Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: G M on March 19, 2011, 08:20:44 AM
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/19/wanting-and-doing/
Wanting and Doing
posted at 10:55 am on March 19, 2011 by Steven Den Beste
How many teleologists does it take to change a light bulb?
None. The teleologist wants the light bulb to make light, so the light bulb never burns out.
Teleology is a world view that says that the world makes sense, and must work in a way which is intellectually and esthetically pleasing to humans. It assumes a mind-body duality and places the mind, the spiritual, above the body and the physical. If an idea is pleasing then it must be true, for ultimate truth will always be pleasing.
That isn’t really how teleology began, but that’s what it’s become in the modern era. Modern transnational progressivism is, at its core, based on that rather warped and degenerate version of teleology at a deep, a priori level. It may seem strange to talk about the “spiritual” when talking about a movement which prides itself in being secular, but progressivism embraces many contradictions.
To a teleologist, the way you stop war is to put a sticker on your car that says “Imagine world peace”. If enough people just want it enough, it’ll happen. Indeed, anything is possible if you just want it enough. You can power modern industrial civilization exclusively using “green” energy, for instance. If it isn’t happening, it’s the fault of all the people who refuse to get on board to help with the wanting.
To a teleologist, socialism is obviously the way things should be. The ideal socialist utopia is such a pleasing image that it must be the way to go. Never mind that every time socialism has been tried, it has always failed badly; empirical results don’t matter to a teleologist.
As a true man of the left, our president is fundamentally teleological, and this is the explanation for a lot of things about him that people find puzzling. Again and again, Obama makes speeches about how important some thing is, but doesn’t seem to do anything about them. But that’s not puzzling if you realize that to a teleologist, wanting something is doing something.
Or take his behavior regarding Libya. John, at Powerline, writes:
Despite the urgency, it appears that the Libyan insurrection likely will be over before the Obama administration makes any decision as to what to do about it. It may well be that the best course has always been to do nothing. But if that is the case, what was the point of Obama’s pronouncement that Qaddafi “must” go? If it is important that Qaddafi go, then why is the United States unwilling to lift a finger to bring about the event that “must” happen? And how can a situation simultaneously be urgent, but not worth doing anything about?
For a teleologist, expressing your desire is how you bring about the event. If enough people say that Qaddafi “must go”, he will vanish in a puff of smoke. That’s why you work for a world consensus, for it is that consensus which alters reality.
(A slightly less implausible way to put it is that if there is strong enough international disapproval, Qaddafi will bow to peer pressure and voluntarily go into exile. But clearly that isn’t going to work with him.)
To a teleologist, it isn’t necessary, and it is obviously wrong, to use military force to depose a corrupt and brutal dictator. Soft power is obviously better.
Except for the minor fact that it isn’t very effective. But as mentioned, to teleologists, empirical results are not persuasive.
The Obama administration, combined with two years of strong Democratic majority in Congress, has caused incalculable damage to this country and the world. But we’ve recovered from worse, and it will discredit the left for a generation. The left finally gained control for two years, and now Americans have seen what that truly means. In November of 2010 American voters gave the left a stinging rebuke, and it’s going to keep happening.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/03/20/left-wheel-of-obama-bandwagon-falls-off/
Dennis Kucinich: Time to impeach Obama over Libya action.
Michael Moore: Obama no better than Bush.
Louis Farrakhan: “Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?”
Andrew Sullivan: Obama now the exact opposite of what I voted for.
This random DailyKos diarist sums up today’s zeigeist on the left:
Barack Obama do you believe in anything or you just want to be in power at the expense of everybody? Shame on you, I cannot believe these words will ever come from my mouth. But you should be shame of yourself.
Barack Obama has finally betrayed the last people that believed in him. . . . Africans…
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And all those Kossacks who are cheering you are nothing but Hypocrites because invasion is an Invasion being it Iraq or Afghanistan. When has the US ever followed the French?
My God you are the President of the United States. Why do you let your own employees push you around? Libya is in a state of Civil war. It is unlike the even in Egypt or Tunisia.
I was one those who headed your campaign here in Harris County, Texas. I supported you when you betrayed me on Health Care Public Option, Guantanamo Bay, Tax Cut for the Rich, as pragmatic but this, you have zero justification.
**Obviously they just hate having a black man in the white house. Straight up racism.
The left was able to put racial politics in the rear-view mirror for less than a year, which corresponds to the length of time that it took for the electorate’s honeymoon with President Obama to end. After that, the left decided that anybody who objected to the president’s policies was really upset about the color of skin, no matter how articulate their arguments might seem. New evidence suggests that Barack Obama himself, and Attorney General Eric Holder, agree with that assessment.
USA Today writer Kenneth T. Walsh’s recently released book, Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House, is a study of the influence that African Americans have had in the Executive Branch throughout our history. His observations regarding the Obama administration are particularly revealing:
“In May 2010, he (President Obama) told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent “Tea Party” movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn’t helping them nearly enough, he said.
A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to “take back” their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn’t dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a “subterranean agenda” in the anti-Obama movement—a racially biased one—that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.”
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adpa5kYUhCA[/youtube]
Impeach now!
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http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/35028?in=44:52&out=46:21
Still like Wright, Crafty?
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I've clicked on it and it comes it at minute 45 of 70. Is there a reason for this? Or are you asking me to go back to 00:00 and watch all 70 minutes?
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I doubt there is much that is useful in watching the whole thing. I think it is revealing of how false his protests of civility are.
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I watched for five minutes. Thank you for saving me the remaining sixty-five minutes, and yes the clip is good evidence of the proposition for which you cite it. :lol:
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He never responded to my emails challenging his assertions about islam, BTW.
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Pravda on the Hudson continues to fellate President Obama:
With nary a Congressional resolution in sight, nor mention of the need for one (let alone a declaration of war) The New Yor Times supports the President's decision to go in.
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President Obama made the right, albeit belated, decision to join with allies and try to stop Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from slaughtering thousands of Libyans. But he has been far too slow to explain that decision, or his long-term strategy, to Congress and the American people.
On Monday night, the president spoke to the nation and made a strong case for why America needed to intervene in this fight — and why that did not always mean it should intervene in others.
Mr. Obama said that the United States had a moral responsibility to stop “violence on a horrific scale,” as well as a unique international mandate and a broad coalition to act with. He said that failure to intervene could also have threatened the peaceful transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, as thousands of Libyan refugees poured across their borders, while other dictators would conclude that “violence is the best strategy to cling to power.”
Mr. Obama could report encouraging early progress on the military and diplomatic fronts. Washington and its allies have crippled or destroyed Colonel Qaddafi’s anti-aircraft defenses, peeled his troops back from the city of Benghazi — saving potentially thousands of lives — and allowed rebel forces to retake the offensive.
Just as encouragingly, this military effort that was galvanized internationally — the United Nations Security Council authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya — will soon be run internationally. Last weekend, the United States handed over responsibility for enforcing the no-flight zone to NATO. And the alliance is now preparing to take command of the entire mission, with the support of (still too few) Arab nations.
To his credit, Mr. Obama did not sugarcoat the difficulties ahead. While he suggested that his goal, ultimately, is to see Colonel Qaddafi gone, he also said that the air war was unlikely to accomplish that by itself.
Most important, he vowed that there would be no American ground troops in this fight. “If we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force,” he said, “our coalition would splinter.” He said “regime change” in Iraq took eight years and cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives. “That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.”
Instead, he said the United States and its allies would work to increase the diplomatic and military pressure on Colonel Qaddafi and his cronies. A meeting on Tuesday with allies and members of the Libyan opposition is supposed to develop that strategy along with ways to help the rebels build alternate, and we hope humane and competent, governing structures. That needs to start quickly.
To hold their ground and protect endangered civilians, let alone advance, the rebels will likely need air support for quite some time. Mr. Obama was right not to promise a swift end to the air campaign. At the same time, he should not overestimate the patience of the American people or the weariness of the overstretched military.
And as Washington reduces its military role, others, inside and outside NATO, will need to increase theirs. Within NATO, unenthusiastic partners like Germany and Turkey need to at least stay out of the way even if they continue to stand aside from the fighting.
The president made the right choice to act, but this is a war of choice, not necessity. Presidents should not commit the military to battle without consulting Congress and explaining their reasons to the American people.
Fortunately, initial coalition military operations have gone well. Unfortunately, it is the nature of war that they will not always go well. Mr. Obama needs to work with Congress and keep the public fully informed. On Monday, he made an overdue start on that.
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Koch Kookery, Kon and Pro: A Roundup
from Hit & Run by Brian Doherty
We are now in the second, more illuminating meta-round of coverage of the recent staggeringly successful spasm of Kochhate launched by the New Yorker's expose on these wealthy, politically active industrial tycoon brothers Charles and David Koch (who give money to the foundation that owns this website, among many other causes).
At the center is Matthew Continetti's well-reported and thoughtful Weekly Standard story, which delivers a calm, sensible, detailed, and accurate picture of these guys' actual role in destroying/saving the country.
Continetti efficiently and thoroughly makes some important points about our public Koch crisis. That, for example, the David Koch prank phone call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker proves exactly the opposite of what proggy Kochhaters think it did--that is, that Walker had clearly never before in his life spoken to his alleged puppetmaster-on-the-cheap Koch, who allegedly bought him for less than half a percent of campaign contributions.
Also, that it's an extremely tendentious, not to say ignorant, interpretation of the facts and motivations behind the rise of the Tea Party movement to attribute it primarily to the paid-for machinations of Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity; that portraying the Kochs as pure trust fund babies who only have what their Bircher daddy Fred gave them shows little knowledge of the multipronged industrial giant the brothers made of the relatively small company they inherited; that their policy giving is tiny compared to their total charitable giving, unusual if they are conscious and deliberate puppet masters of American politics; and that it's simply absurd to claim that their long and peculiar history of ideological giving has some direct link to lining their own pockets:
[it was said that] the Kochs’ talk about free markets was merely cover for economic self-interest. But if that were true, why doesn’t every major corporation full-throatedly support limited government? Are we really to believe that Koch Industries is the only self-interested corporation in America? The reality, of course, is that an easier way to advance corporate self-interest is the one taken by most giant companies: securing monopolies, bailouts, tariffs, subsidies—the opposite of free enterprise. “It’d be much safer economically to sit on the sidelines or curry favor with the Obama administration,” said Richard Fink.
It was impossible for the liberal activists to acknowledge that libertarians might actually operate from conviction. Charles and David believed in low taxes, less spending, and limited regulation not because those policies helped them but because they helped everybody. “If I wanted to enhance my riches,” said David, “why do I give away almost all my money?”
Continetti is also good at contexualizing the real nature of Koch companies' environmental crimes (not so severe as far as enormous industrial processing concerns go) and OK on their libertarian intellectual background, although a long article on this that fails to mention the names Robert LeFevre (the eccentric pacifist anarchist educator who was one of the brothers first extended entrees to libertarian thinking at his Freedom School in Colorado in the mid-'60s) or Murray Rothbard (the anarchist libertarian economist and philosopher who was central to the Koch libertarian project in the late 1970s before a contentious break) isn't telling the whole story--not that any mere magazine feature could. (For more context on the Kochs as libertarian financiers, see my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.)
Continetti does start to sound almost like the people he's jousting against when he describes the supposed highly coordinated sinister proggy machine of hate and death that has taken on the Kochs; and he quotes David Koch getting a bit Glenn Beck-y with exaggerated assessments of exactly how much of a commie bastard President Obama is.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon found the Koch brothers' expressions of dismay over the way they've been demonized recently in the Continetti story to be laughable and offensive, an opinion I don't share, but can see that it's probably hard for anyone to feel so sorry for such successful men. Greenwald is good on data showing that David Koch's belief that Obama is a unique representative of Marxist egalitarianism forcing his will on America isn't well-founded.
In other reaction to the piece, Will Wilkinson, who frames himself a proudly former ideological ally and beneficiary of Koch money, in The Economist has some interesting thoughts on how and why progressives can't--and shouldn't--position themselves firmly against the sort of attempts to shift political and social opinions through ideological giving the Kochs represent, since they rely on it so much themselves.
Politico has a lengthy new piece on the Kochbeat up as well, which frames the Continetti piece as part of a sophisticated P.R. blowback from the Kochs. It also details the extent to which the anti-Koch campaign is a concerted effort, not to say conspiracy:
Back in Washington last month, representatives from Common Cause, Greenpeace, Public Citizen and Think Progress huddled with researchers from the Service Employees International Union at SEIU headquarters to figure out how to make the most of the sudden focus on the Kochs. And meeting participants have continued to trade research about the Kochs and strategize via a Koch-related email listserv and a rolling series of conference calls.
Politico also has some details on the big money behind the groups behind the Kochhate:
Since 1999, Common Cause, the Ruckus Society and the Center for American Progress have received a combined $7.2 million from foundations controlled by or linked to Soros, according to an analysis of grant information provided to POLITICO by Common Cause and data from the Internal Revenue Service provided by the Capital Research Center.
The data also show that those foundations have given another $4.6 million to Public Citizen, Brave New Foundation (a non-profit affiliated with Brave New Films) and a few other liberal groups that have been critical of the Kochs, including the Alliance for Justice, People for the American Way, and Public Campaign. Additionally, some of those groups are beneficiaries of a liberal donor network that meets in secret twice a year – very much like the Koch donor network – though it’s impossible to know how much the groups received from those donors.
As I've written before, to call public furor thus started "astroturf" or phony misses the point; people can try to make an idea catch fire, but it only does so if it genuinely meets the emotional or political needs of a mass; and the need to pretend that the only reason anyone is against public unions, taxes, and spending is that evil oil billionaires are paying them or manipulating them is mighty strong out in the rank and file as well as among progressive leadership, in government or the foundations.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/28/koch-kookery-kon-and-pro-a-rou
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Second post.
Dems Defend Taking Koch Money From Same PAC That Gave to Scott Walker
Michael Warren
March 25, 2011 12:24 PM
Another note on the Koch money funding Democratic campaigns. While Harry Reid and the DSCC try to raise money off the liberal animus against the Koch brothers, the DSCC and a handful of Democratic senators have given no indication that they are willing to give back the thousands of dollars their campaigns received from KOCHPAC, the political arm of Koch Industries. In fact, a spokesperson for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) justified the at least $10,000 the Landrieu campaign received from KOCHPAC last year because the money was not directly from the Koch brothers but comprised of donations from Koch Industries employees in Louisiana.
Why, then, is there so much outrage at Wisconsin governor Scott Walker for accepting donations from the same PAC? The nefarious connection between the Kochs and Walker that had so many Madison protesters up in arms and even prompted a liberal journalist to attempt a "gotcha job" on Walker by pretending to be David Koch is a $43,000 donation from...KOCHPAC. This $43,000 is the source of practically all the liberal animosity toward the Kochs in regards to Wisconsin's public-sector union battle.
So to keep this all straight: If Koch Industries' political action committee contribute money to Republicans, it's the end of our democracy. If the same political action committee contributes money to Democrats, it's all kosher. Got it?
Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/dems-take-money-same-pac-scott-walker-did_555487.html
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BBG. The other half of the double standard was well documented here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028666.php 'The Anatomy of a Smear' I posted it recently on media issues. It is a long methodical read by the guys that brought down Dan Rather. It really takes a slow walk through all the sorted details to grasp how unfair the attacks are, that come from people with an even greater bias and then get repeated all across the mainstream, if places like the NY Times and all its echo chambers can still be called that. A Republican candidate takes a contribution from a Republican businessman and then pushes and votes for legislation that both of them happen to think is good for the district and for the economy. Its outrageous. Now you post that Dems took their money too. Who knew that businesses that congress and the administration keep threatening to shut down would want to get the ear of elected officials before that all is finalized.
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The Quotas Everyone Ignores
Why universities are quietly favoring white males once again.
Andrew Ferguson
March 28, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 27
Anyone who clings to a belief in the inevitability of human progress might want to contemplate the latest trend in college admissions. After a half-century of battles over racial and gender preferences for URMs (admissions-speak for “underrepresented minorities,” a term that has traditionally comprised nearly anyone who isn’t a white male), colleges and universities have boldly embarked on a policy of affirmative action preferences for . . . white males. It’s like old times.
Few admissions deans like to talk about their latest innovation in recruitment, understandably enough. Less understandably, the United States Commission on Civil Rights decided earlier this month it didn’t want to talk about it either. And even harder to figure, women’s rights organizations are staying mum too.
By a vote of four to three, the commission shelved a proposal by one of its Independent members, Gail Heriot, to analyze and publish data that might answer this question: “Are private and public liberal arts schools with somewhat selective admissions discriminating against women—and if so, how heavy a thumb is put on the scale against them?” With a Republican majority, commission members had initially voted to study the question in 2009, and since then staffers have been trying to gather admissions data from 19 schools in the Washington, D.C., area—Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Richmond, and others.
Recently, however, the commission has been in the hands of a de facto Democratic majority thanks to a Republican appointee, political scientist Abigail Thernstrom, who frequently votes with the Democrats. When the staff presented its admittedly provisional and incomplete figures to the commissioners, they shut down the project altogether and voted not to allow the admissions numbers to be made public.
The investigation was shuttered, said one of the Democratic commissioners, because the data were “inadequate or perhaps faulty.” Releasing the numbers, the commissioner said, might result in the public arriving at “misleading conclusions.”
For her part, Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a longtime critic of preferences in admissions, said the move was a “travesty.”
“This wasn’t about the data,” she said in an interview later. “There were problems with the data but they weren’t insurmountable. . . . This was about politics.”
But the politics are very odd. -Heriot, a congressional appointee to the commission whose views lean right, might be thought by the usual ideological taxonomy to be reluctant to press an investigation into wholesale discrimination against girls. On the other hand, the project should have been meat-and-’taters to the Democrats—a chance to expose a concerted effort by large, wealthy, unaccountable institutions to deny an education to qualified women purely on the basis of their sex.
Among college admissions professionals, it has been a barely concealed secret for several years that such an effort is underway at many, if not most, selective schools. The secret became public in 2006 when the admissions dean at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, published an op-ed in the New York Times. Never underestimate the anger of a parent whose kid didn’t get into the right school. Britz’s daughter had just been wait-listed at a college that mom assumed she would glide into, and mom, being in the business herself, said she knew why.
“The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today’s accomplished young women,” Britz wrote. She offered an anecdote from her own experience, about a recent applicant to Kenyon. The girl was admirable in every respect but for her middling SAT scores. Britz finally decided to admit her, but it was a close thing. The kid should have been born a boy.
“Had she been a male applicant,” Britz wrote, “there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit.” The threshold for boys is lower than for girls, not only at Kenyon but at other schools too. Boys, she explained simply, are “more valued applicants.”
Britz’s op-ed loosed a flurry of journalism—editors never tire of college admissions stories—much of it summarized the following year in an excellent exposé by U.S. News and World Report’s Alex Kingsbury. A raft of prominent schools, including Pomona, Tufts, the College of William and Mary, and Boston College, were accepting boys at a far higher rate than female applicants—boys with lower test scores and lower grade point averages than their female rivals. William and Mary, for instance, accepted 40 percent of the boys who applied in 2006 and only 26 percent of the girls.
Since the early 1980s, when a brief period of parity was reached after generations of male dominance, more girls than boys have applied to college each year; in 2011, 60 percent of college applicants will be women. Girls—sorry, fellas—are by any objective measure more attractive applicants than boys, with higher average GPAs and test scores. They have fewer behavioral problems. They write better application essays. They have a wider range of extracurricular interests. They clean up better for interviews.
On any fairly balanced scale, the acceptance rate for women at selective colleges should be far higher than for men. Instead it’s the other way around. The reason is “affirmative action,” sometimes called preferences, sometimes called quotas—though never publicly. Admissions deans like Britz have placed a thumb on the scale.
This much is generally accepted practice among college admissions deans in the upper tiers of American higher education. But why? If girls are better suited to college, why not let them enter the better colleges at rates equal to their achievements?
Here is where the Legend of 60-40 enters in. Sixty-forty is the ratio of women to men at which, according to admissions lore, the “atmosphere” of a campus changes irreversibly and the school’s reputation passes a point of no return. It becomes known as a “girls’ school” and before you know it . . . there goes the neighborhood.
“Once you become decidedly female,” Britz wrote in her op-ed, “fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” Or worse, it becomes attractive to the wrong kind of male. Hubba hubba, in other words. Predation can be a problem. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the indispensable education writer Richard Whitmire offered anecdotes from the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. JMU refuses to institute gender quotas and as a result is now more than 60 percent female. “What can be seen [on campus] so far is not encouraging,” Whitmire wrote. “Stark gender imbalances appear to act as an accelerant on the hook-up culture”—a reference to the Bonobo-like mating patterns that have lately enlivened social life among America’s budding scholars.
For this reason, the admissions dean of the College of William and Mary has been unapologetic about that thumb of his, which he has firmly planted on the boy side of the scale. “We are, after all, the College of William and Mary,” he has often said, “not the College of Mary and Mary.”
The most selective of the private schools from which the Civil Rights Commission staff requested data, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, adamantly refused to cooperate with the commission. Title IX of the education amendments to the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws sex discrimination in public colleges and universities, exempts private undergraduate nonprofessional schools—a loophole designed in 1972 to preserve traditionally single-sex colleges, nearly all of which have since become co-ed.
It’s fair to assume that the refusal of Georgetown and Hopkins was on grounds of self-incrimination. Boy quotas are the unofficial but undeniable means by which schools are staving off the dread 60-40, and even where sex discrimination is not explicitly illegal, a few beams of sunlight cast into the cloisters of college admissions offices might act as a disinfectant, as liberal activists like to put it.
Yet the activists have been utterly silent, for reasons we can only guess. There’s been not a peep even from the National Women’s Law Center, which routinely issues press releases with such headlines as “NWLC Files Brief in Supreme Court, Supporting the Women of Wal-Mart in their Class Action Lawsuit” and “House Republican Spending Cuts Devastating to Women, Families and the Economy.” Reached by U.S. News, a spokesman for the American Association of University Women ducked. “We need to help impoverished boys and girls to improve educational outcomes and have equal opportunity,” she said, with stubborn irrelevance.
Whitmire, the education writer, has offered theories of his own to account for the thunderous silence, based on his discussions with feminist lawyers. “Alerting the public that women increasingly dominate college campuses will make it appear women have ‘won’,” he wrote. “And if women have won, why are they still complaining about discrimination in higher education?” Public sentiments like this might endanger more important feminist projects like increasing the number of tenured female faculty and closing campus “wage gaps.” There again, the Democrats on the commission may have simply been responding to the interests of a precious political ally—the vast, impenetrable combine of American higher ed, which is no happier than any other industry to have the feds snooping into its files.
For her part, Heriot is stumped.
“I don’t get it, I really don’t,” she said. She vows to try once more to bring the matter of girl quotas before the commission. “It bothers me that no one is willing to shine a light on this,” she said. “And it bothers me if no one’s bothered that women might be denied admissions on the basis of sex. I’d at least like the commission to produce real facts, real evidence, so we can know for sure.”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.
Correction: Abigail Thernstrom was originally mistakenly identitfied as a sociologist. She is a political scientist. We apologize for the error.
http://67.43.13.183/articles/quotas-everyone-ignores_554831.html
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2nd post.
March 9, 2011
A Double Shock to Liberal Professors
By Russell K. Nieli
Social psychology has long been a haven for left-wing scholars. Jonathan Haidt, one of the best known and most respected young social psychologists, has heaved two bombshells at his field—one indicting it for effectively excluding conservatives (he is a liberal) and the other for what he sees as a jaundiced and cult-like opposition to religion (he is an atheist).
Here he is on the treatment of conservatives:
I submit to you that the under-representation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering. … We should take our own rhetoric about the benefits of diversity seriously and apply it to ourselves. … Just imagine if we had a true diversity of perspectives in social psychology. Imagine if conservative students felt free enough to challenge our dominant ideas, and bold enough to pull us out of our deepest ideological ruts. That is my vision for our bright post-partisan future.
And here he is on religion:
Surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. …Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior -- giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need -- religious people appear to be morally superior.
Bombshell Number One fell four years ago in an unusually influential article. ("Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion") Haidt argued that the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, together with the secular psychology profession more generally, have failed to grasp the positive role that belief and religious ritual plays in the social life of religious people. In their focus on religion's capacity to generate intolerance and other social harms, the psychology profession and the more outspoken religion critics of recent years, Haidt wrote, missed the all-important binding and community-forming role that traditional religious belief and religious practice frequently perform.
Haidt's earliest professional interest was in the psychology of moral systems and moral beliefs, and his interest in religion sprung from this early academic concern. While he initially tended to view religion in a negative light, his reading of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim gave him greater appreciation for the community-forming and morality-reinforcing importance of shared religious beliefs. "If you want to describe human morality, rather than the morality of educated Western academics," Haidt said, "you've got to include the Durkheimian view that morality is in large part about binding people together." Religion, Haidt said, has been misunderstood by many Western academics because they focus too often on its (often dubious) truth claims or on its (often negative) contributions to modern secular notions of fairness and justice. But religion is a much more multi-faceted phenomenon than Western secularists attribute to it, Haidt wrote, and from the standpoint of moral psychology it must be acknowledged as one of the greatest forces there is in suppressing human selfishness and furthering cooperation and cohesion among its practitioners (though this cooperation and cohesion, Haidt readily admitted, is often purchased at the expense of hostility towards outsiders or internal dissidents).
Haidt backed up his claim about the social benefits of religion by summarizing some of the empirical evidence on the topic, drawing heavily from economist Arthur Brooks' important study, Who Really Cares:
If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right. … [Not only are religious people more charitable among themselves], religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood.
Haidt concluded his article on a Burkean note suggesting that such longstanding practices and ways of life as found in the world's religions are likely to contain at least "some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing." Haidt's bottom line was that much of contemporary moral and social psychology had misunderstood religion, reduced it to only one of its dimensions, and failed to acknowledge its unquestionably positive role in furthering at least certain types of moral conduct.
His Critics Respond
Haidt's article was republished on the website www.edge.org where several distinguished academic psychologists and intellectuals were asked to comment. Some respondents agreed with the claim that secular investigators of religion often miss its positive dimensions, but other respondents, including most vehemently Sam Harris, repeated their ongoing indictment of religion as an unmitigated disaster for humanity. In response to these latter critics Haidt offered an account of his own change of heart on the subject. "I want to make it clear that I am not an apologist for religion," he said. "I used to dislike all religions, back when I thought of them as systems of belief that helped individuals understand the world and cope with the unknown. After reading Durkheim and D.S. Wilson I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimes terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups. Whether the net effects of religion for humanity are good or bad is a complex empirical question, the answer to which varies by religion, by era, and by what terms we include in our cost/benefit analysis. I am motivated neither to convict nor to acquit [religion], but if religion is to be subject to trial by science, I want the trial to be fair. Until we [social scientists] acknowledge a latent prejudice, however, we will have trouble understanding the accused."
Haidt compared religion and its social-binding role to that of college fraternities and college sports teams, and he related how his views on the social utility of these collegiate institutions had undergone the very same kind of change and development as his views on religion. "I used to wish," he explained, "that all fraternities and major sports teams would disappear from my university -- I thought of them as tribal institutions that brought out the ugly and sometimes violent side of young people. But after talking with athletes, fraternity members, and fundraisers I realized that these institutions create powerful feelings of belonging which have enormous benefits for the participants while making them fiercely loyal and extraordinarily generous later on to the University of Virginia. Fraternities and sports teams contribute greatly to the strong school spirit at UVA, and to our rapidly growing endowment." Haidt went on to explain that all students, not just the athletes and fraternity members, benefit from the externalities created by these communal ties.
The Second Bombshell
Needless to say, Haidt was hardly playing it safe among his fellow academics by coming up with good reasons to support religion, varsity sports, and college fraternities in America. But his defense of currently out-of-favor groups and beliefs hardly prepared his social psychology colleagues for his second iconoclastic bombshell delivered this past January. At the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology -- the leading professional organization in the discipline -- Haidt accused his fellow social psychologists of being "a tribal moral community" that acted in many ways like a narrow-minded religious cult bound together by a set of highly partisan political beliefs and "blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values." To an academic audience that prides itself on its open-mindedness, its tolerance of diversity, and its single-minded pursuit of truth, these were "fighting words" and Haidt made sure he backed up his assertion with strong evidence from a variety of domains.
Just look at the Larry Summers firing at Harvard, Haidt began. The wider distribution curve for IQs among men than women may be one reason, Summers suggested, why women are underrepresented in the math and science intensive fields at the most competitive institutions like Harvard, since greater variance means larger numbers of males at both the low and high end of the ability distribution. Such a hypothesis is certainly worth exploring, Haidt said, yet for those within the tribal force field of left-liberal academia such "is not a permissible hypothesis." "It is a sacrilege. It blames the victim rather than the powerful." The ensuing outrage over Summers' hypothesis, Haidt explained, forced the Harvard president to resign. "[Yet] we psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage," Haidt complained. "We should have defended his right to think freely." The social psychologists, however, like most other academics, did nothing, kept quiet about the matter, and passively watched as Summers was forced to resign for his heretical suggestion.
Haidt then explained to his colleagues his strenuous efforts to find social psychologists who dissented from the prevailing left/liberal political perspective dominant in the field with publicly acknowledged political leanings of a conservative or right-of-center character. But it proved a most difficult task. A Google search under the phrase "liberal social psychologist" turned up 2740 hits, Haidt announced to his audience, while "conservative social psychologist" turned up a total of three hits. And none of the three conservative hits turned out to produce the names of a single, real-life, conservative social psychologist.
But Haidt persisted. After emailing 30 colleagues and friends in the social psychology field, and querying them if they knew of any conservatives in the field, one genuine conservative was found. That was Rick McCauley of Bryn Mawr College, a specialist on the psychology of terrorism. Haidt had actually met McCauley years earlier during his student days at the University of Pennsylvania where McCauley was a friend of one of Haidt's academic advisors: "When I first met Rick [as a student at Penn] I was wary of him," Haidt explained. "I had heard that he was a conservative. … I had never before met an actual conservative professor, and it took me a while to realize how valuable it was to hear from someone with a different perspective." Haidt went on to explain that many of McCauley's later insights in the social psychology field were only made possible because "he stands outside of the liberal force field" of the contemporary psychology profession. Without his dissenting political perspective, Haidt suggested, McCauley might not have come up with his particularly valuable angle on political terrorism.
With a huge audience of social psychologists representing a reasonably good cross section of those in the field, Haidt had an ideal situation at the annual meeting to do some informal polling to confirm his claim of an ideological monopoly of the left. He asked the assembled multitude which of four categories best described their political leanings: 1) liberal or left-of-center, 2) centrist or moderate, 3) libertarian, or 4) conservative or right- of-center. By a show of hands, between 80 and 90 percent of the audience indicated they were "liberal or left- of-center," while in this enormous audience that Haidt estimated numbered about 1000, there were only 20 with "centrist or moderate" political views, 12 with "libertarian" views, and only three described their views as "conservative or right-of-center." Conservatives thus made up less than 1 percent of the social psychologists assembled, in a country, Haidt reminded his audience, in which 40 percent of the public describe their political views in this manner.
This virtual absence of right-of-center voices, Haidt boldly proclaimed, "is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering." He backed up this claim with two letters he had solicited from non-liberal graduate students who spoke of their reluctance to express their political views because they were middle-of-the-road in their politics and not liberal. "I consider myself very middle of the road politically," one wrote. "[I am] a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work." Both of these graduate students, Haidt explained, "said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet." To back up his claim that social psychologists, knowingly or unknowingly, create a hostile and unwelcoming work environment for students or faculty with non-conforming political views Haidt cited the words of a previous speaker at the convention: "I'm a good liberal Democrat, just like every other social psychologist I know."
Haidt's indictment of the social psychology profession was devastating. While cult-like or conformist tribal behavior may have its benefits for a religious group -- Haidt, had made just this point in his earlier writings -- it has no place in science, he declared. "We social psychologists" said Haidt, think of ourselves as "super-tolerant free thinkers. We celebrate diversity and non-conformity. We boldly follow our science wherever it takes us, and no matter whom it offends. We care only about truth!" In reality, however, Haidt went on to explain, "we are a tribal moral community. … We have sacred values other than truth; we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don't share those sacred values."
Haidt concluded his address with a plea that social psychology develop a more welcoming attitude toward those who don't share the left-liberal viewpoint on moral and political issues. Having a few conservatives within the profession would be a healthy development, he said, just as bringing women into the profession at an earlier period was healthy. "We should make it a priority," he said, "to find, nurture, and welcome a few dozen conservatives into our ranks." Such a development, he explained, would bring fresh ideas into the profession and no doubt lead to new areas and topics of exploration. Haidt also suggested that his colleagues try to familiarize themselves with viewpoints that they rarely hear from talking to one another. He specifically recommended in this context that they read Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and read a conservative magazine like National Review. Haidt explained that he personally reads eight periodicals a month, seven of which have left-of-center viewpoints, "but I get more new ideas from reading National Review than from any of the others."
Haidt's Colleagues Respond
Like his earlier article on the treatment of religion by academic psychologists and the New Atheists, Haidt's address on the leftist bias of the social psychology profession was reproduced on the www.edge.org website where various colleagues were asked to respond. Some of the responses did more than Haidt could ever have done to confirm his claim that a tribal or cult-like insularity and conformity informs many in the social psychology profession. One distinguished psychologist, a Harvard professor, suggested that the near monopoly of people on the left among social psychologists might simply reflect the fact, not that there are barriers to entry for conservatives, but that "liberals may be more interested in new ideas, more willing to work for peanuts, or just more intelligent, all of which may push them to pursue the academic life while deterring their conservative peers." Another professor from NYU suggested that the fact that so many ordinary Americans are conservative but almost all social psychologists are liberal may simply reflect the greater knowledge and expertise of the latter. "We should ask honestly," he wrote, "whether social scientists are too liberal or society is too conservative." "After all," he went on to explain, "when experts and laypersons disagree, we do not usually rush to the conclusion that the experts are biased."
Not all of the responses to Haidt's address were hostile, however -- or ideologically self-serving. Lee Jussim, for instance, the chairman of Rutgers psychology department, had this to say: "I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to, and enthusiasm for, Jon Haidt's speech. As he so refreshingly pointed out, liberal bias infects, distorts, and undermines the quality of our science. … If [Haidt's speech] leads even one researcher to be more sensitive to the extraordinary double standards and blindness that sometimes taint our field, it will have been a rousing success."
Another supporter of Haidt's speech was Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale. To get across Haidt's central idea of a hostile work environment confronting non-conformists, Bloom asked his fellow psychologists to imagine the following scenario:
Imagine that you are a beginning graduate student accepted into a top-ranked psychology department. The first colloquium talk you go to is about deception, from a famous social psychologist. In the middle of her talk, she makes a remark about how some people are simply incapable of ever telling the truth, and then she puts up a large picture of Barack Obama. People roar with laughter, and there's a bit of applause. You are a teaching fellow in a large Introduction to Psychology course, and the professor talks a bit about popular delusions, giving the example of liberals who believe in global warming. Al Gore is mentioned in a lecture on clinical psychology, in the context of narcissistic personality disorder. Everyone you know is a conservative Republican and assumes that you are one too, making off-hand jokes to you about brain-dead liberals. But suppose you are, in fact, a liberal yourself. How would you feel about this new life you have chosen?
Bloom then went on to state the obvious: "Nobody wants to be part of a community where their identity is the target of ridicule and malice." This, he said, is obvious to social psychologists in dealing with all sorts of other biases involving gender, race, and sexual orientation. It should be obvious, too, he said, for biases against those who hold political views outside the left-liberal mainstream. For a community that proclaims the value of diversity, Bloom said, we should be much more sensitive to these issues of political bias. "Jon is right that we should do better."
A Model of Academic Self-Analysis
It is almost impossible to overstate the courage, intellectual clarity, and simple wisdom involved in Jonathan Haidt's challenges to his social psychology colleagues. His message is as uncompromising as it is uncomplicated: open up the discipline to viewpoints outside the narrow, left-liberal mainstream, learn from people who have political and moral views different than you own, treat religion more fairly, and stop acting like an insular tribal cult and act more like the open-minded science profession you claim to be.
That's a powerful message and one can only wish that it is heard not only by the social psychology profession but by almost all the other current disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. Studies by economist Daniel Klein and others have documented the extreme ideological uniformity and insularity among a host of academic disciplines, psychology being just one. Sociology, anthropology, and women's studies have been found to be even more ideologically skewed than psychology. People outside the left-liberal hegemony that reigns in these disciplines feel intimidated and unwelcomed, and even if a student may feel some attraction to academic life, those with conservative, libertarian, or other dissenting viewpoints will be turned away by an academic culture that they correctly perceive is hostile to their differing values and perspectives. Haidt's exploration of the social psychology profession is a model of constructive academic self-analysis and self-criticism -- and one we can only wish is duplicated by leaders in other disciplines.
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Russell K. Nieli is a Senior Preceptor in the Executive Precept Program in Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/03/two_bombshells_for_social_psyc.html
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3rd post.
Jonathan Chait Completely Misses the Point
David Bernstein • March 16, 2011 2:54 pm
[Note to “The ExileD” readers: George Mason University is a state university, funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia. My paycheck comes from the Commonwealth [which in turn gets the money to fund the university from our students’ tuition dollars, as law school tuition is over 35K for the majority of our students], and that is my employer. I don’t receive any money from the Koch Brothers. I don’t know anything about this website, but if this is illustrative of its reliability, you’re wasting your time reading it. FURTHER: “The ExileD” falsely stated that the Koch brothers are my “employers.” Any halfway respectable media site would just admit its mistake and move on, instead of trying to obscure its errors with juvenile insults.]
Responding to a post of mine regarding “progressive” demonization of the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, TNR’s Chait expresses bafflement at libertarians’ “hypersensitivity” regarding criticism of the Kochs’ “great deal of influence over the political system.”
The problem, dear Jonathan, is that while you and others consistently assert that the Kochs have such influence, you don’t ever demonstrate it. Let’s review: It seems undisputed that the Kochs total spending on political and ideological causes is somewhere around 10–15 million dollars per year. How big a role does this money play in the American political system?
Let’s start with ideological/intellectual causes. The liberal Ford Foundation spends over $400 million a year. The liberal MacArthur Foundation spends about $140 million a year. Liberal billionaire George Soros spends about $150 million a year. Liberals control the vast majority of academic positions in almost every humanities and social science department in every major university in the country, with total budges in the tens of billions.
Even in the libertarians’ tiny corner of the ideological universe, 10 million dollars would only keep the Cato Institute running from January to April this year, and leave nothing left for any other libertarian cause or organization. So the idea that the Kochs are having some huge influence on American politics through their ideological philanthropy is grossly exaggerated, at best.
Even more absurd is the notion that the Kochs’ political contributions are distorting American politics. The Obama campaign spent hundreds of million of dollars on the 2008 election. The 2010 midterm elections cost about $4 billion. The Koch’s relative spending is like pissing in an ocean. Such spending, of course, can under the right conditions win an interest group some narrow favors, but that’s a far cry from suggesting that it can buy “a great deal of influence over the political system” in general.
No, the reason that some liberals have latched on to the Kochs as their bogeymen is that this is what demagogic political propagandists due to win support from their base. They find a mysterious, ominous-sounding (billionaires! who sell oil!–what could raise greater suspicions on the Left?) villain on whom to blame their troubles, and rouse the passions of the partisans of their sides. As these things go, the Kochs are a more innocuous villain than, say, the “Likudnik” bogeymen of the mid-2000s, or Pat Robertson’s “secular humanists who support a New World Order” of the 1990s, but it’s all the same phenomenon.
Regardless, it’s not the sort of thing serious intellectuals take seriously, except as studies in the effectiveness of playing on the traditional paranoid streak in American politics. But if Chait wants to abjure seriousness, and instead be the number one propogandist on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration in the blogosphere, he’s welcome to the title.
Bonus foolishness from Chait: He defines liberaltarianism, the now almost defunct attempt to establish an intellectual coalition between liberals and libertarians, as an agreement “to emphasize social issues and foreign policy over economics, and to define economics as evidence based and less hostile to redistribution and the possibility of market failure.” That sounds to me an awful lot like standard college town liberalism.
In fact, during the Bush II administration, many liberal blogosphere voices could be heard swearing that having seen the administration’s abuses of power, they now understood the importance of decentralization and refusing to lodge too much power in Washington, D.C. In most cases, this realization lasted precisely one millisecond after the bloggers in question realized that the Democrats were likely to win a sweeping victory in the 2008 elections, to the extent that folks like Chait seem to have forgotten that a key to liberaltarianism was supposed to be a newfound liberal skepticism of Big Government.
As I’ve pointed out before, the attack on the Kochs, who are rather consistent libertarians of the left-libertarian stripe (e.g., are quite pacifistic on foreign policy issues) is a sign of the abject failure of liberaltarianism.
http://volokh.com/2011/03/16/jonathan-chait-completely-misses-the-point/
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Stick a Fork in Capitol’s “Green” Utensils
Jonathan H. Adler • March 5, 2011 11:21 am
When Democrats retook the U.S. House of Representatives, they set out to “green” the Capitol. One measure was the introduction of compostable eating utensils in the House cafeteria. The corn-based cutlery may work for some things, but it was not popular on Capitol Hill. As the Washington Post reports, the new utensils were more expensive, broke easily, and “warped when exposed to hot soup.” Worse, the adoption of greener foodware didn’t produce the promised environmental benefits. Much of the energy savings from switching to a corn-based product was offset by the need to haul the compostables away.
Did this kill green cutlery? Not until the GOP was back in charge: “Democratic leaders didn’t kill the program. Instead, they waited until Republicans took over, then suggested they do it. Republicans quickly obliged.” And so, the House cafeteria has returned to plastic forks, knives and spoons. In other words, Congress has eliminated a corn-based product mandate in favor of petroleum. If only they could do this with ethanol too.
http://volokh.com/2011/03/05/stick-a-fork-in-capitols-green-utensils/
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Wal-Mart Goes ‘Back to Basics’: A Cautionary Tale for the Left
Posted By Richard Pollock On April 11, 2011 @ 10:16 am In Uncategorized | 236 Comments
After suffering seven straight quarters of losses, today the merchandise giant Wal-Mart will announce [1] that it is “going back to basics,” ending its era of high-end organic foods, going “green,” [2] and the remainder of its appeal to the upscale market. Next month the company will launch an “It’s Back” campaign to woo the millions of customers who have fled the store. They will be bringing back “heritage” products, like inexpensive jeans and sweatpants.
Few may recognize it as such, but this episode should be seen as a cautionary tale about “progressives” and social engineering experiments on low-income Americans. This morning’s Wall Street Journal [1] article is blunt:
That strategy failed, and the Bentonville, Ark., retail giant now is pursuing a back-to-basics strategy to reverse the company’s fortunes.
The failure, in large part, can be pinned to Leslie Dach: a well-known progressive and former senior aide to Vice President Al Gore. In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products.
Out went drab, inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver.
Dach’s failure should be a cautionary tale for President Obama: last week [3] he scolded a blue collar man in Pennsylvania for driving an SUV, and he has previously admonished Americans to get out of their gas-guzzlers and into electric cars. Dach’s failure should also put Michelle Obama on notice; she has been pushing her White House organic vegetable garden as a model for working Americans.
Like other real-world experiments, the Wal-Mart story exposes the failure of progressivism in the marketplace, as the Dach strategy has been a fiasco: the merchandising turned off low-income (and largely Democratic-leaning) customers. Says former Wal-Mart executive Jimmy Wright [4]:
The basic Wal-Mart customer didn’t leave Wal-Mart. What happened is that Wal-Mart left the customer.
Dach convinced the company to steer away from founder Sam Walton’s core values. At the core of Dach’s campaign was to prove that Wal-Mart was “going green.” He brought in Vice President Gore [5] to speak about environmental issues: they actually screened his global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth, at a quarterly meeting of Wal-Mart empl0yees and invited environmental groups. Expensive organic foods [2] were showcased in their produce section. Trendy and pricey environmentally safe products were put on the shelves.
Richard Edelman of Edelman Public Relations — who had once hired Dach — noted that Dach constantly pushed Democratic Party health care and environmental agendas inside the giant company. Writes the New Yorker [6]:
Richard Edelman suggested that he is seeing Dach’s influence on the company. Edelman called Dach an “idealist” who has carried to Wal-Mart his fervor for such traditional Democratic causes as universal health care and environmentalism.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope seemed pleased that Dach was inside the enemy camp, confiding [7]to the New Yorker:
One of the remarkable things about the environmental movement is how rarely people from our side end up on the other side, and Leslie is on the other side.
But Dach’s fervor only sunk the company. Andy Barron, a Wal-Mart executive vice president, told an investor meeting [4]:
Clearly, we’ve lost some of our focus on what I would call the core customer. … You might say, in short, that we were trying to be something that maybe we’re not.
George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley — the nation’s largest organics cooperative — said to the WSJ [4]:
Is the Wal-Mart customer ready to embrace a full set of organics products? The answer is no, not yet.
This is probably not what Michelle Obama wants to hear.
For leading the failed experiment, Dach was awarded [8] three million dollars in stock and a hundred and sixty-eight thousand stock options, in addition to an undisclosed base salary.
Summing up the mess, mechanic Mike Craig told the WSJ [4]:
Wal-Mart just went and broke it.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/wal-mart-goes-back-to-basics-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-left/
URLs in this post:
[1] will announce: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704776304576253252673697210.html?KEYWORDS=walmart
[2] going “green,”: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wal-mart-plans-green-labels-for-products-wsj
[3] last week: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42468366/
[4] Jimmy Wright: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703803904576152753111788930.html
[5] brought in Vice President Gore: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06341/744353-28.stm#ixzz1JDuJIAQO
[6] New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg?currentPage=4
[7] confiding : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg#ixzz1JEHQDkJx
[8] was awarded: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg#ixzz1JDruAJwC
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So just show us the long form. Where is it. Something is being hidden. It is remarkable why the MSM continues to avoid an answer to this question. Only Chris Matthews earlier came out and asked the obvious glaring question. Why not just show us the long form? Of course he was hushed up.
Trump is the ONLY one who will ask this question. Anyone with a quarter of a brain can see something is being hidden from the public.
****HONOLULU (AP) -- Lost in the renewed scrutiny into President Barack Obama's birth records is the fact that anyone can walk into a Hawaii vital records office, wait in line behind couples getting marriage licenses and open a baby-blue government binder containing basic information about his birth.
Highlighted in yellow on page 1,218 of the thick binder is the computer-generated listing for a boy named Barack Hussein Obama II born in Hawaii, surrounded by the alphabetized last names of all other children born in-state between 1960 and 1964. This is the only government birth information, called "index data," available to the public.
So far this month, only The Associated Press and one other person had looked at the binder, according to a sign-in sheet viewed Wednesday in the state Department of Health building. The sheet showed about 25 names of people who have seen the document since March 2010, when the sign-in sheet begins.
Those documents complement newspaper birth announcements published soon after Obama's Aug. 4, 1961 birth and a "certification of live birth" released by the Obama campaign three years ago, the only type of birth certificate the state issues.
So-called "birthers" claim there's no proof Obama was born in the United States, and he is therefore ineligible to be president. Many of the skeptics suggest he was actually born in Kenya, his father's home country, or Indonesia where he spent a few years of his childhood.
Possible Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly stoked the birther fires recently, and last month called on Obama to "show his birth certificate." Trump said he has investigators in Hawaii searching for more information.
"Nobody has come in and said they're investigating for Donald Trump," said Department of Health spokeswoman Janice Okubo, who acknowledged they could've come in without identifying themselves as representing Trump.
What the would-be sleuths won't find is Obama's "long-form birth certificate," a confidential one-page document containing his original birth records kept on file in the first floor of the Department of Health.
Those original birth records typically include additional birth details, such as the hospital and delivering doctor, said Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the state's former health director who twice looked at and publicly confirmed Obama's original long-form birth records.
But those documents are state government property that can't be released to anyone, even the president himself, said Joshua Wisch, special assistant to the state attorney general. Obama would be able to inspect his birth records if he visited the Health Department in person, but original records of live birth are never released, he said.
Fukino, who served as the state's health director until late last year under former Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, said in an interview with The Associated Press she's convinced the long-form document is authentic. She issued public statements in 2008 and 2009 saying she had seen the original records.
"It is absolutely clear to me that he was born here in Hawaii," Fukino told the AP. "It should not be an issue, and I think people need to focus on the other bad things going on in our country and in our state and figure out what we're going to do about those things."
Before Obama's campaign released his certification of live birth in 2008, he or someone with a tangible interest had to make a written request and pay a $10 fee to receive it, Okubo said. Wisch also said Obama obtained a copy of his own certification of live birth and publicly released it.
State privacy laws prevent a certification of live birth from being released to anyone except those with a tangible interest, such as the person named by the birth record or a close family member.
The document is generated by computer, based on original birth records on file with the state, Fukino said.
New Health Director Loretta Fuddy, a Democratic appointee, declined to comment.
Last week, Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have required presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship before their names could appear on the state's ballot - which was widely viewed as targeting Obama - calling it a "bridge too far."
But the birther conspiracy theory refuses to go away. The latest New York Times-CBS News poll found that 45 percent of adult Republicans said they believe Obama was born in another country, and 22 percent said they don't know. Only one-third of Republicans said they believe the president is native born. The same poll a year ago found that a plurality of Republicans believed the president was born in the U.S.
Obama said in an interview with ABC News this month that Republicans sowing doubts about whether he's American-born may gain politically in the short term by playing to their constituencies, but will have trouble when the general election rolls around.
"Just want to be clear - I was born in Hawaii," the president said at a fundraiser in his hometown of Chicago.
Newspaper birth announcements appeared in both The Honolulu Advertiser and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin in the weeks after he was born.
The Aug. 13, 1961 announcement in the Advertiser appears on page B-6 of the Sunday edition, next to classified ads for carpentry work and house repair.
It says, "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4." The address belonged to the parents of Ann Dunham, Obama's mother.
A similar announcement appeared the following day on page 24 of the Star-Bulletin.
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Online:
http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/obama.html
© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.****
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Where Did All the Anti-War Protestors Go?
The anti-war movement was all over the news before President Obama was elected. But apparently they weren’t really anti-war ... they were just anti-President Bush. Two college professors just released a study of national protests between 2007 and 2009. What did they find?
… After January 2007, the attendance at antiwar rallies [measured in] roughly the tens of thousands, or thousands, through the end of 2008.
… After the election of Barack Obama as president, the order of magnitude of antiwar protests dropped [...] Organizers were hard pressed to stage a rally with participation in the thousands, or even in the hundreds. For example, we counted exactly 107 participants at a Chicago rally on October 7, 2009.
Amazing. Especially because the war in Afghanistan ramped up after Obama was elected. American fatalities shot up in 2009 and 2010.
The protesters have remained silent over Libya.
And I’m struck by the hypocrisy of the supposedly “anti-war” politicians who voted against Iraq, like Nancy Pelosi. Since Obama was elected, she has voted to continue the war in Afghanistan … and supported the attack on Libya.
Only a handful of Congressmen have remained principled on foreign intervention. One of them is Ron Paul. On my FBN show this week, I’ll talk with him about why he opposes our “aggressive foreign policy.” Thursday at 10pm EST.
http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2011/04/25/where-did-all-the-anti-war-protestors-go/
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A major law firm has caved to pressure from militant homosexual activists, and one of America’s top Supreme Court lawyers resigned from that firm rather than abandon principle. That lawyer is former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, and this is a story that everyone who values the rule of law needs to understand.
In 1996, a bipartisan majority of the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton. The law specifies that for purposes of federal law, marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The law also provides that if any state breaks with 2,000 years of Western civilization by redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, no other state need recognize those unions.
Then some people started redefining marriage. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to do the same through an egregious instance of judicial activism. Today, a total of five states out of fifty have same-sex marriage.
Predictably, some activists challenged DOMA in federal court.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has a duty to defend every federal law in court. The only exceptions are for laws that undermine the president’s power (and even then, DOJ sometimes defends it) or for laws where no reasonable argument can be made defending that law.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that DOJ would no longer defend DOMA because he and President Barack Obama believe that there is no rational basis for the law. This is shocking, because President Obama is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, saying that he still believes marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
Let’s make sure we have this right: Marriage is between a man and a woman, but any law saying that is so irrational that it cannot be defended in court. It seems President Obama is either schizophrenic or disingenuous.
Thankfully, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the defense of DOMA. To do so, they retained former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement—now a partner at King & Spalding—to defend the law in court.
In response, a militant homosexual-agenda group, the Human Rights Campaign, took the disgraceful action of organizing a nationwide boycott of King & Spalding and tried to discourage graduating law students from working there.
Everyone should have access to a lawyer. The U.S. Constitution empowers the courts to decide whether a law is unconstitutional, but also requires that a court only do so if arguments are presented on both sides. Our constitutional system of government calls for both parties putting their best arguments on the table, so that a judge has everything necessary to arrive at the correct decision.
But leftist zealots evidently don’t care about a court reaching the right decision, calling for punishing anyone who has enough faith in the American legal system to wage an honorable contest in court.
When Ted Olson decided to take a case arguing that the U.S. Constitution includes a right to same-sex marriage which mysteriously went unnoticed by anyone in the country for over 200 years, no reputable group called for boycotting his firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Nor should they. Gibson Dunn argues for many causes and clients, many of them right.
Yet in an instance of craven cowardice, King & Spalding caved to pressure and has withdrawn from the case. Rather than stand by the principle that every issue—especially one unpopular to some—deserves fair consideration in court, the firm’s chairman, Robert Hays, said that the firm was quitting.
Clement—a top Supreme Court lawyer with over fifty cases before the Court—would not cave. Rather than abandon his client, he resigned from King & Spalding. He has now joined Bancroft PLLC, a law firm and policy organization featuring well-respected conservative lawyers and analysts.
And no one can lose sight of his client’s identity: the U.S. House of Representatives. This isn’t some traitor, or depraved serial murderer of children, or terrorist regime. This is the House representing the American people, chosen by We the People.
I don’t even know if Clement is personally pro-marriage. Maybe he’s not. But he took it as his duty to represent our Congress in court. He’s a patriot for answering that call.
People should remember this episode as showing the oppressive nature of some leftists. They scream about freedom when it suits their purpose, only to deny others freedom to even be heard. On this issue, pro-marriage advocates—especially churches and ministries faithful to biblical teaching on marriage—had better take heed. You will be next.
The truth is never afraid of a good debate. At the core of the First Amendment is the idea that people must be free to speak, because the best ideas should win in the end. The Federalist Society was founded upon that premise in hosting debates at law schools, reasoning that on a level playing field, the best ideas should prevail.
Those who oppose debate do so because they fear that they cannot overcome opposition. Those who try to prevent an opponent from having a good lawyer in court fears that the law may not be on their side.
A nation under the rule of law requires top lawyers to take up both sides of legal issues going to court. Solicitor General Paul Clement shows great courage by upholding that principle. Every solicitor general and deputy solicitor general alive today—both Republican and Democrat—should express their support for the brave stand taken by Paul Clement.
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Obama and Holder are doing epic damage to this nation.
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Diagnosing Krugman
Apr 25th 2011, 19:48 by W.W. | IOWA CITY
SOMETIMES people believe something so patently ridiculous, so detached from evidence and good sense, that it is more useful to diagnose it than to debate it. For example, the New York Times' "Room for Debate" forum has been featuring an interesting discussion of the psychological principles underlying the widespread conviction that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, despite ample evidence to the contrary. While "birthers" are in my opinion richly deserving of such treatment, this sort of psychologising diagnosis of strong political conviction often serves as a cheap, supremely condescending trick for pathologising and thus dismissing those with whom we disagree. A good deal of work on the psychology of conservatism is like this. The motivating question, "What the hell is wrong with these people?" takes it for granted that there is something wrong with "these people", and thus that disagreement with them is based not on a reasonable difference of opinions among intelligent people of good will, but rather on some sort of deep-seated defect of character or cognition in the "other" insusceptible to correction through civilised discourse.
It is in this dismissively diagnostic spirit that I would like to approach Paul Krugman's latest column. He writes:
Here’s my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car—and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough.What has gone wrong with us?
Let us ask this, instead: What has gone wrong with this celebrated economist such that he has come to believe that something "has gone wrong with us" if we have come to conceive of those who buy medical services from those who sell them as "consumers", which is what they are?
Now, I'm sceptical of the idea that the business of "receiving care" is now more commercial than ever. As many economists are glad to tell you, the astronomical American level of health-care spending is largely a function of "price insulation"—of the fact that, um, "care receivers" are, by dint of the nature of typical health plans, prevented from taking costs much into account. We have arrived at our present unsustainable situation because we have moved health care into a liminal zone away from the market discipline of the cash nexus, but not all the way toward the bureaucratic discipline of socialism, such as it is. The most curious thing about Mr Krugman's quasi-religious squeamishness about the "commercial transaction" is that it is normally the economist's lot to explain to the superstitious public the humanitarian benefits of bringing human life ever more within the cash nexus. Yet Mr Krugman has chosen to reinforce rather than fight taboos against trade as if he were a benighted, harrumphing scold, or a sociologist.
In any case, let's examine Mr Krugman's implicit premises. First, that "special, almost sacred" relationships cannot be "commercial". This is a familiar canard, but not as interesting as Mr Krugman's further implied assumption: that a transaction thoroughly mediated by the state is not desacralising. That is to say, whatever is crass and profane about patients exchanging money directly for doctors' services is avoided if the patient-doctor relationship is brought within the matrix of politics. This seems odd to me, but then I am odd, as recent work on the moral psychology of market exchange has helped me see.
In an important paper on "Taboo trade-offs, relational framing, and the acceptability of exchanges", Peter McGraw and Philip Tetlock, psychologists at the Universities of Colorado and California, Berkeley, find that:
Ideology...has a moderating influence on the perceived appropriateness of transactions. Whereas liberals and conservatives find efforts to monetize babies, body parts, and basic rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship abhorrent, we find that among libertarians the objections to these types of transactions wane. Moving left on the political spectrum toward socialism increases the tendency to find not only surrogate motherhood unacceptable but also the buying and selling of borderline controversial commodities such as medical care and legal representation as well as currently uncontroversial commodities such as houses and food. Devout egalitarians tend to see such exchanges as inherently inequitable because they put the poor at a profound disadvantage (and because they seem to carry the implication that the lives and rights of the poor are worth less than those who can pay large sums for doctors and lawyers).
I am one of the libertarian types to whom few transactions seem especially problematical. Anything that's peaceful! In contrast, Mr Krugman would appear to be one of those "devout egalitarians" to whom it seems wrong to leave the protection of basic rights, such as the right to health care, to the vagaries of the market. But there's more to it than this. It's not just that buying and selling certain things is creepy or gross; it's that there is something inherently ennobling and honourable about government providing or assuring the provision of these same things. Messrs McGraw and Tetlock suggest to me an egalitarian mental model that helps make sense of Mr Krugman's complaint about health care as a merely commercial concern. It goes a little something like this.
Market exchange is fine, in it's place. But there are some things to which we are entitled as human beings and/or citizens, and putting those things on the market dishonours our rights and diminishes our dignity as persons and Americans (or whatever nationality you may be). In contrast, government guarantees elevate and sacralise the goods and relationships implied by our entitlements. But why? Because the state is the institutional embodiment of our unity and solidarity as a people. One function of government is to deliver the goods, sure. But it is also an expressive institution that affirms and embodies ideals of equality and mutual respect by delivering the goods as a mandate of the collective will. If patients are not consumers, what are they? Free and equal citizens getting their due.
This is a pretty picture, but it's also a problem—a problem economists generally help us to see through. The policies that publicly express good will and mutual respect—that successfully broadcast that we care about one another—often are not the policies that would actually deliver the goods—the policies you'd favour if you cared more about people than signaling that you care about people. The policies that would actually deliver often would do so by enabling and encouraging consumer choice and entrepreneurial discovery and innovation in competitive markets. If the deep worry about certain forms of market exchange is that they put the poor at a disadvantage, we can address the worry by making certain that means-tested transfers are generous enough to ensure sufficient market power for all. But we can't address concerns about market inequity in this way if market-based policy is preemptively ruled out of bounds by a misguided public theology of markets and politics. Widespread public commitment to a vocabulary of moral and political symbolism according to which "merely commercial" transactions and relationships are seen to be profane, while political transactions and relationships are seen to be sacred, is a significant impediment to improving human welfare with policy that harnesses the power of markets. One task of the liberal intellectual is to chip away at taboos that cause preventable suffering by limiting the range of politically-feasible policy. Isn't this the opposite of what Mr Krugman is doing?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/sacred_and_profane
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/04/29/thinkprogress-storm-victims-kind-of-had-it-coming-didnt-they/
ThinkProgress: Storm victims kind of had it coming, didn’t they?
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Give me a break, pure drivel IMO, but I post this for what passes for journalism and serious analysis. He is too smart and honest for this job, according to experts.
He is a political hack exposed by his tactless assault on the Supreme Court at the SOTU and the same on Paul Ryan at his budget hawk debut. To locate the bias in the writing, just notice they refer the senate's purist liberal as 'center-left'. He is complex only in that he single-mindedly wants to destroy capitalism from within (starve it of energy and burden it with costs) and move us to socialist utopia but needs to hold onto power in a center-right nation in order to do that. He isn't complex, he is deceitful and duplicitous. But that isn't the story going at the top of Washington media and academia.
If he is so smart, show me the grades and test scores. Show me original writings. Show me solutions to problems that come uniquely from him that others hadn't thought of.
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Dana Milbank, Washington Post: Obama, lost in thought
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama_lost_in_thought/2011/04/26/AF0FrwsE_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage
“What distinguishes Obama particularly is the depth and carefulness of his thinking...” said Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. “He is a brilliant social and political analyst, which makes it harder for him to play hardball or to bluff.” Obama’s strengths and weaknesses come from his high degree of “integrative complexity” — his ability to keep multiple variables and trade-offs in mind simultaneously. (read it all if you want)
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http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/03/team-six-from-cheneys-secret-assassination-squad-to-obmas-super-awesome-cleanup-crew/
Wow!
Comment, JDN?
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“What distinguishes Obama particularly is the depth and carefulness of his thinking...” said Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. “He is a brilliant social and political analyst, which makes it harder for him to play hardball or to bluff.” Obama’s strengths and weaknesses come from his high degree of “integrative complexity” — his ability to keep multiple variables and trade-offs in mind simultaneously."
Well this social psychologist needs his own head examined.
The BS is truly mind boggling and frustrating too.
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Here’s Nancy Pelosi from a press conference on September 7, 2006:
[E]ven if [Osama bin Laden] is caught tomorrow, it is five years too late. He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But, in fact, the damage that he has done . . . is done. And even to capture him now I don’t think makes us any safer.
And here’s Nancy Pelosi yesterday:
The death of Osama bin Laden marks the most significant development in our fight against al-Qaida. . . . I salute President Obama, his national security team, Director Panetta, our men and women in the intelligence community and military, and other nations who supported this effort for their leadership in achieving this major accomplishment. . . . [T]he death of Osama bin Laden is historic. . . .
This devastating then-and-now comparison comes to us courtesy of John Hinderaker of Power Line.
- Peter Wehner, Commentary Magazine
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Doug,
Well Lawrence of MSLSD played tapes of W saying roughly the same thing in 2002.
I wonder if they were simply downplaying the embarrassment of not being able to find or catch him till now.
While it is certainly great to be rid of him I can't say I suddenly feel safe from Jihadists.
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CCP, Everybody has an agenda I suppose. At the time Bush said what he said, we had put OBL into hiding and largely cut off his finances, communications and ability to operate. I doubt if his view is any different about that today. I notice that he didn't want to go to ground zero and celebrate.
At the time Pelosi made her first statement, she was following up on the John Kerry story that we let him get away, incompetent administration was her point, even if they find him now they are still a complete failure, etc. talking America's efforts down while troops are in harm's way for political advantage. In her current statement the message is the opposite, it is all about the greatness of President Obama, his team, a mention to other nations but not to his predecessors who made this possible.
The truth I think is that the demise of bin Laden is symbolic of American strength but not strategic. His own ability to operate had already been mostly cut off, and as you point out, the threat we face is still out there. The flip side of the symbolism is that our inability to get him was a symbol of American weakness/impotence and that perception in terms of our military was proven to be wrong.
Obama has one advantage in foreign policy over any Republican: his administration has people who put country before politics in the opposition party.
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I still don't get it that Obama couldn't just release his birth certificate. Questions absolutely were legitimate and he did not blow anyone away. He again proved he put his own political agenda and cynicism and disdain for anyone who disagrees with him above the legitimate concerns of many Americans. Powell who I have much less respect for is speaking to the choir here so I guess I expect too much...
Associated Press Susanne M. Schafer, Associated Press – Fri May 6, 10:32 pm ET
ORANGEBURG, S.C. – Colin Powell told graduates of South Carolina's premier historically black university that they were graduating during a tumultuous time that saw a royal wedding, a pope's beatification and a U.S. military assault that killed Osama bin Laden, "the worst person on earth."
But the former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman told South Carolina State University's 400 graduates on Friday that he particularly enjoyed another recent event: "That was when President Obama took out his birth certificate and blew away Donald Trump and all the birthers!"
The stadium roared in approval of Powell's comments on the president's move last week to quell the doubts of those who don't believe he was born in Hawaii. The retired Army four-star general endorsed Obama's 2008 presidential bid.
Earlier Friday, Powell was made an honorary member of the school's ROTC hall of fame.
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""I think the point of the editorial was that the Indian American governor of Louisiana should not be worried about people's origins and birthplaces. That's one of the great things about this country."
Bobby Jindal's parents were at least here legally.
Now it is no longer legitimate to question someone's birth place? At least Jindal didn't cynically withold the information. He immediately released the birth certificate when the issue was brought up. Unlike the coniver in chief.
****Louisiana governor Jindal caught in birther flap
Sat May 7, 8:24 pm ET
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – A photo of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's birth certificate was published by a newspaper on Saturday even though there is no doubt the Indian American Republican was born in the United States.
Jindal, who is not running for president in 2012 but is mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate, released the certificate to prove a newspaper editorial wrong.
Jindal was born in the United States to Indian immigrant parents who held green cards at the time.
The flap started when Jindal said last month that he would sign a state bill, if it reached his desk, that would require candidates for federal office on the Louisiana ballot to show proof of birth in the U.S.
The bill was a response to doubts about President Barack Obama's Hawaii birth raised by possible Republican presidential candidates such as businessman Donald Trump. Obama recently released his full birth certificate to squelch the doubts.
After Jindal endorsed the Louisiana "birther" bill, the Baton Rouge daily newspaper, The Advocate, on April 22 published a critical editorial.
"Piyush Amrit Jindal is the last man in America who should give his blessing to a birther bill," the editorial said.
Jindal's office angrily responded that the newspaper had got the governor's middle name wrong. "Amrit," was the name of an ancient Middle East city, Jindal's office said, and not his middle name.
Jindal offered to release his birth certificate to prove it. The Advocate received the birth certificate, apologized for use of an "incorrect middle name" and removed "Amrit" from the online version of the editorial.
Asked about the incident, The Advocate Executive Editor Carl Redman told Reuters, "I think the point of the editorial was that the Indian American governor of Louisiana should not be worried about people's origins and birthplaces. That's one of the great things about this country."
But the incident lived on when the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Saturday ran a photo of the birth certificate and a long article about the details of his parents' entry into the United States.
The birth certificate shows his name as only "Piyush Jindal" with no middle name. Jindal has long used the first name "Bobby."
Jindal's spokesman confirmed on Saturday the details in the article of his parents' arrival in the United States. They came on green cards secured by Jindal's engineer father, Amar Jindal, based on a 1965 law that allowed people with "exceptional ability in the sciences or arts" to enter the U.S. Jindal's mother Raj got a spouse green card.
Amar Jindal now works for a large engineering firm that has offices in Louisiana and around the country. Raj Jindal, who hold masters degrees in physics and nuclear engineering from Louisiana State University, is director of information technology in the Louisiana Department of Labor.
Bernie Pinsonat, a Baton Rouge political analyst and pollster, said the whole saga could confuse some people.
"I have no idea why he did this (release the certificate) except maybe he thinks he'll get some popularity points nationally," Pinsonat said. "Nobody in Louisiana doubts that he was born in the United States."
(Editing by Greg McCune)****
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By BARI WEISS
In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"
"They mistitled it," he insists. Mr. Mamet had given the piece the far more staid title, "Political Civility." But the Voice's headline was truth in advertising. "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," Mr. Mamet wrote, referring to his prior self as, yes, a "brain-dead liberal."
The article was the most popular ever published on the Voice's website. But was the acclaimed Mr. Mamet really a conservative?
For a few years, he played it coy. In a 2008 interview with New York Magazine, he sloughed off a question about who he was voting for: "I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer." In 2010, he told PBS's Charlie Rose he'd only offer his opinion about President Obama off-camera. But spend five minutes with Mr. Mamet and you realize that coy can only last so long. "Being a rather pugnacious sort of fellow I thought, as Albert Finney says in 'Two for the Road': 'As I said to the duchess, 'If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess. If you want to make love, it's hats off.'"
Hats off, indeed. Now Mr. Mamet has written a book-length, raucous coming-out party: "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture." (If only the Voice editors had been around to supply a snappier title.)
Hear him take on the left's sacred cows. Diversity is a "commodity." College is nothing more than "Socialist Camp." Liberalism is like roulette addiction. Toyota's Prius, he tells me, is an "anti-chick magnet" and "ugly as a dogcatcher's butt." Hollywood liberals—his former crowd—once embraced Communism "because they hadn't invented Pilates yet." Oh, and good radio isn't NPR ("National Palestinian Radio") but Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.
The book is blunt, at times funny, and often over the top. When I meet the apostate in a loft in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he's wrapping up a production meeting. "Bye, bye, Bette!" he calls to the actress walking toward the elevator. That'd be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug. The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector's murder trial. Mr. Mamet is directing and he looks the part in a scarf, black beret and round yellow-framed glasses. Looking out the window at NYU film school, where he used to teach, I ask him to tell me his conversion story.
He starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, "Witness," documented his turn from Communism. "I read it. It was miraculous. Extraordinary hero-journey of this fellow that had to examine everything he believed in at the great, great cost—which is a cost I'm not subject to—of abandoning his life, his sustenance, his friends, his associations, and his past. And I said, 'Oh my God. . . . Perhaps it might be incumbent upon me to see if I could get my thought and my actions into line too."
There were other books. Most were given to him by his rabbi in L.A., Mordecai Finley. Mr. Mamet rattles off the works that affected him most: "White Guilt" by Shelby Steele, "Ethnic America" by Thomas Sowell, "The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War" by Wilfred Trotter, "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek, "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman, and "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill.
Before he moved to California, Mr. Mamet had never met a self-described conservative or read one's writings. He'd never heard of Messrs. Sowell or Steele. "No one on the left has," he tells me. "I realized I lived in this bubble."
When it popped, it was rough. "I did what I thought was, if not a legitimate, then at least a usual, thing—I took it out on those around me," Mr. Mamet says wryly. It took "a long, long, long time and a lot of difficult thinking first to analyze, then change, some of my ideas."
Then comes one of Mr. Mamet's many Hollywood fables. "It's like Orson Welles," he begins.
"It's his first day on the set of Citizen Kane, and he's never directed a movie, he's the greatest stage director of his time. Gregg Toland is his cinematographer, and Toland's the greatest cinematographer of his day. And Orson says, 'Ok, this next shot we're gonna put the camera over here. And Gregg says, 'You can't put the camera there, Orson.' So Orson says, 'Well why not? The director can put it wherever.' Gregg says, 'No. Because you're crossing the line.' So Orson says, 'What does it mean crossing the line? So Gregg explains to him that there's a line of action." (Mr. Mamet attempts to demonstrate the principle to me by indicating the line of sight between our noses.)
"Orson says, 'I don't understand.'" (Neither did I.) "So Gregg explains it again. And Orson says, 'I still don't understand'—'cause sometimes it can get very, very complicated. So Orson says, 'Stop! Stop filming! I have to go home.' He went home and he stayed up all night with sheets of paper and a ruler and he came back next day and said: 'Now I understand, now we can go on.'"
And so it was with Mr. Mamet and politics. He couldn't move on, so to speak, before he understood "what the nature of government is, just sufficient so that I as a citizen can actually vote without being a member of a herd." Same for taxes: "I pay them, so I think I should be responsible for what actually happens to them." As for the history of the country itself, he wanted to understand "the vision of the Founding Fathers. . . . How does holding to it keep people safe and prosperous?"
Reading and reflecting got him to some basics. Real diversity is intellectual. Whatever its flaws, America is the greatest country in the history of the world. The free market always solves problems better than government. It's the job of the state to be just, not to render social justice. And, most sobering, Mr. Mamet writes in "The Secret Knowledge," there are no perfect solutions to inequality, only trade-offs.
It's a wonder he didn't explicitly adopt this tragic view of reality earlier on. The play "Glengarry Glen Ross," for example, for which Mr. Mamet won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, is about a group of desperate men competing with each other in a Chicago real estate office. At stake: a Cadillac for the top seller. Second place: a set of steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.
Needless to say, no one ends up getting the Caddie. "That's the essence of drama," Mr. Mamet says. "Anyone can write: And then we realized that Lithuanians are people too and we're all happier now. Who cares?" Tragedy is devastating, he says, precisely because it's about "people trying to do the best they can and ending up destroying each other.
"So it wasn't a great shift to adopt the tragic view, and it's much healthier," he says. "Rather than saying, as the liberals do, 'Everything's always wrong, there's nothing that's not wrong, there's something bad bad bad—there's a bad thing in the world and it's probably called the Jews,'" he says sardonically. "And if it's not called the Jews for the moment, it's their fiendish slave second-hand smoke. Or transfats. Or global warming. Or the Y2K. Or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. And something must be done!'"
It's the last part—the temptation to believe that everything can be fixed—that Mr. Mamet thinks is the fatal error. "That's such a f— bore," he says. "I mean, have you ever tried to get a pipe fixed in your bathroom on a Saturday? It's not going to happen. It's gonna happen wrong, and the guy's gonna be late because his dog got run over, and he's going to fix the wrong pipe, and when he takes it apart he's gonna say, 'Oops, the whole plumbing system's gonna have to go and dah dah dah and etc. etc. etc. And your daughter's Bat Mitzvah's gonna be ruined. It's interesting—it's the tragic view of life."
As Mr. Mamet quotes his son, Noah, in "The Secret Knowledge," "it's the difference between the Heavenly Dream and the God-Awful Reality."
On the left, Mr. Mamet is accused of having ulterior motives for his political shift. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait writes that the story is a familiar, Zionist one: "An increasingly religious Jew with strong loyalty to Israel, he became aware of a tension between the illiberal nationalism of his right-wing views on the Middle East and the liberalism of his views on everything else, and resolved the tension by abandoning the latter." Mr. Mamet calls this a "crock of s—."
The Slate website has run with the "Rich Person Discovers He Is a Republican" narrative. And then there's the jiu-jitsu theory offered by a film blogger: "Mamet's escalating interest in martial arts—traditionally the domain of right-wing nutjobs like Chuck Norris—has pointed toward this new stance for some time." Obviously.
None of these responses comes as a surprise. And, being a contrarian and a dramatist, Mr. Mamet doubtless relishes the attention for his heresy. What will be more interesting is to see how critics respond to his two new plays.
The first, playing now in Manhattan, is called "The Linguistics Class." Only 10 minutes long, it's part of a festival of 25 short plays at the Atlantic Theater Company, running alongside works by Ethan Coen and Sam Shepard. It's a coming home for Mr. Mamet: He founded the company with his friend, the actor William H. Macey, 25 years ago.
The play is about a teacher and a student who don't see eye to eye, and Mr. Mamet assures me "it has nothing to do with Noam Chomsky."
"The Anarchist," on the other hand, sounds like it will be red meat for conservatives. The two-woman show, which opens this fall in London, is about a prisoner, a former member of a Weather Underground-type group, and her parole officer. The play's themes have been developing since Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Mamet was in Toronto that day for a film festival. "I read an article, I think it was in that day's Toronto Star, that had been a reprint from the Chicago Tribune," he says. It was an interview with Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dorne, two former leaders of the Weather Underground. "They were talking about the bombings in the '60s. And the guy says to Bill Ayers: 'Are you regretful?' And he said: 'No, no, no.' . . . And I read it, and I thought, this is appalling and immoral," recalls Mr. Mamet.
"Then I got on a plane. And while I was on the plane they blew up New York City. The combination of the two things just started me thinking what have we—meaning my generation—done?" Mr. Mamet knows these characters intimately. They went to school with him at Goddard College in Vermont, or they passed through. "Some of the people I knew actually were involved in blowing up the building on 11th Street [in Manhattan by members of the Weather Underground in 1970]. . . . And I thought: how does this happen?"
Is it a coincidence that this play is arriving at the same time as Mr. Mamet's public conservatism? Does he worry that critics will see it as polemical? "I don't know," he contends, insistent that his job as a writer is not to worry about politics but to entertain and surprise his audience. "The question is can you put the asses in the seats and can you keep the asses in the seats. That's not me, that's Aristotle. I've forgotten the Greek for it."
Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal. A review of Mr. Mamet's book, "The Secret Knowledge," can be found on page C13 in today's Review section.
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Not speaker of house but DNC chair. I guess saying moron things is a prerequisite for Dem party leaders:
DNC Chair: Republicans Believe Illegal Immigration 'Should be a Crime'
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
By Fred Lucas
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.), chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, denounced Republicans last week for believing illegal immigration “should in fact be a crime.”
“I think the president was clearly articulating that his position--the Democratic position--is that we need comprehensive immigration reform,” said Wasserman Schultz at a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on May 26.
“We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy and this is not only a reality but a necessity," she said. "And that it would be harmful--the Republican solution that I’ve seen in the last three years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries and that in fact it should be a crime and we should arrested them all.”
The comment has drawn attention among conservative commentators and bloggers. During the comments, the chairwoman referred to legislation in 2006 by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) that would increase border enforcement and make illegal immigration a criminal offense instead of a civil matter.
However, the Senate bill immunized illegal aliens from being prosecuted for document fraud, a felony, and did not stop the practice of allowing illegal aliens eventually granted legal residency to go back and claim credit with the Social Security Administration for work they did as an illegal. These provisions were in sections 601 and 614 of the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration reform bill.
At the same Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Wasserman Schultz said, “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars; they would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”
The Hill newspaper quickly reported that Wasserman Schultz owns a 2010 Infiniti FX35, a Japanese car whose parent company is Nissan. The newspaper cited Florida motor vehicle records.
Further during the breakfast, she stressed that support for Israel should not become a partisan issue, and believed that Republicans were trying to make it one. But she referenced President Barack Obama as “probably” being pro-Israel.
“One of the most tremendous sources of pride for me is that I am the first Jewish woman to represent the state of Florida in Congress. And another tremendous source of pride is that I am a pro-Israel Jewish member of Congress and I probably support a president that is pro-Israel,” Wasserman Schultz said.
“What I think is unfortunate and what I suggested along with others, including members of the Republican Jewish Coalition that are not the executive director of that organization, that we need to make sure that like AIPAC pushes for, like Jewish Federation pushes for, like ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and every major Jewish organization pushes for in this country, we need to make sure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue,” she said.
The new chairwoman has made a number of attention grabbing comments. In an April 6 interview on MSNBC, Wasserman Shultz voiced her opposition to the proposal by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to reduce the deficit by $6 trillion in 10 years.
“This plan would literally be a death trap for some seniors,” Wasserman Schultz said.
The word literally is defined as meaning actual or not figuratively speaking.
Last week she said on MSNBC, that the passage of the health care law has strengthened Medicare.
“In fact, we added 12 years of solvency to Medicare and ensure that it would be better for senior,” she said on Andrea Mitchell Reports on May 25.
That’s contrary to the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan accounting arm of Congress that predicted the Medicare trust fund will be exhausted by 2020 at the current path, almost a decade sooner than the last year’s forecast.
CNSNews.com is not funded by the government like NPR. CNSNews.com is not funded by the government like PBS.
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How did we get to the point where it is acceptable for politicians to lie because "they all do it" let alone reckless sexual activities, outright pulbic lying coverups, and the rest? This country really is in big decline culturally and morally and that bodes poorly for everything else IMHO.
It seems anything is acceptable as long as the pol in office will keep the money spigget flowing doles to their constituents. What twisted logic can be dreamed of next:
****Matthews: Weiner in Trouble Because His Behavior Offends 'Culturally Backward' Christian Conservatives
By Geoffrey Dickens | June 10, 2011 | 11:40
On Thursday's Hardball, Chris Matthews determined that Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner could be in danger of being forced out of Congress by Blue Dog Dems who face uphill battles in red states because, as he put it, "people in the rural areas of this country who are Christian conservative culturally - you can say backward if you want...don't like this kind of stuff."
During a discussion about Weiner's chances of survival, after being caught sending lewd pictures to women via Twitter, the MSNBCer claimed the liberal congressman didn't have to worry about his, according to Matthews, culturally superior constituents in New York - the "56 percent in Brooklyn and Queens" who "can live with this guy." Instead he had to be concerned with his Democratic colleagues fearful about re-election in the "conservative culturally part of the country."
The following excerpt was aired on the June 9 edition of Hardball:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: If you're a Blue Dog Democrat from a conservative culturally part of the country, where you're fighting out every election with two or three points to spare, if you're a -- if you're are [Jim] Matheson from Utah or you're from Oklahoma and you're a [Dan] Boren -- and he's leaving Congress - your life's getting difficult enough defending the East Coast and the left coast Democratic Party. They're too far left. Look at what happened in Arkansas last year. It's getting very, very hard to defend the behavior, politically, of the party. Now you throw on top of that immoral behavior, indiscrete behavior, embarrassing behavior, gross behavior like this, and you still have him in your midst. And that's my question to you. If you're Steny Hoyer, who does speak for the Blue Dogs, if you're Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker, who has to deal with them, don't you have to deal with the fact - you're losing any chance of getting back a 218 majority?
I want you to pick this up, Ben. This is, to me, the stakes here. If he stays, they never get the leadership back. They never get the Speakership back because the people in the rural areas of this country who are Christian conservative culturally - you can say backward if you want - but they don't like this kind of stuff at all. They're not part of that 56 percent in Brooklyn and Queens who say, "okay, we can live with this guy." Your thoughts, Ben? Isn't that the cutting edge of this?****
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And then there were the various responses to Bill stuffing Monica with a cigar and getting blown in the Oval Office , , , and forcing himself on Paula Jones and the insults tow which she was subjected (ugly, trailer park and the like) and what was her name, the woman who came to him to plead for her husband's job only to get groped or something like that?
Well maybe we can say that Mrs. Weiner is rather attractive and Hillary could give a man frostbite? :lol:
Meanwhile, the country heads off a fg cliff.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20010182-503544.html
On Saturday, Former President Bill Clinton will officiate the wedding of Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner (pictured), according to anonymous sources who spoke to the Associated Press
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20010182-503544.html
Boy, if having Bill Clinton perform your wedding ceremony doesn't bespeak a serious commitment to monogamy and fidelity, I don't know what does.....
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"On Saturday, Former President Bill Clinton will officiate the wedding of Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner"
Unbelievable. Reports were that Weiner called BJ Clinton to apologize.
With leaders like these guys....
They will probably all be getting bjs from the bride's maids.
Of course, so what. :roll: That is their "personal" not "professional" behavior which is another 'distinction' the libs are all coming out with now.
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Morality and ethics are tired old concepts like America as a military and economic superpower. Vote dem!
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"As for Obama, what other President ever had to release his long form birth certificate?"
I am certainly no scholar on the downfall of "empires" but isn't this one theory as to why Rome and other empires fell?
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http://datechguyblog.com/2011/06/08/bill-clinton-anthony-weiner-must-resign/
Bill Clinton Anthony Weiner must resign?
by Datechguy | June 8th, 2011
Interesting stuff from Kirsten Powers:
This is textbook sexual harassment. It may not be illegal, but it’s definitely unethical. He is in a position of influence, and many women—especially a 21-year-old—would be afraid to report a congressman doing that to them because he holds so much power.
Let’s go into the wayback machine and re-write that sentence:
This is textbook sexual harassment. It may not be illegal, but it’s definitely unethical. He is in a position of influence, and many women—especially a 21-year-old—would be afraid to report a President of the United States doing that to them because he holds so much power.
So my question to Kristin Powers and every other democrat calling on him to resign is this:
How come a congressman who never even had physical contact with these woman MUST resign but a President of the United states with a longer history, and actual oral sex with a woman in the White House not only didn’t have to resign but was defended by many of the same democrats expressing outrage now?
I think the question should be asked of every democrat who releases a statement on this case.
Update: We can start by asking Tim Kaine
“Lying is unforgivable. Lying publicly about something like this is unforgivable, and he should resign,” former DNC chief Tim Kaine said.
However apparently it’s ok if done by a sitting president under oath.
And then Harry Reid next:
“I know Congressman Weiner. I wish I could defend him, but I cannot,”
But you could defend Bill Clinton.
I suspect we could play this game all day.
Update: Ace of Spades picks up my theme
Yesterday, or the day before, I heard Kristen Powers claim for those who allege “it’s not about the sex, it’s about the lying,” it really is about the sex.
This is a Clinton-era go-to defense, that, as she says (and was said 100x in 1998-99), if you’re going to have illicit sex, of course you will also lie about it; the two things are bundled, a package deal. Few people have illicit sex and then tell the truth about it.
Hell, we’ve accepted this idea so much that Presidents are permitted to lie under oath about it.
So her point is that this is just about sex, then — the lying being a necessary consequence of the sex — and that this is nobody’s business, except his wife and family’s.
I haven’t hit the moral card very hard because I don’t know how I feel about this. I know David Vitter had all the holes punched in his Subway Frequent Whoremonger Card (get a free girl sandwich!), and he stood for reelection, and won, and I’m not terribly upset by that.
So I guess maybe the liberals are right — honestly, who knows, maybe the only thing that matters is, as Amanda Marcotte avers, whether they vote the right way.
Ace gets more hits in a week then I’ve picked up all time so perhaps people will start asking the Clinton Question.
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A crat is a crat is a crat is a crat. Not surprising. Weiner puts himself above all else. The Dems put party above the country.
And the crats who vote all want the free benefits confiscated from taxpayers. I don't know hwy people like my nephew bother to fight for our country. Even our leaders are a bunch of selfish pigs.
Pelosi declines to call for Weiner's resignation
ShareretweetEmailPrint– Fri Jun 10, 7:07 pm ET
WASHINGTON – Amid increasing calls for Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says the decision should be up to the congressman and his New York constituents.
The former speaker said in San Francisco that she believes the decision should be made by "the individual member" and the people in his district.
Weiner, a seven-term Democrat, has admitted sending sexually explicit photos and messages over the Internet to a half dozen women over the past three years. Pelosi has asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Weiner used any government resources.
Weiner told a newspaper Thursday he would not resign. At least nine House members and three senators said he should quit.
Two former Democratic Party chairmen also said he should resign.
[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]
Weiner did pick up support from Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat who was censured by the House last year for ethics violations.
Rangel suggested that other members of Congress had done things more immoral than Weiner.
Rangel said Weiner "wasn't going with prostitutes. He wasn't going out with little boys."
In a recent poll of registered voters in Weiner's district, 56 percent said he should stay in office while 33 percent said he should leave.
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I see Pelosi came out today with her opinion Weiner should resign.
FWIW whether or not it was a political desicion it really is the right thing to do.
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I see Pelosi came out today with her opinion Weiner should resign.
FWIW whether or not it was a political desicion it really is the right thing to do.
I hope he digs in and refuses to quit. He just might.
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GM
You mean ala Charles Rangel or Bill Clinton?
There is a history of Democratic voters supporting these people.
They don't seem to care.
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No, they don't, but everyday he stays in office, he damages the dem brand for swing voters.
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http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/06/above-law-weiners-pathfinder-has.html
Laws, like taxes are for the little people.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/laughing-at-the-contradictions-of-socialism-in-america/?singlepage=true
Laughing at the Contradictions of Socialism in America
Old Soviet-era jokes have become disturbingly applicable to the U.S.
March 5, 2009 - 12:35 am - by Oleg Atbashian
There was a time in recent American history when certain Soviet jokes didn’t work in translation — not so much because of the language differences, but because of the lack of common sociopolitical context. But that is changing. As President Obama is preparing us for a great leap towards collectivism, I find myself recollecting forgotten political jokes I shared with comrades while living in the old country under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev. (I was too young to remember the Khrushchev times, but I still remember the Khrushchev jokes.) I also noticed that the further America “advances” back to the Soviet model, the more translatable the old Soviet jokes become. Not all Soviet advancements have metastasized here yet, but we have four more glorious years to make it happen.
One of my favorite political jokes is this:
The six dialectical contradictions of socialism in the USSR:
•There is full employment — yet no one is working.
•No one is working — yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
•The factory quotas are fulfilled — yet the stores have nothing to sell.
•The stores have nothing to sell — yet people got all the stuff at home.
•People got all the stuff at home — yet everyone is complaining.
•Everyone is complaining — yet the voting is always unanimous.
It reads like a poem — only instead of the rhythm of syllables and rhyming sounds, it’s the rhythm of logic and rhyming meanings. If I could replicate it, I might start a whole new genre of “contradictory six-liners.” It would be extremely difficult to keep it real and funny at the same time, but I’ll try anyway.
Dialectical contradictions are one of the pillars in Marxist philosophy, which states that contradictions eventually lead to a unity of opposites as the result of a struggle. This gave a convenient “scientific” excuse for the existence of contradictions in a socialist society, where opposites were nice and agreeable — unlike the wild and crazy opposites of capitalism that could never be reconciled. Hence the joke.
Then I moved to America, where wild and crazy opposites of capitalism were supposedly at their worst. Until recently, however, the only contradictions that struck me as irreconcilable were these:
Economic justice:
•America is capitalist and greedy — yet half of the population is subsidized.
•Half of the population is subsidized — yet they think they are victims.
•They think they are victims — yet their representatives run the government.
•Their representatives run the government — yet the poor keep getting poorer.
•The poor keep getting poorer — yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
•They have things that people in other countries only dream about — yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
Hollywood cliches:
•Without capitalism there’d be no Hollywood — yet filmmakers hate capitalism.
•Filmmakers hate capitalism — yet they sue for unauthorized copying of their movies.
•They sue for unauthorized copying — yet on screen they teach us to share.
•On screen they teach us to share — yet they keep their millions to themselves.
•They keep their millions to themselves — yet they revel in stories of American misery and depravity.
•They revel in stories of American misery and depravity — yet they blame the resulting anti-American sentiment on conservatism.
•They blame the anti-American sentiment on conservatism — yet conservatism ensures the continuation of a system that makes Hollywood possible.
I never thought I would see socialist contradictions in America, let alone write about them. But somehow all attempts to organize life according to “progressive” principles always result in such contradictions. And in the areas where “progressives” have assumed positions of leadership — education, news media, or the entertainment industry — contradictions become “historically inevitable.”
If one were accidentally to open his eyes and compare the “progressive” narrative with facts on the ground, one might start asking questions. Why, for instance, if the war on terror breeds more terrorists, haven’t there been attacks on the U.S. soil since 2001? Why, if George W. Bush had removed our freedom of speech, was nobody ever arrested for saying anything? And if Obama has returned us our freedoms, why was a man harassed by police in Oklahoma for having an anti-Obama sign in his car? Why would anyone who supports free speech want to silence talk radio? And why is silencing the opposition called the “Fairness Doctrine”?
After the number of “caring,” bleeding-heart politicians in Washington reached a critical mass, it was only a matter of time before the government started ordering banks to help the poor by giving them risky home loans through community organizers. Which resulted in a bigger demand, which resulted in rising prices, which resulted in slimmer chances of repaying the loans, which resulted in more pressure on the banks, which resulted in repackaging of bad loans, which resulted in a collapse of the banks, which resulted in a recession, which resulted in many borrowers losing their jobs, which resulted in no further mortgage payments, which resulted in a financial disaster, which resulted in a worldwide crisis, with billions of poor people overseas — who had never seen a community organizer, nor applied for a bad loan — becoming even poorer than they had been before the “progressives” in the U.S. government decided to help the poor.
As if that were not enough, the same bleeding hearts are now trying to fix this by nationalizing the banks so that they can keep issuing risky loans through community organizers. In other words, to prevent the toast from landing buttered side down, they’re planning to butter the toast on both sides and hope that it will hover in mid-air. Which also seems like a sensible alternative energy initiative.
If that doesn’t fix the problem, there’s always the last resort of a liberal: blame capitalism. It’s always a win-win. Today government regulators may be blaming capitalism for the crisis caused by their dilettantish tampering with the economy, but who do you think they will credit after market forces resuscitate the economy?
Years ago, living in America made me feel as though I had traveled in a time machine from the past. But after the recent “revolutionary” changes have turned reality on its head — which is what “revolution” literally means — I’m getting an uneasy feeling I had come from your future.
As your comrade from the future, I also feel a social obligation to help my less advanced comrades in the American community, and prepare them for the transition to the glorious world of underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder. Don’t become a nation of cowards — but watch who might be listening.
Let’s start with these few.
People’s power:
•Liberals believe they’re advancing people’s power — yet they don’t believe people can do anything right without their guidance.
•People can’t do anything right — yet the government bureaucracy can do everything.
•The government bureaucracy can do everything — yet liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives.
•Liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives — yet they vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government.
•They vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government — yet they believe they’re advancing people’s power.
Bush and the media:
•The media said Bush was dumb — yet he won over two intelligent Democrats.
•He won over two intelligent Democrats — yet the media said his ratings were hopeless.
•The media said his ratings were hopeless — yet the 2004 electoral map was red.
•The 2004 electoral map was red — yet the media said his policies failed.
•The media said his policies failed — yet the economy grew and the war was won.
•The economy grew and the war was won — yet the media said we needed “change.”
Public education:
•Liberals have been in charge of education for 50 years — yet education is out of control.
•Education is out of control — yet liberal teaching methods prevail.
•Liberal teaching methods prevail — yet public schools are failing.
•Public schools are failing — yet their funding keeps growing.
•Their funding keeps growing — yet public schools are always underfunded.
•Public schools are always underfunded — yet private schools yield better results for less.
•Private schools yield better results for less — yet public education is the only way out of the crisis.
Foreign radicals*:
•Foreign radicals hate America — yet they’re all wearing American blue jeans.
•They’re all wearing American blue jeans — yet they disdain American culture.
•They disdain American culture — yet they play American music, movies, and video games.
•They play American music, movies, and video games — yet they call Americans uncivilized.
•They call Americans uncivilized — yet they expect Americans to defend their civilization.
•They expect Americans to defend their civilization — yet they think American capitalism is outdated.
•They think American capitalism is outdated — yet most of their countries require American handouts.
(* Some Democrat politicians have similar opinions about their redneck constituents — yet they won’t shut up about how proud they are to have their mandate.)
Liberals and taxes:
•Liberals want to help the poor — yet they won’t give money to charities.
•They won’t give money to charities — yet they’d like the government to become a gigantic charity.
