wishing to export to the U.S. to close a deal.

As for China, for now they get to feel the pain. China has retaliated with tariffs on $60 billion of goods including agricultural products soybeans and pork. On currency, China has devalued the yuan almost 10 percent since February.

Trump has warned that if China retaliates, another $267 billion of tariffs could be in the offing.

Speaking on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Oct. 15, Trump said he “might” do more tariffs on China but held out hope they might want to do a deal, too.

“I have a great chemistry also with President Xi of China. I don’t know that that’s necessarily going to continue. I told President Xi we cannot continue to have China take $500 billion a year out of the United States in the form of trade and others things.”

Trump added, “I want them to negotiate a fair deal with us. I want them to open their markets like our– our markets are open.”

As for the prospect of retaliation, Trump dared China to intervene, stating bluntly, “They can retaliate, but they can’t — they don’t have enough ammunition to retaliate. We do $100 billion [in trade] with them. They do $531 billion with us.”

In other words, China could rapidly run out of bullets to fight a trade war with the U.S.

On Oct. 9 the President said, “Now look, China wants to make a deal, and I say they’re not ready yet. I just say they’re not ready yet. And we’ve canceled a couple of meetings because I say they’re not ready to make a deal. We can’t have a one-way street. It’s got to be a two-way street. It’s been a one-way street for 25 years. We gotta make it a two-way street. We’ve got to benefit also.”

So, no deal yet. In the meantime, Congress will have a multitude of trade agreements with South Korea, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Europe and Japan to consider later this year and in 2019 that promise to lower trade barriers for U.S. exporters and get a better deal for American workers.

China will just have sit back and watch. If it wants a good deal, too, then it’s time to talk about currency, intellectual property, dumping and other trade barriers that it has put up. No more free lunches.

SOURCE 

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

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

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WHY was President General Antonio López de Santa Anna such a crazy galoot?

I gather that most Americans still remember the Alamo.  They remember a desperate defence of around 300 Americans against the army of an evil Hispanic dictator, President General Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1836.

But President General Antonio López de Santa Anna was not evil.  He was very foolish but he was not evil. He was in his mind doing something that all national leaders were once -- before the current American Left came along -- duty-bound to do:  Chase away illegal immigrants from his country.  The Texians -- inhabitants of what was then Mexican Texas -- refused to assimilate to Mexico and were generally pesky and rebellious towards President General Antonio López de Santa Anna. They even wanted their own republic

And President General Antonio López de Santa Anna could in fact be seen as something of a hero:  He led his troops personally, something that had gone out of fashion long ago at the time.

So the big question is why the battle went so badly for all concerned.  Why did the Texians and other Gringos not surrender when faced with a whole army arrayed against them?  Why did they fight to the death? They took down two Mexicans for every one of them but what good did that do?  What was gained by the death of 300 gringos and 600 Mexicans?  It was simply a grievous loss all round.

President General Antonio López de Santa Anna was responsible for that.  He was so riled up by the Texians that he declared them pirates, meaning that they would be shown no mercy of any kind.  They could only be killed on the spot.  President General Antonio López de Santa Anna was so emphatic about that that he sent a letter to the President of the United States declaring it.  And the Texians were in no doubt that he would do as he said.  There was simply no point in surrendering.

Had President General Antonio López de Santa Anna been a wiser man he would simply have given the Texians safe conduct out of there and escorted them to the Mexican border.  He would have got rid of them and done so in a way that would have been generally understood and accepted.

And after he had inflicted such a savage and humiliating defeat on the Texians, President General Antonio López de Santa Anna no doubt expected the Texians to do what his fellow Hispanics would have done:  Go home and do nothing more than talk big talk.

But the Gringos did nothing of the sort.  They were instead outraged and rallied to arms, building up an army big enough to chase after President General Antonio López de Santa Anna and give him a taste of his own medicine, which they did.

So there is a question why here also.  Why were the Gringos so outraged?  There are probably several reasons but a major one was cultural. Mercy towards the defeated was in most cases simply good policy.  It presented the victor in a good light among the vanquished and it saved him the lives of many of his troops. And that was widely known and accepted.

