Friday, September 07, 2018


Democrats don’t believe in democracy

The comments below are all too accurate.  Were it not for the fact that the military is always conservative, we would probably have had a Leftist coup of some sort by now

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Donald Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. There’s a pattern here.

The Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement. You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time a federal judge issues an order saying the president of the United States can’t scratch his own back without the judge’s say so, that’s the civil war.

If Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited. He’s a dictator.

But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the president can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty his predecessor illegally invented. A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him. That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn’t yet won that particular fight.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws. Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

The Constitution has something to say about that.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary Clinton take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win did.

Have no doubt. We are in a civil war. This war is between conservative volunteer government and a leftist Democrat professional government.

Author unknown

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Federal Judge Reinforces Ruling-Class Privilege

For decades, government employee unions had been confiscating money from non-members and using it for political causes the non-members oppose. The U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to that in the recent Janus decision. Now a federal district court judge has made firing federal employees a more difficult matter.

On August 26, a Saturday, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson blocked provisions of three recent executive orders she claims “undermine federal employees’ right to bargain collectively.” The executive orders were aimed at promoting more efficient government and making it easier to remove employees for poor performance or misconduct. At present, it takes between six months and a year, or much longer. As we noted, John Beale of the EPA claimed to work for the CIA, but he performed little if any work for nearly 20 years. His ruse went undiscovered and EPA bosses gave Beale retention bonuses and continued to pay his salary after he had retired.

Other examples of poor performance and misconduct would include the federal employees and managers who let hundreds of veterans drop dead while awaiting care at a Phoenix VA facility. In 2013 IRS employees handed out $3.6 billion in fraudulent tax refunds and IRS bosses responded with $62.5 million in bonuses. No reports of anybody being fired.

True to form, the National Treasury Employees Union praised Judge Jackson’s action to make dismissal of federal employees more difficult.

This has nothing to do with collective bargaining. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, an Obama appointee once on that president’s short list for the Supreme Court, has set back the cause of government accountability, struck a blow against taxpayers, and reinforced the privileges of overpaid and pampered federal employees.

SOURCE 

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Amidst the Demo circus around Kavanaugh, Sasse gives a civics lesson

In the midst of a Democrat-created circus intent on obstructing as much of the Senate's confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, as possible, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) offered a timely rebuke and an insightful civics lesson.

In just under 12 minutes, Sasse outlined the constitutional roles of the three branches of government and followed that by explaining why the confirmation of judicial nominees has become so politicized — something the Founders never intended. Sasse diagnoses the root of the problem as the legislative branch having abdicated its constitutional power to career-minded, unelected bureaucrats within the executive branch agencies:

The real reason, at the end of the day, that this institution punts most of its power to executive branch agencies is because it is a convenient way for legislators to be able to avoid taking responsibility for controversial and often unpopular decisions. If people want to get reelected over and over and over again, and that's your highest goal — if your biggest long-term thought around here is about your own incumbency — then actually giving away your power is a pretty good strategy. ... And so, at the end of the day, a lot of the power delegation that happens from this branch is because the Congress has decided to self-neuter.

Sasse then eloquently noted how this abdication of power by Congress has ultimately undermined the voting power of every American citizen:

The important thing isn't whether Congress has lame jobs; the important thing is that when Congress neuters itself and gives power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, it means the people are cut out of the process.

So, ultimately when the Congress is neutered, when the administrative state grows, when there is this fourth branch of government, it makes it harder and harder for the concerns of citizens to be represented and articulated by people, that the people know they have power over. All the power, or almost all the power, right now happens offstage. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, "Who's looking out for me?"

He then concluded by boiling down the only truly legitimate thing senators need to consider for deciding on Kavanaugh:

So the question we have before us today is not what did Brett Kavanaugh think 11 years ago on some policy matter. The question before us is whether or not he has the temperament and the character to take his policy views and political preferences and put them in a box marked "irrelevant" and set it aside every morning when he puts on the black robe. The question is, "Does he have the character and temperament to do that?" If you don't think he does, vote no. But if you think he does, stop the charades. Because, at the end of the day, I think all of us know that Brett Kavanaugh understands that his job isn't to rewrite laws as he wishes they were. He understands that he's not being interviewed to be a super legislator. He understands that his job isn't to seek popularity. His job is to be fair and dispassionate. It is not to exercise empathy. It is to follow written laws.

Ultimately, Sasse accurately articulated what really matters. The rest of the antics in the Senate yesterday were just the sideshow

SOURCE 

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With Jon Kyl, a ‘steady, respected hand’ back in the Senate, could Obamacare repeal and replace be back on the table?