•They’d like the government to become a gigantic charity — yet the money has to be taken from people by force.
•The money has to be taken from people by force — yet they call it welfare.
•They call it welfare — yet higher taxes make everyone poorer.
•Higher taxes make everyone poorer — yet liberals find ways not to pay taxes.
•Liberals find ways not to pay taxes — yet they get to be chosen to run the government.
Liberals and the CIA:
•The CIA is a reactionary institution — yet its agents always leak information that helps liberals politically.
•CIA agents always leak information that helps liberals politically — yet liberals say the CIA is clueless.
•Liberals say the CIA is clueless — yet in their movies the CIA is running the world.
•In their movies the CIA is running the world — yet they tell us that better intelligence could have prevented the war.
•Better intelligence could have prevented the war — yet “enhanced interrogations” of captured terrorists must not be allowed.
Love and marriage:
•Sex differences are the result of social conditioning — yet homosexuality is biological.
•Homosexuality is biological — yet everybody is encouraged to experiment with it.
•Everybody is encouraged to experiment with it — yet venereal diseases are treated at the taxpayers’ expense.
•Venereal diseases are treated at the taxpayers’ expense — yet taxpayers have no right to impose standards since there are no moral absolutes.
•There are no moral absolutes — yet gay marriage is an absolute must.
•Gay marriage is an absolute must — yet family is an antiquated tool of bourgeois oppression.
Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from Ukraine, currently lives in New York. He is the creator of ThePeoplesCube.com, a satirical website where he writes under the name of Red Square. He is the author of recently published Shakedown Socialism.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/06/27/amnesty-international-and-prince/
Amnesty International and Prince: Time to Party Like It’s 1999 BC!
June 27, 2011 - 2:48 pm - by Ed Driscoll
What it is about the Middle East that causes self-styled “Progressives” to suddenly mumble, “Nevermind,” ala Emily Litella?
First up, you’d think that Prince, who debuted on the national scene in the late 1970s as an androgynous, pushing the boundaries kind of guy, would want his fans in the Middle East to have the same freedom to experiment. So much for that idea:
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Film&Music, Prince said: “It’s fun being in Islamic countries, to know there’s only one religion. There’s order. You wear a burqa. There’s no choice. People are happy with that.” When asked about the fate of those unhappy with having no choice, he replied: “There are people who are unhappy with everything. There’s a dark side to everything.”
Prince embraced religion in 2001, when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was anti-authoritarian but at the same time I was a loving tyrant,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t be both. I had to learn what authority was. That’s what the Bible teaches. The Bible is a study guide for social interaction.
“If I go to a place where I don’t feel stressed and there’s no car alarms and airplanes overhead, then you understand what noise pollution is. Noise is a society that has no God, that has no glue. [And thus the 53-year old musician sounds like every 53-year old parent within earshot of a sports arena that's booked Prince for a concert -- Ed] We can’t do what we want to do all the time. If you don’t have boundaries, what then?”
He’s got his. Those of you in the Middle East, you’re on your own. Rand Simberg notes how immediately appalling Prince’s language would sound if it were applied to the American South rather than the Islamic Middle East.
Next up, there’s Amnesty International, which in the mid-1980s, ran commercials full of Hollywood celebrities and rock stars offering toasts to “freedom.” I’m pretty sure I watched this one on MTV more than a few times back then, including during Live Aid, if I’m not mistaken. Look fast for the late Ron Silver halfway through the ad, 20 years before becoming a PJM contributor:
Freedom? Dude, put the collar back down on your polo shirt, take off the Wayfarers, and get your mind out of the 1980s:
If you need a refresher, Hamas conducted a raid (probably illegal, as terrorists never wear uniforms) and snuck across the border, attacked an Israeli outpost, and kidnapped Gilad Shalit.Wikipedia uses the word “capture.” Um, yeah. Like Bruno Hauptman “captured” the Lindbergh Baby.
He has been held illegally for five years.
Those who “captured” him are making threats and demands, like legal armies always do.
Shalit’s captors issued another demand to the Israelis, demanding that Israel release an additional 1,000 Palestinian prisoners (in addition to all female and young prisoners, as previously demanded) and end Israel’s incursions into Gaza.[38] Two days later, the captors issued a 24-hour ultimatum for meeting their demands, threatening unspecified consequences if Israel refused.[39] Hours after the ultimatum was issued, Israel officially rejected the demands, stating that: “there will be no negotiations to release prisoners”
So, of course Amnesty International must protest this and demand his release, right?
Wrong.
If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn’t even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit’s imprisonment.
As Ace concludes, “If donating directly to Al Qaeda and Hamas feels too risky and too dirty to you, try us! We have Bono.”
Back in 2003, Steven Den Beste noted that Amnesty International “is demonstrating that when the cards are down, its soul is for sale.”
I’d say that for both AI and Prince, those transactions have now been concluded.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v1U1Jzdghjk[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v1U1Jzdghjk
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9ZpD34Xk3M&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9ZpD34Xk3M&feature=player_embedded
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http://michellemalkin.com/2011/07/23/report-democrat-rep-david-wu-admits-sexual-encounter-with-donors-young-daughter/
Report: Democrat Rep. David Wu admits sexual encounter with donor’s young daughter
(http://michellemalkin.cachefly.net/michellemalkin.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ZZ53860385.jpg)
By Michelle Malkin • July 23, 2011 12:13 AM
Wu-hoo! Hey, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Nancy Pelosi, I’m over here!
When last I wrote about the bizarre behavior of Democrat Rep. David Wu of Oregon, it was February of this year.
I said he needed a Democrat leadership intervention after he freaked out his staff, posed in the above costume obtained by Willamette Week, and engaged in other inexplicable antics. As I noted, Wu’s behavior has caused Capitol Hill concern dating back to 2003. But none of the swamp-draining Democrat leaders bothered to do anything about it. And Wu went on a national media tour asserting he can continue to hold office.
Now, this from the Oregonian:
Sources: Young woman accuses Oregon Rep. David Wu of aggressive, unwanted sexual encounter
A distraught young woman called U.S. Rep. David Wu’s Portland office this spring, accusing him of an unwanted sexual encounter, according to multiple sources.
When confronted, the Oregon Democrat acknowledged a sexual encounter to his senior aides but insisted it was consensual, the sources said.
The woman is the daughter of a longtime friend and campaign donor. She apparently did not contact police at the time.
One person who heard the voice mail described the woman as upset, breathing heavily and “distraught.”
In the voice mail, the young woman accused Wu of aggressive and unwanted sexual behavior, according to sources with direct knowledge of the message and its contents.
Reporters could not verify the young woman’s age. Notes on Facebook over the past 18 months indicate she graduated from high school in 2010. California records show she registered to vote in August.
RedState reviewed Wu’s unseemly history here, including this:
Allegation of assault on woman in 1970s in college shadow U.S. Rep. David Wu
This is an actual headline from an article in The Oregonian in October, 2004, on the eve of his reelection to a fourth term in Congress.
From the article:
David Wu, future Oregon congressman, and the woman later dated in their junior year. But that spring, in 1976, she broke things off. A few months later, an encounter occurred that neither wants to discuss.
That summer, the 21-year-old Wu was brought to the campus police annex after his ex-girlfriend said he tried to force her to have sex, according to Raoul K. Niemeyer, then a patrol commander who questioned him.
Wu had scratches on his face and neck, and his T-shirt was stretched out of shape, Niemeyer said.
Earlier, someone had interrupted a scuffle in the woman’s dorm room. A Stanford professor said the woman told him the next day that Wu had angrily attacked her. An assistant dean who counseled the woman for two months said that the woman called it attempted rape and that Wu used a pillow to muffle her screams.
Wu told police that what happened was consensual. “He said, ‘We just, I was with my girlfriend, and we just got a little carried away,’ ” Niemeyer remembered. After that, he said, Wu “clammed up.”
The woman declined to press charges. However, this episode has apparently been well known for a long while…
Geez. Does he need to get caught Tweeting lurid photos of his un-costumed package before Democrat leaders — in particular, Democrat women — step up and do something?
Hello, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz? Nancy Pelosi? Bueller? Bueller?
***
Update….You won’t believe this. Never mind. You will. News media misidentified Wu as a Republican.
On a related note: Anthony Weiner says he is cured.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2011/07/23/report-democrat-rep-david-wu-admits-sexual-encounter-with-donors-young-daughter/
Report: Democrat Rep. David Wu admits sexual encounter with donor’s young daughter
(http://michellemalkin.cachefly.net/michellemalkin.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ZZ53860385.jpg)
**Good news! The Nat'l Organization for Women endorsed him!http://www.nowpacs.org/2004/endorse/or.html?printable
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A crat is a crat is a crat is a crat. Not surprising. Weiner puts himself above all else. The Dems put party above the country.
And the crats who vote all want the free benefits confiscated from taxpayers. I don't know hwy people like my nephew bother to fight for our country. Even our leaders are a bunch of selfish pigs.
In my opinion, all this crap about Anthony Weiner being immoral for sending naked photos is a joke. These people treat US soldiers as political pawns. The level and degree of the politician's immorality is of biblical proportions. These people, in my opinion, republican and democrat, are as good as murderers. Weiner's photos are the least of their crimes.
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Weiner wasn't criminally charged.
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CW: Going after hypocritical leaders is a good thing. So too is noting the hypocrisy of those who absolve them :wink:
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CW: Going after hypocritical leaders is a good thing. So too is noting the hypocrisy of those who absolve them :wink:
Haha, true.
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I'm no Obama basher. I didn't vote for him (or McCain) but now that he is in I really like his foreign policy and domestic terrorism policies when compared to Bush. I think he has done a lot of good when it comes to breaking the cycle of violence with them (as much as possible). I like that he bows to kings and doesn't target Arabs for searches in the airports. I get that most people prefer to honor the right hand over the left hand, to use a Taoist expression, but I think the way he is doing it seems wise.
Still, the whole Afghanistan thing really has me bothered. I wish that he would listen to his generals more rather than try to keep political promises over the use of troops.
Didn't they call Afghanistan the unconquerable land? Those people have whipped the crap out of everyone that has gone in there, and after having endured 10 years of our space age fire power, they held it together, wore us out, and we are in negotiations with them now. To make matters worse, Obama is pulling out a ton of men while leaving the rest in. Its crazy. I have friends that get deployed there periodically and it pisses me off that they are acting like half measures are good enough at this point.
The only thing I can guess is that this whole exercise in foreign war has just been to make certain people money. I'd sound like a conspiracy nut if I talked too much about who, but its the only explanation for how they did this.
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"I'm no Obama basher. I didn't vote for him (or McCain) but now that he is in I really like his foreign policy and domestic terrorism policies when compared to Bush. I think he has done a lot of good when it comes to breaking the cycle of violence with them (as much as possible). I like that he bows to kings and doesn't target Arabs for searches in the airports. I get that most people prefer to honor the right hand over the left hand, to use a Taoist expression, but I think the way he is doing it seems wise."
Ok, I must admit I don't know how you parse the difference between Bush's and Obama's terrorism policies, except that Obama has been more aggressive targeting AQ with drone strikes in Pock-ee-stahn.You do know that the racial profiling policy for the USG came out under the Bush administration, right?
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TUESDAY, JUNE 17, 2003 (202) 514-2008
WWW. USDOJ. GOV
TDD (202) 514-1888
FACT SHEET RACIAL PROFILING
"It's wrong, and we will end it in America. In so doing, we will not hinder the work of our nation's brave police officers. They protect us every day -- often at great risk. But by stopping the abuses of a few, we will add to the public confidence our police officers earn and deserve.'' -- President George W. Bush, Feb. 27, 2001
"This administration… has been opposed to racial profiling and has done more to indicate its opposition than ever in history. The President said it's wrong and we'll end it in America, and I subscribe to that. Using race… as a proxy for potential criminal behavior is unconstitutional, and it undermines law enforcement by undermining the confidence that people can have in law enforcement." -- Attorney General John Ashcroft, Feb. 28, 2002
Defining the Problem: Racial Profiling Is Wrong and Will Not Be Tolerated Racial profiling sends the dehumanizing message to our citizens that they are judged by the color of their skin and harms the criminal justice system by eviscerating the trust that is necessary if law enforcement is to effectively protect our communities.
America Has a Moral Obligation to Prohibit Racial Profiling. Race-based assumptions in law enforcement perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that are harmful to our diverse democracy, and materially impair our efforts to maintain a fair and just society. As Attorney General John Ashcroft said, racial profiling creates a "lose-lose" situation because it destroys the potential for underlying trust that "should support the administration of justice as a societal objective, not just as a law enforcement objective. " The Overwhelming Majority of Federal Law Enforcement Officers Perform Their Jobs with Dedication, Fairness and Honor, But Any Instance of Racial Profiling by a Few Damages Our Criminal Justice System. The vast majority of federal law enforcement officers are hard-working public servants who perform a dangerous job with dedication, fairness and honor. However, when law enforcement practices are perceived to be biased or unfair, the general public, and especially minority communities, are less willing to trust and confide in officers, report crimes, be witnesses at trials, or serve on juries. Racial Profiling Is Discrimination, and It Taints the Entire Criminal Justice System. Racial profiling rests on the erroneous assumption that any particular individual of one race or ethnicity is more likely to engage in misconduct than any particular individual of other races or ethnicities. 2 Taking Steps to Ban Racial Profiling: Due to the Seriousness of Racial Profiling, the Justice Department Has Developed Guidelines to Make Clear that It Is Prohibited in Federal Law Enforcement President Bush Has Directed that Racial Profiling Be Formally Banned. In his February 27, 2001, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, President George W. Bush declared that racial profiling is Awrong and we will end it in America. @ He directed the Attorney General to review the use by federal law enforcement authorities of race as a factor in conducting stops, searches and other law enforcement investigative procedures. The Attorney General, in turn, instructed the Civil Rights Division to develop guidance for federal officials to ensure an end to racial profiling in federal law enforcement. The Bush Administration Is the First to Take Action to Ban Racial Profiling in Federal Law Enforcement. The guidance has been sent to all federal law enforcement agencies and is effective immediately. Federal agencies will review their policies and procedures to ensure compliance. The Guidance Requires More Restrictions on the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement than Does the Constitution. The guidance in many cases imposes more restrictions on the use of race and ethnicity in federal law enforcement than the Constitution requires. This guidance prohibits racial profiling in federal law enforcement practices without hindering the important work of our nation=s public safety officials, particularly the intensified anti-terrorism efforts precipitated by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Prohibiting Racial Profiling in Routine or Spontaneous Activities in Domestic Law Enforcement: In making routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions, such as ordinary traffic stops, federal law enforcement officers may not use race or ethnicity to any degree, except that officers may rely on race and ethnicity if a specific suspect description exists. This prohibition applies even where the use of race or ethnicity might otherwise be lawful. Routine Patrol Duties Must Be Carried Out Without Consideration of Race. Federal law enforcement agencies and officers sometimes engage in law enforcement activities, such as traffic and foot patrols, that generally do not involve either the ongoing investigation of specific criminal activities or the prevention of catastrophic events or harm to the national security. Rather, their activities are typified by spontaneous action in response to the activities of individuals whom they happen to encounter in the course of their patrols and about whom they have no information other than their observations. These general enforcement responsibilities should be carried out without any consideration of race or ethnicity. Example : While parked by the side of the highway, a federal officer notices that nearly all vehicles on the road are exceeding the posted speed limit. Although each
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Yeah, I now Obama has been more aggressive in that regard.
As far as the racial profiling thing, it was passed in 2001 I guess.
I don't have anything to quote you but I don't think they stopped racially profiling people then. I can't find anything about it quickly now, but Obama has definitly supported Bush's policy despite heavy right wing anger over it. That, and they were definately still racially profiling in airports just a few years ago.
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"Yeah, I now Obama has been more aggressive in that regard."
What makes you think that?
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"Yeah, I now Obama has been more aggressive in that regard."
What makes you think that?
I was referring to your comment that he has been bombing the heck out of Pakistan.
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"Yeah, I now Obama has been more aggressive in that regard."
What makes you think that?
I was referring to your comment that he has been bombing the heck out of Pakistan.
Ok, understood.
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Add this guy to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates who instead of writing a check of their own money to the treasury have felt it better to call for higher taxes for the "wealthy":
August 01, 2011
Categories:Celebs
Matt Damon weighs in on the debt ceiling
Last week, Ben Affleck briefly became part of the conversation about the debt ceiling. And now his longtime buddy and fellow actor Matt Damon has weighed in on the debate.
“I’m so disgusted man. … I don’t know what you do in the face of that kind of intransigence. You know, so my heart does go out to the president. He is dealing with a lot,” Damon told video journalist Nicholas Ballasy on Saturday. The actor, who’s rocking a shaved head these days, was in Washington to take part in the Save Our Schools March.
Asked is he supports tax increases for the wealthy, Damon said, “Yes, the wealthy are paying less than they’ve paid in any time else, certainly in my lifetime. …It’s criminal that like, you know, so little is asked of people who are getting so much, I mean, I don’t mind paying more. I really don’t mind paying more taxes.”
Damon went on to call the tea party “completely intransigent" in the debt negotiations, explaining: "They are absolutely willing to drive it all off a cliff."
Posted by Caitlin McDevitt 05:32 PM
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**It's almost like it was a cynical partisan movement.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/08/obama-gets-a-blank-check-for-e
Obama Gets a Blank Check for Endless War
Record numbers of U.S. troops are dying under Obama, but the anti-war movement is nowhere to be found.
Ira Stoll | August 8, 2011
The Obama administration is on pace to have more American soldiers killed in casualties related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the George W. Bush administration did in its first term.
Already, hundreds more American troops have been killed in Afghanistan during the less than three years of the Obama administration than during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. According to the iCasualties.org Web site, whose count more or less tracks that of other sites devoted to these statistics, 630 American soldiers died in the Afghanistan operation in the years 2001 through 2008, when Mr. Bush was president, while 1097 American soldiers have died in the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. Even if you allocate the 30 or so American soldiers killed in January 2009 entirely to Mr. Bush, who was president until the January 20 inauguration, it is quite a record.
Include Iraq, and the comparison tells a similar story: about 1,300 Americans killed in operations related to Iraq and Afghanistan combined during the first two and a half or so years we’ve had of the Obama administration, versus less than 600 American casualties in the first full three years of the George W. Bush administration.
It all raises at least two related questions. First, where are the antiwar protests? And second, where is the press?
In a phone interview, the national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, which organized some of the largest antiwar protests during the Bush administration, Michael McPhearson, said part of the explanation is political partisanship. A lot of the antiwar protesters, he said, were Democrats. “Once Obama got into office, they kind of demobilized themselves,” he said.
“Because he’s a Democrat, they don’t want to oppose him in the same way as they opposed Bush,” said Mr. McPhearson, who is also a former executive director of Veterans for Peace, and who said he voted for President Obama in 2008. “The politics of it allows him more breathing room when it comes to the wars.”
Mr. McPhearson says antiwar protests of the sort that drew hundreds of thousands of people during the George W. Bush administration now draw 20,000 at best. He said his group’s strategy now is to emphasize the cost of the wars and the Pentagon amid Washington’s focus on trimming the deficit.
As for the press, a New York Times article on the helicopter downed over the weekend in Afghanistan included the sentence, “Although the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan has steadily risen in the past year, with a 15 percent increase in the first half of 2011 over the same period last year, NATO deaths had been declining — decreasing nearly 20 percent in the first six months of 2011 compared with 2010.” Why compare it to 2010? Why not to 2009, or to 2008? A Chicago Tribune news article, by contrast, declared that the helicopter downing “comes at a time of growing unease about the increasingly unpopular and costly war.”
By the standards of American history, the deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are small, a mere fraction of those suffered in World War II or the Civil War or even Vietnam or Korea. And there are measures of success or failure in war other than American casualties. It doesn’t only matter how many Americans die; it also matters how many enemy soldiers die, and whether America is achieving its war aims.
The approaching tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, is a sober time to weigh these issues for those of us New Yorkers and other Americans who supported the wars in part out of hope that they would decrease the chances of major terrorist attacks here at home. Mr. Obama can make the case here, as he does with the economy, that he is merely cleaning up and winding down the bad situation he was left by his predecessor. With the war as with the economy though, eventually even Mr. Obama will have to take ownership, or have it assigned to him by the voters.
Mr. Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of Samuel Adams: A Life.
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To be precise here, Baraq did run and get elected on Afpakia being "the right war"-- which was a major strand in the line of thoughts against Bush. Yes his concept of how to wage it is incoherent (Vital we win, but we are going to start leaving in 18 months) but the logic of his mini-Surge inherently is to bring it to the enemy much more than the also not very coherent strategy from Bush.
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Just pointing out the "anti-war" movement is really the "Anti-American/Pro-America's enemies" movement.
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We agree!
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Why, if one opposes a particular war, or the foreign policy of our President, believing that it's not in America's best interest, is
that being "Anti-American"?
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That's not the point being made.
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What is the point? Or maybe this is a new point/question. It seems to me that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American. Agreed?
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What is the point? Or maybe this is a new point/question. It seems to me that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American. Agreed?
You might be able to make that argument if the "anti-war" movement was active now, but it's not.
It's just like the "anti-war" activists that claimed to care so much for the Vietnamese people, until the communists overran the south (After the dems cut all support to them) and the mass graves and re-education camps went into action without so much as a whimper of protest from the left.
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I concede your point, why the anit-war movement is not active now I don't know, although the fact we are winding down both wars and pulling out troops
probably has a lot to do with it.
But my question is a generic one. Not only pertinent to this week or even this war.
"It seems to me that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American. Agreed?"
For example I would argue that we never should have gone into Afghanistan and now that we are there, it's time to get out. History shows us this is a losing battle. Now you can disagree, but my point is that we are both Pro-American's we just have a different opinion. Nothing wrong with that.
The same argument or question can be applied to economic matters. You strongly disagree with Obama's policies. Me? I'm not sure. Good people in Congress disagree on both sides. But I don't think anyone in the discussion is any less Pro-American; they just have different opinions on how to solve the problem.
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http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2322203025
http://www.virtual.vietnam.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/starfetch.exe?3pgW2FjZd3bbZgaQjZy9b3@eKRA4@XHtltVUkOj2.SHD9rViMmw3sZNg1QPy7Y@HUAU1WAq9ag0pqu3gNYS72V9nsW0fP93bwZoI40B4s2LkvbD@.6e72g/2322203025.pdf
Where were the protests?
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You seem to be getting off topic. It's a simple question; can you answer it?
"It seems to me that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American. Agreed?"
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Again JDN, you can see who drapes themselves in "anti-war" guises that then drop them when it's no longer useful.
Remember when we had to pull out of Iraq ASAP? Remember when Harry Reid stated that the war was lost? Remember the undercutting of the war effort from president Downgrade when he was running for office? Remember how president Downgrade decried the airstrikes in Afghanistan?
Remember how crucial it was that Gitmo be closed down? Where are the lefty protesters in orange jumpsuits now?
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You seem to be getting off topic. It's a simple question; can you answer it?
"It seems to me that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American. Agreed?"
Theoretically? Sure. In reality, no.
Just like the "Anti-war" movement in the 60's/70's was really just pro-communist. Once the communists won, the "anti-war" mission was accomplished.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=316
LESSONS AND LEGACIES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
The Vietnam War had a profound and lasting impact on the American psyche. Beginning in the 1960s, the New Left (and the anti-war movement that it led) seized upon U.S. involvement in the war as a justification for smearing the country as an imperialist, racist aggressor. The left's relentless assault upon American traditions, values, and motives imbued the nation's consciousness with a deep sense of guilt and shame that ultimately became manifest in the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome," whose hallmark was America's subsequent reluctance to intervene militarily in foreign affairs -- particularly where the conflict was likely to be protracted and hard-fought.
New Leftists organized the first "anti-war" demonstration in the U.S. in 1962. One prominent New Leftist reflects on the objectives that he and his ideological comrades pursued at that time:
"Let me make this perfectly clear: those of us who inspired and then led the anti-war movement did not want merely to stop the killing, as so many veterans of those domestic battles now claim. We wanted the communists to win. It is true that some of us may have said we only wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam, but we understood that this meant the communists would win. 'Bring the troops home' was our slogan; the fall of Saigon was the result."
Many of these New Leftists were communists and socialists who believed that Marxist economic planning was the most rational means of bringing prosperity to the world. At the same time, they were convinced that America, however amenable to reform in the past, was set on a course that would make it increasingly rigid, repressive, and ultimately fascist; that the United States was the leviathan of a global imperialist system; and that its ruling class could only grow more reactionary and repressive. This expectation was the basis of the New Left's political view of the world generally and of its strategy of opposition to America's war in Vietnam in particular.
As leftists' opposition to the war grew more passionate (and violent) and their prophecies of impending fascism more intense, they deliberately crossed the line of legitimate dissent and abused every First Amendment privilege and right granted them as Americans. They spat on the flag, broke the law, denigrated and disrupted the institutions of government and education, and gave comfort and aid (even revealing classified secrets) to the enemy. Some of them provided a protective propaganda shield for Hanoi's communist regime while it tortured American servicemen; others engaged in violent sabotage against the war effort. The erosion of American pride and self-confidence continued inexorably.
The leftist agitators began as a peripheral minority, but as the war dragged on without an end in sight, other people joined them: first in thousands and then in tens of thousands, swelling their ranks until finally they reached the conscience of the nation. This trend was propelled,in large measure, by the media. For example, after the 1968 Tet Offensive -- a decisive American victory militarily -- major figures in the American press depicted Tet instead as an emblem of a military quagmire from which the U.S. needed to extract itself as quickly as possible. "It seems now more certain than ever," the revered newsman Walter Cronkite told his audience in a de facto editorial, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate" and that the war was "unwinnable." Cronkite's statement, and his call for U.S. withdrawal, helped turn public opinion against the war. It also demoralized American troops and President Johnson. The nation simply lost its will to continue the war and withdrew.
America not only withdrew its forces from Vietnam, as the left had said it would never do, but also from Laos and Cambodia and, ultimately, from its role as guardian of the international status quo. But far from increasing the freedom and well-being of Third World nations, as the left had predicted, America's withdrawal resulted in an international power vacuum that was quickly filled by the armies of Russia, Cuba, and the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge. After U.S. funding to Vietnam and Cambodia was terminated in January 1975, the regimes of both countries were quickly overrun by the Communists, who would go on to slaughter some 2.5 million Indochinese peasants.
These events confronted leftists with a supreme irony: the nation they had believed to be governed by corporate interests, a fountainhead of world reaction, was halted in mid-course by its conscience-stricken and morally aroused populace. Meanwhile, the forces the left had identified with progress, once freed from the grip of U.S. "imperialism," revealed themselves to be oppressive, predatory, and unspeakably ruthless. But the left failed to acknowledge or learn from these Marxist atrocities, adhering instead to the narrative of a racist, imperialist America intruding on the internal affairs of other nations. Thus did the Vietnam Syndrome gain its foothold in the American psyche.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. was involved in a handful of military incursions (including, most famously, the Gulf War of 1991), but none of these ever threatened to drag on interminably or to cause large numbers of American casualties.
The Vietnam Syndrome reasserted itself post-9/11, however, when the U.S., in its first protracted battle since Vietnam, engaged a bloodthirsty Islamist enemy in the Middle East. Once again, the left, as it had done in the Sixties, placed the blame for the conflict squarely on America's shoulders. Once again, the left impugned America's motives for waging the war -- claiming that the nation was chiefly interested in establishing worldwide hegemony and usurping the lucrative oil fields of Iraq. Once again, the left spotlighted, and greatly exaggerated, instances of U.S. transgressions in the war -- most notable were the charges of abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the charge of mass murder in Haditha. Once again, the media was complicit in misrepresenting, overstating, and even fabricating the nature of these alleged transgressions. Once again, the U.S. fought this war with self-imposed restraint, as evidenced by the restrictive rules-of-engagement to which its troops were required to adhere. And once again, the constant drumbeat of negativity by leftists in politics and the press steadily eroded the American people's support for the war.
Parts of this summary are adapted from "My Vietnam Lessons," by David Horowitz (1985).
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"It is true that some of us may have said we only wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam, but we understood that this meant the communists would win. 'Bring the troops home' was our slogan; the fall of Saigon was the result."
Substitute Afganistan if you like; of course the other side "wins". But what do they "win"?
Is America truly worse off because we ended the Vietnam war? I don't think so. We never should have been there in the first place.
Did atrocities happen. Probably. But then atrocities happen world wide every year. Are we as a nation to always get involved? Send troops?
I suggest no. We have enough problems here at home to worry about.
But you answered my question, you agreed, albeit theoretically, "that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American."
Thank you. That was my point.
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"It is true that some of us may have said we only wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam, but we understood that this meant the communists would win. 'Bring the troops home' was our slogan; the fall of Saigon was the result."
Substitute Afganistan if you like; of course the other side "wins". But what do they "win"?
Is America truly worse off because we ended the Vietnam war? I don't think so. We never should have been there in the first place.
**You might have heard of this thing called the "Cold War", where we were in a global struggle to preserve human freedom? Should we have prevented Stalin from invading Japan? Should we have been there? Should we have preserved South Korea, or should all of Korea enjoy the benevolent leadership of the Kim dynasty? Should we defend Japan now from China? Why is that our problem?
Did atrocities happen. Probably. But then atrocities happen world wide every year. Are we as a nation to always get involved? Send troops?
I suggest no. We have enough problems here at home to worry about.
**Yeah, if China wants to invade Japan, it's not our problem. Time to end the defense treaty and pull out our troops. We can use them to secure our border w/ Mexico.
But you answered my question, you agreed, albeit theoretically, "that one can be a member of the anti-war movement, i.e. strongly oppose and protest our involvement in a particular war, for example Iraq or Afghanistan and/or the President's foreign policy, yet at the same time be considered very Pro-American."
Thank you. That was my point.
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Why is that our problem? We've got our own problems here at home, right JDN.
Without our protection, Japan will have no choice but adjust to the growing power of China and make the appropriate agreements. They didn't need all those territorial waters anyway. Not my problem, right?
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From Moron.org:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A9WKimKIyUQ[/youtube]
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Baby boomer anti-war movement: "War is bad for children and other living things. We care about the Vietnamese people.
Narrator: The US has withdrawn it's troops and cut off aid to South Vietnam. Saigon falls and America's allies are killed and tortured by the victorious communists.
Baby boomer anti-war movement: Oh look, Disco, leisure suits and cocaine!
The End
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Jimmy Carter faced a challenge from within his own party from Teddy Kennedy.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/12/obama-s-reelection-helped-by-the-left-s-primary-vacuum.html
Eleanor Clift: "The difference now there is no Kennedy heir apparent figure on the horizon, and we’re talking about the first African-American occupant of the White House in a party identified with civil rights."
African-descendant perhaps, but I thought we just determined that he was a Hawaiian-American, more recently an Illinoisan-American. What does any of that have to do with dissatisfied Democrats not running against him in primaries?
Assume for a second that Obama wins in 2012, but loses the House again and the Senate too this time, and governs about like he is now. What kind of shape does he leave his party in (much less his country) coming into the next cycle? His VP will be 74, Hillary 69.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/20/president-mccain-is-clearly-a-warmonger/
President McCain is clearly a warmonger
posted at 4:00 pm on August 20, 2011 by Jazz Shaw
I sure wish we had elected that Obama guy back in 2008. If we had, we wouldn’t be looking at staying in Iraq even longer. Obama would have – at a minimum – gotten out of Iraq on the same schedule that the warmonger Bush had set up.
Of course, there’s still the matter of Afghanistan. If we had elected Barack Obama, I can assure you that he would have set up a firm plan to begin a major draw-down of our forces by this year and gotten the rest out in short order. But not President McCain! Oh, no! We just found out this weekend that he’s close to signing an agreement to keep not only training details, but special forces and air power in country until… are you ready for this? Until 2024.
And as far as the rest of the world goes, I still fondly recall candidate Obama’s spot on criticism of the way President Bush launched wars in a willy-nilly fashion, ignored the War Powers Act and ignored the powers of Congress, as well as the wishes of the American people. Why couldn’t we have elected that guy? Instead, we watched as President McCain launched an attack on yet another nation – Libya – sneering out of one side of his face that we would only be there for days. Right, Mr. President. It’s been nearly 200 of them so far.
Meanwhile, the warmonger McCain is already looking at the possibility of even further commitment of American troops in places ranging from Somalia to who-knows-where next? If we keep going at this rate we’re going to be in five or six wars by the time McCain is up for a second term. Are you going to stand for this? I know I’m not.
That’s why I’m calling on all good Democrats and progressives to continue the efforts which have been underway since 2003. Take to the streets with your signs and your bullhorns! In 2004 there were more than a million of you in Manhattan shaking the very pavement with your cries for peace. And this is no time to slack off in your efforts.
So I’ll meet you all in Times Square tomorrow morning for the massive protest march against President McCain and his endless wars. And I’ll bring the donuts. See you there!
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This could fall under media but the question posed is perplexing the left. Ezra Klein, a 20-something year old 'whiz kid' is the Washington Post's answer to the demand for more leftists in main media opinion writing. His column yesterday: "What could Obama have done?" His answer is basically, I have no clue.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/what-could-obama-have-done/2011/08/12/gIQAEBYbWJ_blog.html
"But I’ve never been able to come up with a realistic scenario in which a lot more got done, the economy is in much better shape, and the president is dramatically more popular today. Anything that even comes close is really a counterfactual of what the chairman of the Federal Reserve could have done, and I’m not confident that I understand Bernanke’s constraints nor that a more massive intervention on the part of the Fed would have been the cure-all some suggest.
Indeed, if you had taken me aside in 2008 and sketched out the first three years of Obama’s presidency, I would have thought you were being overoptimistic: an $800 billion stimulus package — recall that people were only talking in the $200-$300 billion range back then — followed by near-universal health-care reform, followed by financial regulation, followed by another stimulus (in the 2010 tax deal), followed by the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” followed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the apparent ousting of Moammar Gaddafi? There was no way. And yet all that did get done. But the administration hasn’t able to get unemployment under control — perhaps it couldn’t have gotten unemployment under control — and so all of that has not been nearly enough.
But perhaps I’m missing something obvious." - Ezra Klein, Washington Post 8/22/2011
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Yes you are missing something (plural) obvious, namely how a private economy works. First, your timeframe is wrong. Obama burst on the scene as a surprise star speaker at the Dem convention, Aug 2004 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awQkJNVsgKM. When he said, "Harry, I have a gift", he meant a pied piper like gift of oratory and being able to say nearly nothing and sound like oceans have been moved. He did not purport to know any special knowledge about how to turn around in a positive way an economy that was already running on all cylinders. The question is, with all his rising star influence in the new majority congress, what policies should he have advocating and leading with as they campaigned for and took the majority in Nov 2006/Jan 2007. They cam in promising anti-growth economics - and got it.
The answer is something like what just came out of an Arthur Laffer advice column to him just posted recently:
“Reaganomics would fix any economy that’s in the doldrums,” Laffer said. “It’s not a magic sauce, it’s common sense.
“You’ve got to get rid of all federal taxes in the extreme and replace them with a low-rate flat tax on business net sales, and on personal unadjusted gross income. That’s number one.
“Number two, you have to have spending restraint. Government spending causes unemployment, it does not cure unemployment.
“Number three, you need sound money. Ben Bernanke is running the least sound monetary policy I’ve ever heard of," Laffer said.
“Number four you need regulations, but you don’t need those regulations to go beyond the purpose at hand and create collateral damage. The regulatory policies are really way off here.
“And lastly you need free trade," Laffer said. "Foreigners produce some things better than we do and we produce some things better than foreigners. It would be foolish in the extreme if we didn’t sell them those things we produce better than they do in exchange for those things they produce better than we do.”
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1467.msg52868#msg52868
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/laffer-obama-reaganomics-gop/2011/08/10/id/406893?s=al&promo_code=CCF6-1
He moved in the opposite direction instead and got the opposite results. Now would be another time that he could try what has already been proven to work.
All the components need to be done at once. Instead, none of the ideas are even on the table for the after Labor Day speech.
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Doug,
This is the guy who according to Wikepedia started the Journolist which according to Wikepedia he reports to have disbanded (though we know that is obviously not true and they just keep a lower profile). See the portion I have highlighted between the stars below:
Ezra Klein
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Ezra Klein
Klein on Halloween, 2008
Born May 9, 1984 (1984-05-09) (age 27)
Irvine, California
Nationality American
Education B.A., Political Science
Alma mater UCLA
Occupation Journalist and Political pundit
Employer Washington Post, MSNBC, Bloomberg
Website
Ezra Klein - Washington Post
Ezra Klein (born May 9, 1984) is an American blogger and columnist for The Washington Post, columnist for Bloomberg, a columnist for Newsweek, and a contributor to MSNBC. He was formerly an associate editor of The American Prospect political magazine and a political blogger at the same publication.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 Health care debate
2.2 JournoList
3 Personal life
4 Awards
5 Notes
6 External links
[edit] Early life
Klein was born and raised in Irvine, California, and went to school at University High School. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz but later transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 2005 with a B.A. in political science. While at UCLA, he applied to write for the Daily Bruin but was rejected.[2]
Klein is a middle child,[2] raised in a Jewish family, though today, he identifies as a devout agnostic.[3] His father is a math professor, his mother an artist.[2]
[edit] Career
Klein started his first blog in February 2003.[4] He soon joined with Matt Singer, and the name was changed to "Klein/Singer: Political Consulting on the Cheap." In June 2003, he moved to the blog "Not Geniuses" along with Matt Singer, Ryan J. Davis, and Joe Rospars.[5]
Following "Not Geniuses," Klein partnered with Jesse Taylor at Pandagon. This partnership helped Klein gain even more visibility, leading to his eventual founding of his blog "Ezra Klein."[6]
Besides his online contributions, Klein worked on Howard Dean's primary campaign in Vermont in 2003, and interned for the Washington Monthly in Washington, D.C. in 2004. "I used to have political aspirations," said Klein. "...in the sense of getting my name on a ballot and promising Iowans more ethanol subsidies than they could handle. But over time, I found that I enjoy writing far more. More to the point, I think that the creation of a media environment that can sustain and propel progressivism is more important than any single elected official. I'd trade a liberal O'Reilly (or Limbaugh!) for 5, 10 congressmen. The media is as effective and important an agent for change as the legislative bodies, and I think it's where I'm happiest and most effective."[7]
In 2003, he and Markos Moulitsas were two of the earliest bloggers to report from a political convention, that of the California State Democratic Party.[8] In 2006, Klein was one of several writers pseudonymously flamed by The New Republic writer Lee Siegel (posting as a sock puppet called sprezzatura).[9]
On December 10, 2007, Klein moved his blog full time to the American Prospect.[10]
Klein's prolific blogging caught the attention of Steve Pearlstein, the Washington Post's veteran business columnist. A friend referred him to Klein's work in the American Prospect. "I was blown away by how good he was—how much the kid wrote—on so many subjects," Pearlstein said. Pearlstein sent samples of Klein's work to managing editor Raju Narisetti. A few weeks after he heard from Pearlstein, Post foreign correspondent John Pomfret asked Klein to have lunch with him and financial editor Sandy Sugawara. Narisetti quickly hired Klein to be the Post’s first pure blogger on politics and economics.[2] On May 18, 2009, he began writing at the newspaper.[11]
His writing interests include health policy, the labor movement, electoral politics and food.[12] He writes a primer on policy called "Wonkbook," which is delivered by e-mail and on his blog each morning.
Klein frequently provides political commentary on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball with Chris Matthews. He is a former contributor to the now-cancelled Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
In May 2011 when it launched, Klein became a columnist for Bloomberg View in addition to his work at The Washington Post and MSNBC.[13]
[edit] Health care debate
In December 2009, Klein wrote an article in the Washington Post that because Senator Joe Lieberman was motivated to oppose health care legislation in part out of resentment at liberals for being defeated in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary, it meant that Lieberman was "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score".[14] Klein based his estimate off of an Urban Institute report that estimated that 22,000 people died in 2006 because they lacked health-care insurance.[15] This article was criticized by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, who called it a "silly claim."[16] Charles Lane, also of the Washington Post, described Klein's article as an "outrageous smear". But EJ Dionne, also of the Washington Post, agreed with Klein's claim, saying that "Klein is right that there is not a shred of principle in Lieberman's opposition."[17] Klein later said he regretted the phrasing[18] and his position is that despite universal coverage, the social determinants of health are still powerful predictors that, on average, ensure the lower socioeconomic classes die sooner than those with more income and education.[19][20]
[edit] JournoList
Main article: JournoList
******In February 2007 Klein created a Google Groups forum called "JournoList" for discussing politics and the news media. The forum's membership was controlled by Klein and limited to "several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics."[21] Posts within JournoList were intended only to be made and read by its members.[22] Klein defended the forum saying that it "[ensures] that folks feel safe giving off-the-cuff analysis and instant reactions". JournoList member, and Time magazine columnist, Joe Klein added that the off-the-record nature of the forum was necessary because “candor is essential and can only be guaranteed by keeping these conversations private”.[21]
The existence of JournoList was first publicly revealed in a July 27, 2007 blog post by blogger Mickey Kaus.[23] However, the forum did not attract serious attention until March 17, 2009 when an article was published on Politico that detailed the nature of the forum and the extent of its membership.[21] The Politico article set off debate within the Blogosphere over the ethics of participating in JournoList and raised questions about its overall purpose. The first public excerpt of a discussion within JournoList was posted by Mickey Kaus on his blog on March 26, 2009.[24]
Members of JournoList included, among others: Ezra Klein, Jeffrey Toobin, Eric Alterman, Paul Krugman, Joe Klein (no relation to Ezra Klein), Matthew Yglesias, and Jonathan Chait.
On June 25, 2010, Ezra Klein announced in his Washington Post blog that he would be terminating the Journolist group. This decision was instigated by fellow blogger Dave Weigel's resignation from the Post following the public exposure of several of his Journolist emails about conservative media figures.[25][26]*****
Klein had justified excluding conservative Republicans from participation as "not about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology".[27]
[edit] Personal life
Klein is engaged to Annie Lowrey, an economics reporter at Slate.[28]
[edit] Awards
2007 The Hillman Prize, for "Tapped", The American Prospect.
[edit] Notes
^ The American Prospect political magazine.
^ a b c d Jaffe, Harry (2010-03-04). "Post Watch: Whiz Kid on the block". The Washingtonian. http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/people/capitalcomment/15063.html. Retrieved 2011-01-30.
^ "Ezra Klein: Religion Archives". Blog.prospect.org. http://blog.prospect.org/blog/ezraklein/religion/. Retrieved 2009-09-01.
^ Ezra K blog.
^ Not Geniuses blog.
^ Ezra Klein blog.
^ "A Conversation With Political Blogger Ezra Klein of Pandagon". LAist.com. 2004-11-02. http://laist.com/2004/11/02/a_conversation_with_political_blogger_ezra_klein_of_pandagon.php. Retrieved 2011-01-30.
^ Weiss, Joanna (May 10, 2004). "Blogs colliding with traditional media: Convention credentials expected for Web logs". Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/05/10/blogs_colliding_with_traditional_media?mode=PF. Retrieved 2008-01-12. [dead link]
^ Carr, David (2006-09-11). "A Comeback Overshadowed by a Blog". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/technology/11carr.html. Retrieved 2008-01-12.
^ Goodbye post at Klein's old blog
^ Introductory post at the Washington Post
^ "Down with the GVP!". Washington Post. 2010-04-07. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/down_with_the_gvp.html. Retrieved 2011-01-30.
^ Hagey, Keach (April 29, 2011). "Bloomberg View reveals columnists, editorial board". Politico.com. http://www.politico.com/blogs/onmedia/0411/Bloomberg_View_reveals_columnists_ed_board.html. Retrieved August 6, 2011.
^ "Joe Lieberman: Let's not make a deal!". The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/joe_lieberman_lets_not_make_a.html. Retrieved 2010-05-03.
^ Dorn, Stan. Uninsured and Dying Because of It: Updating the Institute of Medicine Analysis on the Impact of Uninsurance on Mortality. Urban Institute.
^ Jonah Goldberg (2009-12-15). "Lieberman Loves Death More than Ezra Klein Loves Life". The Corner. National Review Online. http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzJlMDlhOWIzZmYwMWMyYzIzNTkyZWRmNWQ0YTQ2YmY=. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
^ "The public option died last summer". The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/12/the_public_option_died_last.html. Retrieved 2010-05-03.
^ "Washington's Brat Pack Masters Media". The New York Times. 2010-03-25. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/fashion/27YOUNGPUNDITS.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1301529679-mk6oLlEdLch/o9b3TPMRCQ. Retrieved 2011-03-31.
^ Carney, Timothy (2011-02-28) Turns out ObamaCare might not save hundreds of thousands of lives, Washington Examiner
^ Ezra Klein (February 28, 2011). "Health care doesn't keep people healthy -- even in Canada" The Washington Post Accessed July 14, 2011.
^ a b c Michael Calderone (2009-03-17). "JournoList: Inside the echo chamber". The Politico. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20086.html. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
^ JournoList Google Groups.
^ Mickey Kaus (2007-07-27). "Educating Ezra Klein". Slate (magazine). http://www.slate.com/id/2171362/#kleinklub. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
^ Mickey Kaus (2009-03-26). "JournoList Revealed! Inside the Secret Liberal Media Email Cabal". Slate (magazine). http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/03/26/journolist-revealed-inside-the-liberal-media-email-cabal.aspx. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
^ Klein, Ezra (June 25, 2010). "On Journolist, and Dave Weigel". The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/on_journolist_and_dave_weigel.html. Retrieved June 25, 2010.
^ Keach Hagey, "David Weigel quits – and a debate begins, Politico.com, June 25, 2010. Retrieved 6-27-2010.
^ "EzraKlein Archive". The American Prospect. http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=03&year=2009&base_name=obligatory_journolist_post. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
^ Klein, Ezra (2010-11-03). "Reconciliation -- and more". The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/11/reconciliation_--_and_more.html. Retrieved 2010-11-04.
[edit] External links
Biography portal
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein's blog at Washingtonpost.com
The American Prospect Ezra Klein page and writings
Ezra Klein's old blog at The American Prospect magazine
Ezra Klein's articles and essays published in various media
Video conversations and debates involving Ezra Klein on Bloggingheads.tv
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Jonathon Alters writes, in essence, what more could he have done, with a school kid title of "You Think Obama’s Been a Bad President? Prove It".
In a nutshell, all that he did was is the wrong direction. Question is, what less (harm) could he have done?
The right answer IMHO is (again) streamline the tax system to remove as much of the disincentives to produce as possible while funding essential government functions, restrain public spending, open up the production of abundant energy, more progress across the globe on free trade and protect the US$. Hard to think of one Obama initiative that wasn't in the opposite direction.
Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-26/you-think-obama-s-been-a-bad-president-prove-it-jonathan-alter.html
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"clueless" is not the only word.
Alter is one of the Jewish progressives who sit in their little narcisstic world thinking they are better, smarter, more all knowing than those that cling to guns and religion. They think because they come out publically to champion the poor this somehow makes them better. It is not just a religious thing wherein Judaism teaches to help the poor. It is as had been clued to me by a post on this board - NARCISSM. These sort of Jews (and non-Jewish liberals as well) really do think they are better, smarter and more clever because they are for the Democrat party. Yet many if not most spend their entire lives working to get better of financially.
Apart from their outrageous hypocracy, they refuse to admit their political theories of redistribution, equal wealth to all, government enforcement of this, socialism, communism and the rest of it is actually going to make things worse. History proves it makes things worse. They think they are levelling the playing field for all when instead they are creating power for those few elites who pretend to know what is best for all.
It is more precisely this all knowing all paternalitstic attitude and condescention that turns the world off to Jews IMHO. For all their pretending to lose sleep over the poor (until their pocketbooks are threatened - not the "taxpayers") - just to the contrary - intead of us being appreciated and loved for our (Jewish) concern for the downtrodden, the underdog if you will - Jews are the most despised disliked and beaten down group in history. Look at Soros. He himself stated he has "inadvertantly" served to propogate the idea that Jews run the world. Well, he has certainly used every ounce of his financial power and political connections that confers to do just that.
So Jonathan ALter thinks because he votes as a Democrat we/he will be loved?
He certainly loves himself. Narcissim IS the word that explains it to me. It hit me like a club a few weeks ago. That is the key that unlocks the mystery behind why Jews are so liberal. It makes them think they are therefore better than everyone else. That is it. The answer.
Quite the contrary. We are resented. Who the hell do we think we are telling what is best for everyone and forcing it all on us with big government!
I am proud of being Jewish yet I am disgusted by this narcissistic group within our ranks.
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Krugman with his Nobel peace prize doesn't need to use the logic or charts of Grannis to predict no new 'help' from the Fed. He blames it on political intimidation from Rick Perry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/bernankes-perry-problem.html?_r=1
"Why don’t I expect much from Mr. Bernanke? In two words: Rick Perry.
O.K., I don’t mean that Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, is personally standing in the way of effective monetary policy. Not yet, anyway. Instead, I’m using Mr. Perry — who has famously threatened Mr. Bernanke with dire personal consequences if he pursues expansionary monetary policy before the 2012 election — as a symbol of the political intimidation that is killing our last remaining hope for economic recovery. "
----
"...our last remaining hope for economic recovery" - is to destroy our currency? This is from the lead economic opinion maker on the left? Does the Nobel committee have no recall procedure??
If you are out of new ideas after two and half years and everything you tried failed, how about just give back the keys.
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CCP, Interesting points. I would add that line of liberal thinking is not limited to Jewish opinion leaders. I'm out of my area to talk religion but it seems to me that the foundations of Christianity are the same. Helping the poor is a wonderful theme - always on display in church. We are merely arguing politically over which system helps them best. I have not yet found in the Bible where they measure the good you do in terms of coercive measures you impose on other people's work and money, or anything that supports the erosion of responsible personal freedoms. More specifically I believe it warns (commands) against the worship of these other Gods, like sacred govt entitlement programs.
1 in 2 children in America are born into food stamps. The real needy among us, those families who truly are incapable of providing life's basics for themselves in a benevolent, free society, are an important but very small proportion. Not 50% or anywhere near that. We are doing a myriad of things to ourselves on all fronts to make basic, safe, healthy living so enormously and unnecessarily expensive that half the people can't afford it. (Stop doing those things!) For those who are truly in need of food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, transportation, energy assistance etc etc, are they really best helped by totally blind, unaccountable government programs run from the furthest point away, based on coercive, baseline-expansion-based, runaway funding, or are they better administered on a personal level in the neighborhoods where people might actually know them and know the families, and funded by good and generous people living closer to them, on a voluntary, help your neighbor basis.
Even if you come down on the government side of that argument, why have it run from the furthest away point and why not get it completely out of the tax code and over to the spending side of the ledger.
Like CCP says, whether we see them as elitist or narscissist, decentralized solutions closer to home do not meet their needs for attention and accomplishment. OTOH, the failures of their programs may leave us broke but more importantly (to the elitists/narsisscists) failure leaves them clueless and frustrated. Still saying blame George Bush ("it was worse than we thought") at this 3rd/5th year point is really starting to sound like needing therapy. George Bush has had no new domestic policy initiatives since the election of November 2006 and the left had all the legislative votes they needed for long enough to repeal anything at all that they wanted.
The only thing they accomplished was answering their own question, what could be worse than George Bush and the reckless spending Republicans of the last decade.
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Doug,
Thanks for your response.
"the foundations of Christianity are the same. Helping the poor is a wonderful theme - always on display in church. We are merely arguing politically over which system helps them best. I have not yet found in the Bible where they measure the good you do in terms of coercive measures you impose on other people's work and money, or anything that supports the erosion of responsible personal freedoms. More specifically I believe it warns (commands) against the worship of these other Gods, like sacred govt entitlement programs.
Excellent points. What is moral about forcing some to pay for others or for those others to sit back and demand that the some pay for them?
It seems it is no longer hallowed to speak about God. We can no longer sing the national enthem. The pedge of allegence is banned. No prayer in school. God and anything public must be banned. No clergy at 9/11. Yet say anything bad about Social Security or Medicare and those on those doles howl like warewolves. These have become the (false) Gods/idols as you suggest.
They are now the hollowed framework or ground of America.
Everyone is entitled to not just health care whether they can or will pay for it or not, but school, education, food, housing, retirement, pensions, vacation, travel time, unemployment, disability for anything, free internet.
But it doesn't work when the numbers of people footing the bills for all this are becoming less and less.
Liberals will never give in. I am guessing it is too late for change without a real disaster. The disaster may not be around the corner but it is inevitable because of the malignant growth and persistance of progressive ideology.
For example, do away with mother or father and use only "parent". Why not get do away with male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, black, white, muslim, jew, christian, hindu, rich poor, american french, arab, indian, chinese. We should all be the same. Not fat, not skinny, not tall. Just people. "individual" - my point is there can be no end to this.
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CCP, Step one in helping the poor should be to not let yourself be poor, and step two should be to go out personally and help someone in true need.
------------------
Krugman this week repeats the mantra that WWII was the jobs program that ended the Great Depression. Strange then that economic growth was 17% the year BEFORE spending US government money on the war effort.
a) Hoover was an economic meddler, Hoover increased federal spending by 50%, far from his revised legacy of a laissez faire administration, b) FDR's big programs worsened our problems in the 30s. WPA funding peaked in 1938 - unemployment was 19% in 1939. c) It was actually the winding down of New Deal programs and regulations*, significant WPA direction, funding and rules changes in 1940, that led to 17% growth in the year PRIOR to America being attacked in Pearl Harbor.
*http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/08/25/no-paul-krugman-wwii-did-not-end-the-great-depression/
Other views?
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The economic history of FDR's liberal fascism is very important. May I suggest taking it to the Economics thread in the SCH forum?
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Alderman: Target police, fire contracts to reduce budget deficit
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter fspielman@suntimes.com September 2, 2011 1:02AM
Reprints37ShareTweet
Anthony Beale
Updated: September 2, 2011 2:14AM
Mayor Rahm Emanuel could wring $300 million from the combined $1.8 billion budgets of Chicago’s Police and Fire Departments, in part by dramatically altering union contracts that expire June 30, an influential alderman said Thursday.
“There’s no more sacred cows when the taxpayers are hurting like they are,” said Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former chairman of the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee.
Beale has already infuriated the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) by targeting the $1,800-a-year uniform allowance officers receive as well as duty-availability pay, a $2,800-a-year lump sum that essentially compensates officers for being on call at any time.
Now, he’s going even further.
Instead of having the same number of police officers assigned to every watch and district, Beale is talking about putting officers when and where the crime is. That would allow Emanuel to eliminate 1,400 police vacancies and shrink the police force through attrition.
“I know it’s an unpopular thing to say. ... But if you put the officers where they’re needed vs. where they’re wanted, you could see a reduction,” he said.
“It has to be a conscious effort to make the unpopular decision to say, ‘We’re gonna move officers around to where they’re most needed — not where they’re most wanted.’ If we’re gonna make the entire city safe, we can do it with less officers.”
Instead of doling out annual uniform checks, Beale wants to switch to a voucher system to save as much as $50 million a year. Officers who need shirts, pants and jackets would get reimbursed. Those who don’t would get nothing.
Arguing that overtime is normally tacked on to an officers shift, Beale is also talking about eliminating duty availability pay, reducing disability claims and about eliminating a virtually unheard of policy that allows officers to take as many as 365 sick days every two years.
In the Chicago Fire Department, Beale wants to permanently reduce the minimum staffing requirements for fire apparatus and switch firefighters to an eight-hour shift — and away from the cherished 24-hours-on, 48-hours-off schedule that allows them to work second and third jobs.
Many of the changes proposed by the aldermen would have to be negotiated when police and fire union contracts expire on June 30.
Former Mayor Richard M. Daley threatened repeatedly to switch firefighters to an eight-hour shift in response to a sharp decline in the number of fires, only to back off the demand.
Daley was similarly thwarted in his efforts to relax the requirement that there be five employees on every piece of fire apparatus — the issue that triggered the bitter 1980 firefighters strike. He only managed to increase to 35 the number of times each day when the city is allowed to dip below that requirement.
Tom Ryan, president of the Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2, could not be reached for comment on Beale’s suggestions.
But FOP president Mike Shields ripped the alderman’s proposal.
“The Chicago Police Department today is stretched to the limit. We have had seven police officers killed in the line of duty over the past two years. Now, Ald. Beale wants to give us a pay cut? That is a real insult,” Shields said.
“If the mayor and the city are really serious about saving money, they can save tens of millions per year by cutting the number of aldermen in half and ending all of their ridiculous perks. The mayor asked for suggestions from citizens. That is what the citizens want. They do not want a demoralized and underpaid police force.”
Shields further noted that Beale raised the same concerns about uniforms and duty pay during the last round of contract talks that dragged on for years.
“His positions were soundly rejected,” Shields said.
Emanuel’s communications director, Chris Mather, did not dismiss Beale’s suggestions.
“We have to be honest about the fiscal challenges our city faces and any ideas — be it from the City Council, the FOP or the public — that will help close the budget gap without impacting the safety on streets and in our neighborhoods should be considered,” Mather said.
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier week that he’s been asked to cut $190 million from the Police Department’s $1.3 billion-a-year budget and would only get halfway there by eliminating 1,400 police vacancies.
Beyond the vacancies, there are 730 officers on medical rolls each day and 641 officers on limited desk duty. Emanuel campaigned on a promise to change the sick leave policy.
Then in a totally unrelated story....
6 killed in holiday weekend violence
SUN-TIMES MEDIA WIRE September 4, 2011 2:42AM
ReprintsShareTweetUpdated: September 4, 2011 2:42AM
Six men have been killed in acts of violence on the city’s streets this Labor Day weekend. Since Friday night five men have been fatally shot and one stabbed to death in Chicago.
A man walking on a Southwest Side street was killed in a Saturday afternoon drive-by shooting.
The man — identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office as 38-year-old David Lucas — was shot about 2:50 p.m. in the 6500 block of South California Avenue, police News Affairs Officer Veejay Zala said.
Police said the man was walking when a light-colored four-door vehicle approached, a gunman exited and began shooting then fled in the vehicle.
Lucas, of the 6900 block of South Mozart St., was pronounced dead at 4:01 p.m. at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, the medical examiner’s office said.
Police said he was shot in the chest.
Two men standing on a Garfield Park street were killed in a Saturday afternoon drive-by shooting on the West Side.
The men were standing in the 2900 block of West Adams Street when the driver of a passing car pulled a gun about 12:45 p.m. and shot the men, Zala, citing preliminary information, said.
The medical examiner’s office identified the men as 18-year-old Deandre Boatman and 34-year-old Devonne Polk.
Boatman, of an unidentified home address, was pronounced dead at 1:25 p.m. at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County. Polk, of the 5300 block of West Harrison St., was also taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:22 p.m.
Police described the vehicle as a light-colored two-door car of an unidentified make and model.
Police said both men suffered multiple gunshot wounds.
A gunman walked up to a 32-year-old man in a wheelchair on the West Side early Saturday and opened fire, killing him.
The victim, identified by the medical examiner’s office as Martez Benton, was in a wheelchair when he was shot, according to police News Affairs Officer Michael Sullivan.
About 1:45 a.m., Benton was on the sidewalk in the 5400 block of West Division Street when a male approached him on foot and fired at him, striking him in the neck, head and back, a report from police News Affairs said.
Benton, of in Maywood, was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 2:10 a.m., according to the medical examiner’s office.
One man died and another was injured after they were stabbed in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood early Saturday.
The two were stabbed during a fight about 12:50 a.m. in the 1100 block of West Wrightwood Avenue, police said. A 19-year-old man was stabbed in the chest and abdomen and was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he later died.
Rodney Kyles Jr. of the 5100 block of Roberta Lane in Richton Park was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. after being stabbed in the street at 1132 W. Wrightwood Ave., according to the medical examiner’s Office.
An 18-year-old man was stabbed in the buttocks and was taken in good condition to Illinois Masonic.
A man was shot and killed Friday night while he sat on a park bench on the South Side, police said.
Tyrone Robertson, 20, of the 10000 block of South Wentworth Ave., was pronounced dead at Saint Bernard Hospital at 9:36 p.m. after being shot at 449 W. 72nd St., according to the medical examiner’s Office.
He was sitting on a park bench at Hamilton Park about 8:50 p.m., when shots rang out from behind the fieldhouse and struck him, police News Affairs Officer Laura Kubiak said.
No one was in custody for any of these homicides as of early Sunday.
And yet another totally unrelated story...
The Worst and Best Public Art in Chicago This Year (so far)
It’s already been quite the year for public art in Chicago, even if the year is little more than half over by now. Unfortunately, “quite the year” in this case means a year I would already rather forget.
Millennium Park is undoubtedly the single most important and visible site for public art in Chicago with both permanent and temporary pieces. Opened in 2004, four years behind its slated opening on the millennium, the park hosts two permanent public art works, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, as well as exhibitions of temporary sculpture.
There should be high expectations for the exhibitions in Millennium Park. It’s in the heart of downtown, attracts volumes of foot traffic, and has become quite popular, all of which are good things. This year saw an exhibition from sculptor Yvonne Domenge, following exhibitions from Mark di Suvero in Millennium Park and a group exhibition of contemporary sculpture from China, curated by University of Chicago Art History professor Wu Hung.
Installation view of Yvonne Domenge in Millennium Park, April 2011. Black metal barriers now ring each work.
Domenge’s exhibition presents swirling globes of color and a sinuous abstracted tree, all fabricated out of metal, all painted bright colors. All utterly boring. As I wrote for my review of the exhibition, the aesthetic is as interchangeable as the titles of the work. To top it off, the sculpture is now surrounded by eye-gougingly ugly black metal barriers. Wu Hung’s sculpture show had personality and di Suvero is pretty important, but what we received this year was art that’s boring and lacking ambition. Regrettably this misfire will remain on view through most of 2012 as well.
And then J. Seward Johnson returned with a monstrosity. Now it could rightly be pointed out that this isn't public art; it sits on private land, was privately funded and was privately selected. But that ignores the highly public location, at the beginning of Chicago's über-shopping stretch, the Magnificent Mile, and in the Pioneer Court, nestled next to the Neo-Gothic glory of the Tribune Tower, across from the beaux-arts beauty of the Wrigley Building. Needless to say, like Millennium Park, this location gets a lot of traffic.
Public art doesn’t necessarily have to be on city land or paid for by public money for it to be public, but it does need the public itself, and these locations get the public in droves.
The high-visibility location made the installation of J. Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn, a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt lifted from the iconic pose from The Seven Year Itch (1955), impossible to ignore. Well that, and the fact that you can see her panties if you move around to the rear. This fact has not been lost on many male viewers, causing middle-aged men to act like prepubescent boys. Thanks to Johnson we now have an opportunity close to home for what was dubbed on Twitter as “group perving.” I like the Flickr guy who decided to rate the reactions.
Johnson is a master of kitsch. It’s like he read Clement Greenberg’s definition of it and mistook it for a good thing: “Kitsch is mechanical and it operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations...Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.” Yes, Johnson’s sculpture is all of those. At least Jeff Koons attempts to rescue kitsch, or elevate it. Again I find myself deeply looking forward to the end date of this exhibition, no pun intended.
Chicago is really in debt -- next year's budget already predicts a shortfall of over $600 million. The Mayor is taking suggestions. Literally, that is -- there's a website. I suggest imposing a heavy tariff on all cross-state importing of J. Seward Johnson's work.
There was a bright spot in this year’s public art so far, and it wasn’t big or expensive, in fact, it was dirt-cheap. For the opening night of Chicago’s newest art fair, MDW Fair, artist duo Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger quietly made outlines of their bodies with dirt on the grounds around the fair building. Discovered by groups walking to the fair itself, the outlines were quiet moments of encounter, like the way we experience art in museums, the mere trace of a one-time human presence, now gone. The outlines also wore their impermanence on their sleeve, subject to not only the elements, but also vulnerable to an unsympathetic viewer who could destroy the figures with a mere kick of the foot. They were mortal.
It's unfortunate that two of the best locations in Chicago will be occupied by sculpture that's both bad and not indicative of artists and art in the city. Not everything has to be gigantic and in steel for it to have a big impact; I will remember Miller and Shellabarger’s pieces for far longer than Domenge’s or Johnson’s. It is ironic that in times of tight budgets and penny-pinching, curators and the powers-that-be are bringing in startlingly lackluster artists when they could easily find better ones in their own city if they only looked.
--Abraham Ritchie, Senior Editor ArtSlant living and working in Chicago.
Buddy, Buddy, Buddy.... :-P P.C.
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Frankly, did you read the proposed police/fire changes. They all seem VERY reasonable to me. It's high time...
"Instead of having the same number of police officers assigned to every watch and district, Beale is talking about putting officers when and where the crime is. That would allow Emanuel to eliminate 1,400 police vacancies and shrink the police force through attrition.
“I know it’s an unpopular thing to say. ... But if you put the officers where they’re needed vs. where they’re wanted, you could see a reduction,” he said.
“It has to be a conscious effort to make the unpopular decision to say, ‘We’re gonna move officers around to where they’re most needed — not where they’re most wanted.’ If we’re gonna make the entire city safe, we can do it with less officers.”
Instead of doling out annual uniform checks ($1800.00 to every officer every year), Beale wants to switch to a voucher system to save as much as $50 million a year. Officers who need shirts, pants and jackets would get reimbursed. Those who don’t would get nothing.
Arguing that overtime is normally tacked on to an officers shift, Beale is also talking about eliminating duty availability pay (pay for doing nothing), reducing disability claims and about eliminating a virtually unheard of policy that allows officers to take as many as 365 sick days every two years.
In the Chicago Fire Department, Beale wants to permanently reduce the minimum staffing requirements for fire apparatus and switch firefighters to an eight-hour shift — and away from the cherished 24-hours-on, 48-hours-off schedule that allows them to work second and third jobs."
As for the art being objected to, did you notice:
"Now it could rightly be pointed out that this isn't public art; it sits on private land, was privately funded and was privately selected."
So what's the problem?
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Woof,
And does it dawn on you that crime will increase in the areas that cops are moved out from and the areas that have a lot of crime, already have twice the officers now? My thought is maybe policing isn't the problem but maybe Liberal policies are. What they've basically done is created open block, "dependant's of the State" prisons with cops as guards. In the mean time the greater community is concerned with installing swank sculpture downtown, while dropout rates, teen pregnancy, single parent households, unemployment, drug addiction, crime and murder rates soar just a couple of blocks away. :-P :x :cry:
P.C.
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Prentice, did you read your post?
Did you disagree that only those who need a new uniform should get $1800.00 extra per year? Not everyone every year? For nothing?
Instead of assigning officers evenly, they are suggesting assigning more officers to the trouble areas; make sense?
Take away a $3000.00 "duty pay" for doing nothing; pay just being available for working overtime for which you also of course get paid.
Now officers are allowed 365 sick days in two years! You must be kidding. Who gets that?
As for the Fire Department, don't most people work an 8 hour shift? Then go home? No one else has 24 shifts; who "works" 24 hours on, 48 hours off. I know Fireman in LA who all have second jobs paying them double because of so much time off. That's ridiculous.
Times are tight; there is no reason the Police and Fire Department can't do their share as well.
As for "installing swank sculpture downtown, while dropout rates, teen pregnancy, single parent households, drug addiction, crime and murder rates soar just a couple of blocks away." AGAIN did you read your own post? It sits on PRIVATE land and is PRIVATELY FUNDED and privately selected. If McDonalds for example wants to put an ugly Ronald McDonald statue in front of their restaurant, on their land, what does that have to do with teen pregnancy, single parent households, drug addition, crime ad murder rates" or anything else? YOUR POINT? :?
What "liberal policies" are we talking about :? The city is trying to cut union contracts! Save money! Isn't that a conservative Republican idea?
Well, whose ever idea it is, it's a pretty good idea :-D
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Woof,
My point is they wouldn't be in this mess in the first place if they didn't do the Lib thing and get in bed with the unions to begin with. Police unions, Fire unions, Teacher unions. And if the Lib community that's tired of paying taxes on all of this would turn their attention to actually helping the people in these crime ridden hell holes that they created with their nanny state Lib idealogogy and put people to work instead of handing them a check, instilling personal and moral responsibility, teaching basic math instead of social justice and handing out condoms in schools then maybe just maybe they wouldn't need the police much at all, but no, they're worried about art projects. :-P
P.C.
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Lots of police departments are cutting to the bone. CPD needs to embrace the suck like everyone else.
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Ahhh, then we agree. :-) Sorry, I misunderstood; I thought you posted because you were criticizing the suggested cuts.
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Woof, :-D
My point, (that I didn't do so good a job of making), was that there shouldn't have been anything to cut to begin with.
P.C.
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Woof,
And does it dawn on you that crime will increase in the areas that cops are moved out from and the areas that have a lot of crime, already have twice the officers now? My thought is maybe policing isn't the problem but maybe Liberal policies are.
If you can get the latest issue of Scientific America, they do an article about how New York's crime rate dropped through the floor without addressing poverty, drugs, or anything else. The main thing that made NYC different than other areas with smaller drops in crime was the 9000 or so officers it added, I think in the late 80's. I don't have it in front of me right now.
Anyway, they pointed out that uniformed police targeting hot spots makes a big difference in crime.
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Anyway, they pointed out that uniformed police targeting hot spots makes a big difference in crime.
I agree. But in Chicago, that is what they are trying to do; focus on hot spots.
PC posted his piece in "The cognitive dissonance of the left" but I don't think cutting costs, reigning in unions, focusing on hot spots
is a "leftest" idea. It's just common sense whichever party you belong to.
And sure, 9000 more police is nice, but who has the money...
Cost/benefit analysis.
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Like anything, there is a point of diminishing returns. A well trained, well led police dept. can use the "Compstat" model to great effect, but there must be jails for pre-trial detention, prosecutors, judges, courtrooms, forensic support and prison cells, otherwise targeted enforcement means nothing when the perps just rotate back onto the street because the rest of the system chokes.
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Woof,
And how about making an effort to keep these folks from becoming perps in the first place.
P.C.
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Woof,
And how about making an effort to keep these folks from becoming perps in the first place.
P.C.
Like a "War on poverty"? We tried that, poverty won.
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Woof,
No, like a family values, moral up bringing and responsible citizenship training. So doing more to support families instead of gangs, churches instead of raves and making every 18 year old serve in the military instead of doing time in prison.
P.C.
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I'm not saying that's impossible, but we'd have to get awful authoritarian to pull this off.
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Well, maybe it should be done as it used to be done-- by parents, communities, churches, and so forth.
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Bwahahahahaha!
Parents? The ones that dress their kids in "prosti-tot" fashions? Been to a mall lately?
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I am sure he is invested appropriately:
****Jorge Silva/Reuters; Tom White for the New York Times
“This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers,” said George Soros, the hedge fund investor, citing the lack of a pan-European body to handle an extreme banking crisis.
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As Europe struggles to contain its government debt crisis, the greatest fear is that one of the Continent’s major banks may fail, setting off a financial panic like the one sparked by Lehman’s bankruptcy in September 2008.
European policy makers, determined to avoid such a catastrophe, are prepared to use hundreds of billions of euros of bailout money to prevent any major bank from failing.
But questions continue to mount about the ability of Europe’s banks to ride out the crisis, as some are having a harder time securing loans needed for daily operations.
American financial institutions, seeking to inoculate themselves from the growing risks, are increasingly wary of making new short-term loans in some cases and are pulling back from doing business with their European counterparts — moves that could exacerbate the funding problems of European banks.
Similar withdrawals, on a much larger scale, forced Lehman into bankruptcy, as banks, hedge funds and others took steps to shield their own interests even though it helped set in motion the broader market crisis.
Turmoil in Europe could quickly spread across the Atlantic because of the intertwined nature of the global financial system. In addition, it could further damage the already struggling economies elsewhere.
“This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers,” said George Soros, the hedge fund investor, citing the lack of an authoritative pan-European body to handle a banking crisis of this severity. “That is why the problem is so serious. You need a crisis to create the political will for Europe to create such an authority, but there is still no understanding as to what the authority will do.”
The growing nervousness was reflected in financial markets Tuesday, with stocks in the United States and Europe falling 1 percent and European bank stocks falling 5 percent or more after steep drops in recent weeks.
European bank shares are now at their lowest point since March 2009, when the global banking system was still shaky following Lehman’s collapse.
Investors also continued to seek the safety of United States Treasury bonds, as yields on 10-year bonds briefly touched 1.90 percent, the lowest ever, before closing at 1.98 percent.
Adding to the anxiety, several immediate challenges face European officials as they try to calm markets worried about the debt crisis spreading.
In the coming weeks, the 17 countries of the euro currency zone each could agree to a July deal brokered to bail out Greece again and possibly the region’s ailing banks. Along with getting unanimity, more immediate obstacles could trip up the agreement.
On Wednesday, Germany’s top court upheld the legality of Berlin’s rescue packages, but said any future bailouts for debt-stricken euro zone countries must be approved by a parliamentary panel. On Thursday, officials in Finland are to express their conditions for approving the deal, and other countries may follow with their own demands to ensure their loans will be paid back.
Though they have not succeeded in calming the markets, European leaders have taken a series of steps to avert a Lehman-like failure. New credit lines have been opened by the European Central Bank for institutions that need funds, while the proposed Greek bailout would provide loans to countries that need to recapitalize their banks. In addition, the central bank has been buying up bonds from Italy and Spain, among other countries, to keep interest rates from spiking. Many of these have been bought from European banks, effectively allowing them to shed troubled assets for cash.
While the problems in smaller countries like Greece and Ireland are not new, in recent weeks the concerns have spread to banking giants in countries like Germany and France that are crucial to the functioning of the global financial system and are closely linked with their American counterparts. What is more, worries have surfaced about the outlook for Italy, whose debt dwarfs that of other smaller troubled borrowers like Greece.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that two-year Treasury bonds briefly touched a record low yield of 1.90 percent. It was actually 10-year Treasuries that hit this record.****
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Not a very good piece of writing in my opinion, but , , ,
Humberto Fontova
Jane Fonda's Crush on Che Guevara
9/7/2011 | Email Humberto Fontova | Columnist's Archive Sign-Up A new biography of Jane Fonda by Patricia Bosworth reveals a lifelong lament by the famous actress: “My biggest regret” Fonda is quoted during a “feminist consciousness-raising session,” according to the book’s account, “is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.”
In case you read Townhall, Ms Fonda, here’s some consolation, honey: “I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)” recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girls would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”
“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.
Gallo, as you might have guessed, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who terminate carnal encounters prematurely.
Alas, how the feminist sessionists reacted to Ms Fonda’s above-mentioned confession, and thus, the “raising of their consciousness,” is not mentioned in the book. But we can guess. After all, feminist swooning over Cuban Stalinism started early, and by the feminist movement’s very founders.
“Not only is (the Cuban Revolution) a great success but an example for the rest of the world!” gushed Simon De Beauvoir in March 1960. Her bellhop, Jean Paul Sartre, was not to be outdone. He crowned Che Guevara “the era’s most perfect man.” These “intellectual” hyperventilations 1960 set the tone for future ones of everyone from Maxine Waters’ to Jimmy Carter and from Ted Turner’s to George Mc Govern’s, and from Barbara Walters’ to Andrea Mitchell’s.
“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)
Alas, Cuban feminists view the Cuban Revolution somewhat differently from Hollywood, Georgetown and Manhattan feminists. When feminist icon Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful!” dozens of Cuban feminists suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms Barbara Walters.
“They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”
“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”
“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls prisoner Polita Grau.
The gallant regime co-founded by Che Guevara jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, etc. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.
Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”
Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006 the Washington Post gushed that: “she was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S.
This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life “for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.
On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro and Che’s Russian-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet –style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.
Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the Washington Post’s dutifully transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from same.
In 1962, a Cuban Catholic nun named Aida Rosa Perez was overheard in a private conversation saying things about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara similar (but milder) than those Jane Fonda and Joy Behar trumpet about Republicans. Sister Rosa Perez was sentenced to 12 years at hard labor. Two years into her, while toiling in the sun inside Castro's Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack.
The Cuban Archive project headed Mrs Maria Werlau has fully documented the firing squad executions of 11 Cuban women in the early days of the regime. Another 219 women died from various brutalities and tortures while in prison. The Taliban has nothing on the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. So I trust you’ll excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda as a trifle overblown. And for many of them, though it’s utterly ignored by the MSM, the feminist struggle continues.
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Jane Fonda's Crush on Che Guevara
Just more evidence that leftism is a mental disorder.
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Regarding the Krugman post on the 911 forum, must love Crafty's title, 'Krugman is Scum' and Krugman's own ending punchline: "I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons."
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=2231.msg54131#msg54131
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Enough is enough. Personally I am fed up:
***3-Year-Olds Branded “Racist,” “Homophobic” Put In Government Database
Kids’ future careers jeopardized by committing hate crime of saying the word “gay”
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Over 30,000 British schoolchildren, some as young as three, have had their names registered on a government database and branded “racist” or “homophobic” for using playground insults, infractions that could impact their future careers.
The shocking figures were disclosed after civil liberties group the Manifesto Club made a Freedom of Information Act request which betrayed the fact that kids who used petty jibes are now being treated as thought criminals by education authorities.
34,000 incidents of “racism” in total were reported for the year 2009-2010, with nursery school toddlers as young as three being put on a state database for using the words “gay” and “lesbian”. One child who called another “broccoli head” was also reported to authorities. Other cases included a child who used the word “gaylord,” while another who told a teacher “this work is gay,” was also added to the thought crime database.
The majority of the reported cases involved primary school children.
“The record can be passed from primaries to secondaries or when a pupil moves between schools,” reports the Daily Mail.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“And if schools are asked for a pupil reference by a future employer or a university, the record could be used as the basis for it, meaning the pettiest of incidents has the potential to blight a child for life.”
Schools are being pressured to report such incidents to authorities and face punishments for not doing so under anti-bullying policies.
This is a clear example of how hate crime laws have brazenly been hijacked by the state to get children institutionalized on criminal databases at an early age. This is about the state dictating what your child can think and say – it’s the thought police on steroids.
Orwell talked about the state reducing language via Newspeak in his book 1984. By eliminating the very words that come out of children’s mouths and punishing them for thinking certain thoughts, all critical thinking is ultimately abolished, and Big Brother assumes the supreme power to dictate reality – a dictatorship over our very minds.
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EXTREMISTS ON PARADE
Protesters begin 'Day of Rage' against capitalism
Demonstration plans to 'occupy' Wall Street, camp out for months if necessary
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Posted: September 17, 2011
2:13 pm Eastern
© 2011 WND
Protesters at "Occupy Wall Street" event
Social media networks fomenting a nationwide "Day of Rage" protest are reporting that hundreds have gathered in New York City's financial district to protest "Wall Street's corporate plunder."
According to a Bloomberg report, organizers had originally hoped as many as 20,000 would gather in the financial district and "occupy" it through tent cities and civil disobedience, if necessary, for months.
As a loosely formed conglomerate of Twitter, Facebook and online activists – similar to the Arab spring protesters that have been toppling governments in Africa – clearly identifying the goals and tactics of the protests is nearly impossible.
According to the website Adbusters, a group promoting the demonstration, the goal of "#OccupyWallStreet" is to get President Barack Obama to establish a commission to end "the influence money has over our representatives in Washington." The group advocates camping out in Manhattan for months if needed to get the message across.
But the USDayofRage.org website warns against setting up tents and describes the purpose of the protest this way: "Wall Street is a huge contributor to the political machine, which in turns enables Wall Street's corporate plunder of our nation. Both the Democratic and Republican parties set the bankster agenda because of the money.
"Bought by hard and soft dollars, disloyal, incompetent and wasteful interests have usurped our nation's civil and military power, spawning a host of threats to liberty and national security," the website continues. "We demand satisfaction for the wrongs done to our nation and its people."
New York City's cable news network NY1 spoke with a trio of protesters about the purpose of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations:
"CEOs, the biggest corporations and the wealthy are taking too much from our country, and I think it's time for us to take back," said one protester.
"What I hope to accomplish is that people who have gotten in trouble on Wall Street actually pay an equal share for what they've done," said another.
"The difference between this and other protests of the past is that we're not leaving, and we're going to stay as long as it takes to accomplish something," said a third.
The protest aims to take root around the world.
Activists are advertising on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter for the "Day of Rage" to begin with the "occupation" of Wall Street and continue with protests across the nation in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security further issued a bulletin expecting related protests in the financial districts of Madrid, Milan, London and Paris, as well.
As WND reported, advertisements claim the protests at Wall Street and nationwide will be "non-violent." However, the official website provides resources, including videos and detailed written instructions, for protesters to engage in "civil disobedience."
The resources provided include instructions on how to resist police arrest and disrupt court hearings.
This week, the 'Day of Rage' Twitter feed posted links to what it called "nonviolent civil disobedience training talks."
Similar instructions are provided on the website of an affiliated organization, which calls itself "Occupy Wall Street" and is also involved in planning the Sept. 17 protests.
Live Twitter feeds from protesters indicate police presence in Manhattan has been heavy, but no violence has yet been reported.
"Lots of police and barricades," reports Twitter user Ethar El-Katatney, "but strangely quiet."
The use of the term "Day of Rage" recalls the "Days of Rage" organized in the 1960s by the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization co-founded by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, close associates for years of President Obama.
Numerous radicals, many with direct ties to Obama, are linked to planned protests and other activism scheduled for the coming months.
In March, ACORN founder Wade Rathke announced what he called "days of rage in 10 cities around JP Morgan Chase." Rathke was president of an SEIU local in New Orleans.
The planned Sept. 17 protest appears to be the culmination of Rathke's efforts.
Those efforts are being organized by Stephen Lerner, an SEIU board member who reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times.
Lerner is considered one of the most capable organizers of the radical left. He recently organized the SEIU's so-called Justice for Janitors campaign.
As part of his planned protests, Lerner called for "a week of civil disobedience, direct action all over the city."
His stated aim is to "destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement."
In an interview about the planned protests, Lerner outlined his goals: "How do we bring down the stock market? How do we bring down their bonuses? How do we interfere with their ability to, to be rich?"
---------------------------------------- P.C.
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I would add though it is occasionally right, WND is IMHO a frequently irresponsible site. As a general rule, anything there should be crosss-checked.
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Rush L was pointing this out today. The woman running for Senate in Mass. against Brown. When did the Democrat party get hyjacked by total Marxists? This truly is unbelievable that we have a candidate with the Democrat party with these views. This used to be the stuff of socialist party candidates who no one ever hears about. Now it is mainstream. While FDR, JFK, and LBJ were big on social programs I don't think they were anything like this:
http://realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/21/elizabeth_warren_there_is_nobody_in_this_country_who_got_rich_on_his_own.html
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First, catch the guy's performance here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yZZ710w6GXI
==============================
The Blog
US Video: Liberal law student chokes on silver spoon in (false) protest
.
The latest anti-business viral video burning up the liberal blogosphere today seems heart-wrenching… that is, until you do your homework.
Robert Stephens graduated from Carleton College (average cost: $42,942/year) in 2010 and now studies law at The George Washington University Law School (average cost: $70,449/year). His father has a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees; his mother also has a master’s degree. Only in America could a kid have been blessed with so much… and only in America could he still claim to be a victim. America’s capitalist society has apparently leveled a grave injustice against his family and Robert will not stand for it.
Robert, right, with a friend on the GWU campus (Image: Facebook)
Stephens — who identifies his personal political philosophy as Bolivian socialism — made a trip to New York City this weekend to participate in the “Days of Rage” march on Wall Street. He was arrested Saturday when he refused police requests to get up and out of the way of traffic in the street.
In his emotional “rage,” Stephens told the sympathetic Socialist/Marxist/Anarchist crowd how an eeeeeevil Wall Street bank had taken his parents’ home away from them:
Attempts to contact Robert to find out exactly what grave injustices he and his family have suffered have gone unanswered. In the meantime, sympathetic comments on both Robert’s Facebook page and the YouTube video are also… unsettling:
(Full disclosure: I attended GWU as an undergrad and, to help make sure my mortgage gets paid every month, I continue to work at the law school as a part-time employee on the weekends.)
Our friend Robert and his woeful tale have quickly become darlings of the liberal blogosphere and the mainstream media (and Iran’s Tehran Times!). Here he is in a picture posted at Buzzfeed — an image that perfectly captures him utilizing the biggest tool in the left-wing’s arsenal: the media.
Caption on this photo: “Protested (sic) falls to his knees in tears in front of Chase Bank crying – this is the bank that took my parents’ home.”
According to the Daily Kos, Robert should be commended as “a patriot” for spelling out the reason people are protesting. “If you can watch it without being affected, you are as heartless as Dick Cheney,” the site notes.
There’s just one problem: Robert Stephens’ story is (surprise!) completely bogus.
Phone inquiries into the county property records & taxpayer services office reveal that the Stephens family home is not and never has been in foreclosure, that property taxes had been paid in full this year and the remaining balance on their mortgage for the half-million dollar home is less than one year’s worth of tuition+fees at their son’s law school.
The nail in this empty protest‘s coffin is a delightful phone conversation I just had with Robert’s mother, Marquita, where she admitted Chase Bank indeed was not “taking” their home from them. Instead, due to a recent “reduction in income,” they’ve decided to hold a “short sale.”
When I asked Mrs. Stephens if she and her husband planned to stay in their suburban St. Paul, Minn., surroundings after the sale, she told me they weren’t too keen on the idea. The area is “a bit too conservative,” she said.
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First, catch the guy's performance here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yZZ710w6GXI
==============================
The Blog
US Video: Liberal law student chokes on silver spoon in (false) protest
**What a douche! As to be expected, it doesn't have to be true for the left, as long as it feeeeeels true to them. Facts are just a construct they choose to ignore.
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October 1, 2011 7:00 A.M.
‘Soft’ Nation
There’s nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flatline jobs market, and regulatory sclerosis.
‘The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”
He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at the New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”
If you’re a tenured columnist at the New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’ Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.
But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum: “Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multi-trillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?
Hard statism is usually murmured in soft, soothing, beguiling terms: Regulation is about cleaner air, healthier restaurants, safer children’s toys. Sounds so nice. But federal regulation alone sucks up 10 percent of GDP. That’s to say, Americans take the equivalent of the Canadian economy and toss it down the toilet just in complying with federal paperwork. Obama and the great toxic alphabet soup of federal regulation — EPA, OSHA, SEC, DHSS — want to take that 10 percent and crank it up to 12, 14, 15 percent.
Who could have foreseen that? The most dismal thing about that David Brooks column conceding that “yes, I’m a sap . . . remember, I’m a sap . . . as you know, I’m a sap” was the headline his New York Times editors chose to append to it: “Obama Rejects Obamaism.”
In other words, even in a column remorselessly cataloguing how one of its smartest smart guys had been repeatedly suckered by Obama on jobs, on Medicare, on deficits, on tax reform, etc., the New York Times chose to insist that there is still something called “Obamaism” — prudent, centrist, responsible — that for some perverse reason the man for whom this political philosophy is named insists on betraying, 24/7, week in, month out, spring, summer, autumn, tax season. You can set your clock by Obama’s rejection of “Obamaism.”
That’s because there’s no such thing. There never was. “Obamaism” was the Emperor’s new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president.
In part, this is a natural extension of an ever more conformist and unrepresentative establishment’s view of where “the center” is. On issues from abortion to climate change, a Times man or Hollywood activist or media professor’s notion of “centrism” is well to the left of where American opinion is. That’s one reason why a supposedly “center-right” nation has wound up regulated into sclerosis, drowning in debt, and embarking on its last decade as the world’s leading economy. But in the case of Obama the chasm between soft, seductive, politico-media “centrism” and hard, grim reality is too big to bridge, and getting wider all the time.
You would think this might prompt some sober reflection from an American mainstream press dying in part because of its dreary ideological conformity. After all, a key reason why 53 percent voted for a man who was not, in Tina Brown’s word, “ready” is that Tina and all her pals assured us he was. Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing, a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That’s what America’s elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak indictment of contemporary notions of “accomplishment.” Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.
Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as an archetypal exemplar of the “American business community” rather than as an especially well-connected crony. Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still-underreported Solyndra “green jobs” scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It’s hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader. But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the “Fast and Furious” investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels. It is alleged that the administration chose to facilitate the sale of American weapons to crime kingpins south of the border in order to support a case for gun control north of the border. Evidence keeps piling up: The other day, a letter emerged from ATF supervisor David Voth authorizing Special Agent John Dodson to buy Draco pistols to sell directly to known criminals. Over 200 Mexicans are believed to have been killed by “Fast and Furious” weapons — that’s to say, they were killed by a U.S.-government program.
Doesn’t the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Doesn’t Newsweek or CBS News? Isn’t Obamaism with a body count sufficiently eye-catching even for the U.S. press? Or, three years in, are the enablers of Obama still so cynical that they accept it as a necessary price to pay for “change you can believe in”? You can’t make a hopenchange omelette without breaking a couple hundred Mexican eggs?
Obama says America has “gotten a little soft.” But there’s nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flatline jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, “green jobs” multi-billion-dollar squandering — and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, “centrist” government is hard and cruel. Only the media coverage is soft-focus.
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All true, but also worth noting is how bad the Republican offering was. For example, just what do you think McCain would have done for/to the economy?
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"All true, but also worth noting is how bad the Republican offering was. For example, just what do you think McCain would have done for/to the economy?"
I am no McCain fan, but he would have been less than half as bad on economics. He would not obviously have pursued Pelosi-ObamaCare which is the number one tax and regulatory burden sitting out there killing off hiring and growth. He would floundered through half of a stimulus, he would have taken half this long to get good economic advice.
His approval rating would be worse now than Obama because of the pounding of stories about a bad economy and 3 wars even though unemployment might be at 7% instead of 9% and it would now be the Republicans losing seats and facing a bad election cycle for an economy half as bad.
Ironically, things would be better but our prospects for the future would be worse. Obama would have an 80% approval as opposition leader if he had lost to McCain and Palin, would be a shoe-in for 2012 and we would still have this train wreck coming.
As it happened for the last 4 Presidents, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama, bad leadership strengthened their opposition more than their own agenda.
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Very good points Doug. I'd add that Obama, like Carter helps to remind people why giving the left power is such a bad idea.
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God Bless Steve Jobs. He was a hero to people from all political stripes who love the innovations and value his company and products brought to their lives. Curious, what leftist government program made all that he accomplished possible? Certainly not the pro-abortion agenda. Jobs was born an unwanted child to an unmarried couple and was successfully adopted.
State-centric economies never make creative advances like the ones Jobs pioneered to market. The profits that Jobs drove were a measure of the enterprising impact he had on our civilization, not a subtraction from it.
Personal computers, sound systems and cellphones have amazing, how important are those? Someone over at central planning must have thought those products and industries were not crucial and just allowed them to run free. What was the result? Consistent declines in prices year after year over decades combined with unfathomable advances in performance, quality, features, usability and value. Meanwhile over at all industries we designate as crucial such as healthcare, transportation, agriculture, education, housing, banking, you name it, we take the opposite, failed approach. Staffers of subcommittees in Washington are meeting as we speak to regulate out the next potential innovation.
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I think we should have the US Post Office take over Apple. Save the USPS unions and make Apple even better!
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/10/09/dem_congressman_keith_ellison_regulations_create_jobs.html
US Unemployment was at 4.4% in between Nov 2006 when the Pelosi-Reid-Obama-Hillary-Biden congress was elected to take the majorty and Jan. 2007 when Catholic-raised Keith Ellison from North Minneapolis first solemnly put his hand on the Koran and swore to hold up the constitution to the best of his ability so help him Allah.
Neither Jack Webb nor Johnny Carson, both trained professionals, could keep a straight face through the Copper Clapper Caper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVkZZsS-66c, but Ellison signed on with an agenda of economic destruction, watched unemployment more than double under his policies of unprecedented increases in business strangulating regulation and then look the camera in the eye today to a very well framed question about regulations killing jobs and say... no, he thinks regulations get companies moving with even more hiring because regulations inspire companies to get going with compliance efforts. I swear to God, that is what he said - it's on the video - and that is what he believes. The saddest part of it is that there is a 100% chance he will be reelected in 2012 no matter the unemployment rate.
The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVkZZsS-66c
The BLS data and chart: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
(http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/LNS14000000_198247_1318189710639.gif)
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/10/pro-obama-working-families-party-seeks-advertises-for-professional-activists-to-fight-wall-street/
FAR LEFT Advertises on Craig’s List for Paid Activists to Fight Wall Street
Posted by Jim Hoft on Monday, October 10, 2011, 5:06 AM
We all knew this was happening. We just didn’t think they’d be so open about it.
In case you had any doubt that these Wall Street protests were being manufactured by the far left, there’s this–
The pro-Obama Working Families Party of New York posted this advertisement on Craig’s list. They are looking for energetic progressives to help them to fight to hold Wall Street accountable. And the pay is $350-$650 a week depending on the responsibility and length of time of staff.
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"And the pay is $350-$650 a week depending on the responsibility and length of time of staff."
I keep wondering every time I see these losers on TV how they can afford to sit around for weeks on end yet they claim poverty.
Lets see. They are already getting unemployment, they are sponging off their parents, they are selling drugs, on federal disability,
stealing, or are independently wealthy, retired.
I don't know. You tell me.
I agree with the point (of some of them) about some unfairness in our system. The rest are just there for the "experience", its "coolness", to meet girls and guys, push for free doles.
This is the group of people who no matter what no matter when or forever will always vote Democrat.
You see them at all Democratic political rallies. I remember going to a Bill Clinton rally in Florida. I was probably one of a handful of Republicans. The rest looked similar to this crowd.
It is the handout you owe me entitlement "nation".
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**"It's just like the TEA party!" (Insert leftist talking head here)
Sex, drugs and hiding from the law at Wall Street protests
By LACHLAN CARTWRIGHT and BOB FREDERICKS
Last Updated: 11:18 AM, October 10, 2011
Posted: 3:28 AM, October 10, 2011
The criminals are crashing the party.
Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street, The Post has learned.
“I got warrants. I’m running from the law,” boasted Dave, 24, a scrawny, unshaven miscreant in filthy clothes from Stamford, Conn. “I’m not even supposed to be here, but it’s as good a spot as any to hide.”
Wanted for burglary, the drug-addled fugitive said some of his hard-partying pals clued him in that the protest was a good place to be fed, get wasted and crash.
Lachlan Cartwright
(http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2011/10/10/news/web_photos/10.1n.007.wallstreet.C--300x300.jpg)
IN PLAIN SIGHT: A protest attendee named Dave (above) relaxes in Zuccotti Park, where he said he’s been getting high while running from warrants.
Riyad Hasan
Meanwhile, a crowd yesterday learns to pick open handcuffs.
“I’ve been smoking and drinking in here for eight days now,” said Dave, booze on his breath and his eyes bloodshot as he lay sprawled on a tattered sheet of cardboard. “I need to get some methadone. Every day, I wake up, and I’m f--ked up.”
Drugs can be easy to score -- a Post reporter was offered pot for $15 and heroin for $10.
They’ve already fueled at least one violent incident, when a wasted nut job socked a medical volunteer in the face before others hauled the attacker away.