But there was also good history to support that policy: History going all the way back to Alexander the Great.  When Alexander defeated the Persians at Issus in 333BC. After the battle, the Hellenes captured Persian emperor  Darius' wife, his daughters and his mother, all of whom had accompanied Darius on his campaign. Alexander treated the captured women not only with mercy but with great respect.

Moving further forward into history we come to the crusades.  The Crusaders held on to the Holy Land for about 200 years but were finally routed by Egyptian armies under Saladin.  And Saladin was an unusual man.  He was a Kurd.  So he was not an Arab.  Kurds were and are Indo Europeans, people related to us.  So how did he get to lead Arab armies?  Simple:  He was very good at it.  He won a lot of battles.  And the thing that stood out about Saladin to the crusaders was his mercifulness, honorableness and chivalry.  He was not vindictive to the crusaders when he defeated them.  And the whole of Europe got to hear of that from returning crusaders. And the medieval practices of knightly and courtly behaviour were inspired by the example of Saladin.

And when the extremely pesky Napoleon Bonaparte was captured -- twice! -- he was just exiled, not executed.

So mercy to the defeated had among Europeans what we might call these days a very good press.  And that showed in the 19th century also.  When the Prussians defeated Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870, the defeat was so total that Napoleon III was himself captured.  So did the Prussians behead him?  Far from it.  There survive from the dawn of photography pictures of Napoleon having a polite conversation with the Prussian leader, Otto von Bismarck.


Why was Bismarck holding such a long sword? It was probably a cavalry sword. A cavalry sword has to be long to strike down from the back of a horse. And the cavalry was the most prestigious arm of the services. The term "cavalier" (cf. the Italian "cavallieri" or the French "chevalier") is mainly honorific but its most basic meaning is simply "horseman". Aristocrats normally entered the cavalry, usually the Hussars. So Bismarck was emphasizing his noble status

And Napoleon was eventually released on condition that he move to England and stay there -- which he did.  That episode is later than the battle of the Alamo but it illustrates a powerful current in European traditions.

So the Texians, Texans and others from further North were right to be horrified by the actions of President General Antonio López de Santa Anna at the Alamo. It went against all that they regarded as honorable and wise.

So President General Antonio López de Santa Anna earned himself a military defeat shortly after at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 and lost control of Mexican Texas, which soon declared itself an independent Texian republic.  President General Antonio López de Santa Anna was captured at the Battle of San Jacinto but the Texians spared his life. They could well have done otherwise but were true to their own traditions. They sent him back to preside in Mexico city

But that was not the end of his humiliations.  He never accepted his loss of territory and kept up a hostile attitude to the Gringos.  And that came to the attention of President Polk of the United States.  From his Anglo-Saxon traditions he thought that some sort of compromise might be reached which would restore peaceful relations between the USA and Mexico.  So he sent an ambassador to Mexico, with a small military escort drawn from the United States army.  So what did President General Antonio López de Santa Anna do about that?  He attacked the American military detachment!  With incredible folly, he attacked the US. army.  He really did. The USA was already a formidable power by that time so that needs explanation too.

President Polk was incensed by this vicious behavior and asked Congress for a declaration of war against Mexico, which was promptly granted.  The US army marched South and cleaned up all  Mexican forces sent against them, capturing Mexico city itself .  Mexico was comprehensively defeated and was forced via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to cede a third of its territory before the Gringos would go home.  That's how The USA acquired California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and the rest of Texas.

So what on earth can have lain behind the disastrous deeds of President General Antonio López de Santa Anna?  In one word:  Machismo.  So what is machismo and what causes it?

It is a feature of Mediterranean countries and is particularly strong in Spain, and President General Antonio López de Santa Anna was for all intents and purposes a Spaniard. It arises from the fact that Mediterranean families are very mother-dominated.  Initially the grandmother is in charge and then the mother. And mamma really does rule the roost. Both sons and daughter are supposed to take orders from her. And the aim of it all is to create the family as a powerful single unit that will defend and protect all its members against outsiders.  It is a bit like how men in the army are taught to march together under a single command.