Former Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) has been appointed by Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey to replace the late John McCain. With the new appointment comes a new opportunity for Republicans to complete one of their key 2016 campaign promises: To repeal and replace Obamacare before the 2018 midterms.

In 2017, despite promising to do so if elected and working for months on end, Congressional Republicans failed to pass legislation that would do away with the 2010 health care law signed into law by former President Barack Obama.

One piece of legislation to repeal key elements of the law failed by one vote in the Senate, the so-called “skinny” repeal. One of the missing votes was McCain’s whose rejection came as a shock to many observers.

Other legislation by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) failed later in Sept. 2017 with Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and again, McCain, opposed.

Since that time, Republicans lost the Alabama Senate seat, trimming their majority to a slim 51 to 49. If there were any vote to repeal and replace Obamacare on budget reconciliation, Republicans could only afford to lose one senator.

Senator Kyl could be a different story from McCain. Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning in a statement called him a “a steady, respected hand in the Senate who has the respect of his colleagues.”

So too might Senator Paul, if his objections to the prior Graham-Cassidy bill could quickly be taken into consideration and Republicans could rally together around a new consensus for repealing and replacing the health care law.

One thing is clear from the GOP’s standpoint, it’s worth taking a chance. Health care remains a primary concern for American voters headed to polls, and the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare remains one of Republicans’ and independents’ greatest disappointments with the current Republican-led Congress.

However, turning a new leaf, and bringing up the bill again — even if it means staying in Washington, D.C. in October — could provide the last, best chance to work on the legislation. The outcome of the midterms remains uncertain. Even if Republicans were to keep the Senate but lose the House, all possibility of working on one of their signature legislative promise would evaporate until at least 2021.

Reinstating the budget reconciliation procedure might take a bit of parliamentary juggling. Congress has already passed its budget for the fiscal year, but presumably, it could be amended via the same procedure before Sept. 30. Which is why there isn’t a moment to lose.

Senator Kyl’s first order of business, besides confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, should be sitting down with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Paul to see if something can be worked out on Obamacare before the elections to reset public perception of Congress as one that keeps its promises — before it is too late.

SOURCE 

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Destructive Leftist envy again

Another attempt to drive marginal workers out of the workforce.  Goodbye jobs for single mothers and others who need welfare payments.  Amazon will simply no longer hire them if this bill goes through

Sen. Bernie Sanders' criticism of Amazon peaked Wednesday as he and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced legislation to tax corporations for every dollar that their low-wage workers receive in government health-care benefits or food stamps.

The bill, pointedly called the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies, or BEZOS, Act, is aimed at shaming companies like Amazon and Walmart, whose workers rely on public assistance.

For months, Sanders has targeted Amazon, juxtaposing the wealth of CEO Jeff Bezos with reports that Amazon warehouse workers are paid less than industry averages and rely on food stamps.

"Our legislation gives large, profitable employers a choice: Pay workers a living wage or pay for the public assistance programs their low-wage employees are forced to depend upon," Sanders said of the proposed law.

For example, if an Amazon worker received $2,000 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $2,000 to cover that cost.

Amazon has previously called the Vermont independent's claims about working conditions in its fulfillment centers "inaccurate and misleading" and a spokesperson declined to further comment on the bill.

SOURCE 

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Why does the Left incessantly libel Republicans and conservatives as racists?

Dennis Prager gives a simple answer

The answers are as vile as they are obvious.

First, the left fears that unless blacks continue to believe Republicans are racists, they will not overwhelmingly vote Democrat. And if they don't, Democrats will not regain the White House for the foreseeable future. The same holds true for depicting Republicans and conservatives as women haters. There is no better way to persuade college-indoctrinated women to vote Democrat. And the same holds true for Latinos — Republicans must be continuously labeled "white supremacists" and "xenophobes" or they, too, may not reliably vote Democrat.

Second, though most intellectuals are on the left, the intellectual foundation of left-wing beliefs is unbelievably weak. Leftism is almost entirely emotion-based. That's another reason the left smears conservatives and tries wherever possible to prevent conservatives from speaking in the university, on the internet and by the many big businesses in the hands of people on the left: Since leftists cannot debate conservatives, they have to smear them.

America is the least-racist multiracial, multiethnic nation in world history. The left's constant need to locate racism where it doesn't exist is proof of this.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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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Thursday, September 06, 2018


The Leftist trust in coercion again

Democrats began obstructing Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing less than five seconds into it on Monday, and several protestors were physically removed by police for aggressively trying to shut it down.