“We are trying to keep everything calm and work with the police, but there are some crazies in here,” said Paul, a security volunteer.
“The other day, there was a guy charging people $5 to use the McDonald’s bathroom. He was on LSD or high on something.”
But the creeps can’t give a bad name to the group’s overall anti-greed message, protesters said.
A coalition of religious leaders and their followers yesterday marched from Washington Square Park to the encampment with a makeshift golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street bull, leading protesters in such spirituals as “We Shall Overcome” and “Down by the Riverside.”
The crowd chanted, “We are the 99 percent!” -- referring to the millions of Americans not among the top 1 percent of the country’s earners -- along with priests, rabbis and imams.
“You are fulfilling the words of the prophet Isaiah. You have thrown off the yoke. Occupy, occupy, occupy!” shouted Warren Goldstein, chair of the history department at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
The golden calf sat atop a brown platform that marchers carried on their shoulders. On the platform were the words “false idol.”
The clerics -- some holding signs that read, “Jesus is with the 99%” -- said they were there to support the movement.
“You have woken up all of us ... We will stand with you in every city, every state and every country across this globe,” said Michael Ellick, minister at Judson Memorial Church near Washington Square.
Hundreds gathered around philosopher Slavoj Zizek as he gave a speech and answered questions.
“They tell us we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are,” he said. “We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself.”
Some protesters have said that in addition to being against Wall Street greed, they also are for a withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and more help for Haiti.
But as the protest ground on for a 23rd day, it was evident that there were challenges.
Zuccotti Park smelled like an open sewer -- with people urinating and defecating in public.
And some couples have taken advantage of the free condoms distributed by organizers to do the nasty in full view of other protesters.
“It kinda makes me think of what Woodstock must have been like,” said one protester, Sarah, 19 from the Upper West Side.
“I haven’t hooked up with any guys ... but one of my friends did have sex in a tarp with a guy last night.”
The free chow offered to protesters was boosting the crowd.
“People say they are here for the cause, but the real reason is the free food,” quipped Cameron, 26, of Jersey City.
“On my third day, they had smoked salmon with cream cheese. You know how much smoked salmon is a pound? Sixteen dollars. I eat better here than I do with my parents!”
Many of the protesters said they are here for the long haul -- and predicted trouble if cops try to clear the park.
“When the weather starts getting cold, we’re already talking about bringing tents in here,” said Robert, 47, of Pennsylvania. “I’m not going anywhere.
“I lost my job of 22 years, and someone has gotta pay,’’ he said. “Civil disobedience is something we may need to keep this site occupied. If everyone does it at once, the cops won’t be able to do anything.”
Three protesters took their sleeping bags and tried to camp out on Wall Street near Nassau Street last night. When police told them to move, one demonstrator, Zachary Miller, 20, from California, was arrested for disorderly conduct, cops said.
At one point yesterday, a speaker from Washington, DC, told protesters how to break out of zip ties and handcuffs in case they get collared.
The protest vet, Ryan Clayton, 30, demonstrated how use a bobby pin to spring the cuffs open -- while claiming he was “not encouraging people to break out of restraints.”
Additional reporting by Hannah Rappleye and Andy Campbell
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/it_nyc_lam_sterdam_bmE4vlV5aDUWhBRv9IbaiK
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"Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped"
Well, what were drugs doing there to start with? Who is giving the "free" food. Nothing is free. Who is paying for this?
As though the people who began this noble, just, righteous, cause were all just a bunch of saints and then some bad elements just happen to show up later. Oh I get it.
As usual the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill for this mess and not to say anything about the overtime for city employees.
I assume the ones who can ring the register up top increase their pay just before they retire.
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"Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped"
Well, what were drugs doing there to start with? Who is giving the "free" food. Nothing is free. Who is paying for this?
As though the people who began this noble, just, righteous, cause were all just a bunch of saints and then some bad elements just happen to show up later. Oh I get it.
As usual the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill for this mess and not to say anything about the overtime for city employees.
I assume the ones who can ring the register up top increase their pay just before they retire.
Drugs must be a gateway to generators!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/start-ups-fund-wall-st-150000747.html
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"Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped"
Well, what were drugs doing there to start with? Who is giving the "free" food. Nothing is free. Who is paying for this?
As though the people who began this noble, just, righteous, cause were all just a bunch of saints and then some bad elements just happen to show up later. Oh I get it.
As usual the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill for this mess and not to say anything about the overtime for city employees.
I assume the ones who can ring the register up top increase their pay just before they retire.
Drugs must be a gateway to generators!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/start-ups-fund-wall-st-150000747.html
Typical leftist trustafarians. "I hate capitalism, where do I charge my Ipad"?
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God I only hope we run this guy out of office for good. It just keeps getting worse:
Apologies Not Accepted
Posted 10/11/2011 06:29 PM ET
In November 2009, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to bow to Japan's emperor. View Enlarged Image
Leadership: Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one?
The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama's State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to "express its condolences" to his family.
Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30. We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us.
It's yet another part of the world apology tour that began with Obama taking the oath of office to protect and defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, something he immediately felt sorry for.
One stop on his tour was Prague in August 2009. There he spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure.
Another stop on the tour was in Japan, where Obama in November 2009 bowed to the emperor, something no American president had ever done. It could have been worse if plans to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima to apologize for winning the war with the atom bombs had come to pass.
A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan's Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that "the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a 'nonstarter.'"
The Japanese feared the apology would be exploited by anti-nuclear groups and those opposed to the defensive alliance between Japan and the U.S.
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CCP, That is an amazing story. The USA under Obama wanted to apologize to Japan for using force to end WWII - and Japan wouldn't allow it. Unbelievable!
I wonder if the Obamites regret using force against Hitler as well. Maybe my dad will still be charged aiding and abetting the American military effort in Germany during WWII.
Did we even try to sit down and talk with them first?
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Is there a URL for that?
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http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/587698/201110111829/Apologies-Not-Accepted.htm
Actual cable:
http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09TOKYO2033
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This psychiatrist calls W Bush "distrubed" but Obama "troubled". The choice of words right there exposes him. Of course this guy did his psych training at Harvard. He states Brock is seeking a father figure calling Rev Wright and that. Rev. Wright "disappointed him". Does he mention that he only "disappointed" him when he had to throw him under the bus for selfish political gain. He didn't seem disappointed for the twenty plus years he sat in his church. And, LOL he claims Brock picked Biden because he is still seeking that father figure.
I lke this one, "Take for example Obama's earlier willingness to compromise with Republicans, upsetting his liberal base".
I don't know what planet this guy lives on but I never heard any real offers of compromise. The Dems love to promote him as a compromiser when the rest of us know that is false.
Or this statement, "The result is that he is overly protective of his own nuclear family, desires greatly to see national unity, and yet harbors anger that he took out on bin Laden."
What does he mean "overly protective of his family"? I don't see any difference from any other President. "Desires to see national unity"? What planet is this guy on? This is the most devisive President in my lifetime.
And, "anger he took out on Bin Laden"? What? I think this shrink needs a shrink. The only anger this guy takes out is on America.
I would love to see a far brighter Harvard psychiatrist tear this analysis apart: Charles Krauthammer. I wonder how Charles survived Harvard and is still so normal. Well I guess a few grads are. W graduated from Harvard Business and OReilly graduated from there.
*******US News & World Report Shrink: Obama Suffers 'Father Hunger'
October 14, 2011 RSS Feed Print The abandonment by his father when he was an infant and by his stepfather at age 10 has left President Obama with a "father hunger" that influences everything from why he distances himself from pushy supporters, to his strong desire to compromise and bring people together, to his aggressive campaign to kill Osama bin Laden, says a psychoanalytic book out next week. In Obama on the Couch, George Washington University professor Justin Frank also reveals that Obama has spent much of his life seeking out father figures, but most, like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Vice President Biden, have disappointed him. "Obama searched for a father, for someone to relate to who could help him—a strong man who knew what to do," Frank writes.
This is Frank's second psychoanalytical book about a president. While a sympathetic look at Obama, it follows Bush on the Couch, a sharply critical analysis that suggested then President George W. Bush was disturbed. In that book, he predicted that someone like Obama—"completely different," "someone not ... white"—would succeed Bush. What the nation ended up with, however, is "an almost tragic figure," Frank writes.
The general theme is that Obama has been affected both by being biracial and by the abandonment of his two dads during his childhood. The result is that he is overly protective of his own nuclear family, desires greatly to see national unity, and yet harbors anger that he took out on bin Laden.
Take for example Obama's earlier willingness to compromise with Republicans, upsetting his liberal base. Here Frank cites the negative influence of his parents, especially his mom, who often pressed him to do better in school. "He hates being pushed by supporters who want him to make good on his promises of universal healthcare and care for the poor, something that represents his mother and how she pushed him to study harder," Frank writes. And when he ignores his base, he is emulating his father, expressing annoyance but not worried they will desert him.
As for bin Laden, Frank writes that Obama's inner anger emerged: "He was able to pursue his action against bin Laden in part because bin Laden offered a displacement figure for Obama's rage toward his own parents."
Frank also calls Obama scared of the type of radical change he advocated in 2008. "He wants to be the father who makes change safe, the person he has waited for his entire life."
Check out: our editorial cartoons on President Obama.******
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(http://www.exurbanleague.com/Portals/0/1_percent.jpg)
President Goldman Sachs
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"Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped"
Well, what were drugs doing there to start with? Who is giving the "free" food. Nothing is free. Who is paying for this?
As though the people who began this noble, just, righteous, cause were all just a bunch of saints and then some bad elements just happen to show up later. Oh I get it.
As usual the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill for this mess and not to say anything about the overtime for city employees.
I assume the ones who can ring the register up top increase their pay just before they retire.
Drugs must be a gateway to generators!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/start-ups-fund-wall-st-150000747.html
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKzGbgSe8lg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Putting those generators to use, I guess.
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(note to moderator, we need spelling/typo correction to the topic title)
I wonder who others think are the opinion leaders of the left. I have identified Paul Krugman and Robert Reich but both are so easily discredited. Today Reich writes:
"Flat tax a flat-out fraud
Robert Reich, Sunday, October 30, 2011 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/30/IN9J1LM1E3.DTL&type=printable
...
"The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich." [Straw. He throws all plans into one pile and then criticizes all for defects of one. I normally stop reading and quoting at the first lie, but there is so much more.]
"The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that Cain's flat-tax plan (the only one that's been set out in any detail) would lower the after-tax incomes of poor households (incomes below $30,000) by 16 to 20 percent." [That is, if you have no knowledge or understanding of embedded taxes.]
"Meanwhile, 95 percent of households with more than $1 million of income would get an average tax cut of $487,300." [Complete drivel. It measures in dollars while assuming no change in economic behavior whatsoever to a drastic change in the marginal rate. No one is that dumb. Plus he seamlessly and deceptively changed from calling a tax rate a tax back to measuring in it n dollars. If we measure in dollars and admit lower rates bring more income, then that figure is bunk. The rich will actually pay more dollars by any measure of previous similar rate cuts.] "And capital gains (a major source of income for the very rich) would be tax-free." [An honest person might say: that income would only get overtaxed once under the proposed plan.]
All flat-tax proposals benefit the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: Today's tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percent of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. [Is he intentionally calling President Obama and Warren Buffets bald faced liars?]
"The truth is, the current tax code treats everyone the same." [How come anything that starts 'the truth is - is a lie? Robert Reich, Have you READ the current tax code; it doesn't take 72,000 pages to treat people and different sources of income the same! Even if you settle for 3 brackets or 5. This could have gone under Tax Policy but I am really writing about leftist dishonesty and wondering if someone could point out an honest liberal for me to read.]
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Question to Rbt Reich, is everything in your world really all 'us vs. them', lie at all costs to win more, or should we also be trying to grow our economy and raise revenues to pay our massive spending?
Perry's plan puts ZERO tax on a family of four up to $50,000!! while the same people mostly support spending almost 4 trillion a year. What in God's name would you need to call it fair?
Here is a flat tax: 200 million adults spend almost 4 trillion dollars. Send in $20,000 per adult American, or face prison for tax evasion, or spend less and pay your share of that, and private business matters remain private from government audit. That is a flat tax and everything else is a progressive compromise. If everyone paid their share, that would cure our spending problem, our wall street bailout problem and most other problems in a big f'ing hurry.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/10/a-unified-theory-of-left-wing-causes.php
Posted on October 29, 2011 by Scott Johnson in Liberals
A unified theory of left-wing causes
Steven Den Beste comments on Steve Hayward’s population bomb post:
Isn’t it interesting that no matter what the current global crisis is, according to leftists, the solution is always the same: a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite, and mass transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations.
That’s what they want to do about global warming. It’s what they wanted to do about overpopulation. It’s what they wanted to do about endangered species.
Yeah, I think Jonah Goldberg wrote a good book with this thesis.
JOHN adds: Bear in mind, too, that the remedy for global cooling, when that was feared during the 1970s, was the same as for global warming, overpopulation, etc.
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Even the solution for government programs gone bad is yet another government program. Over-regulate auto manufacturing to the point of bankruptcy -> nationalize it. Fannie and Freddie and CRAprogram -> No problem: order a foreclosure moratorium and pass Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) . Health care costs gone mad over govt mandates -> Affordable Health Care Act. TARP-1 failed -> Tarp-2. No new jobs with Stimulus I -> Stimulus II. (I could go on!)
My question is this:
What if the solution to next thing to go horribly wrong in this country really is a government program?
HOW WILL WE KNOW ?!?!
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Long story at the link. Short answers from the left: the stimulus was too small - and Bernancke was too cautious.
In my attempt to add balance to economic coverage on the forum, I try to link some deep thoughts from the left. This is the young superstar left blogger/columnist for the Washington Post reviewing and critiquing the Ron Suskind Book on Obama and Wall Street, offering both his own views and those of the author. It makes no sense to me, but have a try at it if you want: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/obamas-flunking-economy-real-cause/ Excerpts:
Suskind’s story goes something like this: in 2008, Obama was presented with an economic crisis of astonishing severity and complexity. In the beginning, he showed himself to be unexpectedly prepared to deal with it, both intellectually and temperamentally. His self-assurance and personal magnetism attracted a variety of impressive and able advisers, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, UBS America chief Robert Wolf, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and former SEC Chairman William Donaldson.
But as “the severity of the crisis bore down on him,” Obama found himself leaning toward a different sort of adviser—safer, more predictable. He wanted people who knew Washington, and knew how to get things done. The “bold visions of the campaign season had meanwhile resolved into the serious, often risk-averse business of actually governing,” writes Suskind. “In the midst of a battering economic storm, it no longer seemed like the right time to be making waves.”
And no single adviser better encapsulates Suskind’s criticisms, and the contradictions in his argument, than Larry Summers. Even more than Geithner, Summers is the villain of the book. Suskind describes him as “brilliant at cultivating the sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty.” He calls that talent “an illusionist’s trick calling for a certain true genius.”
It’s that trick that gives the book its title. Merriam-Webster defines a “confidence man” as “a swindler who exploits the confidence of his victim.” Suskind’s definition is more subtle. “Confidence is the public face of competence,” Suskind writes. “Separating the two—gaining the trust without earning it—is the age-old work of confidence men.” To Suskind, Summers was the ultimate confidence man, and Obama the ultimate mark. Summers offered what Obama wanted—certainty—and Obama was just terrified enough to take it. But the certainties Summers offered were not, in Suskind’s view, the certainties the moment required.
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The great counterfactual of Suskind’s book is “What if Obama had chosen a different team of advisers?” But by the end of his book, the counterfactual was coming true. Emanuel was out. Summers, too. Romer had left, and so had Orszag. Even David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime political adviser, was decamping back to Chicago. Only Geithner remains.
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“Everyone shut the fuck up,” Suskind quotes the profane chief of staff [Rahm] as saying. “Let me be clear—taking down the banking system in a program that could cost $700 billion is a fantasy. With all the money that already went to TARP, no one is getting that kind of money through Congress.”
The same goes for stimulus. When Obama angrily dismisses Romer’s umpteenth argument for more stimulus, it’s not because he disagrees. It’s because he can’t get it passed. “Enough!” Suskind quotes him as shouting. “I said it before, I’ll say it again. It’s not going to happen. We can’t go back to Congress again. We just can’t!”
The truth of the matter is this: every member of the White House’s economic and political team was closer to every other member than any of them were to the swing votes in the Senate. Tim Geithner and Christina Romer have their differences, but they’re mostly talking the same language. Put them in a room with Senators Ben Nelson, Scott Brown, and Susan Collins—all of whom would have rejected a strong new stimulus—and they may as well be Martians.
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The reality is more troubling. The initial stimulus was too small, but there’s no plausible case that Congress would have been willing to make it much bigger just because the Obama administration had a theory that the financial crisis would lead to a worse recession than most forecasters expected. The trouble was that attacking a financial crisis with a too-small stimulus was a bit like attacking pneumonia with too-few antibiotics: you feel better for awhile, and then it comes back. And this time, it’s harder to kill.
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the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.
And Obama was better at this than most. He gave America hope. He made America believe he could deliver change. And, by the standards of Washington, he has probably done more than anyone could rightly have expected. Stimulus, health care reform, the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the payroll tax cut, new tobacco regulation—this is much more than your average first-term president achieves. But by the standards of the speeches and spirit that animated Obama’s campaign, he has not done nearly enough.
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Post reporter spends an in‘tents’ night amid anarchy in Zuccotti Park
By CANDICE M. GIOVE
Last Updated: 12:02 PM, November 6, 2011
Posted: 1:46 AM, November 6, 2011
The cheap walkie-talkie crackles inside a crowded downtown McDonald’s, stopping the gathered mass mid-sip from their Kombucha bottles and cups of corporate coffee.
“There’s a situation,” a vagabond gumshoe dubbed “Conscience” tells me after the static-filled communique arrives over the air at around 3 a.m.
Cornered on the other side of the fast-food joint is Fisika Bezabeh, 27, a Zuccotti squatter who inexplicably returned to the eatery after allegedly clobbering a manager with a credit-card reader earlier in the night.
“We can’t take him in by ourselves,” yells another OWS security-force member.
The Zuccotti “cops” had just spent an hour and a half tracking Bezabeh through goat paths in the park armed with a description from the manager.
“We cannot take him in by ourselves, the cops have to come!” reiterates the OWS security force member.
They call the NYPD -- and it becomes abundantly clear that the cops down there are sick of the antics.
“Every single night it’s the same thing. I mean, some guy was a victim of rape!” an officer snarls. “There comes a time when it’s over. This is a disaster. It’s all we’re doing, every two seconds, is locking somebody up every time. It’s done.
“It’s done,” he repeats. “Occupy Wall Street is no longer a protest.”
Scenes like this -- and far worse -- have been playing out since the Zuccotti Park “occupation” began on Sept. 17.
The parcel is now a sliver of madness, rife with sex attacks, robberies and vigilante justice.
It’s a leaderless bazaar that’s been divided into state-like camps -- with tents packed together so densely that the only way to add more would be to stack them.
And despite an NYPD watchtower overhead and the entire north side of Zuccotti lined with police vehicles, it is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous places in New York City.
I arrive in the Financial District after dark on Thursday lugging a backpack, a sleeping bag and layers upon layers of clothes.
It’s 8 p.m., and the suits and ties fill the bars. They glare at my overstuffed bag as I walk from the E train to a 7-Eleven for a few last-minute items for my night in Zuccotti Park.
The anti-bacterial soap and powder are nearly out. Naturally, the condoms are fully stocked.
Outside, an old-man Occupier in a plaid earflap hat is screaming at people in the crosswalk at Church and Barclay.
“Why are you afraid of bunny rabbits? Whyyyyy?”
As I cautiously walk the Zuccotti perimeter, picking up photocopied literature on anarchy, there is a poster on a tent bearing a set of park rules that includes: “If you want to hook up, go to a singles bar.”
There is literally no space to unfold my sleeping bag. I ask around for help.
Out of nowhere, a man pushing a shopping cart with his friend inside rammed the thing “Jackass”-style into a police barrier and walked off laughing like a hyena.
A woman emerges from a makeshift tent that looks more like a layer cake -- a clear tarp draped over a sleeping bag that is on top of a filthy mattress. It even has a welcome mat missing the “m” and the stench of a vagrant.
“There’s not much space left,” she said and walked off into the darkness.
Every camp tent is like its own state. There is “Camp Anonymous,” the group best known for anti-Scientology protests.
It’s neighbored by a tent full of vampires, the “Class War” tent and the “Occupy Paw Street” tent, whose residents hand out treats to occupying pets.
There’s also “Camp France” and the “Nic at Night” tent, which supplies the protest with smokes.
I settle on a sliver near Broadway by an OWS library -- which frighteningly has a children’s section. On a bulletin board, there are personal messages like, “Call your sister!”
I’m wedged between a newbie from Brooklyn and some guy from Toronto, who preferred the experience of urban camping to his buddy’s couch or a hotel.
“My knees will crush you,” a hulking squatter shouts. “I don’t want to hurt you.
“You’re in my doorway. I’m going to crush you.”
Someone takes offense and yells, “Manners!”
He’s much kinder when he emerges later from his green tent and hands me a shiny Mylar blanket for extra warmth. “It’s going to get cold,” he said.
This spirit of generosity and the naivete of the original OWS protesters is devolving into a state of distrust and paranoia, however.
They speak of theft, about government infiltrators and tales of Rikers Island castoffs being dropped off to roam and ravage the site.
From underneath my blanket, I hear allegations of financial corruption and intimidation over sexual orientation.
“I’m in a tent that keeps getting flooded, ransacked and robbed,” fumes a transgender group leader -- a female who identifies as a male.
He said that the transgender group would create its own police force for transgender protesters and females, since an immense distrust loomed over the OWS-created authority.
That group is also demanding financial transparency amid growing concern over the use of the $750,000 war chest.
They have a point. I notice supply-station cupboards are dangerously lacking any blankets, tents, tarps or Mylar.
“Someone forgot to get that stuff out of storage,” an attendant claimed.
“We have three-quarters of a million dollars in the bank and all these f--king people are not doing financial accounting while we’re calling for it from the larger corporations,” says the transgender leader. “A lot of good people are quitting.”
A day later, a female-only “safety tent” would be erected to shield women from predators.
Organizers plan to add a medical tent, as well as others designed to provide safe sleeping for gay, transgender and co-ed groups.
The threat of rape is very real here -- for women and men.
Sitting in the McDonald’s just moments after Bezabeh was hauled off in cuffs, Lauren DiGioia, 26, tells me about how she became one of the growing number of victims on her very first night in the park.
“I was forced into a very tight space,” she says. “He kind of moved up against me.
“ ‘Oh, let me warm you up. It’s cold out here,’ ” the creep told her, she said. “He kept pursuing me, and he started becoming aroused, and I could tell that he was becoming aroused,” she said. “I just tried to shield myself.”
He allegedly groped her, pulled her and tried to get on top of her.
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘In the morning, I am going to get this guy arrested,’ but in the morning, he was gone,” she said.
DiGioia, who is from Clifton, NJ, was shocked to see her alleged attacker’s image in The Post about a week later -- and she identified him to the police.
She is now offering counsel to other victims, as new ones crop up every day.
“I just talked to two gentlemen who were raped last night, and they don’t want to press charges because [authorities] wanted to take them in an ambulance and . . . do a rape kit,” she said.
She passed on their account to the security force, while encouraging them to press charges.
“There was another girl raped by the same man,” she said from a table in the McDonald’s, which has become the headquarters of the revolution.
It’s a place to meet, to get warm, to scarf down dollar-menu grub and to use the bathroom that becomes increasingly vile as the night goes on.
I’m ultimately invited to spend the night in a Camp Anonymous tent instead of solo in a sleeping bag.
I spend the rest of the night awake against the wall of a tent built for four -- but packed with six.
My bunkmates include an anarchist, a sexual-assault victim, two security-force members, a girl dressed like the devil and her kitten -- the “Anarkitty.”
“We are a microcosm of all of society’s defects and the failing economy,” DiGioia said. “Just because we’re here under a microscope, everybody’s going to come and throw up their arms and say we have to shut this place down.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/my_in_tents_night_amid_anarchy_of_ush5s5NscUZincUN0tF0yO#ixzz1d8ggpmqc
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http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/abreitbart/2011/11/10/exclusive-photos-michael-moores-massive-michigan-vacation-mansion-beyond-99-percents-wildest-dreams/
Exclusive Photos: Michael Moore’s Massive Michigan Vacation Mansion Beyond 99 Percent’s Wildest Dreams
by Andrew Breitbart
Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore has been touring Occupy Wall Street demonstrations across the country–including some of the most violent, such as Occupy Oakland–urging activists to continue their fight against the wealthy “one percent” of Americans.
Initially, Moore tried to deny that his massive wealth made him a member of that one percent. Even when forced to admit the obvious, Moore suggested that he was not always among the one percent, based on his income: “Other years, like last year, I don’t have a job (no movie, no book) and so I make a lot less.”
The fact is that Moore is so wealthy that he does not need to worry about his income. According to public tax records, Moore owns a massive vacation home on Torch Lake, Michigan–one of the most elite communities in the United States–in addition to his posh Manhattan residence.
Through an independent source, Big Hollywood has obtained exclusive photographs of the house matching the address of Moore’s waterfront mansion. It is the kind of luxurious summer home that 99 percent of Americans can only dream of owning.
(http://biggovernment.com/files/2011/11/3MooreHouseBig2center.jpg)
Moore’s vacation property is located on the southeastern shore of Torch Lake itself, which locals tout as the “third most beautiful lake in the world.” Here is an aerial view of the house, situated on the turquoise blue waters for which Torch Lake is famous:
(http://biggovernment.com/files/2011/11/Aerial1.jpg)
Property values on Torch Lake, according to one real estate website, range “from $400,000 to plus $3 million.”
Moore’s property has been officially assessed at close to $1 million (see below; we have redacted Moore’s addresses and parcel number). That is likely a gross underestimate, but nevertheless places Moore’s vacation home near the top one percent of home values in affluent Forest Home Township, and among the upper crust of residential properties in the state of Michigan.
(http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/files/2011/11/Moore-Property-Tax-Assessment-1-794x1024.jpg)
In addition, according to statistics from 2009, Forest Home Township has no black residents. The township is roughly 98 percent white. Call that 99 percent, and Moore’s claim to be among “the 99 percent” begins to have some basis in reality.
No one begrudges Moore his wealth, but it is deceitful for him to claim poverty while encouraging class warfare among other Americans. It is also purely narcissistic and selfish for Moore to back radical and destructive socialist policies that would deny other Americans the opportunity to become as rich as he is.
Below are some additional photographs of Moore’s vacation home in Torch Lake. The first shows the front entrance to the property; we have decided not to include a photograph of Moore’s mailbox, which features an address matching the one on the property assessment. The second and third photographs show alternate perspectives of Moore’s home and property when viewed from Torch Lake.
(http://biggovernment.com/files/2011/11/Moore-Torch-Lake-Front.jpg)
(http://biggovernment.com/files/2011/11/Moore-Lake-1.jpg)
(http://biggovernment.com/files/2011/11/Moore-Lake-2.jpg)
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No blacks, but how many welders out of Flint Michigan have a piece of lakeshore like that? Maybe none, but they all helped to pay for it. I find the footprint to be different than the view and both different from what value should be. I would say he is still building and adding on. Like Gore and Edwards, quite a bit of forest clear cutting is going on there.
I will regret suggesting this, but how about Occupy Torch Lake? How about tying up some some rotten pontoons and house boats to fill the public space in front all summer and then demanding access to the private restrooms - like they do at his protests. Interest in private property rights begins with having something to protect.
There is no doubt that Michael Moore is a wealthy man. How did he get his start: 'Moore sued for wrongful dismissal (from 4 months as editor of Mother Jones magazine), and settled out of court for $58,000, providing him with seed money for his first film, Roger & Me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore Capitalism is a beautiful thing.
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Keeping up with the leftists in the spirit of balance on the board. If any real leftist can come forward with better political and economic analysis, please do so.
1) A commenter at Politico with a view into their mindset: "The OWS are the younger, smarter, unemployed version of the Tea Party with the same grievances except the OWS know the evils dwells on Wall Street and the TeaParty wrongly believe that the evil is in Washington."
2) Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman (biased blogger at the NY Times) says the failure of welfare states did not cause Europe’s problems nor is fiscal austerity here any way to avoid their mess. Oh really? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/legends-of-the-fail.html?_r=1
3) Complete that 3 legged stool of liberalism with intellectual giant Robert Reich who says: "Don’t even think about cutting the deficit...budget reduction shouldn't be part of the conversation" http://www.salon.com/2011/11/10/dont_even_think_about_cutting_the_deficit/
4) Over at The Nation they still think the battle is on between capitalism and climate. No recognition from the last few decades that the anti-capitalist nations were always the filthiest. http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
Meanwhile over on the right, all 8 candidates have been clear on how to grow the economy of of this malaise. The one with the least bold plan, Romney, the one most vague and cautious that would grow us out of this at the very slowest rate is the one (surprisingly) most acceptable and comfortable to the establishment.
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http://biggovernment.com/bbaugus/2011/11/13/they-are-the-1-percent-and-we-should-be-worried/
They Are the One Percent… and We Should Be Worried
by Dr. Brian Baugus
To the extent that the Occupy Wall Street crowd has a core cause, it is an economic one. However, its title and location are the only real clues, because when it comes to demonstrating their vast economic knowledge, these people cannot.
They claim to be among the 99% of Americans who are victims of various legal and moral crimes committed by the financial sector, and that has risked their futures. But, what sort of future do they have?
Does Che know how well off he is?
What they are truly demonstrating is the vast failure of the education system. They have no global perspective or understanding of their historical position. They fail to understand THEY are the 1%. My Che Guevara looking friend to the left here stands to earn $1.6 million more in his lifetime than his high school party buddies who did not go to college. This means, on average he will earn $35,500 more a year than his high school counterpart will, and this is just the American part of the story. The average world citizen earns $7,000 a year right now and that is highly skewed, the median income is much lower. Only 19 percent of the global population lives in a country with mean per capita earnings greater than $7,000. Che is among the 20 to 25 percent of Americans that attend college and, assuming he graduates, will be in the upper income strata, likely the upper 20 percent. So, Che here is in the upper 20 percent of the upper 19 percent, which means, globally speaking, he will be among the wealthiest 4 percent in the world. Just like his Woodstock grandparents who became the BMW driving yuppies, he will protest and rail against the man or rage against the machine or whatever and then go earn a very good living over his lifetime and all of it brought to him by capitalism.
Historically, his case is worse. The fact that he has the time to go and camp out and not have to hunt, forage or farm speaks volumes that his twenty years of schooling do not seem to have prepared him to realize. While he is standing on the pavement thinking about the government and what it owes him, he does not realize that his urban camping trip is costing more than most people who have ever lived earned in a lifetime. As Deidre McCloskey points out in her book Bourgeois Dignity, Americans spend on average $120 a day, if this were 200 years ago the figure would be lucky to be $3 a day in current dollars. Living before the advent of wide spread free market capitalism would be like trying to live in the current economy on $3 a day, Che’s visit to Starbucks cost more than $3.
The sad aspect is not so much that Che is protesting but that he does not know any of this. His teachers and professors either do not know it or do not believe it.
Other than some solid points on the bailout issue, the OWS crowd is exhibit A on the massive deficiencies of the American education system. Che’s prospects are as good as anyone who has ever lived, he would not trade places with the richest person in the world of 200 years ago. That person had no modern medicines, lived in a drafty house with no temperature control other than fireplaces, spent most of his life within a few miles of his house, probably saw at least one child die before he did. He had no internet, no lights, no phones, no motor cars, and was frequently infested with lice…ok maybe that one is still an issue for the OWS crowd.
If Che spends his entire life on welfare he will still live better than most people who are living right now or who have ever lived, but he does not know this. Economic progress is not inevitable; it is the product of free market capitalism. The irony in all of this is that true capitalism is about serving others. Wealthy people in a market system do not rob and pillage the poor they find more efficient ways to serve and attract consumers.
Entrepreneurs are people who have a vision for what could be, many fail but those that succeed make our lives easier and better in many ways, they save us time and effort and for that we reward them with a small percentage of the total value we derive from what they have done. Steve Jobs, whom OWS reveres, and Bill Gates and so forth have provided us with billions, maybe trillions of dollars in value, and in exchange, we voluntarily give them a little bit of it in the form of the monetary prices we pay.
Go watch the show Mad Men and see what life was like before Gates et. al. came along. The other side of this is that the socialist system, which Che here wants, encourages greed and exaggerated selfishness as each person has the incentive to get as much of the common resources as he can before someone else beats him to it. Without property, prices and profits there is no progress. The failure of American education to teach these truths is a crime and will have long range impact, as we are already seeing.
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Woof,
It's only wrong if Republicans alone are doing it. :-P
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Print Font:
A television report that questioned whether members of Congress are making investment decisions based on insider information drew a heated response from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of those highlighted.
A report on CBS' "60 minutes" on Sunday said Pelosi was among several lawmakers — including Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner — who had profited from transactions that raised the possibility of conflicts of interest.
The report said Pelosi and her husband participated in a 2008 IPO involving Visa even as legislation that would have hurt credit card companies was being considered in the House. Pelosi was speaker at the time and the legislation failed to pass in that session.
In an exchange with CBS correspondent Steve Kroft, Pelosi denied that the transaction was a conflict of interest. And in a statement on Sunday, after the show aired, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said the report failed to note her work for the rights of credit cardholders.
"Congress has never done more for consumers nor has the Congress passed more critical reforms of the credit card industry than under the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi," Hammill said.
It is not illegal for members of Congress to buy stocks or make land deals based on information they're privy to through their positions. And the profits are often substantial.
A recent study of House members' stock transactions showed them beating the markets' return by about 6 percentage points annually from 1985 to 2001. A 2004 study involving the same authors showed senators beating the market by 12 percentage points annually.
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Those results "are way outside the boundaries of random luck," said the studies' lead author, Alan Ziobrowski, a business professor at Georgia State University.
Ziobrowski said Congress is preoccupied with three things: regulation, taxes and the federal budget.
"If you know a piece of legislation is coming down the line and you can trade in that, you can make a lot of money," he told msnbc.com.
The "60 Minutes" piece was all the buzz on Capitol Hill on Monday, where House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) declined to say whether he would support a law making it illegal for members of Congress to engage in insider trading.
Other political news of note
Supreme Court to take up Obama health care law
Taking up its most important case in more than a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the legal challenges to the Obama health care law.
Congress poised to create new tax break
Gingrich: 'this is most volatile race in my lifetime'
Pelosi fires back at report on 'insider trading'
The golden age of opposition research
"I'm not familiar with the details of the Stock Act, but I know it was mentioned in the program last night. My sense is that it requires more disclosure, I'm for increased disclosure, if there is any sense of impropriety or any appearance of that, we should take extra steps that the public's cynicism is addressed. We are not here to be hiding anything. I've always been very supportive of full disclosure," he said at a pen-and-pad discussion with reporters.
Cantor also dodged a question about whether members of Congress should be subject to the same insider trading laws as the ones restricting the finance professionals.
"I'm not as familiar with what triggers insider trading and the specifics of the laws. What I can tell you is that we are accountable to our constituents and we should be providing the kinds of information that would satisfy any kind of perception of impropriet," he said. "Many members don't actively trade in their portfolios, I don't. Full disclosure though can satisfy some of the questions; we should put that in place."
Pelosi's spokesman, Hammill, said the CBS report left out critical information. He said the legislation in question was passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day the House was in session before the election break that year and a time when the House was grappling with TARP. He noted that the next Congress passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights along with the Dodd-Frank legislation, which he called "a stronger, more direct approach to addressing swipe fees."
Hammill also criticized CBS' use of one source for the report, conservative author and editor Peter Schweizer.
"It is very troubling that '60 Minutes' would base their reporting off of an already-discredited conservative author who has made a career of out attacking Democrats," Hammill said.
Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and is the editor of Bigpeace.com, a website focused on national security founded by conservative activist Andrew Breitbart.
In a follow-up story on Monday, CBS News said they had verified every piece of information included in the report.
CBS noted that the "60 Minutes" report also discussed transactions of Boehner and another Republican, Rep. Spencer Bachus, who denied any impropriety.
Boehner said he leaves daily transactions to a broker. "I have not made any decisions on day-to-day trading activities in my account," Boehner told "60 Minutes."
NBC News' Luke Russert and Frank Thorp contributed to this report.
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This corruption is just so incredible. This is only one more reason OWS should be in Washington not Wall St.
Yet because the are ALL selfish what can America do for me crats they avoid anything that would harm the Brockster. They are demogagocrats.
In any case the corruption of both crats and cans in the Houses is just so blantant. And anyone wonders why people are fed up with both? I don't see how the "mature" or "grown up" Cans as Scarborough and like Cans calls themselves are not simply protecting their turf.
The real Conservatives are correct in wanting to clean house. Unfortunately that will never happen. I have actually gotten to like Bachmann more and more each debate since the vaccine fiasco. Her appeal is not broad among the populace but hopefully with more experience and fine tuning she will one day catch on. Her political future looks bright. Just not this time around.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-left-occupy-what/2011/11/14/gIQAngZHON_blog.html
Posted at 08:00 AM ET, 11/15/2011
Occupy movement deteriorates
By Jennifer Rubin
The left-wing punditiocracy’s fascination with the Occupy Wall Street and its progeny movements has declined in inverse proportion to the upswing in violence, mayhem and public filth stemming from those about whom the left was cooing only a couple weeks ago.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier posted this:
While the Occupy DC movement has been here since October 6, 2011 and the Metropolitan Police Department supports an individual’s right to assemble, we do not condone nor will we tolerate violence or aggression. Prior demonstrations had been peaceful. However, the aggressive nature of Friday’s demonstration prompted the Metropolitan Police Department to adjust tactics as needed to ensure safety.
MPD will continue to protect life (residents, visitors, protestors — everyone) and property as warranted. The administration will do what’s necessary to maintain order in the city and to ensure that everyone is safe.
Five people that we are aware of were injured. That is no longer a peaceful protest. Demonstrators have become increasingly confrontational and violent toward uninvolved bystanders and motorists. Demonstrators have also jeopardized the safety of their own children by using them in blockades. The following videos highlight such actions by demonstrators:
Intentionally Blocking Traffic/putting little children in the street
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpDsogOy2IU
Using little children to blockade the door
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CguFPFJAqlA
Demonstrators blockade doors and injure attendees
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prgkEAuSQT0
Blockading people from leaving the Convention Center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXXf56JhTbs
Regarding the traffic incident and allegations of hit and run, MPD is investigating and is seeking any evidence and witness statements.
Hmm. Doesn’t sound like a bunch of Jeffersonian democrats seeking political redress.
No more are the liberal pundits interesting in measuring the level of support for what they only weeks ago characterized as a genuine political movement. Ignored are the reports of sexual assaults. No mention is made among the OWS cheerleaders of the latest effort to re-establish order in Oakland, Calif., and Burlington, Vt. Huffington Post at least reported the facts:
Police clad in riot gear and armed with tear gas cleared out Oakland’s anti-Wall Street encampment early Monday, the latest law enforcement crackdown amid complaints around the country of health and safety hazards at protest camps.
The raid at the Occupy Oakland camp, one of the largest and most active sites in the movement, came a day after police in Portland, Ore., arrested more than 50 people while shutting down its camp amid complaints of drug use and sanitation issues.
Police in Burlington, Vt., also evicted protesters after a man fatally shot himself last week inside a tent.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a mea culpa from the left blogosphere, which cheered the Occupy encampments and chided conservatives who had the temerity to point out their disagreeable elements.
Funny how the left’s assertion that this was a grand political awakening has now gone down the memory hole. In their frenzy to find a grassroots movement on the left and in their insistence that the public really did support these people, the left-leaning elites tried mightily to ignore the instances of anti-Semitism, violence and fouling of public places. When that became impossible, they simply chose to ignore the whole disgusting mess. Had they been candid from the start about what the Occupy protesters looked like, sounded like and believed, the liberal punditocracy might not be embarrassed (is that possible?), or, at the very least, anxious that someone might call its members out for their immensely dishonest portrayal of the Occupy phenomenon.
By Jennifer Rubin | 08:00 AM ET, 11/15/2011
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/11/20/the-1-occupation/
The 1% Occupation
posted at 4:00 pm on November 20, 2011 by Ed Morrissey
It’s getting pretty cold in New York City these days, and with the courts ruling that protesters can no longer pitch tents in Zuccotti Park, the Occupiers are in for considerable discomfort if they continue. Actually, that’s only true for, er, 99% of the Occupiers. The 1% that comprise their leadership apparently have other ideas about what form a protest against The Man should take (via JWF):
A key Occupy Wall Street leader and another protester who leads a double life as a businessman ditched fetid tents and church basements for rooms at a luxurious hotel that promises guests can “unleash [their] inner Gordon Gekko,” The Post has learned.
The $700-per-night W Hotel Downtown last week hosted both Peter Dutro, one of a select few OWS members on the powerful finance committee, and Brad Spitzer, a California-based analyst who not only secretly took part in protests during a week-long business trip but offered shelter to protesters in his swanky platinum-card room.
“Tents are not for me,” he confessed, when confronted in the sleek black lobby of the Washington Street hotel where sources described him as a “repeat” guest.
Spitzer, 24, an associate at financial-services giant Deloitte, which netted $29 billion in revenue last year, admitted he joined the protest at Zuccotti Park several times.
Dutro decided to check into the hotel because he heard that he might have a little trouble on Thursday getting to the protest. Why? Because of, um, the protesters:
“I knew everything was going to be a clusterf–k in the morning,” he told The Post, alluding to Occupy’s own disruption plans. “How would I get over the bridge when they were shutting it down?”
And Dutro isn’t just one of the rank and file out on the street, either. Guess what his job at OWS happens to be?
Meanwhile, Dutro, 35, one of only a handful of OWS leaders in charge of the movement’s $500,000 in donations, checked in on Wednesday, the night after police emptied Zuccotti Park.
While hundreds of his rebel brethren scrambled to find shelter in church basements, Dutro chose the five-star, 58-story hotel, with its lush rooms and 350-count Egyptian cotton sheets. He lives only a short taxi ride away in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Two weeks ago, Fritz Tucker warned about the hijacking of OWS by the Spokes Council, a small group that plotted to seize control of the funds and usurp the General Assembly. Dutro claims that the money came out of his own pocket for the expensive hotel room, but it’s at least curious that one of the few money men of the movement turns up at one of the swankier downtown hotels. It’s even more curious, given the Huffington Post description of Dutro four weeks ago:
“The vast majority of the people here don’t understand how money works,” said Pete Dutro, a core member of the finance group who spends five hours a day in Zuccotti Park handling petty cash requests and handing out money for General Assembly- approved expenditures. “But we have real financial needs. Not everyone wants to barter and trade.” …
Dutro, a 36-year-old finance student at New York University currently on leave from classes and the former manager of a tattoo parlor, didn’t want to get involved with the finance group, but he saw that his experience handling money and running a business could be useful.
Does that sound like a man who can throw away $500 on a hotel room when he could just go across the bridge to sleep in his own bed? Perhaps — those student loans come in pretty handy at times — but maybe the GA should give a few up twinkles to an audit.
The best irony of all? The Occupiers have thrown a great deal of vitriol at the economic policies of the Bush administration. Landing in the lap of luxury at the W Hotel doesn’t exactly sound like a protest, though. It sounds an awful lot like a further extension of OWS as a practical demonstration of George Orwell’s fears in Animal Farm.
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The park bench sounds good but the guy prefers the honeymoon suite with the Jacuzzi for the occupation. I'm waiting for Occupy Vail, and the powder in the trees at Steamboat. What can you really protest when the cameras aren't running anyway. The rich guy has every right to sympathize with the movement, oppose special treatment for the connected. Jump right in. It should not be an us vs. them question, it is right vs wrong. Is money legitimately earned? Is it treated the same as everyone else? Let's quit the blind attacks on wealth, let's quit the religious attacks on wealth, let's get off the equal outcomes fantasy, end the favors trading business and focus on equal treatment under the law.
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Doug,
That would clash with the actual intent behind OWS.
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"That would clash with the actual intent behind OWS."
Yes but his situation calls the question perfectly. Are you against the special treatment and bailouts of wallstreeters or are you against the freedoms inherent in capitalistic wealth? Without the freedoms of capitalism, the $700 room would never have been built, cleaned or available to him. The right to charge more, to make more money and to pay more for quality are all part of the capitalistic principle of allocating scarce resources based on price. Those shivering outside should take notice.
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"Those shivering outside should take notice."
That would require a degree of intelligence not in evidence amongst the OWS masses. Useful idiots for Soros and others.
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The passive aggressive I am going to get in your face nature of OWS is typical of the types of people who crowd it.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to take control over public or private areas and stop usual course of freedom for everyone else.
Does freedom of speech mean not just opening one's big mouth and saying wahtever one wants is okay if you sit in the middle of the road and block everyone else and then when the police come, just dare them to do anything which when they do use any physical means than turn around and call it police burtality, ham it up for MSNBC cameras.
Did any one see CNN calling it police brutality when an officer maced such a group of passive aggressive personality disordered types sitting in a row doing exactly this?
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What is the other side of the story? Were these people blocking something? Were they asked to not block the sidewalk?
"their right to peaceful protest". MSM is flaming this.
police chief on leave after pepper spraying
By JASON DEAREN, Associated Press – 1 hour ago
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The president of the University of California system said he was "appalled" at images of protesters being doused with pepper spray and plans an assessment of law enforcement procedures on all 10 campuses, as the police chief and two officers were placed on administrative leave.
"Free speech is part of the DNA of this university, and non-violent protest has long been central to our history," UC President Mark G. Yudof said in a statement Sunday in response to the spraying of students sitting passively at UC Davis. "It is a value we must protect with vigilance."
Yudof said it was not his intention to "micromanage our campus police forces," but he said all 10 chancellors would convene soon for a discussion "about how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest."
Protesters from Occupy Sacramento planned to travel to nearby Davis on Monday for a noon rally in solidarity with the students, the group said in a statement.
UC Davis said early Monday in a news release that it was necessary to place police Chief Annette Spicuzza on administrative leave to restore trust and calm tensions. The school refused to identify the two officers who were place on administrative leave but one was a veteran of many years on the force and the other "fairly new" to the department, Spicuzza earlier told The Associated Press. She would not elaborate further because of the pending
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This is why I am done with working patrol. Perhaps with law enforcement altogether.
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Police officers are damned either way. They enforce the law with people who are not cooperating then they are accused of "brutality". They don't do anything then they are blamed for not doing anything.
CNN was all over that picture with the Democrat anchors asking the parade of guests "isn't that police brutality?'
The MSM is out of control. THEY are trying to set the agenda and make news of non news. I hope most people who see this see it for what it is - a Democrat party ploy.
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"This is why I am done with working patrol. Perhaps with law enforcement altogether."
Their loss, our gain. )
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http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/were-uc-davis-police-justified-in.html
Monday, November 21, 2011
Were the UC Davis Police Justified in Pepper-Spraying Students?
That's the query from Wordsmith, at Flopping Aces.
Wordsmith has a 15-minute video, which includes almost 5 minutes of footage leading up to the pepper spray incident. The students were not violent, but they were being told to leave. And when police tell you to leave you leave. All of the progressive outrage is pretty overblown. But hey, no doubt it helps the cause to have police crack down. It's a "police state," dontcha know? And the university earns itself a public relations nightmare. Investigations are coming, which drags out the drama. See New York Times, "California University Puts Officers Who Used Pepper Spray on Leave." And at KCRA-TV Sacramento, "Statewide Investigation After Officers Pepper Spray Student Protesters: Two Officers Placed On Administrative Leave, University Police Say." And from the comments there:
Why are they asking for police presence if they are going to nail the police officers on every move they make?
That's a good question. It's not like UC officials were indifferent to possible outbreaks of violence. See last week at Los Angeles Times, for example, "UC regents cancel meeting, cite security threats":
Fearing potentially violent disruptions, University of California regents on Monday canceled a meeting scheduled for this week in San Francisco, while UC and Cal State students prepared for demonstrations Tuesday at campuses across the state.
The UC board had planned to hold its regular bi-monthly meeting Wednesday and Thursday at UC San Francisco's Mission Bay campus but postponed the session after what officials termed credible threats.
University police had received reports that "rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers" were planning to join otherwise peaceful protests at the meeting, according to a statement by regents Chairwoman Sherry Lansing, Vice Chairman Bruce Varner and UC President Mark G. Yudof. "Ensuring public safety must be a top priority."
And recall that the concerns are not new. It's been a state of siege at the UC for the past few years: "Berkeley Chancellor's Home Attacked by Torch-Bearing Mob: Governor Decries 'Terrorism'; Activists Pledge, 'Burn Every Rich Man's House to the Ground'!"
Posted by Donald Douglas at 9:00 AM
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Forget about finding a message. We need more Cowbell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvhAq1DV5wU
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While I agree it's a bit overblown, the post acknowledges that "the students were not violent". Being told to leave, and not leaving is not necessarily grounds for pepper spraying students on campus. It was a huge mistake. Obviously.
Perhaps more important, this is (we have discussed before) just Campus Police not the City of Davis Police Department. Campus Police work for and are to obey the University's Policies and it's Management's direction on campus - period. They are employees of the Campus. The Campus Police Chief's Boss, the Davis University President, and her UC boss, both determined that the Campus Police exceeded their authority given the circumstances. The officer's were suspended (probably with full pay unlike if they worked for a private company).
And probably they will be reinstated. If it was a private company, and they were private employees, and disobeyed corporate policy (they disobey the Davis and UC Administration Policy using Pepper Spray without authority) they would be probably be fired and given nothing. They exceeded their authority; it is not their position as a staff employee of the campus to make policy or to use force unless authorized or necessary to protect themselves. Only Management can make that call. Just like a clerk at hamburger place who is fired for bringing a gun to work. That's management's (UC) job to make those rules and decisions. It's management's choice, not the campus employee's decision.
I usually agree with you CCP, but I'm a little surprised. Imagine if your receptionist asked a patient and his family to leave your lobby, but the patient refused, however the patient was non violent. non threatening, just annoying and uncooperative. He and his family just sat there. What would you say if your receptionist, without being threatened in any way, then pulled out her Pepper Spray and attacked the entire family just to clear your lobby? Causing damage to the individuals. Wouldn't you feel a little guilty given the circumstances? Was Pepper Spray appropriate? As Management, wouldn't you like to have know before your receptionist Pepper Spayed Patients without justifiable cause and if appropriate, require your approval in advance excluding the employee being physically threatened?
They exceeded their authority and are being appropriately chastised. It's embarrassing for the campus and the entire UC System.
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JDN I hear you.
But I disagree with everything you say.
This is a set up.
"Being told to leave, and not leaving is not necessarily grounds for pepper spraying students on campus. It was a huge mistake. Obviously."
They were warned. I am not sympathetic. But the University is going to be passive and not back the campus police. So we will not likely get the whole story. Just the liberal side of it.
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The President of Davis clearly stated that the Campus Police did not have authority to use Pepper Spray without her consent and it was not given.
They disobeyed causing problems for the University, the UC University System, and the University President.
CCP; I think my analogy in your office was good. If a receptionist took violent action without your authority, (remember she wasn't threatened) causing harm to non violent individuals and because of her actions your business is threatened your morals and ethics are questioned, etc. what would you think of that receptionist? I bet you would fire her on the spot.
Mind you, I am not deeply sympathetic to the protestors. I'm focusing on the inappropriate and unauthorized use of force. That's not a liberal story, that's just wrong.
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I'm willing to bet that UC-Davis PD has a use of force policy that does not require the permission of the UC Davis president.
Again, California University Police Officers are CA POST certfied peace officers with the same training, powers and authority as any other California Police Officer.
In the commonly used continuum of force, OC spray is on the low end, sometimes before the use of soft empty hand on non-compliant subjects.
Failure to obey a lawful command of a peace officer isn't just "irritating", it's illegal and an arrestable offense.
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**An example of a continuum of force policy
RANGE OF RESPONSE CONTINUUM:
1. Level 1 - Officer Presence:
Sublevels = Standing, Walking, Running, Canine, and/or Equine.
Compliant subjects are those individuals who offer no verbal or physical
resistance to the deputy’s commands and demonstrate their cooperation by
immediately responding to directions.
2. Level 2 - Verbal Commands:
Sublevels = Whisper, Conversation, Shout, and/or Canine.
Passive resistant subjects are those individuals that refuse to comply with
commands but are not attempting to physically prevent or defeat the deputy’s
commands or contact controls.
3. Level 3 - Control and Restraint:
Sublevels = Empty Hands, Impact Tools, Restraints, OC Spray, Canine, Equine, and/or
Electronics.
Active resistant subjects are those individuals who refuse to comply with the
deputy’s commands and are physically resisting a deputy’s control techniques, or
individuals whose combination of words and actions may present a physical
threat to others.
4. Level 4 - Chemical Agents: (normally used by SWAT and SRT)
Sublevels = Hand Held, Thrown, and/or Propelled.
5. Level 5- Temporary Incapacitation:
Sublevels = Empty Hands, Impact Tools, Electronics, Canine, Equine.
Combative subjects are those individuals who attempt to defeat a deputy’s
compliance techniques in that they are resistant, combative and overtly
attempting to overpower the deputy.
6. Level 6 - Deadly Force:
Sublevels = Empty Hands, Impact Tools, and/or Firearms (warning shots are not allowed).
Deadly force assaults are any assaults where the deputy has reason to believe the
subject’s actions are likely to cause death or serious bodily injury.
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Actually, the University President was quite clear; the officers did NOT have authority to use Pepper Spray.
And while they may well be "certified" police officers (I have no interest in returning to that discussion) they report to and serve the School. They are employees of the School.
It would seem to me that disobeying a campus police officer to disburse is only "illegal" and an "arrestable offense" on Campus if the School President and School Policy says it is;
the President sets the policy and rules; not staff. However, whether it is an arrestable offense or not, my point is that campus police did NOT have authority to use Pepper Spray.
In response to your most recent post which may or may not be applicable to a campus situation. Probably it doesn't apply since the President clearly said the Campus Police did not
have authority to use Pepper Spray.... The students did not resort to any physical violence nor were the officers in danger.
Level 3. "Active resistant subjects are those individuals who refuse to comply with the
deputy’s commands and are physically resisting a deputy’s control techniques, or
individuals whose combination of words and actions may present a physical
threat to others."
The students neither physically resisted a deputy's control techniques nor were they a physical threat to others. Even you previous post focuses on "non violent" protest.
Use of Pepper Spray against passive resistance on a campus is simply inappropriate especially when not authorized.
Further, I am willing to guess that on a school campus the range of forceful response against students is more limited than your general post. And it should be more limited.
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Actually, the University President was quite clear; the officers did NOT have authority to use Pepper Spray.
**The prez is in butt-covering mode and it's doubtful she anymore of a legal grasp of the topic than you do.
And while they may well be "certified" police officers (I have no interest in returning to that discussion)
**Because you are wrong, as usual when you opine on anything related to law enforcement.
they report to and serve the School. They are employees of the School.
**They are law enforcement officers employed by the State of California, just as CHP Officers and California DOJ Special Agents are, as an example.
It would seem to me that disobeying a campus police officer to disburse is only "illegal" and an "arrestable offense" on Campus if the School President and School Policy says it is;
**You would be wrong. California's Penal Code determines what the law is.
the President sets the policy and rules; not staff. However, whether it is an arrestable offense or not, my point is that they did NOT have authority to use force.
**Again, Peace Officers enforce the laws as made by the state legislature and signed by the governor, in doing so, they are empowered to use force to enforce those laws. That's why it's called Law EnFORCEment.
In response to your most recent post which may or may not be applicable to a campus situation. Probably it doesn't apply since the President clearly said the Campus Police did not
have authority to use Pepper Spray.... Nor did the students resort to any physical violence.
**If you start at the low end of the continuum of force, you move upwards until you gain compliance. If the officer's presence and verbal commands are ignored, then you move to the next level. In addition, the officer uses the force needed to address the situation. If going directly into a gunfight, a officer is not required to try verbal de-escalation first before shooting an armed assailant. You are not going to reach into a non-compliant crowd to go hands on for tactical/officer safety reasons.
Level 3. "Active resistant subjects are those individuals who refuse to comply with the
deputy’s commands and are physically resisting a deputy’s control techniques, or
individuals whose combination of words and actions may present a physical
threat to others."
The students neither physically resisted a deputy's control techniques nor were they a physical threat to others.
**If they were refusing an order to disperse, that's a crime. In order to enforce those laws, force can be used, including spraying the crowd with OC.
Even you previous post focuses on "non violent" protest.
**And as we've seen, they can get violent quite quickly. The job of law enforcement isn't to fight fair, it's to win.
Further, I am willing to guess that on a school campus the range of forceful response against students is more limited than your post..
**Feel free to get UC-Davis PD's use of force policy and post it here.
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***Imagine if your receptionist asked a patient and his family to leave your lobby, but the patient refused, however the patient was non violent. non threatening, just annoying and uncooperative. He and his family just sat there. What would you say if your receptionist, without being threatened in any way, then pulled out her Pepper Spray and attacked the entire family just to clear your lobby? Causing damage to the individuals. Wouldn't you feel a little guilty given the circumstances? Was Pepper Spray appropriate? As Management, wouldn't you like to have know before your receptionist Pepper Spayed Patients without justifiable cause and if appropriate, require your approval in advance excluding the employee being physically threatened?****
Your analogy is a bit ridiculous but OK. I'll give a go. Suppose a group of students walk in my office and sit with arms locked accross the floor and refuse to vacate the premises. I would then call the police and hope they would have these people removed. Suppose they refuse to leave based on verbal commands. Then what? Since they are not violent I should just throw up my arms and agree it is their right to freedom of speech and let it go?
A receptionist is not the same as a police officer and might be subject to arrest in NJ for using pepper spray.
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I'll again point out that depending on Dept. policy, OC spray can be before going hands on, because there is a lesser risk of injury to both the officer and the offender from OC.
Unlike CN or CS gas, OC is actually legally classified as a food additive. It's the same compound that makes salsa or curry hot.
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I'm not avoiding the valid points made, I'm just tied up for the
rest of the day. I'll try to get back tonight or tomorrow. :-)
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CCP's answer make sense. If they block your business and you report it to authorities you would expect them to be removed at some through a series of negotiations and/or increasingly stronger actions taken by LE.
GM: "Unlike CN or CS gas, OC is actually legally classified as a food additive. It's the same compound that makes salsa or curry hot."
Like a waiter, they could just say they got their order wrong. )
Waterboarding is done only with a healthy, all-natural product as well. :wink:
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"Waterboarding is done only with a healthy, all-natural product as well."
Hell, with the right marketing, it might become a hot new trend for spas!
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* I'm just tied up for the
rest of the day*
I cannot resist this one:
You mean you are on Wall Street with fellow "revolutionaries" elbow to elbow in front of Rupert Murdoch's NY office avoiding a bath?
Sound like a lot of fun. Oh its so great to be part of history and of 'something'. And the chicks are freebirds too :-D
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As best as I can tell in this case the question presented if whether the Campus Police needed to get permission from the President to follow the standard posted by GM.
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As best as I can tell in this case the question presented if whether the Campus Police needed to get permission from the President to follow the standard posted by GM.
I don't think that is the question. The question is whether it was an appropriate response.
I'm not sure this subject is worthy of a lot of time, but.....
The standard posted by GM was typical of police departments; for example the LAPD. Schools are different.
While GM may say campus police are employed by the State of CA and are similar to CHP, that's not quite true. I'ld say they are more like meter maids at best in most cases.
Oh yeah, they too are employed by the State and are similar to the CHP.
Also, did you notice that the Chancellor herself on her own volition decided to suspend the Chief and other Officers? It looks like they work directly for her. Nor are they part of the Police Union.
They may well be fired without much recourse.
As far as following the Penal Code, well again the Chancellor makes the decisions (and she did) otherwise the campus police would not have moved against the students.
Campus police exist to serve the School. They enforce the laws as directed by the Administration. The students could have stayed there for the rest of the year unless the
Chancellor gave the nod to evict them.
It was an absolute debacle. I think everyone agrees.
The Police Chief's BOSS, the Chancellor as I pointed out put the Chief and other Officers on Administrative leave. That says something. The Chancellor apologized.
That too says something. the Chancellor is worried about her job because of the inappropriate actions of one of her employees. That too says something is wrong.
If that's not enough, even the UC Board of Regents apologized. Does ANYONE who matters think these Officers made the right decision?
As for CCP, what can I say but I wish. :-) I can only imagine being "tied up" in Rupert Murdoch's office (it probably does have a bath) and freebirds are always nice. :-D
As for my receptionist example, I understand your point, it's valid, but my point is that Campus Police exist to serve the School Administration. They are not LAPD. Campus Police break up parties,
a little stealing, minor car accidents, and a lot of parking tickets. Like a meter maid, they are much different than your receptionist. In this case perhaps they should have called the Davis PD. It would have been handled more professionally with less blowback.
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"The standard posted by GM was typical of police departments; for example the LAPD. Schools are different."
**Says the guy with no training, experience or background in law enforcement. Can you point to any statute, caselaw or policy to support that claim?
"Campus Police break up parties,
a little stealing, minor car accidents, and a lot of parking tickets. Like a meter maid, they are much different than your receptionist. In this case perhaps they should have called the Davis PD. It would have been handled more professionally with less blowback."
**Davis PD may not have jurisdiction on the campus, though I'd bet money they have a mutual aid agreement with the University PD. Some agencies, such as the one my wife works for cross-deputizes University Officers with the City PD and County Sheriff's Dept. They respond to calls in those jurisdictions and vice-versa.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Who could forget the Virginia Tech and Columbine school shootings? Certainly not the UNCC Campus Police Department, which is why they say they're doing everything they can to prepare for the worst. UNCC Police Department formed a 13-member SWAT team with special training, special gear, and special tools and weapons.
"You can't just sit and wait for something to happen. You have to be ready at a moment's notice," said Lt. Josh Huffman of the UNCC Campus Police and SWAT team. "We can mobilize quickly. We have swat members on each squad, dayshift night shift.” "I think it's very possible something like that could happen on campus," said sophomore Corbin Peters. Most of these students weren't in college yet when the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting happened, but it's something they remember. "It was kind of scary. I wasn't even there and I can only imagine how scary it was for the students," said sophomore Calinda Burrus. So learning their college campus has a SWAT team is very comforting. "A lot can happen in a short period of time. For them to be able to react faster makes me feel safer," said senior Jacob Deaton. Officer Jerry Leocomte patrols the campus every day. "I think it's an essential part of a police department even though you hope it's something you'll never need," Leocomte said. The team trains in campus buildings and dorms to learn the layout so if an incident were to occur, they'd know exactly what to do. "We hope that we never have to be activated. It's not something we look forward to or want to happen, but in the event it does happen, we're ready," said Lt. Huffman.
Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/11/06/2753530/uncc-campus-gets-swat-team.html
Police have arrested a member of the Vagos gang in San Francisco on charges that he killed the president of the San Jose chapter of the Hells Angels.
A University of California San Francisco police sergeant spotted Ernesto Manuel Gonzalez, 53, of San Jose at 8:20 p.m. Thursday and took him into custody. Sparks, Nev., police will come to retrieve him, according to UCSF Police Chief Pamela Roskowski.
Gonzalez is wanted in connection with the killing of Jeffrey "Jethro" Pettigrew, 51, the iconic president of the motorcycle club in San Jose, who also worked for the city's Department of Transportation. Pettigrew was shot in the back four times last Friday at John Ascuaga's Nugget casino in Sparks.
Roskowski said Gonzalez was spotted in a rented 2011 Chevrolet Malibu parked near Treat Street, a block away from Mission Center's campus police headquarters.
Sgt. John Gutierrez of the campus police department was on routine patrol when he saw Gonzalez acting "suspiciously," Roskowski said. Apparently, Gonzalez was leaning over the steering wheel and "shuffling around" in the driver's seat of a car with Washington state license plates.
The sergeant asked for identification, and when he ran Gonzalez's name, realized he was wanted in connection with the Hells Angels homicide.
"We're extremely proud of our actions," Roskowski said. "Sgt. Gutierrez is an outstanding police officer."
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Schools ARE different. The school sets the rules. The President/Chancellor is their boss - notice on her authority alone she put the Chief of Police on Administrative Leave plus a few others. Student's safety is paramount. The Chancellor AND the UC Board of Regents APOLOGIZED for the Campus Police. Doesn't that tell you something is wrong? Of course Campus Police are different than the LAPD. Catching the bad guys is barely on their list although it does happen. The local college (30,000 students) campus police here don't even carry guns; the priority is giving out parking tickets and traffic control. Sounds like a Meter Maid, walks like a Meter Maid, must be..... UNCC has a SWAT team; now that is scary. Or a joke. I hope it's a joke. If something that serious happens I don't want meter maids I want professionals. Do you really think the UNCC's SWAT team is even close to LAPD's SWAT team? Make a phone call to the local PD's SWAT team.
As to mutual aid agreements, i.e. responding to emergency calls, well Meter Maids respond too if it's an emergency. All hands on deck including the cook. That doesn't make them equal to LAPD.
All that said, campus police do a good job taking care of the school and the students. But they should never have used Pepper Spray without management direction and authority - they may well lose their jobs for doing so.
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a) I have seen apparently substantiated reports that the students had the police SURROUNDED and refused to budge. Pepper spray seems like a pretty fg reasonable response to me!
b) As for the school president apologizing, , , any chance politics and cowardice played a role there?
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There is absolutely no indication of any student violence, physical threats, or physical resistance on the part of the students to justify use of force.
As for allowing themselves to be surrounded (if they were) by peaceful non violent students, well that says a lot for the supposedly well trained campus police's tactics. :-D
Cowardice? Police resorting to use of force when not needed or authorized is cowardice in my opinion. If you know UC Davis (very good school) this is a quiet idillic college campus; it's not South or East Los Angeles. These are students, not violent gang members. From their ivory tower, for the Board of Regents to apologize means something is very wrong. They don't apologize very often. As for politics, the Chancellor is not a political appointee nor is she running for office. I don't know or care if she is republican or democrat. I do think her apology should be accepted, the officers chastised for their actions, and everyone else move on.
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"UC Davis' embattled chancellor said campus police officers defied her orders when they used pepper spray on peaceful Occupy protesters last week."
In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Katehi said her office told the school's police department that officers needed to be peaceful when removing protesters.
"We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment," she told the paper. "We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it.
So the campus police disobeyed a direct order. Maybe they/should bel be fired.
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Surrounding police and blocking their free movement is a big no no.
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The campus police disobeyed a direct order. THAT'S a big no no.
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As usual, JDN, you weren't there and don't have the background or experience to make an informed judgement on this.
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United States Court of Appeals,Ninth Circuit.
HEADWATERS FOREST DEFENSE v. COUNTY OF HUMBOLDT
The Eureka Police Department defines “active resistance” as occurring when the “subject is attempting to interfere with the officer's actions by inflicting pain or physical injury to the officer without the use of a weapon or object.” 240 F.3d at 1202-3. Characterizing the protestors' activities as “active resistance” is contrary to the facts of the case, viewing them, as we must, in the light most favorable to the protestors: the protestors were sitting peacefully, were easily moved by the police, and did not threaten or harm the officers. In sum, it would be clear to a reasonable officer that it was excessive to use pepper spray against the nonviolent protestors under these circumstances.
"In addition, regional and state-wide police practice and protocol clearly suggest that using pepper spray against nonviolent protestors is excessive. "
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332957.html
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http://www.fletc.gov/reference/reports/fletc-journals/FLETC-journal-Fall2006.pdf
Those of us in the law enforcement community
know them by many names, such as Use of Force
Continuum, Use of Force Model, Use of Force Ladder,
or Use of Force Matrix. Regardless of what they are
called, visual models depicting progressive escalation
and de-escalation of force have become a mainstay in
the law enforcement community. There is a legitimate
debate among police trainers, administrators and
attorneys as to whether Use of Force continuums still
serve a vital function in the modern law enforcement
agency. The purpose of this article is not to take sides
on the issue, but rather to examine the facts, and allow
the reader to make an informed decision as to whether
continuums still serve a purpose in their agency.
Use of Force Continuums have been used in law
enforcement training for many years. According to
Bruce Siddle, founder of PPCT Management Systems
and author of “Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge”, the
first Use of Force models were based on early models
found in U.S. Army Military Police Manuals from the
early 1960’s.1 Siddle also indicated that those models
may have been based
on models developed by
France in the mid 1940’s.
According to police
defense expert George
Williams, “in the late
1960s, law enforcement
trainers who sincerely
desired to assist officers
in properly employing
force developed force continuums.”2 The Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) first developed
its own Use of Force Model as a result of the Use
of Force project which began in September 1990.
Regardless of when they were developed, Use of Force
Continuums have been a foundational element of law
enforcement training for the past twenty years.
Whether one is for or against the use of continuums
in training, an objective look at most continuums
will reveal a number of pitfalls that may limit their
usefulness. The most obvious pitfall is that Use of Force
Continuums are not typically based upon the standard
established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Graham vs.
Connor3. The Graham court established the standard
for Use of Force that applies to all American police
officers, regardless of jurisdiction. The Graham court
held that Use of Force used by police officers is judged
upon the “objective reasonableness” standard of the
Fourth Amendment and incorporates the concept of
the totality of the circumstances. In Graham the court
specifically stated “the test of reasonableness under the
Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition
or mechanical application”4, but that is exactly what
Use of Force Continuums attempt to do. Additionally,
most Use of Force Continuums do not address the
concept of the totality
of circumstances.
Most continuums are
structured in such a
way that a specific
subject action equates
to a specific officer
response, regardless
of the totality of
circumstances known to
the officer at the moment force was used. Experienced
law enforcement officers know that Use of Force
incidents do not occur in a vacuum. There are factors
such as known violent history of the suspect, duration
of the action, officer/subject variables, and other facts
that make up the totality of circumstances. Rather than
a specific response to a subject’s actions, there may be
a wide range of reasonable responses from which an
officer may choose.
Another problem is there is no consensus on the
definitions used in the various models. Passive
resistance may mean many different things to many
different officers. One officer may view passive
resistance as a protestor who refuses to stand up, while
another officer perceives that same protestor as actively
resistant. Who is right? Active resistance is generally
defined as threatening an officer;5 shoving, striking,
wrestling with, and even biting an
officer.6 In contrast, passive
resistance is described
by the following
suspect actions: (1)
remaining seated,
refusing to move,
and refusing to bear
weight;7 (2) protestors going
limp, or persons chaining themselves
together and covering their hands with maple syrup
to impede the use of handcuffs;8 (3) protestors
employing lock-down devices that immobilize their
arms and prevent their separation by police, although
the protestors could disengage themselves from the
devices.9 In many instances, continuums define actions
as active resistance which the courts have defined as
passive resistance. These inconsistencies only add to
the confusion an officer may experience when trying
to apply concepts taught by a model in a dynamic Use
of Force incident.
Finally, most Use of Force continuums are just not
practical from an application standpoint. While they
may certainly have benefit in explaining Use of Force
to juries in a sterile, quiet courtroom environment,
they hardly represent the “tense, uncertain and rapidly
evolving”10 circumstances faced by police officers in the
field. Linear models, progressive models, or whatever
name one may call them, encourage the officer to
try to find the minimal amount of force necessary to
control a subject’s actions. What happens when that
minimal amount of force fails to control the subject?
The officer now has to use even more force to control
the subject, which is likely to lead to more injuries to
both the officer and the subject who is resisting arrest.
At a recent law enforcement trainer’s conference this
analogy was used:
“If there was a fire at your home, would you want
the responding firefighters to attempt to calculate
the minimal amount of water that is necessary to
put out the flames, or would you prefer them to
use the reasonable amount it would take to get
the fire out? If they attempt to use the minimum
amount of water, and it doesn’t work, the fire
will most certainly get worse”11
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**This is who you want to smear, JDN. I know who I want watching my back in a bad situation.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano...y-honored.html
L.A. NOW
Southern California -- this just in
UC Davis officer in pepper-spraying was honored for past feats
November 21, 2011 | 11:48 am
Lt. John Pike
A UC Davis police officer who reportedly pepper-sprayed student protesters Friday is a former U.S. Marine who has been honored for his campus police work.
Lt. John Pike, identified by the UC Davis student newspaper as the officer at the center of the pepper-spray incident, was credited by the university for subduing a UC Davis Medical Center patient in 2006 as she threatened a fellow officer with scissors and a spray bottle containing a caustic chemical, according to a UC Davis news release issued in June 2007.
Pike was in a hallway when he saw the patient try to assault one of two officers who were trying to prevent her from leaving the hospital against the advice of doctors and her mother, according to the release. He "went flying" to assist the officers and "landed a body block, powering his left shoulder into the patient" just as she was about to stab one of the officers, the release said.
Pike was 5-foot-10 and weighed 245 pounds. "I hit her hard," Pike said, according to the release, which said he weighed 245 pounds. He decided against using pepper spray, a baton or a sidearm because he did not want to injure his partners, the release said. One of officers credited Pike with helping to save his life.
"You've got all these tools on your belt," Pike said, "but sometimes they're not the best tools."
Pike received a meritorious service award from the university, his second such award for exceptional police work, the release said.
The patient later pleaded no contest to a single charge of assault on an officer.
"For me it was just a normal day at the office," the release quoted Pike as saying. "She posed a threat, and I had to handle it. I didn't want her to hurt either of my partners."
Pike's first award stemmed from a 2003 chase in which Pike used his patrol car to bump the vehicle of a person who was about to enter a highway going in the wrong direction of traffic.
The release said Pike had worked in law enforcement for 12 years as of 2007 and had divided his time between the UC Davis police and the Sacramento Police Department.
On Monday, UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza was placed on administrative leave in the wake of the controversy over Friday's pepper-spraying. Two campus police officers earlier were put on leave.
The president of the University of California system has called for a review of police procedures on all campuses.
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That's a lot of meter maid! :lol:
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While I may want Lt. Pike watching my back, I wouldn't want him on my college campus. It's different. He's too Gung Ho, maybe his behavior is appropriate for Iraq or Afghanistan, but not a college campus. Further, he disobeyed a direct order. Even in the military that would get him in trouble. In this case, his action will cost the school in more than one way. All because of his gross incompetence.
As for his medal, it seems a bit melodramatic. He's 5'10" and 245lbs. The woman was how big? And she was a patient in the hospital. Indicative, the woman plead out to a misdemeanor. It is sort of like getting a medal for arresting a guy with a single joint. I mean that's cool, but...
An anti-gay slur by Pike in 2008 resulted in a racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a former police officer against the department, ending in a $240,000 settlement. Officer Calvin Chang’s 2003 discrimination complaint against the university’s police chief and the UC Board of Regents claimed he was systematically ‘marginalized’ as the result of anti-gay and racist attitudes on the force. Chang specifically alleged Pike used profane anti-gay slurs describing him.
This guy is a liability. He's archaic. He does not belong on a school campus.
I think enough on this subject; let's see how the investigation plays out.
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"Further, he disobeyed a direct order."
Please cite your evidence of this claim.
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See above. But I'll repeat the post. It's important.
"UC Davis' embattled chancellor said campus police officers defied her orders when they used pepper spray on peaceful Occupy protesters last week."
In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Katehi said her office told the school's police department that officers needed to be peaceful when removing protesters.
"We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment," she told the paper. "We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it."
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:roll:
It appears you and she share the same ignorance of policing and general reality.
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"As for his medal, it seems a bit melodramatic. He's 5'10" and 245lbs. The woman was how big? And she was a patient in the hospital. Indicative, the woman plead out to a misdemeanor. It is sort of like getting a medal for arresting a guy with a single joint. I mean that's cool, but..."
You say this as a man with a long history of brave acts under dangerous conditions, right?
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(http://demotivators.despair.com/tshirts/occupythenorthpoletshirt.gif)
http://demotivators.despair.com/tshirts/occupythenorthpoletshirt.gif
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"As for his medal, it seems a bit melodramatic. He's 5'10" and 245lbs."
"she threatened a fellow officer with scissors and a spray bottle containing a caustic chemical,"
Some of you may remember Carl James from the tape six of the RCSFg series. He was what we then regarded as an ancient 41 years old. Carl served two tours of combat infantry in 'Nam, was a body guard and sparring partner to world boxing champion Alexis Arguello, and was the body guard who saved Larry Flynt's life when his psycho wife went after him with a knife. Also, he worked the door in some of the more dangerous clubs of East Saint Louis. In short, he was a man who had seen something of this world.
I remember that he told me the scariest thing for him was to break up two women fighting. He said they were a combination of pyschol and feline eye scratching/gouging frenzy. I wasn't there, but then neither were you JDN; put scissors in one's hands and a spray bottle with a caustic chemical, and a good hearty tackle seems well within the bounds of reason to me.
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And, facing someone armed with an edged weapon is commonly considered a deadly force scenario.
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"As for his medal, it seems a bit melodramatic. He's 5'10" and 245lbs."
"she threatened a fellow officer with scissors and a spray bottle containing a caustic chemical,"
Some of you may remember Carl James from the tape six of the RCSFg series. He was what we then regarded as an ancient 41 years old. Carl served two tours of combat infantry in 'Nam, was a body guard and sparring partner to world boxing champion Alexis Arguello, and was the body guard who saved Larry Flynt's life when his psycho wife went after him with a knife. Also, he worked the door in some of the more dangerous clubs of East Saint Louis. In short, he was a man who had seen something of this world.
I remember that he told me the scariest thing for him was to break up two women fighting. He said they were a combination of pyschol and feline eye scratching/gouging frenzy. I wasn't there, but then neither were you JDN; put scissors in one's hands and a spray bottle with a caustic chemical, and a good hearty tackle seems well within the bounds of reason to me.
It's true, I wasn't there and neither were you or anyone else here. But I'm entitled to my opinion, just like the DA and Judge who weren't there either, nor have they been a police officer nor have they necessarily experienced "dangerous conditions"; but somehow they still make judgments based upon the facts provided. In this matter, their conclusion was no big deal; she pleaded to a misdemeanor (probably she did community service only) - a DUI is far worse. So I truly doubt if Carl James would have called this hospital patient "scary". That said, I have no problem with a "good hearty tackle". It's the medal I was making fun of. Many LAPD Police on a weekly basis face danger far more severe than than an inpatient sick woman who is half their size and still they don't get a medal; they are just doing their job. LAPD, unlike most campus police are professionals.
This guy messed up, big time. Worse, he had a direct order from his superior NOT to use force which he obviously disobeyed and which is even on Video. There is simply no excuse for this guy. He's already cost the school money because of his racist red neck attitude, further this incident will and has already cost the school far more because of his ignorance and incompetence. A private company would have fired him by now. Instead he's home collecting his six figure+ salary PLUS huge benefits watching soaps on TV. God bless government jobs, right? :-D :-o :-o
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Yes, you have the right to your opinion, as you enjoy the protection of the men and women you condemn.
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Van Jones left the administration because of past extremist affiliations? Or did he leave to form new ones??
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh_3Nm19Ncw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh_3Nm19Ncw&feature=player_embedded
Does this look like a ground level up movement to you? Repeat after me...
I wonder what the early national socialist rallies in Germany looked like.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57329900/uc-davis-pepper-spray-cop-once-lauded/
Many students, lawmakers and even the university's chancellor have called the officers' actions a horrific example of unnecessary force. But some experts on police tactics say, depending on the circumstances, pepper spray can be more effective to de-escalate a tense situation than dragging off protesters or swinging at them with truncheons.
"Between verbalized commands and knock-down, drag-out fights, there's quite a bit of wiggle room," said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and instructor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who reviewed the pepper spray footage.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57329900/uc-davis-pepper-spray-cop-once-lauded/
Many students, lawmakers and even the university's chancellor have called the officers' actions a horrific example of unnecessary force. But some experts on police tactics say, depending on the circumstances, pepper spray can be more effective to de-escalate a tense situation than dragging off protesters or swinging at them with truncheons.
"Between verbalized commands and knock-down, drag-out fights, there's quite a bit of wiggle room," said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and instructor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who reviewed the pepper spray footage.
That may well be true, often, if not usually, there is quite a bit of "wiggle room". Frankly, if they met resistance and were told to "drag off the protesters" I can understand the point.
However, in UC Davis situation, a DIRECT ORDER was given to do it peacefully.
"We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment," she told the paper. "We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it." That seems pretty clear; if you meet resistance, you back off, you do not escalate. Further, I think a college campus is different; kid gloves is the norm, not use of force.
I'm interested to see how the LAPD handles the problem this week. It is my understanding that unlike UC Davis, orders are different. They are to clear
the area - period. In general, I am a big fan of LAPD so I anticipate they will handle it professionally and if force is necessary to carry out the mandate to clear the area they will use the minimum force necessary to do so. That may include Pepper Spray.
Circumstances are different.
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"I'm interested to see how the LAPD handles the problem this week."
Hmmmm. I'm not impressed. What's a little lawlessness, so long as it distract from Obozo's failings.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj41abaaNtI[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj41abaaNtI
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I understand your point, but LA has a long history of protest tolerance. The causes seem to vary..... Two months ago it was some protest against Thailand. Before that the Philippines. Mexico of course. It's always something. I support free speech, but I wish they would announce it in advance; I could avoid going downtown and the traffic jam. :-)
That said, when given a direct order to clear the area, LAPD CLEARS the area. By whatever means are necessary. Stay tuned...
PS Obviously LAPD in this video was not told to use any force or to take action to clear the intersection (typical in a protest in LA). Unlike some (UC Davis), at least LAPD rank and file know how to obey orders..... :-)
They know that's a management call; way above their pay grade.
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I wish these asshats would block the intersection of Florence and Normandie.
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They are crazy, but not stupid... :-D
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"I understand your point, but LA has a long history of protest tolerance."
Oh really?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeus9IO1C-w[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeus9IO1C-w
Not OC spray.
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As I said, when LAPD is given a direct order to "clear the area", they CLEAR the area. Nothing ambiguous about it. Their only mistake at MacArthur Park is that they thumped a few Newscasters.
They like to think they are exempt. :-)
That said, that was not the order given to UC Davis Campus Police. In fact, the opposite order was given, yet disobeyed. Disciple is important.
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"That said, that was not the order given to UC Davis Campus Police."
That's the claim from the butt-covering educrat. We shall see.
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I agree; but if she gave the order (see her quote) not to use force then the officer should be toast.
Then again, if it's all BS, and she said "clear them out" period, then frankly, the President should be toast. The officer was just doing his job.
Emails and witnesses should be able to verify the facts.
I look forward to hear how it plays out. I understand former LAPD Chief Bratton (whom I respect very highly) has been retained to do the investigation.
It should be fair. If anything, being a former police officer, he is biased in favor of the officer (faculty and students are complaining), but then again, I respect Bratton's objectivity, competency, and honesty.
Let the chips fall as they may.
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There was a study some time back that found that civillian review boards tended to rule in a more favorable manner towards officers over police administrators.
As I've posted before, Graham v. Connor is the national standard for use of force for law enforcement.
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I understand Graham v. Connor, but please remember this is a college campus. I still say that's different. A "soft touch" is the norm.
Being "surrounded" even if they were, doesn't count as being "threatened". Just bad tactics; note, no one physically threatened the officer at any time.
No one disputes that fact.
I think Bratton will be fair.
More important, did the UC Davis President say what she said or didn't she? That is the key.
If she did, the officer should be toast. He disobeyed an order. It wasn't his call.
If she is lying well, she's out of a job. And should be.
Hopefully, the truth can be found.
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We shall see.
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President Obama praised Frank's work on the financial reform legislation.
"This country has never had a Congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him," Obama said in a statement. "It is only thanks to his leadership that we were able to pass the most sweeping financial reform in history designed to protect consumers and prevent the kind of excessive risk-taking that led to the financial crisis from ever happening again."
:evil:
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Continuing from media issues, Crafty wrote: "It goes far deeper and far worser than missing the call. He [Rep. Barney Frank] actively drove the disaster [Housing Freddie Fannie crisis]."
True!
CRA and everything about affordable housing means making decisions on criteria other than creditworthiness and likelihood of paying the loan back.
"Beginning in 1992 and continuing through 2007, Fannie and Freddie were required to meet affordable housing goals established by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. For most of these years, Frank was the staunchest defender of this policy." http://www.aei.org/article/economics/financial-services/barney-frank-still-does-not-get-it/
That is what is was and he is who was driving it.
But Frank blames Republicans who controlled the house from 1995 through 2006. Also true. That is what we call RINOs, the go-along crowd. These are liberal policies, but a coalition of Dems and RINOs is a governing majority even when Republicans in name control the House.
Flashback, here is Barney Frank at the end, chair of the committee, hellbent on cutting off Michele Bachmann's questioning of Geithner and Bernancke March 2009 (Rep. Bachmann and the 3 stooges): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SXpGV1HLZk
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The LAPD did a first class professional job.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/occupy-la-non-violent-dismantling-deemed-a-success.html
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Umm, glad to hear it, but why is that in this thread?
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Umm, glad to hear it, but why is that in this thread?
There is foundation. If you look above GM and I had a long discussion on the proper role of force and police action at UC Davis. Among other issues, I questioned the professionalism and actions of
the Campus Police (GM defended them) and I commented that I thought/hoped the LAPD would handle the situation here better. In fact the LAPD did handle IMHO the LA situation superbly;
a situation much more volatile, dangerous and politically hot than the student protest at UC Davis. Unlike UC Davis campus police, LAPD followed orders; then when ordered to clear the area, solved the problem
with minimal use of force. That's how it should be done. That's why I said LAPD did a first class job and linked the LA Times article.
Then again you could argue this belongs Citizen-Police Interactions.
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Which could restart the conversation on a fresher note :-)
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I think GM (although I can't answer for him) and I will both wait until further developments happen in the UC Davis matter before
we take up this conversation again. Stay tuned! :-) I am glad though the LA situation turned out reasonably well.
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http://photo.twincities.com/mediaCafe/news.html#id=album-4609&num=2
Photo of Occupy poster - obese woman - protesting for more food and welfare rights. Good grief.
Welfare Rights Committee, St. Paul, MN.
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http://photo.twincities.com/mediaCafe/news.html#id=album-4609&num=2
Photo of Occupy poster - obese woman - protesting for more food and welfare rights. Good grief.
Welfare Rights Committee, St. Paul, MN.
Because uncaring capitalists like you won't shell out for a personal trainer and chef for this poor woman. Shame!
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"Because uncaring capitalists like you won't shell out for a personal trainer and chef for this poor woman."
GM, You must write from a red state. In the blue states we don't joke about new entitlements. She is already entitled to a free cab ride to her taxpayer paid sex change operation.
A tornado ran through that town this year still needing cleanup. If she had worked off some of that welfare she would be a much thinner, healthier version of ugly.
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Hey how come Sharpton Jackson and the rest of the race baiters are no where to be seen or heard when the media is assasinating a conservative Black?
Bottom line - it ain't about race - its about reparations.
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"Because uncaring capitalists like you won't shell out for a personal trainer and chef for this poor woman."
GM, You must write from a red state. In the blue states we don't joke about new entitlements. She is already entitled to a free cab ride to her taxpayer paid sex change operation.
**It's more purple now. It's red in the rural areas where people actually do productive things and maintain civilization, where the metro area is filled with illegals and other members of the leech class as cultivated by the dems.
A tornado ran through that town this year still needing cleanup. If she had worked off some of that welfare she would be a much thinner, healthier version of ugly.
**You want people to work for money? OUTRAGE!
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bavou_SEj1E#![/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bavou_SEj1E#!
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GM, Welcome to my world. The court's goal after taking them away is to keep re-uniting them with their mother, 'the best interest of the child' and start it over again.
"I Got 15 Kids & 3 Babydaddys-SOMEONE'S GONNA PAY FOR ME & MY KIDS!!!"
Fiance and father of 10 of them arrested. No! They didn't say what he did for a living before the arrest, lol.
"Somebody needs to pay for all my children" "Somebody needs to be held accountable" - Yes!
Cute kids. Adopt them out early. And take her to a humane society to be 'fixed' - voluntarily in a plea agreement.
What is a leftist solution to correcting no-consequences behavior?
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Today's column is that Europe is spending too little, but his argument is the same here. A Nobel Laureate (aren't they all?), I don't know what it would take to call him a discredited economist/pundit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/opinion/krugman-killing-the-euro.html?_r=1
... And here, too, we desperately need expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to support the economy as these debtors struggle back to financial health. Yet, as in Europe, public discourse is dominated by deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.
So the next time you hear someone claiming that if we don’t slash spending we’ll turn into Greece, your answer should be that if we do slash spending while the economy is still in a depression, we’ll turn into Europe. In fact, we’re well on our way.
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"A Nobel Laureate (aren't they all?)"
Every time I drive through Princeton all I can think of is "stinking liberal university professors". All the same. Columbia Hahvood, Yale Princeton.
I cannot think Ivy league without the thought of American hating professors teaching the propaganda.
To think this guy Krugman was given a noble prize is just as big a joke as Brock getting one for peace.
They belong in the same boat as Arafat.
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I don't understand why people disrespect the work that most Nobel laureates do.
And I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities. For example, I was taught by a economics faculty member with strong ties to the Institute for Humane Studies.
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I don't understand why people disrespect the work that most Nobel laureates do.
**Because Buraq the Bloodthirsty and Krugman damage the brand.
And I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities. For example, I was taught by a economics faculty member with strong ties to the Institute for Humane Studies.
**Probably because of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=3&ref=science
Social Scientist Sees Bias Within
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 7, 2011
SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.
“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”
The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.
The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”
Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”
Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.
“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.
Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”
For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.
In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”
As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 10, 2011
Because of an editing error, the Findings column on Tuesday, about political bias among social scientists, omitted the last four words of a sentence that countered the notion that female scientists face discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. The sentence should have read: But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/12/02/a_left_wing_monopoly_on_campuses/
JEFF JACOBY
A left-wing monopoly on campuses
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 2, 2004
THE LEFT-WING takeover of American universities is an old story. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.
Today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly minted graduate of another prominent university -- Ben Shapiro of UCLA -- shows in "Brainwashed," a recent bestseller. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity," Shapiro writes, "lies a grave and overpowering bias" -- a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.
No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.
So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and six were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise's editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: "Today's colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America."
At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. While 64 percent said they were "liberal" or "somewhat liberal," only 6 percent described themselves as "somewhat conservative' -- and none at all as "conservative."
And the evidence continues to mount.
The New York Times reports that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.
Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. "Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent," writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, "deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. ... Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition."
Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors "frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course," 48 percent said some "presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided," and 46 percent said that "professors use the classroom to present their personal political views."
Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students' right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe -- liberals and conservatives alike.
"If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment," says ACTA's president, Anne Neal, "there would be an uproar." That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand -- like the one-party conformity it flows from -- they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
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Bigdog, I am sorry for my ad hominem attack on Nobel prize winners. In the context of all my previous posts, I was only referring to:
a) I cannot connect Paul Krugman the columnist with the scholarly work he did previously,
b) Al Gore and the IPCC who made wild inflammatory claims not even following their cherry picked data, and
c) Pres. Barack Obama after a partial term in the Senate and a minute or two in his job.
These examples devalue IMHO the international gold standard for scholarly work. I appreciate being held to account for my statements that go over the top.
FWIW, I was taught economics by the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who was also economic adviser to Presidential candidate Sen. Kennedy. He taught us that his answer is the answer. I envy those who had the prominent conservative professors, or those who present more than one viewpoint well, as I assume you strive for in your teaching. I never personally met one.
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Thank you Doug.
And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.
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Thank you Doug.
And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.
Did they cover what statistical outliers are in that liberal, Ivy League-quality education?
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:lol: FWIW, my undergrad degree was from U PA and my JD from Columbia.
I remember with great fondness my International Relations Prof. William Quandt in 1975, who headed up the mid-east desk at the NSC under Henry Kissinger. I remember him as a man of intellectual integrity. He gave me an A+ for a paper that strongly criticized the then liberal progressive outrage against multinational corporations. Generally he was a great teacher.
I also remember Professor Mansfield. I was the star of the class in the semester on micro-economics. The second semester, using the textbook that the Prof wrote, we covered Macro. The book was strongly Keynesian. In the late 60s due to my strong opposition to the Vietnam War, I imagined myself a leftist, but when confronted with the specious reasoning of Prof. Mansfield's Keynesianism, I realized I was a free marketeer. I sealed my fate with Prof M. one day in class when I doubted his prosletyzation for government guidance of the economy because it would require "sustained intelligence on the part of the government". The wave of snickering across the class had 80-100 people discomfitted him and somehow I went from an "A" in the first semester to a "C" in the second semester.
I also liked my prof for my senior thesis class. We spent a goodly amount of time on Samuel Huntington and Barrington Moore (The Social Origins of dictatorship and democracy) I liked this a lot and found the class stimulating.
OTOH there was Columbia. More tomorrow (if I remember to) including my Con Law class with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
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Robert Mundell (just taking a stab at it) is one I greatly admire.
Looking forward to any memorable stories from Prof. Ginsburg.
Walter Heller, who I mentioned, was a Keynesian with quite an interesting bio. Later a Ted Kennedy adviser working on national health care and gas rationing in the late 1970s, but I believe he was noticeably to the right of the current writings of Prof. Krugman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Heller (1915–1987) was a leading American economist of the 1960s, and an influential advisor to President John F. Kennedy as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, 1961-64.
He was a Keynesian who promoted cuts in the marginal federal income tax rates. This tax cut, which was passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress after Kennedy's death, was credited for boosting the U.S. economy. Heller developed the first "voluntary" wage-price guidelines. When the steel industry failed to follow them, it was publicly attacked by Kennedy and quickly complied. Heller was one of the first to emphasize that tax deductions and tax preferences narrowed the income tax base, thus requiring, for a given amount of revenue, higher marginal tax rates. The historic tax cut and its positive effect on the economy has often been cited as motivation for more recent tax cuts by Republicans.
The day after Kennedy was assassinated, Heller met with President Johnson in the Oval Office. To get the country going again, Heller suggested a major initiative he called the "War on Poverty", which Johnson adopted enthusiastically. Later, when Johnson insisted on escalating the Vietnam War without raising taxes, setting the stage for an inflationary spiral, Heller resigned.
In the early phases of his career, Heller contributed to the creation of the Marshall Plan of 1947, and was instrumental in re-establishing the German currency following World War II, which helped usher an economic boom in West Germany.
Heller was critical of Milton Friedman's followers and labelled them cultish: "Some of them are Friedmanly, some Friedmanian, some Friedmanesque, some Friedmanic and some Friedmaniacs."[1]
Heller joined the University of Minnesota faculty as an associate professor of economics in 1945, left to serve in government, and returned in the 1960s, eventually serving as chair of the Department of Economics. He built it into a top-ranked department with spectacular hires, including Nobel Prize winners Leonid Hurwicz (2008) and Edward C. Prescott (2004).
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Thank you Doug.
And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.
Did they cover what statistical outliers are in that liberal, Ivy League-quality education?