And the best known example of a Mediterranean mother is probably the Yiddisher Momma.  Israel is after all a Mediterranean country.  If you don't know about Yiddisher Mommas and the terrible things they say to keep their children in line Google should enlighten you but a cartoon below should tell you how ruthless these ladies can be in what they say to keep control.



But Mediterranean mothers do tend to emasculate their sons.  Being mother-dominated is not manly, regardless of what feminists might say. And Mediterranean men hate to think that they are under a female thumb.  But it is hard to show that they are not when they are.  So they do anything they can think of to demonstrate their masculinity.  And that can often lead to excess.  They can mistake aggression and inflexibility for manliness. And that is what President General Antonio López de Santa Anna did.  He thought "I'll show 'em" not only to the Gringos but also to his own people -- by being ruthless with the Texians at the Alamo.

So in the end it was a culture clash.  Machismo against an American culture of Northern European origin that included a tradition of mercy to the vanquished.  President General Antonio López de Santa Anna is a towering example of how foolish and destructive machismo can be -- JR.

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Trump jokes about his hair -- and the media promptly condemn him for that

Apparently they are the only ones allowed to say when you can joke about his hair.  The idea of a joke as tension relief is apparently beyond these brainboxes

The United States is reeling from a week of violence allegedly perpetrated by white-male terrorists. And the President seems more worried about his hair.

Past presidents would have immediately suspended politicking and given convincing condemnations of violence.

Mr Trump issued a condemnation, of sorts, yet he then criticised the synagogue for not having “some kind of protection”.

He then refused to cancel a planned political rally. Instead, he complained to the crowd that the “very unfortunate news conference”, where he commented on the synagogue killings, had got his hair wet.

“The wind was blowing and the rain and I was soaking wet, and that’s what I ended up with today,” he told the crowd, pointing to his hair. They cheered.

“And I said, maybe I should cancel this arrangement, because I have a bad hair day. And the bad news, somebody said actually it looks better than it usually does.”

SOURCE  

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They are NOT refugees. They are a deliberate invasion

Caravan migrants heading to the U.S. have refused Mexico’s offer to receive refugee status that would provide schooling, jobs, medical care and shelter.  Thousands of migrants turned down Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto’s program You Are In Your Home, The Associated Press reported Saturday.

The program gives refugee status to those who apply and provide migrants access to shelter, medical attention, schooling and temporary employment opportunities to Central American migrants in the Chiapas and Oaxaca states

“Our goal is not to remain in Mexico,” Oscar Sosa, 58, of Honduras told The AP. “Our goal is to make it to the (U.S).”

Those of working age would clean, repair and maintain infrastructure in the two southern Mexican states, according to the program. Migrants can also obtain Mexico’s version of a social security number called CURP (Clave Unica de Registro Publico). This will allow the migrants to have legal proof of identity, enter and leave shelters and open bank accounts.

The program came in response to the “unprecedented flow of people from Central American countries who have entered [into Mexico] the last few days,” according to the program’s press statement.

SOURCE

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Trump mulls plan to bar entry of all migrants at US-Mexico border

President Trump is considering a sweeping executive order that would block migrants, including asylum seekers, from entering the U.S. at the southern border in a bid to stop the caravan traveling north through Mexico.

The White House, if it goes ahead with the measure, would issue new regulations restricting certain migrants from seeking asylum. The rules would effectively block most if not all the migrants who are taking part in the caravan, Politico first reported.

Fox News has learned the proposal originated out of the White House and is one of several being considered. No final decision has been made.

The order would be akin to Trump's previous aggressive immigration-blocking executive orders, such as the travel ban aimed at halting people from some Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.

Any attempt to block the entry of Central American migrants is likely to prompt legal challenges, though Trump is likely emboldened following a Supreme Court ruling earlier this summer that affirmed the president’s right to bar the entry of migrants who “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Hundreds of U.S. troops are also set to make their way to the southern border to help Homeland Security and the National Guard as the caravan pushes north.