According to The Washington Examiner, Democrats and liberal protestors made the hearing so contentious that Kavanaugh’s young daughters —  Margaret, 13, and Elizabeth, 10 — were rushed out of the hearing on Capitol Hill.

The Examiner reports that a source said the two girls were rushed out by their mother, Ashley Kavanaugh, “as the hearing got ‘hot.'” It was very heated with Democrats and protestors losing their minds over the thought of Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court. “It was very unpleasant for young children,” said the source.

Democrats literally began the hearing by interrupting Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, less than five seconds into the hearing, largely refusing to allow him to even begin the confirmation process.

The hearing began at 9 a.m. ET, and Democrat committee members spent the first few hours grandstanding about how Kavanaugh — President Donald Trump’s pick to serve on the Supreme Court — will end the world.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., kicked it off by raising objections to the committee receiving over 400,000 documents relating to Kavanaugh’s work with past administrations, claiming that “was not enough.”

“We cannot possibly move forward,” Harris theatrically claimed, likely using the hearing ahead of her potential 2020 Democratic presidential run.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., jumped in soon after, and was also rude to Grassley by demanding he be given time to voice his concerns about Kavanaugh.

After every single Democrat interrupted Grassley and another protestor was kicked out every 15 minutes or so, Grassley knocked Democrats for using the hearing as a political stunt to create drama.

“We have said for a long period of time that we were going to proceed on this very day and I think we ought to give the American people the opportunity to hear whether judge Kavanaugh should be on the Supreme Court or not.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, defended Grassley, and ripped Democrats for their childish antics. “Democrats would be held in contempt of court if they behaved that way in a court of law. We have rules in the Senate. We have norms for decorum. Everybody as you pointed out will get a chance to have their say.”

It’s unfathomable and downright disturbing that Democrats and their ilk were so raucous and hostile on Tuesday that Kavanaugh’s own children had to leave the room over concerns that the protestors may get so hostile that they wouldn’t be safe.

Liberals are so determined to oppose Trump that they are unbothered by intimidating and making children feel unsafe at their father’s confirmation hearing. That is unacceptable, many would agree, and should never be tolerated.

SOURCE 

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Arizona Governor Announces Replacement for John McCain

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey named former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl as the late Sen. John McCain’s replacement on Tuesday.

Kyl served with McCain in the Senate from 1995 to Jan. 2013 before his retirement. Sen. Jeff Flake succeeded him. Kyl, 76, was the GOP minority whip before leaving office, which is the second-highest position in the Republican conference, the Arizona Republic reported.

Ducey made the announcement at a press conference from the Arizona capitol in Phoenix. “There is no one in Arizona with the stature of Sen. Jon Kyl,” Ducey said.

“I am deeply grateful to Sen. Kyl for agreeing to succeed his friend and colleague of so many years. Every single day that Jon Kyl represents #Arizona in the U.S. Senate is a day our state is well-served,” Ducey tweeted.
Kyl has agreed to serve out the remainder of the current session of Congress, which will conclude in December.

The governor expressed the hope that Kyl will stay on through the special election to fill McCain’s seat, which will take place in 2020. That election will be to fulfill the last two years of McCain’s term, which ends in 2022.

McCain’s wife, Cindy, expressed support for Ducey’s choice tweeting, “Jon Kyl is a dear friend of mine and John’s. It’s a great tribute to John that he is prepared to go back into public service to help the state of Arizona.”

Most recently, Kyl has been serving in the role of “sherpa” by guiding Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh through the confirmation process in the Senate.

SOURCE 

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Obama Prepares For The Campaign Trail, But Some Democrats Want Him To Back Off

Former President Barack Obama is preparing to stump for various Democrats as midterm elections near while some members of the party running for reelection are telling him to keep his distance.

Democratic Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota worry a surrogate like Obama could distract from focusing on their Republican opponents. Obama himself is keeping a wide berth from endorsing national campaigns in states President Donald Trump won in 2016.

“We’re not going to use any surrogates. Surrogates are fine but we don’t need them,” Tester told The Hill on Saturday.

Heitkamp was even more curt, saying “nope, no” to questions about the possibility of Obama visiting North Dakota. “He threatened to campaign against me once so I don’t think he’s coming out there,” she said.

Obama endorsed Richard Cordray’s campaign for governor in Ohio, for instance, but he has not yet endorsed Sen. Sherrod Brown’s reelection campaign. Brown frequently paints himself as a Trump opponent but a senator who will nonetheless work with the president on certain issues.