Of course they did, GM. If you read closely, I was responding to a particular post that was discussing the absolute absence of conservatives in higher education. I then went on to say "...I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities." There was nothing in either of my posts that should indicate to you that I was suggesting a 3-1 conservative to liberal ratio. But, I did illustrate that there is NOT an absolute absence of conservatives teaching in the nation's finest universities.
And, there are conservatives who teach at the nation's finest law schools. The University of Chicago, which is consistently ranked in the top five in the nation, is considered to be a conservative legal education. And John Yoo, who most of have heard of, teaches at UC-Berkeley.
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GM - Even from here, I can hear you crying in sympathy! :-) :-) :-)
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/12/some-occupy-la-arrestees-feel-traumatized-might-need-therapy.html
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GM - Even from here, I can hear you crying in sympathy! :-) :-) :-)
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/12/some-occupy-la-arrestees-feel-traumatized-might-need-therapy.html
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpXybTnGVg[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpXybTnGVg
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TDd_TYotrxw#![/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TDd_TYotrxw#!
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I sealed my fate with Prof M. one day in class when I doubted his prosletyzation for government guidance of the economy because it would require "sustained intelligence on the part of the government".
That is really funny.
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Why progressive policies always fail
By:Richard A. Epstein | 12/07/11 8:05 PM
Op-Ed Contributor.
Much has been made lately of those whose income is in the top 1 percent, who supposedly don't pay their "fair share" of taxes. They have been denounced as close to common thieves.
But think of the gains that they generate for others. We have rigged our tax policies so that, depending on the year, close to 40 percent of the income tax revenue comes from the 1 percent of the population that controls 20 percent of the wealth.
Close to half the population pays no federal income tax at all. This is a political disaster in the making.
The American economy is currently stagnating for two main reasons. At the top of the system, a relentless program of redistributive taxation undermines incentives for long-term investment and growth.
Yet from this vain pursuit of economic equality, we get declining standards of living for all. Simultaneously on the ground, excessive regulation of labor and real estate markets chokes off growth -- employer by employer and house by house.
Our lopsided structure cannot last. Stock market losses cut the total income of so-called "one percenters" by around 30 percent between 2007 and 2009, with the greatest losses in the top 0.1 percent.
Higher tax rates will drive that overall level of wealth lower still, given that so little government revenue comes from the bottom half of the income distribution. Low tax revenues plus shiny new entitlements create an unsustainable situation where 40 percent of current expenditures are funded by long term debt, on which principal and interest payments will soon come due.
The correct policy flattens the tax rates to boost growth to the top, by leaving more wealth in private hands for intelligent wealth creation. Short-term tax horizons make it difficult for intelligent investors to implement long-term planning, which drives foreign capital from our shores, and sends American capital abroad.
The problem at the top is compounded by a similar paralysis at the bottom. Job creation best occurs in competitive markets. It is hampered when a purported jobs bill starts with "buy American" and "prevailing wage" provisions that pay homage to protectionism and monopoly unions.
Job creation is not helped when the Obama administration takes after Boeing for refusing to build new plants for the benefit of its intransigent unions, and proposes endless changes of national labor law in order to strengthen the hands of unions in organizing drives.
Still more jobs are destroyed by stiffer enforcement of overtime, minimum wage and antidiscrimination laws, all of which nix hiring by cautious employers. The prospect of heavy, but uncertain levies, to fund Obamacare injects yet further caution.
Housing policy is no better. Constant delays on foreclosure keep people in possession of their homes after chronic default imposes a permanent pall over housing markets.
Borrowers with no equity in their home, are more concerned with staving off foreclosure than maintaining their premises. Existing housing stock does not get resold in the market at prices that reflect its present value. Yet further subsidies are channeled via the Federal Housing Administration to perpetuate the cycle of high-risk lending.
All of this must stop if American government hopes to avert the rapid dissipation of human and physical capital. Deregulation has advantages that no system of government subsidies can hope to match.
Dial back on the full-court press against job creation and mortgage foreclosure, and jobs and new construction will follow. But the stagflation will continue so long as unsound regimes of taxation, public expenditure and market regulation place a hobnail boot on the throat of the American economy.
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch professor of law, New York University Law School, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This piece was adapted from his broadside, "Why Progressive Institutions Are Unsustainable," available from Encounter Books.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/12/why-progressive-policies-always-fail/1982701
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Al Gore is giving voice to researchers: "Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann of Maastricht University, and Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim of Harvard" and others who found that: "sustainable businesses realize financial benefits such as lower cost of debt and lower capital constraints".
The assumption is that corporate managers otherwise only look to next quarter's earning, all are really Enrons imploding without a new focus. But the great corporations of today already are the ones who perform well year after year and decade after decade by looking our for long term interests.
Get ready for ESG Metrics to be a required MBA course and a fast growing major across the fruited, liberal academic plain. Who is your company's Chief ESG Officer?
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203430404577092682864215896.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism
How businesses can embrace environmental, social and governance metrics.
By AL GORE AND DAVID BLOOD
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United States was preparing its visionary plan for nurturing democratic capitalism abroad, Gen. Omar Bradley said, "It is time to steer by the stars, and not by the lights of each passing ship." Today, more than 60 years later, that means abandoning short-term economic thinking for "sustainable capitalism."
We are once again facing one of those rare turning points in history when dangerous challenges and limitless opportunities cry out for clear, long-term thinking. The disruptive threats now facing the planet are extraordinary: climate change, water scarcity, poverty, disease, growing income inequality, urbanization, massive economic volatility and more. Businesses cannot be asked to do the job of governments, but companies and investors will ultimately mobilize most of the capital needed to overcome the unprecedented challenges we now face.
Before the crisis and since, we and others have called for a more responsible form of capitalism, what we call sustainable capitalism: a framework that seeks to maximize long-term economic value by reforming markets to address real needs while integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics throughout the decision-making process.
Such sustainable capitalism applies to the entire investment value chain—from entrepreneurial ventures to large public companies, seed-capital providers to institutional investors, employees to CEOs, activists to policy makers. It transcends borders, industries, asset classes and stakeholders.
Those who advocate sustainable capitalism are often challenged to spell out why sustainability adds value. Yet the question that should be asked instead is: "Why does an absence of sustainability not damage companies, investors and society at large?" From BP to Lehman Brothers, there is a long list of examples proving that it does.
Moreover, companies and investors that integrate sustainability into their business practices are finding that it enhances profitability over the longer term. Experience and research show that embracing sustainable capitalism yields four kinds of important benefits for companies:
• Developing sustainable products and services can increase a company's profits, enhance its brand, and improve its competitive positioning, as the market increasingly rewards this behavior.
• Sustainable capitalism can also help companies save money by reducing waste and increasing energy efficiency in the supply chain, and by improving human-capital practices so that retention rates rise and the costs of training new employees decline.
• Third, focusing on ESG metrics allows companies to achieve higher compliance standards and better manage risk since they have a more holistic understanding of the material issues affecting their business.
• Researchers (including Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann of Maastricht University, and Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim of Harvard) have found that sustainable businesses realize financial benefits such as lower cost of debt and lower capital constraints.
Sustainable capitalism is also important for investors. Mr. Serafeim and his colleague Robert G. Eccles have shown that sustainable companies outperform their unsustainable peers in the long term. Therefore, investors who identify companies that embed sustainability into their strategies can earn substantial returns, while experiencing low volatility.
Because ESG metrics directly affect companies' long-term value, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations and the like—investors with long-term liabilities—should include these metrics as an essential aspect of valuation and investment strategy. Sustainable capitalism requires investors to be good investors, to fully understand the companies they invest in and to believe in their long-term value and potential.
We recommend five key actions for immediate adoption by companies, investors and others to accelerate the current incremental pace of change to one that matches the urgency of the situation:
• Identify and incorporate risk from stranded assets. "Stranded assets" are those whose value would dramatically change, either positively or negatively, when large externalities are taken into account—for example, by attributing a reasonable price to carbon or water. So long as their true value is ignored, stranded assets have the potential to trigger significant reductions in the long-term value of not just particular companies but entire sectors.
That's exactly what occurred when the true value of subprime mortgages was belatedly recognized and mortgage-backed assets were suddenly repriced. Until there are policies requiring the establishment of a fair price on widely understood externalities, academics and financial professionals should strive to quantify the impact of stranded assets and analyze the subsequent implications for investment opportunities.
• Mandate integrated reporting. Despite an increase in the volume and frequency of information made available by companies, access to more data for public equity investors has not necessarily translated into more comprehensive insight into companies. Integrated reporting addresses this problem by encouraging companies to integrate both their financial and ESG performance into one report that includes only the most salient or material metrics.
This enables companies and investors to make better resource-allocation decisions by seeing how ESG performance contributes to sustainable, long-term value creation. While voluntary integrated reporting is gaining momentum, it must be mandated by appropriate agencies such as stock exchanges and securities regulators in order to ensure swift and broad adoption.
• End the default practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance. The quarterly calendar frequently incentivizes executives to manage for the short-term. It also encourages some investors to overemphasize the significance of these measures at the expense of longer-term, more meaningful measures of sustainable value creation. Ending this practice in favor of companies' issuing guidance only as they deem appropriate (if at all) would encourage a longer-term view of the business.
• Align compensation structures with long-term sustainable performance. Most existing compensation schemes emphasize short-term actions and fail to hold asset managers and corporate executives accountable for the ramifications of their decisions over the long-term. Instead, financial rewards should be paid out over the period during which these results are realized and compensation should be linked to fundamental drivers of long-term value, employing rolling multiyear milestones for performance evaluation.
• Incentivize long-term investing with loyalty-driven securities. The dominance of short-termism in the market fosters general market instability and undermines the efforts of executives seeking long-term value creation. The common argument that more liquidity is always better for markets is based on long-discredited elements of the now-obsolete "standard model" of economics, including the illusion of perfect information and the assumption that markets tend toward equilibrium.
To push against this short-termism, companies could issue securities that offer investors financial rewards for holding onto shares for a certain number of years. This would attract long-term investors with patient capital and would facilitate both long-term value creation in companies and stability in financial markets.
Ben Franklin famously said, "You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again." Today we have an opportunity to steer by the stars and once again rebuild for the long-term. Sustainable capitalism will create opportunities and rewards, but it will also mean challenging the pernicious orthodoxy of short-termism. As we face an inflection point in the global economy and the global environment, the imperative for change has never been greater.
Mr. Gore, chairman of Generation Investment Management, is a former vice president of the United States. Mr. Blood is managing partner of Generation Investment Management.
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http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=595282&p=1
Vaclav Havel Crushed Communism By Speaking The Truth
Posted 12/19/2011 06:57 PM ET
Leadership: Europe's outpouring of grief over the death of Vaclav Havel, hero of Czechoslovakia's great Velvet Revolution, says much about its longing for more like him. His honesty and courage liberated Europe.
Some 75,000 Czechs bearing roses and candles lined up in Wenceslas Square beginning Sunday, as they once did in 1989, to pay tribute to one of the greatest freedom fighters of the 20th century. Havel died Sunday at age 75 after liberating his country, leading his nation as president from 1989-2003, and voicing his moral authority to scourge lingering tyrants in Cuba, Burma and China.
Havel, a playwright whose health had been weakened by years spent in communist dungeons, was an unlikely and yet perfect leader for leading Eastern Europe's liberation from communism. He unshackled Europe with the only weapon in his arsenal — words, which he animated and empowered by expressing them truthfully.
In the former Czechoslovakia, the nightmare of communism imposed after World War II was employed with a Nazi-like oppressive intensity, leaving a bleak society whose citizens got by on lies, collaboration, mediocrity and ratlike survival ethics.
"We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions. ... Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful," Havel told his nation after being elected the first president of the restored democracy in December 1989.
Condemned from birth as a "bourgeois element," Havel was always an outsider who could never become a "new communist man" or a cog in the machine of "progress." Denied admission to university, denied jobs, denied permission to leave the country, spied on by secret police and refused liberty in prison beginning in 1979, he managed to free his country by standing up for freedom against all odds.
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It was an incredible dream then — because right up until the end, no one believed communism would ever fall. Havel's Velvet Revolution changed that, as first a few thousand, and then a few hundred thousand flooded the streets calling for the regime's end — and the move spread like wildfire through Europe and eventually hit the gates of Moscow.
Havel's peaceful revolution, unlike almost any other, left all oppressive regimes — to this very day — uncertain about their self-declared permanence.
All the same, the sorry imitations now seen in Egypt and Libya and other places leave people skeptical. That's because they aren't animated by the classical concepts of liberty and human rights that Havel's truth was.
First, his plays pointed out the rampant dishonesty, collaboration and conformity of society under communism and enraged the regime for that alone. Then in 1976, motivated by the regime's arrest of a psychedelic rock band called "Plastic People of the Universe," he initiated the first call for political freedom through his Charter 77, a manifesto for liberty on classical principles. He got 242 others to sign it — only a few years after Soviet tanks crushed Czechoslovakia's freedom fighters in a bloody 1968 invasion.
And yet, Havel himself said that standing up for freedom was the only choice.
"Humanity will pay the price for communism until such a time as we learn to stand up to it with all political responsibility and decisiveness," he said, encouraging a group of Cuban civil society organizers in 2006.
Havel not only articulated the corrosive effect of communism on the human soul as few others did, he also warned the West to defend its liberties and free markets.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/12/19/barney_frank_wears_revealing_shirt_on_house_floor.html
Too bad there isn't a vomiting icon.... :x
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Guys all think they are experts on discerning real from fake. Those for sure are enhanced; some kind of hormone treatment. I hesitate to ponder whether the package came with the plumbing conversion. I never understood why 'ordinary' gays want to be associated with all the iterations of the LGBT movement. Are they still a gay couple if his lover really wants him to be a woman?
I wonder what the media attacks would be if Sarah Palin wore that blouse in congressional testimony with breasts exposed while everyone else was in a business suit.
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http://www.chequerboard.org/2011/12/apologists-for-communist-totalitarianism-i-hate-those-guys/
Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys
by Pejman Yousefzadeh on December 23, 2011
One would think that the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il would prompt universal condemnation for the dictatorial communist regimes the former so bravely fought against, and the latter used for self-aggrandizement at the expense of his own citizens. One would be wrong; the condemnation of dictatorial communist regimes is blessedly widespread, but it is by no means universal.
Consider first Neil Clark, who informs us of the following regarding Havel’s struggle:
No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.
These comments are, of course, repulsive beyond belief, in addition to being historically illiterate, but as far as Clark is concerned, no good will come of Havel’s death if people like Clark cannot use it in order to lie about history. Andrew Stuttaford rightly takes Clark to task. So does Johnathan Pearce:
Presumably, [Clark's article] explains why there were millions of downtrodden, poor people attempting to enter the Soviet Empire from such hellholes as West Germany. That explains why East Berlin erected the Wall, to contain the flood of people trying to enter it. Yes, that must have been the reason. (Sarcasm alert).
I guess the fact that the Soviet System created a two-tier society: the Party and Everyone Else, must have escaped Mr Clark’s gimlet-eye attention. Perhaps the Gulag, the shootings of political opponents, the construction of the White Sea Canal (with slave labour), etc, were in fact all features of ensuring that the “needs of the majority” came “first”.
For what it is worth, on a more theoretical level, the horrors of collectivism can be summed up in Marx’s dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. For if you believe that the needs of the majority trump such pesky issues as rights or liberties, then so much the worse for such liberal principles. But in practice, of course, the history of the Communist world was littered with stories of shortages, famines and shabby, crappily produced goods and services.
Make no mistake; however eloquent Stuttaford’s and Pearce’s condemnation of Clark’s drivel, no one will succeed in the effort to make Clark ashamed of what he wrote. The man is clearly ineducable.
Speaking of ineducable, consider Simon Winchester–hidden behind a paywall, so alas, no link–on North Korea:
The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.
India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.
Let’s give the mike to Brian Micklethwait, for a reply:
No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with “For all its faults …”. You’ll struggle to top that one.
One could take that competition and run with it all day. “For all its faults, Nazi Germany was really good on the issue of realizing the health dangers of smoking.” “For all its faults, the Stalinist Soviet Union had itself a leader with an awesome mustache.” “For all its faults, Maoist China did not completely collapse into utter ruin.”
Now, your turn. Don’t be shy; this is a fun game!
Alex Massie is indignant. And who can blame him? Indignation ought to be directed at CNN as well, which has made eliding the facts and missing the point into something of an art form when it comes to North Korea. To be fair, of course, it is entirely possible that CNN is relying on the wrong academic to guide its thinking–or whatever passes for “thinking” at CNN–when it comes to North Korea. But that’s still no excuse, even if it might be an explanation.
I just have a simple request, however. Is it possible that we could ostracize communists–and their fanboys and girls–the way that we would ostracize Nazis and the people who make excuses for them? Could I possibly see that happen before I die of old age? Because that would be nice.
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What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. - Thomas sowell
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/12/27/random_thoughts_112538.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Keynes Was Right
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 29, 2011
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.
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Someone please show where this award winning economist / far left pundit called for spending austerity during the last boom. I missed that column. Which programs did he want cut and by how much? Krugman swerves into the truth. One reason for failure of all stimulus programs today is that we already swimming in government stimuli and simply can't feel any effect anymore from another tril or two. Krugman points to Ireland. How about Canada?
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"How about Canada?"
I have always like Canada; beautiful country and nice people. They have an excellent National Health Care plan for example. :-) Canada's income tax rate is approximately 10% higher than ours. :-) Further, Canada's income tax system is more heavily biased against the highest income earners versus the U.S. :-) Makes sense to me... :-D
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Doug has a post on Canada this morning in the Political Economics thread. JDN, would you bring your comments here over to there please?
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You can't make this stuff up. I have used some of the same logic to explain how we could have survived our massive debt if we had gotten our act together a couple of years ago, grown the economy and stopped adding to the debt. But Krugman still wants more. At 15 trillion with deficits still over a trillion a year in 2012, he still wants more:
"We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?_r=1
Hard to point out he is wrong when he does that for you:
"Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion."
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On drudger this am:
Another liberal socialist professor from Columbia U. succeeded in gaining a class for college credit for the OWS radical agenda.
Hannah Appel.
I presume if someone in the class went to a Tea Party event instead the person would get an F.
Just because one can think "outside the box" does not make one qualified to teach. There is a limit to opposing and independent thought beyond which it is just stubborn, angry stupidity.
The radical left has really hyjacked the political thought in the Ivies.
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Is she stupid (no) or does she just think we are? (maybe) Perfect Soviet-Orwellian talking. Romney won a close Iowa caucus that he almost didn't enter and trailed badly 10 days ago, but she says a win is a loss. Reasoning: because of money.
The point she is trying to make is that the money and establishment advantage didn't buy that many votes. Meanwhile her guy is the establishment with the big money advantage.
2 million jobs lost, I wouldn't want her job spinning these facts.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/04/wasserman_schultz_bad_night_for_romney_great_night_for_us.html
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"Spin" is ok. It makes no difference what a politician says but just go ahead and call them a liar and look what happens - You have the CNNs ODonnel going bonkers with her gotcha moment on Newt - "are you calling him a liar?" [Romney]
Newt said frankly yes. So of course CNN runs with it trying to make it into another big scandel. This from the keeping 'em honest station - what a joke. :cry:
The political correct establishment thing is to never call spin what it is - lying. The L word is no different now then the N word the F word.
On second thought the F word is great.
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The DNC Chair won't hurry back to Fox News Sunday. This clip only shows a little of it. It was worse in total. She struggles to answer the "one term proposition" he made in his own words in Feb 2009: "if I 'doesn't get it done in 3 years'...
I harped on this in another thread, but she can only refer back to the mess "he inherited":
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/08/wasserman_schultz_painfully_tries_to_explain_why_obama_deserves_another_term.html
"Without any help from the Republicans"
"The Republican Congress" - [HE HAD A DEM CONGRESS THE FIRST 2 YEARS!]
"he inherited a huge set of problems at once"
"George W Bush presided over... No one was minding the store, with almost no regulation that was appropriate over the financial services industry..."
I realize I am the only one harping on this, but he moved over to the White House, not from political obscurity, but from serving 2 YEARS IN MAJORITY CONTROL AND DE FACTO LEADERSHIP OF CONGRESS, ALMOST COMPLETELY UNRESTRAINED BY A LAME DUCK, 2ND HALF OF A 2ND TERM PRESIDENT.
Unemployment was 4.6% when the American people turned out people like Sen. Santorum by double digits in a swing state and put a San Francisco liberal in Speaker's chair leading up to the elevation of the Senate's number one rated liberal to be the nominee and then the President. That is not exactly an inheritance - it has their fingerprints all over it. And also it was not exactly a path to getting conservatives or Republicans on board with a reach to the middle agenda.
"Without any help from the Republicans" - Thank God.
Even if no one says it aloud, didn't everyone alive and paying attention see this happen?
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I'm with ya Doug in my amazement at how divorced "the story" is from reality. :x
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One consensus among the 20% of Americans who identify as liberal is that Republicans are in denial of science.
On global warming, they won't say how fast it is warming or what part of it is caused by human's using fossil fuels for energy but are certain that causation is proven in science, even after the lead scientists were caught cooking and cherry picking the data, studies and analysis.
Next is always evolution where a few 'Christian conservatives' prefer not to speak out against a Judeo-Christian religious belief that man is different from other creatures. No one that I know on the right denies that God's creation included some ability for living things to adapt.
OTOH, the left on global warming is in compete denial that man or species will be able to adapt to the slightest variation in temperature.
Most stunning though is the omission of abortion from any discussion of a war on science. let's see, science establishes it is a) alive, b) human, and c) of genetic code completely distinct from the mother. In the later term, IF the cord is cut and the creature removed, it can live on support just like other people at the hospital. Yet we kill them off at a rate that could make lenin and Stalin take pause, comparisons to Hitler and holocaust passed up by request. Yea, this is science. But the Huffington Post is in search of something gone awry in the conservative brain. Go figure.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/why-republicans-deny-scie_b_1196823.html
Chris Mooney
Author, 'The Republican War on Science' and 'The Republican Brain'
Why Republicans Deny Science: The Quest for a Scientific Explanation
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The Columbia Univ. liberal who writes books on poverty as well as a lecturer for the far left liberal movement including one world government, wind and solar proponent and basically trashing capitalism and the rest was on Scarborough this AM. I didn't listen to all of it but he listed CEOs, financiers and doctors as the 1% who are bilking the 99%. They also had Ezeikel Emmanuel the brother of Rahm and an MD policy liberal on.
I notice he doesn't mention the entertainment industry being part of the 1%, or politicians, or some lawyers.
How about Columbia University professors who make a nice salary and benefits and get plenty of time to write/hawk books:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/where-professors-make-the-most/
There is always justification for some to do well as long as they are politically correct. All the others are lumped into "bilking the system".
Frankly as a doctor I WISH I was in the one percent. Lumping all doctors together is just as bigoted and biased as one can get. I am sure the Emanuals are broke. I wonder how much Sachs makes off his books. I am sure every penny goes to feeding the poor.
Class warfare continues.
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Andrew Sullivan calls himself a conservative :roll:. He gives assigns credit for anything good to the genius of Obama. Anything bad is result of the incompetence of the right or the delusion of the far left (which of course does not include Obama). Obama he concludes is a moderate.
Some of the highly debatable opinions whcih are stated as though they are fact include:
For example, the bailout of the auto industry was a "great success". (I ask for whom?)
And of course if Brock is not as far left as some paint him it is not because he couldn't be, it is because he *really is* a moderate left of center. :roll:
He totally ignores Brock's own devisive politics. I could go on but one can see for himself. OF course the article is under the Newsweek banner. A few decades ago I used to subscribe to this magazine:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html
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For example, the bailout of the auto industry was a "great success". (I ask for whom?)
Actually, most people consider it a "great success".
But give some of the credit to Romney; a big car guy himself.
Actually, Romney is now taking credit for the "great success" of the auto industry bailout! :?
“Mitt Romney had the idea first,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, citing the Times opinion article. “You have to acknowledge that. He was advocating for a course of action that eventually the Obama administration adopted.”
Actually, you've got to love Romney's flip flops.
In broad terms, that’s pretty much the course that Obama followed. But of course, the story doesn’t end there. Let’s briefly review the chain of events:
1.) Romney lays out broad outlines of a plan to rescue American auto industry.
2.) Obama implements a plan that follows general contours of Romney plan.
3.) Conservative Republicans erupt in fury at Obama plan, condemning it as a government takeover of industry and accusing Obama of being a socialist Marxist Kenyan secularist Muslim, or something like that.
4.) Romney joins the withering condemnation of the Obama plan, ignoring the fact that it’s quite similar to his own. He says it’s “a very sad circumstance for this country … really tragic in a lot of ways.”
5.) The plan works, inspiring Romney to try to reclaim authorship of a plan that he earlier attacked as “really tragic” and “very sad.”
Is there anything Romney won't flip flop on?
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I didn't know Romney is taking "credit" for using billions in taxpayer money to save them.
:-o :?
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"guys, as much as I like to debate stuff, please keep this thread contained of all else, BUT formulated questions for the man."
I will copy and extend comments Chomsky quotes here and delete them out of the 'Chomsky' thread.
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What hypocrisy?: Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its immoral actions.
http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N51/chomsky.html
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Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden, Chomsky stated: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."
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(Doug):Uncontroversially, Mr. Chomsky, the "deciders" to be assassinated or hanged unlike the Libyan war are many, including the current Vice President and Secretary of State as former members of the senate authorizing military destruction. Obama could start by prosecuting his veep for authorization and then himself for continuing the war. Guilty are not only George Bush but also 77 Senators, 296 House members and all 15 members of the UN Security Council at the time.
Not only are we are no better than bin Laden but that we are far worse, he says. You folks go ahead and raise him to that status of visiting dignitary; I have no questions for him. He is an expert on linguistics employed at anesteemed university, MIT, I have no linguistic questions. For the rest of it, I would like to see his views elevated with clarity to the ballot and DEFEATED.
War criminals around the world, by a unanimous 15-0 vote; Russia, China, France, U.S., U.K., plus Bulgaria, Cameroon, Guinea, Ireland, Mexico, Mauritius, Norway, Singapore and Syria all voted in favor of Resolution 1441, some will contend they had no idea the consequence would be a war already authorized by the US congress.
Seventy Seven War Criminals in the Senate alone: YEAs ---77
Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Biden (D-DE)
Bond (R-MO)
Breaux (D-LA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT)
Campbell (R-CO)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carnahan (D-MO)
Carper (D-DE)
Cleland (D-GA)
Clinton (D-NY)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
Daschle (D-SD)
DeWine (R-OH)
Dodd (D-CT)
Domenici (R-NM)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Edwards (D-NC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Fitzgerald (R-IL)
Frist (R-TN)
Gramm (R-TX)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Harkin (D-IA)
Hatch (R-UT)
Helms (R-NC)
Hollings (D-SC)
Hutchinson (R-AR)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lott (R-MS)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Miller (D-GA)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Nickles (R-OK)
Reid (D-NV)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Santorum (R-PA)
Schumer (D-NY)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-NH)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Thomas (R-WY)
Thompson (R-TN)
Thurmond (R-SC)
Torricelli (D-NJ)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)
We might have to expand Guantanamo in order to criminalize our foreign policy differences. OTOH, we would no longer be a sovereign nation with a say in it if his views had prevailed.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/27/multimillionaire-elizabeth-warren-im-not-wealthy/
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios” she told [Lawrence O'Donnell].
Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million.
She also has a portfolio of investments in stocks and bonds worth as as much as $8 million, according to the form, which lists value ranges for each investment. The bulk of it is in funds managed by TIAA-CREF.
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Make no mistake, Ed Koch is a liberal, but I enjoyed this piece by City Journal covering his career fairly well. I admire certain decisions he made along the way to stand on principle sometimes to his own political detriment.
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_ed-koch.html
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2012/02/02/what-if-barack-obama-and-paul-krugman-ran-a-business/
A little bit facetious but so is the idea presented in the title that (either of) these two ideologues would ever let there ideas be tested in a competitive marketplace.
Spoiling the ending for you:
"Putting workers before profit, it turns out, leaves you with neither."
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Sometimes I am deeply disappointed in Obama.....
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-drones-and-the-law-20120205,0,876903.column
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Sometimes I am deeply disappointed in Obama.....
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-drones-and-the-law-20120205,0,876903.column
Ha hahahahaha!
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Concerning the Ed Koch article: Ed was at our house a few times because it was where a committee within the 17th CD that was co-chairedy by Bella Abzug (also mentioned in the article) and my mother would meet to further the candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy for the nomination of the Dem party for President in 1968. I liked Ed, and continued to like him throughout his career. He was REAL and he genuinely loved New York City. BTW, the slogan referenced in the article put out by the Cuomo people was "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo."
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Sometimes I am deeply disappointed in Obama.....
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-drones-and-the-law-20120205,0,876903.column
So, the trillions more in debt, the loss of American strength, the massive Obama corruption doesn't bother you, but the drone strikes do?
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I'm not interested in debating any of the subjects, except drone strikes, but to answer your question, perhaps the additional debt may have saved us from going into a full depression (many economists agree). Obama IMHO is one of the most honest and family oriented Presidents in my memory so his so called "corruption" doesn't bother me. It pales in comparison to many others. As for our loss of strength, I'm not sure why we need to spend more than the next 10+ countries combined on military matters. Frankly, I am glad we are out of Iraq and leaving Afghanistan. I hope we don't go into Syria or Iran or anyplace else for that matter unless we are directly threatened. Ever since we entered the Vietnam War, I am tired of being the world's policeman, losing American lives, spending billions/trillions of our dollars, and never being thanked. We have enough issues at home.
But yes, I think the drone strikes are wrong; I don't think one man, be it Obama who I trust more than most, or any other President, should be allowed to target and kill American citizens with impunity just on his say so alone. I believe that there must be some due process.
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"perhaps the additional debt may have saved us from going into a full depression (many economists agree)."
You mean the shovel ready jobs that weren't? The Solyndras that have gone belly up? The dem donors/union thugs got saved from a depression, unfortunately, the rest of America didn't.
What economists? Krugman?
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Obama IMHO is one of the most honest and family oriented Presidents in my memory so his so called "corruption" doesn't bother me. It pales in comparison to many others.
Yes, nothing says family values like attending a church of racial hatred for 20 years.
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JDN answered the Obama question, are you better off than you would have been. The emergency funding to avoid panic and collapse however was in the transition period with Bush, McCain, Obama, Geithner and Bernancke all in agreement. Hardly the policy direction difference that will determine the next election.
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"Obama IMHO is one of the most honest"
Folks, this is what we are up against.
The 40-45% who will always vote for this guy no matter what.
Lying is no longer lying (unless one is Republican), spinning is no longer lying it is just politics and "they all do it", and indeed one cannot even call someone a liar when in fact they clearly are as that is now poltically incorrect and worse than calling someone a slang bigotted name.
Last night I noticed CNN calling Obama on his "reversal" on PACS. If it was a republican it would have been called "flip-flop".
I didn't see the show but I assume they had several guests essentially explaining why it is really NOT a reversal or at the very least how he was driven to do it and is still true to his word etc...
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/when-i-was-called-slut-barbara-walters-just-laughed-laura-ingraham-slams-the-view-on-double-standard/
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A very interesting piece by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt - he takes an approach to the political situation that is very similar to one that I have been exploring for the last few years with regard to religiosity and mythological realization.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/
Extracted from Haidt:
"Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes."
He trends from the left - and yet I find the core of his argument very persuasive. It applies equally well to both "sides" of the spectrum and begins to account for why we are so enthusiastically tearing ourselves apart. How we can possibly make sense of maiming ourselves.
Mark 9:43: And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched
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Interesting point Tricky Dog.
In a similar vein, in later years Konrad Lorenz spoke of the possibility of creating a a fourth type of aggression on top of territorial, hierarchical, and reproductive aggression-- "collective militant enthusiasm" into his analytical framework.
The passion of some on the left against religion, indeed against those who oppose them in any fundamental way, might well be called CME-- as well as an example of Jungian shadow projection.
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A very interesting piece by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt - he takes an approach to the political situation that is very similar to one that I have been exploring for the last few years with regard to religiosity and mythological realization.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/
Extracted from Haidt:
"Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes."
He trends from the left - and yet I find the core of his argument very persuasive. It applies equally well to both "sides" of the spectrum and begins to account for why we are so enthusiastically tearing ourselves apart. How we can possibly make sense of maiming ourselves.
Mark 9:43: And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched
Look at the damage the democrat party has done to black Americans and continues to do under Obama, yet he'll get at least 90% of their votes. Tragic.
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GM:
A point with which I am in hearty agreement, yet I'm not sure it segues smoothly from Tricky Dog's post :lol:
I understand his point to be one into which evolutionary psychology has put some thought, see e.g. Matt Ridley's , , , I forget the name or Robert Wright's superb "The Moral Animal" concerning how to explain selfless behavior in Darwinian terms.
While generosity is an aspect of this question, the progressives/liberal fascists/Dems/liberals tend to be generous with other people's money-- which of course is an oxymoron. Those capable of linear thought must surely experience cognitive dissonance when contrasting the substantial personal charity of Mitt Romney with the niggardly charity of super-rich gigolo Sen. John Kerrey, Vice-President Biden, presidential candidate multi-millionaire plaintiff attorney , , , wuzzhisface-- the one with the pretty hair?-- or even the Community Organizer in Chief , , , but I digress :-D
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Crafty,
The dems shattered the black family and use race to enslave captive voting blocs on the left's plantation and use tribalist invective to enforce those boundaries.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/20/video-comedy-is-not-pretty/
Big fan of Obozo!
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http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/23/crime-and-the-numbers-game/
Does Trayvon Martin Killing Reveal Epidemic of Racial Violence?
The present media wave about the tragic death of Trayvon Martin is for me, an outsider, a fascinating lesson in race, politics, and media perversity in America.
The impression is being generated that young black men are continuously hunted by white men, and killed.
So I wanted to know the exact figures. The most recent, those of 2009, I could find are on the site of the Department of Justice.
About 13% of the population is black. About 80% is white (this number includes Hispanics).
In 2009, 2,963 white individuals were killed by white offenders. White offenders killed 209 black individuals.
In that same year, 2,604 black individuals were killed by black offenders. And 454 white individuals were killed by black offenders.
As we see, there is cross-racial deadly violence, but offenders mainly cause victims within their own race; it is so-called intra-racial.
What about recent decades? Murders surveyed between 1974 and 2004 show that 52% of the offenders were black, 48% were white. Of the victims, 51% were white, 47% were black.
In that period, 86% of white murders had whites offenders, and 94% of black murders had black offenders.
There may be a hunt by white vigilantes for innocent young black men in Florida — if it exists, the figures show this is a limited phenomenon. Trayvon Martin’s death should be thoroughly investigated and the vigilante should be brought to trial in case he broke the law. But such a crime is an exception.
The main problem for young black men is not violent white men chasing them. It is black on black violence.
The number of net cross-racial violence in 2009 shows that blacks killed more whites than whites killed blacks. To be exact: 245 more.
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They never stop distorting and spinning.
I watched for a few minutes Chris Hayes leftist propaganda show this AM and the topic is civil disobedience. Now I am thinking what in the world is a liberal propaganda show speaking of civil disobedincen the left is all ABOUT huge government control over every aspect of our lives and promting class warfare and redistribution of wealth. JUST THE OPPOSITE of what "civil disobedience" is all about!
So I note they are referring to climate change. Again they have that loon Van Jones on who is all over the talk show circuit promoting the left agenda:
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up-with-chris-hayes/46982806/#46982806
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“A man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”
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http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2012/04/09/the-big-double-standard/?singlepage=true
The Big Double Standard
The News...
Some of you may be bothered by the fact that NBC News lied and is now lying about its lies in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. As Breitbart.com reported while all the mainstream outlets except the Washington Post looked the other way, NBC News edited a tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call to make Zimmerman sound like a racist. A full description of the scurrilous edit is at the link.
When they were caught in their dishonesty, NBC News temporized. When they could no longer temporize, they scapegoated a single unnamed producer, firing him late on the Friday before Easter/Passover weekend so no one would notice. Then NBC News President Steve Capus released a statement to Reuters saying the deliberate editing of the tape to misrepresent the phone call was “a mistake and not a deliberate act to misrepresent the phone call.”
Some of you may read that statement and say to yourself, “Golly, Klavan on the Culture! How can Mr. Capus keep the word News in his title and not curl up in a ball of shame while tearing at his own flesh with his fingernails and begging God to forgive him for having sunk to depths of disingenuousness unimaginable to any real news person?” And some others of you may scratch your heads and wonder, “Gee! How come Andrew Breitbart was accused of dishonesty and racism when he posted edited videos of Shirley Sherrod, even though he attached a post explaining the edited context?” After which, you might add, “Crikey! Didn’t Breitbart respond to the accusations by making every piece of material in the Sherrod case readily available online?” And you might go on to remark, “Holy Moly, whatever a Moly is! Isn’t it kind of unfair that when NBC News actually has been dishonest and racist — and when they’ve responded to being caught in their dishonest racism by being even more dishonest — the news media doesn’t accuse them of anything at all but merely puts their collective fingers in their collective ears and whistles Dixie?”
Ah well. I can explain. There’s a double standard — but that’s okay! You see, NBC News is allowed to lie and get away with it because they’re good. Breitbart couldn’t even tell the truth without catching hell because he was bad. See the difference? It’s subtle I know — in fact, it’s so subtle you may have to be a big time literary theorist and legal scholar to understand it. So let’s turn for an explanation to big time literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish.
Recently (as my colleague Michael Walsh pointed out to me) Stanley Fish wrote an article for the New York Times explaining why there was a firestorm when Rush Limbaugh made an inappropriate remark about a woman whereas Bill Maher and Ed Schultz made even worse sexist remarks but remained relatively unscathed. “Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice,” Stanley Fish and his mighty mind explained. “Rush Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy.” There you have it. It’s okay when leftists are evil because they’re good; but it’s evil when patriots are good because they’re evil.
Now I understand you may need a few more years of graduate school before you can understand the reasoning of a very smart man like Stanley Fish, but it’s worth the effort because with a presidential election coming up, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a lot more lies from the mainstream media like the ones we saw from NBC News. And I wouldn’t want you to think that mainstream journalists were being evil when they were only being evil out of goodness. Because if you couldn’t see that their evil was good because they were good when they were being evil, you might carry Mr. Capus and some of his MSM buddies out of their offices and tar and feather them in the public square.
And that would be evil. Or good. Really, it’s hard to say.
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"they scapegoated a single unnamed producer, firing him late on the Friday before Easter/Passover weekend so no one would notice."
How do we know THIS is true?
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"they scapegoated a single unnamed producer, firing him late on the Friday before Easter/Passover weekend so no one would notice."
How do we know THIS is true?
Good point. NBC claims to have fired an unnamed producer.
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http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/04/11/in-praise-of-chumps/?singlepage=true
In Praise of Chumps
April 11, 2012 - 4:05 pm - by Richard Fernandez
When a red Ferrari recently crashed in Beijing, the rumor mills exploded with reports that the driver was none other than Bo Guagua, son of the Communist Party chief of Chonquing and graduate of Harrow and Oxford. Such is life among the vanguard of the Proletariat: in a Ferrari one day, on the run the next. Bo’s dad, Bo Xilai, has just been cashiered by the Politburo, and Bo’s mother is under arrest. But it was good while it lasted:
The Proletarian Life
Bo Guagua had been making social media headlines in China as he squired around Chen Xiaodan, the daughter of “Chen Yuan, the governor of the China Development Bank and one of China’s most influential bankers”:
Advertisement
Chen, now studying at Harvard for an MBA, is the granddaughter of Chen Yun, one of China’s top leaders until his death in 1995 and one of the “eight immortals” of the Communist leadership of the 1980s and 90s …
Her background thus makes her one of the most eligible women in the country. Together with 17-year-old Jasmin Li — the granddaughter of Jia Qinglin, a member of the all-powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee — they are better known among Europe’s elite as China’s “red princesses” for their high-profile appearances at blue-blooded Paris balls.
Chen has featured in photographs of debutante balls such as the Crillon Ball in Paris which have appeared on Twitter and Facebook as well as the usual Chinese social networking sites. In 2006, Chen was considered the most attractive young woman at the ball attended by beauties such as 20-year-old Princess Costanza of Italy and other European royals.
Wearing her Oscar de la Renta dresses, her stylish looks have been an inspiration to many young people in the new China, yet as news about these red princesses who mingle with the European and American glitterati is kept out of the state-run Chinese press, little is actually known in China about them.
The thing about communism, at least to the uninitiated, is that it appears to be identical in all respects to a hereditary aristocracy. If one didn’t know better, it would seem that the more communist a country, such as North Korea, the more it resembles a monarchy. In China, the children of the Politburo members are actually called princesses and princes, and they gad about in a style that makes the current European royalty look like a bunch of low-rent grifters.
How admirable then, that intellectuals like Cornel West, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers can go around and seriously sell socialism and Marxism in the name of “equality” and “egalitarianism”. You know, because they are one with the Common Man. Surely their superior educations must provide a true insight into the nature of Marxist societies, because to the uninitiated the whole thing looks like a scam to trick people into waging “revolution” in which a few odd million will be horribly killed to create a worker’s paradise and green society. All the resulting outcomes we actually examine reveal only societies ruled by an aristocracy no different from — nay, more lavish than — the Court of the Sun King at Versailles. Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing.
But at least it had trees and bushes in the garden. North Korea doesn’t. North Korea’s forests have been burned down by the happy peasants to cook their gruel and to keep from dying of cold in winter. Defectors heading south know they’ve reached the capitalist Republic of Korea because they can see trees again. And as for the environment in China: well, why do you think the red princes and princesses go to Paris to dance the night away?
Future generations may wonder how it was possible for sophisticated Western intellectuals to actually devote their lives to bringing about communism as if it were anything more than a swindle. Consider Walter Kendall Myers, a distinguished State Department intelligence analyst, who together with his wife Gwendolyn spied on America for years on behalf of Fidel Castro. They were not paid money. In fact, their only known reward was being congratulated by Fidel himself:
Myers, an Ivy League-educated Europe specialist who made his home in Northwest Washington’s diplomat-friendly precincts, began working for the State Department as a contract instructor in 1977. He joined full time in 1985 and become a senior analyst with a top-secret clearance in the department’s sensitive bureau of intelligence and research.
…
“We did not act out of anger toward the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism,” Walter Myers said in a 10-minute statement in seeking leniency for his wife. “We did not intend to hurt any individual American. Our only objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We only hoped to forestall conflict” between the countries.
They acted, as always, from what they believed to be idealism. Never did they entertain the notion that they might have been led on by stupidity. Gross, manifest, and terminal imbecility. They betrayed their country, and not in order to advance the cause of “peace” or “prosperity” for the “poor and downtrodden”. In reality, they sold out their country so that slimy tyrants in foreign countries could live the life of kings, and they did not even have the wit to notice.
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@ GM
I have no idea if Zimmerman is guilty of a crime in the Martin incident. It's tragic of course. What little I know, and I've read a lot,
there seems to be two valid sides to the story. I don't of course, know all the facts. I'm not sure anyone does except Zimmerman and i doubt
if he will ever present his side at trial.
Anyway, my question GM is do you think, given your experience, that Zimmerman should have been charged by the DA with a crime? And why?
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From what I read in the press (which must be taken with a BIG chunk of salt) the Assistant State's Attorney (what is know as a Assistant D.A./Deputy D.A. in other places) that responded to the call and reviewed the case did not think that a case could be made in court and elected not to charge Zimmerman. Ultimately, the decision to file charges falls to the prosecutor and their ethical obligation is to act "in the interest of justice" as opposed to a defense attorney who must "act in the best interest of their client". As I understand it, if the prosecutor does not believe there is a reasonable chance at prevailing at trial, then charges are not supposed to be filed.
I heard the first officer on scene's report, verbatim on a local radio show and it corroborated Zimmerman's claim of being assaulted by documenting his bleeding nose, injury to the back of his head and wet, grass covered clothing.
If Obama and his race-baiting allies didn't need to fire up their base and distract from his failed presidency, this would have been a local story quickly forgotten.
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http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/327370-trayvon-martin-police-report
What's been made public thus far, at least what I can find for the moment.
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As I understand it, if the prosecutor does not believe there is a reasonable chance at prevailing at trial, then charges are not supposed to be filed.
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html
Standard 3-3.9 Discretion in the Charging Decision
(a) A prosecutor should not institute, or cause to be instituted, or permit the continued pendency of criminal charges when the prosecutor knows that the charges are not supported by probable cause. A prosecutor should not institute, cause to be instituted, or permit the continued pendency of criminal charges in the absence of sufficient admissible evidence to support a conviction.
(b) The prosecutor is not obliged to present all charges which the evidence might support. The prosecutor may in some circumstances and for good cause consistent with the public interest decline to prosecute, notwithstanding that sufficient evidence may exist which would support a conviction. Illustrative or the factors which the prosecutor may properly consider in exercising his or her discretion are:
(i) the prosecutor's reasonable doubt that the accused is in fact guilty;
(ii) the extent of the harm caused by the offense;
(iii) the disproportion of the authorized punishment in relation to the particular offense or the offender;
(iv) possible improper motives of a complainant;
(v) reluctance of the victim to testify;
(vi) cooperation of the accused in the apprehension or conviction of others; and
(vii) availability and likelihood of prosecution by another jurisdiction.
(c) A prosecutor should not be compelled by his or her supervisor to prosecute a case in which he or she has a reasonable doubt about the guilt of the accused.
(d) In making the decision to prosecute, the prosecutor should give no weight to the personal or political advantages or disadvantages which might be involved or to a desire to enhance his or her record of convictions.
(e) In cases which involve a serious threat to the community, the prosecutor should not be deterred from prosecution by the fact that in the jurisdiction juries have tended to acquit persons accused of the particular kind of criminal act in question.
(f) The prosecutor should not bring or seek charges greater in number of degree than can reasonably be supported with evidence at trial or than are necessary to fairly reflect the gravity of the offense.
(g) The prosecutor should not condition a dismissal of charges, nolle prosequi, or similar action on the accused's relinquishment of the right to seek civil redress unless the accused has agreed to the action knowingly and intelligently, freely and voluntarily, and where such waiver is approved by the court.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/os-trayvon-martin-probable-cause-20120404,0,1976621,full.story
The search for probable cause in Trayvon Martin case
By Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel
1:34 p.m. CDT, April 5, 2012
In order to arrest George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the special prosecutor heading the investigation must show a judge that she has found probable cause.
Sanford police faced public outrage when they announced they found no probable cause to arrest the Neighborhood Watch volunteer.
So what exactly is it?
"It's a 'reasonable person' standard under the law," said John Tanner, former state attorney in the 7th Judicial Circuit, which includes Volusia County.
It is evidence that would convince a reasonable person that a suspect committed a crime.
For example: It's a rock of crack cocaine found in a man's pocket. It's a department-store security video showing a woman slipping a necklace into her handbag. It's a blood test showing a driver's blood-alcohol level above the legal limit.
Bob Dekle, who prosecuted serial killer Ted Bundy and is now a professor at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, characterized probable cause as "just above suspicion."
In the case of Trayvon's shooting death, it would be any piece of evidence that would convince a judge that Zimmerman probably committed a crime when he shot the unarmed teen in a gated Sanford community in late February.
That could be a witness, a piece of physical evidence or something else.
Sanford police were looking for evidence of manslaughter. Special Prosecutor Angela Corey will not say what charge or charges her team is reviewing.
Police can and do arrest suspects without probable cause, but judges must then order their release from jail. Senior Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. said that happened at least once or twice every weekend he was on jail duty reviewing Seminole County arrests for the previous 24 hours.
When that happens, police can rearrest the suspect, and prosecutors are free to file charges. But they must bring the case to trial within 175 days of arrest, according to Florida rules of criminal procedure.
That ticking clock is often an incentive for prosecutors to hold off on an arrest, they said. It gives them more time to collect evidence — for example, to get ballistics tests done if a gun is involved or to have fingerprints analyzed.
Prosecutors almost always demand more evidence than cops.
Though an officer needs only probable cause to make an arrest, prosecutors typically want enough evidence for a conviction — enough to convince a jury beyond every reasonable doubt that the suspect is guilty.
It is a natural point of friction between the two branches of law enforcement, said Ric Ridgway, chief assistant state attorney in the 5th Judicial Circuit, which includes Lake County.
"It's probably the single most frequent source of … disagreement between law enforcement and prosecutors, between victim's families and prosecutors," he said. "They look at it and go, 'We know he did it.' As a prosecutor, I say, 'Can you prove it?' "
Evidence standards
Because of those different evidence standards, prosecutors typically kick loose at least a quarter of the cases in which police make arrests, he said.
That happened in the case of four co-defendants in the Jessica Lunsford murder, Ridgway said. The 9-year-old Homosassa girl was abducted, raped and buried alive in 2005. Prosecutors convicted suspect John Couey, the kidnapper and killer, but Citrus County deputies and prosecutors disagreed about what to do with four of his roommates.
Deputies arrested them on charges of obstructing an officer — withholding information.
"We would not prosecute them," Ridgway said, because there wasn't enough evidence for a conviction.
Sometimes police and prosecutors work a long time to gather enough evidence before making an arrest.
A Seminole County grand jury in February handed up a murder indictment in a 21-year-old homicide: Betty Claire Foster was stabbed to death at the Casselberry computer store where she worked in 1991. David Lee Hedrick, 50, a computer and audiovisual specialist, is now in the Seminole County Jail, awaiting trial.
A Brevard County grand jury last year indicted a woman there on a first-degree-murder charge in a three-year-old homicide.
And in Orange County, Brett Ballard and his wife, Joy, have been waiting more than three years to find out whether the security guard who fatally stabbed their 20-year-old son, Marcus, in 2008 will be arrested and prosecuted.
Marcus Ballard was stabbed eight times in the torso and neck and several times on the palms of his hands, according to his autopsy. The security guard told deputies the men were fighting at a Pine Hills apartment complex and he used his knife to defend himself after Ballard had begun choking him.
Sometimes, mistakes
Police and prosecutors sometimes get it wrong.
An officer was dispatched to a Miami-Dade County neighborhood in response to a reported burglary. About that same time, a black 15-year-old, his brother and a friend ducked into a neighbor's carport because of a sudden rain, according to an appeals-court ruling.
The officer saw the boys, drew his weapon, and the 15-year-old took off running and hid. An officer soon found him, ordered him facedown in the mud, handcuffed him and arrested him on a charge of resisting an officer without violence, according to the ruling.
The Third District Court of Appeal in May 2010 reversed the juvenile court's finding in the case, ruling that the police officer should never have made the arrest.
There was no probable cause that the boys had committed a crime.
Staff writer Susan Jacobson contributed to this report. rstutzman@tribune.com or 407-650-6394
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http://media.trb.com/media/acrobat/2012-04/69353440.pdf
I have some serious issues with what looks like inexact and loaded language in the affidavit and the lack of probable cause in this case.
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@ GM
Thank you for your detailed response and summary.
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Justice for Trayvon...and Only Trayvon
Paul Jacobson
Justice for Trayvon by Charles M. Blow, columnist for the New York Times (where else?). The tears begin with the opening paragraph:
A boy's blood had been spilled on a rain-soaked patch of grass behind a row of mustard-colored condominiums by a man who had pursued him against the advice of 911 dispatchers. That man carried a 9-millimeter handgun. The boy carried a bag of candy.
The cascade of lacromosity quickly turns into a tsunami:
Americans saw the anguish of the boy's father and the tears of his mother. America saw a child who was its own. America saw its concept of basic fairness sinking in to the marsh of miscarried justice.
What Blow is really demanding is not justice at all but "social justice" (hereinafter called socialjusticeism), an utterly bogus leftist propaganda term that turns the authentic, historic definition of justice on its head: socialjusticeism is not justice for anybody, accused or accusers; it is injustice for all those whom the left hates. Nor should anybody be decoyed by Blow's brusque, phony feint at genuine justice: "The state will vigorously prosecute, and Zimmerman will be vigorously defended as is his constitutional right."
Charles Blow is obviously certain beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that George Zimmerman brutally gunned down Trayvon Martin out of racist malice. So are the Black Panther goons who have put a million-dollar lynch mob bounty on Zimmerman's head. A trial has not yet been concluded, so I don't know if Zimmerman is guilty or not; therefore, I have nothing to say about his guilt.
I do know that none other than Alan Dershowitz -- no friend of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," he -- has unambiguously condemned the affidavit prepared by Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder:
Dershowitz called the affidavit justifying Zimmerman's arrest "not only thin, it's irresponsible...Most affidavits of probable cause are very thin. This is so thin that it won't make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge...There's simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder...I think what you have here is an elected public official who made a campaign speech last night for reelection when she gave her presentation and overcharged. This case will not - if the evidence is no stronger than what appears in the probable cause affidavit - this case will result in an acquittal."
Suppose the Black Panther thugs succeed in their plot to brutally assassinate George Zimmerman -- God save us from such an outcome. Millions of real Americans would be angered and outraged beyond words to express. Even more unspeakable consequences could ensue, we know not what.
And the moral silence of Charles Blow and his ilk would be deafening...as long as they could suppress their glee at seeing socialjusticeism prevail yet again.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/justice_for_trayvonand_only_trayvon.html
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This is not the first racially driven mob in our history to howl for blood. The solution for mistaken speech is Truth. Let us do our part so that we can keep this divinely inspired Republic.
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/walking-papers-the-incredibly-thin-speculative-zimmerman-affidavit/?singlepage=true
Walking Papers? The Incredibly Thin, Speculative Zimmerman Affidavit
Angela Corey's filing against George Zimmerman bears the hallmarks of a career-ender.
by
Bob Owens
Bio
April 17, 2012 - 10:06 am
Last week, Florida prosecutor Angela Corey stunned many within the legal establishment when she announced her office was filing a second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman. The four-page affidavit of probable cause filed by Corey’s office shocked legal experts, ranging from liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and liberal law blogger Jeralyn Merritt to conservative former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and talk show host Mark Levin, among others.
The affidavit starts out typically, listing the names and qualifications of the two investigators used by the special prosecutor. It then begins to build a case against George Zimmerman:
On Sunday 2/26/12, Trayvon Martin was temporarily living at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community in Sanford, Seminole County, Florida. That evening Martin walked to a nearby 7-11 Store where he purchased a can of iced tea and some Skittles. Martin then walked back to and entered the gated community and was on his way back to the townhouse where he was living when he was profiled by George Zimmerman. Martin was unarmed and was not committing a crime.
Not one paragraph into the “meat” of the affidavit, Corey’s team already made two unsubstantiated claims.
First: there is no publicly known evidence that supports the contention that Zimmerman “profiled” Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman’s 911 call made no reference to skin color or apparel until the the police dispatcher started pressing for a better description. If Corey’s team had evidence that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin, they should have included it here. They did not, which not only undermines the profiling charge in this case, but in any federal civil rights case the U.S. Department of Justice may have been considering.
The second unsubstantiated claim: they say Martin was not committing or preparing to commit a crime. Zimmerman became suspicious because he saw a figure who struck him as a person casing houses for burglary potential. Unbeknownst to Zimmerman at the time was the fact that Martin had been suspended from school for the possession of a “burglary tool.” We don’t know what Martin was thinking, but his actions were erratic enough to prompt George Zimmerman to want police to investigate.
That represents a lot of unsubstantiated speculation by a prosecutor trying to build an affidavit to support a second-degree murder charge, and that’s just from the first substantive paragraph.
The next troublesome claim is the lead sentence of the following paragraph:
Zimmerman, who also lived in the gated community and was driving his vehicle, observed Martin and assumed he was a criminal.
Perhaps it is hair-splitting, but there is no evidence to support Corey’s claim that Zimmerman assumed Martin was a criminal. In his first comments on the 911 call, Zimmerman claims he saw “a real suspicious guy” acting erratically: “Like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about.”
Zimmerman was merely reporting suspicious behavior, just as our own Department of Homeland Security advocates with its “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, which has been created and promoted by cabinet officials appointed by the Obama Administration. Zimmerman saw someone acting suspiciously, and did precisely what DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano wants citizens to do in that situation.
The prosecutor then made another claim not supported by the recorded evidence:
The police dispatcher then informed Zimmerman that an officer was on the way and to wait for the officer.
The second half of that claim is a complete and apparently willful misrepresentation of the conversation between George Zimmerman and the police dispatcher. The closest the dispatcher ever gets to telling Zimmerman to “wait for the officer” was when Zimmerman was attempting to follow Martin, and the dispatcher told him, precisely: “Okay, we don’t need you to do that.”
In response to the dispatcher’s comment — which isn’t a command, but an ambiguous statement — Zimmerman’s response is “Okay,” and an immediate termination of his attempt to follow Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman spends the next 93 seconds — more than enough time for Trayvon Martin to reach where he is staying, even at a walking pace — in one location talking to the police dispatcher, informing the dispatcher that he is on the way back to his truck, and that he will meet the responding officer by the mailboxes.
Angela Corey’s team is misrepresenting the actual events as they occurred in order to fabricate a claim that George Zimmerman disobeyed police orders. Proving her behavior is one matter, but to be found deliberately misrepresenting the evidence is certainly grounds for considering disbarment.
The affidavit contained further problematic statements. The next one:
During the recorded call Zimmerman made reference to people he felt had committed and gotten away with break-ins in his neighborhood. Later while talking about Martin, Zimmerman stated “these a**holes, they always get away” and also said “these f***ing punks.”
John Work, a multi-decade law enforcement veteran, caught something in this prejudicial paragraph that I’d missed on my first reading:
Either Zimmerman and the investigators who wrote the affidavit knew there had been burglaries in the neighborhood, or they did not know about any burglaries. It’s not possible to credibly say that anyone, including the defendant, felt that crimes had been committed. If, in fact, there was or was not a series of unsolved burglaries in that neighborhood, the cops should have included that fact in the affidavit. It’s a lie of omission, either way.
Corey’s affidavit then made even more unsubstantiated claims:
Zimmerman got out of his vehicle and followed Martin. When the police dispatcher realized Zimmerman was pursuing Martin, he instructed Zimmerman not to do that and that the responding officer would meet him. Zimmerman disregarded the police dispatcher and continued to follow Martin who was trying to return to his home.
The affidavit’s claim is in direct opposition to the facts as recorded on the 911 call.
Zimmerman was not “instructed” of anything. The use of that particular word creates the impression that Zimmerman was affirmatively told — commanded — not to do something. That isn’t what occurred. The dispatcher spoke ambiguously: “We don’t need you to do that.”
Then, the affidavit makes the completely unsupported claim that Zimmerman continued to follow Martin, even as the 911 call indicates that he stopped following Martin and was stationary for more than a minute and a half before attempting to return to his truck to meet with the responding officer. This, again, appears to be a misrepresentation by the prosecutor, unsupported (and possibly refuted) by the known evidence.
The affidavit also makes the completely unsupported claim at the end of that paragraph that Martin “was trying to return to his home.”
There is no evidence of the sort. The timeline strongly suggests that — having evaded Zimmerman initially and with Zimmerman terminating his pursuit and then heading back the way he came — Martin had plenty of time and a direct, unobstructed path home had he chosen to return directly home. We don’t know where Martin was or what he was doing between the time he fled Zimmerman and when the confrontation began. What we do know is that Martin had an opportunity to make it home, and chose not to do so for reasons we may never know.
The affidavit continues:
Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued. Witnesses heard people arguing and what sounded like a struggle. During this time period witnesses heard numerous calls for help and some of these were recorded in 911 calls to police. Trayvon Martin’s mother has reviewed the 911 and identified the voice crying for help as Trayvon Martin’s voice.
“Zimmerman confronted Martin.”
This is supposition, apparently based upon the recollection of Martin’s girlfriend. There is no physical evidence or eyewitness supporting this charge.
The next part of that crucial sentence has already been ripped apart by legal experts — the passive “and a struggle ensued.”
This entire case hinges upon who started the confrontation and then escalated it into a deadly force event that left a young man dead. If the prosecution has evidence that Zimmerman indeed triggered the confrontation and initiated the struggle, then Zimmerman’s self-defense claim becomes much harder to support. If the events occurred as Zimmerman described it — with the confrontation initiated by Martin, the physical assault initiated by Martin, and Martin then escalating the fight to assault with a deadly weapon by attempting to smash Zimmerman’s head on the concrete — and the evidence supports Zimmerman’s claims, then we have a justified use of deadly force in self-defense.
Sybrina Fulton’s contention that the voice she heard crying for help on the 911 calls was her son certainly adds emotional pain to the case; her claim is not one I would personally wish to challenge at a trial if she is called as a witness. However, competent attorneys routinely cast doubt on such testimony, perhaps by citing confirmation bias and the trauma of losing a child. No known audio experts have come forth to claim they can confirm with any degree of certainty that the voice calling for help is Martin. I would venture that Fulton’s claim is included in the affidavit only to elicit an emotional response from the public, which would be a grandstanding ploy, and perhaps an especially cynical one by a veteran prosecutor seeking reelection just a few months from now.
There are simply no facts in this affidavit to remotely support the charge of second-degree murder according to Florida’s statute, which reads:
The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree …
There is nothing in this affidavit nor among the publicly known facts about the case — nor even among the allegations from the victim’s family or their attorneys — that comes even remotely close to reaching the “depraved mind” standard. At most, the prosecutor would face making a difficult manslaughter case, and even then would risk having the lesser charge thrown out for insufficient evidence.
I am comfortable with saying that Corey’s multiple references to “Justice for Trayon” during her press conference combined with this breathtaking affidavit strongly suggest a political motivation.
I live and work in central North Carolina, just miles away from where an overzealous, politically minded prosecutor named Mike Nifong attempted to railroad athletes from the Duke University lacrosse team in a similarly racially charged environment just a half-decade ago.
Nifong was disbarred and found guilty of criminal contempt for his actions. Angela Corey’s affidavit against George Zimmerman looks to be treading dangerously close to that same path.
Bob Owens blogs at Bob-Owens.com
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"Why not raise taxes on capital gains but lower them on income?"
Yes, except that the proven way of raising taxes collected from capital gains is to LOWER the rate.
15% tax is low enough. Make it permanent so that investors could try to build and create wealth and know with certainty what the tax rate on that effort, if successful, will be.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-campbell-flaws-in-the-buffett-rule-20120422,0,441132.story
Besides lost revenues, there is no recovery that comes out of punishing investment in America. Other than that it all makes sense.
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Doug, I already posted that article elsewhere. But I'm curious, why would you
post it in "The Cognitive Dissonance of the Left" when the article was written by
Tom Campbell who served five terms as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives.
:-o
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"Doug, I already posted that article elsewhere."
I wonder if I already criticized it elsewhere... )
Thanks (sincerely) for that clarification, that Campbell is a Republican. I guess this is a case then of the cognitive dissonance of trying to appease the left. If you see a RINO thread, I will move the post. I take back the blame insinuated at the LA Times for publishing this view no matter how flawed. If he is a 5 term congressman, his view is newsworthy in his local paper.
I should have known no real leftist would lower personal income tax rates under any circumstance. I noticed that some of the rest of the piece made sense but I got stuck on his false premise. With all his impressive economic training (he studied under Milton Friedman) he does not support his premise.
Answer this back on the tax policy thread then: What is the evidence that raising capital gains tax rates will raise revenues to the Treasury (as opposed to just appeasing liberal California voters for personal reelection). All evidence of our lifetime indicates the opposite. See the video posted of Obama being asked about that in a 2008 debate.
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The war on women is a uniquely Republican phenomenon... excerpt for the texting of Dem congressman Anthony's Weiner, the foul mouth of Obama financial supporter Bill Maher, now near-President and VP and Attorney General hopeful, former Dem Sen. John Edwards on trial:
Young also testified about Edwards' reaction to the news that Hunter was pregnant. "He said she was a crazy slut and there was a one-in-three chance it was his child"
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75538.html
Which America is it, Sen Edwards, where you have millions out of bogus lawsuits but can still find a millions of other people's money to quiet a woman with expensive tastes that he didn't even like?
Who knew that such a womanizer and political feminist would speak so disrespectfully when he thinks the throngs can't hear him.
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Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. We just don't know. His calling her a slut in a private conversation is just not something I see as worthy of attention. Whether the Dem nominee for the VP of the United States of America is guilty as accused or not is.
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Too smart but he can't release a grade or test score. Too smart but wrong on everything economic. Too smart but no clue on how to solve a crises in Syria, Egypt, the Chinese embassy or anywhere else. Can't balance a budget - ever. He is perhaps the only person on earth to have moved from pro gay marriage 1990s to against it in the 2000s back to for it again in 2012. Too smart or spineless or have gay people 'evolved' that much in such a short time.
This is lousy journalism to me reflecting on the paper that pays for it and publishes it, but it is opinion so into the cognitive dissonance of the left thread it goes.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum-obama-love-letters-maraniss-20120510,0,2453306.column
Obama's intellect doesn't have much currency in the political climate of extreme partisanship and pandering to a very low common denominator.
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The Edwards ordeal seemed irrelevant because it imploded right after his candidacy didn't quite make it. Besides irrelevant, it seemed personal, sad and stupid. But in fact, he was VERY close to being the non-Hillary who very well could have been President if Obama had not run such a flawless 2008 campaign. He also could have been VP and wanted to be attorney general.
What I forgot was that he WAS the candidate - chosen for VP in 2004, I was reminded by: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/john-edwards-and-the-reality-based-community.php
Amazing what lack of vetting occurred with this unaccomplished one term Senator, now known to be a liar and corrupt (pending more defense and a jury verdict).
Edwards’ own attorney told the trial judge this week: “No one is going to deny that Mr. Edwards lied and lied and lied and lied.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/john-edwards-endures-two-pronged-trial-testing-his-morals-and-his-actions/2012/05/12/gIQAhNL0KU_story.html
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This also could have gone in the Liberal Fascism thread:
=============
The green jobs Obama may destroy
By LIZ PEEK
NYPost
Posted: 10:18 PM, May 21, 2012
It turns out some “greens jobs” are more equal than others.
The Obama Commerce Department last week moved to slap 31 percent tariffs on solar panels imported from China. That may prop up failing US panel-makers like Solyndra, which have received hundreds of millions in taxpayer support — but it’s a blow to the industry that’s installing panels in US homes.
The residential solar industry is doubling in size each year and creating tens of thousands of jobs. But apparently it’s not as important in the administration’s eyes as domestic panel-manufacturers.
Oh, the Commerce move also risks triggering a trade war with China.
That’s the feds — picking winners and losers, and making a mess.
Commerce didn’t have to rule as it did on a complaint last October from seven US-based solar-panel suppliers about alleged Chinese dumping. The key was which “surrogate” market to pick for comparison: It chose Thailand, a tiny market with high prices — not India, where huge demand and economies of scale have driven solar-panel costs lower.
Chinese-made panels in the US cost less than panels cost in Thailand — so, voila, Commerce ruled that prices in the United States were artificially low, and held Chinese makers accountable.
Bigar Shah is president of Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, a residential-solar trade group. He complains both about the “surrogate” decision and Commerce’s failure to negotiate some deal with the Chinese makers.
He also points out that it was actually a German national, SolarWorld CEO Gordon Brinser, who initiated the Commerce investigation, noting: “It’s literally a script out of the X-Men movies — one German trying to create a war between the US and China.”
Shah’s group expects the hefty tariffs to raise solar prices and slow conversions — putting in jeopardy the 100,000 jobs it says the sector has created in just a few years. After all, the industry thrived as the price of solar cells and modules dropped from $3.30 per watt in 2008 to roughly $1 by year-end 2011.
The Commerce decision could also cost the US export business. US suppliers export some $2 billion a year in solar materials to China, but could lose out in a trade war.
Shah thinks Commerce chose Thailand out of sheer ineptitude; others fault election-maneuvering. For months, Mitt Romney has attacked President Obama for not standing up for US workers displaced by aggressive Chinese trade practices; these tariffs might give Obama an answer.
Yet the tariffs aren’t likely to save US panel-makers. Their global market share fell from 27 percent in 2001 to 5 percent in 2010. The Chinese built huge overcapacity in order to dominate the market, and now they are.
Without continued huge subsidies, it’s unlikely that any US panel makers could stay in business. After Germany recently slashed its subsidies, many panel-makers there went bankrupt.
Ironies abound here. Even as the administration tries to boost one solar industry at the expense of another, solar power still costs more than energy from coal or natural gas. Until recently, even a vast alphabet soup of state and federal subsidies wasn’t enough to jump-start US solar conversions.
What turned the tide? China’s aggressive expansion of solar-panel manufacturing, which sent prices plummeting.
Hmm: Instead of encouraging a trade war that will damage solar providers and users — and, inevitably, all taxpayers — perhaps the Obama administration should consider sending Beijing a thank-you note.
Liz Peek is a columnist for The Fiscal Times.com and FoxNews.com.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_green_jobs_obama_may_destroy_rHRJFdNjFgCnYWu6h9FgRJ#ixzz1vcHT7wGW
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Mitt: for freedom
The left: for free Birth control.
http://nation.foxnews.com/mitt-romney/2012/03/20/romney-schools-heckler-if-you-want-free-stuff-vote-obama
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Followup to CCP's post on Politics, DNC attacks, but can't answer it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6j6abQAwZnk
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Bloomberg's ban on large sugared drinks .
First the continuance of the government's control of our lives to the extent of INDUSTRIAL QUALITY level control is a problem.
Think of it, from the time we get up to the time we go to sleep our lives can be controlled. We get up go to the bathroom. Brush our teeth because if we don't don't we get tooth decay and we cost the society more. We go to the BR and use only an allotted amount of water to wash, flush, drink, brush. We are told how much electric to use for our coffee maker, our oven, our stove, our electronics, lights, our wash machines, AC, our cars are regulated with endless safety features, kind of fuel, we are punished if we don't use mass transit, bike or walk to work, we can't eat anything that doens't conform with the proper Harvard decided nutritional values, we must never use elevators, we cannot sit at our desks but must work at stations that are on treadmills, lunch can consist of no more than a salad bar, every single detail of everything we do is chronicalled, catalogued, data warehoused, sold to marketers, or sent off to government agencies, CDC, FDA, HHS, and the political machines, CIA, FBI, and probably over to China as well as professional criminal organizations from the US and overseas, and on and on and on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/nyregion/bloomberg-plans-a-ban-on-large-sugared-drinks.html?_r=1
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I forgot to add as I drifted off down the left's "progression" to total government control of our lives as well as control coming from every other avenue within the digital universe,
*The soda restriction will have absolutely no effect on obesity*.
To think that if we only avoided soda we would all be thin... :-P
If only it were that easy. :wink:
Medicine is fast becoming increasingly controlled with industrial strength quality controls. If one thinks it pleasant to have every single step, thought process, time documented for every single action all day long..
I can look forward to the day I come home and the same process exists there too (as well as in the office and the hospital) when my flushes, sink usages, wattage amounts etc or also being measured, taxed, restricted, regulated, requiring more and more forms , permissions, feedbacks loops, and endless measures, changes, commnets, opinions, studies that change what we should do every 6 months, and more.
I long for the 60's and 70's and 80's.
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If the left's analysis of why the left went down in Wisconsin is correct, then the left is doomed.
The answer is money, she says (Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation ), reflecting a very widespread line of analysis. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the right is able to outspend the left ten to one, ensuring that the left can never win.
- Walter Russel Mead http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/06/06/the-people-united-go-down-in-flames/
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Important piece IMO by Kevin Williamson at National Review.
http://www.nationalreview.com/exchequer/302257/detroit-moral-story#
Detroit: The Moral of the Story
By Kevin D. Williamson
June 8, 2012 3:18 P.M.
Comments
28
The Left’s answer to the deficit: raise taxes to protect spending. The Left’s answer to the weak economy: raise taxes to enable new spending. The Left’s answer to the looming sovereign-debt crisis: raise taxes to pay off old spending. For the Left, every deficit is a revenue-side problem, not a spending-side problem, and the solution to every economic problem is more spending, necessitating more taxes. The problem with that way of looking at things is called Detroit, which looks to be running out of money in about one week. Detroit is what liberalism’s end-game looks like.
And Detroit does in fact have a revenue problem, as I argued in the May 14 National Review (“Let Detroit Fail”): “Revenues declined by more than $100 million between 2007 and 2011. Income-tax revenue dropped by 18 percent, utility-tax revenue by 17 percent, property-tax revenue by 2.3 percent. Seeking a quick fix to its revenue problems, Detroit chartered several casino-gambling operations, only to see taxes from them begin to decline (by 1.5 percent last year) after a period of early growth. Detroit, once the wealthiest city in the United States by per capita income, is today the second-poorest major U.S. city.”
Detroit is evidence for the fact that the economic limitations on tax increases sometimes kick in before the political limitations do. The relationship between tax rates, tax revenue, economic incentives, growth, and investment is complex, to say the least, and deeply dependent on the historical and economic facts of particular places at particular times. We have theories of growth, but no blueprint. But Detroit was not reduced to its present wretched circumstances by historical inevitabilities or the impersonal tides of economics. It did not have to end this way, but it did, and understanding why it did is essential if we are to avoid repeating Detroit’s municipal tragedy on a national scale.
One lesson to learn from Detroit is that investing unions with coercive powers does not ensure future private-sector employment or the preservation of private-sector wages, despite liberal fairy tales to the contrary, nor do protectionist measures strengthen the long-term prospects of domestic firms competing in highly integrated global markets. We cannot legislate away comparative advantage or other facts of life. But the problem of unions’ coercing distortions in the private sector is at this point a relatively small one, given the decline of unionization outside of government. Organized labor being a fundamentally predatory enterprise, its attention has turned to the public sector, where there are fatter and more stable rents to be collected.
The second important lesson to be learned from Detroit is that there are hard limits on real tax increases, a fact that will be of more immediate significance in the national debate as our deficit and debt problems reach crisis stage. Even those of us who are relatively open to tax increases as a component of a long-term debt-reduction strategy must keep in mind that our current spending trend is putting us on an unsustainable course in which our outlays will far outpace our ability to collect taxes to pay for them, no matter where we set our theoretical tax rates. The IMF calculates that to maintain present spending trend the United States will have to nearly double (88 percent increase) all federal taxes to maintain theoretical solvency. Those tax increases are sure to have real-world effects on everything from investing to immigration. At some point, the statutory tax increases will not increase actual revenue.
Even the best tax regimes are cannibalistic: Every tax is an incentive for the taxpayer to relocate to a more friendly jurisdiction. But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions). The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit? This is not angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. People do not invest in firms, industries, cities, or countries they do not trust. Corruption makes people poor.
What is true of Detroit is true of the country. Our national public sector not only is bloated and parasitic, it is less effective, less responsible, and less honest than that of many other developed countries, including New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Germany. I am not an unreserved admirer of Transparency International’s global corruption-perceptions index, but I believe that it is in broad outline accurate. Liberals are inclined to learn the wrong lessons from the relative success of countries such as Canada or New Zealand, concluding that what we need is a bigger welfare state, government-run health care, etc. (Conservatives, for our part, tend to overemphasize the role of comparatively low taxes and light regulation in the success of countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Those are important, but there are other equally important factors.) In reality, there is a great diversity of health-care arrangements and social-spending levels among the countries that have more effective institutions than ours, while many countries with the sorts of institutions liberals admire (take Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal for starters) are in crisis, in significant part because of plain corruption. What the more successful countries tend to have in common is a public sector that is less intent on looting the fisc.
Sure, Hong Kong and Singapore have lower levels of government spending (as a share of GDP) than does the United States. So do Switzerland and Australia. At 38.9 percent of GDP, our public-sector spending is indistinguishable from that of Canada (39.7 percent). It is not obvious that we have much to show for it.
The city fathers of Detroit inherited one of the richest and most productive cities in the world, and they ruined it in a generation. The gentlemen in Washington have been entrusted with the richest and most productive nation in the history of the world, and the trendline does not look good. Those of us seeking to radically reduce the footprint of government must remind ourselves from time to time that our case is as much ethical as economic, that the ethical and the economic are indeed closely intertwined.
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Not mentioned in Mark Steyn's piece but along his lines of thinking is Elizabeth Warren's phoney and knowing claim to be part Cheriokee. Claiming membership into a "victim group" has become rewarding monetariily and career wise in the new "post" racial, post gender America.
*** June 22, 2012 Updated: June 23, 2012 7:58 a.m.
Text: Next Article » Mark Steyn: Obama the first Invented-American president
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
letters@ocregister.com
Courtesy of David Maraniss' new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama's identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram'pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack's "memoir" who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama's autobiography as "a symbol of young blackness" was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people's valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he "fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes."
David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can't understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. "It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir," he told Soledad O'Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines "memoir" as "an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge." And if Obama doesn't have "personal knowledge" of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah's Book Club recommended James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a "heartbreaking memoir" of "poetic honesty," but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the "poetic" and rather light on the "honesty." The "heartbreaking memoir" of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.
File: This undated file photo released by Obama for America shows President Barack Obama as a young boy, and his father, also named Barack Obama.
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70 cartoons on executive privilege, immigration, leaks and more
Oprah was also smitten by "The Education of Little Tree," the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace's "Segregation Forever" speech. "Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood" is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc., account of Binjamin Wilkomirski's unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America's respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple. He certainly had a deprived childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir to a major publisher. But the "unimaginable" horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six-figure debts for the privilege ("I, Rigoberta Menchu"). They're handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson's "Three Cups of Tea") on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy.
In such a world, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake memoirist got elected as president of the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Rigoberta Menchu ran as a candidate in the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala, although she got knocked out in the first round – Guatemalans evidently being disinclined to elect someone to the highest office in the land with no accomplishment whatsoever apart from a lousy fake memoir. Which just goes to show what a bunch of unsophisticated rubes they are.
In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over "Dreams From My Father" is the fault of conservatives who have "taken the self-portrait at face value." We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d'esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.
The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest chapter of Obama's fake memoir. You'll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace's speechwriter. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups. And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.
Thus, Obama's executive order on immigration exempting a million people from the laws of the United States, is patently unconstitutional, but that's not how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama's unilateral amnesty enriches stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchus and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder's entire tenure as attorney general is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of "executive privilege" in the Fast & Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can't hear: Insofar as they know anything about Fast & Furious, it's something to do with the government tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama "Segregation Forever" nuts, rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchus south of the border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policy-makers of the Obama administration. If that's the alternative narrative, they'll take the fake memoir.
Similarly, Obamacare is apparently all about the repressed patriarchal white male waging his "war on women." The women are struggling 30-year-old Georgetown Law coeds whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year, but let's not get hung up on details. Dodd-Frank financial reform, also awaiting Supreme Court judgment, is another unconstitutional power grab, but its designated villains are mustache-twirling top-hatted bankers, so, likewise, who cares?
One can understand why the beneficiaries of the postwar West's expansion of middle-class prosperity would rather pass themselves off as members of way-cooler victim groups: it's a great career move. It may even have potential beyond the page: See Sandra Fluke's dazzling pre-Broadway tryout of "Fake Memoir: The High School Musical," in which a 30-year-old Georgetown Law coed whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year passes herself off as the Little Rigoberta Hussein Wilkomirski of the Rite-Aid pick-up line. But transforming an entire nation into a fake memoir is unlikely to prove half so lucrative. The heartwarming immigrants, the contraceptive-less coeds, the mustache-twirling bankers all provide cover for a far less appealing narrative: an expansion of centralized power hitherto unknown to this republic. In reality, Obama's step-grandfather died falling off the chair while changing the drapes. In the fake-memoir version, Big Government's on the chair, and it's curtains for America.
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Who cares if its constitutional, we got healthcare:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/03/valerie_jarrett_on_obamacare_being_a_tax_we_will_take_it_any_way_we_can_get_it.html
“We will take it any way we can get it," Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said about the Supreme Court calling the individual mandate a tax in the majority opinion upholding ObamaCare. "I mean we argued both ways, but we thought that it fell within the commerce clause, the Court ruled it was a tax, we really look at it as a penalty."
"But whatever they want to call it, the fact of the matter is it was a historic day for the United States. A country as wealthy as ours is now going to provide health insurance for everyone," Jarrett said to Roland Martin on the Tom Joyner Morning Show.
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Bumper sticker seen on a parked car in a nice, liberal neighborhood yesterday;
"Am I liberal or just well educated?"
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Speaking of liberals well educated in something, art history maybe, to compensate for the shortage of liberals posting on the board I offer you the latest from the liberal media echo chamber in the Upper Midwest, today's Minneapolis StarTribune editorial taking the President to task for not turning further and sharper to the left. What we really need right now, they argue, is more of the exact same policies that didn't work the first three and a half years in failed Barack Obama Presidency:
Editorial: Obama should call for new stimulus\
"June jobs numbers show that economy needs more juice."
They want him to do more on deficit reduction and offer a new fiscal spending stimulus. Huh?
"Obama shouldn't wait for a full-blown recession to return. He should ask Congress for another dose of stimulus this summer..."
Read it at the link if you need a good dose of leftist confusion. What they don't seem to get is that these results called fairness, "the June unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 13.7 percent, back up to where it was last fall", not economic growth, are exactly what you get from their policies.
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/editorials/161853845.html
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Always fun to see that famous people are picking up on the themes here in the forum. Sometimes they credit us, sometimes they don't.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303740704577520890454878330.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
The Politics of Cognitive Dissonance
Why closed-mindedness is an imperative for the left.
By JAMES TARANTO Editor of OpinionJournal.com and member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board
"Don't repeat conservative language or ideas, even when arguing against them."
That bit of advice, No. 1 on a list titled "The 10 Most Important Things Democrats Should Know," comes from the promotional material for "The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic" by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling. (You may remember them from our June 12 column.) In a PJMedia.com essay, the anonymous blogger whose pen name is Zombie draws out the implications:
Many politicians, pundits and talking heads have taken Lakoff's recommendation to heart. This is why conservatives and liberals can't seem to have the simplest conversation: liberals intentionally refuse to address or even acknowledge what conservatives say. Since (as Lakoff notes) conservatives invariably frame their own statements within their own conservative "moral frames," every time a conservative speaks, his liberal opponent will seemingly ignore what was said and instead come back with a reply literally [sic] out of left field.
Thus, he is the progenitor of and primary advocate for the main reason why liberalism fails to win the public debate: Because it never directly confronts, disproves or negates conservative notions--it simply ignores them. . . .
By intentionally refusing to challenge, disprove, understand or even acknowledge the existence of the other side's argument, you allow that argument to grow in strength and win converts.
This is an important insight, not only into the way the left debates and otherwise communicates, but into the way the left thinks--or fails to think. The book's subtitle, after all, promises an instruction in "Thinking and Talking Democratic." Lakoff and Wehling command their readers not only to act as if opposing arguments are without merit, but to close their minds to those arguments. What comes across to conservatives as a maddening arrogance is actually willed ignorance.
Such an attitude is the product of leftist intellectuals, not political professionals--and, as Zombie notes, the latter are foolish to follow it:
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, is an exemplary Lakoffite, relentlessly hammering home her own framing of each issue, and utterly ignoring the Republican frame, except on rare occasion to mock it. How effective is this? A quick survey of conservative sites shows that she is regarded as the Queen of Buffoons, a figure meriting gleeful derision and eliciting relief that the Democrats have selected the worst possible spokesperson. She certainly hasn't changed a single conservative mind, I can assure you. But has she converted "undecided" voters to the liberal cause?
I posit that the answer is "No," and I'll explain why. . . . Lakoff has an authoritative "scientist" persona in addition to his partisan "activist" persona, but in order to lend gravitas to his arguments he must conflate the two and pretend to be an impartial scientist while in reality enunciating transparently partisan talking points. Yet people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz don't have that option, so that when she speaks, every single listener already knows that she is a partisan spewing partisan spin. She doesn't have an "authority hat" to put on which might give her statements the veneer of impartial truth.
This is one difference between an intellectual and a politician: When an intellectual haughtily dismisses opposing arguments, he does so in part by resting on his authority as an intellectual. This authority may give him a false sense of his own intellectual strength and that of his arguments.
Recall how lefty law professors thought mockery a sufficient response to the idea that Congress's Commerce Clause authority has limits. Lefty journalists and politicians joined in the mockery, made confident by the authoritative pronouncements of the scholars. The U.S. Supreme Court has now adopted a legal principle that elite law professors refused even to comprehend.
The other difference between an intellectual and a politician is that the latter's profession entails regular reality checks. If the Democrats do badly this fall, Barack Obama and the unwieldily named Wasserman Schultz will be understood to have failed. He will lose his job, and she will likely lose her prominence. Lakoff presumably has tenure, which shields him from reality. Barring a severe financial crisis in the higher education industry, he's set for life.
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Yeah, he made a mistake (depends on what the word 'a' means) and it was a DOOZY. Keep in mind, the Treasury Secretary is the cabinet official responsible for the IRS. Having Geithner in that position would be like having Eric Holder at DOJ oversee the ATF. Oh, never mind, I forgot about the double standard.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123187503629378119.html
Geithner's Tax History Muddles Confirmation
Timothy Geithner didn't pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for several years
(Imagine the uproar if they find that on Romney; a leftist wet dream!)
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/18/AR2009011802070.html
Timothy Geithner's Tax Problems
Monday, January 19, 2009
At a time when the nation needs a reliable, respected voice on financial issues at the Treasury Department, is an admitted tax cheat the best we can do [front page, Jan. 14]
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http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/13/treasury-geithner-obama-biz-beltway-cx_bw_0113geithner2.html
Geithner's Tax Troubles Are Serious
Brian Wingfield, 01.13.09, 07:22 PM EST
The issues surrounding Obama's choice for Treasury secretary may be worse than Democrats are letting on.
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Timothy Geithner has just run into a potentially serious obstacle on the road to his confirmation as Barack Obama's Treasury secretary.
Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee made public concerns about Geithner's tax obligations, which resulted in his recent payment of $42,702 in additional taxes and interest for tax years 2001 to 2004. In addition, the committee's report on the matter says that in 2005 Geithner employed a housekeeper for about three and a half months after her ability to work in the U.S. had lapsed. (Maybe we can let the states handle immigration enforcement.)
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., described Geithner's errors as "serious," but he said they were "honest mistakes" that "do not rise to the level of disqualification." Baucus also said Geithner corrected the problems as soon as he learned of them. The Montana Democrat wants to have a confirmation hearing on Friday because he says it's important to have a Treasury secretary on "day one." Obama's inauguration takes place Jan. 20.
But Geithner's tax troubles are more worrisome for his confirmation than Baucus lets on--and not just because the Internal Revenue Service is part of the Treasury Department.
According to the Senate committee's report, Geithner "recently filed amended tax returns" for each tax year from 2001 through 2006. (3 strikes and you're out?? I guess not.) However, the report doesn't specify when these returns were filed, leaving open the question about how long Geithner knew about the improprieties before he fixed them.
On Dec. 5, Obama's transition team told Finance Committee staff that Geithner hadn't paid social security or self-employment taxes on income received from the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2004, the report says. Three years ago, the IRS audited Geithner for tax years 2003 and 2004, which resulted in him paying back taxes and interest--but no penalties--totaling $16,732. (I guess he didn't make a mistake. More like a series of mistakes, all in his favor.)
However, Geithner voluntarily amended his 2001 and 2002 returns only after Obama expressed interest in nominating him to the Treasury post. The total bill this time: $25,970.
Income taxes for U.S. citizens who work for the IMF can be tricky. The IMF doesn't withhold an employee's share of social security taxes, and all of the organization's employees are responsible for meeting their own tax obligations. The IMF gives its employees--Geithner included--direction on how to pay self-employment taxes. And Geithner, a former Treasury official who is now president of the New York Fed, has dealt with complicated tax issues before, the report notes.
Was Geithner previously aware of irregularities on his 2001 and 2002? Did he only correct them when it became evident that a congressional committee would likely scrub his tax records in anticipation of confirmation hearings? The report doesn't say. Officials from Obama's transition team were not immediately available to comment.
But there's another concern, related to three people who have worked for him as household help since 2004. "He did not obtain the required Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, from these persons at the time they were hired to verify their legal work status," the Finance Committee's report says.
Nonetheless, Geithner was apparently aware of their legal status--someone entered into an address book owned by the Geithners, the report says. The Geithners apparently made a record that one employee's legal work status expired in July 2005, though she "did not renew her legal work status and the Geithners did not follow up with the employee to confirm whether she had done so." The person remained on the family's payroll until October 2005.
For now at least, Obama is standing by Geithner... Obama has pledged to make addressing the economic crisis his top priority. The timing for this couldn't be worse.
Forbes Jan 13, 2009
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He made a "mistake" obviously not very serious since no penalties were assessed.
I've been audited before; after hours upon hours on haggling, I ended up paying a few dollars plus interest as well. No penalties. Absolutely no one accused me of "tax evasion".
Further, as I also pointed out, it couldn't have been too bad in the opinion of those who matter since he was approved by the Senate in a bipartisan vote of 60-34 for Secretary of the Treasury.
Those that matter, on both sides of the aisle agreed, it was clearly a "mistake".
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A mistake? Can you STILL not grasp the errors was not SINGULAR??!??!??!
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Doug, can YOU still not grasp that even the U.S. Senate, in a bipartisan decision decided it was a "mistake" and approved him overwhelmingly.
There's nothing there.... You might want to move on to something of substance.
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Writes it singular again, 3 times after having the plural nature of the serial mistakes over an extended period on a multitude of problems pointed out. I posted 3 sources detailing more than 10 major tax law compliance errors cited. They didn't fall randomly either; all were on the side of TAX EVASION. You and I can't get away with that, don't kid yourself. The context was a historic financial crisis and the opposition looked the other way to give the popular new President a good start. So they put him in charge of the guy who is in charge of tax law compliance. In hindsight that was stupid. He is a buffoon and we should have known. Doesn't know Treasury, doesn't know tax law and doesn't know or care about the constitution. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-Fz35Ra1spk)
Good luck to you - it's fun having our own internet troll.
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I'm just trying to help. :-) Someone has to "troll" and so you can "find the truth". :evil:
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Ummm , , , no. NO ONE has to troll, and it is a bummer and a drag on this forum when someone does. In this case Doug took the time to find and bring here considerable support/evidence of the point he was making. Your response just ignores it. This is tedious and a waste of our time.
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Ummm , , , no. NO ONE has to troll, and it is a bummer and a drag on this forum when someone does. In this case Doug took the time to find and bring here considerable support/evidence of the point he was making. Your response just ignores it. This is tedious and a waste of our time.
My "troll" comment was tongue in cheek in response to Doug's snide troll comment. I agree Doug posted an excellent piece although I would not call it "considerable support/evidence. The FACTS remain that the Senate in a BIPARTISAN manner agreed it was a mistake, a mistake so little that they approved the man to be Secretary of the Treasury. Further no other enforcement agency thought they were "major tax law compliance errors. They were all minor; as proof he paid no penalty.
Geithner called the tax issues "careless", "avoidable" and "unintentional" errors, and he said he wanted to "apologize to the committee for putting you in the position of having to spend so much time on these issues".Geithner testified that he used TurboTax to prepare his 2001 return, but that the tax errors were his own responsibility. The Obama campaign stated that Geithner was advised by his accountant that he did not owe any taxes beyond those assessed by the IRS following the 2006 audit. Geithner said at the hearing that he had always believed he was an employee, not a self-employed contractor, while serving at the IMF
Nearly everyone, except for a few partisan critics said it was a non issue. Hardly "tax evasion".
Tedious and a waste of time; why because I don't agree that Secretary Geither is buffoon? One is not a buffoon merely because they disagree with your economic policies.
Geithner spent most of his childhood in other countries, including present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, India, and Thailand where he completed high school at the International School Bangkok. He attended Dartmouth College, in the tradition of his father and paternal grandfather, graduating with an A.B. in government and Asian studies in 1983. In the process, he studied Mandarin at Peking University in 1981 and at Beijing Normal University in 1982. He earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He has studied Mandarin and Japanese.
In October 2003, at age 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His salary in 2007 was $398,200. As President of the New York Fed, he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty. In May 2007, he worked to reduce the capital required to run a bank. In November he rejected Sanford Weill's offer to take over as Citigroup's chief executive.
During the 2008 Presidential election, as a registered Independent, Geithner was one of three people tipped to be nominated for Treasury Secretary regardless of whether John McCain or Barack Obama won.
Hardly a Buffoon or a tax evader.
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The tedious comment was in response to your non-response to content of a substantive post.
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This is a theme running through both Presidential and congressional threads. Thomas Sowell spells it out quite well: "Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/07/20/trashing_achievements_114842.html
Trashing Achievements
By Thomas Sowell - July 20, 2012
There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale.
The perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of materials for the filament of the light bulb he was inventing; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln as he studied law on his own while struggling to make a living -- these were things young people were taught to admire, even if they had no intention of becoming inventors or lawyers, much less President of the United States.
Somewhere along the way, all that changed. Today, the very concept of achievement is de-emphasized and sometimes attacked. Following in the footsteps of Barack Obama, Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard has made the downgrading of high achievers the centerpiece of her election campaign against Senator Scott Brown.
To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate."
Do the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop and think through what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?
People who run businesses are benefitting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?
At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow being subsidized by "the rest of us," whether in paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.
Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like free loaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, because it is part of an "underlying social contract."
Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy on the left -- one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled "The Promise of American Life."
Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a "promise" that American society was supposed to have made -- and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all sorts of "social contracts" began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the left.
If talking in this mystical way is enough to get you control of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' hard-earned money, why not?
Certainly someone who claimed to be part Indian, as Elizabeth Warren did when applying for academic appointments in an affirmative action environment, is unlikely to be squeamish about using imaginative words during a political election campaign.
Sadly, this kind of cute use of words is not confined to one political candidate or to this election year. The very concept of achievement is a threat to the vision of the left, and has long been attacked by those on the left.
People who succeed -- whether in business or anywhere else -- are often said to be "privileged," even if they started out poor and worked their way up the hard way.
Outcome differences are called "class" differences. Thus when two white women, who came from families in very similar social and economic circumstances, made different decisions and got different results, this was the basis for a front-page story titled "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'" in the July 15th issue of the N.Y Times. Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.
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"Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality."
DEAD ON!!!
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Sensing big trouble over the "You Didn't Build That" statement, the left* has decided the attacks on his statement are out of context and wrong, *Rachel Maddow for example. Before he said you didn't build that, he was talking about roads around your business. You didn't build that. Or did you?
Elizabeth Warren was more clear: roads "THAT THE REST OF US PAID FOR", she shouted angrily and repeatedly.
But the rich DO pay their fair share of the taxes and more and they do pay their fair share of the infrastructure and education systems in their towns that made the businesses that hire people possible.
More important though is that by parsing his words it exposes what Obama was really doing, as he always does in the heat of politics, making the straw argument.
He was putting on his opponents the view that if you favor any kind of limit on the continued growth of an obese and wasteful $4 trillion dollar FEDERAL government that is overlapped on most functions at the state and local levels and is already 1.2 trillion/yr in the red, then you must oppose all spending on all functions of government at all levels of government.
Remember what he said about any reform to our overblown regulatory jungle: "my opponents want dirtier water and dirtier air".
He can't argue honestly a political difference with a political opponent; he can only argue straw with a straw man if needs the win.