Democrats, while previously outspoken regarding Trump’s immigration policies, are staying largely silent on the issue, instead preferring to remain focused on tackling the GOP on issues like health care, saying it’s the winning issue this election cycle.

SOURCE

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NBC hid exculpatory information that would have cleared Kavanaugh of gang rape accusation

NBC News is admitting that information that would have exonerated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of a gang rape accusation was kept from the public.  Instead, despite knowing that the charge against Kavanaugh was bogus, NBC ran the story anyway.

The information involves the sworn affidavit of a supposed witness to the gang rape given to the Judiciary Committee by attorney Michael Avenatti on behalf of the alleged "victim," Julie Swetnick.  Swetnick said Kavanaugh was present during her rape by several of his friends.

But the witness claims that Avenatti twisted her words.

On Thursday, nearly three weeks after Kavanaugh's confirmation, NBC News published an article headlined, "New questions raised about Avenatti claims regarding Kavanaugh," that detailed "inconsistencies" with Swetnick's claims.  In the article, NBC News admitted the unidentified woman repudiated the sworn statement Avenatti provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee on her behalf to corroborate Swetnick's claims. ...

"Reached by phone independently from Avenatti on Oct. 3, the woman said she only 'skimmed' the declaration.  After reviewing the statement, she wrote in a text on Oct. 4 to NBC News: 'It is incorrect that I saw Brett spike the punch.  I didn't see anyone spike the punch...I was very clear with Michael Avenatti from day one,'" NBC News reporters Kate Snow and Anna Schecter wrote on Thursday.

"I would not ever allow anyone to be abusive in my presence.  Male or female," the woman told NBC when pressed about Avenatti and his client's claims, according to NBC's report.

NBC's latest story also noted that Avenatti attempted to "thwart the reporting process" and the woman changed her mind several times before eventually texting the network a final time.

"I will definitely talk to you again and no longer Avenatti.  I do not like that he twisted my words," she wrote.

Not surprisingly, Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley has referred both Avenatti and Swetnick for perjury prosecution.

CBSNews:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley on Friday referred lawyer Michael Avenatti to the Justice Department for a second criminal investigation, alleging that Avenatti had submitted a fraudulent sworn statement to the committee on Oct. 2.  Grassley also referred Avenatti and his client, Julie Swetnick, to the Justice Department for a separate investigation Thursday, for three separate crimes: conspiracy, providing false statements to Congress and obstructing a Senate investigation. ...

Swetnick was never a credible witness.  The fact that she sued her former employer for being sexually harassed by two male coworkers after they had filed suit against her for harassment – later withdrawing her own suit – would have convinced any professional journalist that her accusation was baseless.

And they wonder why Trump attacks the media?

SOURCE

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A moral tale

The wedding ceremony came to the point where the minister asked if anyone had anything to say concerning the union of the bride and groom. 

The moment of utter silence was broken when a beautiful young woman carrying a child stood up. She starts walking slowly towards the minister.

 The congregation was aghast - you could almost hear a pin drop.  The groom's jaw dropped as he stared in disbelief at the approaching young woman and child.  Chaos ensued.  The bride threw the bouquet into the air and burst out crying.  Then the groom's mother fainted.  The best men started giving each other looks and wondering how to save the situation.

 The minister asked the woman, "Can you tell us, why you came forward?   What do you have to say?"   There was absolute silence in the church.

 The woman replied, "We can't hear you in the back."

 And  that illustrates what happens when people are considered guilty until proven innocent.

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

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

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Synagogue gunman was a TRUMP HATER

So a pro-Trump man sent easily identifiable bombs to Democrat politicians that hurt nobody while an anti-Trump man killed 11 people in a terrorist attack.  Is Trump still the problem or is it the frenzy of hatred poured out at Trump that has generated such extreme reactions?  It's the Trump hatred that has killed in these two episodes. The Trump defender just sent a graphic warning

The suspected gunman who opened fire on a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday morning, killing at least 11 people and injuring several others, has been named as 46-year-old Robert Bowers, a Trump-hating antisemite who regularly complained on social media about the president and 'the infestation of Jews.'