The senator’s Republican opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci, meanwhile is trying to depict Brown as a bitter political partisan obstructionist who is out of step for a state that supported Trump in the 2016 election.

Obama gave Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey similar treatment. The former president announced his support for two Keystone State House candidates, Madeleine Dean and Susan Wild, but left Casey off his list.

One Democratic strategist told reporters that the list of endorsements is a strategy designed to allow Trump to create foils.

“Both of those senators are doing well their respective states and they don’t exactly need Obama’s seal of approval. In fact, it might do more harm than good,” the strategist said. “Obama is still popular with certain folks in those states but he’s not exactly popular with some others.”

SOURCE 

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Sweden’s Universal Healthcare System Goes the Way of All Others

Sweden’s Universal Healthcare System Goes the Way of All Others
Proponents of socialized medicine like to remind Americans that the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other industrialized nation without necessarily getting the best results. Instead, they suggest emulating European welfare states with their national healthcare systems.

According to a report from Agence France-Presse, however, one of the crown jewels of the welfare state, Sweden, spends extravagantly on healthcare yet finds its prized universal healthcare system succumbing to the same forces that have doomed all other such programs, with waiting lists growing ever longer and doctors, nurses, and hospitals becoming ever scarcer.

Swedes, on average, pay over half their income in taxes, and their government’s healthcare spending is the third highest in the European Union. And what do they get for it?

AFP writes:

Swedish law stipulates patients should wait no more than 90 days to undergo surgery or see a specialist. Yet every third patient waits longer, according to government figures.

Patients must also see a general practitioner within seven days, the second-longest deadline in Europe after Portugal (15 days).

Try as they might, politicians cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand. With healthcare seemingly free, people tend to use more of it than necessary, driving costs up while failing to increase the supply of care. (In a free market, by contrast, higher prices would induce consumers to reduce their consumption and producers to increase their production, bringing prices back down.)

Thus, even the government’s seemingly modest goals for timely care, known as the “Healthcare Guarantee,” go unmet. As insurance executive Kent Andersson told the European news site The Local, “The Healthcare Guarantee isn’t a guarantee.”

Twenty-three-year-old Asia Nader, for instance, told AFP that she had to wait a year for surgery to repair a hole in her heart. A dental patient said he had to wait six months for a checkup. Prostate-cancer patients wait 120 days on average for surgery, but in one county the wait was as high as 217 days. Patients wait four hours on average to be seen in the emergency rooms of Stockholm’s major hospitals.

When patients do get to see doctors, they “complain about not being able to see their own regular general practitioner — and the ensuing lack of continuity — as a growing number of doctors and nurses are temporary hires employed by staffing companies,” notes AFP. Official numbers — which may understate the problem — suggest that 80 percent of the healthcare system is short of nurses.

Some hospitals are closing, while even new ones aren’t able to keep up with demand, reports AFP:

In Solleftea, the premier’s northern hometown with nearly 20,000 residents, the only maternity ward was shut down last year to save money.

With the closest maternity ward now 200 kilometers (125 miles) away, midwives offer parents-to-be classes on how to deliver babies in cars — which some have since done….

Frustrations peaked this year when it emerged that the bill for Stockholm’s over-budget state-of-the-art New Karolinska Hospital would tick in at 61.4 billion kronor (5.8 billion euros, $6.7 billion) — the most expensive hospital in the world.

And yet patients have had to be transferred to other overcrowded hospitals because some of the facilities are unusable.

Add to that the aging population and the recent influx of immigrants, and the cracks in the socialist edifice are becoming impossible to ignore, much to the chagrin of Sweden’s leftists. Lisa Pelling, chief analyst at progressive think tank Arena Ide, told AFP that Swedes’ lack of confidence in politicians’ ability to solve the healthcare system’s problems creates “a risk their faith in the welfare state will be eroded.”

Of course, governing parties, rather than admit socialism’s failure, are simply trying their same old tactics. The Social Democrats, who currently control the government, are promising to fix the system by spending even more money on it. Their main opponents, the Moderates, want to patch the system their own way by rewarding counties for reducing queues, a mandate that “critics say … just encourages doctors to prioritize easily-solved cases,” observes AFP.

There is only one sure way to fix the healthcare system in Sweden or any other country: Get the government out of the way and let the free market reign.