Yes, maybe he was talking about local government, local roads and local schools, but for the leader of the FEDERAL government talking about differences in federal laws and taxation, that is bunk. I don't know about where you live but local businesses here pay huge amounts of property taxes, and I mean scary-high amounts. Besides that he can't honestly say they didn't pay for that, he is the head of the federal government and not building the roads around your business is not a federal issue.
Federal roads are paid for with usage taxes that are in fact pilfered for liberal purposes like mass transit. Maybe he meant the airports but those are paid for in usage fees too. He did mention the internet, but yesterday's WSJ says that the government invented the internet is urban legend:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444464304577539063008406518.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks. But full credit goes to the company where Robert Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
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"[We] didn't build that"?? No, Mr. President. YOU didn't build that.
Whatever the hell "that" is.
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Here's Mrs. Clinton's fuller quote, from March 27, 2011, answering CBS's Bob Schieffer on why the U.S. was prepared to intervene against Moammar Gadhafi but not against Assad: "There's a different leader in Syria now," she explained. "Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer." - Hillary Clinton, current Secretary of State, advancing that viewpoint to support validate her policy. Not surprising since she previously had quite a kiss with Mrs Arafat at the conclusion of a hate-Israel speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xddAUHvuSfI
In 2007, Nancy Pelosi enthused that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace." The lady wants to be Speaker of the House - again.
On March 16, 2011—the day after the first mass demonstration against the regime—John Kerry said Assad was a man of his word who had been "very generous with me." He added that under Assad "Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States." This is the man who might be our next secretary of state.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444025204577544891777555840.html
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Short Cuts
"President Obama is angry at Mitt Romney for suggesting that college students should
'borrow money from their parents.' Right. You should do what Obama does -- have them
borrow money from their future children." --Fred Thompson
"Personally, I'm on a quest [at the Republican National Convention] to find all of
these racist Republicans everyone at MSNBC keeps saying dominate the party. I
thought I saw a Klansman, but it turned just to be someone with a totebag on their
head to fight the rain." --columnist Jonah Goldberg
"Yeah, the Democratic National Convention goes second and has a chance of upstaging
the Republicans, but I'm not sure how. Is there anything more tiresome than the
thought of Obama giving another speech? I mean, the one Biden gives might be some
comic relief, but they'll force him to stay on script and it will probably just be
boring. But they have fake-Indian Elizabeth Warren! Won't American respond to yet
another rich person whining about rich people? And then there is the dynamically
unlikable Sandra Fluke taking on our nations greatest problem: how annoying it is to
go to Walgreens and buy your own birth control." --humorist Frank J. Fleming
"President Obama passed up the chance to play golf in Washington Sunday to attend
church at St. John's Episcopal with his family. It was an emotional experience for
him. He felt the pain that all politicians feel when a collection plate goes by and
it's not for them." --comedian Argus Hamilton
"They [were] worried that Tropical Storm Isaac [w]ould hit Florida during ... the
Republican convention. But Florida [was] ready for it. Thanks to President Obama's
economic policies, many businesses down there [were] already boarded up." --comedian
Jay Leno
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07fTsF5BiSM&feature=player_embedded
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http://www.navytimes.com/news/2012/09/navy-russian-warships-displayed-dnc-veterans-tribute-091112/
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/09/15/Obama-Contribution-Anti-Islam-Filmmaker
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Covering for the lack of liberal posts on the board, I offer these:
Bill Keller's advice for Romney in the final debate. He actually followed point one, lay off of Benghazi. Point two is say something nice about the Palestinians, then extend a hand to the Muslim Brotherhood and on it goes. Keller is former editor of NY TImes, maybe even inspired Crafty's 'Pravda' naming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/opinion/keller-presidential-mitt.html?_r=0
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Next, the geniuses ot NYT thought if I liked that one I would like to read this one too!
Government creates jobs - millions of them: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/opinion/the-myth-of-job-creation.html
Mr. Romney interrupted. “Government does not create jobs,” he said. “Government does not create jobs.”
It was a decidedly crabbed response to a seemingly uncontroversial observation, and yet Mr. Obama took the bait. He said his political opponents had long harped on “this notion that I think government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer. That’s not what I believe.” He went on to praise free enterprise and to say that government’s role is to create the conditions for everyone to have a fair shot at success.
So, they agree. Government does not create jobs.
Except that it does, millions of them — including teachers, police officers, firefighters, soldiers, sailors, astronauts, epidemiologists, antiterrorism agents, park rangers, diplomats, governors (Mr. Romney’s old job) and congressmen (like Paul Ryan).
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What they don't get it that government jobs ride off the revenues generated by taxpaying enterprise jobs (not the other way around). Government can't and doesn't create them first or on their own.
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Big Bird
Posted by John Stossel | October 24, 2012
Print Email Share 0 CommentsTweet
Give me a break.
The left screams because Romney says he'll cut PBS.
A Huffington Post writer says that would be "a cultural and spiritual disaster for the nation."
Please. America is going broke! If we can't cut PBS, what can we cut?
Public broadcasting costs taxpayers "only" $420 million per year, but that's real money, and even if it weren't, the price is not the point. Government should not fund any broadcast networks.
As for news programs, government funding means taxpayers pay for lefty propaganda like Bill Moyers and most of NPR. We need separation of News and State. Thomas Jefferson warned that it is wrong to force citizens to pay for "the propagation of opinions which [they] disbelieve." He was right, but now I have to fund NPR.
As far as children's programming, Big Bird doesn't need the money! Sesame Street has assets of $355,858,257! Sesame Workshop makes $46M in licensing fees. The company is such a gold mine, it paid its recent president $929,629. Big Bird will do fine without taxpayer subsidies.
PBS once asked, "If not PBS, then who?" Cato's David Boaz points out that now the answer is: HBO, Bravo, Discovery, History, Science, C-SPAN, The Learning Channel ... and so on. I'm told that kids' programs like Noggin (Nick Jr.) are like pre-school on TV.
Yes, you have to pay for cable, but 63.7% of people below the poverty line have cable or satellite TV.
Those who don't have cable still get education programs on free TV. NBC alone has The Wiggles, Noodle and Doodle, and LazyTown (get up & go, eat healthy).
Funding public broadcasting is welfare for rich people. PBS viewers are richer than average Americans.
NPR even bragged about its listeners' wealth to potential advertisers: "152% more likely to have a home valued at half a million or more ... 194% more likely to travel to France."
It's fine that they appeal to rich people. But you shouldn't have to fund it.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2012/10/24/big-bird
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http://www.glennbeck.com/content/blog/glenn/wow-53-of-dems-actually-like-this/
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http://www.glennbeck.com/content/blog/glenn/wow-53-of-dems-actually-like-this/
Only 53% ?
Seems pretty low.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/un-treaties/270293-liberal-group-launches-petition-blasting-susan-rices-outrageous-keystone-investments
Liberals blast Susan Rice's 'outrageous' investments in Canadian pipeline firm
By Julian Pecquet - 11/30/12 10:48 AM ET
A liberal group launched an online petition Friday demanding that potential secretary of State nominee Susan Rice divest herself of “every dollar of stock” in the Canadian company seeking approval for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline to the Gulf Coast.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations owns between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada Corp. stock, according to her financial disclosure forms. The pipeline needs approval from the State Department before it can go forward.
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It was just reported this evening on CNN she and her husband are worth 20 to 25 million dollars.
I continue to call for all Democrats liberals and Hollywood types who are in the one percent (including you you jerk Buffet) should get a special tax of 90%. Esp. he who spent his entire life avoiding taxes and instead of donating his 50 bill fortune to the government to help pay down debt donates it to the Gates foundation.
Hey if our gov. is so good with money that we should continue to pay more in taxes really put YOUR money where your mouth is.
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In the interest of political economic diversity on the forum I continue to post things that make no sense to me from writers like Krugman and Reich...
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/30/wal_mart_and_mcdonalds_whats_wrong_with_u_s_employment/
Wal-Mart and McDonald’s: What’s wrong with U.S. employment
The walkouts were no coincidence. Low wages are strangling the economy, and Washington needs to pay attention
By Robert Reich
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No. Washington and other meddling governments are the cause. Low wages are market wages when there is a dearth of successful new startups or existing companies flourishing to compete for the services of these workers.
'Entry level' jobs are intended for entry level workers, or people who earn only a portion of the money in a multi- income household.
"These workers are not teenagers. Most have to support their families."
Flipping fast food burgers and working the drive up window does not raise a family, allow your wife to stay home with the children or put the kids through college. That doesn't mean there is something wrong with having a first job, a first rung on the economic ladder, making the second, third and fourth rungs each an easier step. What is wrong is that someone removed the ladder - by implementing the big government, private strangulation policies of Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Barack Obama et al.
"More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line."
MILLIONS more than that are underemployed, unemployed or spome other form of just not working. We are pursuing 'fairness' at the expense of lost national prosperity and lost economic opportunity. That said, "poverty" as measured by the Census Bureau is a false measure and does not count most of their transfer payment income.
Startups in America are occurring at the lowest rate in 40 years. I don't suppose 47,000 new regulations in the last 47 months and new taxes impending on everyone and everything has anything to do with that.
"Organizing makes economic sense."
Force someone to pay you more than you are worth to the enterprise, or put them out of business, is the answer of the left. Not for these people to rise up freely and contribute to the economy with more valuable and productive work.
"wage gains are likely to come out of profits...That wouldn’t be such a bad thing."
To the Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley: It will result in even fewer jobs, you birdbrain. Non-performing restaurants CLOSE! Potential new businesses projected to never provide a healthy return on investment simply don't open. Take a look around.
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George Zimmerman Photograph
on 03 December 2012.
This is a photo of George Zimmerman taken by a police officer on the night of February 26, 2012. A black and white photocopy of this image was provided by the State in the first Discovery. This high-resolution digital file was finally provided to the defense on October 29, 2012. This image was disclosed in the State's 9th Supplemental Discovery. In accordance with the updates to our media policy that we published on November 13, we will be making all public documents related to the case available on our website, including the rest of the State's 9th Supplemental Discovery as soon as we are sure it has been properly redacted according to the Court's stipulations on protecting information regarding specific witnesses.
(http://gzlegalcase.com/images/zimmerman_scene_photo.jpg)
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Is this all they've got in leftist logic? (oxymoron) Washington Post/mainstream media but really this is just a typical leftist straw argument to avoid the real one. No attempt is made at real journalism or trying to understand the the other side of an argument.
Fed’s big decision is victory for liberal economics
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2012/12/12/feds-big-decision-is-victory-for-liberal-economics/
"...it’s a sign that the current Fed board is increasingly taking the “dual” part of its dual mandate — to seek stable prices and full employment — a lot more seriously than it seemed to earlier in Barack Obama’s presidency... it’s a consequence of the November 2008 election, members of the Fed Board of Governors; [Pres. Obama] has now appointed six of seven [members of the Fed Board of Governors], all of whom voted for today’s policy."
"Republicans... rejecting entirely the Fed’s responsibility for improving the economy in favor of having it worry only about inflation. In fact, just last week, Marco Rubio implied that he may adopt that as a key position in his possible presidential campaign. Yes, that’s right: ...many Republicans believe that (at least when it comes to monetary policy) the United States has been paying too much attention to jobs and not enough to fighting inflation."
FYI to the leftist wingnut published in the mainstream media: Tight monetary policy at zero percent interest and shortage of quantitative expansion currently close to a trillion a year is NOT what is wrong with investment and employment in this country. Who could possibly think that is what's wrong? Let's say your car engine is seized up but the gas tank is full to the top and spilling over. With their logic, they would keep adding gas and criticize everyone who opposed them as not caring as we watch it spill over into the street - and keep doing it expecting that eventually it will cause the car to start running again. It won't. Adding more gas doesn't address what is wrong, so don't do it. At zero percent interest rates with our money flooding all over the world at a rate of close to a trillion a year, year after year, and diluting the value of all our existing money, we don't have a problem with interest rates being too high or money unavailable. The problem is that no one wants to start, run or expand a business in this current business climate.
People are leaving the workforce by the millions, existing businesses are refusing to expand in this country and startups are occurring at the lowest rate in history because of a combination of taxes, regulations and uncertainty laid on them by our government at all levels on a scale unprecedented in our history. The problem is that our public sector is screwing up our markets in all major industries, taking away resources from private enterprise and making rules and regulations and imposing layers and layers of taxes that are strangulating the life out of private initiative, business expansion and hiring.
Republicans aren't the ones who oppose fixing this; they oppose putting more gas on the fire.
(I will post more on the monetary policy thread.)
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This is too stupid to answer... but here goes:
A NY Daily News opinion piece linked at Real Clear Politics today has the headline:
Why they came for Susan Rice’s scalp
Answer: "It is about her skin color. It is also about her being female." Exact quote.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/susan-rice-scalp-article-1.1220678#ixzz2FQlcxxv0
Photo accompanying the bizarre answer:
(http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1220677.1355532531!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/crouch16e-1-web.jpg)
It could be my television set but I watched those shows and didn't notice she was 'a person of color'. Nor do I care. They went after her because she lied - on an important matter when the whole point was to get accurate information out to the American people.
The author must not have known that the same day the Indian American Republican Governor of South Carolina would appoint tea party favorite: Tim Scott. RCP used this photo:
(http://images.rcp.realclearpolitics.com/168978_5_.jpg)
Excusing them for not knowing, they might though have known that the darling of the Republican party in the campaign of 2012 was Mia Love:
(http://thegrio.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/mia-love-16x9.jpg?w=650)
Neither Democrat lying, nor conservative favoring limited government is a topic about race - or gender!
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http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/01/03/leftism-forget-it-jake-its-chinatown/?singlepage=true
Leftism: ‘Forget It, Jake. It’s Chinatown.’
January 3rd, 2013 - 9:57 am
I went shopping with my family on New Year’s Day at the “premium” outlet mall in Cabezon, California, outside Palm Springs — the kind of place where you traipse around for hours in the hopes of scoring a $225 Prada tie for 30 bucks, or a $700 Versace sweater for $135.
A large number, possibly a majority, of the shoppers there are well-heeled Chinese who have flown over to binge on Yves Saint Laurent, etc. products — many of which were made in their home country in the first place. Dressed in designer clothes, these mostly young and trendy Chinese are the privileged scions of the Communist Party. Their parents and grandparents are the ones who played along and did their best not to make waves, even cooperated, throughout the mass murders of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Now, they and their kids are reaping the harvest of their modern state capitalist system that still flies under the banner of communism, a false flag operation if ever there was one. Ironies abound, and those same ironies provide a snapshot of what constitutes “leftism” in our own culture.
Idealism is not the point, nor has it been for ages.
Leftism has devolved into a kind of scam run not only on others but also on the self. Leftists are brilliant at convincing themselves of their own altruism and then broadcasting it to the public, thus providing cover for the most conventionally greedy and selfish behaviors. We see that in our society all the time: the quondam Marxists of Hollywood, the media, and the academy blathering on about economic equality while living lives the Medici could not have dreamed of.
Part of this construct is a “prevent game,” a public persona and system erected so privilege cannot be questioned or undermined. A nomenklatura more successful and sophisticated than anything ever conceived in the Soviet Union. The result of this is a highly stratified society. As is well known but scarcely reported, blacks and Latinos have actually done worse under Obama than other groups. Normally, that would be unconscionable, considering the rhetoric. But as we know, it’s all about the rhetoric. Reality is unimportant — an inconvenience.
Relatively unbridled capitalism has always been the best way out of this, the best way to true social mobility, but our nomenklatura doesn’t want to admit this because it might threaten them and their perquisites. It would blow their cover.
I suspect those Chinese shoppers knew this better than anyone, having lived through a similar experience ratcheted up to the nth degree. Although I was too polite to do it, I wanted to question them. I would have loved to know what they say to each other in the privacy of their own homes, not that they would be likely to tell me.
But there was something to learn from watching them. I felt like a detective and it made me think of Roman Polanski and Robert Towne’s Chinatown. I also thought of myself, of the way I was when I was a leftist. Yes, I drove a Porsche then (a used one). And had a house in the Hollywood Hills. And ate at gourmet restaurants. And there were plenty like me. I was part of a class. I felt safe and protected for many years, though finally I just left it. I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy anymore. Or maybe I just lost the ability to convince myself of my own altruism.
Whatever the case, when it comes to the truth about leftism, it’s about the cover it gives. Or, as Bob Towne put it: “It’s Chinatown.”
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(This where it belongs?)
Yes, they really hate America.
Gentlemen and ladies,
Guro Marc Denny did me the honor of inviting me on to this forum, and I've been remiss in jumping in. I'll introduce myself at greater length later, but in brief: I'm a single dad, a journalist, a martial artist (PTK and Wu Wei Gung Fu.) I lived from 1991 to 2004 in Eastern Europe: Poland (where my son was born), Bulgaria, Serbia, and traveled around the region quite a lot. I lived a year in Saudi Arabia as well.
My blog site is stephenwbrowne.com and you can find out more about me there.
The topic I'd like to get a discussion started on concerns my thesis which is briefly - yes, the left hates America, and I believe I know why.
See the first of a series I wrote about it a while back, which I really need to distill into a more succinct article, but the basic thesis is here. Two men, Abraham Lincoln and Francis Bacon showed my why the people who are arguably the most fortunate individuals in the history of the human race hate the civilization that gifted them beyond the reach of ancient kings.
http://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2006/10/western-civilization-and-its-discontents-part-1/
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Stephen:
Yes, this is the thread for it.
Again, delighted to have you with us.
TAC!
Marc
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Likewise, welcome! After your first post a little while back I took the time to read a good number of your writings both at your site and at the newspaper. Very impressive and insightful, covering a lot of the same topics of the forum. I hope you jump into the discussion here on a wide range or things.
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http://washingtonexaminer.com/top-dems-urging-obama-to-raise-debt-ceiling-all-voted-against-increase-in-06/article/2518344
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I've got news for Sec. Powell. Someone who supports Obama twice and all of the leftist agenda is not Republican. You are a leftist. Be proud of that.
Powell went on Meet the Press to give a show of support for Chuck Hagel. He said regarding Hagel's use of the term Jewish lobby, "that term slips out from time to time".
Yes it does, and so does support for Iran, Hamas, Castro, etc. His ideological matching with Obama is his qualification.
Powell called American DOD official, Douglas Feith "a card-carrying member of the Likud Party." Those slip ups are going to happen??
Hagel is not an anti-semite for what he said but the GOP IS racist for what they didn't say:
Powell went on to say that when Romney supporter Gov. Sununu called Obama "lazy" after his first debate performance, it was short for lazy bleaping nigger(?), the GOP is racist - they just don't say the last parts out loud. Huh?
Scorched by Powell without the verbal slipup. One is not anti-Jewish for saying he is and the other is racist for not saying what he didn't say. What a jerk. Whatever Powell did to earn all his credibility (lying to the UN about WMD?) ought to be re-examined.
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Brett Stephens WSJ wrote about the Powell double standard today: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324734904578241561480345042.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
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The Second Bill of Rights of which Obama, Sunstein et al speak has been sourced:
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html
"guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum"
"the right to education. This right is ensured by free provision of all forms of education, by the institution of universal, compulsory secondary education, and higher education - free vocational and professional training, improvement of skills, training in new trades or professions, and development of the systems of vocational guidance and job placement"
"the right to rest and leisure... a working week not exceeding 41 hours"
"the right to health protection. This right is ensured by free, qualified medical care provided by state health institutions; by extension of the network of therapeutic and health-building institutions; by the development and improvement of safety and hygiene in industry..."
"the rights to housing...well-appointed dwellings, and by low rents and low charges for utility services."
"the church is separated from the state, and the school from the church"
"It is the internationalist duty of citizens to promote friendship and co-operation with peoples of other lands and help maintain and strengthen world peace."
A more perfect union has been found. (All quotes from USSR Constitution linked above.)
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The Second Bill of Rights of which Obama, Sunstein et al speak has been sourced:
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html
"guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum"
"the right to education. This right is ensured by free provision of all forms of education, by the institution of universal, compulsory secondary education, and higher education - free vocational and professional training, improvement of skills, training in new trades or professions, and development of the systems of vocational guidance and job placement"
"the right to rest and leisure... a working week not exceeding 41 hours"
"the right to health protection. This right is ensured by free, qualified medical care provided by state health institutions; by extension of the network of therapeutic and health-building institutions; by the development and improvement of safety and hygiene in industry..."
"the rights to housing...well-appointed dwellings, and by low rents and low charges for utility services."
"the church is separated from the state, and the school from the church"
"It is the internationalist duty of citizens to promote friendship and co-operation with peoples of other lands and help maintain and strengthen world peace."
A more perfect union has been found. (All quotes from USSR Constitution linked above.)
Dreams from his father.
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I would also add the "right" to retire is guaranteed.
There is no higher service, no greater good, no more honorable thing one could do than to serve in the government.
We are the people of for and by the government. :-(
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The pro-women political party that made sure to honor both Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton at their last convention, has a new rising star!
Protests and outrage from feminists in 3....2....never
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nj_menendez_flees_ho_heat_n589gIo6JgK6O43jAQnSYP?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Local
NJ’s Menendez flees ho heat
By GERRY SHIELDS
Last Updated: 11:46 AM, February 1, 2013
Posted: 1:04 AM, February 1, 2013
Sen. Robert Menendez repeatedly dodged reporters in Washington yesterday — avoiding questions about allegations he had sex with underage hookers in the Dominican Republic.
The Democrat from New Jersey slipped quietly out a back door after a New Jersey Chamber of Commerce banquet, at which he made his first public speech since the allegations surfaced.
Cornered by a wall of reporters, he refused to answer questions — and, with a half-grin, escaped into an elevator.
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The pro-women political party that made sure to honor both Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton at their last convention, has a new rising star!
Protests and outrage from feminists in 3....2....never
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nj_menendez_flees_ho_heat_n589gIo6JgK6O43jAQnSYP?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Local
NJ’s Menendez flees ho heat
By GERRY SHIELDS
Last Updated: 11:46 AM, February 1, 2013
Posted: 1:04 AM, February 1, 2013
Sen. Robert Menendez repeatedly dodged reporters in Washington yesterday — avoiding questions about allegations he had sex with underage hookers in the Dominican Republic.
The Democrat from New Jersey slipped quietly out a back door after a New Jersey Chamber of Commerce banquet, at which he made his first public speech since the allegations surfaced.
Cornered by a wall of reporters, he refused to answer questions — and, with a half-grin, escaped into an elevator.
“The same people who claimed Mitt Romney was waging a ‘War on Women’ are doing everything they can to avoid talking about Bob Menendez.”- JIM TREACHER
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http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/07/you-dont-need-a-weatherman-to-know-which/print
You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way Journalists Blow
Nick Gillespie|Feb. 7, 2013 7:00 pm
Remember back in what was it - 2006 or thereabouts - when left-leaning critics of President Bush couldn't stop talking about how nothing was more red, white, and blue than good old-fashioned American dissent? Why, our very country was founded by an act of dissent, didn't you know! So back when Vice President Dick Cheney - routinely likened to Darth Vader and Voldemort - was running things, the very air was filled with cries of "not in our name" and all that, because it was so damned important that the United States not contravene its basic principles even in the name of self defense!
Those were good times, friends, and they stopped pretty much the minute that liberals and Democrats took control of the federal government. The antiwar movement disappeared once it became clear that Barack Obama wasn't going to shut down Gitmo or stop bombing places or give a rat's ass about that constitutional stuff he used to teach in law school.
But cheer up, because things can always get worse, as the last few days have demonstrated.
There's that report from the Open Society Justice Initiative that despite Obama's soothing intonations to the contrary, the U.S. is complicit in torture up the ying-yang. And of course there's the leaked memo outlining what passes for Obama's decision tree regarding killing suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens. It's a relief to that the president has put his top men - anonymous yet "informed, high-level" officials - on figuring just who should be pinged and when. No need to share information or evidence or anything with either the legislative or judicial branches because that would just get in the way of getting the job done, right? Checking your math and making sure you're not making a bone-headed unconstitutional mistake is for losers. We're at war, don't you see, a new and different sort of war in which the old rules don't apply. And besides, doesn't the authorization of war powers signed three days after September 11, 2001 mean that whatever Obama does is A-OK? So even if we do need rules, Obama's got that covered! Nothing to see here, move along please.
It's sad, though never unexpected, when leaders such as Obama flip flop like a fish on the sand once they ascend power. Cromwell did it, the French revolutionaries did it, Castro did it, the Sandanistas did it, and on and on. It's one of the oldest plots in history and infinitely adaptable to new conditions. How else to explain, as Jacob Sullumn notes, that candidate Obama rejected the Bush adminstration's position that it could detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants without pressing charges while President Obama claims the right to kill U.S. citizens without laying charges? The guy may not be able to pass a budget but christ, give him credit for ingenuity and brass balls.
But Obama is a politician - what do you expect? Politicians are not just the bottom of the barrel - they're what's under the bottom of the barrel, right?
So what then explains the contortions that journalists fold themselves into like so many carnival sideshow rubber-men in defending their hero? Mike Riggs points to comments by rising liberal MSNBC pundit Toure that suggest just how far explicitly pro-Obama liberals are willing to go in excusing the president's declaring himself and his crew judge, jury, and executioner. As Riggs explains, it seems pretty clear that Toure isn't up to speed on specifics, especially when it comes to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son:
When his co-hosts continue to press him on the consequences of a small group of individuals determing who deserves to die without a shred of oversight, Touré dismisses them by saying, "Al Qaeda attacked this nation. We are attacking al Qaeda back." On Twitter Touré simply said, "He's the Commander in Chief."
Al Qaeda is the new Communism, dig? To invoke its name is to settle all arguments. If Toure is just light on facts, the recent defense of Obama's kill list machinations from Michael Tomasky is more illuminating of the mind-set that controls journalists. Tomasky has been at the news game far longer than Toure and once upon a time penned a fawning "inside" account of what he dubbed Hillary Clinton's "Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign." After stints at various leftoid outposts such as The American Prospect and The Guardian, Tomasky has now found a perch at The Daily Beast. Back in the day, Tomasky was a reliable critic of everything related to Bushitler, by which I of course mean Dick Cheney. Here he is circa 2009, in a typical post titled "Dick Cheney's Dangerous Game":
Cheney wants Americans to live in fear. He believes that we should be living in more or less constant fear of another attack. I suppose it probably occurred to him over the years that, when a people are whipped into a fearful state, they tend to hand their leaders more power....
Obama wants to move people beyond fear. "If we continue to make decisions from within a climate of fear," he said, "we will make more mistakes." Are the American people up to this? More to the point – and more depressing to consider – are Washington politicians? We will find out as this debate plays out.
This sort of analysis struggles to rise above Goofus and Gallant in Highlights for Children: Goofus constantly invokes real and imagined threats to concentrate his power. Gallant talks a good game about protecting rights even while claiming far more power than this predecessor.
Tomasky struggles with the in-your-face spectacle of a president saying he has the right to pick which Americans can be killed unilaterally by insisting that the important thing is to walk a mile in Obama's mocassins:
I’ve always written about politics with part of my brain focused on the question of what I would do if I were in Politician X’s position. This line of thought came so naturally to me that I imagined everyone did this.... [The memo is] certainly not something that makes the breast swell with pride. But it does make me wonder what I would do in this situation, and I can’t honestly come up with easy answers.
He should try harder to come up with answers, perhaps by halting the mind-meld with the powerful and instead grokking some imaginary solidarity with the falsely accused. After dilating a while on the term imminent as used in
the memo and then deciding that al Qaeda is pretty much always about to attack the U.S., he concludes
Well, either this makes a certain sense to you, or you just think that a state can't be in the business of killing its own citizens and that's all there is to it. There's no doubt that a sentence like "the president has the power to order the assassination of American citizens" sounds positively despotic. However, these are people who have gone off and joined Al Qaeda (the white paper also mentions "associated groups," and one definitely wonders where that line is drawn, precisely). If an American citizen of German descent had gone back to...Germany in 1934 and joined the Nazi Party and worked his way up such that he was involved in the plotting of attacks against American soldiers, and Roosevelt had order him killed, no one would have batted an eye in 1940s America.
You got that? You're either with the president's logic or you can't understand it (shades of George Bush's simplistic, Bible-based manicheanism when he said you're either with us or against us!). There's enough qualifiers in the passage above to give anyone pause, of course: Who are the associated groups after all? How exactly is this like 1940s America? The short version, as even Tomasky eventually grants later, is that "it's not 1940s America." Last time, I checked, Congress declared war against Nazi Germany. And the Nazis kept membership lists which greatly minimized - though didn't eliminate fully - questions of who belonged. Maybe more important, mistakes were made, including the internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans and alien residents for no good reason other than hysteria. Can we learn at least a little from the past? And not the distant past, either. Enough of the detainees at Gitmo were wrongly held so that you'd figure Obama (didn't he pledge to shut that prison down?) would want to make double-plus sure that he's targeting the right bastards?
But all Tomasky's mental whittling is besides the point, really, because people aren't saying they can't think of scenarios in which the state has the legitimate right to kill bad guys (including its own citizens) without going through every possible aspect of criminal or military due process. The current controversy is over Barack Obama's unwillingness to explain precisely how and when he's been making such calls and exactly where he thinks he derives the right to do so.
Tomasky's colleague at The Daily Beast, David Frum, is not beset with internal strife. A former Bush speechwriter (best known for coining the phrase "the Axis of Evil"), Frum says that just about anything Obama does is plainly covered under the authorization of the use of military force (AUMF) that was signed a few days after 9/11. "That resolution remains in force today," writes Frum. "It assigns to the president - not to some judge - the authority to determine who committed the 9/11 attacks. It assigns to the president - not a jury - the responsibility to prevent any future acts of international terrorism." Leaving aside the fact that it was signed a dozen years ago, the AUMF does direct the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force" to bring the 9/11 terrorists to justice as well as "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." While the authorization covers a lot of ground, it doesn't mean that the president, or whoever he designates, can simply do whatever he pleases. As Eli Lake noted for Reason in 2010, the Supreme Court limited President Bush's powers under the AUMF and the Obama adminstration itself pledged to respect international law even while prosecuting the war on terror. More to the point, perhaps, the AUMF doesn't mean that Congress can't oversee or be privy to the president's actions and logic. What does it say about Obama's respect for a separation of powers and the Constitution that he has refused to give the Senate the classified truth on his decision matrix for killing suspected terrorists? Nothing good.
We grudgingly allow the government to surveil, detain, and confront people all the time when various sorts of suspicions are raised; the difference is that there is a clear framework in place so that we can judge whether the government is acting in accordance with the law rather than simply acting on its own impulse. You'd think that Obama - an Ivy League lawyer and a Nobel Peace Prize winner no less- would be proactive in reassuring the Congress and the country that he's not flying by the seat of his pants on this.
By making clear that as a journalist he tries to see things first and foremost from the perspective of the powerful, Michael Tomasky helps to clarify why so many in the media are rushing to the president's defense. They are entranced with power and the view from the top. "Presidents live with that responsibility [of protecting American lives] every day," he writes. "If that responsibility were mine, I can't honestly say what I'd do, and I don't think anyone can." Not all journalists are awed by power, of course, even on the right (National Review's Jim Geraghty, for instance, asserts that this sort of thing of extra-judicial killing policy wouldn't be cricket even under a GOP president).
This isn't ultimately about ideological hypocrisy - of liberals changing their tune once their guy is in office - but something much more basic and much more disturbing. It reveals that for all their crowing about being watchdogs of all that is good and decent in society, when push comes to shove, too many journalists are ready and willing handmaidens to power - including the power to kill.
There's the old saw from Mother Jones - the namesake of today's left-wing publication - that her job was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." To its credit and unlike too many on the broadly construed left, Mother Jones (the magazine and website) still believes that as it relates to civil liberties. As Adam Serwer has written,
The Obama administration claims that the secret judgment of a single "well-informed high level administration official" meets the demands of due process and is sufficient justification to kill an American citizen suspected of working with terrorists. That procedure is entirely secret. Thus it's impossible to know which rules the administration has established to protect due process and to determine how closely those rules are followed. The government needs the approval of a judge to detain a suspected terrorist. To kill one, it need only give itself permission.
That such an obvious analysis escapes so many in the press is troubling, to say the least. But it makes total sense if, as Michael Tomasky says, you focus first on what you would do if you were in "Politician X's position." The world - and your concerns - must surely look different when viewed from such a lofty vantage point.
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Contrast my post of John Yoo just now in the Legal Issues presented by the War with Islamic Fascism thread-- you might even want to post this Reason piece there GM.
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Nancy Pelosi with Chris Wallace shows at the link why powerful people like her don't normally do this kind of interview.
Liberals have their own language and it permeates their thinking. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense to her.
"It's almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem"
This bizarre statement begs two questions: 1) We spend a trillion more than the most we have ever been able to figure out how to take in plus 150 trillion of unfunded liabilities. Nancy, we have a spending problem. 2) What is "almost a false argument"? Does she not know that in English that is a way of saying something is true?
"Nothing brings more money to the Treasury of the United States than ..." [public spending].
She believes so strongly that increasing the federal government's involvement in every area equals improvement. She forgets that she never won that argument. The Soviet central control system never did outperform individual freedom and ingenuity. It imploded. Ayers, Alinsky, Obama and Pelosi all have this wrong.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/10/pelosi_a_false_argument_to_say_that_we_have_a_spending_problem.html
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Didn't President Obama and Nancy Pelosi just say we don't have spending problem? It's almost a false argument. Now Carney is sent out by the same President's handlers to say we do have a spending problem - but it's all healthcare.
Will they use this in future political science classes to illustrate what we mean by talking out of both sides of your mouth?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/11/carney_of_course_the_president_believes_that_we_have_a_spending_problem.html
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Clinton's Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says growth agenda. Then he lays out an agenda that largely skips over taxes and regulations. Good luck. His points if they were numbered 3-8 are actually pretty good:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lawrence-summers-the-economic-growth-agenda-we-need/2013/02/10/86d41afa-7239-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html
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Could go under Glibness, failed programs, gun control, ACORN corruption or America's inner city, Michelle Malkin hits it out of the park. How come the party of science doesn't tie policies to results?
Who Failed Chicago?
By Michelle Malkin - February 13, 2013
On Tuesday, President Obama and the first lady used the State of the Union spotlight to pay tribute to an innocent teenage girl shot and killed by Chicago gang thugs. On Friday, Obama will travel to the Windy City to decry violence and crusade for more gun laws in the town with the strictest gun laws and bloodiest gun-related death tolls in America.
Does the White House really want to open up a national conversation about the state of Chicago? OK, let's talk.
Obama, his wife, his campaign strategists, his closest cronies and his biggest bundlers all hail from Chicago. Senior adviser and former Chicago real estate mogul/city planning commissioner Valerie Jarrett and her old boss Richard Daley presided over a massive "Plan for Transformation" in the mid-1990s to rescue taxpayer-subsidized public housing from its bloody hellhole. How'd that work out for you, Chicago?
Answer: This social justice experiment failed miserably. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that after Daley and Jarrett dumped nearly $500 million of federal funding into crime-ridden housing projects, the housing complexes (including the infamous Altgeld-Murray homes) remained dangerous, drug-infested, racially segregated ghettos. Altgeld is a long-troubled public housing complex on Chicago's South Side, where youth violence has proved immune to "community organizing" solutions and the grand redevelopment schemes championed by Obama and company.
In fact, as I've reported previously, it's the same nightmarish 'hood where Obama cut his teeth as a community activist -- and exaggerated his role in cleaning up asbestos in the neighborhood, according to fellow progressive foot soldiers. As always, Obama's claims to success there were far more aspirational than concrete.
In the meantime, lucrative contracts went to politically connected Daley pals in the developer world to "save" Chicago's youth and families. Another ghetto housing project, the Grove Parc slum, was managed by Jarrett's former real estate empire, Habitat, Co. Jarrett refused to answer questions about the dilapidated housing development after ascending to top consigliere in the Obama administration.
But as the Boston Globe's Binyamin Appelbaum, who visited the slums several years ago, reported: "Federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale -- a score so bad the buildings now face demolition. ... (Jarrett) co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems." Grove Parc and several other monumental housing flops "were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the (federal) subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered."
Democrats poured another $30 million in public money into the city's public schools to curb youth violence over the past three years. The New York Times hailed the big government plan to fund more social workers, community organizers and mentors and create jobs for at-risk youth. But watchdogs on the ground exposed it as a wasteful "makework scheme." One local activist nicknamed the boondoggle "Jobs for Jerks" because "it rewards some of the worst students in the school system with incredibly rare employment opportunities while leaving good students to fend for themselves."
Obama and his ineffectual champions of Chicago's youth will demand more taxpayer "investments" to throw at the problem. But money is no substitute for the soaring fatherlessness, illegitimacy and family disintegration that have characterized Chicago inner-city life since Obama's hero Saul Alinsky pounded the pavement. As Heather Mac Donald noted in a damning indictment of the do-gooders' failures, "Official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today's Chicago as it was during Obama's organizing time there."
Team Obama will find perverted ways to lay blame for Chicago's youth violence crisis on the NRA, Sarah Palin, FOX News, George Bush and the tea party. But as the community organizer-in-chief prepares to evade responsibility again, he should remember: When you point one finger at everyone else, four other fingers point right back at you-know-who.
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Continuing in our get to the know the left series.
It’s For Your Own Good!
Cass R. Sunstein
Left thinker Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism"
by Sarah Conly which explains with a straight face why a system of "paternalist" government-based decision making is better than individual free choices. I kid you not.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/
"Conly convincingly argues that behavioral findings raise significant questions about Mill’s harm principle [coersion can only be to prevent harm to others]. When people are imposing serious risks on themselves, it is not enough to celebrate freedom of choice and ignore the consequences."
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Now that they think they've won, we see the true face of the left.
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:-o :-o :-o :cry: :cry: :cry: :x :x :x
Please post in the Liberal Fascism thread.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2013/02/18/co-democrat-hey-even-if-you-feel-like-youre-gonna-get-raped-you-might-not-so-no-guns-for-you/
CO Democrat: Even if you feel like you might get raped, you may not, so no guns for you
posted at 9:31 pm on February 18, 2013 by Mary Katharine Ham
Downplaying the threat of rape? Check. Questioning the ability of grown, sentient women to perceive that threat? Check. A man in a position of power presuming to know what’s best for women he knows nothing about? Check. Limiting women’s choices by law in potentially life-threatening situations? Check. Six months ago, this was known as the frightful patriarchy. Now, it’s just another member of the Party of Women doing his part for the good work of gun control.
In arguing for the disarmament of college students in Colorado this week, state Rep. Joe Salazar suggested a novel method of self-defense for women on campus— just chill, ladies.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jCvng-jSp60[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jCvng-jSp60
“It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop around at somebody.”
Well, after all, you might not get raped. In Salazar’s world, not only are women incapable of defending themselves against a physical threat, but they are incapable of even identifying a physical threat, and should therefore be deprived of the ability to try. Empowerment! I guess if you are raped, there’s this…safe zone. Look, colleges are welcome to establish safe zones (though criminals are notoriously unobservant of such signage), call boxes, lighted paths, and whistles to help prevent campus attacks. I have benefited from at least a few of these tools, and begrudge no one their use. But I would also like women who choose to arm themselves, in the event that safe zones, call boxes, lights, and whistles don’t work, to retain the right to their chosen tool of prevention.
Revealing Politics has background on the bill in question:
House Bill 13-1226 to prohibit the lawful concealed carry on Colorado college campuses passed the Colorado House of Representatives this morning. Many of the arguments Democrats used to justify the bill included the alcohol and drug use common on campuses coupled with the age and immaturity of average college students. These arguments didn’t resonate with many Republican lawmakers and opponents of the bill who cited Colorado’s intensive training process for obtaining a concealed carry permit and the state’s requirement that permit-holders be 21 years of age, as rebuttal.
Salazar has apologized for revealing how incapable he believes women are. (Notice the framing of the story in local media is not about his comments, but about conservatives objecting to them.)
“I’m sorry if I offended anyone. That was absolutely not my intention,” Salazar said. “We were having a public policy debate on whether or not guns makes people safer on campus. I don’t believe they do. That was the point I was trying to make. If anyone thinks I’m not sensitive to the dangers women face, they’re wrong. “I am a husband and father of two beautiful girls, and I’ve spent the last decade defending women’s rights as a civil rights attorney. Again, I’m deeply sorry if I offended anyone with my comments.”
Charles Cooke notes the University of Colorado’s advice for women under attack. This would be the liberal-sanctioned method of self-defense if the Rep. Salazar method of hoping real hard doesn’t pan out. Passive resistance, bare feet, and your period:
Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.
“Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.” That is, unless you’d like to use a projectile more potent than vomit, in which case, settle down little missy. You can’t be trusted.
In other “common sense” gun control news, a Washington state bill obliterates the Fourth Amendment for gun owners. Oops:
It seemed in recent weeks lawmakers might be headed toward some common-sense regulation of gun sales. But then last week they went too far. By mistake, they claim. But still too far.
“They always say, we’ll never go house to house to take your guns away. But then you see this, and you have to wonder.”
That’s no gun-rights absolutist talking, but Lance Palmer, a Seattle trial lawyer and self-described liberal who brought the troubling Senate Bill 5737 to my attention. It’s the long-awaited assault-weapons ban, introduced last week by three Seattle Democrats.
Responding to the Newtown school massacre, the bill would ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons that use detachable ammunition magazines. Clips that contain more than 10 rounds would be illegal.
But then, with respect to the thousands of weapons like that already owned by Washington residents, the bill says this:
“In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.”
In other words, come into homes without a warrant to poke around. Failure to comply could get you up to a year in jail.
When the sheriff shows up, try vomiting or urinating.
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NYU, a taxpayer owned institution, paid Lew $840,339 in a year and lent him and additional $1.4 million Mr. Lew said that the university "provided a mortgage forgiven in equal installments over five years, and an additional shared appreciation mortgage." Plus severance when he left voluntarily. Citi paid him 1.1 million to run a group that lost a billion and required a taxpayer bailout. Let's put him in charge of the Treasury. Liberals and leftists are up in arms about this. Just kidding.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323949404578314412568158962.html
Jack Lew doesn't seem to know much about how or why he got paid.
Senate Democrats are in a hurry to confirm Jack Lew as Secretary of the Treasury before anyone notices his biography. Otherwise, liberal lawmakers might be embarrassed voting for a man who represents everything they've been campaigning against.
Investor in Cayman Islands tax haven? Check. Recipient of a bonus and corporate jet rides underwritten by taxpayers at a bailed-out bank? Check. Executive at a university that accepted student-loan "kickbacks" for steering kids toward a favored bank? Check. Excessive compensation with minimal disclosure? Check.
Like a financial Forrest Gump, Mr. Lew keeps walking into the frame of the business-political dramas of the last decade. But unlike the lovable movie character, Mr. Lew is playing the villain of liberal financial lore. One very compelling role, highlighted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), was Mr. Lew's star turn as an administrator at a university that encouraged students to borrow from his future employers at Citibank.
Prior to working at Citi, Mr. Lew was the executive vice president for operations at New York University from 2001-2006. He was responsible for NYU's budget and finances. During his tenure the university agreed to recognize Citibank as its primary private lender for student loans. Citibank in turn paid NYU 0.25% of the value of the loans.
Mr. Lew and the school say that Citi offered the payments to NYU only after winning a competitive process to offer low rates to students. Mr. Lew says he doesn't recall much about the arrangement, and he responded to a Grassley inquiry by saying, Gump-like, "I do not believe that I approved the selection of Citigroup as C +0.61% a preferred lender for NYU students."
We never thought it was the crime of the century for universities to get a cut of loan revenue when they recommended particular lenders to students. But politicians like Senator Max Baucus (D., Mont.) referred to these payments as "kickbacks." Yes, the same Max Baucus who has spent his career howling about the Cayman Islands. Yes, the same Mr. Baucus who has now forgotten how outraged he is while supporting Mr. Lew's nomination.
Anyway, after Mr. Lew had left NYU to work at Citi, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charged in 2007 that the school's payments from Citi had not been adequately disclosed to students and that the school's policy toward Citi created a conflict of interest and violated state laws. NYU settled without admitting any wrongdoing and agreed to a new code of conduct.
We'd have thought this story would offend principled liberals, but then they're also giving a pass to Mr. Lew's fabulous compensation from the tax-exempt school. NYU students shoulder one of the highest collective debt burdens in the country as they struggle to afford one of the nation's most expensive universities. For those who claim after watching Mr. Lew's confirmation hearing that he doesn't understand finance, we say: Check out his NYU compensation package. He sure knows how to get paid.
According to a 2004 report in NYU's student newspaper, Washington Square News, Mr. Lew was paid $840,339 during the 2002-2003 academic year. This meant that Mr. Lew earned more than most of the country's university presidents that year, including his own boss, John Sexton.
After more Grassley inquiries and reporting by the New York Post, it's not clear whether even that astronomical figure covers all the compensation paid to this employee of an ostensibly nonprofit outfit.
The Post discovered in NYU's IRS forms that the school lent Mr. Lew at least $1.4 million. When Mr. Grassley asked the Treasury nominee about it, Mr. Lew said that the university "provided a mortgage forgiven in equal installments over five years, and an additional shared appreciation mortgage."
Mr. Lew says that NYU reported "income related to housing assistance" on his W-2, so it's possible the loan subsidy was counted in the $840,339 figure. We asked NYU and the Treasury to disclose Mr. Lew's total compensation from the school, including benefits. NYU suggested we review their public tax filings and White House spokesman Eric Schultz said only that, "Mr. Lew has answered more questions than any Treasury Secretary nominee in history. He has been fully transparent and responsive to the Committee and deserves a vote as soon as possible."
What Mr. Lew has told Mr. Grassley is that "in addition" to his salary, he received other benefits, including "a one-time severance payment upon my departure." The website for the Obama Department of Labor notes, "Severance pay is often granted to employees upon termination of employment." That's our understanding as well—severance is typically paid to employees being laid off. But NYU says he left voluntarily.
Why would the school shovel still more money to an employee as a parting gift before he heads off to Wall Street? NYU is a university that gets favorable tax treatment on the premise that it is pursuing an educational mission, not a commercial or political one.
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The Grassley inquiry is unlikely to derail Mr. Lew's nomination, because Senate Democrats, the White House and most of the media really don't care. But Mr. Grassley is doing a public service in revealing how liberals redistribute income to themselves. And Mr. Lew is finally delivering educational value to youngsters by providing a lesson for the Obama era: If you want the big bucks, go into the world of taxpayer-backed enterprises.
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http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news-markets/international-news/portfolio/2007/09/17/Chiquita-Death-Squads.html?page=all
The firm’s lawyers have struggled to explain publicly that Chiquita had to make a choice between “life and law” and that it chose the “humanitarian” route of protecting its workers. “This company was in a bad position dealing with bad guys,” says Eric Holder, a Washington attorney representing Chiquita. “There’s absolutely no suggestion of any personal gain here. It’s not a case like Tyco, where someone is squirreling money away. No one is out buying great shower curtains.”
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Please post in the Latin America thread as well. Thank you.
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Bill Clinton now argues that DOMA, the defense of marriage act, that he signed is unconstitutional.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bill-clinton-its-time-to-overturn-doma/2013/03/07/fc184408-8747-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html?hpid=z2
Like minimum wage laws killing off jobs, what is good and bad policy, what is right and wrong, and what is constitutional and unconstitutional if you are a lefty is largely determined by the latest public opinion poll.
Was he sworn to uphold the constitution? Did gays change, did the constitution change? Is it too late to impeach him?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/its-too-bad-we-cant-impeach-bill-clinton-again.php
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"increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies"
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In the heart of the nation's 4th wealthiest metro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-income_metropolitan_statistical_areas_in_the_United_States) is the failing City of Minneapolis. This article could have been written about nearly any of America's Democrat-governed major inner cities. Minneapolis is not bankrupt (yet) because many of the social costs are picked up by the rest of Hennepin County and the State of Minnesota. Minneapolis has zero Republicans on its 13 seat city council, the rich neighborhoods are Democrat too. Mpls is represented in Washington DC by Dem. Rep. Keith Ellison and Dem. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken.
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http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-minneapolis/
Toxic Government by Democrats: Minneapolis
April 4, 2013 By John Perazzo
Editor’s note: The following is the first in a series of articles that will expose the misery of life in America’s poorest cities, all of which have one thing in common: they are controlled exclusively by Democrats. Each article presented by FrontPage will reveal how the production of mass urban poverty is much more than just a failure of leadership, but a means of political survival for the Left.
The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota—whose population is composed of 63.8% whites, 10.5% Hispanics, and 18.6% African Americans—has been governed exclusively by mayors from the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, the state affiliate of the Democratic Party, since 1978.
As of 2011, the poverty rate in Minneapolis was 23.5%, more than one-and-a-half times the national figure of 15%. This differential is consistent with a longstanding, well-documented trend: Virtually all of America’s poorest cities have been led politically by Democrats for many years, even decades. In 2010, for example, not even one of the ten poorest large cities in the U.S. had elected a Republican mayor since the 1980s. In fact, 8 of the 10 cities had been led exclusively by Democrats for more than half a century.
The common thread running through each of these economically decrepit cities is a phenomenon that Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer famously dubbed “The Curley Effect,” after its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four non-consecutive terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950. This phenomenon, Glaeser and Shleifer explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
This typically occurs when Democratic administrations adopt policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the poor, causing the latter to become economically dependent upon their political patrons, and thus to become a permanently pro-Democrat voting bloc. At the same time, these redistributive policies cause the people harmed by them (i.e., those from whom wealth is extracted) to emigrate to other cities and states, thereby further solidifying the political power of Curleyist practitioners.
The beneficiaries of Curleyist redistributionism invariably become unable to perceive the connection between left-wing policies and their negative consequences. Instead, they view Democrats as the noble, last line of defense that stands between them and total destitution. As a result, their loyalty to Democrats persists, undiminished, regardless of how bad conditions may get—chiefly because they interpret the failures of leftist policies as evidence that those policies simply did not go far enough, probably as a result of conservative obstructionism. Thus do residents of Democrat-controlled cesspools of poverty and crime continue, in perpetuity, to elect Democrats to political office.
Prior to the permanent Democratic takeover of Minneapolis in 1978, the city’s poverty rate had been consistently lower than the national average. Then, through most of the 1980s, the ripples of the Reagan economic boom delivered a positive effect to cities nationwide, including Minneapolis. Indeed, Minneapolis added some 3,000 new jobs to its downtown area each year from 1981-87. In 1983, only 8% of the city’s metropolitan-area population lived below the poverty level, as compared to approximately 15% nationally.
But by 1988, Minneapolis’s left-wing Democratic mayor, Donald Fraser, had grown troubled by the stark contrast between those sections of his city that were thriving economically, and a number of African-American neighborhoods where crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency were widespread. Fraser believed that the proper remedy for these pathologies would be to implement a host of taxpayer-funded, government-administered social-welfare programs. “What is needed,” said the mayor, “is a more thoughtful discussion, a rethinking of the city, of welfare support, and it should begin right here.” Specifically, Fraser held that federal and local agencies needed to focus more of their attention and financial resources on the economic and social problems confronting unwed mothers and their children. His successors as mayor, Sharon Sayles Belton and R.T.Rybak, have shared this same perspective—a mindset that has fueled the decades-long trend of ever-increasing wealth redistribution and government subsidies for the poor, not only in Minneapolis but across the United States.
By no means is financial hardship in Minneapolis limited solely to low-income residents. Indeed, the city’s homeowners pay higher property taxes than their counterparts in most other metropolitan municipalities. One study of 142 metro areas found that only 15 of them bore a heavier property-tax burden than Minneapolis as of 2010, and that was before Minneapolis raised its property taxes by 4.7% in 2011.
Just as Minneapolis residents face significant economic challenges, so must they deal with the city’s sizable crime problem. In the early 1990s, crime began trending downward in much of the U.S. for various reasons, including the decline of the crack cocaine epidemic, more aggressive policing strategies, and harsher punishments for criminal behavior. New York City, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton, led the way in this regard with their CompStat crime-tracking system and their use of the so-called “broken-windows” approach to crime-prevention. In comparison to other cities, Minneapolis was slow to adopt the new law-enforcement and criminal-justice strategies and thus lagged behind the national trend for several years. But once the city changed its ways (e.g., by incorporating CompStat) in the late 1990s, it likewise experienced a noteworthy reduction in crime.
Notwithstanding this positive downward trend, however, crime rates in Minneapolis remain far higher than statewide and national figures alike. For example, in 2010 the violent crime rate for Minneapolis exceeded the corresponding Minnesota rate by 346.55%, and the overall U.S. rate by 161.03%. Similarly, the property crime rate in Minneapolis surpassed the Minnesota rate by 84.44%, and the national rate by 61.27%.
In a particularly ugly develoment, Minneapolis in recent times has been the scene of numerous incidents involving “flash mob” violence, usually by large groups of black assailants targeting white victims. For example, on March 17, 2012, a gang of some 20 young men inflicted serious brain injuries on one young man, just an hour after a large group of assailants had beaten an out-of-town couple in that same location. Six days later, without provocation, 15 to 20 suspects attacked and beat three cyclists, leaving one of the victims with a broken jaw. As Sergeant Steve McCarty of the Minneapolis Police Department observed: “It’s just mainly to create mayhem, assault people and just whatever they can do. It’s a weird mentality I don’t think a lot of people can fathom or understand. Just to victimize people.” And a few days after that, four Minneapolis juveniles assaulted two men in quick succession, rendering one of the victims unconscious and inflicting serious injuries (including a broken arm) on the other.
It has long been commonplace for Democrat-led cities to have much-higher-than-average crime rates. As of 2011, for instance, America’s ten most dangerous cities were all strongholds of Democratic political leadership. Minneapolis’s experience, therefore, is par for the course.
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Maybe we can move this over to the Ted Cruz thread... )
John Hinderaker, Powerline
Demonizing Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz has made quite an impression in just three months in the Senate. Like Marco Rubio, he is the son of a Cuban exile. He is a extraordinarily talented guy. Unlike Barack Obama, he had a stellar record both in academia and in the practice of law: he was national debating champion, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America, served as Solicitor General of the State of Texas and authored more than 80 briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. As a law student, Cruz was described by Professor Alan Dershowitz as “off the charts brilliant.” He was elected to the Senate last year in what the Washington Post called “the biggest upset of 2012 . . . a true grassroots victory against very long odds.” So it is not surprising that, just as Cruz has quickly become a hero on the right, the Democratic Party is out to destroy him.
The Post’s Dana Milbank contributed to that effort yesterday. Milbank is a bit like Jon Stewart: he often comes across as a clown, but his underlying purpose is deadly serious. This is how Milbank began his hatchet job on Cruz:
Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?
The young senator from Texas has been on the job for about 100 days, but he has already turned the Senate’s ancient seniority system upside down and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues. He’s speaking for them on immigration, guns and any other topic that tickles his fancy; Republican leaders are seething at being outshone yet are terrified of challenging him.
If Milbank had any evidence to support this assertion, it would make for an interesting story of the Washington gossip variety. But Milbank, a notoriously partisan Democrat, is no intimate of Republican leaders of the Senate, and he cites no evidence to back up his claim that “Republican leaders are seething,” but “terrified” of Cruz. Milbank did, however, go to the trouble of counting up words at a recent press conference:
Consider his news conference this week to promote the Republican alternative to gun control. …
Cruz took over the lectern and refused to relinquish it. He spoke 2,924 words for the cameras, more than Grassley (904), Graham (1,376) and Coats (360) — combined. Factoring in his dramatic pauses to convey sincerity and deep thought, Cruz’s dominance was even more lopsided. The others shifted uncomfortably and looked awkwardly around the room. At one point, Graham requested a chance to speak. “Can I?” he asked Cruz.
Now, it’s possible that Cruz talked too long. In D.C., it has been known to happen. But I suspect it is more likely that Cruz was delegated to carry the ball at the press conference, and Milbank tells us nothing to the contrary.
But now Milbank gets to the real point:
Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration. Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year….
This is one of the most ludicrous smears in the history of journalism. It would make as much sense to say “Cruz is 42, the same age as Thomas Jefferson when he was named Ambassador to France.” Or “Cruz, like Abraham Lincoln, is tall.” But Milbank wanted to echo the Democratic Party’s chosen route of attack by linking Cruz, however randomly, with McCarthy.
Why? Because “Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans.” In fact, Cruz, along with a number of other Republicans, criticized Hagel for refusing to explain his sources of income during the years after he left the Senate. It is reasonable to suspect, given Hagel’s out of the mainstream foreign policy views, that he may have received honoraria from Middle Eastern countries or groups, in particular. What Cruz said–”We do not know, for example, if he received compensation for giving paid speeches at extreme or radical groups. It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea”–made perfect sense, given that Hagel was nominated to be Secretary of State.
Milbank goes on to accuse Cruz of lying on various occasions, but in each case, Cruz was right and Milbank is wrong:
On guns, Cruz’s high profile required Grassley to give the upstart a premium chunk of floor time for his trademark falsehoods. Cruz claimed that his bill was the “result of multiple hearings in the Judiciary Committee.” (It was never brought before the panel.)
But Cruz didn’t say his bill “was brought before the panel,” he said it grew out of the Judiciary Committee’s hearings, like this one. There is no inconsistency at all.
He claimed the opposing legislation would extend “background checks to private transactions between private individuals.” (The bill applied to only advertised sales. [sic])
This one is mystifying. Under current law, only federally licensed dealers have to run background checks. The whole point of the Democrats’ proposed legislation and the Manchin/Toomey compromise bill was to extend background checks to private transactions between private individuals, specifically over the internet and at gun shows. Cruz obviously was correct.
Off the floor, he made the patently false claim that the “so-called ‘gun show loophole’” doesn’t exist.
Again, Milbank is simply wrong. There is no “gun show loophole.” Gun shows are treated exactly like everything else: if a licensed dealer sells a firearm at a gun show, he has to run a background check. If a private citizen sells a firearm at a gun show, he doesn’t. Milbank and his fellow liberals may not like the existing law, but Cruz stated it accurately.
If this is the best Milbank and the Democrats can do to illustrate Ted Cruz’s “trademark falsehoods,” they are going to have to come up with a new line of attack.
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I knew Cruz had a strong resume, but that is even more than I realized :-o 8-)
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I knew Cruz had a strong resume, but that is even more than I realized :-o 8-)
Doesn't even do him justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
Good post, Doug.
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Ineed, it is worth pasting here:
Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz (born December 22, 1970) is an American politician and the junior United States Senator for the state of Texas, in office since 2013. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Cruz was Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to May 2008, appointed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. He was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas,[2] the youngest Solicitor General in the United States, and had the longest tenure in Texas history. He was formerly a partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice.[3]
He previously served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice, and as Domestic Policy Advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush on the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. In addition, Cruz was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation, from 2004 to 2009.
Cruz was the Republican nominee for the Senate seat which was vacated by fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.[4] On July 31, 2012, he defeated Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff, 57%–to-43%.[5] Cruz defeated the Democrat, former state Representative Paul Sadler, in the general election held on November 6, 2012; he prevailed with 56%-to–41% over Sadler.[5] Cruz is endorsed by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Liberty Caucus.[6]
On November 14, 2012, Cruz was appointed vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.[7]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life and education
2 Legal career
3 U.S. Senate
3.1 2012 election
3.2 Committee assignments
4 Personal life
5 Electoral history
5.1 2012 Republican primary
5.2 2012 Republican primary runoff
5.3 2012 General Election
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
[edit] Early life and educationCruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his parents, Eleanor Darragh and Rafael Cruz, were working in the oil business.[8][9] His father was a Cuban immigrant to the United States during the Cuban Revolution.[10] His mother was born and reared in Delaware, in a family of Irish and Italian descent.[9][11] Cruz's family returned to the U.S. when he was four years old.[10]
Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,[12] and then graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston.
Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1992.[13] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.[14] In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton).[15] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship.[16]
Cruz's senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled "Clipping the Wings of Angels," draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to James Madison: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect the rights of their constituents, and the last two items in the Bill of Rights offered an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz wrote: "They simply do so from different directions. The Tenth stops new powers, and the Ninth fortifies all other rights, or non-powers." [17][18]
Cruz then attended the Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995.[19][20] While at Harvard Law, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.[13] As a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.”[21]
[edit] Legal careerCruz served as a law clerk to William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, and J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.[22][2] Cruz was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.[23]
Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department and as the director of policy planning at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission under President George W. Bush.[21]
In 2003, Cruz was appointed Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.[2]
Cruz has authored more than 80 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.[2][21][24] In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by attorneys general of 31 states, which said that the D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.[24][25] Cruz also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.[24][26] Cruz did legal work during the Florida recount during the Presidential campaign of Bush/Cheney 2000.[27]
In addition to his victory in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,[21][24] the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools[21] and the majority of the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.[28]
Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States.[2][21][24]
Cruz has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America,[29][30] by The National Law Journal as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,[31][32] and by Texas Lawyer as one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.[33][34]
[edit] U.S. Senate[edit] 2012 electionMain article: United States Senate election in Texas, 2012
Cruz speaking to the Values Voters Summit in October 2011.Cruz's election has been described by the Washington Post as “the biggest upset of 2012 . . . a true grassroots victory against very long odds.”[35] On January 19, 2011, following an announcement that U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison would not seek reelection, Cruz announced via blogger conference call his candidacy for the position.[4] Cruz faced opposition from sitting Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican senatorial primary. Cruz was endorsed by the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative political action committee;[36] Erick Erickson, editor of prominent conservative blog RedState;[37] the FreedomWorks for America super PAC;[38] nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin;[39] former Attorney General Edwin Meese;[40] Tea Party Express;[41] Young Conservatives of Texas;[42] and U.S. Senators Tom Coburn,[43] Jim DeMint,[44] Mike Lee,[45] Rand Paul,[46] and Pat Toomey.[47] He was also endorsed by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and former Texas Congressman Ron Paul,[48] George P. Bush[27] and former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum.[49]
Cruz won the runoff for the Republican nomination with a 14-point margin over Dewhurst.[50] In the November 6 general election, Cruz faced the Democratic nominee Paul Sadler, an attorney and a former state representative from Henderson in east Texas. In the general election, Cruz prevailed with 4,469,843 ballots (56.4%) to Sadler's 3,194,927 (40.6%). Two minor candidates held the remaining 3% of the ballots cast.[5] Cruz won 35% of the Hispanic vote in the general election.[51]
[edit] Committee assignmentsCommittee on Armed Services
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support
Subcommittee on Seapower
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights (Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism
Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security
Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security
Subcommittee on Science and Space (Ranking Member)
Committee on Rules and Administration
Special Committee on Aging
[edit] Personal lifeCruz was born and spent the first four years of his life in Calgary before his parents returned to Houston. His father was jailed and tortured by the Fulgencio Batista regime and fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution[52] but "didn't know Castro was a Communist" and later became a staunch critic of Castro when "the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent."[53] Rafael Cruz moved to Austin in 1957 to study at the University of Texas. He spoke no English and had $100 sewn into his underwear.[24][54] The elder Cruz worked his way through school as a dishwasher making 50 cents an hour.[21] Cruz's father today is a pastor in North Dallas and became a U.S. citizen in 2005.[17] Cruz’s mother, who was from Delaware, was the first person in her family to attend college. She earned a degree in mathematics from Rice University in Houston in the 1950s, working summers at Foley’s and Shell.[17] Cruz has said, "I'm Cuban, Irish, and Italian, and yet somehow I ended up Southern Baptist."[55]
Cruz and his wife, Heidi Cruz, have two daughters, Caroline Camille and Catherine Christiane. Cruz met his wife while working on the George W. Bush presidential campaign of 2000. Cruz's wife is currently head of the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and previously worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice and in New York as an investment banker.[56]
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Keeping up with the left in the interest of balance on the board:
Paul Krugman claims unemployment is too high today because of our irrational fear of debt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/opinion/krugman-the-jobless-trap.html?_r=0
Thomas Friedman argues that the correct response to the Boston bombings is a carbon tax.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-put-america-back-together-again.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
New Sec of State John Kerry says our number one foreign policy priority is climate change.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/01/24/senator-john-kerry-confirmation-hearing-for-secretary-state-post-begins-with-bipartisan-praise/uts3l1lbwSHTeR6vXfzfRL/story.html
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/anthropogenic-climate-change-priority-kerry-asia
Gabby Giffords believes law abiding citizens can stop mass shootings by disarming.
You can't make this stuff up.
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Remember how they yearned to find a tea party connection to the Tucson and Aurora shooters?
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Hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer continues
Liberal hopes were dashed with the revelation that the Boston Marathon bombers were a couple of Chechen Muslim immigrants. The Left was so sure they had finally bagged the elusive Tea Party murderer! The bombings occurred in Boston on Tax Day. Surely, at long last, the opportunity to smear libertarians, small-government conservatives, anti-tax crusaders, and the whole hellish tri-corner hat crowd was at hand! ”Two plus two equals…?” Michael Moore burbled happily...
http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/20/hunt-for-the-elusive-tea-party-murderer-continues/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/hunting-that-elusive-tea-party-bomber.php
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Now that it turns out that the political tie to bombing innocent people in our furthest left state was to the anti-war left, the relevance of their political motivations diminishes.
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Now they can't figure out what might have motivated the Boston bombers and "at this point, what difference does it make" will probably become their new talking point....
Remember how they yearned to find a tea party connection to the Tucson and Aurora shooters?
-------------------
Hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer continues
Liberal hopes were dashed with the revelation that the Boston Marathon bombers were a couple of Chechen Muslim immigrants. The Left was so sure they had finally bagged the elusive Tea Party murderer! The bombings occurred in Boston on Tax Day. Surely, at long last, the opportunity to smear libertarians, small-government conservatives, anti-tax crusaders, and the whole hellish tri-corner hat crowd was at hand! ”Two plus two equals…?” Michael Moore burbled happily...
http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/20/hunt-for-the-elusive-tea-party-murderer-continues/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/hunting-that-elusive-tea-party-bomber.php
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Now that it turns out that the political tie to bombing innocent people in our furthest left state was to the anti-war left, the relevance of their political motivations diminishes.
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Two unrelated stories today regarding Cognitive Dissonance of the Left:
1) AP reports that 'African Americans' had higher voter turnout than pale-Americans last year for the first time in history [to vote for Obama]. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/29/in_a_first_black_turnout_passes_white_turnout_118158.html
2) Urban Institute reports that Minorities Lose Their Shirts under Obama:
http://www.urban.org/publications/412802.html
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/04/29/minorities-lose-their-shirts-under-obama/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/racial-wealth-gap-widened-during-recession.html?ref=us&_r=0
[Relying on CRAp and the rest of the failed GSE/Fannie Mae programs] "Black families were hit disproportionately by the housing collapse, because heading into the recession housing constituted a higher proportion of their wealth than for white families, leaving them more exposed when the market crashed. Higher unemployment rates and lower incomes among blacks" [that got worse under the Pelosi-Reid-Obama's war against enterprise] "left them less able to keep paying their mortgages and more likely to lose their homes, experts said".
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http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/14/the-myth-of-the-scientific-liberal
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Will the Daily Show go after this:
Winstead, who created The Daily Show and uses social media to promote her far-left views, sent out this Twitter joke earlier today:
"This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives."
Ha, ha, ha. Is the fact that the IRS targeted conservatives groups funny too?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/05/20/daily-show-creator-twister
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Oops, this elected leftist wasn't joking:
"When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover," he said. "And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.”
He continued, "You drag America with you to your fate."
- Sheldon Whitehouse, United States Senator, not the Daily Show, Democrat of Rhode Island
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I wonder what the uproar would be if a Republican Senate candidate said something similar. They wouldn't become a U.S. Senator.
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Funny how the left finds the deaths of children funny, unless the see an opportunity to disarm law abiding Americans.
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former Democratic National Committee head and current Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe blames Bush for his dad dying. Really. In an interview in May 2001, McAuliffe said that his father, Jack, died because “he could not go into a new year knowing that a Republican was actually moving into the White House.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/30/Dem-VA-McAuliffe-Bush
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Obama’s ‘Chicago Way’
The administration’s political tactics are straight out of the Daley playbook.
By John Fund
The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how “hope and change” seem to have been supplanted by “arrogance and fear.” Perhaps it’s time they revisit one of their original premises about Barack Obama: that he wasn’t influenced by the Chicago Daley machine. You know: the machine that boosted his career and whose protégés — including Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and his wife, Michelle — he brought to Washington with him.
The liberal take on the president was best summed up by Slate magazine’s Jacob Weisberg, who wrote last year that Obama “somehow passed through Chicago politics without ever developing any real connection to it.” It’s true that Obama initially kept some distance from the machine. But by the time he ran for the Senate in 2004, his main political Sherpas were Axelrod, who was then the chief consultant to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Jarrett, the mayor’s former deputy chief of staff. As Scott Simon of NPR noted: “While calling for historic change globally, [Obama] has never professed to be a reformer locally.” The Daley machine, which evolved over 60 years from a patronage-rich army of worker bees into a corporate state in which political pull and public-employee unions dominate, has left its imprint on Obama. The machine’s core principle, laid out in an illuminating Chicago Independent Examiner primer on “the Chicago Way,” is that at all times elections are too important to be left to chance. John Kass, the muckraking columnist for the Chicago Tribune who for years has warned that Obama was bringing “the Chicago way” to Washington, sums up his city like this: “Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut. Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.”
“We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, warned ABC News when Obama ran in 2008. He noted that Obama had “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state.”
Joel Kotkin, an urban expert who still considers himself a “Kennedy Democrat –– John F. Kennedy,” wrote at Forbes: “Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth. But the bare demographic and economic facts for both Chicago and Illinois reveal a stunning legacy of failure.” Since 2007, the Chicago region has lost more jobs than Detroit has, and more than twice as many as New York. The city’s murder rate is a national disgrace, and its teachers’ union is so powerful that a strike it called last year forced new mayor Rahm Emanuel to back down from his attempt to curb union power.
The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch tags Chicago as the fifth most heavily taxed city in the country: Its sky-high effective sales tax of 9.75 percent makes the tax burden on a family earning $25,000 a year the fourth highest in the country. From 1991, two years after Richard M. Daley first took office as mayor, to 2011, the year Emanuel took the reins, the average debt per Chicagoan grew from $600 to $2,600, an increase of 433 percent. As Dick Simpson, a former reform Chicago alderman who now teaches at the University of Illinois, put it: “There’s a significant downside to authoritarian rule. The city could do much better.”
Conservatives in Chicago, an embattled breed, say the Obama scandals now coming to light — the IRS, the intimidation of journalists, the green-energy boondoggles such as Solyndra — could have been anticipated. “The 2008 Obama campaign perpetrated a fraud that he was a reformer,” says Chris Robling, a former journalist who has served as a Republican election commissioner. “All of the complaints — from the lack of transparency to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s shaking down corporations to promote Obamacare — stem from the culture of the Daley Machine.” For decades, Robling says, Mayor Daley “encouraged” contributions to his favorite charities, with the implicit understanding that the “encourager” controlled the city’s inspectors and regulators. “That sounds an awful lot like what Sebelius was doing to prop up Obamacare,” Robling notes. “Obama’s ideology may come from Saul Alinsky’s acolytes, but his political tactics come straight from the Daley playbook.” Indeed, friends of Bill Daley, Mayor Daley’s brother, say that one reason Bill left his post as Obama’s White House chief of staff after only one year was that even he thought Team Obama was too much “all politics, all of the time” and not enough about governance.
Journalists used to know that presidents are in part a product of their past: where their careers were nurtured and where their politics were shaped. They understood this as a given when it came to Ronald Reagan and California; they basically grasped it about Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, and certainly nailed it on George W. Bush and Texas. But when it came to Barack Obama, all that went out the window. Speaking at the University of Southern California, at a post-2008 conference on the election, Mark Halperin, then of ABC News, said that the media’s treatment of Obama had been “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.” It was “extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage,” he concluded.
That media failure continued throughout Obama’s first term. Perhaps now, as Obama’s “Chicago Way” is coming into focus, the media will want to redeem itself. With Obama, it’s become all too clear: You can take the politician away from the machine, but you can’t take the machine out of the politician.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
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(http://mail.aol.com/37752-111/aol-6/en-us/mail/get-attachment.aspx?uid=33832440&folder=OldMail&partId=3)
Typical.
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Time to move on off of Obama and onto Hillary. :wink:
So it was the Dem leadership and the media that turned on Hillary in '08 - not her collapse among Black voters.
In any case he is right that those of us on that side "fear" her. Women still adore her no matter what. In their minds she is their Abraham Lincoln.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/the-gops-hillary-hits-won_b_3376093.html
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The Washington Post is comfortable putting forward an opinion piece that leave readers with a false knowledge of the facts:
Regarding the IRS, Dana Milbank says the GOP shoots first, asks questions later. FYI to Dana Milbank, the questions have all been asked. The letter was written by a Democrat. It is the ANSWERS that are lacking. Does Milbank really not know that the questions were asked and the answers were not forthcoming?
OPINIONS Washington Post
The ‘shoot first’ party
Dana Milbank
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-accuse-and-ask-questions-later/2013/06/03/d107e9e0-cc9c-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
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http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/05/21/The-41-Questions-Max-Baucus-Wants-to-Ask-the-IRS.aspx#page1
Here are the unanswered questions, imagine if you didn't answer their questions!
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/App_Data/MediaFiles/A/6/1/%7BA6181389-1F1B-42EB-9CBF-B49110DCAF25%7DIRS_Tax_Exempt_May_20_2013.pdf
http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/05/31/irs-ignores-senate-deadline-answer-questions-about-scandal
IRS Ignores Senate Deadline To Answer Questions About Scandal
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/302863-irs-fails-to-meet-senate-finances-info-request-deadline-#ixzz2VGBZD2kU
IRS fails to meet Senate Finance's deadline for documents on targeting
http://cincinnati.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/31/irs-fails-to-meet-finance-committee-deadline-for-documents/
The Internal Revenue Service missed a Friday deadline for turning over reams of documents to the Senate Finance Committee, one of several panels investigating the tax agency’s targeting of tea party groups.
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Nice work putting that together Doug!
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"The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue[NSA surveillance]. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?_r=0
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RALPH NADER: Yeah, has there—has there been a bigger con man in the White House than Barack Obama?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/06/13/ralph-nader-has-there-been-bigger-con-man-white-house-barack-obama#ixzz2WCfPdGY1
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Ralph, I feel your pain.
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This observation from Crafty's post in US Economics is too good to leave in just one thread:
... a “negative feedback loop from hell,” where states that are suffering with large debt overhangs and dwindling tax revenues don’t have the money to pay or invest in things like infrastructure, education, and public safety. As those services begin to deteriorate over time, states will be forced to raise taxes, which only reinforces the decline.
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=985.msg73207#msg73207
The concept applies to nations as well.
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"Ironically, Kristin Davis, the madam infamous for her role in the Spitzer scandal, is also running for comptroller (only in New York!). But unlike Spitzer's, Davis' candidacy is not being taken seriously, despite the fact that she has performed well in debates in her previous runs for office. Instead Davis is laughed off, in part because she is a convicted felon. What was she convicted for? She served time for her role in Spitzer's prostitution scandal. He never did. --Keli Goff, TheRoot.com, July 8
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David Burge@iowahawkblog
Of all the young black shooting victims in this country, you can name 1. Because you've been trained like a circus seal to bark on command.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/29/women-harassment-filner-weiner-sydney-leathers-column/2594213/
The latest action in the war on women: Column
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 1:43 p.m. EDT July 29, 2013
Recent scandals find politicians harassing women and embarrassing themselves.
(Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images)
Story Highlights
So far seven women have accused San Diego Mayor Bob Filner of sexual harassment.
New York now has the infamous serial sexter Anthony Weiner running for mayor.
Weiner's wife has stood by him throughout.
Back during the 2012 election, Democrats were quick to seize on some Republican words -- like Todd Akin's remark about "legitimate rape" and late-term abortion, orRush Limbaugh's calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" for wanting free birth control -- to build the notion of a "war on women."
But if you look past words to actual deeds, most of the action in the war on women seems to be coming from the Democratic front lately. Just consider these cases:
First, Democratic San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. So far seven women have accused him of sexual harassment. According to one report, Filner said, "You'll have to excuse me for what's about to happen. It's your fault," before pinning a woman in a restaurant booth. Other allegations include kissing, grabbing and assorted other inappropriate behavior.
As is usually the case, this stuff was no secret within the world of San Diego Democratic politics, but even though there were complaints, the leadership supported Filner anyway until things went public. And even afterward, until the pressure became too great, Democrats supported him. As with Bill Clinton, and his alleged assaults on Paula Jones, Juanita Broddrick and Kathleen Willey, tribal loyalties to party kin outweighed any concern for women as a group -- or for the accusers as individuals. The accusers were tossed over the side until the publicity became too strong to ignore. Democrats -- like Hillary with Bill -- stood by their man, Tammy Wynette-style.
Then take New York. Please. New York now has the infamous serial sexter Anthony Weiner running for mayor. Unlike Clinton and Filner, the women Weiner was involved with seem to have been entirely consenting. Though the names involved (Weiner's online pseudonym was "Carlos Danger," and one of his virtual paramours -- a former Obama campaign worker and anti-Sarah Palinpetitioner -- went by "Sydney Leathers" though that, shockingly, is her real name) seemed like something from a 1970s porn film, the sexual contact involved seemed voluntary enough. It was just pathetic.
Even more pathetic was the fact that for Weiner this was the second time around, after giving up his congressional seat for, basically, the same thing in 2011. For Weiner, the "War On Women" aspect has more to do with the doormatization (Is that a word? It is now) of his wife, Huma Abedin. Long a star to people on the left, for reasons that Slate's Dave Weigel finds somewhat unclear, Abedin has stood by Weiner throughout, even putting on a rather embarrassing press conference appearance.
But now that her stand-by-your-man routine has gone from the possibly noble to the clearly ridiculous, even liberal writers such as The Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve are saying that "Huma has lost her halo." Indeed, even as Huma was delivering quotes for rehabilitative puff-pieces in People and The New York Times, it's now clear that she knew that Weiner hadn't been rehabilitated at all, leaving some to say that she's even worse than he is. People are even starting to ask about how Huma could work for the State Department while consulting for people who dealt with the State Department. Her future political career, previously bright, seems seriously tarnished.
As Gloria Allred's daughter, Democratic attorney Lisa Bloom, notes, Weiner's treatment of Huma could be described as a kind of spousal abuse. Well, whatever it is, it's not indicative of any particular respect for women. Weiner, meanwhile, seems to have been weirdly jealous for an online philanderer. Leathers reports: "Me being hit on by other men really upset him. We were Facebook friends, so he could see if men were commenting on photos of me, or telling me that I was pretty. Really minor things like that really bothered him." Uh huh.
Then there's former New York governor and attorney general Eliot Spitzer, better known as "client #9" for his extensive patronization of call girls. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing wrong with that: These were consenting adults, and if it were up to me, I'd make prostitution legal everywhere the way it is in Nevada. But even while patronizing call girls, Spitzer was also going out of his way, as attorney general, to see that they were prosecuted. It's usually Republicans who are charged with sexual hypocrisy, but this is first-rate phoniness.
The funny thing, though, is that in the press, an isolated remark by a Republican candidate or radio host is treated as representative of the entire party. The behavior of these Democratic officeholders and candidates, on the other hand, is treated as an isolated incident -- and in many of the national media reports regarding Filner, his party affiliation is omitted, or not mentioned until paragraph 12.
But do I think this behavior betrays a special contempt for women on the part of Democrats? Well, not really. I think it demonstrates a contempt for people in general, and especially for voters. But then again, why shouldn't they be contemptuous of voters? Look who elected them.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.
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It is quite strange to hear the far-left punditry call the most far-left possible governance - not far enough left. I should have sent my previous de-bunk of this straw to Reich last time. He clearly does not read the forum. Now it seems the inequality worsened under Pelosi-Reid and then under Obama. Hmmm. What policies then are needed to cure it? Why won't he say it, if you want all to be equal you must use what in math they call lowest common denominator. For incomes to be equal with people who don't produce or don't produce abundantly, others must stop or slow their efforts. How does THAT make us better off?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/american-inequality_b_3745493.html
" income, wealth, and power have become more concentrated at the top than they've been in ninety years."
"Make no mistake: The savage inequality America is experiencing today is deeply dangerous."
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Oh good grief. Among the bunk: static, snapshot analyses always avoid the facts of income mobility. Every new worker, illegal, immigrant or otherwise, brings down the median without lowering any one person's income. Every successful retiree who moves from producing income to living off of earned, accumulated wealth moves down in income while moving up in leisure and perhaps quality of life. Our measures of income for the poor do not measure their income. Our measures for income of all do not include their wealth. The top 1%, 5%, 20% or 50%, or bottom quintiles or half, are NOT the same people when you make comparisons versus a year ago, a decade ago or in this case, over three and half decades. The only interruption in the Reich income inequality scare was when the Pelosi-Reid-Obama congress precipitated the recent, historic collapse of wealth in this country. But after the devastation, paraphrasing Wesbury, the plow horse continues to plow and not everyone is equally invested and pulling.
The real test of an economy is what opportunities or choices do you have, not just what is your immediate outcome.
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Republicans will cause a constitutional crisis if they fail to fund Obamacare in the new budget, because it is the law of the land, and requires more than a vote by one chamber to be repealed.
If so, then what about the Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed in 1982 requiring the construction a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain?
"Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has robbed Yucca Mountain of funding, and although President Barack Obama has commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to look at other nuclear-waste alternatives, Yucca Mountain is still the law of the land."
http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/steve-sebelius/ignoring-law-yucca-not-real-solution
"The D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week delivered a scathing rebuke to the Obama administration, ordering it to restart work on the Yucca licensing process."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324139404579014913001031336.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
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I confess to be a bit unclear here.
If the point is that Dingy Harry et al were in the wrong, then wouldn't the Reps be wrong here?
a) Not necessarily IMHO because Obama is violating his oath to enforce the law by picking and choosing.
b) Note too that according to Jim DeMint (and his analysis seems sound to me) not funding Obamacare is NOT shutting down the government (which goes very badly for the Reps when they do this)-- this is a tremendous canard-- because presumably the rest of the government will be funded-- or am I missing something here?
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"If the point is that Dingy Harry et al were in the wrong, then wouldn't the Reps be wrong here?"
Yes, hypocrisy cuts both ways. In this case Dems accuse R's of contemplating what they themselves do regularly.
My view with spending authorizations is that one congress has no power to bind the next congress to spend money. The congress of 2009 never had the authority to bind the voters of 2013 and beyond.
"not funding Obamacare is NOT shutting down the government ... because presumably the rest of the government will be funded-- or am I missing something here?"
That is the way I thought it was designed to work. A bill goes to the House, to the Senate and then to the President. Instead, a bill passes in the House. The Senate ignores or intentionally changes that and passes a different bill. A joint committee writes a 'compromise' to send back to the House, to the Senate and then to the President.
It is in this second loop where Republicans get screwed and end up with the stark choice of funding everything or closing the government. Their own bill was clear - to fund everything except healthcare. That will no longer be the issue and they don't have enough bully pulpit to say that it is.
Government spending be the smallest number of what the House, Senate pass and President will sign. That, and no more, is the amount we all agree on. In fact, it is the biggest spenders who force the choice of fund it all or shut down the government.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BTPhrINIIAAsvq-.jpg)
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BTPhrINIIAAsvq-.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/
September 03, 2013
Shock: Democrats' Deeply-Felt and Principled Opposition to War in All Its Forms Ended, Coincidentally Enough, Upon the Election of one Barack Hussein Obama, Nobel Peace Lauraeate
—Ace
(http://img343.imageshack.us/img343/2921/cindysjjalsweb6dq.jpg)
You know when we used to claim that the Democrats were playing games with foreign policy and national security to advance their petty animal partisan interests?
We were all so wrong!
I have entitled the following graph "Nuance and Profound Intellectual Analysis."
(http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5223d1f3eab8eafb248b4567-899-635/screen%20shot%202013-09-01%20at%207.40.36%20pm.png)
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David Burge @iowahawkblog
Global warming has apparently wiped out the Puff-Chested North American War Protester.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIbl28O99Lg&noredirect=1
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/30/lifelong-hollywood-democrat-jumps-ship-to-join-gop-endorses-republican-candidate-for-governor/
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Buffett; an enigma to me
« on: Today at 10:54:48 AM »
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He doesn't mention either party per se but he is clearly speaking out about Republicans. I have no problem with the genius in Nebraska. I just understand why he is such a Democrat Partisan. He has lived his whole life like a capitalist. And he does let people share in his wealth by investing in his stock. He plans on giving most away via the Gates Foundation. While he uses his influence, money, and international sources of intelligence to leverage his investments to his favor there has been no evidence of unethical or illegal activity to my knowledge. Yet he still supports a party and President that are socialist in nature. I wonder how this is. I guess one can say the same for Gates. Gates was as ruthless as anyone in business on the way to the top. Now that he is there suddenly he is a die hard Democrat who believes in transfer of wealth rather than individualism, freedom, competition, self reliance, and responsibility?
The only thing I can think of is it must be something psychiatric to this. They must have a need to feel loved. Maybe they are guilty? I admire their charity. I don't admire them making the great masses who work hard and strive in their work the way they did, albeit of course without the extreme financial success into goats who are just greedy selfish etc.
They want to give their money away go ahead. Most of us don't have fortunes that are so vast we can only dream of how to spend it over several lifetimes. That doesn't mean it is my fault that people may be starving thousands of miles from here. Or that there are poor people down the street. What about helping them help themselves?
I am ruminating. There just seems to be some disconnect between the way these guys have lived and their politics now.
*****Buffett speaks out against DC's 'extreme idiocy'
By Matthew J. Belvedere | CNBC – 3 hours ago..
.Lacy O'Toole | CNBCView Photo.
Lacy O'Toole | CNBC
History will judge the Troubled Asset Relief Program more positively than people do now, Warren Buffett said on CNBC Thursday-five years to the day since the financial bailout program was signed into law, and in the midst of the first government shutdown in 17 years.
Appearing alongside former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on CNBC's " Squawk Box ," Buffett first addressed TARP-saying people don't realize how tough a position Paulson was in when he crafted the rescue package.
(Read more: Hank Paulson: Teaparty 'hijacked the debate' )
The chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) said the bailout was vital at the time in order to shore up the credibility of the banking system. "Belief creates its own reality," Buffett said. "If people think the banking system is unsound, it is unsound, because no bank can pay out all of its liabilities at the same time."
The interviews were conducted a day after chief executives from major financial institutions met with President Barack Obama , and warned of adverse consequences if government agencies remain closed, and if lawmakers failed to raise the U.S. debt ceiling by mid-October.
(Read more: Wall Street CEOs sound alarms on fiscal problems )
Later in the day, the president spoke to CNBC-saying he's genuinely worried about what is going on in Washington and exasperated that Republicans are trying use to the shutdown and the borrowing limit fight as leverage to delay Obamacare. (Read more below the video.)
"If [Republicans] can't get their way on another issue, they'll use the threat of, in effect, defaulting on the government's credit to get their way," Buffett said. "That won't work long-term."
"The public will turn on them, and they'll all of a sudden have a counter revelation," he predicted-adding that Washington "will go right up to the point of extreme idiocy" but won't cross it.
Buffett did provide a glimmer of hope if the Oct. 17 debt limit deadline is breached. "If it goes one second beyond the debt limit, that will not do us in. If it goes a year beyond that would be unbelievable."
(Read more: Obama to Wall Street: This time be worried )
"These guys may threaten to take their mother hostage, but they will never hurt their mother," joked Paulson, who's also a former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS).
Buffett played a crucial role in providing capital during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, and rescuing Paulson's old firm. Berkshire's $5 billion lifeline to Goldman Sachs at the time has proved quite lucrative today. Berkshire has now exercised warrants acquired as part of the original deal-netting more than $2 billion in Goldman stock.
In addition to the warrants, that Berkshire-infusion had called for the investment bank to provide Berkshire with $5 billion in preferred stock, which paid annual dividends of $500 million. Three years later, Goldman repurchased those preferred shares from Buffett at a premium.****
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Citizens are not allowed on the Mall but illegals are permitted. The excuse is "first amendment rights".
*****Pro-Amnesty Forces Rally on National Mall
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by Matthew Boyle 8 Oct 2013, 11:28 AM PDT 925 post a comment
Several thousand AFL-CIO and SEIU sponsored pro-amnesty demonstrators began rallying on Capitol Hill on Tuesday afternoon around 12:30 PM to call for Congress to grant legal status to America’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants.
The size of the crowd suggest the organization that put on the rally, the Center for Community Change (CCC), under-delivered on its promise to have “hundreds of thousands” attend the rally; the group tweeted on Monday afternoon and on Tuesday morning that it expected “hundreds of thousands” of people to attend.
Several members of Congress are in attendance at the event, including GOP Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is expected to join the event soon as well, an organizer confirmed to Breitbart News.
Scores of Democratic House members also began arriving shortly after 12:30 PM on golf carts. House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is scheduled to speak as well, as are many different labor union officials. Washington, D.C. mayor Vince Gray is slated to address the group too.
Illegal immigrants and union members have been chanting “Si Se Puede!” the Spanish slogan of the United Farm Workers which President Barack Obama adapted for his “Yes we can!” campaign slogan.
The event on the National Mall, which is supposed to be closed because of the ongoing government shutdown but to which the Obama administration granted exception for today's rally, is heavily funded by organizations like the labor unions and amnesty special interest lobbyists sponsoring it. At least four jumbotrons and an elaborate setup of port-a-potties, special event fencing, tents, and raised and lighted stages are set up across the National Mall.
AFL-CIO, SEIU, and Casa De Maryland organizers are walking around in groups, wearing orange vests labeled with their organization’s namesake printed on them.
Referencing how union dues from working class American citizens are being used to help fund this rally, a congressional GOP aide told Breitbart News, “It is utterly shameful that these big money interests have fooled so many they’re trying to hurt into helping them.” If amnesty were to pass, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and many other high-ranking economists expect wages of American workers to be driven down while similarly expecting unemployment to go up.
In a statement released as the rally was about to begin, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that this is unfair to American workers. “Why are businesses laying off thousands and then spending a fortune to lobby for ‘comprehensive immigration reform’?” Sessions said. “That’s because, in Washington, ‘comprehensive reform’ means increasing the number of immigrant workers to reduce the cost of labor."
"The Senate bill would double the number of guest workers and add 30 million mostly lower-skill legal immigrants over the next ten years. Today’s rally is designed to pressure the House to pass similar legislation," he explained. "There’s something odd about House leaders like Nancy Pelosi protesting on the Mall to get jobs for illegal aliens and pushing legislation to reduce job opportunities for US citizens. The House must resist calls to replace struggling workers and instead fight for the public interest and to restore our shrinking middle class.”
- See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/08/Pro-amnesty-forces-rally-on-National-Mall#sthash.jyLaoYTl.dpuf****
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The Leftists only have one problem, their policies don't work. Other than that, this is as good as it gets.
A decade ago they could only wield power from the minority in congress with amplification by the media.
Then the Leftists won back the House and Senate with Pelosi-Reid-Hillary-Obama-Biden taking majority control, and scheduled the end of Republican economic policies and broke the cycle of private sector prosperity. Within 2 years the Senate's most leftward member was elevated to the White House and by the end of the Franken recount they had their 60th Senator and Obamacare.
Chief Justice Roberts affirmed Obamacare, Candy Crowley shot down Benghazi, and with the rape-abortion and Romney-47% fiascos, Dems held the Senate and Presidency assuring themselves that no one could repeal their agenda.
Now the tax rate hikes are firmly in place as is Obamacare's unprecendented control over the rest of people's lives. Enter Janet Yellen's commitment to put monetary flooding and government intervention above dollar responsibility at the Fed - for years past the Obama's second term - and this is as good as it gets if you are a leftist.
Meanwhile, Republicans negotiate surrender and America contemplates what to do when work, savings and investment all become obsolete.
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Despite this he will defend and "protect" the President. Just wait till we have another 30 million people who will work harder than you and will work for less Tavis.
*****Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama
By Noel Sheppard | October 11, 2013 | 12:34
PBS's Tavis Smiley made a comment Thursday that every African-American as well as liberal media member should sit up and take notice.
Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Smiley said, "The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: My last question to you. You often do these seminars with the state of black America. I've watched them on C-Span and different channels, right?
TAVIS SMILEY: Right.
HANNITY: Are black Americans better off five years into the Obama presidency?
SMILEY: Let me answer your question very forthrightly. No, they are not. The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.
But here's the other side. I respect the president. I will protect the president. And I will correct the president. He's right on this government shutdown. Republicans are thwarting the rule of law with the Constitution. If they let this debt go into default, they're trampling again on the Constitution.
Wow!
Now to be fair to Smiley, he has been hard on the president concerning how his policies are economically damaging the black community, but this is the first time I believe he's been this harsh on national television with such a large audience.
Sadly, he's right.
So why would this community re-elect someone doing so much damage to them economically?
Is it possible they're not aware of it because most liberal media members other than Smiley aren't reporting it?
Hmmm.
.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/10/11/tavis-smiley-black-people-will-have-lost-ground-every-single-economic#ixzz2hWcEICL1
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While the left is rejoicing at the choosing of leftist-Keynesian Janet Yellen to head the Fed, his second place discard, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, urges us to "focus on growth", recognize the "need to reduce regulatory barriers that hold back private infrastructure". "We need to take advantage of the remarkable natural gas resources that have recently become available to the U.S. We need to...assure that public policy promotes entrepreneurship."
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/10/14/Deal-or-No-Deal-US-Has-Its-Eye-Ball#sthash.ZmBpqm1a.dpuf
Imagine if moderate Democrats controlled the party and governed in some kind of bipartisan fashion with these points in mind! Rest assured Summers is still a Democrat and sounded all those familiar themes as well. Pres. Obama did not pick Yellen she is a woman. He picked her because she is the most highly qualified far-leftist available for the job.
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Ezra Klein, designated liberal hitter for the Wash Post, makes sense here.
"The Obama administration's top job isn't beating the Republicans. It's running the government well. On this -- the most important initiative they've launched -- they've run the government badly. They deserve all the criticism they're getting and more."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/14/five-thoughts-on-the-obamacare-disaster/
[Klein supports the program and also ripped Republicans in the piece.]
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FYI to leftists, replacing millions and millions and millions of individual free choices in a free market all with one rigid government program designed by staffers isn't as easy as it looks.
(http://www.cpt12.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Healthcare_Chart-620x526.jpg)
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Doug,
Just think of the jobs this creates. The policy tinkerers, the lawyers, the academics, the associated "researchers", their staffs, the interest groups who insert themselves somewhere into this mess, the cottage industries, the consultants who thus attempt to interpret all this to the rest of us, the fodder it gives to pundits, and media types.
Why, this has created a huge internal economy. Never mind the rest of us are forced into it whether we like it or not.
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Welcome young people to the consequences of leftism. A Koz regular in his own words:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/30/1242660/-Obamacare-will-double-my-monthly-premium#
Obamacare will double my monthly premium (according to Kaiser)
My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don't go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.
Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife's rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.
I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any fucking penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?