Bowers allegedly opened fire at the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh shortly before 10am. The synagogue was busier than usual with Sabbath services and because of a baby naming ceremony that had also been scheduled.

After opening fire on the congregation with three handguns and an AR-15, he was confronted by two Pittsburgh police officers who had been called to the scene as he tried to leave the building. Police say Bowers returned fire, injuring both of the cops, then retreated inside and ran to the third floor to hide.

He then engaged in a gun battle with a SWAT team and injured two of them before being shot multiple times himself and surrendering.

He is still alive, in a stable condition, and is in the hospital under the watch of police.

None of the victims have been named. Police revealed on Saturday afternoon that all of those killed were adults and that no children were harmed.

The six people injured include a 70-year-old man who is undergoing surgery for multiple gunshot wounds and a 61-year-old woman who is expected to survive.

Three of the four cops are likely to survive but a fourth, a 55-year-old law enforcement officer, is in a critical condition.

The entire incident, from when he entered the synagogue to when he was removed, lasted 20 minutes.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Saturday that the federal government plans to file hate crimes and other charges against the alleged gunman - which carry the maximum penalty of death.

SOURCE

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Crowd Full of Young Black People Erupts When Trump Walks In

There is a lot of love shown towards Trump by his followers.  That must help him to withstand the hatred poured out at him by the media and the Left generally

The cultural shift toward conservatism within the black community is very real … and it’s picking up steam faster than the left wants to admit.

For months, we’ve pointed to examples of how African-Americans, long considered almost guaranteed to vote Democrat, have been rejecting the left’s narratives and are increasingly climbing aboard the Trump Train.

Figures like conservative commentator Candace Owens have led the way, using sharp intelligence and world-class debate skills to dismantle liberal arguments. Cultural icons such as Kanye West, an unlikely ally, have also come on board — and the rapper’s recent meeting in the Oval Office could be seen as a pivotal moment.

Now, President Donald Trump himself is proving just how powerful this shift has become.

During a large gathering of black Americans at the White House organized by the Young Black Leadership Summit, the president made a much-anticipated appearance — and the largely black crowd gave him a rock star reception.

Video of the event shows a large White House room filled with American flags and young people sporting “Make America Great Again” hats. There’s a buzz of excitement, and then a voice pierces the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.” As Trump steps into the room, the young people in attendance break into cheers and even shrieks of excitement with their hands in the air.

Then a chant of “USA! USA!” spontaneously breaks out as the president steps to the podium.

There was a similar excited and friendly energy earlier in the day, when the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., mingled with the African-American crowd and joked around with attendees.

“Check out the energy & passion,” the younger Trump tweeted, along with a video of him with the crowd. “The largest ever young conservative black summit started tonight.”

The clip showed him excitedly joining the group of young black Americans, including Owens, while the entire room joyfully chanted “USA! USA!”

SOURCE

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Trump: 'Call Me a Nationalist If You’d Like, But I Don’t Want Companies Leaving’

President Donald Trump referred to himself again as a “nationalist” during the White House State Leadership Day Conference on Tuesday, saying that he doesn’t want U.S. companies to move their businesses overseas.

“Call me a nationalist if you'd like, but I don't want companies leaving. I don't want them firing all their people, going to another country, making a product, sending it into our country -- tax-free, no charge, no tariff, no nothing. And in the meantime, we end up with empty plants, unemployment all over the place. We end up with nothing. So those deals are not happening anymore,” he said.

Trump used the same term on Monday night at a rally for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in Houston.

“A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can't have that. You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It's called a nationalist. And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I'm a nationalist, OK? I'm a nationalist,” the president said. "Nationalist. Nothing -- use that word. Use that word."

During Tuesday’s event, Trump touted the success of the economy during his first two years in office.

“This is a truly exciting time for America. You've heard me say this before, but we just got the World Economic Forum the recognition that the United States has reclaimed its rightful place, after many years of being off the list, as the most competitive economy anywhere in the world,” he said.