SOURCE 

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Reality



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Illegal immigrants who exploited Motor Voter to register in North Carolina still on rolls

Elvis David Fullerton has voted in 16 elections in North Carolina dating back nearly two decades. The only problem, authorities say, is he’s not a citizen and never should have been on the voter rolls, much less allowed to step into a polling booth to cast a ballot.

Mr. Fullerton, who is still a citizen of Grenada, is one of 19 North Carolinians the federal government indicted last month on charges of illegal voting. Yet even now, his name remains on the state’s rolls in Wake County, and local officials say there’s not much they can do about it.

“At this time I’ve not been made aware of any formal source to remove anybody,” said Gary Sims, elections board director in Wake, where five of the 19, including Mr. Fullerton, were registered. Three of them are still on his rolls.

Mr. Sims said an indictment or sworn affidavit isn’t even enough for him to begin an investigation, saying he needs a notification from an “official or formal source.”

Yet the indictments, which got only cursory attention nationally, do offer unprecedented insight into the contours of illegal voting in the U.S.

The first clear conclusion is that most non-citizens who sign up to vote appear to do so at motor vehicle bureaus. Of the 18 accused voters for which The Washington Times was able to find state records, all of them registered at North Carolina DMVs.

And of those 18, 13 were registered as Democrats, four as Republicans and one unaffiliated with a party. While a small sample, that does suggest Democrats may be benefitting more from illegal non-citizen voting than Republicans.

Mr. Sims, the elections official in Wake County, said he can’t begin a review of people the federal government says are voting illegally until a more “verifiable” source comes forward.

He said his main role in registration is to make sure people fill out their information correctly, and he said he relies on checks to clear his rolls of people who moved out of the area, or who have passed away. But Mr. Sims acknowledged none of those checks would catch non-citizens. “That really is managed by the North Carolina state Board of Elections,” he said.

Perhaps it’s time local officials take a more proactive approach, said Logan Churchwell at the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has done pioneering work in tracking down non-citizens on voting rolls, and which uncovered many of the names still registered in North Carolina last month.

“These are registrants facing federal indictments for election crimes. In the face of new law enforcement efforts, the standard operating procedure may not always apply,” Mr. Churchwell said.

He also said the fact that all of the registrants were listed as having signed up at motor vehicle bureaus pointed clearly at a flaw in the system: the Clinton-era National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the Motor Voter law, because it requires states to push voter registration on people who show up to conduct business at DMVs.

Non-citizens can easily sign up, either by accident or on purpose, and as Mr. Sims pointed out, there are no easy ways to skim them out of the pool.

“Incidents like this demonstrate why we need to put Motor Voter back on the table for reform — all of it,” Mr. Churchwell said. “Maintenance stagnation breeds voter roll bloat and can only harm confidence in the system as a result.”

The PILF released a report last week tracking 13 cities and counties with sanctuary policies, and counted more than 3,000 non-citizens who’ve been stripped from their voting rolls in recent years.

Those are usually people who either self-reported or were flagged as illegal voters, and it doesn’t capture the potentially hundreds of thousands of others who have not outed their unauthorized voting behavior, analysts said.

Federal officials declined to say how the 19 people in North Carolina came to their attention.

The court-appointed lawyer for Mr. Fullerton didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

Others among the 19 include Alessandro Cannizzaro, an Italian, was granted legal permanent residence in the U.S. in 1985, and applied for citizenship in 2003 — but was denied four years later. Still, in 2008 he swore he was a citizen when he registered to vote in Wake County, and did in fact cast ballots in 2008, 2012 and 2016, according to state records.

His name has been dropped from the voter rolls.

Yet another of the 19, Ramon Esteban Paez-Jerez, of the Dominican Republic, was ordered deported in 1988 but never showed up for his deportation. Instead he adopted a fake identity and managed to win citizenship under that name in 1999, prosecutors said.

The government didn’t divulge the fake identity in court documents, and The Times was unable to track his voting history — though prosecutors said he, too, was registered in Wake County.

Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the state elections board, said the indictments presented “somewhat of a unique situation” to officials. “We do not have a regular voter list maintenance process to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls, at least partly because there is no comprehensive citizenship database to rely upon,” he said.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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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Wednesday, September 05, 2018



Babies conceived via IVF are SIX TIMES more likely to have high blood pressure as teenagers (?)

As the father of an adult son conceived via IVF, I have some personal interest in this study.  On looking at it in detail, however, I doubt that the results are much cause for concern.  The "sample" size is small, there was apparently no attempt at random sampling and the average differences found are very slight.