Oh, ok, if we qualify, we can get some government assistance. Great. So now I have to jump through another hoop to just chisel some of this off. And we don't qualify, anyway, so what's the point?
I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.
I don't know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.
What am I missing?
I realize I will probably get screamed at for posting this, but I can't imagine I am the only Californian who just received a rate increase from Kaiser based on these new laws.
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Niall Ferguson — Harvard professor (and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution fellow — launched a three part series, in the Huffington Post, entitled Krugtron the Invincible, Parts 1, 2 and 3 with a notable coda at Project Syndicate. Ferguson succeeds in methodically humiliating New York Times columnist, celebrity blogger, and Nobel economic prize laureate Paul Krugman.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/10/21/much-bigger-than-the-shutdown-niall-fergusons-public-flogging-of-paul-krugman/
Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niall-ferguson/paul-krugman-euro_b_4060733.html
Krugtron the Invincible, Part 2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niall-ferguson/paul-krugman-housing-crisis_b_4067580.html
Krugtron the Invincible, Part 3
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niall-ferguson/krugtron-the-invincible-p_b_4073956.html
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-perils-of-paul-krugman-by-niall-ferguson
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Top Democrat says those aren't 'cancellation notices,' they're 'transitions' into Obamacare (Oh Good Grief!!)
By JOEL GEHRKE | OCTOBER 29, 2013 AT 1:53 PM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/top-democrat-says-those-arent-cancellation-notices-theyre-transitions-into-obamacare/article/2538122
Insurance companies aren't sending out cancellation letters, they're helping people "transition" into Obamacare, according to a top Democrat.
"If [the companies] changed [the insurance plans] then they have to notify the people who have to have the opportunity to have another policy," said House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Sander Levin, D-Mich.
In fact, according to Levin, the "so-called cancellation notices" merely "help people transition to a new policy."
Levin cited comments made by Florida Blue CEO Patrick Geraghty, the insurance company executive who originally floated the "transitioning" talking point on Sunday's Meet the Press.
"We're not cutting people, we're actually transitioning people," Geraghty told NBC's David Gregory. "What we've been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn't meet the test of the essential health benefits, therefore they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange." (At double the cost!)
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Meanwhile, while we dither with no de-fund and repeal strategy, here comes Obamacare into your living room:
Hollywood Receives Grant to Promote Obamacare on TV Shows
by Elizabeth Sheld 5 Nov 2013,
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/11/05/Hollywood-Receives-Grant-to-Promote-Obamacare-on-TV-Shows
The California Endowment, a foundation spending big bucks to promote Obamacare, has just delivered a $500,000 grant to TV writers and producers to sneak Obamacare promotions into their programs. "The aim is to produce compelling prime-time narratives that encourage Americans to enroll, especially the young and healthy, Hispanics and other key demographic groups needed to make the overhaul a success."
In a rather backhanded insult, grant recipient Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center explained, "We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it's fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual." He continued on to say that "people learn from these shows."
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Fcuk! That's rather Orwellian :cry: :x
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" the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million"
A wealth transfer to the well-off in pursuit of liberal objectives, “cash for clunkers” merely caused people to purchase vehicles “slightly earlier than otherwise would have occurred.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-clunker-progressivism/2013/11/06/95faf0be-4676-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html
Clunker progressivism
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Barack Obama’s presidency has become a feast of failures whose proliferation protects their author from close scrutiny of any one of them. Now, however, we can revisit one of the first and see it as a harbinger of progressivism’s downward stumble to HealthCare.gov.
“Cash for Clunkers” was born with Obama’s administration as a component of his stimulus. Its fate is a window into both why the recovery has been extraordinarily weak and what happens when progressives’ clever plans collide with recalcitrant reality.
Consumers could trade in older vehicles and receive vouchers toward the purchase of a new, more fuel- efficient car. The vouchers were worth $3,500 or $4,500, depending on the difference in fuel economy between the trade-in and the new purchase. The program’s purposes were economic stimulation and environmental improvement.
Now a study by Ted Gayer and Emily Parker, published by the Brookings Institution, a mildly liberal think tank, concludes: “The $2.85 billion in vouchers provided by the program had a small and short-lived impact on gross domestic product, essentially shifting roughly a few billion dollars forward from the subsequent two quarters following the program.”
Most of the 677,842 sales were simply taken from the near future. That many older vehicles were traded in — and, as required by law, destroyed. Gayer and Parker accept as reasonable an estimate that the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million. Although the vouchers did not come close to covering the cost of the new cars, voucher recipients seem not to have reduced their other consumption. This, say Gayer and Parker, suggests that participants in the program “were not liquidity constrained,” which is a delicate way of saying “there was no change in other consumption patterns,” which is a polite way of saying that “cash for clunkers” merely caused people to purchase vehicles “slightly earlier than otherwise would have occurred.”
Because the program was not means-tested, it had only a slight distributional effect of the sort progressives favor: Voucher recipients had lower incomes than others who bought new cars in 2009. Against this, however, must be weighed the fact that the mandated destruction of so many used vehicles probably caused prices for such vehicles to be higher than they otherwise would have been, meaning a redistribution of wealth adverse to low-income consumers.
As for environmental benefits from Cash for Clunkers, the reduction of gasoline consumption was small and “the cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced by [the program] far exceeds the estimated social cost of carbon.” But it was — herewith very faint praise — more cost-effective than the subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol.
Cash for Clunkers lasted 55 days and ended with confusion that was a preview of things to come. The New York Times explained in August 2009 the final surge of demand for clunker funds:
“Around the country, dealers had put off the laborious task of applying for the rebates . . . which requires entering the 17-character identification numbers of each vehicle to be scrapped, scanning images of proof of insurance and filling out other paperwork. The computer system was overloaded, according to the dealers. They said they would finish one page in the application, hit enter and nothing would happen. Eventually a message would appear notifying the dealer that the page had ‘timed out.’ Tom Frew, the business manager at Galpin Motors in Los Angeles, said that he needed 35 tries to register just one of the company’s 11 dealerships on the day that the program opened because of problems with the government Web site. On Friday, he spent an hour processing just one rebate application, he said.”
The recovery from the recession began in June 2009; 53 months later, vehicle sales still have not yet reached the pre-recession peak. Cash for Clunkers was prologue for the government’s vastly more ambitious plan to manage health care’s 18 percent of the economy.
The present, too, is prologue. There is heated debate about Common Core, whose advocates say it merely involves national academic targets and metrics for primary and secondary education. Critics say it will inevitably lead to a centrally designed and nationally imposed curriculum — practice dictated by targets and metrics. Common Core advocates say, in effect: “If you like your local curriculum, you can keep it. Period.”
If you believe this, your credulity is impervious to evidence. And you probably are a progressive.
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Both of them were huge supporters of Obama. Now he is safely re-elected and the focus is now in the direction of the next liar to be in chief, Hillary, they are safe to come out and mock HIM.
Where were they when it counted - before the election?
http://www.gossipcop.com/cmas-obamacare-video-carrie-underwood-brad-paisley-affordable-care-act-cma-awards-song/
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As Doug points out "after the obligatory belittling of Republicans, and now Bamster is safely elected, and AHA is law, and Hillary now has opportunity to distance herself and is being set up for her coronation, and we get opening phrases such as, "to be fair", and "on balance" the left now sort of makes some sort of back ended "Obama has to take his lumps".
Importantly the Repubs will have to devise strategy to deal with Hillary in the future. Not simply keep up the same barrage against Obama the same way.
Hillary's mob is already figuring ways to spin this to her favor. The total difference between her and Obama is she will pretend to compromise, she will pretend to give on certain issues (era of big gov is over) and not be steadfast in your face double downing ideologue - even though she is. The Republicans always thought they had the goods on Clinton and he most of the time could successfully spin it around take credit and walk away laughing.
In any case back to Bamster's comrades in arms:
IT'S TIME FOR OBAMA TO TAKE HIS LUMPS
Cynthia Tucker
By Cynthia Tucker 9 hours ago
President Obama deserves forbearance on the bungled rollout of his health care initiative. After all, Republicans have dedicated themselves to sabotaging the law -- withholding funds required for a smooth inauguration, harassing the experts hired to explain the law to consumers, and even threatening the National Football League when Obama asked teams to advertise it to their audiences.
Millions losing health plans under Obamacare. Did president mislead? Christian Science Monitor
Obama Tells Americans Losing Coverage: 'I'm Sorry' ABC News
Republicans Allege Obama Deception on Health Plan Cancellation ABC News
Obama promises to "smooth out" health care Associated Press
Why some individuals are losing their health plans under ObamaCare The Week (RSS)
Still, Obama deserves all the blame for the deception that may be the biggest threat to his signature legislative achievement -- and his legacy. He must have known better when he told Americans repeatedly over the past five years that they could keep their insurance policies if they were happy with them. As countless policyholders have learned over the past few weeks, that's simply not true.
Early on, the president was careful in his descriptions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Speaking to a joint session of Congress in 2009, he said, "If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have." The veracity squad at Politifact rated that statement "true."
But as Obamacare, as it is now widely known, picked up a dedicated and vociferous group of critics, the president grew careless. In countless speeches in the last three to four years, he dropped the nuances: "If you like the (health insurance) plan you have, you can keep it."
Just as more Americans were beginning to pay attention to a mandate that will go into effect in 2014, that flawed description became Obama's mantra. Now, as insurers send out cancellation notices, many consumers feel betrayed. And that includes some of Obama's most loyal supporters.
Writer Peter Richmond, who has purchased his health insurance through a small group affiliated with a local Chamber of Commerce in upstate New York, was stunned to learn recently that his insurer was dropping the group.
"(Obama) spoke so vehemently about our being able to keep our coverage. ... I feel betrayed for the first time by (this) president. ... I resent it a great deal," he said.
At a recent congressional hearing, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a liberal Democrat from Maryland, weighed in, contending that the cancellation notices were creating a "crisis of confidence" about Obamacare. She's right.
On balance, the cancellation notices are affecting a relatively small group of Americans -- those who don't get insurance from their employers but who purchase it in the individual market. They represent about 5 percent of the population. There are no exact figures on the number receiving cancellation notices, but experts have given estimates ranging from seven to 12 million people.
To be fair, many of them will be better off. Obamacare has virtually abolished their old "bare bones" policies, some of which didn't even pay for hospital stays. With subsidies, many consumers will be able to buy far superior health insurance policies for less money. Kaiser Family Foundation health care expert Larry Levitt told CBS News that "the winners will outnumber the losers."
Still, there are many customers who are experiencing genuine rate shock. They will be stuck paying a higher premium for health insurance policies they may not have wanted. That's bad enough, but it's made worse by the fact that Obama misled them.
At the moment, Obamacare is a morass of confusion: dysfunctional websites, lies spread by its critics and even deceptive practices by some insurance companies. That's all the more reason that Americans need to be able to trust their president to tell them the truth about his health care overhaul -- even if some of that truth is unpleasant.
Obama needs to stand up and admit that he misled consumers about keeping their health care plans. He needs to take his lumps and promise to give the public straightforward and truthful answers.
If he keeps prevaricating, he will be doing as much damage to Obamacare as its harshest critics.
(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)
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Long story, but he lied because we can't handle the truth:
"Seemingly the only path to change is telling voters what they want to hear."
"So accuse Obama of lying about health-care reform — but understand the simple underlying reality: we can’t handle the truth."
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/behind-obama-lie-immaturity-article-1.1511360#ixzz2kMEEfsBJ
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They own the language and they keep needing to change it. Steven Hayward of Powerline picks up on this point I have been trying to make.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/progressive-linguistics.php
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/02/24/10-phrases-progressives-need-to-ditch/
Progressive Linguistics by Steven Hayward
Out in the further reaches of the critical theory left, the necessity of denying objective reality extends to language itself. The deep-dish post-modernists declaim that language is just another subjective tool of the (white) power structure. Whenever I hear such drivel, I usually ask not only why are we having this argument, but how are we having this argument? (And if there is nothing but power in the world, I like to say: “Fine. How many guns you lefties got? Because I’ve got lots of them.” That’s when the whole subject is usually changed or dropped.)
It should not surprise us, then, that “progressives” (the new term for “liberals” since modern liberals have discredited liberalism) are obsessed with language, and think that merely changing words will change minds. George Lakoff has made a lucrative cottage industry out of this.
The latest entry in the glossolalia of progressivism is this post about how we need to ditch “big business,” “entitlements,” “free market capitalism,” “government spending,” and other hardy perennials. Some of the suggestions include:
(1). Big Business: (Also referred to as: Corporate America; Multinationals; Corporate Interests) When we use any of these words, we automatically sound pie-in-the-sky liberal. People think, “what’s wrong with that?” After all, they’d like their own businesses to get “big” and have no negative associations with the words “corporate” or “multinational” — which actually sound kind of exciting and worldly. Instead, progressives can try: Unelected Government. This puts big, global, multinationals in their proper context as unelected entities with unprecedented powers, whose actions have immense impact on our lives, and which we are powerless to hold accountable.
(2). Entitlements: I keep hearing reporters from National Public Radio and other liberal news outlets use the word “entitlements” and it makes me froth at the mouth. They’re not “entitlements” — which sounds like something a bunch of spoiled, lazy, undeserving people irrationally think they should get for nothing. Instead, we progressives should try: Earned Benefits. . .
(4). Government Spending: (Also referred to as: Taxes, Burden, and Inconvenient) Conservatives talk about “government spending” like it’s this awful thing, but the fact is, communities across America benefit from U.S. tax dollars, especially supposedly anti-government red states, which receive way more federal tax money than they contribute. Instead, progressives should try: Investing in America. Because, that’s what our federal tax dollars do.
(11). The Environment: When people talk about “the environment,” they often sound annoyingly self-righteous, as if lecturing people with dubious hygiene practices. Unfortunately, you can’t count on people to make environmentally friendly choices — especially when people are struggling financially and these choices cost significantly more. Instead, we progressives can try: Shared Resources.
(12). Welfare: When conservatives talk about “welfare,” they make it sound like this pit people wallow in forever, rather than a source of help that’s available when we need it – and that we pay for through our taxes. The majority of us need help at one time or another. Instead, progressives should try: Social Safety Net: When people think of a safety net, they’re more likely to think of a protection of last-resort, and one that they can instantly bounce out of like circus acrobats.
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Does anyone from the left remember when then Vice President Dick Cheney formed an Energy Task Force that included industry experts to advise him on creating an energy plan for that administration?
There was an uproar from the left, one might recall, including a lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court trying to force the details of the meetings to be made public.
"This ruling means that for now, the public will remain in the dark about the Bush administration and energy industry executives' secret meetings about national energy policy," said David Bookbinder, Washington legal director for the Sierra Club..."
http://articles.philly.com/2004-06-25/news/25370001_1_task-force-david-bookbinder-energy-policy
What a difference a dozen years can make...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/business/after-meeting-health-insurers-question-proposals-workability.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&pagewanted=all&
A day after they were caught off guard by President Obama’s proposal to prevent cancellation of insurance policies for millions of Americans, top executives of some of the biggest insurance companies emerged from a meeting at the White House on Friday, expressing mixed feelings about whether the idea could work in every state.
They did not discuss in detail how the president’s goal might be achieved.
The participants included executives of WellPoint, Aetna, Cigna, Humana and Kaiser Permanente, as well as several nonprofit Blue Cross plans.
After the meeting, Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group, said only that it had been “very productive.”
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Normally a reliable shill for the Democrats, now he is saying almost exactly what Charles Krauthammer is saying:
MARK SHIELDS: [You can keep your plan] -- wasn't a true statement. And you're driven to one of two conclusions. Either the president was almost -- almost negligently uncurious in not asking about what the answer was, or he made the choice to trade his considerable reputation and record of integrity for short-term political gain. That's why they had to come and that's why there was such consternation in the ranks.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you explain it, David, what happened, with the president acknowledging yesterday that he wasn't on top of it?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think it is politics. They knew that they -- getting this thing passed -- we were there -- it was hard. And so they were pulling out every political stop in the book. And a lot of those political stops have made it harder now. The first early one was, they were really late in issuing the regulations because they didn't want them to come out during the campaign so Romney could attack them.
As a result, the whole implementation got pushed back, and that's part of the reason the Web site is such a mess. And then they made this political calculation. Then they made the -- that they weren't going to tell you there will be losers here. And they made the political calculation there would be no deficit effects. They made a whole series of political calculations.
Shields didn’t think Obama made enough of a personal apology, like John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and it looks grim:
SHIELDS: It wasn't this is mine and I'm going to make sure that it never happens again. I mean, this has got to work. Judy, this is beyond the Obama administration. If this goes down, if the Obama -- if health care, the Affordable Care Act is deemed a failure, this is the end -- I really mean it -- of liberal government, in the sense of any sense that government as an instrument of social justice, an engine of economic progress, which is what divides Democrats from Republicans -- that's what Democrats believe.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec13/shieldsbrooks_11-15.html
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I don't know Seattle but it has similarities with Minneapolis where Democrats hold all the city council seats and the only opposition to them comes from the left. What separates these two great cities from the fate of Detroit is probably only a matter of timing and circumstance.
Enter Kshama Sawant, just elected in a city-wide election to the council. She was a leader of Occupy-Seattle, an avowed hater of capitalism. Some Kshama Sawant quotes:
“Capitalists are criminals of our society”
“The Capitalist system itself…Is at the root of racism, hatred, and fear of black people, people of color, of poor people”
“We need to…put on trial capitalism itself”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on7_-5Mp2No#t=40[/youtube]
So what does she do for a living? She teaches 'Economics' at a public university.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexberezow/2013/11/11/why-is-seattle-socialist-kshama-sawant-allowed-to-teach-economics/
Let's get capitalism out of Seattle and see how the "black people, people of color, and poor people" do. Good grief. Maybe North Korea would be a good model.
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I admire her honesty, rather than running as a democrat and then voting as a socialist as the rest of the dems do.
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I admire her honesty, rather than running as a democrat and then voting as a socialist as the rest of the dems do.
That's right. Instead of the deception of the Obama phenomenon, Hillary and the rest, let's put actual socialism on the ballot and take an up and down vote. In Seattle this week, they did and it passed.
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I am not sure this is suitable for people with brains:
http://www.alternet.org/visions/noam-chomsky-america-hates-its-poor :roll:
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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee calls for unemployment benefits for 'working men and women'
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Jackson-Lee-calls-for-unemployment-benefits-for-5062013.php?cmpid=htx
The Houston Democrat called upon her fellow Congress members to extend jobless benefits for people with jobs.
"Let us vote to provide for unemployment insurance for working men and women so that faces across America will not have the tear of desperation on their faces,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jer5VNkMKOU
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Shame of the Academy
The American Studies Association votes to boycott Israel.
Dec. 16, 2013 7:20 p.m. ET
The political corruption of the American academy is by now an old story, but every so often it reveals itself in a new and shocking way. The latest example comes from the professors of the American Studies Association, which on Monday announced that two-thirds of its members had voted in favor of boycotting Israel.
Jonathan Marks reports nearby on the association's internal politics, and readers won't be surprised at the bullying tactics employed to pass the boycott resolution. This is how the modern academic and media left operate.
Yet it's still worth pondering what must go through the mind of a professoriate, presumably dedicated to free political speech, that would choose to boycott the most democratic country in the Middle East. The country in which Arabs are treated far better and have far more rights than they do in most Arab lands. And the country that is America's most reliable ally. We can only imagine what these same professors must teach their students about the supposed crimes of America.
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Has anyone read anything as nuts as this? Christie should save his career by coming clean and being transparent and, get this emulate a Clinton! :x
He should change the subject, after coming clean, with a *sister soldier* moment. No peep from this lib that both Clintons are the ROLE MODELS for how to cover up and get your corruption swept under the rug.
No Fournier, Christie should do the opposite of Clinton. He should resign. Instead he will follow the role model Clintons with clever lies, cover-ups and the rest.
Amazing how a few emails give the left credibility on this. Yet when Obama, Rice, Clinton where all over the place lying about an event before the election which is even worse they just sweep it under the rug. Simply not one email turned up.
*****Politics
How Chris Christie Can Save His Career
Transparency and accountability would transcend politics of today.
Ron Fournier
January 9, 2014
Since 1992, when Bill Clinton moderated the Democratic Party's image by criticizing a hip-hop artist for her racially incendiary comments, politicians have searched for their "Sister Souljah moment" – when a candidate takes what appears to be a brave stand against extremes in their party.
Related Stories
Republican Leaders Assess Scandal Damage to Christie
Christie Says He Was 'Misled' on GW Bridge Closings
Christie Administration Implicated in a Very 'New Jersey' Scandal
In 2000, George W. Bush caricaturized conservative jurist Robert Bork in an attempt to appear more compassionate than the GOP brand. That same year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain demonized the far right's "agents of intolerance." Eight years later, Sen. Barack Obama distanced himself from his own pastor, calling Jeremiah Wright's racially charged comments "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in the truth."
The sordid George Washington Bridge scandal offers Chris Christie two choices: Continue to deny, deflect and dissemble in a manner that is so common in the politics of today, and most recently exhibited by President Obama during a spate of controversies in 2013; or … pull a Super Sister Souljah.
A Super Sister Souljah goes beyond distancing one's self from extremes within your party. It is when a candidate to take what appears to be a brave stand against politics as practiced by both parties. It is what I had in mind Wednesday with this tweet:
Christie needs to come clean about his involvement in the bridge-lane closures, if any, and provide a more believable explanation of when he learned about the activity. Instead of hiding behind spokesmen, lawyers, press releases and smug assertions, the New Jersey governor needs to apologize, accept responsibility, and release every document and electronic communication about the closures. He should call for an independent investigation and order his advisers to comply.
Finally, he should do as I urged Obama to do last year: Clean house. Fire anybody who knew or should have known about the closures and replace them with people who will change the culture of his office. These charges are sticking to Christie because they fit so neatly into his office's reputation for bullying and arrogance. "He and his staff operate as divas," conservative blogger Erick Erickson wrote in a post titled, "The Politics of A-Holes."
The challenge for Christie is overcoming the damage to his reputation caused by his office's role in shutting down some access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, an act of political retribution that endangered lives. The scandal is an easy-to-understand antithesis to Christie's carefully cultivated image of a leader capable of transcending petty politics to serve the public good. Here's how New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial team assessed the situation:
Until yesterday, the official line from Christie's lieutenants at the Port Authority has been that this was all part of some secret "traffic study"; that they were simply curious to see what sort of mayhem would ensue if two of Fort Lee's three access lanes to the George Washington Bridge were cut off, suddenly and unannounced.
That's clearly a bogus story. But was the governor lying, too?
Christie originally said that after checking with his staff, he determined that no one from his office was involved in these lane closings. He scoffed at the very idea that it was political retribution against the Fort Lee mayor for refusing to endorse Christie's re-election, and joked that he had moved the traffic cones himself.
His attempts to laugh this off now appear to be dishonest, though we can't yet be sure that he personally knew about the doings of one of his top aides. Either way, though, Christie bears responsibility. If it turns out he did know, he is obviously lying and unfit for office — let alone a 2016 presidential run.
And even if he did not, his officials are liars. If Christie can't control them, how can we trust him as a potential future leader of our country?
Those are fair questions that go right to the issue of leadership, which John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate covers religiously. He wrote of Christie:
This is a political problem for Christie, but more importantly, it's a leadership test. Since the governor arrived on the national stage, he has given various ad hoc seminars on leadership and the qualities required for greatness. He talks a great deal about the topic and offers himself as an expert. Before he became partners with Barack Obama in responding to Hurricane Sandy, he gave a very astringent critique of the president's shortcoming. Recently Christie advised the president to apologize for his promise that if people wanted to keep their insurance they would be allowed to. "When you make a mistake, you should own up to it and apologize for it," he said.
Will Christie do that here? Christie now faces problems that echo ones this president has faced, most recently in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act: Does he apologize, and how fully? Does he take responsibility for the actions of his aides? Does he admit mistakes? Does he fire someone? Does he increase his famous bluster or does he step back from it? Christie is very good at giving advice on these matters. Now he can show rather than tell.
If he's lying, his career is over. But if Christie truly was not involved, he can show some accountability and transparency, which in this era of no-responsibility politics, would be a Super Sister Souljah moment.
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Boy, if I didn't know better, I'd think this was a perfect example of media bias...
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From which side of the media?
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/conservatives-on-chris-christie-diva-getting-what-he-deserves-20140109:
Republican media strategist Rick Wilson, who worked on Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign, argued that Christie "goes out of his way to be a dick to other Republicans" -- and will reap the payback if his fortunes start to head south.
"You're going to see conservatives returning the favor he gave them over the last year. There's no love lost between Chris Christie and conservatives. I don't expect them to be in love with him, and he doesn't want their love," said Wilson. "But if you want to win a GOP primary, you better find a way to get there."
Boy, if I didn't know better, I'd think this was a perfect example of media bias...
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Good point.Christie got a pass when he smuggled guns to the Mexican cartels and got a pass when he used the IRS to target politics opponents and the MSM gave him a pass on Beghazi, so it's about time the media stopped giving him a pass on this scandal. Right ?
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Using a traffic study to inflict political payback is disgusting. Imagine if we had a president that used federal law enforcement officers to barricade the WWII monument from being visited by veterans and shut down national parks?
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I know Christie is not really a conservative, but I'm not sure why "Operation Fat & Furious" (hat tip to Glenn Beck) is in this thread.
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Bigdog,
Just one question. Why is your response to any criticism of a left politician that the Republicans do it too?
As for Christie I admit if he is thrown out (he won't resign) I know my taxes will go even higher. And half of NJ will be cheering for that.
Yet I won't accept a liar. I won't accept anyone who abuses his/her power. He is full of crap. He knew. Just like Obama knew. Just like the Clintons knew.
This kind of behavior from right OR left has got to stop.
We need people who are honest. First and formost. For God's sake is this too much to ask?
Unfortunately McCain was partly right about campaign finance reform. It just takes so much money to run a national campaign there seems no way to keep corruption out.
I am not sure his fix was the best answer but he is right in theory.
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IMHO the McCain-Feingold law is an incumbency protection act and that this is not an accident.
The reason campaigns require so much money is that the government has its paws and claws into ever more of our lives-- thus there is more at stake.
It is not clear to me that Christie knew. After his press conference yesterday if it comes to light that he did know, then he may well be done. But if things are as he said (arrogance of power idiot employees in government-- how rare!) then he did the right thing. He promptly looked into it and fired those responsible and apologized to the people, including a visit to Fort Lee itself if I am not mistaken.
The left is looking to take down the strongest challenge at present for Hillary. Where was the outrage on their side over Obama closing parks and monuments to make the 16% govt. shutdown as painful as possible?
Anyway, may I suggest that we take Operation Fat & Furious to the Politics thread?
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Maureen Dowd - a lib - who I usually do not agree with. On this I mostly agree.
You can fool some of the people all of the time. Legal diatribe arguments that split hairs help. And of course the political consequences play a huge role in who is protected. The left with Clinton for example and now the establishment DC right with Christie all coming to his defense.
****JAN. 11, 2014
Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON — I HAVE learned two things covering politics.
One, first impressions are often right. John Edwards is slick. Hillary Clinton is expedient. W. was in over his head. Barack Obama is too much in his head. Chris Christie can be a bully.
Politicians are surrounded by spinners who work tirelessly to shape our perceptions of the characters of their bosses. Pols know how to polish scratches in their image with sin-and-redemption news conferences, TV confessionals and self-deprecating turns at hoary Washington press banquets. As Carter spokesman Jody Powell joked, if Hitler and Eva Braun came on stage at the Gridiron Dinner and mocked themselves in a song-and-dance routine, Washington chatterers would say, “Oh, they’re not so bad.”
After being showered with spin, you say to yourself, maybe that first impression was wrong. But often it isn’t.
Christie’s two-hour “I am not a bully” news conference was operatic about an act of malice so petty it did not merit being called “authentic Jersey corruption,” as New Jersey native Jon Stewart said, adding that it was unworthy of a state with a severed horse head on its flag.
If you’re going to wage a vendetta, at least make it a well-thought-out one. How can Christie & Co. run a national campaign when they can’t even aim straight? How moronic to think the mayor of Fort Lee would get blamed for problems on a bridge that everyone knows is controlled by the Port Authority. If you want to be malicious, it would be so easy to put a project close to the mayor’s heart on hold for a few months or redirect 60 state snowplows the night before a storm.
The governor groveled to New Jersey residents after his aides so gleefully burned them (even joking about children being late for the first day of school because of the orchestrated gridlock on the George Washington Bridge).
After zapping Obama for being so clueless that he couldn’t find “the light switch of leadership” in a dark room, Christie is trying to salvage his once blazing career by claiming he was in a dark room, clueless to the bogus traffic study masking a revenge plan that top aides were executing in plain sight.
The epic news conference felt like a scene out of the governor’s favorite movie, “The Godfather”: Christie offering his tremulous, grandiose, self-pitying public apologia while in cross-cut scenes, his henchmen were getting rid of those who threatened his operation.
Calling his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly “stupid” and “deceitful,” he threw her off the bridge, without talking to her himself or, as Niall O’Dowd slyly wrote in IrishCentral.com, even extending the courtesy of the old Irish wedding night admonition: “Brace yourself, Bridget.”
He also disappeared his two-time campaign manager, Bill Stepien. His cronies at the Port Authority, Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, fell on their swords last month.
Christie took a line straight out of the Robert DeNiro handbook, lamenting: “I am heartbroken that someone who I permitted to be in that circle of trust for the last five years betrayed my trust.”
Yet we know workplaces are chameleon-like. I once had a publisher who loved the Audubon Society, so we ran a lot of bird stories. I had another boss who wore suspenders, so guys in the office started wearing suspenders.
Shades of Watergate: Since they were headed toward a landslide, you’d think the Christie crew would have been in a more benevolent mood. But given the governor’s past flashes of vindictive behavior, this was probably a wink-wink, nod-nod deal. Question: Who will rid me of this meddlesome mayor? Answer: The “little Serbian” has been dealt with.
The second thing I’ve learned from covering politics is that we can debate ad nauseam whether Christie was telling the truth, shading it or bluffing. But we can’t gauge that from his impressive, marathon Trenton performance art.
No matter how jaded we feel in the news business, we are still suckers for the big lie. It’s tough to wrap your head around a stunning level of duplicity.
I learned this lesson the hard way covering Paul Tsongas’s presidential surge in 1992. When The Times’s Dr. Larry Altman came on the campaign trail to interview Tsongas, he was skeptical about the candidate’s claim that his lymphoma had not recurred. I told Altman it was impossible for me to believe that Tsongas, who prided himself on his honesty and who was so straightforward he was mocked as “Saint Paul” by Clinton aides, could lie about that — especially given the profound political consequences.
Dr. Altman was right, as Tsongas later admitted. The candidate and his doctors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston repeatedly said he was cancer-free when he was not.
A cascade of subsequent outraged denials about transgressive behavior delivered with bravado and finger wagging, from Gary Hart to Bill Clinton to John Edwards to Anthony Weiner, has persuaded me that politicians — who are narcissists and, in essence, actors stuck in the same role — can persuasively tell the big lie if they believe their futures are on the line.
The Christie saga is still unraveling. Maybe he was a dupe in the dark. Maybe the man in the fleece jacket is fleecing us. Let’s just say, I’m not yet permitting him in my circle of trust.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 12, 2014, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Thunder Road. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe****
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Working from memory here:
Sen/Gov/SecTreasury John Conally of Texas ran for president in 1980. He was asked about whether he lied at his trial about corruption (something having to do with milk???) and told this story:
"I bet most of you don't know that George Washington was a Texan. One days he cut down a mesquite bush. His father asked who had cut down the tree. "I cannot tell a lie. I did." said little George.
"Well don't bother running for office until you can" his daddy replied.
In plain sight Obama did a plethora more of petty and fiendish misdeeds during the 1/6th government reduction (a.k.a. the Shutdown) that he chose to create (and was blamed on the Reps). Nary a peep from the Pravdas.
This is all Alice-in-Wonderland.
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Crafty,
This is the most cynical post I've seen you make in all the years "boarding" with you.
If that is the case then why do we care about Benghazi, the IRS, Fast and Furious?
If we cannot get honesty from our leaders than they can do anything and later deny and cover it up.
We cannot accept dishonesty. Christie has got to go. Of course he is denying he knew. That is his last play here. He had no problem with the bridge thing until emails were exposed. To think he wasn't a least bit curious as to why the GWB was blocked off to Ft Lee because of a "traffic study"? He ignored all the complaints prior. Oh yes he takes "full responsibility".
You can't really mean this.
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Sorry for my lack of clarity.
I'm not advocating this attitude, I'm describing it.
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How much does Paul Krugman make, and what does he contribute, seriously.
I made the mistake of clicking on his column today. Don't do that. Let's have government decide how hard people work and how much they make. Don't trust free people making free choices.
If David Ortiz and his batboy come to the ballpark at the same time, leave at the same time, why not the same pay?
Link: NYTimes/unsubscribe
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One website says Kruggy has a personal wealth of 2.5 million.
I'm sure he's given it all away to the poor, right?
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Divided Democrats Put Obama in a State of the Union Squeeze
Liberals want the president to tackle income inequality; moderates want him to focus on economic growth.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/state-of-the-union-2014/divided-democrats-put-obama-in-a-state-of-the-union-squeeze-20140120
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Of course pursuing policies that 'tackle income inequality' is the exact opposite of pursuing policies that focus on positive economic growth.
And 'moderate Dem' is a term not seen since the rising of Pelosi-Reid-Obama. Moderates who "want him [Obama] to focus on economic growth" sound like former Dems and likely 2014/2016 Republican voters.
News Flash: The Democratic party is not the party of economic growth and opportunity.
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Thomas Sowell, pointing out truths with clarity:
Fact-Free Liberals
By Thomas Sowell - January 21, 2014
Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words -- "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.
President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality?
That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term "socialism." Those communities all collapsed.
It was tried even earlier, in 18th century Georgia, when that was a British colony. People in Georgia ended up fleeing to other colonies, as many other people would vote with their feet in the 20th century, by fleeing many other societies around the world that were established in the name of economic equality.
But who reads history these days? Moreover, those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the left -- which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study -- are not likely to get much attention.
The net results are bright people, with impressive degrees, who have been told for years how brilliant they are, but who are often ignorant of facts that might cause them to question what they have been indoctrinated with in schools and colleges.
Recently Kirsten Powers repeated on Fox News Channel the discredited claim that women are paid only about three-quarters of what a man is paid for doing the same work.
But there have been empirical studies, going back for decades, showing that there is no such gap when the women and men are in the same occupation, with the same skills, experience, education, hours of work and continuous years of full-time work.
Income differences between the sexes reflect the fact that women and men differ in all these things -- and more. Young male doctors earn much more than young female doctors. But young male doctors work over 500 hours a year more than young female doctors.
Then there is the current hysteria which claims that people in the famous "top one percent" have incomes that are rising sharply and absorbing a wholly disproportionate share of all the income in the country.
But check out a Treasury Department study titled "Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005." It uses income tax data, showing that people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes fall -- repeat, fall -- by 26 percent by 2005.
What about the other studies that seem to say the opposite? Those are studies of income brackets, not studies of the flesh-and-blood human beings who are moving from one bracket to another over time. More than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.
This is hardly surprising when you consider that their incomes were going down while there was widespread hysteria over the belief that their incomes were going up.
Empirical studies that follow income brackets over time repeatedly reach opposite conclusions from studies that follow individuals. But people in the media, in politics and even in academia, cite statistics about income brackets as if they are discussing what happens to actual human beings over time.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
For example the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers -- and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks.
But was correlation causation? American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites -- and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.
When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans -- and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.
Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.
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GM says:
"One website says Kruggy has a personal wealth of 2.5 million.
I'm sure he's given it all away to the poor, right?"
I have been an advocate of the left's wishes on this board a number of times. All wealthy liberals should be taxed at 90% and their wealth handed over to big government welfare programs. The rest of us can be left alone.
Doug,
Sowell does it again. I am sick and tired of hearing how women do't get paid the same as men. I can tell you in health care that is simply bogus. Women may make less than men overall but that is by THEIR design. There is NO conspiracies going on to KEEP WOMEN DOWN. They get reimbursed the same from Medicare, Medicaid, insurers the same as the rest of us. They may make less because THEY choose jobs that have easier hours. To some extant this is so they can take time off for pregnancy leave with generous guarantees their job is secure and waiting for them when they choose to come back.
They also do not choose high paying surgical careers as much. These tend to have long hours and be more demanding. Yes, surgeons historically had been an all boys club, no doubt, but this is not the case now. Women have quite good. They have it both ways. Nonetheless we will be hearing the none stop propaganda machine from the left MSM setting up for Hillary. It is all about getting her elected now.
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ccp wrote: "I am sick and tired of hearing how women don't get paid the same as men. I can tell you in health care that is simply bogus. Women may make less than men overall but that is by THEIR design. There are NO conspiracies going on to KEEP WOMEN DOWN. They get reimbursed the same from Medicare, Medicaid, insurers the same as the rest of us."
"In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more: 108 cents on a man's dollar."
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/06/18/women_and_the_unequal_pay_myth_100407.html
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Is there something about leftists and lying? Wendy Davis is the latest Hero of The Left and is running for Governor as a Democrat in Texas. Ann Coulter is very much on point and funny all the way through. Read it the end where Davis blames her paraplegic opponent for the news story and complains that he hasn't "walked a day in my shoes."
The Heroism of Wendy Davis
By Ann Coulter - January 23, 2014
Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator running for governor, became a liberal superhero last June when she filibustered a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. (This was the good filibuster, not that awful filibuster three months later by Ted Cruz -- that was just grandstanding.)
Apart from her enthusiasm for abortion (and you have to admit, abortion is really cool), the centerpiece of Davis' campaign is her life story. Also the fact that she's a progressive woman who doesn't look like Betty Friedan.
In a typical formulation, Time magazine said Davis was someone who could give the Democrats "'real people' credibility," based on "her own personal story -- an absent father, a sixth-grade-educated mother, a teen pregnancy, followed by life as a single mom in a mobile home, then community college and, at last, Harvard Law School."
The headlines capture the essence of Wendy-mania:
CNN: Wendy Davis: From Teen Mom to Harvard Law to Famous Filibuster
Bloomberg: Texas Filibuster Star Rose From Teen Mom to Harvard Law
The Independent (UK): Wendy Davis: Single Mother From Trailer Park Who Has Become Heroine of Pro-Choice Movement
Cosmopolitan: Find a Sugar Daddy to Put You Through Law School!
Actually, that last one I made up, but as we now know, it's more accurate than Davis' rags-to-riches life story.
The truth was gently revealed in the Dallas Morning News this week. Far from an attack, this was a puff-piece written by Wayne Slater, rabid partisan Democratic hack and co-author of the book, "Bush's Brain." (He is not an admirer of Bush's brain.) It would be like Sean Hannity breaking a scandal about Ted Cruz.
The first hint that Slater was trying to help Davis get ahead of the story and tilt it her way is his comment that Davis' life story is "more complicated" than her version -- i.e., completely the opposite -- adding, "as often happens when public figures aim to define themselves."
Actually, the truth is much simpler than her story. Also, be sure to look for that "as often happens" excuse the next time a Republican gets caught lying about his resume.
Slater's peculiar obsession with whether Davis was 19 or 21 when she got her first divorce, and exactly how long she lived in a trailer home, is meant to deflect attention from something much more problematic: the huge whoppers Davis told.
Her big lies were about the obstacles she had to overcome and how she overcame them, not about how old she was at the time of her first divorce.
She claims she was raised by a single mother, went to work at age 14 to support her family, became a single mother herself in her teens, and then -- by sheer pluck and determination -- pulled herself out of the trailer park to graduate from Harvard Law School!
The truth is less coal-miner's daughter than gold-digger who found a sugar daddy to raise her kids and pay for her education.
Point No. 1: Davis' family wasn't working-class. Her father owned a sandwich shop and a dinner theater, which puts Davis solidly into middle-class land.
Point No. 2: No one who works at MSNBC would know this, but everyone whose parents run a family business starts work at age 14, if not sooner.
Point No. 3: Her parents were separated, but that is not the commonly accepted meaning of "single mother."
Point No. 4: As for being a single mother at age 19 -- she wasn't a "single mother" in the traditional sense, either. She was married at age 18, had a child at 19 and divorced her first husband, a construction worker, at 21. (He couldn't afford tuition at Harvard.)
So she got married young? That isn't a hard-luck story. Well into the 1950s, nearly half of all first-born children were born to married women under the age of 20.
But Wendy Davis' harrowing nightmare of poverty and sacrifice wasn't over yet.
Just a few years after her first divorce, Wendy was on the make, asking to date Jeff Davis, a rich lawyer 13 years her senior, who frequented her father's dinner club. In short order, they married and had a child together.
The next thing Jeff Davis knew, he was paying off her college tuition, raising their kids by himself and taking out a loan to send her to Harvard Law School.
(Feminists rushed to the stores to buy the shoes Davis wore during her famous filibuster. I'd like the shoes she was wearing when she met her sugar daddy.)
Then Wendy left her kids with the sugar daddy in Texas -- even the daughter from her first marriage -- while she attended Harvard Law.
Slater says Davis' kids lived with Jeff Davis in Texas while she attended law school. Wendy Davis claims her girls lived with her during her first year of law school. Let's say that's true. Why not the other two years? And what was the matter with the University of Texas Law School?
Sorry, MSNBC, I know you want to fixate on how many months Davis spent in the trailer park and her precise age when the first divorce went through. And that would be an incredibly stupid thing for conservatives to obsess on, if they were, in fact, obsessing on it. But I'm still stuck on her leaving her kids behind while she headed off to a law school 1,500 miles away.
The reason Wendy Davis' apocryphal story was impressive is that single mothers have to run a household, take care of kids and provide for a family all by themselves. But Wendy was neither supporting her kids, nor raising them. If someone else is taking care of your kids and paying your tuition, that's not amazing.
Hey -- maybe Jeff Davis should run for governor! He's the one who raised two kids, including a stepdaughter, while holding down a job and paying for his wife's law school. There's a hard-luck story!
Mr. Davis told the Dallas Morning News that Wendy dumped him as soon as he had finished paying off her Harvard Law School loan. "It was ironic," he said. "I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left."
In his defense, a lot of people are confused about the meaning of "ironic." That's not "ironic." Rather, it's what we call: "entirely predictable."
It's ironic -- my car stopped running right after I ran out of gas.
It's ironic -- my house was broken into, and the next thing I knew all my valuables were missing.
It's ironic -- I was punched in the face right before my nose broke.
In his petition for divorce, Mr. Davis accused his wife of adultery. The court made no finding on infidelity, but awarded him full custody of their underage child and ordered Wendy to pay child support.
Wendy boasted to the Dallas Morning News: "I very willingly, as part of my divorce settlement, paid child support." Would a divorced dad get a medal for saying that?
In response to Wayne Slater's faux-"expose," naturally Davis put out a statement denouncing ... her probable Republican opponent, Greg Abbott. Again, Slater wrote the story. But Davis blathered on, blaming Abbott for the Dallas Morning News story and complaining that he hasn't "walked a day in my shoes."
About that she's certainly right. Greg Abbott could never walk a day in her shoes or anyone else's. He's a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.
I guess Wendy could teach him a lot about suffering.
Davis also said these attacks "won't work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women ..." Yes, for example, Anna Nicole Smith. Though at least Smith had the decency not to ask for a paid education.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304007504579346871772434330?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
We're All Single Moms Now
"Wendy Davis did make a mistake," according to the subheadline of an article by Liza Mundy. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/wendy-davis-the-most-judged-woman-in-america-102598_full.html
"She thought that we were ready for a single mother." Mundy, author of "The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family," deems Davis "The Most Judged Woman in America."
Mundy turns out to want a transformation of the family beyond basic logic. She writes:
[Davis's] the strategy is risky, in part because our notion of a single mother is rigid: Critics have been picking holes in her story, saying that she didn't live in that trailer long enough, or was too ambitious. We seem to have a pretty strict notion of who a single mother is and how she should live. Truth is, the lives of single mothers are multifaceted and hard to categorize.
It's not that hard to categorize Wendy Davis: She was among the category of "single mothers" who are married to rich dudes.
Heck, if you don't have to be single to be a single mother, it stands to reason, or whatever Mundy is substituting for it, that you don't have to be a mother either. That would make your humble columnist a single mother (James Taranto, WSJ). So don't judge us.
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On this WD story, I think our side would do better focusing on the fact that her older, rich husband stayed home to raise the children, and the day after he paid off her tuition loans, she dumped him. EVERYONE, man and woman, knows that what story reveals is as revolting as it is revealing. Fibbing about the age at which her divorce was finalized and fluffing up having lived in a trailer does not even come close.
Stupid Reps.
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"On this WD story, I think our side would do better focusing on the fact that her older, rich husband stayed home to raise the children, and the day after he paid off her tuition loans, she dumped him. EVERYONE, man and woman, knows that what story reveals is as revolting as it is revealing."
Excellent point. Is this the kind of person one wants as their leader? If she could do that to her husband and caretaker of her own children just think what she could do to an electorate.
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Many chronically ill Americans unable to afford food, medicine
Reuters
By Allison Bond 42 minutes ago
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - One in three Americans with a chronic disease such as diabetes, arthritis or high blood pressure has difficulty paying for food, medications or both, according to a new study.
People who had trouble affording food were four times more likely to skip some of their medications due to cost than those who got plenty to eat, researchers found.
"This leads to an obvious tension between 'milk' or 'med,'" said Dr. Niteesh Choudhry, who worked on the study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "If you have a fixed income, should you treat or should you eat?"
The findings are based on data collected by the 2011 National Health Interview Survey, a questionnaire that offers a snapshot of the U.S. population as a whole. Nearly 10,000 people age 20 and up filled out the survey and reported having one or more chronic illnesses like cancer, asthma, emphysema or a psychiatric illness.
Among those participants, 23 percent took their medication less often than prescribed because of the cost, 19 percent reported difficulty affording food and 11 percent said they were having trouble paying for both food and medications. In the end, about one in three had trouble affording food, medication or both.
These rates are high but are similar to figures found in previous studies, said lead author Dr. Seth Berkowitz, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Yet the link between difficulty paying for food and for medications is a novel one.
"The idea of tradeoffs that people might make (between buying medications or food) is something we haven't seen before," said Berkowitz.
The researchers also found that patients who had difficulty paying for both food and meds were 58 percent more likely to be Hispanic or African American.
With each additional chronic illness the patients reported, their risk of having a tough time affording those items went up by 56 percent, according to the findings published in The American Journal of Medicine.
Finally, people having trouble affording medications and food were 30 percent less likely to have public, non-Medicare insurance like Medicaid, and about 60 percent less likely to participate in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC. This program provides supplemental food and healthcare referrals for certain women and children up to age five.
By removing some of the financial pressure from people struggling to afford food, assistance programs like WIC may also help them afford their medications, Berkowitz said.
For that reason, for people struggling to pay for either food or medications, the authors recommend looking into eligibility for food assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and WIC, along with community support services like food banks.
When it comes to medications, there may be cheaper alternatives or assistance programs for the medication a patient is already taking.
"The most important thing people can do is talk with their doctors about it," said Berkowitz.
It's also important for people to be honest with their doctor if they are unable to afford enough food, since that may affect which medications and dosages are best.
"If you are eating very irregularly, a medication that might be perfectly safe when you are eating regularly could cause low blood sugar," or other complications, Berkowitz told Reuters Health.
If patients don't bring up the fact that they are struggling to afford medications or food, Berkowitz said, the doctor won't know to adjust medications accordingly.
He said people should "not be embarrassed or ashamed" to bring up the topic with their doctor.
SOURCE: bit.ly/1evzX7V The American Journal of Medicine, online January 21, 2014.*****
*****""This leads to an obvious tension between 'milk' or 'med,'" Only a liberal could say this.
""The most important thing people can do is talk with their doctors about it,"
Is this guy putting me on. Patients have always complained when they can't afford health care.
""The idea of tradeoffs that people might make (between buying medications or food) is something we haven't seen before," said Berkowitz."
How old is this fool. This has always been the case. How about people who always seem to afford cigarettes or booze when they want to yet are always short for more important stuff. Oh this never happens.
This is the problem with Ivy league liberals. This was not a "study". Did tax money go to fund this stuff?
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http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/02/04/sotomayor-labeling-illegal-immigrants-criminals-is-insulting/
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http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/02/04/sotomayor-labeling-illegal-immigrants-criminals-is-insulting/
In the US code, the term is illegal alien.
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Well, that might explain why she is uncomfortable with it.
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http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101
(3)The term “alien” means any person not a citizen or national of the United States.
8 U.S.C. § 1325 : US Code - Section 1325: Improper entry by alien
Search 8 U.S.C. § 1325 : US Code - Section 1325: Improper entry by alien
3 1542
(a) Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both. (b) Improper time or place; civil penalties Any alien who is apprehended while entering (or attempting to enter) the United States at a time or place other than as designated by immigration officers shall be subject to a civil penalty of - (1) at least $50 and not more than $250 for each such entry (or attempted entry); or (2) twice the amount specified in paragraph (1) in the case of an alien who has been previously subject to a civil penalty under this subsection. Civil penalties under this subsection are in addition to, and not in lieu of, any criminal or other civil penalties that may be imposed. (c) Marriage fraud Any individual who knowingly enters into a marriage for the purpose of evading any provision of the immigration laws shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or fined not more than $250,000, or both. (d) Immigration-related entrepreneurship fraud Any individual who knowingly establishes a commercial enterprise for the purpose of evading any provision of the immigration laws shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years, fined in accordance with title 18, or both.
- See more at: http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/8/12/II/VIII/1325
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/02/04/
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Now we have a socialist/communist Pope.
****Obama, Francis to meet amid shared economic view
Obama and Pope Francis to meet in the Vatican in March with focus on shared economic view
Associated Press
By Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press January 21, 2014 9:11 PM
Obama, Francis to meet amid shared economic view
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When President Barack Obama meets Pope Francis in the Vatican in March, both men will speak a common economic language rooted in similar views about poverty and income inequality, giving prominence to an issue that the U.S. president wants to be a central theme of his second term.
In the complicated relationship between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church, the White House sees the popular new pontiff and his emphasis on the plight of the poor as a form of moral validation of the president's economic agenda. When Obama delivered a major address on the economy last month, he cited the growth of inequality across the developed world and made sure to note that "the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length."
The White House and the Vatican announced Tuesday that Obama will meet with the pope on March 27 during a four-day European trip that includes a nuclear security summit in the Netherlands and a U.S.-European Union summit in Brussels. The meeting is the first between the president and Pope Francis.
Obama had an audience with the previous pope, Benedict XVI, in July 2009. At the time, the Vatican underscored the deep disagreement between them on abortion. Benedict gave the president a copy of a Vatican document on bioethics that asserted the church's opposition to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and in-vitro fertilization. Obama supports stem cell research.
Francis has made it clear that Catholic positions on homosexuality, same-sex marriage and abortion haven't changed.
"But in his view those issues which create conflict need to be deemphasized a bit," said John C. Green, a political scientist who specializes in religion and politics at the University of Akron.
The pope created a stir in November when he decried trickle-down theories that assert that economic growth can result in greater justice and inclusiveness as unproven. "The excluded are still waiting," he wrote.
Paul Begala, a former top aide to President Bill Clinton, said Obama can only benefit from Francis' emphasis on economic disparities.
"It becomes very difficult for conservatives to attack President Obama for being divisive, when the world's greatest figure for unity is saying pretty much the same thing," Begala said.
Still, Francis' attention to poverty has also captured the attention of Republicans, among them Rep. Paul Ryan, a devout Catholic and Mitt Romney's running mate in 2012. Other Republicans, such as Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky have also staked out prominent anti-poverty positions.
The economic theme will be a centerpiece of Obama's State of the Union address next week. But his specific policies — a higher minimum wage, universal pre-school and ending loopholes for the wealthy — face difficulty in Congress in an election year.
"American Catholics as a whole don't tend to take specific policy guidance from the pope, whether it's Pope Benedict or Pope Francis," Green said. "But what the pope can do is to get them thinking about particular issues and thinking about them in distinctly Catholic ways. That kind of rethinking could very well be an advantage to President Obama."
The issue of health care has highlighted other disagreements between the administration and the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has been a high-profile critic of a provision in Obama's health care law that requires employers to provide insurance coverage that includes birth control.
Churches and other houses of worship are exempt from the control requirement, but affiliated institutions that serve the general public are not. That includes charitable organizations, universities and hospitals, and critics say that violates religious liberty. The issue is now before the Supreme Court.
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Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn
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Virginia Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Confuses Declaration of Independence with Constitution
"Our Constitution declares that 'all men' are created equal. Surely this means all of us," Judge Allen wrote on the first page of her opinion. That line opens the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and appears nowhere in the Constitution.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/edva-ssm-opinion.pdf
Wright Allen was appointed to the federal bench by President Obama.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-virginia-gay-marriage-20140213,0,5553408.story
The Virginia decision follows a declaration from Attorney General Eric Holder that the federal government will begin to expand same-sex marriage rights from the top down by recognizing marriages between same-sex couples on a federal level that invalidates the ability of states that ban such rights. Privileges included in this expansion by the federal government would include spousal privilege in a courtroom and the right to jointly file for bankruptcy.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/02/14/VA-Same-Sex-Marriage-Ruling-Confuses-Declaration-Of-Independence-With-Constitution
How many branches of government do they control?
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They just have to find some sort of cause no matter how ridiculous. Maybe she wants some sort of entertainment contract from one of the gay Hollywood people:
****Chelsea Clinton says gay rights have made progress
AP 2/16/2014 11:24:57 PM
Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton said Sunday that the gay-rights cause made "incredible progress" on political and legal fronts in 2013, but progress should not be mistaken for success.
Clinton called lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues "the unfinished business of the 21st century" in an address at a national conference in Las Vegas where actress Ellen Page came out as gay days earlier in an emotional speech that's stirred a social media outpouring.
Clinton urged a crowd of 600 professionals who work with children to become more sensitive to the needs of LGBT youth, saying the deck is stacked against them because of bullying, rejection and other harassment.
"I've often been asked why issues of equality are so important to me. Frankly, I don't know why they ask that question," Clinton said. "This is about the premise and promise of our country. (It's) always marching forward to a more perfect union. I was raised in a family where inertia is not an option."
The Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign Foundation's inaugural conference, which was designed to promote the safety and welfare of LGBT youth, honored Magic Johnson and his wife, Cookie, former 'N Sync singer Lance Bass and writer Robin McHaelen for their support of gay rights.
The Johnsons' son, E.J., who accepted the award on their behalf, praised his parents for giving him unconditional love after he revealed that he was gay.
During the three-day conference that ended Sunday, Betty DeGeneres, mother of Ellen DeGeneres, stressed the importance of parents in giving support to LGBT children, and Candace Gingrich, the openly gay half-sister of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, served as a moderator for a panel discussion about LGBT youth issues.
On Friday, Page, 26, whose role as a pregnant teenager in the 2007 film "Juno" won the hearts of moviegoers and earned her an Oscar nomination, came out as gay at the conference, saying, "I feel a personal obligation and social responsibility" and that she was "tired of lying by omission."
Clinton praised both Page and Jason Collins, the NBA player who announced he was gay after last season.
"Now others have followed his (Collins') courageous example, and I hope later on this year, we'll be cheering for the first openly gay player in the NFL," Clinton said, referring to Missouri All-American Michael Sam, who came out this month.
She noted how 17 states and Washington, D.C., recognize same-sex marriage and how the U.S. Justice Department recently instructed all of its employees to give lawful same-sex marriages sweeping equal protection under the law in every program it administers.
"With all the incredible progress we had in 2013, it's easy to think progress marks success," she said. "We certainly shouldn't take anything away from the historic victories in 2013 ... But we should not mistake progress for success. We need to continue to push for progress in communities, states and the country."
The conference, which was held in partnership with the National Education Association and American Counseling Association, drew teachers, counselors, coaches, social workers, health professionals and others who work with children.
A report issued in conjunction with the conference focused on youth who identify themselves as transgender or express their gender in nonconventional ways. It found that such youth feel even more marginalized and challenged at school and require more attention, said Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign.****
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The recent post on Gender thread, ‘Kill the Gays’ Law Called for by Muslim Association in Malawi
by Pamela Geller, reminded me of the delicate balance Minneapolis congressman Keith Ellison strikes with both constituencies. Can't everybody just get along?
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2158
I wonder if Rep. Keith Ellison addressed gay rights on his visit to Mogadishu last year, or kept those views in the vest pocket.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/us/politics/keith-ellison-minnesota-congressman-visits-somalia-and-meets-president.html?_r=0
How about when he was in Gaza:
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Persecution_of_Homosexuals_%28Palestinian_Authority_area%29
He is at ease with the issue in front of the camera on home turf:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS9AZ-_VOsQ
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The competitive Georgia Senate race will covered elsewhere. My observation on this piece by the founder of Daily Kos is the left's belief they will win states merely by upping their "non-white" numbers.
"Georgia’s population grew by 1.5 million between 2000 and 2010. Of those, 81 percent — 1.2 million — were nonwhite. That brought down Georgia’s percentage of whites from 63 percent in 2000 to 59.7 percent in 2010. And that trend appears to be accelerating: According to updated census estimates, that number was down to 55.1 percent in 2012. "
http://thehill.com/opinion/markos-moulitsas/198650-markos-moulitsas-a-blue-georgia
Absent in his certainty is any indication, much less proof, that leftist policies have been helpful to "non-white" people.
He also fixates on Presidential year voting with a non-white at the top of the ballot. A bigger political story is the huge level of Obama-2012-voter buyer's remorse.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/02/buyers-remorse-71-of-obama-voters-regret-voting-for-his-reelection/
https://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2013/December/Young-Obama-Voters-Suffering-Buyers-Remorse/
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-voters-already-feeling-buyer-s-remorse
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(http://4-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/03/655x445xStupidDemocratJoke047.jpg.pagespeed.ic.g6xRxITZT7.jpg)
These are dark days - being ruled by the ignorant.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/remember-when-ronald-reagan-was-in-congress-good-times-good-times.php
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-democrats-policies-make-income-inequality-worse/2014/03/14/97d5074e-aada-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html
Democrats are making income inequality worse
By George F. Will, Published: March 14
Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it. So Barack Obama will not temper his enthusiasm for increased equality with lucidity about the government’s role in exacerbating inequality.
In the movie “Animal House,” Otter, incensed by the expulsion of his fraternity, says: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture.” Such thinking gives us minimum-wage increases that do very little for very few. Meanwhile, there are farm bills, like the one Obama signed last month at Michigan State University.
MSU was one of the models for the land-grant colleges created under the 1862 Morrill Act, whose primary purpose was to apply learning to agriculture. Today, we apply crony capitalism to agriculture. The legislation Obama lavishly praised redistributes wealth upward by raising prices consumers pay. Vincent Smith of Montana State University says small non-farm businesses are almost 30 times more likely to fail than farms, partly because the $956 billion farm legislation continues agriculture’s thick safety net. The geyser of subsidies assures that farm households will continue to be 53 percent more affluent than average households.
Certain payments are, however, restricted. People making more than $900,000 annually are ineligible.
Seventy percent of Agriculture Department spending funds food services. Nearly 48 million people — almost as many live on the West Coast (in California, Oregon and Washington) — receive food stamps. This dependency, inimical to upward mobility, is assiduously cultivated by government through “outreach initiatives” to “increase awareness” and “streamline the application process.”
Between 2000, when 17 million received food stamps, and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, even though unemployment averaged just 5.1 percent. A few states have food stamp recruiters. An award was given to a state agency for a plan to cure “mountain pride” that afflicts “those who wished not to rely on others.”
Nearly two-thirds of households receiving food stamps qualify under “categorical eligibility” because they receive transportation assistance or certain other welfare services. We spend $1 trillion annually on federal welfare programs, decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that if one-third of the money for poverty programs was given directly to the poor, there would be no poor. But there also would be no unionized poverty bureaucrats prospering and paying dues that fund the campaigns of Democratic politicians theatrically heartsick about inequality.
The welfare state, primarily devoted to pensions and medical care for the elderly, aggravates inequality. Young people just starting up the earnings ladder and families in the child-rearing, tuition-paying years subsidize the elderly, who have had lifetimes of accumulation. Households headed by people age 75 and older have the highest median net worth of any age group.
In this sixth year of near-zero interest rates, the government’s monetary policy breeds inequality. Low rates are intended to drive liquidity into the stock market in search of higher yields. The resulting boom in equity markets — up 30 percent last year alone — has primarily benefited the 10 percent who own 80 percent of all directly owned stocks. Charles Wolf writes in the Weekly Standard: “The financial sector’s profits rose from 18 percent of total corporate profits preceding the recession in 2007 to 23 percent in 2013.”
Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says the total reserves of depository institutions “have ballooned from a pre-crisis level of $43 billion to $2.5 trillion.”
And? “The store of bank reserves awaiting discharge into the economy through our banking system is vast, yet it lies fallow.” The result is a scandal of squandered potential:
“In fourth quarter 2007, the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $14.7 trillion; at year-end 2013 it was estimated to be $17.1 trillion. Had we continued on the path we were on before the crisis, real GDP would currently be roughly $20 trillion in size. That’s a third larger than it was in 2007. Yet the amount of money lying fallow in the banking system is 60 times greater now than it was at year-end 2007.”
The monetary base having expanded 340 percent in six years, there is abundant money for businesses. But, says Fisher, the federal government’s fiscal and regulatory policies discourage businesses from growing the economy with the mountain of money the Fed has created. This is why “the most vital organ of our nation’s economy — the middle-income worker — is being eviscerated.” And why the loudest complaints about inequality are coming from those whose policies worsen it.
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(http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/stimulus-cartoon.jpg?w=771&h=575)
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Typical Bloomberg News item. Don't worry Democrats ; Bush approval rating even lower than Brock's.
Barack Obama
Obama Beats Bush
Jonathan Bernstein
Mar 19, 2014 9:31 AM ET
By Jonathan Bernstein
In February, I asked whether Barack Obama's approval ratings had pulled ahead of those of George W. Bush at a similar juncture in his presidency, ending a long period where they were basically tied. We now have evidence they have.
Today, Gallup has Obama at 41 percent approval, which is probably a bit lower than his true Gallup score from the last few weeks. HuffPollster’s polling average estimates the president's approval at 43.7 percent and slowly rising. A month ago, the trend was less clear, and results varied depending on whether one looked at regular polls or those that were more sensitive to recent changes. Now the two methods are showing essentially the same thing: Obama bottomed out in November or December and has been improving gradually since.
(Yes, that means the New York Times was wrong to refer to Obama’s “sinking approval ratings.” I wouldn’t quibble with low and stable ratings. But sinking? Not in the last several months).
At a similar point in Bush's second term, in 2006, a March 13-16 Gallup reading gave him a 37 percent approval rating. He remained at that level or below until a late-summer rally, which pushed him above 40 percent for the final time of his presidency. So Obama’s lead over Bush, which I estimated at around 3 points last month, is up to around 5 points now, and the two men are headed in opposite directions.
This is not to say Obama is doing well. Unless his recent improvement gathers steam, he’s going to be a drag on Democrats in November, though he won't be as big a drag as Bush was for his party in the 2006 midterms. And even if Obama rebounds, it probably wouldn't be enough to help the Democrats hang on to some tough Senate seats. Ronald Reagan was very popular until the 1986 election, when Democrats took a number of Senate races, in large part by unseating Republican incumbents who had benefited from having Reagan at the top of the ticket in 1980.
But at least for now, Obama isn't as unpopular as Bush was in 2006. This suggests a good year for Republicans (especially in the Senate), but not a landslide.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/01/anti-obamacare-cancer-patient-attacked-by-reid-now-receiving-death-wishes-from-liberals/
Compassion: Anti-Obamacare cancer patient smeared by Reid now receiving death wishes from liberals
posted at 7:51 pm on April 1, 2014 by Guy Benson
Welcome to your feel-bad story of the month. Remember Julie Boonstra? She’s the single mother fighting leukemia who appeared in an anti-Obamacare television ad running in Michigan:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpjyr1x7mC0&safe=active[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpjyr1x7mC0&safe=active
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid assailed Ms. Boonstra, and others like her, in a breathtakingly mean-spirited floor speech — going so far as to say that “all” of their negative experiences were “untrue” and “lies.” Reid now claims he doesn’t remember saying any such thing, but there’s video tape:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nefN-QvOPXY&safe=active[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nefN-QvOPXY&safe=active
In his effort to discredit Boonstra, Reid relied on a Washington Post “fact check,” which effectively ruled her story half true. In fact, every claim Boonstra made in the ad has been confirmed, as explained by the Detroit News’ Dan Calabrese:
Boonstra is on five different medications to help deal with her leukemia. The Blue Cross PR spokesman claimed that they are all covered. But when Boonstra went to fill her prescription for Loratadine — a prescription-level equivalent of Claritin that she uses to control congestion brought on by chemotherapy — she was told that Loratadine is not covered. She has not yet attempted to restock any of her other meds but she is already having to come with strategies to deal with that problem. The $5,100 cap on Boonstra’s out-of-pocket spending is for in-network care only. If she has to go out of network, she could spend an additional $10,200…When Boonstra was first diagnosed, she had to go through a painstaking process to get approval for her chemotherapy drugs to be covered. When she finally found insurance she liked, she had no problem with the chemo drugs. She now says that process is starting all over again. Boonstra has already had to cut back on her bone marrow biopsies, which she was having on a regular schedule she had worked out with her doctor, because she doesn’t have clarification on whether these will be covered. I could go on, but the bottom line is this: Julie Boonstra told the truth, and arrogant media “fact checkers” had a lot of nerve claiming she hadn’t when they never even talked to her.
Nevertheless, Reid’s inaccurate nasty gram touched off a torrent of bile from Obamacare supporters, including this delightful care package Boonstra received in the mail:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkGLhQtCQAAFBdq.jpg)
Die, because your experience is inconvenient to my “pissed off” ideology. Incidentally, Ms. Boonstra isn’t the only Obamacare victim who received a cancellation notice, and whose subsequent plan presents out-of-pocket hardships:
Breast cancer survivor Ginny Mason was thrilled to get health coverage under the Affordable Care Act despite her pre-existing condition. But when she realized her arthritis medication fell under a particularly costly tier of her plan, she was forced to switch to another brand. Under the plan, her Celebrex would have cost $648 a month until she met her $1,500 prescription deductible, followed by an $85 monthly co-pay. Mason is one of the many Americans with serious illnesses — including cancer, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis — who are indeed finding relatively low monthly premiums under President Barack Obama’s law. But some have been shocked at how much their prescriptions are costing as insurers are sorting drug prices into a complex tier system and in some cases charging co-insurance rates as high as 50 percent. That can leave patients on the hook for thousands.
Another example from North Carolina:
Amy Newbold, a 57-year-old saleswoman from Randolph County, N.C., lost her employer insurance last year. Through HealthCare.gov, she found a mid-tier “silver” plan with premiums that at first blush are $75 a month lower than her previous policy. But there are no savings, she said, since her old premiums were paid with pretax dollars and Obamacare premiums are paid with aftertax dollars. Newbold said she faces substantially higher drug costs for arthritis and psoriasis and worries that an out-of-pocket maximum of $5,000 could put needed medicines out of reach. “I feel left out in the cold, and I don’t know why it has to be that way,” she said
Maybe Reid can make these “liars” famous, too. Indeed, unleashing left-wing wrath on ordinary people for the sin of speaking out must be a pretty effective method of stifling dissent — which is precisely what Reid wants.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oglXa0jG6OQ
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Where does the liberal slant end? Even Takotsubo syndrome is due to global climate change - and all "natural disasters" are due to climate change. They never existed before. Now they are all man made :x
*****By Rachel Hochhauser April 3, 2014 5:45 AM The Daily Beast
Broken Hearts Can Kill You
Day-to-day heartache doesn’t hold a candle to scientifically proven heartbreak—a real thing called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Turns out, your cardiac muscle can temporarily enlarge and weaken, and what’s more, the number of diagnoses is growing, leading a team of researchers to examine the cause. They found a surprising correlation that has the power to impact each and every one of us, even if you think you’ve got heart health on lock.
First described in Japan, broken heart syndrome got its name because a diagnosed patient’s left ventricle balloons to resemble the shape of an octopus trap. In non-doctor speak, the condition is essentially an impermanent weakening of the heart, often triggered by extreme emotional or physical stress—anything from losing a job to surviving a tsunami. Some physicians postulate a similarity to the fight-or-flight response; stress hormones paralyze the heart, affecting muscle tissues and blood vessels, and impede proper contraction of the left ventricle.
Patients with the condition may experience chest pain, shortness of breath, and other false evidence, such as biomarkers and electrocardiogram changes, bearing the markers of a cardiac arrest.
Though some studies have been conducted internationally, the latest research from the University of Arkansas—which explores a synergy between natural disasters and cases of cardiomyopathy—is unlike any other stateside. Dr. Sadip Pant, an internist at the university and the lead investigator of the report, explains, “This is the first study of its kind in the country. We have so many hurricanes and storms…but not one has described the spiking of the cases after natural disasters.”
His team used a nationwide hospital discharge database to identify a group of more than 20,000 diagnosed cases. When they mapped them out geographically, the results indicated “clusters” of broken heart syndrome patients around sites of recent tragedies. Essentially, the data illustrates a notably larger number of reported cases in areas that had seen a natural disaster.
Missouri and Vermont possessed the highest number of reported cases, and the latter, with 380 cases per million residents, had more than double most other states. The data came from the same year Hurricane Irene wreaked the worst havoc Vermont had seen in decades. Similarly, the “cluster” in Missouri occurred near the site of 2011’s massive Joplin tornado. And while there might have been a number of other factors affecting these results, the general research takeaway suggests natural disasters can strongly contribute to cardiomyopathy.
The correlation was first noticed after the 2004 earthquake in Japan, and since then plenty of other global examples have popped up on the radar. Dr. Pant says, “There have been cases reported from Australia after the great flooding. Similarly, people from France described increasing cases after a village burned down.”
Looking at the bigger picture, the study’s implications are significant when viewed in light of the increasing number of natural disasters on the whole. According to a 2013 report from the New England Journal of Medicine, the scale of these events is expanding, with three times as many from 2000 through 2009 versus those recorded from 1980 through 1989. Climate-related events account for nearly 80% of the increase, indicating that climate change may affect our health in more ways than we anticipated. The journal also notes that since 1990, “natural disasters have affected about 217 million people every year,” which just goes to show the importance of furthering our understanding of medical heartbreak.
As if you needed another reason to worry about global warming.
Climate changes aside, there are smaller immediate shifts we can make today, namely prepping response teams for future catastrophic incidents. Dr. Pant’s most important takeaway is the need for further education amongst physicians. Emergency room staff—often the first to see patients affected by natural disasters—and cardiologists need the background knowledge required to properly diagnose the syndrome, because its symptoms usually resemble those of a heart attack. Misidentification of the problem means a delayed legitimate diagnosis—no small thing when it comes to matters of the heart. While the syndrome is largely reversible, Takotsubo also requires careful attention during its acute phase.
Dr. Pant says, “It’s really important to have widespread knowledge of this disease, not just among cardiologists, but among the other medical specialties, so they can detect in time and diagnose accurately after.”
A properly diagnosed cardiomyopathy patient usually mends—like most romantic heartbreak—within a month or two.*****
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The Left Isn’t Pro-Gay — It’s Pro-Power
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On April 7, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
Libertarians and liberal Republicans have been proposing a truce on social issues in order to be able to concentrate on fiscal issues, but there is no such thing as a truce on any issue with the left.
Brendan Eich offered the left a truce on gay marriage. He talked about tolerance and diversity and he got his head handed to him. His forced departure from the Mozilla Foundation, which is behind the Firefox browser, should be a wake up call to anyone on the right who still thinks that social issues can be taken off the table and that we can all agree to disagree.
Those on the right who insist that conservatism should be reduced to fiscal issues imagine that the culture war is a fight that the right picked with the left. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The left does not care about gay marriage. In most left-wing regimes, homosexuality was persecuted. It was illegal in the USSR. Gay men were locked up in Cuba and are still targeted in China. Nicolas Maduro, the current hero of the left, openly uses homophobic language without any criticism from his Western admirers. It goes without saying that homosexuality is criminalized throughout the Muslim world.
Engels viewed homosexuality as a perversion born out of the bourgeois way of life that would be eliminated under socialism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States stated that homosexuality “is a product of the decay of capitalism” and vowed that once the revolution took place, a “struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.”
The left’s shift on this issue, as on many issues, was purely tactical. The left’s leading lights were racists who jumped into civil rights. They were sexists who became feminists. They were advocates for the working class who despised the idea of working for a living.
The culture war does not emerge from the left’s deeply held beliefs. Its leaders could care less about the things that they pretend to care about. It emerges instead from the need to maintain a constant state of domestic conflict.
You can’t have a truce when the other side wants a war.
Did the activists who claimed Eich’s scalp care about him or his $1,000 donation to defend marriage? They’re already forgetting his name and moving on to the next target. Eich just happened to make a good target. The Mozilla Foundation is shaky, its board was insecure, and once an online dating company cynically came out with a publicity stunt to keep the news cycle churning, the scalp of the man behind Javascript was claimed. If he had hung on for another few days, the whole thing would have gone away.
Next week it will be someone else. And then the week after that.
Opting out of the conflict means standing by while men like Eich are torn down, not because they did anything wrong, but because destroying them allows the left to feel the thrill of its power over people.
Every gang needs to hurt and terrorize people in order to feel its power. Unlike a Chicago street gang which goes in for an honest mugging or beating, the online activists of the left do their dirty work in this way. Afterward there is no blood and there are no bruises, but lives are destroyed and its social justice activists chortle to themselves coming off an adrenaline high before going after someone else.
The purpose of these purges is not to make the country more tolerant, but to make it more afraid. The message of the Eich purge is not, “accept gay marriage,” it’s “don’t question us.” As many have pointed out, Eich had the same view of gay marriage at the time he made that donation as Obama and Hillary.
But Eich wasn’t “us.” He wasn’t a member of the club.
Members of the club can and do make racist jokes. They can oppose gay marriage. They can sexually harass female employees, pay them less and even kill them. They can do all these things because the “club” is not about gay marriage or equal rights for race or gender.
It’s about the supreme power of the club.
You can call the club, liberalism, progressivism or simply “the left.” You can call its members Marxists, Socialists or anything else you like. They go by many names, some real and some fake, but they are the “club”; a totalitarian organization dedicated to absolute power in the name of any available lie.
The left is a totalitarian movement that inverts everything it touches. It fights against poverty by making more men poor. It helps black people by keeping them down, and it promotes tolerance through displays of intolerance. Its endgame is simply raw power. It wants as much of it as it can get its hands on.
We can stand aside, but it will affect us sooner or later. Even if we don’t get picked to be the teachable moment of the day, we will find ourselves in a country that is less free and more oppressive every year.
The idea that any part of the left’s agenda can be delinked and ignored is wishful thinking. The left’s incessant accusations of racism show that the refusal to engage an issue does not take it off the table. It’s the left that determines the content and the context of the conflict. And that’s why the right is losing. It imagines that it can unilaterally retreat to more favorable ground.
That’s a strategy that has yet to work.
The left doesn’t do truces. If the right cedes gay marriage, all it will have won is the right to be called homophobes for the next hundred years. And the culture war will move on to the next issue and the one after that. The purges will continue and more criminals guilty of thought crimes will be paraded for the virtual cameras. Yesterday’s commonplace idea will be tomorrow’s act of unspeakable bigotry that prevents you from being employed, opening a business or even staying out of prison.
You may be in the clear today, but you won’t be tomorrow.
Wars aren’t won by constantly retreating. They’re won by taking a stand for what you believe in.
The left constantly takes stands, but it believes in nothing. Like all totalitarian movements, it worships at the feet of the bronze bull of power. It believes in the virtue of its outrage, the might of its rhetoric and the pleasure of trampling an enemy underfoot. Every one of its beliefs are baseless and expendable in the name of its true god of power.
The right has sold its moral birthright in the hopes of being tolerated by a movement with no morals or beliefs except in the virtue of its own intolerance. It strategically embraces the left’s ideas and hopes that this process will eventually lead to a truce.
It can’t and it won’t.
The left does not hate the right because of gay marriage. It does not hate the right because it thinks that the right is racist, sexist, transphobic, semaphoric or plasmatic. It hates the right because it is not of the left. The right stands in the way of its absolute power. These two things are enough to be hated.
Totalitarian movements are destructive. They feed off conflict and desire absolute power. They cannot be compromised with, reasoned with or appeased. Instead they have to be exposed for what they are.
The only way to beat a totalitarian movement is to expose the dirty little secret that it is not pro-black, pro-gay, pro-woman or pro anything except pro-power. It is a greedy, corrupt and selfish movement that does not stand for a better world tomorrow, but for unlimited abuses of power in the world today.
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'Smart growth' means that leftist, centrally planned governments will tell you where you may work, live and travel.
THE LEFT’S DREAM IS THE TWIN CITIES’ NIGHTMARE
Relying on the excellent work of Katherine Kersten, we’ve written before about the left’s big plans for the Twin Cities. The Metropolitan Council, an unelected body, wants to steer new jobs, homes, and economic development to areas within one half mile of major transportation stops. These stops will mostly be in the urban core and inner-ring suburbs.
In these favored areas, tax dollars will be lavished on high-density housing, bike and pedestrian amenities, and subsidized retail shops. The money thus lavished will come from people who live elsewhere.
The transportation needs of the rest of the metropolitan area will take a back seat. Money to improve highways and bridges will shrink. Congestion will grow and traffic safety will suffer. Residents will be pushed into “stack and pack” high-density housing.
As Kersten observes in her latest column on the subject, such a regime “is a tough sell in a democracy in which people believe they have a right to govern their own towns with their neighbors.” Accordingly, it is being promoted as the price the Twin Cities region must pay to remain “economically competitive” with peer regions. The Council insists that without its program — which it markets as Thrive MSP 2040 — the Twin Cities will lose jobs and creative young professionals to more enlightened metro areas like Portland and Seattle.
Intuitively, though, it seems obvious that, in Kersten’s words, people don’t move to a metro area for light rail; they move for opportunity. Similarly, intuition tells us that rigid central planning around a leftist agenda does not promote opportunity.
The facts bear this out. According to the Council’s own data, between 2000 and 2010, while the Twin Cities were was losing population and New York and Los Angeles were experiencing a mass exodus, Atlanta gained 415,000 residents; Dallas-Fort Worth 318,000; Houston 241,000, and Raleigh, North Carolina 190,000.
What do these “people magnets” have in common? Less burdensome government regulation and fewer land use restrictions. Both are strongly correlated with greater economic growth. Thus, Kersten concludes that the Council’s plan will push the Twin Cities in exactly the wrong direction.
In reality, though, Thrive MSP isn’t about competing with other areas for jobs and creative professionals. Rather, it’s about implementing a vision of how, as a matter of leftwing ethics and aesthetics, we should live. People always seem to vote with their feet against this top-down, authoritarian approach.
The Council’s other rationale for Thrive MSP is concern about the economic plight of the region’s low-income households. Here, the Council may be sincere. However, as Kersten shows, these households are likely to suffer most from its misguided policies:
The council deplores our region’s lack of “affordable housing.” Yet its drive for densification likely will significantly increase housing prices, which will harm low-income residents. Rents will rise, too. In Portland, for example, income-adjusted median gross rents in high-poverty areas rose more than 2.5 times the increase in the rest of the metro area during densification from 1999 to 2009.
The “gentrification” that accompanies transit-oriented development often disproportionately displaces low-income households, driving them from the urban core to more dispersed areas with less transit. Low-income families also suffer disproportionately when bus service must be cut to pay for light rail serving well-heeled suburbanites, as frequently occurs.
Kersten reminds us that the Twin Cities already has a very low rate of business formation and, in recent years, taxes as well as labor, property and energy costs have escalated substantially. Thrive MSP seems designed, almost diabolically, to exacerbate these trends and render them irreversible.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/why-the-lefts-dream-is-the-twin-cities-nightmare.php
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Leftist oppose Keystone XL because the heavy oil is worse than light sweet crude like they have at ANWR.
Fine, then what about oil from ANWR? Who stopped that??!!
Oil from tar sands spews 17% more greenhouse gas than the average crude oil refined in the United States. ... That's a risk that climate champions such as Kerry and Obama shouldn't be willing to take.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/15/opinion/white-house-waxman-keystone-pipeline/index.html
New leftist dictionary: Exhale - to "spew" CO2.
Climate Champions? Obama leaves Air Force One on and idling during 15 day golf vacations, flies the family dog on a separate jet, and Kerry's pride is a $7 million, 76 ft imported yacht. Good grief!
Kerry's Yacht - "a departure from the norm in the opulent world of yachting”:
(http://www.ihatethemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/john-kerry-yacht-isabel-e1280139732692.jpg)
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/tax-dodging-john-kerry-new-yacht-built-overseas
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I only post this liberal propaganda because of this line:
"The Republican "more drilling brings the price down" argument clearly isn't working. It is, however, making oil companies a hefty profit at our taxpayer-subsidized expense."
I have to ask, since when does the left give a crap about taxpayers. Leave it up these people and our taxes would be substantially higher. Yet here he tries to sound like he is protecting taxpayers.
******Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva Become a fan
Co-chair, Congressional Progressive Caucus
'Drill, Baby, Drill' Has Failed -- And Now We Can Do Something About It
Posted: 05/02/2014 11:18 am EDT Updated: 05/02/2014 11:59 am EDT
In the next few weeks, Congress will decide the country's Fiscal Year 2015 funding priorities. A lot is riding on whether we fund necessary environmental, clean energy and reclamation programs or leave them to wither. I'm hoping we do the right thing.
It's important to know the context. Americans paid an average of $3.57 for a gallon of gasoline last year. Compare that to the $2.40 per gallon average in 2009. The Republican "more drilling brings the price down" argument clearly isn't working. It is, however, making oil companies a hefty profit at our taxpayer-subsidized expense. We need a better national strategy.
This year President Obama requested about $6.9 billion for clean energy technology programs at the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. Many parts of his proposal are smart investments in our environmental future. Unfortunately, the administration wants to accelerate the already rapidly expanding exploitation of domestic oil and gas fields. This would do grave damage to our already heavily stressed climate.
How stressed? Last month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a series of reports finding once again that human activities are the leading cause of higher atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) levels and a warming climate. The reports find that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industrial processes have contributed 78 percent of total GHG emissions since 1970. The scientific community expects the volume to double -- some even say triple -- by 2050.
Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues have other things on their minds. In the guise of being worried about the economy, they have introduced a number of bad bills to allow oil and gas companies to drill and frack wherever and however they please. This won't help the consumer. Since 2008 oil production from federal lands and waters has gone up 7 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Despite that dramatic increase in extraction, gas prices haven't gone down since 2009.
More oil and gas activity adds more CO2 to the atmosphere, causing our climate to get warmer. The scientific consensus on those questions is overwhelming. The only debate today exists in professional climate change denial circles. If my conservative colleagues are concerned about the country we leave our children, my question is this: Is our environmental debt out of control? Is it time for us to scale it back?
Solving environmental degradation and curbing climate change are not easy tasks. But I believe we have the chance to do what's right for our future now, without waiting. We need to curb the carbon dioxide emissions already polluting our atmosphere; just as seriously, we need to start making sustained investments in a cleaner future. Part of the president's proposed budget would address this, especially through increased renewable energy production investments and through the Climate Action Plan.
Republicans keep arguing for sequestration as the only way to reduce the deficit. I think they're wrong, but their argument raises an important question: When you see a problem, when is it time to stop contributing to it? When is enough enough? When Congress finalizes the FY2015 budget, I hope my colleagues bear in mind the need to start chipping away at the environmental debt we're leaving our children. Coming generations of Americans will judge us harshly if we continue to pollute our atmosphere in the name of short-term profits, especially when there's a better way.
This post is part of a series from the Safe Climate Caucus. The Caucus comprises 38 members of the House of Representatives who have committed to ending the conspiracy of silence in Congress about the dangers of climate change. For more information, visit the Safe Climate Caucus website and like the Safe Climate Caucus on Facebook.*****
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Only 30 seconds and there isn't a word in here that is true. This is the Majority Leader of the US Senate?
(And Mitt Romney didn't pay income taxes for 10 years? http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/06/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-anonymous-source-told-him-mitt-rom/)
This guy is reckless and nuts, and somewhere close to half the country supports what he is doing?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncN1f3umTec[/youtube]
“Pollution” isn’t causing global warming, the Koch brothers are not the “two richest people in the world,” and the idea that the brothers are somehow one of the “main causes” of climate change is delusional, even if you buy into the anthropogenic global warming theory. The U.S. is not the main emitter of CO2–China is–and within the U.S., Koch Industries is far down the list of CO2 emitters. Koch doesn’t do any coal mining or oil extraction, to my knowledge, and it doesn’t own power plants. No doubt refineries emit some CO2, as do all manufacturing operations, but Koch Industries is not one of the major emitters in the United States, let alone the world.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/harry-reid-sinks-deeper-into-the-abyss.php
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Democrats and leftists (now one and the same) have zero interest in truth. They care only about how they can manipulate the public into doing their bidding. It's all about centralized control. There is clearly no lie which Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama will not spout - knowing full well it is in fact a lie - to influence low-information voters.
I honestly don't know how this situation can possibly be fixed without the country splitting into constitutionally conservative and social democratic fragments. Far too many of our citizens are ignorant and disengaged. This will not end with the nation's borders as we know them now. Secession and quite possibly violent resistance are all but inevitable at this point, IMHO.
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Agree with two previous posts. I am very pessimistic that it is already too late. The left is winning big.
We have immense corruption in government, wall street and the rest. We hear about "1% ers" when it suits the left's political purposes. The answer is always to tax the rich and buy votes with the cash. Obamster reduced funding for the FBI for white collar crime. And yet the illegals get more legal help than the rest of us:
******Administration to pledge equal education for illegal immigrants
.
By Benjamin Goad - 05/07/14 02:27 PM EDT
The Obama administration announced Wednesday it would issue new guidance requiring U.S. schools to provide equal education to all children, regardless of their immigration status.
Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are expected to detail the proposal Thursday morning during a conference call with reporters.
The Justice and Education departments sought through 2011 guidance to ensure equal treatment for children living in the U.S. illegally in accordance with the Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyler vs. Doe ruling, which prohibited a school district from charging illegal immigrants extra tuition fees.
“The Obama administration continues to receive reports that school districts are adopting policies and practices that have the effect of discouraging, and in some cases preventing, undocumented children and children from immigrant families from enrolling in public schools,” the Justice Department said in announcing the follow-up guidance. “The new guidance is intended to help address these issues.“
The updated guidance is intended to help schools understand their responsibilities under Plyler vs. Doe and other federal civil rights laws..
Read more: http://thehill.com/regulation/205484-administration-to-pledge-equal-education-for-illegal-immigrants#ixzz318lrFiIR
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook
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...Secession and quite possibly violent resistance are all but inevitable at this point, IMHO.
Possibly true, but I think discussion of the s-word or taking up arms is out of bounds politically. For one thing, the deep divisions are not geographical. I would love to see an inside the nation, opt-out plan where I could give up my claim to government benefits and cronyism perks in exchange for lower levels of taxation and regulation. But its not going to happen.
More realistically, the conservative movement could - win over the Republican party, win the House, gain more than 10 seats in the Senate and put forward a half dozen really good Presidential candidates that would run against leftist-fascism this time instead of running against each other - all this year!
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First this, from wikipedia: Populism is a political doctrine in which one sides with "the people" against "the elite".
Reich is as far left as they come, in my view. Therefore it is funny when we find areas of agreement. The so-called populism argument is one conservatives need to articulate to win. The left uses it heavily in their rhetoric but not in their governance. A purer leftist like Reich might actually want them to embrace it. Reich starts with this, also showing that the purer conservative thought is populist:
Who made the following comments? (Hint: Not Warren, and not Bernie Sanders.)
A. We "cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street."
B. "The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy..."
C. "If you come to Washington and serve in Congress, there should be a lifetime ban on lobbying."
D. "Washington promoted moral hazard by protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized profits and socialized losses."
E. "When you had the chance to stand up for Americans' privacy, did you?"
F. "The people who wake up at night thinking of which new country they want to bomb, which new country they want to be involved in, they don't like restraint. They don't like reluctance to go to war."
(Answers: A. Rand Paul, B. Ted Cruz, C. Ted Cruz, D. House Republican Joe Hensarling, E. House Republican Justin Amash, F. Rand Paul )
Skipping forward, here are Reich's six principles, with my comments:
1. Cut the biggest Wall Street banks down to a size where they're no longer too big to fail. I don't know about making banks smaller, but stop bailing out the Wall Street financial industry.
2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment from commercial banking... No, but he is right in concept. If you want federal insurance, there will be limits on risk taking.
3. End corporate welfare -- Yes, but also end the over-taxation, over-regualtion that corp welfare is intended to mitigate.
4. Stop the National Security Agency from spying on Americans. No, but stop the abuses.
5. Scale back American interventions overseas. Okay, but replace interventions with successful deterrence, not disarming, surrendering or pretending to not see the evil in the world.
6. Oppose trade agreements crafted by big corporations. Free trade agreements should not be crafted in the shadow of big government either. A real free trade agreement can be written on one side of a cocktail napkin. Anything more is government regulated trade. This concept is better labeled 'freedom to trade', a basic economic right.
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This would fit well in the Way Forward for the American Creed thread as well.
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I don't want to help this guy publicize a book, but this WSJ review should save us the trouble or finding and reading it.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-stress-test-by-timothy-f-geithner-1399844566?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304431104579554872107561290.html
... Mr. Geithner makes a persuasive case that he is the man most responsible for the federal bailouts of 2008.
Some prefer to credit his Treasury predecessor, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Others focus on the role of former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. But Mr. Geithner insists that, time and again as the crises flared in 2008, he was the most consistent and tireless advocate for government aid to struggling firms. His core principle is that, during a crisis, the creditors of large financial institutions should not suffer any losses.
...
Bear Stearns was heavily exposed to subprime mortgages, had been planning to file for bankruptcy protection, and its regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission were prepared to protect customer brokerage accounts. This was standard practice when securities firms failed. But Mr. Geithner intervened to give the firm short-term liquidity and arranged a sale to J.P. Morgan, a move that put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for some of Bear's risky mortgage paper. And so the taxpayer safety net was stretched to cover not just commercial banks but Wall Street investment houses as well.
...
...Mr. Geithner's difficulty in understanding the health of large financial firms. He admits that he didn't see the mortgage crisis coming and didn't grasp the severity of the problems after it appeared. He didn't require that the banks he was overseeing raise more capital because his staff's analysis couldn't foresee a downturn as bad as the one that occurred.
None of this is particularly surprising in a man who, at the time he became president of the New York Fed, had never worked in finance or in any type of business—unless one counts a short stint in Henry Kissinger's consulting shop. At Dartmouth, Mr. Geithner "took just one economics class and found it especially dreary."
*more at link*
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http://www.dennisprager.com/left-doesnt-care-bad-economic-news/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/14/heres-why-jon-stewart-mercilessly-mocked-harry-reid-last-night/
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The Democratic Party’s Brain Damage
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 16, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
In 2008, Democrats insisted that Senator John McCain was too old to be president. At a rally introducing Hillary Clinton, Congressman John Murtha criticized him for even running. “It’s no old man’s job,” he said.
Obama and Kerry used language suggesting that McCain was senile. Left-wing activists claimed that he could die of skin cancer at any moment. Late night comedians turned McCain’s age into a target.
McClatchy headlined a story, “Some wonder if McCain’s too old and wrinkly to be president.”
There are no stories in which reporters ask passerby if Hillary is too old and wrinkly to take 3 AM phone calls.
In Newsweek, Anna Quindlen, a fanatical Hillary supporter, wrote that, “The senator’s pursuit of the presidency reminds me a bit of those women who decide to have a baby in their late 50s.” If she has any objection to Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency while pushing 70, she hasn’t written about it.
By October, spurred by repeated media attacks on his age, 34 percent of Americans said that McCain was too old to be president. The sharp spike in the poll numbers over one month showed how effective the Democratic age smear was.
Had McCain been elected, he would have taken office at 72. If Hillary Clinton wins, she’ll be 69. And age is suddenly no longer an issue. Neither is health.
Quindlen emphasized that McCain couldn’t lift his arms over his head. No one is going to ask how flexible Hillary Clinton is in body (the political flexibility of the woman who opposed and supported nearly everything at one time or another is already renowned).
The problem as it turned out was not that McCain was old. It was that he was a Republican.
Slate ran an article claiming that McCain’s brain would go bad over the next eight years, but discussing the state of Hillary’s brain is out of bounds. Late night comedians won’t be making jokes about how old Hillary is or how confused she gets in the morning.
Those jokes could only be made about a man who was three years older than she is now.
It’s outrageous to question the medical consequences of Hillary’s “traumatic brain injury” which took her six months to recover from after passing out and falling down while boarding a plane. But ridiculing Bob Dole’s dead arm, an injury he suffered while dragging one of his men into a foxhole out of enemy fire during WW2, or McCain’s inability to lift his arms or perform certain tasks after they were broken by his torturers, was part of the political game.
We can question the health of war veterans, but not of a career politician.
There will be no stories about how wrinkled Hillary’s skin is. No one will ask her if she can tie her shoes or use Twitter without an assistant. Or whether she forgets things sometimes.
But if a Republican in his late sixties or early seventies becomes a candidate, then the switch will flip and suddenly asking those questions will become fair game.
Again.
The issue isn’t Hillary’s brain. It’s that Democrats don’t consider themselves accountable in the same way that they expect Republicans to be. It’s that they consider attacks on Republicans fair game that they are too thin-skinned to accept.
If McCain was too old and his brain too infirm to serve in the White House, the same people making that argument should have to explain why those same questions can’t even be asked about Hillary. Does three years make a world of difference? Has medical science been so dramatically revolutionized over the last eight years that they no longer matter?
If Hillary isn’t too old and if her health is off limits, then Democrats should admit that they engaged in cynical ageist attacks to win the White House. But that too would be accountability.
And we have a crisis of accountability.
The Democrat in the White House and his associates refuse to accept responsibility for anything. Any call for accountability results in an explosion of outrage as if the very act of holding the ruling party accountable is a crime.
The huffing and puffing over the suggestion that a woman who took six months to recover from a serious health episode may have health problems that will affect her performance is typical of the way that the Democratic Party behaves.
And of the way that its media auxiliaries echo its agenda.
When Murtha accused McCain of being too old, the media took the attack seriously. When Karl Rove mentioned Hillary’s health problem, the majority of the stories focused on it as a cynical attack. This partisan coverage gap is not an anomaly. It’s the new normal.
The problem isn’t Hillary’s brain damage. It’s the Democratic Party’s brain damage.
The Democratic Party, which has been around since the early 19th century, is just too old. The parts of its brain that relate to accountability and integrity have been burned out. The political party suffered a traumatic brain episode in the sixties and hasn’t recovered from it since. The left side of its political brain is dominant while the right side has completely withered away.