“And if you look at consumer confidence, we're at the top of every list. We're setting records in terms of that, too. But we got back on the list in the number-one position and world's most competitive. Following the passage of our massive tax cuts and regulation cuts, the unemployment rate has fallen to the lowest level in more than 50 years,” the president said.

“We have created more than 4.2 million new jobs and lifted over 4 million Americans off of food stamps,” he added. “Median household income in 2017 was the highest level ever recorded.”

Trump applauded low unemployment numbers among Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans. He also heralded the creation of the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“We've reached a deal to replace NAFTA, and, as you know, I wasn't a big fan of NAFTA. I think it's one of the worst trade deals ever entered into. I rate it second; I won't tell you what the first is. There's another one that's actually worse, and I won't tell you it's the WTO. Okay? I refuse to tell you the name,” he said, as the audience laughed. “But that's a total disaster, also. I refuse to say what it is, though. Keep it quiet. Am I allowed to say ‘off the record?’ Let's see.”

“And we have a tremendous new deal with -- so, with the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The ‘USMCA,’ we call it. I didn't want the ‘NAFTA’ name on it, because I saw what NAFTA did many years ago to towns and factories and businesses and what it did to the car companies where -- not so much to companies -- to Michigan, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania and Kentucky and so many other places where these companies just left the United States. And we still have empty factories all over the place from that devastation of NAFTA,” the president said.

“Well, we have just the opposite: the USMCA. One of the strongest things about that, you're not going to have companies leaving anymore, because they have a disincentive to leave. I don't want them to leave,” he said.

SOURCE

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How Trump’s New Rule Aims to Expand Health Coverage and Lower Costs

The Trump administration just announced a major regulatory change, effective Jan. 1, 2020, that could significantly expand access to affordable health coverage and increase the choice of health plans, particularly among workers and their families in small businesses.

The proposed rule, jointly developed by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department, would allow employer-sponsored health reimbursement accounts to fund the purchase of individual health insurance on a tax-free basis.

Today, workers and their families can use tax-free health reimbursement accounts to offset medical expenses, such as out-of-pocket medical costs. Under the new rule, workers and their families could use employer contributions to the accounts to buy health insurance on their own.

This opportunity is particularly valuable for workers employed by small business owners who cannot afford to offer standard group health insurance, but who could afford to help offset the premium costs of their employees’ individual coverage.

Treasury Department officials estimate that the new rule could encourage as many as 800,000 employers to sponsor health reimbursement accounts, or HRAs, to fund individual coverage for more than 10 million workers.

This relief is crucial, particularly for workers and their families in small businesses. With the enactment of Obamacare in 2010, the already fragile condition of health coverage among small businesses worsened. For little companies with fewer than 25 workers, the percentage of businesses offering health insurance fell from 44 percent in 2010 to just 30 percent in 2018.

The Trump rule has the potential not only to expand coverage, but also to increase employees’ choices in health plans.

Among small and midsize companies (with fewer than 200 employees), 81 percent offered only one health plan as of last year. No choice, just a “take it or leave it” option.

The Trump rule would open up new coverage opportunities for employers and employees.

The rule also has some ancillary benefits for workers already covered by traditional, employer-sponsored health insurance. It would permit employers to contribute up to $1,800 yearly (indexed to inflation) to reimburse workers for certain additional medical expenses, such as dental benefits, as well as premiums for short-term health insurance plans. Such less expensive plans are especially valuable for persons who are between jobs.

The impact of the Trump rule could prove genuinely transformational, if Congress would take the obvious next step: Adopt the reform policies outlined in the Health Care Choices Proposal, developed by a broad coalition of conservative health policy analysts.

That proposal would restore the bulk of regulatory authority over health insurance markets to the states, provide financial assistance for the poor and the sick, and enable persons in government programs to use public funding to enroll in a private health plan of their choice, if they wished to do so.

By enabling states to liberalize their health insurance markets, Congress could enable employees, using health reimbursement accounts as a vehicle for tax-free premium payments, to choose among a variety of new and innovative plans.

Today, enrollees in the broken individual and small group markets are trapped in artificially expensive Obamacare plans. They are punished with explosive deductibles, shrinking choices, and excessively narrow networks of doctors and hospitals.