Additionally, I cannot see that they have excluded the effects observed as being due to differences in the mothers rather than differences in the method of conception.  The authors claim to have controlled for differences in the mothers but it is not clear to me how to do that.  Mothers who have to resort to IVF would usually have subtle health differences that could have non-obvious effects.  The cause of infertility is quite often rather mysterious but it is there.

And the father cannot be omitted from consideration either. It can often be the father who is infertile (has a low sperm count or deficient sperm motility) and that could have complex ramifications. The father may have broader health problems that are passed on genetically. I presume the authors were careful enough to leave out conceptions due to ICSI, which is a whole different ballgame (no pun intended).

Those objections do however have the character of denying that any research into the method of conception is possible and I do not want to claim that so let us look again at the other problems in the study.  The sample size is not impossibly small but it very much at the low end of what we expect in delivering stable results.  And that doubt is sharpened when we look at the average differences in BP. 120/71, compared to 116/69, is a trivial difference and founding it on a small sample  makes it a trivial finding.

And the criterion for high blood pressure is very severe: more than 130/80.  In normal clinical practice that would count as being within the normal range.

And the lack of random sampling in assembling the study population is a very large lacuna. Unless you have some evidence that your sample is representative you cannot validly generalize from it. Hoping or assuming that it is representative reduces the study to a work of faith, not a work of science

So the study is interesting but far from conclusive.  I append the journal abstract


Thousands of children born each year by IVF could be at risk of serious heart problems in later life, a study suggests.

Scientists found signs of 'premature vascular aging' in children as young as 11 who had been conceived as a result of fertility treatment.

And by the age of 16 IVF children were six times more likely to have high blood pressure - a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

The scientists believe how embryos are fertilised and manipulated before they are implanted into a woman's uterus may cause small genetic changes that affect a baby's heart and circulatory system.

They warn that the soaring use of IVF 'may have come at a price' for many children, who could suffer cardiovascular disease as a result.

Children conceived via IVF have higher blood pressure readings

Researchers from University Hospital in Bern, Switzerland, tracked 54 seemingly healthy children who had been born via IVF, and compared them to 43 children born naturally.

They found at age 11 and 12 the IVF children had a 25 per cent narrower brachial artery - the major blood vessel in the arm - and their arteries had thicker walls.

The team then tracked the children for five years. At the age of 16 and 17 the IVF children were far more likely to have developed high blood pressure. They had an average blood pressure of 120/71, compared to 116/69 for the teenagers who had been conceived naturally.

Crucially, eight of those conceived via IVF had developed 'hypertension' - the medical term for high blood pressure, involving a reading of more than 130/80. Only one of the teenagers conceived naturally had hypertension.

The study bolsters the results of previous research which found mice born to IVF had heart problems.

SOURCE

Association of Assisted Reproductive Technologies With Arterial Hypertension During Adolescence

Théo A.Meister MD et al.

Abstract

Background: Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been shown to induce premature vascular aging in apparently healthy children. In mice, ART-induced premature vascular aging evolves into arterial hypertension. Given the young age of the human ART group, long-term sequelae of ART-induced alterations of the cardiovascular phenotype are unknown.

Objectives: This study hypothesized that vascular alterations persist in adolescents and young adults conceived by ART and that arterial hypertension possibly represents the first detectable clinically relevant endpoint in this group.

Methods: Five years after the initial assessment, the study investigators reassessed vascular function and performed 24-h ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring (ABPM) in 54 young, apparently healthy participants conceived through ART and 43 age- and sex-matched controls.

Results: Premature vascular aging persisted in ART-conceived subjects, as evidenced by a roughly 25% impairment of flow-mediated dilation of the brachial artery (p < 0.001) and increased pulse-wave velocity and carotid intima-media thickness. Most importantly, ABPM values (systolic BP, 119.8 ± 9.1 mm Hg vs. 115.7 ± 7.0 mm Hg, p = 0.03; diastolic BP, 71.4 ± 6.1 mm Hg vs. 69.1 ± 4.2 mm Hg, p = 0.02 ART vs. control) and BP variability were markedly higher in ART-conceived subjects than in control subjects. Eight of the 52 ART participants, but only 1 of the 43 control participants (p = 0.041 ART vs. controls) fulfilled ABPM criteria of arterial hypertension (>130/80 mm Hg and/or >95th percentile).