The Democrats keep insisting that they’re moving forward, when they’re actually wandering off to the left. They insist that they’re centrist when they’ve completely drifted off the road.
It doesn’t matter how young or old its candidates are as long as they base their worldview around discredited 19th century ideas about economics and equally discredited 20th century ideas about the virtues of central planning. A youthful body with a decayed brain rotting with ideas that were old when Nixon and LBJ were toddlers isn’t progressive.
It’s hopelessly reactionary.
Obama may have been in his late forties when elected, but his ideas were around one hundred and forty years old. No matter what age Hillary is, her ideas are equally old. It’s not the state of her brain that’s the problem; it’s the things that she’s been putting in there since a young age.
If Hillary and her Democratic Party really want to demonstrate their mental fitness, they can start by naming one single new economic idea that they’ve brought to the table in the last seventy years. And if they can’t, Americans will ask themselves whether they can afford another eight years of 19th century economics from a party whose last new idea is even older than Hillary.
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Thursday, May 19, 2011
USS Cesar Chavez? Why not the USS Saul Alinsky?
Incredibly, the U.S. Navy has decided to name a cargo ship after the guy who came up with the Obama campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!" That man is the late labor agitator and community organizer Cesar Chavez. Chavez's union, the United Farm Workers, used the saying he coined as its official motto. (In Spanish, "¡Sí se puede!")
The decision to name a Navy ship after this radical is remarkable not only because President Obama's teleprompter has the phrase "Yes, we can!" burnt into it from the phrase's overuse, but because the far-left leader was a disciple of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez, who died in 1993, worked for the Community Service Organization from 1952 to 1962. CSO was a pressure group created by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. Chavez has been lionized by the left because he hated capitalism and shared Alinsky's contempt for the American system. The man even sounded like Alinsky, insisting he loved America while working to undermine its institutions. Chavez said
Until the chance for political participation is there, we who are poor will continue to attack the soft part of the American system - its economic structure. We will build power through boycotts, strikes, new union - whatever techniques we can develop. These attacks on the status quo will come, not because we hate, but because we know America can construct a humane society for all its citizens - and that if it does not, there will be chaos.
"There will be chaos?" Prediction or threat? You decide.
Chavez is also connected to ACORN founder Wade Rathke, a fact I reported in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
When Rathke was employed as an organizer at ACORN's parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), he was trained by a man named Bill Pastreich who had studied Alinsky’s in-your-face organizing techniques. Pastreich had also been employed by Chavez's United Farm Workers.
Is it just a matter of time before the Obama administration commissions the USS Saul Alinsky? No doubt it will be a destroyer.
Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
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http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=60467
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Well, Cesar Chavez was strongly against illegal immigration.
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Together in Boston, a dream event for the silent leftists on the forum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEYAS5U5Wuk
Described here on National Review for the rest of us:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379587/elizabeth-warren-delusion-patrick-brennan/page/0/1
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I wrote about this race somewhere, probably under election fraud, but the ugliness exposes a rift in the Dem party. Jewish liberal Democrat incumbent since 1972 Phyllis Kahn is facing a serious primary challenge from Islamic Somali immigrant Mohammed Noor. Phyllis Kahn is a household name around here, on a par maybe equal to what Ted Kennedy was nationally. The liberal lioness is now blowing the whistle on Democrat fraud they perpetrated earlier as it backfires against her. More fraud incidentally than the Al Franken margin of victory that gave Obamacare it's 60th vote in the Senate. Perhaps more interesting than cheating is the cultural divide in the party the race is exposing. I wonder how well her position on gay rights fits with Sharia law, lol. Minneapois-based Powerline is covering the race, calling it business as usual:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/in-minneapolis-its-just-business-as-usual.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/109076.php
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Not sure this hyperlink will work but I don't have a url to the original cartoon.
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/206783309358337/photos/a.207689922601009.46857.206783309358337/732535253449804/?type=1&theater
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I had to cut and paste the entire URL and then it worked.
Good one!
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Another scorcher, I thought...
https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/ConservativeCartoonsDaily/photos/a.746324325406048.1073742575.215319478506538/746324738739340/?type=1&theater
(Marc: You will have to cut and paste the entire link to see it)
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1. :-o
2. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
3. :x
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/wh-weve-substantially-improved-tranquility-global-community
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When he first came on the scene he was more capable of this much more often, but still quite nice to see he still has it on occasion.
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/07/157129-moment-clarity-bill-maher-describes-liberals-like-never-thought/
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Leftist power, leftist results, how did it all work out?
(skip to the bottom if you don't like my long intro)
In November 2006, based mostly on Iraq war fatigue, the American people transferred nearly all power in Washington to the left. The last initiative won by the lame duck George Bush was the surge; all domestic policy momentum shifted to the Democrats, led in name Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and in fact by the Presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What happened in that time? Unemployment doubled. Real estate crashed. There was a financial run on the too big to fail institutions unprecedented at least since 1929. Then there were the bailouts, TARP, a Presidential change, QE, cash for clunkers, cash for home buyers, cash for solar, cash for hybrids, cash for quitting work, artificially low interest rates and a debatable 'recovery' of sorts and a recession ending in the summer of 2009, the recovery summer of 2010 and so on. If you invested everything you owned at the exact bottom of the market, you would have at least two or three times (nothing) today!
For the left, this was the perfect storm, complete control of the House, the White House, and the swearing in of the (stolen) 60th Democratic Senate seat in July 2009. Tax increases on the rich became inevitable, along with the passage (or "deemed passed") of Obamacare along with a couple dozen more taxes that made it all possible. As good as it gets!
Jumping forward, Republicans swept the House elections in Nov 2010 to be sworn in and take control of the one chamber in Jan 2011, limiting the growth and spread of leftism to just Republican caving and administrative over-reaches. So the best year to judge the results of our leftist American storm was in their last big year, 2010, when George Bush had totally and completely left the building.
Here are the results of all this leftist euphoria, measured in terms of progress on their number one priority, income inequality.
Today's New York Times, Journal of the Left, Pravda on the Hudson, lifted from the trusted Editorial Page, from one of their most trusted columnists, Nicholas Kristof, telling us how bad income inequality is, (drum roll please):
" In 2010, 93 percent of [all] additional income created in America went to the top 1 percent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/opinion/nicholas-kristof-idiots-guide-to-inequality-piketty-capital.html?_r=0
Idiot's Guide to Income Inequality
This, from the party of the middle class and the expanding underclass?? Unfortunately, the policies of cronyism, government takeover, class envy and punishment of personal achievement are not how you rise the tide that lifts all boats.
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Even if you knew nothing else about our Secretary of State except this:
"Kerry had a cumulative average of 76 and got four Ds his freshman year - in geology, two history courses and political science, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerry-bush-gpas-at-yale-similar/
then THIS would not come as too much of a surprise:
"Leaked comments from unnamed senior government sources to Army Radio, Channel 2 and other Hebrew outlets have described the secretary as amateurish, incompetent, incapable of understanding the material he is dealing with — in short, a blithering fool."
http://www.timesofisrael.com/john-kerry-the-betrayal/
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/left-took-over-democratic-party-109348.html?ml=m_a2_1
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But can she afford birth control?
Sandra Fluke is trying desperately to carve political career out of being the face of "millennials who want free stuff," so she's running for California's state Senate. It isn't going well. Despite being the most easily recognizable candidate, Fluke floundered in June's open primary, where she carried just 19.4% of the vote in a turnout described as "embarrassingly low." That was enough to give her a weak second place finish. Unfortunately for her, it was probably not enough to bring substantial donors to the table.
Ms. Fluke is now the single largest contributor to her own Senate campaign.
From the Washington Examiner:
Fluke donated $12,000 to her campaign and $4,826.27 in non-monetary contributions. While $16,826.27 may not sound like a lot, Fluke also loaned her campaign $100,000.
Where does a 2012 law school grad working as a social justice attorney get a loan that size? Her campaign never responded to a Washington Examiner inquiry, so we’re left to speculate.
Perhaps the loan was in part secured by the family of Fluke’s husband, Adam Mutterperl. In 2012, Fluke married Mutterperl, an amateur stand-up comic and son of big-time Democratic donor William Mutterperl.
This is not a good sign. It could be an indicator that external support is less than stellar and, combined with Fluke's poor performance in the primaries, could portend trouble in the general election.
Also troubling? It looks like her family is propping up the numbers in order to keep up appearances....
As a family, the Mutterperls have given Fluke $20,500. Fluke’s own family has donated $9,600 to her campaign (her mother gave one donation as Betty and one as Elizabeth).
In total, Fluke has raised $416,185.28, according to disclosure forms. With one-third of that total coming from her family, it appears the campaign is trying to pump up its donation totals to appear stronger than it actually is.
Now, a family donating to a campaign is not surprising or unusual but the percentage of overall funds coming from Fluke's inner circle should raise red flags.
Currently, Fluke's campaign has raised more cash than Ben Allen, but Allen may still still be in a stronger position. First of all, he's considered a potent candidate with deepconnections in the district. He's given his campaign a $50,000 loan, and his parents have each donated $4,100. If you remove his family and his loan from the equation, he's raised $330,141 - slightly more than Fluke, who stands at $278,859.
And according to the Associated Press, the Examiner's numbers represent a "rosy" estimate. In reality, things are probably a bit worse:
“Allen has raised at least $443,388, including more than $50,000 from his law firm, Richardson & Patel LLP, while Fluke has raised about $500,000, including $175,000 from her own loans and contributions, according to campaign finance reports."
That would mean that Allen has funded just over 10% of his campaign, while Fluke is footing the bill to the tune of about 35%.
That's bad news for a campaign, but it's great news for someone who - just a few years ago - was claiming that $15 a month for birth control was a bridge too far....
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We must teach our children to be the NICEST on the planet. We are all so nice and thoughtful and understanding. That is the most important thing. We all love one another NOW, right NOW....
I never realized how many people are promoting this crap. It must be the internet juggernaut. Where did all this liberal crap come from? That and millions coming here who don't believe in America anymore.
*******Readin’, Writin’, and Social Justice Agitatin’
By Michelle Malkin • August 8, 2014 07:57 AM
Readin’, Writin’, and Social Justice Agitatin’
by Michelle Malkin
It’s back-to-school season across the country. But in an increasing number of districts, “back to school” doesn’t mean back to learning. Under the reign of social justice indoctrinators, academics are secondary to political agitation. Activism trumps achievement.
In Massachusetts, the John J. Duggan Middle School will open on August 25 with a new name and mission. It is now a “social justice magnet school.” As a hiring advertisement for teachers explained earlier this year, the emphasis will be on “helping students develop the necessary skills to analyze and synthesize information and to generate empathy by looking at multiple sides of important issues facing the world, be that hunger, water quality, racial barriers, child labor or imbalance of power.”
Concise writing, as you can see, is not on the social justice pedagogues’ agenda.
Oh, and forget about memorizing times tables or mastering the scientific method. The new principal says the school’s primary job is teaching “fairness.” Duggan Middle School’s junior lobbying factory is “serious about creating 21st century global citizens, and it begins with understanding who we are as members of each of those communities.”
The ultimate goal of these social justice prep schools: creating left-wing political advocates.
At the Crescent Heights Social Justice Magnet School in Los Angeles, children will work on “action projects” tied to the “United Nations Millennium Development Goals.” Students will spend the academic year transforming into “agents of change.” Yes, they will learn language arts. But basic reading and writing are only a focus of the magnet school, the founders explain, because “we want our students to recognize injustice in their world or the world at large and be able to fully express their outrage, their plan of attack, their progress in this endeavor.”
In Chicago, Ground Zero for social justice brainwashing, the Social Justice High School (SOJO), follows a similar mission. Activist teachers openly foster identity politics and systematically undermine individualism. Their specialties: “struggle and sacrifice.” SOJO’s mission statement sounds like a pot-addled Oberlin College freshman’s — er, freshperson’s — Sociology 101 term paper:
“Through collective community power, we commit to a conscious effort to overcome the intended historical obstacles that have been designed to disempower and divide our communities.”
At the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School, also in Massachusetts, students won’t learn math. They’ll be taught “social justice math.” (Freire was a Brazilian leftist who wrote a social justice teacher’s Bible called “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”)
His acolytes explain the push for radicalization of math: “Math is an instrument for detailing social justice issues and developing critical consciousness.” In the hands of progressive teachers, math “becomes an analytic tool to bring awareness to important world issues.”
In other words: One plus one equals “That’s unfair!”
New York City schools have been infested for years with city-funded math teachers who “train students in seeing social problems from a radical anticapitalist perspective,” as City Journal’s Sol Stern reported. As I’ve noted previously, the “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” guide rejects traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of politically correct number-crunching.
Out: Algebraic equations, geometric proofs and advanced calculus.
In: “Racial profiling, unemployment rate calculation, the war in Iraq, environmental racism, globalization, wealth distribution and poverty, wheelchair ramps, urban density, HIV/AIDS, deconstructing Barbie, junk food advertising to children, and lotteries.”
State education codes mandate value neutrality in the classroom. But in schools of “social justice,” every academic subject is a means to a “progressive” (anti-American, pro-collectivist, redistributive) ideological end. The radical transformation of K-12 classrooms into leftist agitation labs is embedded in the mission of countless teachers colleges and universities, which require social justice training or offer special certification in its indoctrination techniques.
These teaching institutions are pumping out generations of educators who cast themselves as leaders against “social struggle” — instead of facilitators of intellectual inquiry. Passing the most rigorous student standards in the world won’t amount to squat as long as the overseers of public education exploit government schools as community organizing vehicles for captive tots, tweens and teens.
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Pres. Obama and the Dems are trying to keep multinational corporations in America by passing laws, issuing executive orders and deeming things to be law retroactively, instead of competing with other countries and economies on a level playing field based on business climate, regulations, taxers etc. Witness firms like Walgreen and Minnesota's Medtronic dying to leave.
I wrote last year or so that California cannot solve its fiscal problems by raising tax rates - unless it bars the exits.
Minnesota's Governor is fighting the migration-out problem by attempting to levying state tax against the snowbirds even if they are gone for most of the year.
Glenn Beck noted in this context that the Berlin Wall was built and armed to keep people in, not to protect a border from outsiders as we think of it.
Is that what this country has come to - under liberal-fascist rule? Really?
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Unless we fight and win, then yes.
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Talk like a socialist while living like a capitalist raking in the dough:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113760/meet-amber-mostyn-wendy-daviss-most-powerful-political-patron
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Dan Rather on war against Islamic murderers, unless you would send your own son or daughter, shut up.
Why doesn't that same logic apply to the 99% always wanting to keep raising taxes on the 1%?
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The logic of the point is not without merit.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/08/25/leftists-hamas-and-nazis/
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http://www.justfourguys.com/1400-girls-are-raped-in-rotherham-and-feminists-dont-care/
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This is aimed at Paul Krugman but applies to all of the hypocritical left. How is it that they believe that hiking the cost of fossil fuels will kill energy use, but deny that an artificially high minimum wage law kills jobs or that high marginal tax rates kill off economic activity and job creating investment? It seems to me you can have it one way or you can pretend to have it the other, but you can't have it both ways.
(http://3-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.powerlineblog.com/i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/09/economics_venn1.gif,qresize=580,P2C382.pagespeed.ce.DhMS-I0jEK.png)
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387877/democrats-push-criminalize-dissent-kevin-d-williamson
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Good one Doug.
GM please post that in the First Amendment thread on the SCH forum as well-- that is a keeper.
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Now everyone has a "right" to "free" child care and paid leave!! Did anyone catch John Kerry advising Code Pink that one of the reasons they should support BamBam's going after ISIS is because they don't offer their members free health care?
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Joe Biden: 'The NFL Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet'Speaking at a conference Friday, the vice president was equal measures somber and feisty.
BY EMMA ROLLER
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz introduces Vice President Joe Biden at the DNC's Women's Leadership Forum on Sept. 19, 2014 in Washington.(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
September 19, 2014 In the bowels of the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington, Joe Biden was yelling.
The vice president was there to speak at the Democratic National Committee's annual Women's Leadership Conference, and he was fired up. Hillary Clinton and President Obama will address the crowd Friday afternoon.
In the run-up to its leadership conference, the DNC has faced somewhat of a leadership crisis of its own. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has faced flack from members of her party over the past two weeks for two recent PR blunders. On Friday she took the stage to introduce Biden, who has made a couple gaffes of his own recently.
In an otherwise warmly received speech, Biden did make one apparent slip, when he oddly praised a former Republican senator, Bob Packwood, who was accused of sexual harassment and ultimately resigned. Biden called Packwood "the type of Republican I miss," then continued his speech against sexual assault.
There was no apparent love lost for Biden and Wasserman Schultz—at least in the crowd. Wasserman Schultz called Biden a "national treasure" for his work on domestic violence, including his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, which President Clinton signed into law 20 years ago. She also admitted to sporting a "Biden for President" button on her backpack when she was in college.
Biden in turn called Wasserman Schultz his "little sister," and praised her for her work as chairwoman. "I've never seen anybody work as hard and as tirelessly as Debbie has," he told the crowd.
Both addressed domestic violence in the scope of Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice, whom the National Football League suspended indefinitely after TMZ uncovered footage of Rice assaulting his then-fiancée in an elevator.
Biden name-dropped Cynthia Hogan, one of his former aides on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was recently hired as the NFL's senior vice president for public policy and government affairs.
"The NFL ain't seen nothin' yet," Biden said. "They have no idea what they just bought onto." Also on Friday morning, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reportedly asked his staff to look into the military's relationship with the NFL.
BIDEN: 'THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY JUST BOUGHT ONTO"
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Biden touted the success of the Violence Against Women Act, saying there has been a 64 percent drop in domestic violence between 1993 and 2010.
"Success will come when the societal attitude changes and not a single woman in America asks herself the question, 'What did I do?' " he said. Then, in a theatrical staccato: "Never. Never. Never is it the woman's fault!"
Biden also used the speech to introduce a new PR campaign by the White House to encourage young men to speak out against sexual assault on college campuses. The new campaign, called It's On Us, will try to shift the burden of combating rape culture from women to men. The Justice Department will also award $6 million in grants to 18 colleges "to develop comprehensive campus sexual-assault prevention and response programs."
"We have to reach out and engage young men, because the vast majority are decent," Biden said.
Then—after finishing a speech about domestic violence to a predominantly female audience—Biden derided the idea of "women's issues." The state of America's middle class, Biden said, is the most important women's issue. His speech echoed similar comments Hillary Clinton made Thursday, in which she pushed for paid leave and universal child care, along with passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.
"You can't have a conversation about economic growth if women aren't fully participating in the economy," Biden said. "It's not just about equity, it's about economic growth for everyone."
But no speech would be complete without a bit of campaign puffery, especially now that lawmakers in Congress have mutually decided to skip out on work to campaign for the next two months. Biden ended his speech by mentioning female senators facing tough reelection bids—Jeanne Shaheen, Mary Landrieu, and Kay Hagan—and reassuring the crowd, "They're gonna win, by the way."
He also praised two female gubernatorial candidates who face uphill battles against Republicans—Wisconsin's Mary Burke, and Texas's Wendy Davis, who is polling around 12 points behind her Republican opponent, Greg Abbott.
"If you have an extra dollar, give it to Wendy Davis," Biden said. "She's going to win that race."
The audience's applause drowned out the scoffs coming from the press gallery.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/22/die-at-75-emanuel-obamacare-death-cult
It is a bad sign that Obamacare's architect thinks you have no value past 75. 65 really, he just gives you a 10 year cushion.
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Found this to be a really good article...
http://www.westernfreepress.com/2014/09/21/the-top-three-reasons-why-liberals-hate-conservatives/
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Found this to be a really good article...
http://www.westernfreepress.com/2014/09/21/the-top-three-reasons-why-liberals-hate-conservatives/
Yes. Very insightful!
One quote:
“Conservatives believe what they see; liberals see what they believe.”
The over-riding theme of Utopianism is right on the money. Who knew that aiming all kinds of new taxes and regulations at the rich would in fact make the rich richer and all the rest of us worse off? It's like trying to restrict blood flow through the heart to get better circulation in the extremities. It doesn't work that way.
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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-meyer/2014/10/07/piers-morgan-slams-obama-what-hell-he-doing
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Piers Morgan Leon Panetta; all these liberal s are the same. Where were they before? Only now they are slamming the Delusional One. They are full of crock.
Panetta is really a self serving scumbag. This guy belonged to a one world government organization when he was Congressman. Who does the think he is kidding?
He looks and sounds like a cheap fraud now.
Nothing to cheer about these damn liberals calling out Obamster now.
Every f'n one of them will be front and center to shove Hillary down our throats. She is just as liberal as any of them. To further their God darn causes.
Go back to Britain Morgan.
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will the left criticize him on domestic policy? The few whispers on that note are criticisms to the tune that he is NOT liberal enough!!! :-o
*****"Morning Joe': Panetta, Elite Dems 'Holding Back' on What They Really Think of Obama
'Morning Joe' on Dems Attitude Toward Obama, 10/9/14
On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough and newly minted Bloomberg TV host Mark Halperin discussed opinion behind the scene of President Barack Obama within the Democratic Party ranks.
According to Scarborough, there are parallels to be drawn between Obama in 2014 and then-President George W. Bush in 2006.
“Listen, there are going to be a lot of Democrats on the campaign trail that are going to be hypocrites, that are going to do what Hillary Clinton did by saying, ‘Well gee, if he only listened to me on Syria, dandelions would be spreading across northern Iraq and eastern Syria,’” Scarborough said. “That said, Mark Halperin, at some point, Barack Obama is going to have to face the fact that he is alone and isolated in Washington, D.C. every bit as much, or I would say more than George W. Bush in 2006. I commented at the time that Republicans in 2006 would come to me in green rooms and talk about how absolutely horrific George W. Bush was in the White House, what a terrible leader he was and then the red light would come on and they wouldn't say anything. Of course, I would so i was hated. I was a disloyal Benedict Arnold Republican for saying on air what they would never say on air. It’s such a carbon copy of that now where Democratic senators, senior Democratic senators trashing Barack Obama up and down when the red light is not on. Red light comes on, they're muted. Only difference between Leon Panetta and 80 percent of Democrats in Washington I’ve talked to is Leon Panetta is actually saying it while the camera light is on. What are your experiences?
Halperin pointed out it wasn’t just Leon Panetta, who reveals some of his dissatisfaction with Obama in his memoir, and other Washington, D.C. Democratic Party elites, but Hollywood Democrats as well.
Partial transcript as follows:
HALPERIN: Well Ron Fournier is exactly right. What Panetta is saying what you hear from Washington Democrats, but Hollywood Democrats. The president is going out to do a fundraiser tonight. I talked to prominent people in Hollywood. Almost all of them, strong supporters of the president, feel disappointed for one reason or another. Either all the elites in the Democratic Party, or the vast majority of them, are right or the president and his team are right and I think we'll learn over the next two years and history will record, you know, Panetta says the president is more like a law professor than a passionate leader. I know that Robert [Gibbs] and others hear these things too but they largely dismiss them as not being relevant or being wrong. I think the judgment will be made if he can lead this coalition, if he can deal with the aftermath of the midterms, he can have a good final two years of his presidency but elite opinion is strongly against him on all these same issues.
THOMAS ROBERTS: Let's not forget Panetta is getting paid and the more that he goes out there to hawk a book –
HALPERIN: He’s not that kind of guy.
ROBERTS: He doesn't want to sell a book?
HALPERIN: He does.
ROBERTS: And doesn't want to have close ties to Hillary Clinton if she runs for president?
HALPERIN: The fact of the matter is in his book and on his book tour, he’s held back on what he really think.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That’s holding back?
HALPERIN: He does
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We may be a little discouraged right now but the left is unraveling.
1. They told us a strong economy was no good because of the inequality in it. They took the strength, growth and velocity out of the economy and inequality worsened - especially for targeted Democratic constituent groups.
2. They can't win without winning a big margin with the women's vote so they invented the Republican war on women. Sen. Mark (Uterus) Udall is the poster boy, attacking Cory Gardner on birth control that has been legal in 50 states since Griswald. 1965. Gardner took the air out of it with his support for making it available over-the-counter.
3. They can't win without black vote. So their candidates all beg blacks to vote for them, in support of Obama, but he is so unpopular in their state that they won't say whether they themselves ever voted for him! (Is there a better example anywhere of cognitive dissonance?)
4. They can't win without the Hispanic vote and they get it only by promising amnesty based immigration reform. Small problem: They had the House, Presidency and 60 votes in the Senate and did NOTHING on this front. The President clarified on Univision by explaining that there are some things the President can not do alone. He further clarified that he can do it alone. At the end of the summer. No, after the election. But if he can do it alone, why give him the House or the Senate too? On those races they could vote their economic interests.
5. Back to no one respecting women other than the left and the left says most women don't know if they've been raped.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-26/news/bs-ed-rape-statistics-20140928_1_22-percent-13-percent-30-percent
6. And now David Corn of Mother Jones says Minorities "May Not Even Know That They're Not Being Allowed To Vote"!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/10/22/david_corn_minorities_may_not_even_know_that_theyre_not_being_allowed_to_vote.html
Meanwhile Republicans think women are big girls now and treat blacks and minorities as equals, unneeding of special attention.
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Once people admit Hillary isn't running, maybe Faux-cahontas can get her own thread...
I would like to rip her lack of substance separately, but for now these pieces seem to expose her rotten hypocrisy.
Elizabeth Warren’s silence was Fidelity’s gain
By Joan Vennochi | GLOBE COLUMNIST OCTOBER 23, 2014
ACCORDING TO Senator Elizabeth Warren, the political system is rigged to help Wall Street. For that, she blames Republicans, lobbyists, and President Obama.
Yet, Warren is not entirely immune from the urge to help powerful financial interests — at least when they are local.
As reported by the Globe’s Christopher Rowland, Boston-based Fidelity Investments was able to water down new rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that were aimed at regulating the mutual fund industry in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
The SEC wanted to impose a new liquidity standard on mutual funds, and replace a fixed $1 share price with a more accurate “floating” share price. But by the end of an aggressive Fidelity lobbying campaign, the capital requirements were eliminated and the “floating” share price applied only to funds that serve large, institutional investors.
“The lobbying pressure was relentless,” Sheila Bair, former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and now head of the nonprofit watchdog group Systemic Risk Council, told the Globe. “It is a good example of how the narrow interest of the industry prevails in this debate.”
Given her populist image, it would be more in character for Warren to fight such a narrow industry interest. In this case, she did not. When Fidelity’s top executive, Abigail P. Johnson, personally lobbied the SEC in 2012, Warren stayed out of the fight. At the time, Warren was running for Senate against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, whose biggest source of funding came from Fidelity employees, according to a news report by the Globe’s Beth Healy.
While it made political sense to avoid antagonizing the mutual fund giant, Warren’s silence was Fidelity’s gain.
As the lobbying battle dragged on into 2014, Warren and Ed Markey — now both representing Massachusetts in the Senate — objected, through their staffs, to proposals that Fidelity didn’t like. They didn’t cite industry complaints; they cited concerns of local politicians. A compromise was reached, which, according to Rowland’s reporting, favored the mutual fund industry.
In a statement to the Globe, Warren’s office said the SEC rules were “an important first step” and stressed a need to “balance the risks that money market funds can pose to the economy against the need to maintain money market funds as an important investment alternative.”
Compromise is not a crime. It’s a natural part of politics. But when compromise comes down on the side of powerful financial interests, that’s exactly the kind of politics Warren is said to be fighting. And she’s taking that fight to the national stage.
“The game is rigged and the Republicans rigged it,” she said recently in Minnesota. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” she said in Colorado.
She doesn’t leave Democrats off the hook either. In an interview with Salon, she said of Obama, when “the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street . . . Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education . . . ”
Pronouncements like that keep Warren’s name in the mix of potential White House candidates, which she insists is of no interest to her. Yet the super-liberal wing of the Democratic Party revels in the Wall Street-rigging gospel according to Warren, and sees her as an alternative to Hillary Clinton.
But as the back story on Fidelity shows, ideological purity is hard to sustain in the real world of politics — especially in the real world of local politics.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/22/elizabeth-warren-fight-when-financial-interests-are-local-warren-doesn-always-fight-them/DkghG96OG60w9IZm1H1dhM/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2014/10/18/with-aggressive-strategy-fidelity-fought-washington-over-money-market-funds-and-won/3ZbsOGsb9rfMuPpx2wx58H/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2014/04/23/warren-should-more-candid/xlHHBZNv8Fn5HSEC53OqhN/story.html
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And if victims speak up - plan to get arrested and be brought to jail. Wow! From George Will. Sounds like Communist Russia to me....
*****The nastiest political tactic this year
George Will
By George Will
Published Oct. 22, 2014
The early-morning paramilitary-style raids on citizens' homes were conducted by law enforcement officers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests and lugging battering rams, pounding on doors and issuing threats. Spouses were separated as the police seized computers, including those of children still in pajamas. Clothes drawers, including the children's, were ransacked, cellphones were confiscated and the citizens were told that it would be a crime to tell anyone of the raids.
Some raids were precursors of, others were parts of, the nastiest episode of this unlovely political season, an episode that has occurred in an unlikely place. This attempted criminalization of politics to silence people occupying just one portion of the political spectrum has happened in Wisconsin, which often has conducted robust political arguments with Midwestern civility.
From the progressivism of Robert La Follette to the conservatism of Gov. Scott Walker (R) today, Wisconsin has been fertile soil for conviction politics. Today, the state's senators are the very conservativeRon Johnson (R) and the very liberal Tammy Baldwin (D). Now, however, Wisconsin, which to its chagrin produced Sen. Joe McCarthy (R), has been embarrassed by Milwaukee County's Democratic district attorney, John Chisholm. He has used Wisconsin's uniquely odious "John Doe" process to launch sweeping and virtually unsupervised investigations while imposing gag orders to prevent investigated people from defending themselves or rebutting politically motivated leaks.
According to several published reports, Chisholm told subordinates that his wife, a teachers union shop steward at her school, is anguished by her detestation of Walker's restrictions on government employee unions, so Chisholm considers it his duty to help defeat Walker.
In collaboration with Wisconsin's misbegotten Government Accountability Board, which exists to regulate political speech, Chisholm has misinterpreted Wisconsin campaign law in a way that looks willful. He has done so to justify a "John Doe" process that has searched for evidence of "coordination" between Walker's campaign and conservative issue advocacy groups.
On Oct. 14, much too late in the campaign season to rescue the political-participation rights of conservative groups, a federal judge affirmed what Chisholm surely has known all along: Since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago, the only coordination that is forbidden is between candidates and independent groups that go beyond issue advocacy to "express advocacy" — explicitly advocating the election or defeat of a particular candidate.
But Chisholm's aim — to have a chilling effect on conservative speech — has been achieved by bombarding Walker supporters with raids and subpoenas: Instead of raising money to disseminate their political speech, conservative individuals and groups, harassed and intimidated, have gone into a defensive crouch, raising little money and spending much money on defensive litigation. Liberal groups have not been targeted for their activities that are indistinguishable from those of their conservative counterparts.
Such misbehavior takes a toll on something that already is in short supply: belief in government's legitimacy. The federal government's most intrusive and potentially punitive institution, the IRS, unquestionably worked for Barack Obama's reelection by suppressing activities by conservative groups. Would he have won if the government he heads had not impeded political participation by many opposition groups? We will never know.
Would the race between Walker and Democrat Mary Burke be as close as it is if a process susceptible to abuse had not been so flagrantly abused to silence groups on one side of Wisconsin's debate? Surely not.
Gangster government — Michael Barone's description of using government machinery to punish political opponents or reward supporters — has stained Wisconsin, illustrating this truth: The regulation of campaigns in the name of political hygiene (combating "corruption" or the "appearance" of it) inevitably involves bad laws and bad bureaucracies susceptible to abuse by bad people.
Because of Chisholm's recklessness, the candidate he is trying to elect, Burke, can only win a tainted victory, and if she wins she will govern with a taint of illegitimacy. No known evidence demonstrates any complicity in Chisholm's scheme, but in a smarmy new ad she exploits his manufactured atmosphere of synthetic scandal in a manner best described as McCarthyite. Indeed, one probable purpose of Chisholm's antics was to generate content for anti-Walker ads.
Wisconsin can repair its reputation by dismantling the "John Doe" process and disciplining those who have abused it. About one of them, this can be said: Having achieved political suppression by threatening criminal liability based on vague theories of "coordination," Chisholm has inadvertently but powerfully made the case for deregulating politics. *****
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Epic corruption.
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The Democrat Party must really think blacks are complete idiots - how insulting. This from the party that brought us segregation in the first place.
Democrats Join The Ferguson Lynch Mob Right As The Case Against Officer Wilson Collapses
Posted By David Horowitz On October 27, 2014
Reprinted from DailyCaller.com.
Everyone who hasn’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid is aware that during elections Democrats resort to the race card to scare African Americans, for whose intelligence they have limitless contempt, into voting for them. If Republicans are elected, their propaganda claims, “black churches will burn” or the racial clock will be turned back to the era of segregation, an era that Democrats happen to have been directly responsible for.
This year it’s the mythical threat white policeman allegedly pose to black youth, as Democrats and their media enablers encourage a “lynch mob” mentality — as Howard Kurtz put it recently — in a desperate attempt to pocket black votes.
A flyer distributed by the Georgia Democratic Party (Ferguson is in Missouri) warns:
“On August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year old African-American named Michael Brown was fatally shot six times and killed by a white police officer, his body left in a pool of blood for four hours. Ferguson Missouri’s population is 67% African-American. But the city’s mayor, 5 of its 6 city council members, and 94% of its police force are white. What are we going to do about it? If we want a better, safer future for our children, it’s up to us to vote for change.”
Note first that this flyer was distributed in Georgia, not Missouri. In other words, according to Democrats: Republicans everywhere are racists. Moreover, if 67 percent of Ferguson citizens are black and they elect a white mayor and city council members shouldn’t that be applauded as a sign that they are committed to America’s inclusive ideal, and are not voting along racial lines? Wouldn’t Democrats be saying that if white majority populations were voting for blacks (as they in fact do)? Once again the claim that this reflects white racism is itself a racist claim, one that is typical of self-hating progressive whites.
The flyer’s timing couldn’t have been worse. The just released autopsy report shows that Michael Brown was only unarmed because he failed to wrestle Officer Darren Wilson’s gun from his holster, when he attacked Officer Wilson in his police car. How many innocent citizens attack a policeman in his police car and attempt to grab his gun from him?
According to the very liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch, “A source familiar with Wilson’s version of events, as told to investigators, said the ‘incredibly strong’ teen punched Wilson and then pressed the barrel of the cop’s gun against the officer’s hip and fought for control of the trigger.” You think the officer might have been in fear for his life after that?
The autopsy report further shows that Michael Brown’s hands were not in the air in a posture of surrender when he was shot – as the Ferguson lynch mob claims — but that the 6’4” 292lb individual was advancing on the much smaller officer, less than twenty feet away. In other words, the autopsy report supports Officer Wilson’s claims that there was a violent struggle and that he shot Wilson first with the intent to warn him to stop and finally – when he failed to do so — to stop him.
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shlep:
To drag, traditionally something you don’t really need; to carry unwillingly. When people “shlep around,” they are dragging themselves, perhaps slouchingly. On vacation, when I’m the one who ends up carrying the heavy suitcase I begged my wife to leave at home, I shlep it.
schlemiel:
A clumsy, inept person, similar to a klutz (also a Yiddish word). The kind of person who always spills his soup.
schlock:
Cheap, shoddy, or inferior, as in, “I don’t know why I bought this schlocky souvenir.”
shlimazel:
Someone with constant bad luck. When the shlemiel spills his soup, he probably spills it on the shlimazel. Fans of the TV sitcom “Laverne and Shirley” remember these two words from the Yiddish-American hopscotch chant that opened each show.
shmendrik:
A jerk, a stupid person
schmuck:
Often used as an insulting word for a self-made fool, but you shouldn’t use it in polite company at all, since it refers to male anatomy.
schultz: A jerk, a liar, spews political nonsense, a political clown, as in Debbie Wasserman.
Many Democrats are schultz's
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-moms-who-stay-home-raise-kids-thats-not-choice-we-want-americans-make_817807.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
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What happened to the woman's "right to choose"? Another example of Obama's war on freedom.
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As always, it is never the policy. Just the messagenger. Why in the world would the Dem Party want to keep Schultz as the DNC head after this loss? But it is good for conservatives to keep her there :wink:
AP | By By KEN THOMAS
Posted: 11/08/2014 2:45 pm EST Updated: 11/08/2014 4:59 pm EST
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats are planning an extensive review of what went wrong in the 2014 and 2010 elections, hoping to find ways to translate success in presidential campaigns into future midterm contests.
A party committee will conduct a "top-to-bottom assessment" of the Democrats' performance in recent midterm elections and try to determine why they have struggled to turn out its core voters in nonpresidential elections.
"It's apparent that there are increasingly two separate electorates: a midterm electorate and a presidential electorate. We win one and we don't seem to be able to win the other," said Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who leads the Democratic National Committee, in an interview Saturday. "That is a fundamental dynamic that we have to change."
Democrats suffered heavy losses in last week's elections, ceding Senate control to the Republicans and surrendering more seats in the already GOP-majority House as Republicans ran against an unpopular President Barack Obama.
Republicans picked up governor's offices in a number of Democratic-leaning states like Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois and strengthened their grip on state legislatures.
Democrats have been successful in turning out an Obama-led coalition of minorities, women and young voters in presidential elections, but have struggled in midterm races when turnout is lower and the electorate tends to be older and whiter, favoring Republicans.
Wasserman Schultz said the new committee, whose membership will be announced in the coming weeks, will look at the party's tactics, messaging, get-out-the-vote operations and digital efforts in recent nonpresidential elections. The group plans to report back in February at the DNC's winter meeting.
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said last week's elections underscored GOP momentum.
"When Republicans came to the table and played their game, they lost and that's a problem," Kukowski said. "We have said from the beginning that Obama 2012 wasn't the standard for us. The midterms showed that and we are going to keep building on our successes."
The DNC's postelection review has parallels to a postmortem that Republicans conducted after Mitt Romney was defeated by Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
The report urged Republicans to shift its focus to year-round, on-the-ground political organizing in the states and recommended that the GOP embrace a comprehensive immigration overhaul. That recommendation quickly hit resistance from congressional Republicans who rely on primary voters who oppose creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the U.S.
"Our party has a problem," Wasserman Schultz said in a video announcing the project. "We know we're right on the issues. The American people believe in the causes we're fighting for. But the electoral success we have when our presidential nominee is able to make a case to the country as a whole, doesn't translate in other elections. That's why we lost in 2010, and it's why we lost on Tuesday."
Wasserman Schultz said she discussed the need for a review with Obama on election night and both agreed on the need to move forward. She also spoke about her plans Saturday with Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the party's leaders in Congress.
"We need to understand everything that went wrong so that we can address all the potential problems and prepare for future elections," she said.
Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KThomasDC
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392900/universities-are-now-taking-down-their-jonathan-gruber-videos-brendan-bordelon
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/pets-allowed
This is where we are as a civilization.
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Perhaps George Will's best column ever, IMHO.
We rightfully worry a lot around here about elected Republicans not governing conservatively and not representing our own best interests. A much greater failure has been elected Democrats not representing their constituents best interests. Who else is pointing THAT out?
Government for the strongest
By George F. Will Opinion writer December 5, 2014
Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.
Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.
The American majority that believes life will be worse for the next few decades — more than double the number who believe things will be better — senses that 95 percent of income gains from 2009-2012 went to the wealthiest 1 percent. This, Kotkin believes, reflects the “growing alliance between the ultra-wealthy and the instruments of state power.” In 2012, Barack Obama carried eight of America’s 10 wealthiest counties.
In the 1880s, Kotkin says, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad revenues were larger than the federal government’s revenues. That was the old economy. This is the new: In 2013, the combined ad revenue of all American newspapers was smaller than Google’s; so was magazine revenue. In 2013, Google’s market capitalization was six times that of GM, but Google had one-fifth as many employees. The fortunes of those Kotkin calls “the new Oligarchs” are based “primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods: media, advertising and entertainment.”
He calls another ascendant group the Clerisy, which is based in academia (where there are many more administrators and staffers than full-time instructors), media, the nonprofit sector and, especially, government: Since 1945, government employment has grown more than twice as fast as America’s population. The Founders worried about government being captured by factions; they did not foresee government becoming society’s most rapacious and overbearing faction.
The Clerisy is, Kotkin says, increasingly uniform in its views, and its power stems from “persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society.” The Clerisy supplies the administrators of progressivism’s administrative state, the regulators of the majority that needs to be benevolently regulated toward progress.
The Clerisy’s policies include dense urban living as a “sustainable” alternative to suburbia, and serving environmentalism by consuming less. Hence the sluggish growth and job creation since the recession ended in June 2009 — a.k.a. the “new normal” — do not seriously disturb the Clerisy. It preaches what others — including the 43 percent of non-college-educated whites who consider themselves downwardly mobile — are supposed to practice. The result, Kotkin says, is a “more stratified, less permeable social order.” And today’s “plutonomy,” an economy fueled by the spending of the relatively few people who guaranteed that luxury brands did best during the recession.
Michael Bloomberg, an archetypical progressive, enunciated a “ ‘Downton Abbey’ vision of the American future” (Walter Russell Mead’s phrase) for New York. As New York City’s mayor, Bloomberg said: “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.” Progressive government, not rapid, broad-based economic growth, will “take care of” the dependent majority.
In New York, an incubator of progressivism, Kotkin reports, the “wealthiest 1 percent earn a third of the entire city’s personal income — almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.” California, a one-party laboratory for progressivism, is home to 111 billionaires and the nation’s highest poverty rate (adjusted for the cost of living). One study shows that young Californians are less likely to become college graduates than their parents were. “The state’s ‘green energy’ initiatives,” Kotkin observes, “supported by most tech and many financial Oligarchs, have raised electricity rates well above the national average, making it difficult for firms in traditional fields like manufacturing, fossil fuels, agriculture or logistics.” California is no longer a destination for what Kotkin calls “aspirational families”: In 2013, he says, Houston had more housing starts than all of California.
In 2010, there were 27 million more Americans than in 2000 — but fewer births, a reflection, surely, of what Kotkin calls “the end of intergenerational optimism.” The political future belongs to those who will displace the progressive Clerisy’s objectives with an agenda of economic growth.
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by me in my opinion.
"the political future belongs to those who will displace the progressive Clerisy's objectives with an agenda of economic growth"
I drive down a major thoroughfare by me each day and it is remarkable the growth in new chain outlets (two new walmarts within a few miles of each other, paneras, chipoltes, flash burgers etc.) New malls springing up. Others half dormant. All very strange. In most of the chains are people obviously born elsewhere.
There really are two economies. For the wealthy and connected and cheap labor (those being born here paid beans and those from elsewhere willing to work for beans) the economy is booming. For the big moneyed players, the big companies. Health care is a case in point. The big companies are making huge profits. Somehow everyone else seems to paying more for it. The gov subsidizes these big companies who continue to increase rates passing the cost of those who get it free or cheap to the rest of us while they squeeze out every dime. Even drug stores are getting into managing our health care. They are now becoming providers.
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The reification of John Edwards "two Americas" :cry:
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100260720/whenever-you-mention-fascisms-socialist-roots-left-wingers-become-incandescent-why/
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The reification of John Edwards "two Americas" :cry:
There are two Americas, but not divided by rich and poor as Edwards asserted, IMHO. There is the America where your household participates or particpated in the productive economy and there is the America living where no one has done that. To me, that means the school janitor and the successful business owner are in the same, interconnected economy. They have more in common with each other than with people who don't have to get up in the morning, work and pay taxes.
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I like that.
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When people in these lands learn about all the bad Americans have done, it creates a whole new generation of terrorist. So the liberals say.
Now they want the whole world to know all they can release of details, methods, locations, partners, etc.
And they exaggerate what was done while playing down its value.
Torture in an al Qaida manual is when you scoop out the eyeballs one by one. When the enemy says we'll kill your children ... they kill your children.
Why do we want to tell future terrorists that we won't hurt anyone.
Who did we hurt, by the way? Who got injured by a US interrogator?
No one that I know of.
What did we get with these strong techniques?
Names, places, dates, plans, organizations, arrests, attacks stopped. That kind of thing.
We would have had that information anyway?
Yeah, right. Maybe after the fact.
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Krugman's theory is that government "stimulus" causes growth, and too much austerity hampers growth.
However, roughly since the Republicans won the House in 2010, spending as a percentage of GDP has been falling, the super deficits have been falling too, while growth has been steadily (and allegedly) improving.
Dan Mitchell at Townhall makes this point with US and UK numbers.
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/danieljmitchell/2014/12/31/another-oops-moment-for-paul-krugman-n1937290/page/full
"But where’s his evidence? Whether you look at OMB data, IMF data, or OECD data, all those sources show that overall government spending has been steadily shrinking as a share of GDP ever since 2009."
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More on the same point and same data...
If you wanted to grow government, and all leftists do, then maybe you should adopt Republican, "supply side" policies.
The greatest growth in government was made possible by the decrease in capital gains tax rates in particular under the Bush administration:
(http://freedomandprosperity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Krugman-U.S.-Austerity1.jpg)
On the other hand, had we successfully grown the private sector WITHOUT the expansion of government spending, the bungled housing policies and the monetary insanity, we could have had the real economic growth without the damage of inflating the bubble, the workforce meltdown and the ensuing collapse.
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While I am not against anyone who wants to meditate, between this and having James Taylor go to France to sing love songs to the French does not a rational government policy make:
*****Lawmakers To Meditate With Deepak Chopra
Betsy Rothstein 5:42 PM 01/16/2015
Can new age tactics get members of Congress to relax, get along and actually get something done?
Really. Highly. Unlikely.
But Deepak Chopra, a legendary meditation guru and bestselling author who has appeared on Oprah, is coming to Capitol Hill for a special briefing and presser and will give it his best shot.
He’s going to talk about how to reduce stress. But keep in mind that Deepak reportedly owns a Jaguar and lives in a 2.5 million home in La Jolla, Calif. — where stress is probably a rare visitor.
According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Deepak has some Deeply weird methods. For example, he “claims you can prevent and reverse cataracts by brushing your teeth, scraping your tongue, spitting into a cup of water, and washing your eyes for a few minutes with this mixture.”
He’s a huge Obama fan. In 2011 in HuffPost, he wrote, “I’d suggest that the X factor which sets Barack Obama aside as a unique candidate is his hard-won self-awareness.” He also called him the ”lighthouse and lightning rod” who “called upon Americans to show their better nature.”
The event on Capitol Hill will end with a short meditation session.
The members of Congress who are responsible for what should be a memorable occasion are Reps. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Steve Israel (D-N.Y.). Ryan is known for practicing meditation.
In the details… Thursday Jan. 22 from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Deepak will be available to answer questions from 2:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/16/ruth-bader-ginsburg-tattoo_n_6486594.html
While Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been a pop culture icon, her committed fanbase took their game to the next level this week.
A Ginsburg fan rivaling the devotion of Ruth Baby Ginsburg just got a tattoo of the justice, captioned "SUPREME."
The tattoo was drawn by Nikki Lugo, a Tattoo Paradise artist based out of Washington, D.C. and Wheaton, Maryland. She shared the artwork on her Instagram account Thursday.
The tattoo joins the swath of already existing merchandise praising Ginsburg as a badass, most of which was inspired by the Notorious R.B.G. Tumblr that the justice has hailed as "a wonderful thing."
"I had to be told by my law clerks, 'what's this notorious?'" Ginsburg told Katie Couric last July. "And they explained that to me."
Earlier this month, it was announced that Notorious R.B.G. blog creator Shana Knizhnik and MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon will co-author a biography of the justice.
P.C.
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Just fear mongering, bigotry, and rallying the base. :roll:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/21/for-republicans-muslims-will-be-the-gays-of-2016.html
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Unfortunately FOX's irresponsible over play is going to have some lasting consequences.
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Unfortunately FOX's irresponsible over play is going to have some lasting consequences.
http://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/fox-news-took-the-heat-but-cnn-talked-no-go-zones-too/253271
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Hollywood’s War Against American Sniper
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On January 22, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com
American Sniper is the movie that should not have existed. Even though the book was a bestseller, nobody in Hollywood wanted the rights.
And why would they?
The Iraq War already had an official narrative in Hollywood. It was bad and wrong. Its veterans were crippled, dysfunctional and dangerous. Before American Sniper, Warner Brothers had gone with anti-war flicks like Body of Lies and In the Valley of Elah. It had lost a fortune on Body of Lies; but losing money had never stopped Hollywood from making anti-war movies that no one wanted to watch.
Even the Hurt Locker had opened with a quote from leftist terrorist supporter Chris Hedges.
An Iraq War movie was supposed to be an anti-war movie. There was no other way to tell the story. Spielberg’s own interest in American Sniper was focused on “humanizing” the other side. When he left and Clint Eastwood, coming off a series of failed films, took the helm, it was assumed that American Sniper would briefly show up in theaters and then go off to die quietly in what was left of the DVD aisle.
And then American Sniper broke box office records that had been set by blockbusters like Avatar, Passion and Hangover Part II by refusing to demonize American soldiers or to spin conspiracy tales about the war. Instead of pandering to coastal progressives, it aimed at the patriotic heartland.
In a sentence you no longer expected to hear from a Hollywood exec, the Warner Brothers distribution chief said, “This is about patriotism and all the things people say the country is lacking these days.”
The backlash to that patriotism and the things the country is lacking these days didn’t take very long to form and it goes a lot deeper than snide tweets from Michael Moore and Seth Rogen. Academy members were reportedly passing around an article from the New Republic, whose author had not actually seen the movie, but still denounced it for not showing Chris Kyle as a bigoted murderer.
Hollywood progressives are both threatened and angered by American Sniper. And with good reason.
The most basic reason is the bottom line. Between Lone Survivor, Unbroken and American Sniper, the patriotic war movie is back. Hollywood could only keep making anti-war movies no one would watch as long as that seemed to be the only way to tackle the subject. Now there’s a clear model for making successful and respectful war movies based around the biographies and accounts of actual veterans.
Hollywood studios had been pressured by left-wing stars into wasting fortunes on failed anti-war conspiracy movies. Matt Damon had managed to get $150 million sunk into his Green Zone failed anti-war movie before stomping away from Universal in a huff. Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe had a real budget estimated at around $120 million, but had opened third after Beverly Hills Chihuahua whose titular tiny dog audiences preferred to either star and their political critiques.
But why spend over a hundred million on anti-war movies no one wants when American Sniper has already made over $120 million on a budget only half that much?
Hollywood progressives don’t look forward to having to write, direct and star in patriotic pictures and if they can’t destroy American Sniper at the box office, they can taint it enough that no major star or director will want to be associated with anything like it.
Adding to their undercurrent of anger is the way that American Sniper upstaged Selma at the box office and at the Academy Award nominations. Selma is a mediocre movie, but it was meant to be a platform for the usual conversation that progressives want to have about how terrible Americans are. Instead audiences chose to see a movie about how great Americans can be even in difficult times.
There’s nothing that threatens the left as much as that.
In a Best Picture lineup that includes the obligatory paeans to gay rights and the evils of racism, American Sniper distinctly stands out as something different. It displaces Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the previous sure winner which had its obligatory drunken Iraq War veteran claiming that the war was fought for oil, with an authentic veteran instead of Hollywood’s twisted caricature of one.
American Sniper and Lone Survivor signal a shifting wind in which the focus of movies about the War on Terror moves from the organizational conspiracy theories that Hollywood liked to make to the personal narratives of the men who fought in them. Many of the smarter progressive reviews of American Sniper grapple with the fact that the time when they could even have their favorite argument is going away.
Progressives would like Dick Cheney to be the face of the war, but are forced to deal with a world in which Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell will be how America sees the conflict. The lens through which the left liked to view the war, its obsessions with WMD, Bush and the path to war, have been eclipsed by the rise of ISIS and the return of American veterans. Their worldview has become outdated and irrelevant.
It’s easier for the left to vent its anger on American Sniper than to deal with its own irrelevance. The most shocking thing about the movie is not any political statement, but its presumption in dealing with the Iraq War and the men in it as if it were WW2. It doesn’t confront the left; instead it acts as if the left isn’t there. It fails to acknowledge the entire worldview through which Hollywood dealt with the war.
The left spends most of its time living in its own bubble and is shocked when events remind it that the rest of the country does not really share its opinions and tastes. American Sniper’s success is one of those explosive wake-up calls and the left has responded to it with all the expected vicious pettiness.
A billboard for the movie was vandalized and attacks from lefty outlets like New Republic and Vox not only target the movie, but the dead man at the center of it. The smear campaign against Kyle has reached new lows, because in death he has become an even more powerful symbol of everything that the left hates.
Hollywood tried to “Vietnamize” Iraq in the popular imagination. American Sniper shows they failed.
Whether or not American Sniper wins the requisite number of Oscars, its impact on Hollywood and on ordinary Americans will not go away. The anti-war movie is in eclipse. The movies that tell the stories of the sacrifices that American veterans have made in the war against Islamic terrorists are rising.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/354576.php
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Ok today on Drudge is DeBlasio thanking Sharpton for his "work" on "climate change"
Recently we saw the director of Health and Human Services praising him
Now I get it. It all comes to full circle in my mind now. Now I see in general where Sharpton gets his power.
He must be funded from wealthy progressive leftist elite. The deal is he can have is MSLSD platform to do his racial rants, promote himself and make fortunes in return for preaching all this leftist stuff.
He only needs a few powerful media moguls and agenda driven journilisters to keep him up front and center. As long he mouths their propaganda he is in the circle of the elites of the Obama army and Democrat machine and mainstream media and even the university types who are the central planners. the intelligentsia has gone power hungry in our country.
Perhaps this is why in history some have fought these university types - the intelligentsia ( I digress though).
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Racial hatred has always been a powerful weapon wielded by the dems. Nothing has changed, except the appearance of their racist demagogues.
Ok today on Drudge is DeBlasio thanking Sharpton for his "work" on "climate change"
Recently we saw the director of Health and Human Services praising him
Now I get it. It all comes to full circle in my mind now. Now I see in general where Sharpton gets his power.
He must be funded from wealthy progressive leftist elite. The deal is he can have is MSLSD platform to do his racial rants, promote himself and make fortunes in return for preaching all this leftist stuff.
He only needs a few powerful media moguls and agenda driven journilisters to keep up front and center. As long he mouths their propaganda he is in the circle of the elites of the Obama army and Democrat machine and mainstream media and even the university types who are the central planners. the intelligentsia has gone power hungry in our country.
Perhaps this is why in history some have fought these university types - the intelligentsia ( I digress though).
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01/27/two-weeks-after-zuckerberg-said-je-suis-charlie-facebook-begins-censoring-images-of-prophet-muhammad/?tid=sm_tw
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What is the carbon footprint from a burning clothing store?
Ok today on Drudge is DeBlasio thanking Sharpton for his "work" on "climate change"
Recently we saw the director of Health and Human Services praising him
Now I get it. It all comes to full circle in my mind now. Now I see in general where Sharpton gets his power.
He must be funded from wealthy progressive leftist elite. The deal is he can have is MSLSD platform to do his racial rants, promote himself and make fortunes in return for preaching all this leftist stuff.
He only needs a few powerful media moguls and agenda driven journilisters to keep him up front and center. As long he mouths their propaganda he is in the circle of the elites of the Obama army and Democrat machine and mainstream media and even the university types who are the central planners. the intelligentsia has gone power hungry in our country.
Perhaps this is why in history some have fought these university types - the intelligentsia ( I digress though).
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http://toprightnews.com/?p=8581 :x :x :x
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So six foreign students get to decide if the flag can be flown in UC Irvine?
More dismantling from within.
I suppose the professors give their whole hearted support.
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http://conservativetribune.com/kerry-gop-senators-iran/
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Secoond post:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/5-times-democrats-undermined-gop-presidents-with-foreign-governments/article/2561314
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Levin points out that each time the liberals were cavorting with the communist enemy.
The difference now is that the Republicans are trying to stop a liberal President from cavorting with the enemy.
So not only will the MSM not point out the fact Democrats have done this many times they would never point the out this difference either.
And the Republicans should be out front and center pointing this out. But what do they do instead - cave. Like they always do.
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:cry: :cry: :x
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Trying to cover for our shortage of lefties here, this is Salon editor Joan Walsh rambling on about the challenges and troubles facing the left today. A guaranteed cure for insomnia. A must read for people who need to know what part of her thinks...
"Progressives’ looming challenge: Bill de Blasio, Elizabeth Warren, inequality, and a stunning blind spot"
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/14/as_2016_looms_can_progressives_organize_or_at_least_get_out_of_their_own_way/
Cut through the distractions and the infighting and the answer to failing government is always more government. Bigger government, higher taxes on production and more limits on economic liberty, that's what we're missing!
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No matter the problem, the answer is always more taxes and more control of the individual.
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I find this poll rather discouraging. Apparently 37 % polled think or are so stubborn they will claim she Clinton is honest. 70% think she is a good leader. Really. Why? On what basis?
We don't have democracy or a republic if our leaders are serial liars. We have tyranny.
Honesty should be, but is not, a major prerequisite to hold elective office. I don't rejoice at these numbers.
*****by John Nolte28 May 2015203
Former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the most famous and well-known politician (not named Barack Obama) in America today. Clinton has been in the national public eye for nearly a quarter-century. Everyone has their own opinion of her, and for that reason she is polling like an incumbent. The only thing is that she is polling like a vulnerable incumbent.
The joint scandals involving Clinton violating State Department email regulations and all the shady money around the Clinton Foundation have taken a serious toll, especially on her credibility. According to a Pew Poll released Thursday, a full 53% say Clinton is not honest. Only 39% disagree.
Clinton scores high on leadership (60-37%) but is weak on whether she cares about voters’ “needs and problems” (48-47%).*****
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https://mobile.twitter.com/politicsiswar/status/611565291928031233
This is where we are as of 2015.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/politicsiswar/status/611565291928031233
This is where we are as of 2015.
(https://mobile.twitter.com/politicsiswar/status/611565291928031233)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/357443.php
Agendas
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http://neveryetmelted.com/2015/06/20/the-wisdom-of-salon/
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"As The Atlantic notes, if a debt situation got particularly bad in the US, America could technically print its own money to pay back its debt, since it owes money in a currency that it controls. This would increase inflation and weaken confidence in the dollar, but wouldn't spell doom for the US economy. *
Is this author serious??? What does he think 18 trillion in debt is???
Bobby - my top choice at this time.
*****And now we have our first presidential candidate warning about Greece happening in America ...
Business Insider By Maxwell Tani
17 hours ago
.AP272731252793
(AP/Jim Cole) Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R).
Louisiana Gov. and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal (R) believes that the US is headed down the path to a Greek-style financial disaster.
“Greece will happen here if we do not change course. Anyone who disagrees with this is a ‘math denier,'" Jindal said in a statement on Monday.
The governor's comments come as Greece is set to default on its debt, which sent stocks plummeting and threatened Greece's status in the Eurozone.
Jindal said that President Barack Obama's spending record is putting the US on a path to financial instability, and that a 2016 victory for Hillary Clinton would virtually ensure a crisis.
“This is the American future if we continue going down the road that President Obama has us on, and that Hillary Clinton wants to continue and even accelerate," Jindal said.
“Greece is now coming to the pot of gold that awaits at the end of the socialist rainbow, and Hillary Clinton pledges to take America further down the road to socialism," Jindal said.
Jindal's argument is similar to the argument that former Massachusetts Gov. and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney (R) made in 2012 when it became apparent that Greece needed another bailout to manage its debts.
But though Romney and now Jindal appear to be making a point about excessive government spending and debt, the comparison is flawed.
That's because US debt and Greek debt are nothing alike.
Greece owes money to its creditors in a currency that it does not control. The International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank have bailed out Greece several times and set the terms for how Greece pays back its debt. Greece has no way to pay back its debt other than to accept austerity measures imposed by these three groups.
In contrast, the US is has a currency it controls and risks no debt default. And its debt is denominated in dollars.
As The Atlantic notes, if a debt situation got particularly bad in the US, America could technically print its own money to pay back its debt, since it owes money in a currency that it controls. This would increase inflation and weaken confidence in the dollar, but wouldn't spell doom for the US economy.
Myles Udland contributed to this report.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9Si5pkAqg&feature=youtu.be
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Conservatives are having some fun watching declared Socialist Bernie Sanders gain on her in the polls, not unlike how fun it was to watch the furthest left junior Senator from Illinois gain and pass her in 2007-2008. Be careful what you wish for! Calling someone a socialist isn't good enough anymore, nor is proving the candidate is a socialist, nor even in this case is the candidate calling himself a socialist a disqualifier anymore.
We have to answer that question in a thorough, but concise and irrefutable way, why not socialism?
I challenge all here, and especially Crafty of 2015 to explain to Crafty of age 20, why not socialism/liberalism/progressivism?
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Conservatives are having some fun watching declared Socialist Bernie Sanders gain on her in the polls, not unlike how fun it was to watch the furthest left junior Senator from Illinois gain and pass her in 2007-2008. Be careful what you wish for! Calling someone a socialist isn't good enough anymore, nor is proving the candidate is a socialist, nor even in this case is the candidate calling himself a socialist a disqualifier anymore.
We have to answer that question in a thorough, but concise and irrefutable way, why not socialism?
I challenge all here, and especially Crafty of 2015 to explain to Crafty of age 20, why not socialism/liberalism/progressivism?
The whole running out of other people's money thing doesn't look like much fun. Go ask the Greeks.
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"The whole running out of other people's money thing doesn't look like much fun"
No biggie. Just print more. Unlike the Greeks we control our money supply. Just ask the libs.
They tell us were safe :roll:
Besides what would the poor do???? They would scream.
How do we explain they make it all worse not better?
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G M: "The whole running out of other people's money thing doesn't look like much fun. Go ask the Greeks."
Yes. The Soviet example has grown too old for young people to know.
ccp: "How do we explain they make it all worse not better?"
That's right. It doesn't do what it purports to do. I also think we need to explain why it doesn't work.
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And there's this:
Socialism pretends to offer you income security, knowing that all the basics of life are free, nothing to worry about, all treated the same.
"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dwightdei107094.html#zexXOAHtE65vkHXI.99
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http://twitchy.com/2015/07/09/whos-laughing-now-we-are-at-the-twerps-who-mocked-romney-for-warning-about-chinese-hackers/
Today's left is quite distinctive in it's smug arrogance çombined with incredible levels of ignorance and idiocy.
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Who would have guessed the one business the left enthusiastically supports is Planned Parenthood's baby body parts trafficking?
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Yeah.
Americans spend all the money doing research and innovation and the Chinese just hack or bribe to get this information for little to no significant investment.
So do the Russians.
They are laughing at our being dupes.
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This is her business address but anyone know where she physically lives? It is my understanding celebrities just love having people showing up at their homes:
http://www.fanmail.biz/2292.html
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:evil: :evil: :evil: :lol:
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https://www.facebook.com/FreeBeacon/videos/864907640224927/
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https://www.facebook.com/FreeBeacon/videos/864907640224927/
Nothing now.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/cecil-the-lion-and-cecile-richards-no-humaneness-for-humans
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"Nothing now"
Indeed.
So why does Matthews support the crats so fervently if even he thinks there should be?
That is based on his questioning of Vasserman Socialistschultz.
He just can't let go can he?
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http://www.bookwormroom.com/2015/08/17/the-collected-nitwit-and-unwisdom-of-bernie-sanders/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/27/report-lgbt-rainbow-hate-flag-found-in-wdbj-killers-apartment/
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He is the picture perfect Democrat. The model for their electorate: a victim.
Of course
http://news.yahoo.com/businesses-reopening-scene-deadly-air-shootings-084354055.html#
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ccp from Iran thread:
"Wait a second… did hell just freeze over? An area where we actually AGREE with DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz? (Even if her move was purely to protect her own political future with her largely Jewish constituency in South Florida.)"
Same goes for Chuck Schumer. We know they don't care about security, and they know their support for Obama's hoax isn't needed to pass it. It's about political pressure from big contributors, just like the gay issue was. There are hands at the top of the puppet strings. By opposing the deal while letting it pass anyway, these filthy politician can play it both ways. MHO
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"Same goes for Chuck Schumer" "and they know their support for Obama's hoax isn't needed to pass it"
It might have been different if the idiotic Republicans didn't allow this to go to a "super majority" vote.
I guess the cowards were too afraid they might be branded of the party against peace or the liberal "war monger" phrase.
I disagree with many on the right who claim that Obama's argument that it is either this deal or war. I think it is more accurately war vs a nuclear Iran.
No "deal" will stop them. And the military and Obamster have decided to allow them to have nucs. The whole deal thing is just con game of the American Public anyway.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-huma-abedin-operated-at-the-center-of-the-clinton-universe/2015/08/27/cd099eee-4b32-11e5-902f-39e9219e574b_story.html
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Consistent constitutional standards are simply not progressive.
http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/31/for-progressives-first-amendment-comes-i
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If there isn't a thread for this Pope, I'll put it here.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424365/pop-francis-left-poverty-social-teaching
The Left Has Its Pope
(Franco Origlia/Getty)
by THOMAS SOWELL
September 22, 2015 12:00 AM
Pope Francis has created political controversy, both inside and outside the Catholic Church, by blaming capitalism for many of the problems of the poor. We can no doubt expect more of the same during his visit to the United States.
Pope Francis is part of a larger trend of the rise of the political left among Catholic intellectuals. He is, in a sense, the culmination of that trend.
There has long been a political left among Catholics, as among other Americans. Often they were part of the pragmatic left, as in the many old Irish-run, big-city political machines that dispensed benefits to the poor in exchange for their votes, as somewhat romantically depicted in the movie classic, “The Last Hurrah.”
But there has also been a more ideological left. Where the Communists had their official newspaper, the Daily Worker, there was also the Catholic Worker published by Dorothy Day.
A landmark in the evolution of the ideological left among Catholics was a publication in the 1980s, by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, titled “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.”
Although this publication was said to be based on Catholic teachings, one of its principal contributors, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, said: “I think we should be up front and say that really we took this from the Enlightenment era.”
The specifics of the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter reflect far more of the secular Enlightenment of the 18th century than of Catholic traditions. Archbishop Weakland admitted that such an Enlightenment figure as Thomas Paine “is now coming back through a strange channel.”
Strange indeed. Paine rejected the teachings of “any church that I know of,” including “the Roman church.” He said: “My own mind is my own church.“ Nor was Paine unusual among the leading figures of the 18th century Enlightenment.
To base social or moral principles on the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment and then call the result “Catholic teachings” suggests something like bait-and-switch advertising.
But, putting aside religious or philosophical questions, we have more than two centuries of historical evidence of what has actually happened as the ideas of people like those Enlightenment figures were put into practice in the real world — beginning with the French Revolution and its disastrous aftermath.
It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining.
Both the authors of the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter in the 1980s, and Pope Francis today, blithely throw around the phrase “the poor,” and blame poverty on what other people are doing or not doing to or for “the poor.“
Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things — none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.
Geographic settings are radically different, both among nations and within nations. So are demographic differences, with some nations and groups having a median age over 40 and others having a median age under 20. This means that some groups have several times as much adult work experience as others. Cultures are also radically different in many ways.
As distinguished economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.” But which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate — fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?
In 1900, only 3 percent of American homes had electric lights but more than 99 percent had them before the end of the century. Infant mortality rates were 165 per thousand in 1900 and seven per thousand by 1997. By 2001, most Americans living below the official poverty line had central air conditioning, a motor vehicle, cable television with multiple TV sets, and other amenities.
A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico. The much-criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the Left.
Pope Francis’ own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is www.tsowell.com. © 2015 Creators Syndicate Inc.
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VIEW COMMENTS
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"The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call "his own", and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community."
- Pope John Paul II, CENTESIMUS ANNUS ENCYCLICAL LETTER, May, 1991
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html
Hat tip Steve Hayward
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In 1896, income per person in the United States and Argentina, two of the richest countries in the world, was about identical. Argentina subsequently eschewed the free market, replacing it with trade protectionism and other corporatist policies intended to help the poor by redistributing wealth. By 2010, Argentine income was a third of that of the United States. - Ian Vasquez, Cato http://www.cato.org/blog/pope-francis-graph-day
(http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2015/09/Argo-Chart-copy.jpg)
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A perfect piece of ammo for me in a conversation in which I am engaged!
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A shower and some clean clothes.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/10/feminists-fall-for-pissforequality-hoax/
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Written previously on the forum, every time we let in one more low income person, legally or legally, the median income goes down even if the income of every person went marginally up. This made a nice attack line for the left against Bush. Now they eat/own their words. Also hurting median income, jobs and worker is income is the attack against new business investment.
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During Ronald Reagan’s first six years in office, GDP grew 22% while the median income grew 6% (see chart 1). During Bill Clinton’s first six years, GDP grew 24%; median income, 11%. But growth began to slow in the 2000s, undermining both the mean and the median. In George Bush’s first six years GDP rose 16%, but median incomes fell 2%. Under Mr Obama it has been even worse: GDP is up 8% and median income is down 4%
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21620199-america-getting-richer-most-voters-cant-feel-it-woes-average-joe
“our current problems with incomes are neither a long-term feature of the U.S. economy nor merely an after-effect of the 2008-2009 financial upheaval.”
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2015/03/06-household-income-growth-kamarck
(http://www.redstate.com/uploads/2015/07/median-income.png)
http://www.redstate.com/2015/07/20/median-income-falls-20-year-low/
The most interesting point in the above chart is that Hillary wants to govern more like Obama than Clinton.
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From the no feces file:
http://offgridsurvival.com/yale-ethics-of-looting/
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From the no feces file:
http://offgridsurvival.com/yale-ethics-of-looting/
Unaware that without the police, the citizenry will revert to shooting looters quickly.
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We already have good answers in this thread like "running out of other people's money" and "the fundamental error of socialism" by Pope John Paul II. As as we come into tomorrow's Democratic Socialist Party extravaganza with Bernie and the gang, the need to be able to fully explain to any young or impressionable voter you may encounter, why not socialism, has never been greater.
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"The term “liberal” originally referred politically to those who wanted to liberate people—mainly from the oppressive power of government."
“Socialism has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it” - Thomas Sowell
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/10/14/politico-reporter-sneers-at-jim-webb-for-mentioning-his-combat-record/#pq=9SS7I4
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/10/14/barbarians-at-the-gates-of-realville/
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/msf-u-s-tank-destroyed-potential-evidence-kunduz-hospital-n445736
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"We Were Losing 800,000 Jobs a Month"
A Bernie Sanders Line now being used by Hillary Clinton.
- On the day President Obama took office, he says.
Meaning it's George Bush's fault. Still.
But whose fault was it? What happened? Why were we losing jobs? Because Capitalism failed?
No. That isn't what failed and the market's collapse (2008) wasn't in response wasn't to George Bush being elected President (Nov. 2000), it was to the incoming Congress of Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Hillary, Biden, Kerry, (and Trump?), January 2007.
Nor was it a reaction to the George Bush tax rate cuts. Revenues grew by double digits in the years following full implementation of the tax rate cuts and jobs grew for 51 consecutive months.
Markets collapsed in anticipation of the fact that pro-growth economic policies would be very soon be coming to a screaching halt.
Where were Hillary and Obama on the days preceding the "the day President Obama took office"? On the sidelines, innocently watching and waiting?
No. They were the de facto leaders of the Congress promising to bring an end to the growth aspects of the Bush economic agenda. And that they did.
My suggestion: Win this argument or lose this election.
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http://www.steynonline.com/7244/the-clock-ticks-on
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As usual Steyn says the truth just as good as does Rush.
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I keep pressing that we need clarity in our messaging in order to compete with the left.
Then there is this from current Secretary of State, Diplomat of the Year, John Kerry:
"Climate change is certainly one of two of the defining issues of our generation and perhaps the defining issue of our generation, because of the stakes.
The other being the rise of radical extremism, sectarianism, and the failure of states simultaneously surrounding it, and vast populations of young people needing jobs instead of mind-bending theories of false assumptions about Islam and other things. Both are gigantic challenges."
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/10/20/kerry-climate-change-greater-easier-to-solve-than-mind-bending-false-assumptions-about-islam/
James Taranto: Maybe we should just abbreviate it and declare war on RESATFOSSSIAVPOYPNJIOMBTOFAAIAOT.
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I guess that much like the Nobel Peace Prize, you don't need any actual, tangible accomplishment to get an award like "diplomat of the year".
I keep pressing that we need clarity in our messaging in order to compete with the left.
Then there is this from current Secretary of State, Diplomat of the Year, John Kerry:
"Climate change is certainly one of two of the defining issues of our generation and perhaps the defining issue of our generation, because of the stakes.
The other being the rise of radical extremism, sectarianism, and the failure of states simultaneously surrounding it, and vast populations of young people needing jobs instead of mind-bending theories of false assumptions about Islam and other things. Both are gigantic challenges."
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/10/20/kerry-climate-change-greater-easier-to-solve-than-mind-bending-false-assumptions-about-islam/
James Taranto: Maybe we should just abbreviate it and declare war on RESATFOSSSIAVPOYPNJIOMBTOFAAIAOT.
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"I keep pressing that we need clarity in our messaging in order to compete with the left."
Doug you are so right. The only problem is I have yet to here a single Republican make this case in a very persuasive way except some of those on talk radio.
Rush can do it. Levin can do it. But both have too much political baggage and are not running for anything.
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Well, if I may, we here on this forum have our moments :-D
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https://reason.com/blog/2014/09/25/at-u-m-sexual-violence-includes-discount#comment
By the above definition...
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"Well, if I may, we here on this forum have our moments grin"
:-D
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You have to pay six bucks to visit Marx's grave
http://twitchy.com/2015/10/26/most-perfect-thing-ive-seen-all-day-capitalisms-still-kicking-karl-marxs-butt/
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Doug,
Did you see there was an attempt to blow up his head atop his grave one or two times?
They should give out one way tickets to China at his gravesite. Maybe then these fools can learn a real lesson.
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Doug,
Did you see there was an attempt to blow up his head atop his grave one or two times?
They should give out one way tickets to China at his gravesite. Maybe then these fools can learn a real lesson.
I wonder if China's economy is more Marxist than ours anymore.
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Doug,
Did you see there was an attempt to blow up his head atop his grave one or two times?
They should give out one way tickets to China at his gravesite. Maybe then these fools can learn a real lesson.
I wonder if China's economy is more Marxist than ours anymore.
Much less.
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http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-30-at-12.21.26-PM.png
(http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-30-at-12.21.26-PM.png)
I am not sure if this is the vast majority of peaceful muslims protesting various jihadi acts, or an antiwar protest...
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Maybe this is the 'good war' ...
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Maybe this is the 'good war' ...
No, that is the one Lois Lerner and the IRS waged against Conservatives.
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Maybe this is the 'good war' ...
No, that is the one Lois Lerner and the IRS waged against Conservatives.
They never protested that war either, did they.
You'd think that lady that got fired from the Watergate committee would up in arms about IRS abuse.
If I didn't know better I'd think there's a double standard.
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http://thepeoplescube.com/images/Bernie_Sanders_Difference_Socialist.jpg
(http://thepeoplescube.com/images/Bernie_Sanders_Difference_Socialist.jpg)
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I guess she didn't get the weeping mom of slain Palestinian memo:
https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/662390177252380672
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PolitiFact: Dems have lost 910 state legislative seats since Obama took office:
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/25/cokie-roberts/have-democrats-lost-900-seats-state-legislatures-o/
Thirty-five states posted double-digit seat losses for the Democrats in state legislatures, including more than 50 seats each in Arkansas, New Hampshire and West Virginia.
Dems lost 85 Congressional seats since Obama's election, the most in history.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/dec/07/matthew-dowd/has-president-obama-lost-more-democratic-seats-con/
Dems lost 12 Governorships under Obama:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/11/08/chuck-todd-highlights-democratic-historic-electoral-losses-under-obama/
But there is good news for Dems. The problem is not policy, it is messaging:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/17/dnc-looks-to-rebrand-to-stem-losses-during-obama-a/print/
The national Dem response so far this cycle is to turn further left with either admitted socialist Bernie or Hillary from the Clinton Crime Family running on a campaign slogan of 'Double Down on Failure'.
And they say the Republicans are in disarray.
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"The Clinton Crime Family"-- I like that. Currently headed by the Empress Dowager of Chappaqua.
Anyway, this is recommended by a good friend who went far in SF:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/330frnuq.asp
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"The Clinton Crime Family"-- I like that. ...
Credit on that to Rush L. I think he also refers to the Clinton Library as 'library and massage parlor'.
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Clearly Smith college needs to add some new courses: Irony 101, Remedial Oblivious Ignorance, and so on:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/19/smith-college-bars-reporters-from-sit-in-unless-they-agree-to-explicitly-state-they-support-the-movement-in-their-articles/
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http://www.redstate.com/2015/11/24/liberal-rage-mass-shooting-new-orleans/
MIA. Why?
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/360174.php
November 24, 2015
Fundamental Concepts - Nothing to Believe In [Weirddave]
The latest surge by ISIS has brought to the fore one of the hallmarks of modern leftism, and that is their absolute refusal to process facts that conflict with their worldview. Here we have ISIS, a murderous, genocidal Islamic supremacy group. They have stated quite openly that they intend to carve a caliphate out for themselves by any means necessary, and by “by any means” they mean as violently as possible. They view the West, Christianity, Secular Humanists, Hindus, everybody who doesn’t conform to their brand of Islam as the enemy, and they have only one tactic for dealing with the enemy : kill them and keep on killing them until they are either all dead or their remnant is so cowed that they convert to Islam. They justify this using the Koran and various Hadiths and they will quite happily tell anyone who will listen exactly what they believe is divine rational for their actions.
You or I look at this and say “Huh. These assholes want to kill us. Let’s arm ourselves and prepare. Let’s go out and kill them first to protect our weak and vulnerable. They have demonstrated again and again that they are serious, we should take them at their word”. To us, this is the most basic common sense. When ISIS says that they are going to smuggle terrorists in amongst Syrian refuges to kill us at home, something they have demonstrated the ability to do as recently as last week, we think it’s simply prudent to halt an influx of refugees that we can not verify free of terrorists. Again, simple common sense.
Our leaders, the so called smart set, don’t seem to agree, and an increasing percentage of the population is realizing that what we see as blindingly obvious, they don’t see at all? Why? I’ve seen this question asked more than once this past week on social media and in the press, and have yet to hear a good answer. It quite simply makes no sense.
When talking about leftists in the United States, it would be logical to assume that their denial of reality is tied to their investment in fantasy, and I do think that that is a part of it. They are absolutely committed to the Lightbringer narrative. Obama was supposed to do nothing less than change the way the world works, and the fact that he hasn’t must be obfuscated at all costs. The reality that his idiotic graduate school Utopian mindset has CAUSED many of these problems is blackest heresy that must never be spoken of out loud. There is a generous dollop of that amongst Proggys here, but Left Wing European elites have no reason to shield Obama from criticism, and yet they feel the same way. So what exactly is the reason that these people so stridently deny reality?
I think the roots go back to WWI. It is hard for us raised in a post WWI (and WWII) world to understand exactly how shattering WWI was to the psyche of the West. Tens of millions dead, the cream of an entire generation ripped from the bosom of their homes to be extinguished in the bloody horror of Gallipoli, Ypers and The Somme. Prior to WWI, the West (and by this we mean Christendom), had an unbounded confidence that it was the pinnacle of human achievement, leading the way to a brighter future (which came to pass, just look around at the material wonders of life in the West today). Post WWI the West recoiled from what it had done (only to do it again a generation later) and allowed a societal rot to take root and spread. Since traditional morals had so failed Christendom, then they must be done away with and replaced.
I’m going to fast forward a little bit over the details, books have been written about things like moral relativism, Marxist theory and secular humanism, but once you get to today you find that the vast majority of our “elites” share a mindset that makes them virtually incapable of responding to a threat like ISIS.
These people believe in the primacy of self. The ultimate end all be all of the universe is the 2.2 lbs of cabbage they have between their ears. Just their ears, what other people may think or believe has no bearing on the universe if it disagrees with their precious worldview. Now, it’s fine and dandy to recognize that the brain is the only tool we have to understand the universe. It is folly unbound to demand that the universe reconfigure itself to match the wishes of the brain. That is arrogance at its rawest, and that is what we see daily from the Left.
Obama arrogantly speaks of “universal values” without realizing that no, the values he’s referring to are anything but universal and in fact they are the product of a religious and moral code that he rejects.
The elites arrogantly reject that ISIS can hurt the West. Oh sure, they may kill some random members of the hoi polloi, but that won’t affect THEM. And it might not. Until it does, or until the hoi polloi get tired of bleeding all over the place and decide to make some changes.
The media arrogantly denies that the terrorists themselves have any agency. They constantly seek to excuse their bloody attacks by excusing them as pawns or blaming society, imperialism, Christians, corporations, BOOOOSH! Capitalism or whatever.
Most of all, what all of these smug assholes fail to accept, steeped as they are in their philosophy of self and blinded by the myth of their superior intellects, is that there are billions of people out there who do not subscribe to their selfish worldview: people who believe in something larger then themselves and who act upon those beliefs. They can’t understand it when they run across it in their own culture for God’s sake (That Christians might have an honest belief that homosexuality is a sin does not compute. Christians MUST be bigots, or homophobes or haters), they have no chance at recognizing it in a foreign one. Last week in Paris, one of the terrorists calmly went down a row of handicapped people in wheelchairs and calmly executed each and every one of them in turn. I guarantee you that as this evil man calmly committed this bloody and evil act, he felt in his heart the same satisfaction that you do when you give money to a homeless man Mr. Elite. These people have their own beliefs and the free will to act upon them. They will tell you all about them if you ask, and even if you don’t. They are PROUD of what they are doing. They BRAG about their bloody ways. THEY MEAN WHAT THEY SAY.
Unfortunately, that is so utterly foreign to the worldview of our so-called elites that they just don’t get it, and I doubt the ever will because it contradicts that worldview completely. To understand they would have to let go of the arrogance that sustains them, and that’s a very hard row to hoe.
And that leaves us screwed. How can we defeat out enemies if we refuse to take them seriously?
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Mon - Fri, 8 - 5.
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Seems odd to be pro-life and feel the need to condemn the shootings in case someone thought we favor that. But here goes, I condemn the shootings. I favor prosecution of the people who broke the law instead.
Dana Milbank, Gov. Hickenlooper and others think it might be the rhetoric opposing the killings in these clinics that set off this lunatic.
The left might consider the possibility that it was the heinous activities happening in the abortion clinic, not the rhetoric, that set off the deranged shooter.
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Talking about PP's murdering babies and selling their organs is BAD.
PP murdering babies and selling their organs is Good.
Just want to make sure I understand what the left is telling us.
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Talking about PP's murdering babies and selling their organs is BAD.
PP murdering babies and selling their organs is Good.
Just want to make sure I understand what the left is telling us.
I should quit criticizing North Korea and ISIS too. What they're doing is legal in their countries.
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Talking about PP's murdering babies and selling their organs is BAD.
PP murdering babies and selling their organs is Good.
Just want to make sure I understand what the left is telling us.
I should quit criticizing North Korea and ISIS too. What they're doing is legal in their countries.
Safe and legal!
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Safe and legal!
Butchering a million a year. Safe, legal, and "rare".
If ISIS was raping that many young girls or beheading that many infidels, we would ... draw a red line? Skip it.
Watch the abortion clock for a few seconds while it ticks forward. http://www.numberofabortions.com/
Black lives matter? 17.5 million black babies alone killed since Roe v Wade. Disproportionate impact? Nah, 'reproductive freedom'. Oops, it went up since I wrote that. Liberals believe that kid would have had a miserable life anyway, in the black family they destroyed, in the country they destroyed. Strangely, the racist conservatives think he or she would have benefited from not having God given rights terminated, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in that order.
For each abortion, one killed, one injured. Not one of our better federal spending programs. But let's not get bogged down on moral issues - while we spend $4 trillion a year on moral issues.
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Doctors for America, the same pro Obama group started by the 37 yo kid who is now the surgeon general. I call them doctors for a communist America. They phonies don't represent me:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/12/02/hours-before-san-bernardino-mass-shooting-doctors-were-on-capitol-hill-petitioning-congress-to-lift-ban-on-gun-violence-research/
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Rahm Emmanuel's long delay in the release of the video before an election sounds just like the Benghazi cover up prior too BROCKs election.
He takes responsibility of course unlike BROCK - he fires others and says he "takes responsibility". But of course he won't resign.
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Rahm Emmanuel's long delay in the release of the video before an election sounds just like the Benghazi cover up prior too BROCKs election.
He takes responsibility of course unlike BROCK - he fires others and says he "takes responsibility". But of course he won't resign.
That's right, if you say you take responsibility, take it.
Even if the "Justice Department" 'investigates' the cover up of this video through the election, it would be just calling in another co-conspirator. It is a sad state of affairs. Imagine if this actual case of police state atrocities happened in a Republican controlled jurisdiction! Not possible because, whether it is correlation or causation, cities in total dysfunction don't vote Republican.
Assuming Deadfish Emmanuel's version is right, shouldn't the firing of the police chief have followed the mayor discovering the facts instead of being his reaction to the public discovering them?
It's all about covering his own leftist ass.
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"It's all about covering his own leftist ass."
Yup.
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Let's say hypothetically that we went the left's way on gun control and passed really stringent laws nationwide, even passed a constitutional amendment to get around the 'right of the people' 'shall not be abridged' obstacle. Let's say we restricted legal gun ownership all the way down to just on-duty law enforcement, or not even that.
Besides having no 'solution' for the 400 million pre-existing guns (giant magnet theory?), wouldn't we also have to secure the southern border for any new restriction on gun sales or ownership to have any effect?
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Doug,
You might want to come with a blueprint for a giant gun magnet. I am sure the left will find money to finance this.
Anyone bother to read the Huff Post. It is so ridiculous. "MOTIVE UNKOWN"! How stupid do we have to be!!!
This is worse than that CNN guy Chuck Todd telling Trump, "truthfulness matters". I had to laugh out loud. It only applies to Republicans.
Any way look at this. 1600 rounds, pipe bombs, Saudi mail bride, devout Muslim, left 1/2 yr old daughter with grandma to go on suicide mission yet, "motive unknown". I want a revolution folks.
******REPORT: SHOOTER CONTACTED FBI-MONITORED EXTREMISTS
Suspects Had 1,600 Rounds On Them, 12 Pipe Bombs At Home...
Left 6-Month-Old Daughter With Grandmother... Motive Unknown... Obama: 'We Don't Know' If It Was Terrorist-Related... Police Chief: They 'Came Prepared'... 'As If On A Mission'... 14 KILLED, 21 WOUNDED... THE VICTIMS...
Killers Led Secret Life... Official: 'This Was Somebody We Had Not Heard Of Before'... Brother-In-Law: ''I Am In Shock'... Coworkers: Syed Farook Met Wife Online, Went To Saudi Arabia To Marry... The Couple: What Sets Them Apart From Other Mass Shooters... Court Docs Detail Turbulent Childhood For Farook... Federal Officials: Suspects Bought Guns Legally...
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http://ace.mu.nu/Windows-Live-Writer/c9e85b1c2ee6_11348/Screen-Shot-2015-12-03-at-2.20.24-PM_2.png
(http://ace.mu.nu/Windows-Live-Writer/c9e85b1c2ee6_11348/Screen-Shot-2015-12-03-at-2.20.24-PM_2.png)
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"Hey, let's not vilify an entire group"
Unless you're a white male NRA Republican.....
Like said before the Repubs are worse than Nazis to a lib. We are the enemy as Rush says. Not the real enemy.
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"PLEDGED ALLEGIANCE TO ISIS ON FACEBOOK" (from Drudge.)
Response from the left:
Well of course he did. What else can you expect from the poor man who had to suffer endless humiliations and abuse at the hands of imperialists, Mooslim hating, privileged white devils who insulted the prophet?
He was justified. It is the fault of white male JudeoChistian Westerners. At least all the Republican ones........
I want a revolution.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/04/yale-students-say-science-professors-arent-culturally-sensitive-enough/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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"PLEDGED ALLEGIANCE TO ISIS ON FACEBOOK" (from Drudge.)
Response from the left:
Well of course he did. What else can you expect from the poor man who had to suffer endless humiliations and abuse at the hands of imperialists, Mooslim hating, privileged white devils who insulted the prophet?
He was justified. It is the fault of white male JudeoChistian Westerners. At least all the Republican ones........
I want a revolution.
Bonus Question - Name a single predominately Caucasian country in the world other than Russia, where immigration isn't a forced issue by the Left, and then explain the complete lack of open immigration policies in non Caucasian countries and the lack of outcry concerning that from the media.
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http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/howie_carr/2015/12/carr_g_men_media_don_t_dare_tell_truth_about_san_bernardino
Lies.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN9bu6CP318
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN9bu6CP318[/youtube]
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I was having a discussion with a responsible neighbor in a tough neighborhood she happened to be a white liberal living in a black or divers area. We were discussing some of the bad behaviors around us from murders to people just not taking care of their plaes and letting their children run wild, and suddenly she turned the blame to the obscene amount of money people make on Wall Street, 1200 miles away. An otherwise intelligent woman, I wondered why she doesn't know how stupid that sounds. They read and hear that inequality causes our problems, but what they have doesn't even cause you to not have, much less to act irresponsible, violent or criminal.
Now this:
“Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month—and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.”
- Recent column of Thomas Piketty, 11/24/2015
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1208bw.html
http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/11/24/le-tout-securitaire-ne-suffira-pas-2/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter
If we could stomp out wealth, all these other problems would go away. (?) How is that working around the world in all the places that have no wealth. I will put my town, median home price 600k, murder rate over the last 100 years = 0.0, up against Congo or Haiti any day.
Again, do they really not know how stupid the someone-else's-wealth-caused-it theory sounds. Yet they keep attracting roughly 50% of the vote.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvvvomANbRo
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Minneapolis is a Democrat city in a Democrat county in a Democrat state in a Democrat country. They can't wait to shut down a nativity scene anywhere near public property, consider a wreath the 'establishment of religion', can't have enough distance between church and state, send out notices in Arabic, and are in complete denial that we are a country founded on a Judeo-Christian ethics.
Nonetheless, they went out of their way to inform me today that eviction notices cannot be served on Friday, Christmas Day.
What's up with Friday if you are an atheist. Every militant leftist should go to work at the usual time.
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Minneapolis is a Democrat city in a Democrat county in a Democrat state in a Democrat country. They can't wait to shut down a nativity scene anywhere near public property, consider a wreath the 'establishment of religion', can't have enough distance between church and state, send out notices in Arabic, and are in complete denial that we are a country founded on a Judeo-Christian ethics.
Nonetheless, they went out of their way to inform me today that eviction notices cannot be served on Friday, Christmas Day.
What's up with Friday if you are an atheist. Every militant leftist should go to work at the usual time.
I say it's high time to give them a few states to govern as they wish....and let them have at it.
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I hate to say it, but very often feel the same way. I don't want to be ruled by them and I don't want them to have to live under my ideas against their will either.
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I hate to say it, but very often feel the same way. I don't want to be ruled by them and I don't want them to have to live under my ideas against their will either.
I agree. I don't have any problem with anyone being born any colour. We didn't choose that. We do choose our cultures and I don't want anyone living under a military dictatorship that I would put in place....unless they wanted to. I also don't want their ideas thrust upon me.
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Polls shows 59% think Hillary is dishonest and 35% think she is.
The scary part is 35 refuse to admit the truth.
If the 35% said she is dishonest but that they just don't care than that would give me more hope. What this suggests is that 35% of people are outright liars too.
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"Polls shows 59% think Hillary is dishonest and 35% think she is [not].
The scary part is 35 refuse to admit the truth.
If the 35% said she is dishonest but that hey just don't care than that would give me more hope. What this suggests is that 35% of people are outright liars"
More like they believe the ends justify the means, which is fundamental to leftist governance. And give them credit for being smart enough that 35% recognize a trick question in a poll. If they answered truthfully it would hurt their candidate.
In another measure, 23% say we are headed in the right direction (that number should be zero) and 66% say we are headed in the wrong direction (that number should be 100%).
This society has been headed down a leftist path since the 60s with brief interruptions, and most clearly headed left since the election of 2006 of the Pelos-Reid-Obama-Hillary majorities in congress and the 2008 election of Pres. Obama. The current budget proves leftists still control Washington and every Republican and Democrat knows it. Hillary is running to keep us on this same path, improve the path, and all Republicans are running at least in words to change the direction of the country. Yet the general election matchups are almost even, indicating a major problem with our brand name - we are seen as a worse choice than being headed in the wrong direction.
To beat leftism today, you will need the best communicator in a generation (Reagan was an example), you need to be strong but perceived as compassionate ("he/she cares about people like me"), commit virtually no unforced errors, and still need a lot of luck. And if you win, to stay in power when all the institutions of media, education and the rest are against you, you need positive results fast. Had Reagan's reelection been one year earlier while the economy was barely recovering, his 49 state win could easily have been a loss.
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Bernie says they should be able to finish college without worrying about debt.
Meanwhile, Obama racked up 8.1 trillion in debt, all of which will be left behind as a debt burden for the kids in college today.
As usual with leftists, no reform of the cost structure causing the underlying problem is proposed.
What contains costs better than anything else ever discovered? Market discipline.
How was market discipline removed from a decentralized system like college education? Inject massive amounts of outside money.
He has had 74 years to learn this stuff. Not a fast learner.
When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
When you are a leftist, every problem looks like you need to throw more of other people's money at it.
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Don't publish papers that don't concur with liberal orthodoxy:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/tell-the-truth-about-benefit-claimants-and-the-liberal-left-shuts-you-down/
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"Now, none of that will surprise anyone who has spent time among the long-term unemployed or their -progeny, such as the police, social workers and teachers. You might even say it’s bleedin’ obvious."
Lib response:
"not one shred of evidence!"
or
"there may be a few bad apples, but the overwhelming majority ARE victims with no alternatives"
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Typical liberal Jew with his new religion - being a good Democrat. The Republicans are worse than Hitler and are out to destroy the world and are the biggest threat to civilization:
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/27/noam_chomsky_the_gop_is_a_threat_to_human_survival_partner/
Those EVIL Republicans. Hate "mongers", war "mongers", for the evil rich, out to trample the entire planet, intolerant bigots. Did I forget anything?
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Typical liberal Jew with his new religion - being a good Democrat. The Republicans are worse than Hitler and are out to destroy the world and are the biggest threat to civilization:
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/27/noam_chomsky_the_gop_is_a_threat_to_human_survival_partner/
Those EVIL Republicans. Hate "mongers", war "mongers", for the evil rich, out to trample the entire planet, intolerant bigots. Did I forget anything?
Funny how Chomsky has become a multimillionaire selling Marxism. That seems to be left out in most all reporting on him.