Working together, Congress and the president could yet achieve the greater policy goal long supported by America’s most notable economists, including the late Milton Friedman: individual tax relief for the purchase of health insurance in a robust and competitive consumer-driven market.

That change could be, in the very best sense of the word, revolutionary.

SOURCE

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The Left’s Latest Absurd Claim: Requiring Voter Registration Is ‘Voter Suppression’ Tool

As Election Day rapidly approaches, the radical Left is making yet another absurd claim: that requiring voter registration is a “voter suppression” tool.

Registration is essential to assure the integrity of elections. It allows election officials to verify the eligibility and identity of voters. It also enables them to make sure they will have enough ballots in polling places that use paper ballots — and that’s the majority of jurisdictions across the U.S.

The Washington Times recently reported that the Texas Democratic Party “asked noncitizens to register to vote, sending out applications to immigrants with the box [on] citizenship already checked ‘Yes.’” And Texas is not the only state where the accuracy and integrity of the voter-registration process is imperiled.

To improve the accuracy of the state’s records, Georgia legislators last year passed a law requiring voter-registration-application information to match a “driver’s license, state ID card or Social Security record.” Inconsistencies can cause a voter’s registration to be flagged as “pending” while the discrepancy is investigated.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, accuses the Republican candidate and current secretary of state, Brian Kemp, of “voter suppression” simply for complying with this law.

But here’s the rub: A “pending” status does not bar anyone from voting. All they need do is “show a government photo ID that substantially matches the registration application.” Even if the voter’s information can’t be verified on the spot, the voter can cast a provisional ballot that will be counted once the registration information is verified by local election officials.

How can that be “voter suppression?”

So why the uproar about voter registration? Abrams claims that Kemp’s effort to enforce the law is an “intentional move” to suppress votes, especially of minority voters. Kemp has refuted those claims and says that application discrepancies that make registrations “pending” are due to “sloppy forms” submitted by the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams herself in 2014 that “set out to sign up 800,000 new young and minority voters.”

The real issue here is a disregard for election integrity. And that includes those who are calling for an end to traditional voter registration in favor of automatic voter registration based on government databases such as driver’s licenses and property-tax records.

While government records are useful for verifying voter registrations, research shows they would be ineffective in creating accurate voter rolls. One of the most glaring problems with these databases is that they cannot verify a basic eligibility requirement for voting — citizenship. Noncitizens can receive driver’s licenses in all 50 states, and illegal aliens are receiving licenses in more than a dozen states, including California. Noncitizens also pay property taxes. Automatic voter registration would register all such ineligible individuals.

Moreover, individuals can be listed multiple times in different government databases that would be a source for automatic registration. For example, one person may pay taxes in multiple counties and multiple states, raising the possibility that he could vote multiple times, in multiple jurisdictions.

Also, voter registration requires a signature to verify petitions, ballot initiatives, and absentee ballots. Many government databases don’t contain signatures and thus would be useless for verifying signatures.

Such issues came to light recently in California, where the DMV admitted that, in just the last two months, it had mistakenly registered 24,500 ineligible individuals, including noncitizens. The problem arose because of the state’s new voter-registration process, which automatically registers people who renew or replace their driver’s licenses. The error came to light only after a Canadian citizen told the media he had been improperly registered by the state.

No evidence exists that eliminating voter registration will increase turnout. In fact, Census Bureau data from the 2008 election found that individuals who were not registered to vote did not cite registration problems as the reason for not voting. Instead, 46 percent were not interested in the election and 35 percent listed other reasons, such as “not being eligible to vote, thinking their vote would not make a difference, not meeting residency requirements, or difficulty with English.” The biggest reason for individuals’ not registering and not voting is a lack of interest in politics and candidates, which has nothing to do with registration.

The registration fight in Georgia is just part of a larger effort by the Left to undo any reforms that increase the security and integrity of the voter-registration and election process. Ensuring election integrity begins with creating and maintaining accurate voter rolls. Voter registration is an essential part of the process, and it should be a bipartisan effort.

SOURCE

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

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

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