Conclusions: ART-induced premature vascular aging persists in apparently healthy adolescents and young adults without any other detectable classical cardiovascular risk factors and progresses to arterial hypertension. (Vascular Dysfunction in Offspring of Assisted Reproduction Technologies; NCT00837642.)
Central Illustratio

Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Volume 72, Issue 11, 11 September 2018, Pages 1267-1274

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The ACLU Stirs Against Cuomo

The New York Democrat is targeting the NRA, but gun rights have perhaps an unlikely ally.

Good news has emerged in the ongoing legal battle of New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s abuse of financial regulations to target the National Rifle Association. The American Civil Liberties Union has joined the fight — and it is siding with free speech.

We have noted the ACLU’s silence on select issues of free speech in the past, and Cuomo was prominently cited. We’re glad to update the record, but this is something that should have been done when Cuomo made the threats. The good news is that the ACLU doesn’t want the case dismissed, which means a favorable ruling could come. The bad news: The ACLU has taken a limited step, only supporting discovery, not the actual objective itself.

The fact is, though, once it goes to discovery, we’re likely to see the evidence that what the NRA claims is being done is actually happening. It’s a fair bet that when the NRA filed its suit, the corporate partners who ended relationships in the face of Cuomo’s intimidation campaign left behind some evidence.

Cuomo’s unapologetic attitude — all but daring somebody to do something about his campaign — will also likely have trickled down, and some aides will have stuff in their emails. This will, in a court of law, make it hard for any jury to find in the governor’s favor.

The fact is, even an injunction and a favorable jury verdict will not completely undo the harm that has been done. Even if the consent decrees for Chubb and Lockton are voided, those companies may not come back — because even with the vindication, the process has become punishment for having the temerity to oppose the Left, just as the “John Doe” investigations were used by leftist prosecutors in Wisconsin against allies of Scott Walker, and just as the IRS was used to stifle the Tea Party.

That said, the ACLU probably didn’t just act on principle. Recently, Louisiana told Citigroup and Bank of America not to bother trying to take part in financing a round of road construction due to the banks’ participation in a push for corporate gun control. In the ACLU’s release, it specifically stated that Cuomo’s actions could be replicated for use against Planned Parenthood or the Communist Party. The ACLU’s decision came eight days after Louisiana’s announcement and was part of a Friday news dump.

So while we can be grateful the ACLU is standing to stop government retaliation against those who exercise their First (and Second) Amendment rights, we also must not kid ourselves. Our constitutional rights are at grave risk.

SOURCE

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Walter E. Williams: Immigrants and Disease

The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that all immigrants and refugees undergo a medical screening examination to determine whether they have an inadmissible health condition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has technical instructions for medical examination of prospective immigrants in their home countries before they are permitted to enter the U.S. They are screened for communicable and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, mumps and HIV. They are also tested for syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. The CDC also has medical screening guidelines for refugees. These screenings are usually performed 30 to 90 days after refugees arrive in the United States.

But what about people who enter our country illegally? The CDC specifically cites the possibility of the cross-border movement of HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, tuberculosis, shigellosis and syphilis. Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent in South Texas, warned: "What's coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone. We are starting to see scabies, chickenpox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and different viruses." Some of the youngsters illegally entering our country are known to be carrying lice and suffering from various illnesses. Because there have been no medical examinations of undocumented immigrants, we have no idea how many are carrying infectious diseases that might endanger American children when these immigrants enter schools across our nation.

According to the CDC, in most industrialized countries, the number of cases of tuberculosis and the number of deaths caused by TB steadily declined during the 100 years prior to the mid-1980s. Since the '80s, immigrants have reversed this downward trend in countries that have had substantial levels of immigration from areas where the disease is prevalent. In 2002, the CDC said: “Today, the proportion of immigrants among persons reported as having TB exceeds 50 percent in several European countries, including Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. A similar proportion has been predicted for the United States.” The number of active TB cases among American-born citizens declined from an estimated 17,725 in 1986 to 3,201 in 2015. That was an 80 percent drop. Data reported to the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System show that the TB incidence among foreign-born people in the United States (15.1 cases per 100,000) is approximately 13 times the incidence among U.S.-born people (1.2 cases per 100,000). Those statistics refer to immigrants who are legally in the U.S. There is no way for us to know the incidence of tuberculosis and other diseases carried by those who are in our country illegally and hence not subject to medical examination.

This public health issue is ignored by all those Americans championing sanctuary cities. The public health issue is also ignored by Americans clamoring for open borders, and that includes many of my libertarian friends. By the way, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, when masses of European immigrants were trying to enter our country, those with dangerous diseases were turned back from Ellis Island. Americans hadn't "progressed" to the point of thinking that anyone in the world has a legal right to live in America. Neither did they think that it was cruel or racist to take measures to prevent our fellow Americans from catching diseases from foreigners.

But aside from diseases, there is the greater threat of welcoming to our shores people who have utter contempt for Western values and want to import anti-Western values to our country, such as genital mutilation, honor killings and the oppression of women. Many libertarian types make the argument that we would benefit from open borders when it comes to both people and goods. That vision ignores the important fact that when we import, say, tomatoes from Mexico, as opposed to people, to the U.S., they are not going to demand that we supply them with welfare benefits.

The bottom line is that we Americans have a right to decide who enters our country and under what conditions. If we forgo that right, we cease to be a sovereign nation. But that may not be important to some Americans.

SOURCE

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Democrats Are Leaving Their Party in Droves. Conservatives Should Pay Attention

Two thousand years ago, St. Paul found himself blinded by a bright light on the road to Damascus. The dramatic experience led him to stop persecuting his opponents and to take up new beliefs.

Today, many former leftists are taking their first steps on their own road to Damascus, and the right is not doing nearly enough to capitalize on this unprecedented mass exit from the left.

It all began just a few short weeks ago when gay New York hairdresser Brandon Straka posted a hard-hitting video explaining why he is no longer a Democrat or a liberal. Since then, his #WalkAway Campaign Facebook group has attracted more than 172,000 members. A multitude of videos from other WalkAways have been posted online.

Make no mistake, the left has been greatly rattled by all this. The left’s treatment of the #WalkAway Campaign mirrors the way it reacted to the Tea Party movement. First, it ignored it, hoping it would go away. Then it moved on to minimizing and attempting ridicule, which it has done with #WalkAway. Steven Colbert and others claimed that the #WalkAway Campaign is just run by Russian bots.

Having seen that fail, the next step was to try to co-opt it with its own movement.

Bill Scher wrote a piece in Politico inviting Republicans to become Democrats. The suggestion is that Never Trumpers should walk away from the GOP, get themselves elected as delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and thereby prevent the Democratic Party from going full-blown socialist.

Nearly every WalkAway has a unique reason for leaving the Democratic Party. Some of the most common reasons I’ve encountered are:

The Democrat Party rejects Christian values.

Liberal rhetoric on helping the poor does not match up with reality. For instance, Democrat-run Los Angeles now has 55,000 homeless people living on the streets.

The left frequently denounces the armed services, law enforcement, and the American flag. Many military veterans are outraged by this.

There are countless others. But the wellspring of the #WalkAway movement has less to do with policy than with the realization that Democrats and the left invariably use despicable methods to achieve their goals, and without remorse. To the left, winning is all that matters.

Consider these words from one WalkAway, Rebecca Meli, who posted on Facebook:

The left only cares about pitting us against each other to keep control and keeping people dependent on them. … This movement has gone right to my core. To have the privilege of watching people think for themselves and recognize the deceitful practices of the left and the manipulation of minorities has been like an awakening.

Another WalkAway, Amanda Velásquez, wrote:

I am tired of the narrative, tired of people who don’t let you speak even if you have proof of what you are talking about, they attack you and label you as racist, closed-minded, and so on.

Many WalkAways have said it was easier to come out as gay than to come out as a conservative or libertarian. Many have even lost friends and been ostracized by family members because they decided to leave the Democrat Party.

One man, Vlad, who grew up in communist Poland, posted a YouTube video in which he compared the methods of today’s American left to the old communist government in his home country.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for conservatives, and it is not likely to come our way again in our lifetimes. Many of these WalkAways come from surprising demographics—gay people, ethnic minorities, and others.

The left worked these communities hard in amassing its power, and it is incumbent on the right to reach out to these same individuals. With the left inching ever closer to total victory, the right cannot afford to shun those who are like-minded just because they previously found themselves on opposite sides of a debate. This is a golden opportunity.

The bright light has shone. The WalkAways are on the move. We at Potomac Tea Party are doing our part to affirm their courageous personal decisions.

What will you do to get other former Democrats to Damascus?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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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Tuesday, September 04, 2018


Witch Hunts Over Substance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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David Horowitz Freedom Center Declares Victory Over Censorship Attempt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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Progressives: The Real World vs. Neverland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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)

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




Monday, September 03, 2018



Vicious Leftist hate again

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Justice Department said it supported Hanen’s decision.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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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Sunday, September 02, 2018



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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Elizabeth Warren’s latest attempt to end capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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An excellent speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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Blue-Collar Optimism Soars

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL 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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