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It used to be it was just about sex and so what and we all lie anyway. Now dishonesty is no biggie. What difference does it make anyway if our leaders lie? Check this kid out and tell me you wish to subscribe to his blog:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/28/it-really-doesnt-matter-if-hillary-clinton-is-dishonest/
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It used to be it was just about sex and so what and we all lie anyway. Now dishonesty is no biggie. What difference does it make anyway if our leaders lie? Check this kid out and tell me you wish to subscribe to his blog:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/28/it-really-doesnt-matter-if-hillary-clinton-is-dishonest/
Perfectly captures the decline of this country.
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I don't know exactly what thread to post this under but more leftist craziness:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/08/the-tampon-tax-explained/
Are jocks and cups exempt? :|
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http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/01/29/german-feminist-welcomes-refugees-better-rapists-racists/
Willing to take one, or 5 or 20 for the team.
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http://coed.com/2016/01/30/university-of-oregon-campbell-house-crisis/
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St. Louis usurps Detroit to become most violent city in the US: Gateway City is worst for rape, robbery aggravated assault and murder according to FBI data.
Detroit last had a Republican mayor in 1957 St Louis last had a Republican mayor in 1943.
It's a bit of an understatement to call today"s urban leftism a doubling down on failure!
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St. Louis usurps Detroit to become most violent city in the US: Gateway City is worst for rape, robbery aggravated assault and murder according to FBI data.
Detroit last had a Republican mayor in 1957 St Louis last had a Republican mayor in 1943.
It's a bit of an understatement to call today"s urban leftism a doubling down on failure!
If they could only raise taxes just a bit more...Eutopia!
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Look. It is obvious the fault lies with a racist law enforcement culture. If this did not exist the oppressed would have no need to kill rape and rob.
Just ask big butt Beyonce.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=462&v=j556MWGVVqI
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=462&v=j556MWGVVqI[/youtube]
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This could go under Bernie Sanders but applies to all of the left.
It turns out the leftist utopia that Bernie, Hillary and others are describing and proposing is not theoretical but is an experiment that has been in place in a number of areas in this country for over 200 years so we already have some good data available on how the leftist paradigm will work on society as a whole.
These areas have been set up as a federal or a government program designed to make everyone as equal as possible. People are provided free housing and 3 square meals a day at no charge. Guns and all weapons are banned from everyone except the employees of the government. Healthcare is free to all. College classes and all educational resources are free. Security is very good and also provided to everyone at no charge. People are mostly free to spend all day doing whatever they want, have virtually no responsibilities and no bills to pay. The taxpayer pays for all of it and rarely complains about the cost.
You are wondering how this works and why you haven't seen or heard about it but these areas have largely been fenced and walled off and kept out of the public view.
Where is this happening, and what is it called?
Prison.
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Include GE, Walmart, Michael Bloomberg, Mick Jagger, Denzel Washington. I just don't get it.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rev-al-sharpton-1m-birthday-nonprofit-article-1.1961881
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Include GE, Walmart, Michael Bloomberg, Mick Jagger, Denzel Washington. I just don't get it.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rev-al-sharpton-1m-birthday-nonprofit-article-1.1961881
Yankel Rosenbaum was unavailable for comment.
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One person told me she suspect he gets support from the black gangs and wonders if some of this is drug money. BTW (she is black and hispanic)
I guess he has some economic clout in that man Blacks will take marching orders from him and people and companies are afraid of being boycotted.
or intimidated by gang members.
Otherwise there is still a piece of the puzzle missing here.
Again why do so many suck up to this charlatan?
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[Rev. Al Sharpton] "Again why do so many suck up to this charlatan?"
The business plan is a form or blackmail/extortion. Support us (financially) or we will find and exploit issues against you (legal, public relations and financially). Making the problem worse that you are ostensibly addressing is an inherent part of leftism that you have to accept to be a leftist.
False leaders are made possible by the absence of real leaders. Except on a tape from half a century ago, I don't hear a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King calling for a color-blind society today:
"I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." - MLK, I Have a Dream, August 28, 1963 https://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf
What if we were all judged only by the content of our character, what special interest or 'civil rights' group would benefit from that? None. Who would benefit? Every black person except Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and the rest of the race baiters.
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It is funny you mention MLK. This lady I was speaking to mentioned that he died in vain in her opinion. She said not because of the racism but because blacks have developed this sense of entitlement mentality. She felt they were better off before the civil rights of the 60s.
With regard to Farrakan she talked about the million man march was supposed to be a gathering for black men to get together to talk about their responsibilities as fathers and husbands and providers not really targeted to just go after white people at all.
Many black women wanted to go to the march but were refused. They were told they are already doing what they are supposed to . It is the men who are not living up to their responsibilities.
So there are some blacks who are not swallowing the lines from the race baiters, hustlers, and just angry white hating people such as Sharpton, spike Lee, and the rest.
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Continuing the discussion about fascism/socialism...
62 people have as much wealth as world's 3.6B poorest
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/17/62-people-have-as-much-wealth-as-worlds-36b-poorest-oxfam-finds-ahead-of-davos.html
So which side of this equation is the problem, that some people have vast wealth or that billions of people don't have any wealth. That is the political question of our time.
The left's answer is bring down the wealth of the wealthy.
The right's answer is open up wealth creation opportunities for everyone.
Left logic: If A and B are both true, then A caused B.
The false premise of the left is that 3.6 billion are poor because 62 people are very rich. How so? It simply isn't true. I wish we had a thoughtful leftist here to argue their side of this. How does one's success cause another's failure? Where is the evidence to support the idea we have a zero sum economy? All evidence proves the opposite. Take a look at the Heritage Freedom Index. Where people have economic freedom, all people tend to benefit. Where you have dictators, oppression and excessive government, inconsistent rule of law, all tend to stagnate. We see minor and temporary exceptions such as in Scandinavian countries where the work ethic was so strong that the generous safety net is not abused. They maintained a high standard of living but no growth. Then it implodes as people without that strong cultural work ethic come for the benefits.
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Remember when Marco R committed the sin of reaching for a sip of water? She gets a round of clapping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wWl57AtKGY
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Remember when Marco R committed the sin of reaching for a sip of water? She gets a round of clapping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wWl57AtKGY
It is reasonable to recognize it, when an elderly, disabled person does something that their head injury might make very difficult.
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Reminds me of the corruption of Terry McAuliffe except that he is a better BS artist:
http://observer.com/2016/03/rigged-debbie-wasserman-schultz-strikes-once-again/
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(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Dw0Pvc7rExE/VuBFd7HBrwI/AAAAAAAACIE/874xMdGwJkA/s1600/sanders.PNG)
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http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/03/29/hamilton-casting-call-non-white/
This is ok with me.
Just so long as they cast minorities in a play about Hitler or Stalin? How about an oriental playing Saddam Hussain?
How about a Latin guy playing the English King during the Irish famine of the early 1800s?
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As Trump stumbled on abortion, Rush L. made a pretty good point today. It is Democrats who are trying to inject social issues into the campaign. In this case, Chris Matthews pressing DT on abortion when it hasn't been an issue this year.
Wasn't it Stephanopolous who brought up birth control.
Also Dems are always playing on gay issues when gay marriage is already 'settled law'.
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"It is Democrats who are trying to inject social issues into the campaign. In this case, Chris Matthews pressing DT on abortion when it hasn't been an issue this year."
I was saying last night that Trump made a grave error in not being ready for Matthews to press him on this or similar social issue. Of course he questions every Republican he can on this or as Doug points out the gay rights stuff.
He fell right into the leftist trap. Hook line and sinker and he is now squirming on the ground on the shore line while the left , including Hillary is ready to chop his head off and cook him for dinner.
That said Trump also stated that there should be a punishment for women if "it were made illegal".
And naturally the MSM left out the second part of this with him stating women should be punished for abortion on every headline in EVERY news media outlet. At least CNN does point out that he was "thinking out loud" a topic he apparently hasn't thought through and give him a little leeway.
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That said Trump also stated that there should be a punishment for women if "it were made illegal".
Along with many other Trump mis-steps, bad answers from our bumbling leaders hurts all Republicans and all conservatives, not just Trump.
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Long read. I must say, this is interesting. Sensitive to bias, I was trying all the way through to figure out where he was headed with it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-frank/the-blue-state-model-_b_9562960.html?
The focus is on Massachusetts where some things are going right and other things aren't. He is making distinctions between different kinds of liberalism. It is the Huffington Post. He talks about Massachusetts liberals seeking a more perfect meritocracy.
"Professional-class liberals aren’t really alarmed by oversized rewards for society’s winners. On the contrary, this seems natural to them — because they are society’s winners."
Senator Elizabeth Warren is the other kind of liberal, the common man liberal, the inequality fighting liberal. Not like former governor Deval Patrick, an innovation entrepreneur liberal who sided with Uber riders over taxi drivers.
The role of elite education is central. "MIT’s alumni have started nearly 26,000 companies over the years, including Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Qualcomm. If you were to take those 26,000 companies as a separate nation, the report tells us, its economy would be one of the most productive in the world."
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I just heard Dem economist Austan Goolsbee argue that CRAp did not factor in the crash and that banks don't make mortgages.
http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/03/29/listen-to-an-economist-shut-down-hannity-for-bl/209611
Now this:
Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-administration-pushes-banks-to-make-home-loans-to-people-with-weaker-credit/2013/04/02/a8b4370c-9aef-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html
----------------------------------
I notice the story dateline April 2, 2016. Any chance this was an April Fools' prank? Today the President is addressing corporate inversions by making stricter rules instead of making tax rates competitive.
Republicans should spend every political dollar available this month on proving the case that this President is the April Fool. Make Hillary or the nominee run away from these policies.
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Little guy, Bernie Sanders, is raising $44 million a month in small donations by speaking the truth from an Occupy Wall Street far left perspective, more than Hillary is getting from bi corporate interests, while he calls for taxpayer funding of all campaigns - because it is impossible otherwise for the little guy to compete with the big money interests.
Isn't that the definition of this thread, Cognitive Dissonance of the Left!
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Doug, please post that lower criteria post in the Housing thread as well.
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Bored with the right, I was reading "The Nation" today.
This is your brain on Climate Change
http://www.thenation.com/article/your-brain-on-climate-change/
“Mental health consequences of climate change range from minimal stress and distress symptoms to clinical disorders, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts,” the report reads. It draws on a body of evidence linking the experience of extreme weather events, displacement, and other environmental degradation to mental illness. Even just hearing about climate change on the news, or reading reports like this one, can cause anxiety.
No, you're not reading a spoof in "The Onion". This is the handbook of the left.
---------------------------------------------
Humans live healthfully from the Yukon to the equator, we enjoy everything from hot tubs to polar plunges, yet leftists are worried that we somehow can't adapt to 1 degree of warming.
Also covered is that while emissions have already peaked (good news), all coastal cities will likely be lost to ocean rise by 2100 (bad news). http://www.thenation.com/article/good-news-on-climate-changeand-bad-news/
Not mentioned ever is that none of the climate models created so far have been the least bit accurate.
Meanwhile we have a couple of inches of April snow here this morning and the east cost is faces record cold temps..
At least they are learning to push their predictions further out to where we can't stick around and prove them wrong. If I make it to 2100, climate change will be the least of my problems.
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Blacks hate the results of both Clinton and Obama policies as well as the Dem governance of their own cities, Philadelphia in this case. Yet these people including Hillary win because of black votes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/us/politics/bill-clinton-apology-black-lives-matter-philadelphia.html
"... central to the 2016 campaign...the 1994 crime bill, which created tougher penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, erected dozens of new prisons, banned certain types of assault weapons and sent 100,000 more police officers to American cities. Today, Black Lives Matter protesters have pointed to the effects of that legislation as contributing to the high rates of incarceration of black men and the current tensions between police officers and black communities."
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"Blacks hate the results of both Clinton and Obama policies as well as the Dem governance of their own cities, Philadelphia in this case. Yet these people including Hillary win because of black votes."
For the life of me I just cannot comprehend why Republicans cannot make any in roads with Blacks.
I wish our candidates would speak to them much more. It was like some big event when Rand Paul made one speech to a group of skeptical Blacks.
We aren't going to change minds with one lousy speech.
Defending a white guy punch out a black guy as he is being escorted out the door is not going to win over any fans.
I've been pleading this for years.
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"Blacks hate the results of both Clinton and Obama policies as well as the Dem governance of their own cities, Philadelphia in this case. Yet these people including Hillary win because of black votes."
For the life of me I just cannot comprehend why Republicans cannot make any in roads with Blacks.
I wish our candidates would speak to them much more. It was like some big event when Rand Paul made one speech to a group of skeptical Blacks.
We aren't going to change minds with one lousy speech.
...
Yes and it goes both ways. Blacks should be trying to make inroads into the Republican party, as should other groups that the Democrats are leaving behind. Rand Paul did that. Paul Ryan has reached out. Jack Kemp always did. We haven't found a way to reach the black community with black conservatives. The latest was Ben Carson. I think his support came from the usual Republican demographics. Probably the same for the readership of people like Thomas Sowell. Maybe if Carson ends up on the ticket he can be in a position to reach people where that message is otherwise not heard.
Our candidates talk to them by including them, not by singling them out. The Reagan economic expansion was for everyone and benefited everyone. But we don't get credit for that because we don't have a separate but unequal program for groups.
Law enforcement in your neighborhood is a good thing. If your race is under-represented, get more people, your sons and daughters, into those professions - law enforement. Democratic opposition to school choice is keeping your kids in bad schools and it is a case of Dems, they are putting their special interest, teachers' unions, ahead of your kids' best interests. It's crazy that inner city blacks support the anti-school choice party. Republicans aren't going to put an end to the safety net, so quit saying things that sound like we will. We don't want you to starve, but we need you to recognize that the over-dependence on these programs, on balance, is holding you back. If and when a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy returns to this country, you will want to be a part of it.
At the end of slavery, the feeling was that we are black, set us free, we can compete, make a living, and own and run businesses etc. Blacks were Republicans then. 150 years later, the winning (Democrat) message is that you are black, you are a victim, and you have no chance in this rigged world without a constant leg up from us and from a big government. It isn't true. It isn't working, and no one effectively points that out.
We need to be resolute in distancing ourselves from any support of a rigged, crony world. That is the turf of the left; let them own it. We need to repeal the unfair over-regulations that are designed to keep entrenched interests in and new entrants out. We need economic growth for all. A stagnant economy favors those who already have money and power. Witness the Obama years.
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Doug,
This from a Princeton Professor.
Victimization is all they teach in the schools the universities. So here is a professor going after Clinton. The Blacks don't like Sanders because he is Jewish. They don't agree with the Clintons because they (he at least) dared to ask them to recognize some culpability, some personal responsibility yet they hate Republicans. It all comes down to reparations.
I for one will not pay reparations. Indeed I feel like I already pay enough in the form of Democrat party extortion fees.
In any case what can one do with this? What the hell does this guy want? What would make him happy? It ain't equal opportunity. Someone needs to ask him:
http://time.com/4288491/bill-clintons-blunder/
PS: Trump "floats" Rubio for VP ; Marco back in the game? :-o
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/04/11/trump-floats-rubio-kasich-walker-vice-president-picks/
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I'm not enjoying the Republican race, might as well have some fun with the divide on the left...
This is the left calling out Bill Clinton and his co-President for being anti-crime. The funniest part I suppose is to see their reaction is to apologize for instead of defend their anti-crime policy.
Both splits of the left miss the central error; we don't want our local police forces nationalized. Bill Clinton was putting a hundred thousand more cops on the street with federal dollars because it sounded good in a State of the Union speech, like he cares, not because it is good policy or the federal government's responsibility.
-------------------------------------------------------------
The Nation
PoliticsWorldEconomyCultureTake Action
ELECTION 2016 BILL CLINTON BLACK LIVES MATTER
Nothing About the 1994 Crime Bill Was Unintentional
In the ’90s, Bill Clinton exploited fears about crime in the same way that Donald Trump uses immigration today.
http://www.thenation.com/article/nothing-about-the-1994-crime-bill-was-unintentional/
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/the_politics_of_bill_clinton_s_crime_bill_were_messier_than_they_seem.html
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ccp, Too late for slavery, maybe we should pay reparations for the damage done by our 'war on poverty' spending spree that pulled millions of good and healthy people out of the productive economy.
Why don't we try to get the present right before we make reparations for the past.
Regarding slavery reparations from a northerner point of view, we fought a bloody war to free slaves and want nothing in return. You would never get it right as to who should pay in and who should receive. Besides the victims and the perpetrators are all dead now. We have a statute of limitations. This is all noise in the room that makes it harder to recognize when someone actually has a valid claim.
e pluribus unum. We aren't a nation of warring factions in spite of what our leadership would have us believe.
As you suggest, these groups dissatisfaction with Dems is not making them Rs. But it's a start.
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Exactly why is THIS guy sitting in front of a Senate appropriations committee discussing his opinion and recommendations on foreign policy anyway?
Exactly why do celebrities get to sit in front of Senate committees so frequently? Are the committee members interested in autographs for their kids?
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/13/frank-gaffney-obama-bono-migration-advocates-truly-blind-nature-enemy-facing/
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Exactly why is THIS guy sitting in front of a Senate appropriations committee discussing his opinion and recommendations on foreign policy anyway?
Exactly why do celebrities get to sit in front of Senate committees so frequently? Are the committee members interested in autographs for their kids?
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/13/frank-gaffney-obama-bono-migration-advocates-truly-blind-nature-enemy-facing/
As qualified as Obama or Trump. This is where we are in 2016 America.
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Suddenly the left is going after Bill. Till recently he was the media and the lefts titan , their darling. Now they don't need him, he goes under the bus so they can push their narrative:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-bill-clinton-lost-his-1406972950126646.html
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This could go under an Islam thread but it applies to the entire "left" today. "discrimination is a growth industry". I could not have summed it up any better than that one phrase. All about the money:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/14/what-britains-muslims-really-think-is-that-nothing-is-ever-their-fault/
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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/treasurys-lew-to-announce-hamilton-to-stay-on-10-bill-222204
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on our paper currency with one criteria . They are not male and white. Lets turn our currency into celebrity postage stamps now. Sorry maybe they are great Americans but none of these people belong on bills:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-harriet-tubman-20-bill-20160420-story.html
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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/treasurys-lew-to-announce-hamilton-to-stay-on-10-bill-222204
Harriet Tubman was a gun owning republican woman.
I am cool with that.
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Are there any polls that ask women how they feel about this? Where are all the feminists? Why are they not outraged? I don't believe the majority of women are ok with this. Not that it matters. The left will shove this shit down our throats like it or not:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/20/target-stores-open-womens-bathrooms-changing-rooms-to-men/
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"Harriet Tubman was a gun owning republican woman.
I am cool with that."
Well you know those are not reasons why she is picked or that will be taught about her being there. It is humorous to point this out though! :-D
If it wasn't for the idiot Barry Goldwater we may have still had Blacks on our side. AS LBJ is quoted as saying, "we pass Civil Rights and we will have those "N" [his word not mine]
voting for us for 100 years".
So far he is half right. No end in sight. Thanks Barry you jerk.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/treasurys-lew-to-announce-hamilton-to-stay-on-10-bill-222204
GM: Harriet Tubman was a gun owning republican woman.
I am cool with that.
(http://pajamasmed.hs.llnwd.net/e11/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Screen-Shot-2016-04-20-at-8.35.52-PM-600x463.png)
Hamilton was the Founder of the Democratic Party...
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Hamilton was a great American (including being a co-author of the Federalist Papers!) who guided us into founding as an economically solvent nation after the tremendous economic disruption (including massive monetary inflation) of the War for Independence. He most certainly deserves to stay where he is.
More to the point however, is that we have now entered a new era where the currency will be the source of propaganda wars. What the hell is Eleanor Roosevelt doing on our currency? A woman singer? 5 suffragettes?
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Hamilton was a great American (including being a co-author of the Federalist Papers!) who guided us into founding as an economically solvent nation after the tremendous economic disruption (including massive monetary inflation) of the War for Independence. He most certainly deserves to stay where he is.
More to the point however, is that we have now entered a new era where the currency will be the source of propaganda wars. What the hell is Eleanor Roosevelt doing on our currency? A woman singer? 5 suffragettes?
For the left, the battlespace is everywhere.
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Crafty:
Hamilton was a great American (including being a co-author of the Federalist Papers!) who guided us into founding as an economically solvent nation after the tremendous economic disruption (including massive monetary inflation) of the War for Independence. He most certainly deserves to stay where he is.
Thank you for a well-informed defense of this great American. My poke at the Obama's political Treasury Dept ignored all of Hamilton's contributions. Your post is a good example of the value of reading these pages.
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I don't agree. Maybe a coin. Not paper currency but the train has left the station:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/what-you-might-not-know-about-harriet-tubman
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As an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, I don't have any love for Andrew Jackson. See the Trail of Tears as to why.
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I have never been a fan of Andrew Jackson. War hero yes. Nice guy - no. Politics not mine.
But Harriet Tubman is only the start. Soon it will be Beyonce.
Interesting that
his mansion is a stately museum estate but there are only fields left where his slaves used to live at the Hermitage.
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The story is Germany but the issue is everywhere, cognitive dissonance of the left, crony governmentism and unintended consequences.
"Germany to subsidize electric cars to help own auto industry"
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/67265729712a40dca98c6aa8a50305e2/germany-subsidize-electric-cars-help-own-auto-industry
But Germany was also closing its nuclear plants as a result of tsunami (in Japan). Electric cars are far more polluting than gasoline ones. The electric grid in Germany is 45% coal, 55% fossil fuel. Generating with fossil fuels involves a 63% energy loss at the plant and loses 2/3rds more in transmission, making the overall efficiency 13.7%.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/the_dirty_little_secret_about_allelectric_vehicles.html
While they build more public sector solar I would note that it has been cloudy every time I was there, dark all night, and their latitude is similar to Ketchikan, not Scottsdale.
The policy of finding failure and subsidizing it is not uniquely German or European.
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No, but it is quite leftist. Thankfully, the Islamic invaders are used to living in poverty, so they have that going for them.
The story is Germany but the issue is everywhere, cognitive dissonance of the left, crony governmentism and unintended consequences.
"Germany to subsidize electric cars to help own auto industry"
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/67265729712a40dca98c6aa8a50305e2/germany-subsidize-electric-cars-help-own-auto-industry
But Germany was also closing its nuclear plants as a result of tsunami (in Japan). Electric cars are far more polluting than gasoline ones. The electric grid in Germany is 45% coal, 55% fossil fuel. Generating with fossil fuels involves a 63% energy loss at the plant and loses 2/3rds more in transmission, making the overall efficiency 13.7%.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/the_dirty_little_secret_about_allelectric_vehicles.html
While they build more public sector solar I would note that it has been cloudy every time I was there, dark all night, and their latitude is similar to Ketchikan, not Scottsdale.
The policy of finding failure and subsidizing it is not uniquely German or European.
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A Revision on the Bill of Rights, Part III
04/26/2016 01:07 pm ET
821
Justin Curmi
A blogger that seeks to engage people in thought and conversation through presenting new views to matters, new or old.
“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment is highly contested. There is no doubt that people do have the right to carry and have a stockpile of guns (“the right of the people to keep and bear arms”) and a state has the right to organize a well-regulated Militia. But, the main issue is on the right to self-defend with a firearm.
The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights. In addition, one’s mental capacity is a major factor in deciding whether a man or woman has the right to have a firearm. There are two reasons for ensuring mental capacity. First, one of the Five Aims is to ensure domestic tranquility and there can be no tranquility if one does not have the capacity. Second, if one’s brain is distorting his or her reality, they do not have the proper reasoning and deduction skills to use a firearm.
Therefore, if we ponder and meditate on the recent events in news about guns, it would be obvious that the current state is incorrect. A gun for civilians is a weapon for a revolution and not for ordinary use. The belief that a gun is a useful tool to protect one is counterintuitive because guns get into the hands of people who use them for horrible reasons. In addition, there are reasons why cops are trained to use a firearm in stressful situations. It is not to keep their mind at ease or anything of that sort, but to be able to fire accurately at the target in the correct location. It is immensely difficult to fire when under pressure. Moreover, one may argue this is an analogous argument and yes it is because the United States government is lobbied to not study or fund research that observes the effects of guns. This cripples the chance of evaluating a proper policy to deal with gun violence. But, there was one study by ABC, which observed using guns in a classroom. All the participations poorly performed at the mock situation.
Once again, if there is an argument in the reasoning of this amendment and others, one must filter it through the Five Aims of the USA and the Bill of Rights. This is to ensure that any argument can be answered, avoiding a political divide.
Follow Justin Curmi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yophilosophy
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-is-the-racial-wealth-_b_9790262.html
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-is-the-racial-wealth-_b_9790262.html
Funny how he doesn't mention certain immigrant groups that do well.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-is-the-racial-wealth-_b_9790262.html
"Why Is the Racial Wealth Gap Widening?"
- Black people are disproportionately held back by the programs that Robert Reich advocates. It isn't because we had slavery in part of our country a century and a half ago. The biggest reason people live paycheck to paycheck is the artificially high cost of everything. The burden of government is in everything we buy, not just the tax in your paycheck. And employers are held back from expanding payrolls by the kinds of taxes and regulations that he always wants to increase.
Address inequality by stomping out wealth:
"First, reform the tax system so capital gains — increases in the value of assets — are taxed at the same rate as ordinary income."
- Great, just subtract the inflationary component first. That isn't a gain, it isn't income and it doesn't bring in revenue when it prevents investors from selling assets.
"Second, limit how much mortgage interest the wealthy can deduct from their incomes."
- (We already do that!) Odd that he thinks the super rich are people who need to borrow to buy a house. People reading Pat's posts know that a large portion of the housing transactions were all cash, especially times were the hardest. I'm surprised he didn't say ban people from using their own money to buy houses. The left seeks equality by rejecting equal treatment under the law. Why do they always want two sets of rules? Should mortgage interest be deductible or not? How about letting interest rates return to market levels - when everyone knows that the Fed's wrongful meddling is disproportionately benefiting the rich?
"Provide every newborn child with a savings account consisting of at least $1,250 — and more if a child is from a low-income family. This sum will compound over the years into a solid nest egg."
- Again, two sets of rules with an incentive to be poor. Give them what money, borrowed money? That they will have to pay back with interest if they grow up and succeed in joining the productive economy? No worries, the program won't succeed. Like all the rest, it will help to trap people in poverty. Like the fight against social security privatization, poor people will be banned from having this money in "risky" rich people investments (the market). With the power of compound interest it could grow at a .0001% for all those years - while thsee low income families can't touch this money for more urgent needs.
"Allow families receiving public benefits to save."
- Or put the other way, give assistance to people who don't need the money.
He never answers the question, what money? We already squandered ourselves into 19 trillion of debt. If poor people thought they would ever catch up and have to pay for these programs where they see the waste firsthand, they wouldn't support them either. The more we did of the Obama-Reich-Left policies, cash for clunkers, solyndra, community reinvestment act, federal student loan increases, affordable healthcare, prescription drug benefit, the Kennedy education bill, family leave, quantitative expansion, all of it, the worse inequality got. Their answer: We need to do more!
How about we trust people in their abilities, even "racial" people, and let them compete on a level playing field?
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Actually, cutting the mortgage interest deduction is a good way to punish the blue States, so I support that.
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Actually, cutting the mortgage interest deduction is a good way to punish the blue States, so I support that.
Right, and the deduction for state and local taxes. It is totally not fair that people choosing to pay higher state and local taxes should then pay less than their share of federal for that choice.
Needs to be said with that: [Eliminate deductions] ...and lower the tax rates accordingly.
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The "Left" vs "*Far* Right". Again we see control of the language in the media:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alternative-fur-deutschland-conference-protesters-germany-arrested-a7007971.html
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/02/why-arent-we-having-a-national-conversation-about-leftist-violence/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=5922a935e7-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-5922a935e7-83807757#.VydE122-EpQ.facebook
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Right. Just some social justice warrior "browns" beating up "hateful" white men - getting a tad wee bit rambunctious; that is all. No biggie
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Better not learn American History from the left:
"The Great Depression of the 1930s struck the United States with extreme force, and many people blamed the economic and financial elites for having enriched themselves while leading the country to ruin. (Bear in mind that the share of top incomes in US national income peaked in the late 1920s, largely due to enormous capital gains on stocks.) Roosevelt came to power in 1933, when the crisis was already three years old and one-quarter of the country was unemployed. He immediately decided on a sharp increase in the top income tax rate, which had been decreased to 25 percent in the late 1920s and again under Hoover’s disastrous presidency. The top rate rose to 63 percent in 1933 and then to 79 percent in 1937, surpassing the previous record of 1919."
- Thomas Piketty from his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century pages pages 506-507
http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X?ie=UTF8&keywords=thomas%20piketty&qid=1462788167&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
The top rate was lowered to 25 percent in 1925, not exactly “the late 1920s” and not by Herbert Hoover. The top rate was jacked up to 63 percent in 1932, not 1933, and it was done by Herbert Hoover, not by FDR. This isn’t an arbitrary screwup on Piketty’s part: On the contrary, it serves his narrative. It would be really great for Piketty’s story if the right-wing business-friendly Herbert Hoover slashed tax rates to boost the income of the 1%, thereby bringing in a stock bubble/crash and the Great Depression. Then FDR comes in to save the day by jacking up tax rates. Except that’s not what happened.
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2016/05/leftist-thomas-piketty-another.html
Robert Reich , Paul Krugman , Chris Matthews and other statists tell you that Herbert Hoover cut federal spending during the depression.
Herbert Hoover Increased Government Spending 67%
Calvin Coolidge balanced the budget every year and cut the national debt in half!
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf
More on (moron) Leftist Piketty: (Finding the flaws of Piketty and the income equality snipe hunt is still relevant this campaign season.)
Professor Piketty's supposed history of changes in the minimum wage is not tarnished by a single error, but by a vast array of systematic errors. His history is pure revisionist fiction, and revisionist fiction with a political purpose: making Democratic presidents look magnanimous and Republican presidents look uncaring. Yet, over the past quarter century, the period Piketty describes as showing a dramatic increase in inequality, Republican presidents signed into law larger percentage increases in the minimum wage than did Democratic presidents.
Piketty suggests that America copy France, where the minimum wage in 2013 was 9.43 euros ($13 dollars) an hour. But the consequences of the minimum wage can be seen in the differences in youth unemployment rates in the two countries. In 2013, young people aged 15 to 24 had an unemployment rate of 24 percent in France and 16 percent in the United States, according to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development statistics. Germany has no minimum wage: its youth unemployment rate was 8 percent last year.
Another reason we might not want to copy France: OECD data also show that in 2012 France's per person GDP was 70 percent of per person GDP in the United States.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2014/04/22/the_systematic_errors_in_thomas_pikettys_new_book_101016.html
Getting CEO pay right is surely a challenge, but does anybody on earth think it is the defining challenge of our time?
http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/23/what-thomas-piketty-gets-wrong-about-cap
Piketty’s fans ignore the obvious answer to this problem. Instead of attacking capital and capitalism, why not expand the number of people who participate in the benefits of having capital?
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/piketty-gets-it-wrong
The problem is that worldwide labor statistics [used by Piketty] do not have a category that relates the poor to their entrepreneurial activities, nor to their aspiration to be part of the global market.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hernando-de-soto/piketty-wrong-third-world_b_6751634.html
It is literally shocking that Piketty ignores the impact of welfare programs on the effective distribution of capital.
Entrepreneurial activity is inchanged by high tax rates, :Pikeety alleges, yet no private French company founded in the last 100 years has ever reached the top 100 globally.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/05/06/thomas-piketty-gets-the-numbers-wrong/#712ee07524eb
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When you put fight income inequality first, some things tend to come out upside down, such as the poor get poorer and the nation gets poorer. I wonder if the average leftist could find a flaw in the Piketty model using the examples below. Meanwhile, Piketty is making an estimated $1,000,000 /year off of inequality book sales. I should write leftist books...
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In Piketty’s world, it would be a bad thing if someone were to develop a drug that cured Alzheimer’s. This is because that person would certainly become a multi-billionaire, and that would increase inequality.
The only thing worse than the scenario described above would be if, because his/her newfound riches hadn’t been confiscated by Piketty’s income and wealth taxes (as they certainly should be), he/she used the capital to develop a cure for cancer. Even more inequality!
Under Piketty’s tax system, it would have been impossible for Elon Musk to leverage his success with PayPal to fund Tesla Motors.
In Piketty’s model, it would be a disaster if 15 million unemployed Americans went out tomorrow and got jobs paying $8.00/hour. This because is creating new jobs that pay less than the average wage of the “Bottom 50%” will increase labor income inequality.
In contrast, it would be good if all of America’s minimum wage workers quit their jobs and went on welfare, because then labor income inequality would be reduced.
On page 309 of Capital, Piketty notes approvingly that the minimum wage in France has been higher than that of the U.S. since 1985. However, Piketty doesn’t mention that, since 1985, French unemployment has averaged about 9%, vs. about 6% for the U.S.
Seizing all of the venture capital firms in America and giving the funds to Amtrak would be good, because it would not only reduce wealth inequality, but also allow the federal government to build much needed high-speed rail infrastructure.
To Piketty, a rising ratio of wealth to national income is bad, and a falling ratio is good. Accordingly, Piketty’s bad periods have names like “la Belle Epoch” (the beautiful era), the “Roaring Twenties,” and “the Soaring Sixties.” In contrast, his good times have names like “World War I,” “World War II,” and “the Great Depression.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/05/06/thomas-piketty-gets-the-numbers-wrong/4/#45e100233000
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/13151895_516913008515245_1161383372739557502_n.jpg?w=500&h=500)
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In the Breitbart article on how he gives a homeless man $5 because he is holding a sign that says "give me a dollar or I will vote for Donald Trump is the statement below.
Anyone else pick up on how absurd this statement is:
“I’ve been interested in and involved in politics all my life,” the 75-year-old actor said. “My first act of political civil disobedience was in 1945 during the post-war election, so I am interested in parties and groups. Particularly, in these days, we are confronted by extremist points of view and extremist actions, certainly since the troubles with the IRA.”
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Believe it or not, it's still George Bush's fault, or so they imply at the start of this hit piece on the state of the economy. But then they go on to assess specific blame for the failed recovery at it is the lack of government spending, believe it or not. We had TARP. We had QE1234. We had ZIRP, NIRP, Cash. for Clunkers and Solyndra. we had a trillion dollars a year of temporary spending that became permanent. But we did not do enough with our government sector spending. Are you f****** kidding?
Other than false cause diagnosis, this would be a perfect reply to Wesbury and Grannis optimism pieces. The underemployment rate is nearly 50% for new college grads while we tell ourselves we are back to 5% unemployment. We set policies for a decade that perfectly emulate Venezuela, begin to see the same results, and the problem is "tricky timing" for the class of 2016? Do these people believe their own writing?
Later this month I will celebrate a $265,000 college graduation. Their goal for next year is to raise tuition.
The New York Times
(Don't) SUBSCRIBE
Sunday Review
EDITORIAL
Tricky Timing for the Class of 2016
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
MAY 14, 2016
This year’s high school graduates were 10 years old when the economy hit the skids in 2008. Many college graduates in the class of 2016 were 14. Yet, their economic prospects remain darkened by the enduring effects of the Great Recession.
[What caused the great recession??!!]
That is not to say there has been no improvement. The class of ’16 has more and better-paying job opportunities than earlier post-crash graduating classes, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. But for the most part, today’s graduates still face employment conditions that are worse than in 2007, the year before the recession, and are much worse than in 2000, when the economy was last at full employment.
The recent unemployment rate for college graduates ages 21 to 24 was 5.5 percent, compared with 4.3 percent in 2000. Their underemployment rate — which includes the unemployed, those who have briefly left the work force and those stuck in part-time jobs — was recently 12.3 percent, compared with 7.1 percent in 2000. And in 2015, nearly 45 percent of college graduates ages 22 to 27 were in jobs that did not require a college degree, compared with 38 percent in 2000. Over the same period, student debt has soared, which means that many of today’s graduates are trying to pay off more debt with less secure jobs.
The situation for new high school graduates is far bleaker, in part because many lower-wage jobs are being filled by college graduates. Among high school graduates ages 17 to 20, unemployment is nearly 18 percent, compared with 12 percent in 2000. One in three are underemployed, compared with roughly one in five in 2000.
The soft labor market has depressed wages, with average hourly pay for young college graduates, recently $18.53, barely higher than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. Young high school graduates are averaging only $10.66, lower than in 2000, adjusted for inflation.
Without full employment to help push up pay, wages and salaries for all workers lag even as corporate profits rise. But the consequences for young people are particularly severe, because early bouts of unemployment, underemployment and low pay can continue to harm job prospects and earnings over a long period. One’s pay and position starting out has a big impact on subsequent raises and promotions, and thus on accumulated wealth over a career.
This trap is especially dangerous for racial minorities and women, who even in the best of times have to combat bias in hiring and pay. For young black college graduates, the recent unemployment rate, at well over 9 percent, is double that of young white graduates. Young female college graduates earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers, a gap that is bound to get worse as men at the very top of the wage ladder capture an increasing share of total pay.
These persistent problems are the result of political failure. Job growth and pay growth were weak and largely ignored as policy issues for most of the 2000s, even before the Great Recession. To restore full employment after the crash would have required sustained government investment in many areas, including infrastructure, education, health care and energy technologies.
More public spending could have raised demand at a time of diminished private-sector spending. But Republicans in Congress have rejected that approach and have embraced budget cuts that have hampered broader recovery and growth, at times with the support or acquiescence of Democrats and administration officials.
Even piecemeal labor market improvements have been stymied or delayed. A higher federal minimum wage would lift wages for low-earning graduates, and updated overtime rules for salaried workers would lift middle-class pay. But lawmakers last raised the minimum wage in 2007, and it will be 2017, at the earliest, before they do so again. Similarly, the administration is expected to issue new overtime rules soon, but at this late date, putting them into effect will fall to the next administration.
In the meantime, the class of 2016, like many before it, will graduate into a tough economy in which even the college educated are not assured a toehold.
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What do you say to a graduate with a non-STEM degree?
Venti mocha on ice, please.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/hugo_chavezs_economic_miracle/
WEDNESDAY, MAR 6, 2013 05:30 AM MST
Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle
The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains
DAVID SIROTA Follow
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TOPICS: EDITOR'S PICKS, HUGO CHAVEZ, HUMAN RIGHTS, LATIN AMERICA, POVERTY, SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA, POLITICS NEWS
Hugo Chavez's economic miracle
Hugo Chavez (Credit: AP/Leslie Mazoch, photo treatment by Salon)
For the last decade in American politics, Hugo Chavez became a potent political weapon – within a few years of his ascent, he was transformed from just a leader of a neighboring nation into a boogeyman synonymous with extremism. Regularly invoked in over-the-top political rhetoric, Chavez’s name became a decontextualized epithet to try to attach to a political opponent so as to make that opponent look like a radical. Because of this, America barely flinched upon hearing the news that the Bush administration tried to orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected Venezuelan leader.
Just to get it out of the way, I’ll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms (though as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy notes, “Venezuela is recognized by many scholars to be more democratic than it was in the pre-Chávez era”). His rein also coincided with a boom in violent crime.
That said, these serious problems, while certainly worthy of harsh criticism, were not the primary reason Chavez became the favorite effigy of American politicians and pundits. In an age marked by America’s drone assaults, civil liberties abuses, and war on voting, it is not as if this nation’s political establishment sees an assault on democratic freedoms as deplorable. Likewise, that same political establishment is more than friendly with leaders of countries like Mexico and Colombia – countries which are also periodically hotbeds of violent crime.
No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”
When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on.
For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism.
That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati – a high crime prompting a special punishment.
As evidenced by the treatment of everyone from Martin Luther King to Michael Moore to Oliver Stone to anyone else who dares question neoliberalism and economic imperialism, that punishment is all about marginalization – the kind that avoids engaging on substance for fear of allowing the notion of socialism to even enter the conversation in the first place. Instead, the non-conformist is attacked and discredited with vapid invective and caricature, becoming a cartoon villain whose ideas, performance and record are ignored before they can be considered on the merits. He becomes, in other words, the Hugo Chavez we so often saw in American political ads.
Stating this, mind you, is not to claim that Venezuela’s economy under Chavez was perfect. As The Week correctly put it, while “Chavez’s policies of redistribution and nationalization of oil assets endeared him to Venezuela’s working class” and produced many laudable results, the country’s “oil-centric economy has taken away resources from other areas that are badly in need of development.”
However, it is to argue that at a moment when America faces a pivotal debate about taxation and the size of government in specific and free market fundamentalism in general, Chavez’s passing should prompt as much reflection on the individual iconoclast as on the overarching economic ideas he came to embody.
To start, that means asking important questions.
For example, the United States has adamantly rejected the concept of nationalization and instead pursued a bailout/subsidy strategy when it comes to rapacious banks and oil companies – and those firms have often gone on to wreak economic havoc. Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?
Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?
And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?
No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked. The problem is that even gently raising them typically gets one tarred and feathered as a communist and then inevitably called a Hugo Chavez pal (even if Chavez’s overall record is also being criticized!). At the moment Chavez’s name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse.
That is by design – it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin.
David Sirota
David Sirota is a senior writer for the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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What do you say to a graduate with a non-STEM degree?
Venti mocha on ice, please.
I'm glad you said non-STEM; my daughter's degree is in math. :-D
WHAT CAUSED THE GREAT RECESSION? Lack of government spending under George Bush?! Are they kidding? Free markets running wild - in the mortgage business that is nearly 100% federal, completely infiltrated by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GSEs and CRAp. Does anyone remember Saving and Loans, S&Ls? Loans were once tied to Savings. Crazy Now we have no savings. Your credit line is your nest egg and your wealth. Those loans are tied to government monetary creation no matter how Wesbury and Grannis want to sugar coat it. We can adjust Fed policy with a volume switch to make stock markets or housing markets go up - artificially. And that's all we know. We don't know what to do next or how to make it go down without crashing or how to ever let an economy operate under normal or real incentives again.
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I'm glad you said non-STEM; my daughter's degree is in math.
Smart girl. Now she should find a good job in Singapore or Hong Kong to develop global business skills.
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I'm glad you said non-STEM; my daughter's degree is in math.
Smart girl. Now she should find a good job in Singapore or Hong Kong to develop global business skills.
I will suggest the growth industries of our time, canned goods and ammo...
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I'm glad you said non-STEM; my daughter's degree is in math.
Smart girl. Now she should find a good job in Singapore or Hong Kong to develop global business skills.
I will suggest the growth industries of our time, canned goods and ammo...
We have some time, I hope. Not long ago I was having dinner with a friend who has a an elite military background and is a career law enforcement officer. We see the same endgame,and it's hard to say if we have months, or years before it kicks off.
Now, the firearms business is one of the few bright spots for domestic industries, thanks to history's greatest gun salesman.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435448/obamas-pajama-boy-menagerie
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Awesome. Please put in the Rants thread as well.
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http://gothamist.com/2016/05/17/operation_mass_vasectomy.php
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http://gothamist.com/2016/05/17/operation_mass_vasectomy.php
Us hicks out west have this thing called hunting that is much more effective in managing deer populations.
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Nothing says leftist compassion for the homeless like a free, one way bus ticket out of their jurisdiction.
http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/portland-begins-sending-homeless-people-to-other-cities-including-seattle/296353382
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/203278/bad-bad-anthony-weiner
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Doug,
Thanks for the post on the movie
It sounds like Oscar material -
no not that Oscar.
I mean Oscar Myer Wiener!
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quote author=ccp link=topic=2177.msg96366#msg96366 date=1464347096]
Doug,
Thanks for the post on the movie
It sounds like Oscar material -
no not that Oscar.
I mean Oscar Myer Wiener!
[/quote]
) A look inside a most famous marriage that no one wants to look inside!
The author of the article is Judith Miller of New York Times and Valerie Plame fame.
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Oh my God! This is the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee covering for Hillary. How sick is this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/feinstein-says-enough-enough-clinton-132855333.html?nhp=1
:x
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http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/03/vox-editor-if-trump-comes-to-your-town-start-a-riot/
Vox editor: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot
POSTED AT 10:41 AM ON JUNE 3, 2016 BY ED MORRISSEY
Share on Facebook 88 88 SHARES
Golly, mightn’t this play hob with the accusation that Donald Trump is the one inciting riots? Vox’s “deputy first person editor” Emmet Rensin took to Twitter last night to declare that, since Trump is a racist and a fascist (in Rensin’s opinion, at least), then all forms of violence short of murder have become completely legitimate. I wonder whether the mayor of San Jose might rethink his blame-throwing for yesterday’s violence from a leftist mob after this:
Follow
Emmett Rensin ✔ @emmettrensin
Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot.
10:10 PM - 2 Jun 2016
119 119 Retweets 113 113 likes
So …. who exactly is the fascist in this scenario? The Week’s Michael Dougherty seemed to wonder that himself, asking Rensin what exactly he saw as the limits of “legitimate” political violence. The answer? Murder’s out … but that’s about it:
13h
Michael B Dougherty ✔ @michaelbd
@emmettrensin Wait, this is a diversion. What is legitimate to do to Trump or his supporters? What isn’t?
Follow
Emmett Rensin ✔ @emmettrensin
@michaelbd Destroying property is legitimate. Shouting down is legitimate. Disruption of all events is legitimate. Murder isn't.
10:06 PM - 2 Jun 2016
13 13 Retweets 18 18 likes
So any violence short of murder is legitimate, as long as the political aim is pure enough, presumably. If you’re wondering what kind of violence isn’t legitimate, Jeryl Bier found this line in Rensin’s sand from last year:
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Jeryl Bier @JerylBier
Here's @emmettrensin on "literal violence": https://twitter.com/emmettrensin/status/664247251917742081 …
7:45 AM - 3 Jun 2016
3 3 Retweets 6 6 likes
A “Stop Hillary” wifi password is literal violence, while destruction of property and shutting down free speech is just legitimate political action. Can’t wait for the Voxsplainer on that! Mediate’s Alex Griswold rounds up some of the reaction to Rensin’s rant, including a number of familiar reminders of Vox’s editorial integrity. No one’s mentioned the Gaza-West Bank Bridge yet, but I’m sure that will be literal violence too when it comes up.
By the by, Rensin’s asinine ideas about political violence don’t amount to literal incitement either, at least not in a legal sense. Incitement has to be specific to a time and place, and have a very clear and direct direction; Brandenburg restricts such legal action to “imminent lawless action.” Rensin’s statements are far too abstract for him to suffer any legal impact from his “advice.” His credibility, on the other hand, should suffer plenty of figurative violence, as should Vox’s.
The best remedy for bad speech is more speech, not fascist mob actions to silence people and intimidate others out of the public square. Calling for the latter demonstrates intellectual and moral impotence. It debases politics to a calculation of who has the biggest rocks and guns in order to impose the rule of mob force rather than reasoned self-governance … and that’s definitely a feature of fascism.
Update: The mayor is from San Jose, not San Diego. I fixed it in the first paragraph. Thanks to C. T. Rex for the correction. My apologies to San Diego …
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Please check my math on this, the increase alone of Food Stamp recipients under Obama, 16 million more people on food stamps under Obama, is equal to the population of 13 states: Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming.
That's a good thing, right?
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I have a little more to go on this and then I will copy this over to 'Political Economics' for safekeeping.
94.1 million now "out of the workforce".
7.4 million of "the workforce" unemployed.
101.5 million working age and above people don't work in a country of 245 million adults.
The number working age and above people in this country not working exceeds the entire population of our 35 lowest population states.
Some of these should be working. Some should not. My point in the plowhorse analogy is that, at some point, the load is too great for the rest to carry.
How many too many that is - is a matter of opinion. But it is WAY too many.
Left wing fact check from 14 months ago:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/10/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-92-million-americans-arent-working/
The poor got poorer under Chavez Obama. The rich got richer under Obama. They locked in their market share in all the crony industries while the government acted powerfully to prevent new companies to enter those industries, rise up and compete.
We traded economic opportunity away for a snipe called income equality - and got neither.
One might say, we have a dead economy 10 years after Democrats took control of it, AT THIS POINT WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!
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Please check my math on this, the increase alone of Food Stamp recipients under Obama, 16 million more people on food stamps under Obama, is equal to the population of 13 states: Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming.
That's a good thing, right?
32 million on food stamps when Obama took office. Peaked at 47 million, roughly a 50% increase.
7.4 million on disability assistance when Obama took office. 11 million today, roughly a 50% increase.
More people in poverty. More people unable to work because of a disability, millions more. More people need assistance to buy health insurance. And more people on food stamps, tens of millions more. This is what we call a "recovery". How would it look differently if the economy sucked?
Seriously, where do we go with this. Is there a disability epidemic? Is the Surgeon General aware of it, doing something about it? The Medical Journals, do they know? Or does everyone know with a wink and a nod that it's just more free stuff. People are willing to give up work for free stuff. Same goes for food stamps. We advertise for food stamp customers. Great program. 20% of households are using it. Maybe more people should check it out.
What part of This Is Leftist Failure do they not understand? The more he grows the stagnant economy, the more people don't work in it. Can't even eat without help.
They are taking us on the same path as Venezuela; we are just at a different point on the time line.
Math update: The total number of people on food stamps, 46 million, is the same number of people that live in the 25 smallest states. All the people in half the states! So, what is the poverty rate after we pay all this money? Same as it was before. The Census Bureau does not count in kind payments as income.
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Please check my math on this, the increase alone of Food Stamp recipients under Obama, 16 million more people on food stamps under Obama, is equal to the population of 13 states: Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming.
That's a good thing, right?
Revise and extend my remarks:
32 million on food stamps when Obama took office. Peaked at 47 million, roughly a 50% increase.
7.4 million on disability assistance when Obama took office. 11 million today, roughly a 50% increase.
More people in poverty. More people unable to work because of a disability, millions more. More people need assistance to buy health insurance. And more people on food stamps, tens of millions more. This is what we call a "recovery". How would it look differently if the economy sucked?
Seriously, where do we go with this. Is there a disability epidemic? Is the Surgeon General aware of it, doing something about it? The Medical Journals, do they know? Or does everyone know with a wink and a nod that it's just more free stuff. People are willing to give up work for free stuff. Same goes for food stamps. We advertise for food stamp customers. Great program. 20% of households are using it. Maybe more people should check it out.
What part of This Is Leftist Failure do they not understand? The more he grows the stagnant economy, the more people don't work in it. Can't even eat without help.
They are taking us on the same path as Venezuela; we are just at a different point on the time line.
Math update: The total number of people on food stamps, 46 million, is the same number of people that live in the 25 smallest states. All the people in half the states! So, what is the poverty rate after we pay all this money? Same as it was before. The Census Bureau does not count in kind payments as income.
Recovery summer 2016! Just ask Wesbury, everything is awesome!
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What a bummer for the left to make this historic nomination, the first woman to win a major party nomination for President, the day after we abandoned the old gender distinctions of 'man' and 'woman'.
Even if femininity was still a recognizable quality, she has no more of it than any President prior.
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Thank God almighty, thank God almighty, thank God almighty. The Heavens have opened and a rainbow pours love and equality down on the world:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/08/politics/hillary-clinton-makes-history-reactions-trnd/
I cannot think of a more deserving person to be the "first" in history. [Heavy enough on the sarcasm?]
Now if she can be the first major party nominee to be indicted that would be far more just. Then if only Trump can win he should appoint an AG who will see that justice is truly delivered and she gets her due.
:wink:
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Sorry, but she would be the second woman president , , ,
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More lies to change history:
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/06/08/hillary-clinton-campaign-swag-gets-date-victory-wrong/
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Democrats, who control the state House, Senate and governor’s office, [passed the following minimum wage law"]
Wages will rise to $12.50 in rural Oregon, $13.50 in mid-size regions and $14.75 in greater Portland, all by the year 2022.
Are they saying there isn't one wage that works best for all no matter the age, industry of location?
Then there's this:
state analysts concluded in a prepared forecast the high wage will “result in approximately 40,000 fewer jobs in 2025 than would have been the case absent the legislation.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/06/10/minimum-wage-maximum-mess-in-oregon.html
The cost of "progress", fewer people working, more needing assistance. Who knew?
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"Wages will rise to $12.50 in rural Oregon, $13.50 in mid-size regions and $14.75 in greater Portland, all by the year 2022."
This is nuts.
can you imagine the confusion?
There can be NO end to more and more micro management in our lives
Anytime I hear the word manage it is basically telling me I am losing more freedom.
*Big data* is making the extent of this truly insane.
In the medical field there is an endless supply of supposed "researchers" who are sifting through reams of data to come up with anything . So they can claim a name a for themselves and publish in some trash phony medical journal and get place on yahoo health etc. some statistical association of something (virtually anything) with some disease and tell us we could save 5000 lives a year if (for example) we reduce our opening the refrigerator door two times less a day.
And this is extrapolated to 330 million people. So all 330 million should be aware not to open the refrigerator door 2 less times a day because they find that 1 out of 100,000 people may have their life saved.
Then since this is not enough the next "expert" horses ass, will publish an editorial that says we should only include those at high risk to do this and they will discuss more research is needed to identify those at "high risk". Then there will be another round of "researchers" who will come up with crazy tables and formulas that are supposed to identify people at high risk.
Then they will publish and all doctors are now supposed to screen people for high risk and ask them if they are identified based on a whole slew of features or scores to not open the refrigerator for 2 times less per day.
Then after we are all driven freakin nuts with all this bullshit in about a year another study will come out with opposite conclusions and advise not to do any of what we are "supposed" to do for the past year.
You want to live in a leftist society like this?
I "f" don't!!!
Well this is what is happening in medicine.
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GASP. Her young daughter comes homw and ruins dinner by saying that "Hillary is a liar".
Well you LIE to your daughter EVEN more by falsifying facts to convince your daughter that Hillary is NOT a liar, thats what a liberal does:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fallacies-about-hillary-clinton-setting-the-record_us_575af52de4b0b6c4960096cd
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The shooter was a registered Democrat. He voted in 2008 and 2012 during Obama's election and reelection. Will that come up in the President's unavoidable talk to us.
Is that one sign of being vulnerable to becoming radicalized? The President's pastor: "God DAMN America!"
Will the President apologize - or blame Republican policies? Tacky either way.
http://voters.findthedata.com/l/28019600/Omar-Mir-Seddique-Mateen
There is something dissonant about radical Muslims, gays (and Jews) all being constituent groups in the same political party.
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http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2016/06/15/i-turned-mateen-away-from-my-gun-store-because-he-seemed-odd-owner-says/
Can't wait for CAIR to protest.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/britain-s-elites-ignore-the-masses-at-their-peril
The ignored won't be ignored forever.
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Gotta love the left . Trump lies that we don't pay high taxes. Well half of the people in the Us don't. So true on that account. But for those of us who do it is high:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-tax-rate_us_576ade9ae4b0c0252e781158?section=
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CloaaF3VYAAlM_3.jpg)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CloaaF3VYAAlM_3.jpg
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Democrats Abandon Due Process
by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON June 23, 2016 1:50 PM @KEVINNR
First the First, second the Second and the Fifth Amendments In September of 2014, Senate Democrats voted to repeal the First Amendment. They were enraged by a Supreme Court decision holding that ordinary constitutional protections for free speech prohibited the government from punishing political activists who had shown a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. This was a straightforward case of classical political speech — critics of Mrs. Clinton arguing that she’d make a poor president and distributing a film making that case — and Democrats, including every single Democrat in the Senate, insisted that that isn’t what the First Amendment is intended to protect. They started at the beginning, and are making their way down the Bill of Rights, with the Second Amendment and the Fifth Amendment. The Second Amendment holds that “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” while the Fifth provides that no one may “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
These are what are known as civil rights, meaning the rights associated with citizenship, rights having to do with the relationship between people — or “the People” as the Constitution puts it — and their government. Many Americans do not think of the right to keep and bear arms as a civil right, but they are mistaken. It helps to understand things from the point of view of the Founders and the 18th-century radical liberals whose ideas shaped our republic. Prior to the American founding, the right to keep and bear arms was generally limited to the aristocracy; it was, like the possession of a title or a coat of arms (coat of what?), a bright and dramatic dividing line between the ruling class and the ruled classes, between the Whos and Whoms of society. Arguments about licensing the carry of weapons are hardly new: Caravaggio was arrested for carrying without a license (a sword, in his case) in 1598 near the Piazza Navona in Rome at 3 a.m.
The bearing of arms is a sign of citizenship, which is to say, of being a full participant in government who acts through it, as opposed to subjectship, the state of being a passive being who does not act through government but who is acted upon. In that sense, it is like the ability to vote or to be eligible for service in government. Frederick Douglass understood this linkage perfectly, inasmuch as these ideas were much better understood in those more literate days. “A man’s rights rest in three boxes,” he said. “The ballot box, jury box, and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex.” The militias contemplated by the Second Amendment were armed citizen volunteers who could act to use the force of arms to keep the peace in an emergency; they are entitled to act in the peacekeeping role generally reserved for the state because, being the citizens of a republic, they are the state, the very seat of its sovereignty. The formal government is a provisional arrangement (hence regular elections) constituted as a convenience. While the Second Amendment may not codify a “right of revolution,” as some put it, the idea of armed citizens pushing out a government that had become inconvenient, a burden on their liberties rather than a guarantor of them, could hardly have been alien to a group of men who had just risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor doing just that.
The Democrat party has abandoned the notion of procedural justice in pursuit of substantive outcomes demanded by its supporters, the rule of law be damned. The Fifth Amendment, with its emphasis on process, is an expression of the republican ideal of justice, which is oriented toward process rather than outcomes. The classical liberal view is that justice has two components, a procedural one and a substantive one, and that the law is organized to ensure procedural justice, i.e., that all men are treated equally and that no one is penalized without the formal criteria of the law having been satisfied. This is why even the worst criminals, caught red-handed in the act, are given trials with legal representation, the presentation of evidence, a robust defense, and the consideration of a jury rather than being torn to pieces in the street. Lynching a child molester might satisfy substantive justice in that the offender did indeed deserve to die for his crimes, but it does not satisfy procedural justice, which is what the law concerns itself with. Because mobs are prone to error and easily misled, one of the functions of procedural justice is to protect substantive justice (beyond a reasonable doubt and all that), but it also exists to ensure the orderly functioning of a society under the rule of law, which is why we generally accept the enforcement of unjust or unwise laws (e.g., the prohibition of marijuana) while we work to change them.
It is a measure of the corruption of the Democratic party and its ability to inspire corruption in others that John Lewis, once a civil-rights leader, is today leading a movement to strip Americans of their civil rights based on secret lists of subversives compiled by police agencies and the military. Perhaps it has not occurred to Representative Lewis that his mentor, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., also was on a secret government list, as indeed was Lewis himself under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover. The Democrats demand that Americans be stripped of their Second Amendment rights with no attention paid to the Fifth Amendment, to due process. They propose that Americans be stripped of their legal protections under the Bill of Rights even when they have not been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. They propose that this be done on the basis of a series of secret government lists, whose contents, criteria, and keepers are treated as state secrets. You cannot call yourself a “liberal” and endorse that. You cannot call yourself a “liberal” and endure that.
The Democratic party in 2016 is not a liberal party. It is a party that is working diligently to rescind free-speech rights on one front and to undermine due-process protections on another. It has abandoned the notion of procedural justice in pursuit of substantive outcomes demanded by its supporters, the rule of law be damned. There is a term for the armed pursuit of justice, real or perceived, outside the rule of law, and that term is “lynching.” The Democrats have lynching in their political DNA, and they seem to be unable to evolve past it. Ironically, their abandonment of due process and their flirtation with tyranny are reminders of one of the reasons why the Founders believed it necessary to have an armed citizenry. That is an unpleasant thing to contemplate. Better that all of us, conservatives and the genuinely liberal alike, should demand the rule of law, due process and all, even for our political opponents, even when we do not like the outcome. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437025/democrats-abandon-due-process
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http://heatst.com/politics/26-of-the-democrats-who-participated-in-the-gun-control-sit-in-own-guns/
While protesting in a building protected by men with guns, including AR type rifles.
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Lets see. If we get millions of people to sign that a redo of the 2012 election is only fair then lets get the signatures. We all know Romney should have won and he only lost because Hillary and obama went out and lied about Benghazi and also that he is not really advancing the US but is advancing the one world country dogma. And the libs are just too dumb to know what is best for themselves:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/28/billionaire-branson-calls-nonbinding-brexit-vote-rejected/
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More singling out a demographic they need votes from and use tax money to bribe them for their votes. No end to segmentation of whole classes of society and singling them out for special treatment from the left. Divide people , steal from some and bribe others with that which was taken and conquer :
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/clinton-offer-debt-forgiveness-young-entrepreneurs-100041087--politics.html
endless "policy" "management" government control and attempts at social engineering. Just no end. Till the day we all die.
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https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/29/obama-appointed-prosecutor-chills-free-speech-in-idaho-migrant-sex-assault/?singlepage=true
Watch what you say.
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"America’s version of the British antidote to elite hypocrisy is the buffoonish populist Donald Trump. Like the architects of Brexit, he arose not from what he was for, but what he said he was against."
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437303/brexit-elites-dont-practice-what-they-preach
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437303/brexit-elites-dont-practice-what-they-preach
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https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/07/07/denial-dies-in-dallas/?singlepage=true
Denial Dies in Dallas
By Richard Fernandez July 7, 2016
Beware, really beware
The dry branches were piled high on the forest floor waiting for a spark. The City Journal wrote:
Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.
The crime wave in Chicago illustrates how politicians trapped themselves in a vise of conflicting expectations from which there is no escape. It has proved impossible to do something and its opposite simultaneously, in this case withdraw the police and protect the community. It may prove just as impossible to require transgender bathrooms and guarantee no sexual harassment takes place or open the borders while promising there will be no terror attacks. When one thinks of it, making health care "affordable" while opening it to high risk groups was always a unlikely proposition.
Impossible, yet Big Tent constituencies are routinely green-lighted on both ends of a one way street and told to floor the pedal. For a while they could spin it with smoke and mirrors. But in the end, illusion does not last.
Sponsored
“What if I told you,” asks a Matrix-themed photo meme circulating on Facebook, “that you can be against cops murdering citizens and citizens murdering cops at the same time?” To that one might reply that the America in which that was possible might have died in Dallas, Texas in the last few hours. The age of the zero sum game may have arrived with a vengeance.
Dallas police say four officers have died after at least two snipers opened fire during protests downtown. Seven other officers were wounded.
Police Chief David O. Brown said police have a suspect cornered in a garage and are negotiating with that person. He says the snipers fired upon officers "ambush style."
Brown had said three officers were killed, and police issued a tweet later saying a fourth officer had died. Brown says snipers shot from "elevated positions" during a protest over two recent fatal police shootings.
Was terrorism involved? Were the ideas of Ferguson taken to their final, frightening conclusion? While the individual culprits of the shooting have yet to be identified, the factors which have turned the summer of 2016 into a witches' brew were clear for all to see. It is the culmination of decades of identity politics, the fruit of open borders, the outcome of an unwarranted disdain for Islamic extremism, the destruction of everything once held in common. Most of all it is the product of a collapse in legitimacy that has soured the public on nearly every institution: the political parties, the Supreme Court, the presidency, the police and the FBI. Now at the very moment when the public needs to trust someone the question is: whom can you trust?
The security system of America is trust, which manifests itself in legitimacy which in turn makes it possible to govern a huge nation largely on consent. The mistake was to believe it was possible to play the identity card endlessly, to set one against another, to destroy trust -- without consequences.
The public is suddenly face to face with the realization that the solid status quo is a fragile facade that might at any moment dissolve into something unrecognizable. It's a veneer masking a crumbling structure. Donald and Hillary are not freaks. They are monsters from our Id. If any proof were needed that the discontent sweeping Europe and the United States is all too real, that the can has reached the end of the road, it may be provided in the next few weeks.
Dallas leaves the Narrative with no place to go. What'll it be? Withdraw the police from the streets? Crack down on the usual suspects? Announce this was the work of that Jayvee team, ISIS? Close the borders? Confiscate the guns? Call in the FBI?
Or maybe we can listen to another speech about how hatred is on its last legs? There's nowhere to turn without admitting failure. Or perhaps we can just change the subject and talk about the war on women and Christian hatred? What'll it be? It's always worked before, maybe it'll work again.
Sponsored
For once the Narrative will find this can't be spun, though it will try, this time in the growing realization that lies may only make it worse, as the former lies have worsened things till now. The roots of discontent run deep. The status quo has been living on borrowed money and borrowed truth. It is now living on borrowed time.
Denial will no longer work. That is the single most important thing to understand.
Update:
Dallas chief of police David Brown described the motive of one attacker. He "wanted to kill white people", especially police., as the Washington Post reports. It's a sad outcome. The Narrative truly has nowhere left to go.
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Lets see. I am wondering. "I want to kill white people'. Hmmm. Work place violence? Disgruntled because he is unemployed? Drugs? Chemical imbalance? Did not have father at home?
Due to white privilege ? hmmmm.
How about a *hate crime*? OK DOJ - how about investigating this as a hate crime?
What about it Obama?
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(https://pajamasmed.hs.llnwd.net/e12/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/obamalies.jpg)
https://pajamasmed.hs.llnwd.net/e12/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/obamalies.jpg
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I like the stain on his tie.
Not an unusual event for me. Indeed I often joke that that is the purpose of a tie from day one. To keep one's shirt clean.
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Pointing out the obvious:
Regarding Hillary's college plan and every other leftist position on every leftist issue, from the Iraq war to minimum wage, healthcare, unemployment, education, and the Obama phones...they don't want to solve the problem; they want to get elected.
"We are the change that we seek." - Barack Obama, Feb 5, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/us/politics/05text-obama.html?_r=0
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The attack was nothing more than "road rage". He had PSTD. Nervous breakdown in 2004. He was off his psych meds. He is not a terrorist. He has mental disorder.
So lets get rid of the military and police. What we really need is an army of psychologists to flood the mentally disturbed ISIS enclaves. And lawyers to be sure they get their mental care. Like addiction. No one is responsible for anything anymore. Except Republicans. They are the only evil left on Earth:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3693227/Brother-reveals-violent-drug-crazed-ISIS-soldier-Mohamed-Lahouaiej-Bouhlel-smuggled-84-000-family-Tunisia-DAYS-murdering-84-Nice.html
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3691293/Huge-cache-guns-grenades-larger-weapons-inside-bullet-riddled-truck-sparking-fears-Nice-massacre-deadly.html
So did the guns, grenades and "larger weapons" magically appear in the jihad truck?
The attack was nothing more than "road rage". He had PSTD. Nervous breakdown in 2004. He was off his psych meds. He is not a terrorist. He has mental disorder.
So lets get rid of the military and police. What we really need is an army of psychologists to flood the mentally disturbed ISIS enclaves. And lawyers to be sure they get their mental care. Like addiction. No one is responsible for anything anymore. Except Republicans. They are the only evil left on Earth:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3693227/Brother-reveals-violent-drug-crazed-ISIS-soldier-Mohamed-Lahouaiej-Bouhlel-smuggled-84-000-family-Tunisia-DAYS-murdering-84-Nice.html
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3691293/Huge-cache-guns-grenades-larger-weapons-inside-bullet-riddled-truck-sparking-fears-Nice-massacre-deadly.html
So did the guns, grenades and "larger weapons" magically appear in the jihad truck?
The attack was nothing more than "road rage". He had PSTD. Nervous breakdown in 2004. He was off his psych meds. He is not a terrorist. He has mental disorder.
So lets get rid of the military and police. What we really need is an army of psychologists to flood the mentally disturbed ISIS enclaves. And lawyers to be sure they get their mental care. Like addiction. No one is responsible for anything anymore. Except Republicans. They are the only evil left on Earth:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3693227/Brother-reveals-violent-drug-crazed-ISIS-soldier-Mohamed-Lahouaiej-Bouhlel-smuggled-84-000-family-Tunisia-DAYS-murdering-84-Nice.html
Nothing to see here, move along.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3694282/Brought-weapons-s-good-equipment-Terrifying-final-text-messages-Bastille-Day-killer-sent-minutes-murdered-84-people.html
Workplace violence, I guess.
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Seems to me that being a psycho and being a radical Islamic terrorist are not mutually exclusive conditions.
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Seems to me that being a psycho and being a radical Islamic terrorist are not mutually exclusive conditions.
No, indeed they are not. Remember, if you die a shaheed, all sins are wiped clean and you proceed directly to paradise.
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/cnlqtjyuiaapnli-jpg-large.jpeg)
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Seems to me that being a psycho and being a radical Islamic terrorist are not mutually exclusive conditions.
No, indeed they are not. Remember, if you die a shaheed, all sins are wiped clean and you proceed directly to paradise.
There is no way to control someone that has made peace with the fact that they will die. The problem is, those people are growing in number.
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Seems to me that being a psycho and being a radical Islamic terrorist are not mutually exclusive conditions.
No, indeed they are not. Remember, if you die a shaheed, all sins are wiped clean and you proceed directly to paradise.
There is no way to control someone that has made peace with the fact that they will die. The problem is, those people are growing in number.
Keeping them out of your country is a good start.
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Amen!
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Seems to me that being a psycho and being a radical Islamic terrorist are not mutually exclusive conditions.
No, indeed they are not. Remember, if you die a shaheed, all sins are wiped clean and you proceed directly to paradise.
There is no way to control someone that has made peace with the fact that they will die. The problem is, those people are growing in number.
Keeping them out of your country is a good start.
Agree 100%.
That still doesn't solve the domestic, multicultural problem. People simply do not ave the same values, and people on both sides of that have ceased valueing life because they know that it's cheap.
What to do with them? It isn't just fringe people either. It is people on both sides of the law.... both actively speaking about how people on the other side of the law should be killed, depending on who they are or what they've done. Violence begets violence. Always has, always will.
Theeconomy is one of the best ways to solve this.... People becoming rich goes a long way in quieting that masses.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/dnc-making-womens-bathroom-lines-long-again
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/27/on-donald-trump-and-the-rule-of-law-contd/
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I have a feeling all the people who really need to read Thomas Sowell regularly don't. For one thing Hillary, socialism and all your Bernie inspired policy proposals are anti-science and anti-economics, a denial that incentives and disincentives affect behavior and outcomes.
Socialism for the Uninformed
image: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols2/sowell.jpg
Thomas Sowell
By Thomas Sowell
Published May 31, 2016
Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.
While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.
The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?
But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.
When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?"
In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.
But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political left.
How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers — sometimes known as "everybody," with their assumptions being what "everybody knows."
Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16-17-year-old black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent.
The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can't move up the ladder if you don't get on the ladder.
The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should — and will — be paid by raising taxes on "the rich."
Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.
In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.
None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think — and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell053116.php3#oG1t0PdYUa1U8c8c.99
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/an-open-letter-to-ivanka-trump-from-one-daughter-to_us_57a23305e4b0456cb7e146f5?section=&
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method
And by the way this same practitioner of the crat religion would not even dream of writing a letter to chelsea
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Thanks to Hotgas.net:
Soros the Elder, a self professed God like the ancient pharaohs writes:
"Today's U.S., he writes in his latest book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy," is a "threat to the world," run by a Republican Party that is the devil child of an unholy alliance between "market fundamentalists" and "religious fundamentalists." We have become a "supremacist" nation."
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/04/opinion/oe-ehrenfeld4
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OK, so If I say most crooks on Wall Street are white am I a bigot?:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gov-lepage-most-drug-dealers-arrested-black-hispanic-130226823.html
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http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2016/08/25/diversity-historys-pathway-to-chaos-n2209576
Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos
Victor Davis Hanson
Posted: Aug 25, 2016 12:01 AM
Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.
The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.
Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.
The propaganda of history's multicultural empires -- the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the Soviet -- was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.
Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda or Yugoslavia boast that they were "diverse." Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.
When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.
For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.
Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation's security, prosperity and freedom?
CARTOONS | Steve Breen
View Cartoon
America's melting pot is history's sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.
Some students attending California's Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated "safe spaces" are fixtures on college campuses.
We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color -- as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.
We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South's "one-drop rule" has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.
Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.
Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.
How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?
Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?
The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the "majority." Yet "white" is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.
In California, those who check "white" on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms and set up "Caucasian Studies" programs at universities?
Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?
If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?
It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.
Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word "diversity" and now prefers "inclusion."
A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not "culturally appropriating" anyone's white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.
Asian-Americans are not "overrepresented" at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.
African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not "acting white" but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.
Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one's essence and is irrelevant to one's character and conduct.
No one is impinging on anyone's culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.
Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.
Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations -- just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.
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Pure, hypocritical nonsense, published for the ages.
The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment.
The depressed economy in 1982 also explains ''Morning in America,'' the economic boom of 1983 and 1984. You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump.
- Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/an-economic-legend.html?_r=0
The recovery was robust because the policy change was bold and pro-growth.
This is exactly what DIDN'T happen under Obama. Why not? TARP, QE, cash for clunkers, Solyndra and 'don't do stupid shit' is not a bold, pro-growth economic policy. More like a walk to a grave.
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HOw ironic and misleading that Soros uses the name "Open society" for the name of one of his political propaganda organizations. He means one government controlled by the likes of him and his business colleagues over the rest of us. Hardly open when he is behind the scenes agitating etc:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/31/report-george-soros-exploits-catholic-useful-idiots/
Soros would have been the poster boy for Hitler.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439714/virtue-signaling-liberals-condemn-privilege-while-enjoying-privilege
"The Reformation — and Counter Reformation — mostly ended the selling of penances. Only something similar will end our pathetic version, perhaps when the public tunes out at the tired boilerplate of “racist,” “sexist,” and “nativist”; or when we quit sending money to the “safe space,” “trigger warning,” “micro-aggression” Ivy League; or we flip the channel when NFL gladiators playact as robed philosophers; or we laugh off celebrity activists as the new John D. Rockefellers tossing out a few of their shiny new dimes."
As long as the LEFT can keep dipping into taxpayer pockets and buying votes with wealth distribution I don't see any Reformation or Counter Reformation anytime soon. If ever. Till everything collapses.
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A while ago, there was a discussion somewhere here about the accumulated wealth of Chavez, Sanders, Clinton, et al., whom are "magnates" of the "people."
I promised GM a list on this a while ago, but here is some of what I have come up with. Throwing it here, because I'm not sure where to put it. I'll admit that I have limited the list to Democrats, due to the fact that Republicans operate under a different philosophy and don't claim to be champions of the poor and oppressed. It bears mentioning, that several politicians, David Koch and Michael Bloomberg for example, either lean heavily left on social issues (as with the former) or in the latter case, started as a Democrat, and registered as a Republican in a traditionally blue state, just to be able to run, therefore, I have also included several RINOs and the sort.
Hillary Clinton $31.3-111 million - Methodist
John Kerry $193 million - Catholic
Al Gore $100 million - Baptist
Ted Kennedy $163 million - Catholic
Nelson Rockefeller $1 billion (deceased, Republican, stated as such on Wikipedia, the idea of any Rockefellers being considered Republican is a joke, but their influence cannot be left out of the discussion and they are widely considered liberals). In fact, Jay Rockefeller will be listed shortly as a Democrat. - Baptist (however they are listed on the list of Jewish Billionaires site)
Mark Dayton Minnesota $1.6 billion - Presbyterian
Jared Polis Colorado $388 million - Jewish
Mark Warner $243 million - Presbyterian
Nancy Pelosi $29 million - 101 million - stated wealth come from "consulting," (for what?) and public relations. - Catholic
Jon Corzine New Jersey $300 million - former Goldman Sachs CEO Comey worked for HSBC, HSBC is connected to the Clinton Foundation (James Comey is a board member of the Clinton Foundation) through a number of initiatives, including its “Building the Corporate Coalition,” “Scaling Rainwater Harvesting for 21st Century Mexico,” “Investing in Management and Leadership in Vietnam,” and other projects. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and a number of transnational corporations, also participate. Clinton has given speeches at Goldman Sachs, refused to release the transcripts of speech. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/04/12/hillary-clinton-goldman-sachs-why-it-matters/ He was charged by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in connection with MF Global's bankruptcy, due to his mismanagement, in 2011. - United Church of Christ
Michael Bloomberg $41.2 billion - Banking industry - A Democrat before seeking elective office, Mayor of New York City - Jewish
David Koch $44.2 billion - Republican/libertarian, but is an admitted social liberal, supporting every hot topic there is, including gay marriage, stem cell research, etc. - Donate to Catholic schools, many think are Jewish. Religion maintained private
Michael McCaul $294 million - NOTED Republican, 2nd wealthiest member of Congress, connected to Clear Channel Communications (as is the bush family), Bush connections to Clear Channel pushing war - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/04/medi-a17.html (there is a dead link in the article that was supposed to state where Bush made his money), which Clinton also endorsed "On October 11, 2002, Clinton voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq," but a pattern is there, that perhaps all of the politicians are in bed together. An interesting point would be, how did Clinton manage to enrich herself from it? "Campaign 2016: Hillary Clinton Pitched Iraq As 'A Business Opportunity' For US Corporations" http://www.ibtimes.com/campaign-2016-hillary-clinton-pitched-iraq-business-opportunity-us-corporations-2121999
McCaul also voted in favor of the war "Voted YES on declaring Iraq part of War on Terror with no exit date. (Jun 2006) http://www.ontheissues.org/TX/Michael_McCaul.htm
Point being, this guy is probably about as Republican as anyone, but it is still interesting to see what business ties (making money off of conflict right along with the Democrats) they all have in common (another subject altogether), getting back to Democrats... - Catholic
Rep. John Delaney Democratic Maryland $111.92 million - Made money off of the healthcare and banking industries - Catholic
Sen. Jay Rockefeller Democratic West Virginia $108.05 million - The name speaks for itself as far as involvement in finance and politics goes - Presbyterian - Jewish
Sen. Richard Blumenthal Democratic Connecticut $62.06 million - 80.1million - married to the daughter of Peter L. Malkin, and who's wife's brother has net worth of some $10 billion - Jewish.
Rep. Scott Peters Democratic California $45.04 million - "He served as an economist on the staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), then earned a law degree from the New York University School of Law. Peters served as a deputy city attorney in San Diego from 1991 to 1996. Prior to his election to the City Council, Peters worked as an attorney in private practice." How one amasses that much money in being a public servant and a lawyer, is beyond me. -Lutheran
Sen. Dianne Feinstein Democratic California $43.72 - 47.2 million - but is married to Richard Blum who is worth perhaps more than a $1 billion http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2015/07/16/sen-dianne-feinsteins-husband-richard-blum-grows-fortune-on-the-ruins-of-the-american-dream/ , much of which accumulated to the way his wife votes. At the age of 23 in 1958, Blum, who is currently 81, held a job working for Sutro & Co., becoming a partner 7 years later. In 1975, he formed his own business, Blum Capital, five years later, marrying Pelosi, who at the time was mayor of San Francisco. When attempting track down Blum's worth in 1980, it is difficult to peg. What is clear; however, is that there has been no shortage of scandals between the two, and that Blum has run his own business as well as chairing CBRE, collectively worth billions, and in no uncertain terms, has used his wife's position to his great advantage. ODDLY, Goldman Sachs pops up here as well. It's probably a coincidence. http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-senator-dianne-feinsteins-husband-selling-post-offices-friends#sthash.2bZFK4Ff.dpbs
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/PROFILE-Richard-Blum-The-man-behind-URS-next-2617380.php -Jewish
Rep. Suzan DelBene Democratic Washington $37.89 million - self made, Microsoft. - Episcopalian
Rep. Chellie Pingree Democratic Maine $34.47 million - Pingree shot up the list this year after her marriage to hedge fund manager Donald Sussman. Sussman has been described as a billionaire by some sources. Sussman himself has donated more than 10 million, the majority to Democrats, 103K to Republicans http://influenceexplorer.com/individual/donald-sussman/30d5a1a570e544e0ace2ae3e08ce332e - Lutheran-Jewish
Rep. Alan Grayson Democratic Florida $26.18 million - Grayson worked as a law clerk at the Colorado Supreme Court in 1983, and at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1984 to 1985, where he worked with two judges who later joined the U.S. Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. He was an associate at the Washington, D.C. firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson for five years, where he specialized in contract law. In 1991 he founded the law firm Grayson & Kubli, which concentrated on government contract law. - - Jewish
Rep. Joseph Kennedy III Democratic Massachusetts $20 million - Catholic
Sen. Claire McCaskill Democratic Missouri $18.38 million - Insurance and law - Catholic
Sen. Tom Harkin Democratic Iowa $11.85 million - Military, lawyer, politics - Catholic
Rep. Brad Schneider Democratic Illinois $11.71 million - Business and Insurance -Jewish
Rep. Lloyd Doggett Democratic Texas $11.51 million - Not unlike Sanders, he has only ever worked in politics, left school roughly 1970, since 1973 has been a politician ever since. - Methodist
Rep. Jim Cooper Democratic Tennessee $11.51 million - After getting his law degree, he spent two years working for the law firm Waller, Lansden, Dortch and Davis in Nashville, then ran for Congress in 1982 -Episcopalian
Rep. Nita M. Lowey Democratic New York $11.48 million - Life long career in government and public service - Jewish
Sen. Kay Hagan Democratic North Carolina $9.12 million - Law, Finance and since 1999, politics -Presbyterian
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney Democratic New York $7.73 million - she worked as a teacher and an administrator for the New York City Board of Education, In 1977, she obtained a job working for the New York State Legislature and held senior staff positions in both the State Assembly and the State Senate. She's basically, since being a teacher, worked in government since 1977. -Presbyterian
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (deceased 2013) Democrat New Jersey $56.9 million - Succeeded by his crony, Jon Corzine (mentioned above), Lautenberg entered office at the age of 58, and after founding ADP (one of the most used payroll services in the country). Though little is clear about any wrongdoing by Lautenberg, he was very much friends and working partners with Corzine, who has so much dirt on him, that even Liberal New Jerseyans, hate him. - Jewish
Digging into this, there are several relationships that are uncovered, for example, Goldman Sachs, who is primarily run by Democrats, many of whom, go on to become politicians, such as; Timothy Geithner - United States Secretary of the Treasury - up to $6 million per CNN, Bradley Abelow, Treasurer and Chief of Staff to Jon Corzine (his name just keeps coming up), Josh Bolton - Whitehouse Chief of Staff under G.W. Bush, William C. Dudley - president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York (who was preceded by Geithner by the way), Rahm Emanuel - Mayor of Chicago (who was preceded by Josh Bolton - listed just previous to this, with Emanual also serving as WH Chief of Staff previously), Judd Gregg (who's father also was governor of the same state)- Former New Hampshire governor and senator (listed as a Republican, but nominated by Obama to serve as Secretary of Commerce), Jim Himes - sitting Democratic Representative for Connecticut (net worth 4.5 million), Arthur Levitt (deceased 2001) - Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission under Bill Clinton, Evan McMullin - Independent Candidate for US President 2016 (former chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in the U.S. House of Representatives, former CIA operations officer), Henry Paulson - United States Secretary of the Treasury (preceded Geithner and was preceded by Corzine), Robert Rubin - Chairperson for the Council on Foreign Relations (which helps sitting politicians decide how they're going to make more money in foreign matters).
When seeing just the amount of interaction between politics and Goldman Sachs, there's no wonder why the banks weren't allowed to fail.
In fairness, even Trump's name come up in this with Stephen Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs employee being the former executive officer of Breitbart News and the CEO of Trump's presidential campaign, not to mention, he is the co-founder and executive chairman of the Government Accountability Institute (which touts itself to be a is a conservative nonprofit investigative research organization).... we'll just sit back while they all scratch each others backs. Bannon isn't the only one from Goldman Sachs to jump on board with Trump either. Steve Mnuchin joived even before Bannon did. http://fortune.com/2016/08/17/donald-trump-bannon-mnuchin-goldman/
Clinton connection to Goldman Sachs - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3584863/Chelsea-Clinton-s-husband-Marc-colleagues-Goldman-Sachs-shutter-25million-hedge-fund-losing-nearly-investors-money-good-thing-10million-apartment.html
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What is this supposed to prove?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1810267/sadiq-khan-throws-first-ball-at-mets-baseball-game-during-the-london-mayors-whirlwind-visit-to-new-york/
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What is this supposed to prove?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1810267/sadiq-khan-throws-first-ball-at-mets-baseball-game-during-the-london-mayors-whirlwind-visit-to-new-york/
It's supposed to prove that Arabs can assimilate into western countries and are pro western culture. I remain unconvinced.
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Tiny nitpick: If I am not mistaken, he is of Pakistani descent, not Arab.
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I don't know exactly the thread this fits into. In any case this is just so hard to believe this is happening:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/10/01/columbia-university-student-forced-to-attend-re-education-for-saying-hes-handsome/
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Politically (In)Correct thread is an option here too.
Until people have the balls to stand up to this nonsense it will continue to percolate and foment , , ,
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"Now, the Congressional Budget Office is predicting deficits will, more or less, remain in the $600 billion range for the next several years. Those are eye-popping numbers to the average person, but they represent about 3 percent of the size of the economy, a level many economists say is bearable."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article108285582.html#storylink=cpy
Deficit spending rate is twice the (artificial) 'growth' rate. (What growth?)
Deficits in a stable environment don't remain in that range when the wheels fall off.
Under these economic policies, this is the new full employment. Growth cannot happen without growing our capital base or workforce. Without a change of policies it only gets worse. Revenues stopped climbing; spending keeps increasing, and virtually none of it went toward rebuilding our infrastructure or modernizing our military.
The debt doubles in one Presidency, more accumulated deficits than the first 43 Presidents combined. And the proposal going forward is MORE OF THE SAME. Best case. As national healthcare and every other HRC program builds and the private sector diminishes, the real trend is to see national debt hit $40 trillion in 8 years. That is assuming a continuing plowhorse economy, and not the financial and economic collapse that is far more likely.
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http://www.captainsjournal.com/2016/10/13/we-conspire-to-produce-an-unaware-and-compliant-citizenry/
“We Conspire To Produce An Unaware And Compliant Citizenry”
BY Herschel Smith
2 days ago
PJ Media:
One of John Podesta’s emails released by WikiLeaks this week exposes how progressive elites seek to exploit the unwashed masses. The email features one of Podesta’s colleagues from the Center for American Progress admitting that the institutional left “conspires to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry,” ostensibly to impose their radical agenda on us without much resistance.
The correspondent is Bill Ivey of Global Cultural Strategies, “the online representation of the ideas, writings, and affiliations of author/consultant Bill Ivey.” He is an author trained in folklore and history, a trustee of the Center for American Progress, a former team leader in the Barack Obama presidential transition in 2008, and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Clinton administration.
In the email from March of 2016, Ivey expresses concern about the rise of “opinionated blowhard” Trump and frets because the “citizenry” seems to be awakening.
Well, we all thought the big problem for our US democracy was Citizens United/Koch Brothers big money in politics. Silly us; turns out that money isn’t all that important if you can conflate entertainment with the electoral process.
Trump masters TV, TV so-called news picks up and repeats and repeats to death this opinionated blowhard and his hairbrained ideas, free-floating discontent attaches to a seeming strongman and we’re off and running. JFK, Jr would be delighted by all this as his “George” magazine saw celebrity politics coming. The magazine struggled as it was ahead of its time but now looks prescient. George, of course, played the development pretty lightly, basically for charm and gossip, like People, but what we are dealing with now is dead serious.
How does this get handled in the general? Secretary Clinton is not an entertainer, and not a celebrity in the Trump, Kardashian mold; what can she do to offset this? I’m certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not.
And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.
I’m not insulted. I actually feel a bit sorry for your ignorance. Mr. Ivey, you make the same mistake that most other progressives make. Oh, there’s a lot of couch potatoes around who like to watch night time sitcoms, wear stupid clothing and cheer for their favorite band of criminals on Sunday.
But you’re missing the larger point. The NRA is blamed for rousting the masses of gun owners, for telling them what to think, and for getting in the way of “common sense” gun regulations. You see the world this way because progressives need their leaders to tell them how to think and what to do. To the extent that the NRA fights the Senate, Congress and President, they’re doing what we tell them to do. To the extent that they don’t, they are being recalcitrant. In the total absence of the NRA, our views wouldn’t change one iota. We don’t look to them for our world view.
Similarly, messaging won’t change things for us. When I say “us,” I mean more people than you know. Donald Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The only other candidate who had any chance of winning was Ted Cruz, and he was as hated by the establishment as Trump is. Trump didn’t ascend to the top because of his television persona, but because it’s all being burned down by the people. Trump is the vessel. The people threw gasoline and lit the match.
As for the goal of conspiring to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry, you’re far too late for that. America is the most heavily armed nation in the world. I’ve seen your plans.
The legislation has already been written. H.R. 4269 would enact a national, permanent ban on the manufacture and sale of so-called “assault weapons” and all firearm magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds. The bill, introduced last December, already has149 Democratic co-sponsors (218 are needed to pass the House).
H.R. 4269 would ban all AR-15 and AK-type rifles and all civilian versions of military rifles produced anywhere in the word within the past 60 years or so. The bill would also ban all parts kits, stripped receivers, “bump-fire” stocks, thumbhole stocks, trigger cranks, so-called “compliant” rifles, and “any… characteristic that can function as a [pistol] grip.” Law enforcement is exempt from the bill’s provisions.
H.R. 4269 is not a “kick down the door and confiscate ‘em” bill. Existing rifles and magazines are “grandfathered” (but the transfer of existing magazines is permanently prohibited). Gun banners know that it is literally impossible to perform a door-to-door gun confiscation in a nation of 300 million people, and that any attempt to do so would certainly be met with violence. Consequently, they have pre-empted the “Come and take it” crowd by employing a long-term strategy. Once the manufacture and sale of certain weapons is prohibited, it is only a matter of time before the legislation would be amended to outlaw the transfer of “grandfathered” rifles as well as magazines, thus enacting a de facto confiscation within a generation.
This won’t work. No one will comply. You don’t honestly think we’re going to spend our hard earned money on guns and ammunition, teach our sons to shoot and fend for themselves, and then turn the guns over to you in our wills, do you?
As I said. It’s too late. There is an inevitable split coming to America. Your plans for collectivism can’t control the American spirit. Every turn of the screw by you will only make matters worse and the people more ungovernable. But since your world view works from the top down, I don’t expect you to understand this. That bodes darkness for the near term.
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/screen-shot-2016-10-16-at-7-46-08-pm.png)
I hope HRC apologizes and recognizes this was inevitable given her hate-filled rhetoric.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yZqsDUbKI
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yZqsDUbKI[/youtube]
It's only destructive and destabilizing when Donald says it.
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No male role model here:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/24/opinions/letter-to-daughter-about-trump-kohn/index.html
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Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.
http://nypost.com/2016/10/31/dems-should-blame-hillary-not-comey-for-the-october-surprise/
Democrats willfully looked the other way.
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http://althouse.blogspot.com/2016/11/in-nyc-protests-include-trump-effigy.html
In NYC — Protests include a Trump effigy hanging from a noose.
From "Liberals Gone Wild: Protests, flag burnings, Trump hung in effigy."
From Madison, Wisconsin, David Blaska cracks the joke everyone here in Madison should get: "Assuming the folks with the noose won't be admitted to Camp Randall. Right?"
You might remember — click my UW noose incident tag — that here in Madison, much was made of an incident at the football stadium (Camp Randall) on the night of Halloween festivities, when people saw of a photo of a man in a black-and-while prison suit with a noose around his neck and an Obama mask on the back of his head. On the front of his head was a Hillary mask and holding the other end of the rope was a guy in a Donald Trump mask.
This wasn't tolerated as free speech and political street theater, but condemned as racism, and everyone was supposed to know that a noose refers to the lynching of black people and that the guy in the noose was enacting hate and had to be punished.
Initially, the University referred to freedom of speech and purported to have dealt properly with the incident by simply talking to the man and persuading him to voluntarily remove the noose. But criticism ensued and the University repositioned itself. On Monday, 9 days after the incident, the UW–Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank apologized:
“I am personally very sorry for the hurt that this incident and our response to it has caused,” Blank read from a prepared statement at a Monday afternoon Faculty Senate meeting. “I have heard from students, faculty and community members who are dissatisfied with our response and I understand why. A noose is the symbol of some of the worst forms of racial hatred and intimidation in our country’s history. We understand this, and we should have communicated that more forcefully from the very beginning...I understand the deeply hurtful impact this particularly has on our students and communities of color.”...
Blank told the Faculty Senate that she was limited in what she could say, but that the season tickets of “a pair of individuals related to this event” were revoked because the person using them brought a prohibited item into the stadium, and failed to follow directions of event staff....
"This is a work in progress, and we are a long way from where we want to be," Blank said. "But with your advice and input of governance, we have invested time, energy and effort into things like the Our Wisconsin program aimed at incoming freshmen, a bias reporting system, a review of our ethnic studies curriculum, and a black cultural center."
You can read my old posts at the tag. I'll just repeat that hanging in effigy is long-standing political theater — notably in the American Revolution — and when current political figures are hung in effigy the reference is more naturally to that tradition and not to the history of racism and lynching. There is at least ambiguity, and the punishment of these individuals through revocation of their season tickets is shameful pandering and a violation of freedom of speech.
Maybe the hanging of Trump in effigy will restore some interest in the depth of the meaning of the noose in American history and the importance of freedom of speech in the form of street theater and protest.
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http://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2016/11/11/stunning-just-look-at-this-old-pic-of-the-2012-romney-riots/
Hey, we were very upset at the outcome of the election!
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https://ombreolivier.liberty.me/the-tolerant-liberal-reaction/
The Tolerant Liberal Reaction
By Francis Turner from L'Ombre de l'Olivier link Nov 11, 2016
The Tolerant Liberal Reaction
Most of my online friends and acquaintances who aren’t liberals have spent the last few days having what one called a “schadenboner”.
[Aside: following cogent criticism at Samizadata I realize that the word needs umlauts and a proper font for full appreciation
schadenboner
]
The mass freak out by the “liberal”/”progressive” part of the (social) media world has been hilarious to watch for the most part.
tolerance2
But then there’s the less salubrious part of that reaction. There are the ones who show their tolerance by hoping that random strangers are burned to death, as in the images on this post, or who actually riot, attack pets or deface property. And there are numerous threats to kill President Elect Trump or suggesting violent revolution.
This and the fear-mongering about Trump’s intentions towards various potentially oppressed minorities is in strong contrast to the behavior of McCain and Romney supporters in the last two elections. It is also highly reminiscent of the fear-mongering about racist attacks in the UK after the Brexit vote. In that case any spike in hate-crimes seems to be in very large part because the police were more incented to ask whether some perfectly normal mugging or similar was potentially motivated by hate. Likewise the endless mass cry-ins on college campuses and the overwrought blamestorming like this outburst:
“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”
In other words the evidence seems pretty strong that the liberals are projecting their own fears, hate and intolerance onto their opponents rather than basing it on actual facts. For a group who often claim to be evidence and science based, even if they mostly didn’t actually study in a STEM field, this is pretty pathetic.
One suspects their great fear is that, in fact, they are wrong and in that they are probably correct.
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http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/731537/us-election-donald-trump-mother-punishes-son-hilary-clinton-president-trump
The forces of reason and love.
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http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/731537/us-election-donald-trump-mother-punishes-son-hilary-clinton-president-trump
The forces of reason and love.
Though I heavily disagree with the sentiment expressed in the video, I am apprehensive to tell another parent how they should raise their children.
That's a slippery slope that is better left to the parents.
I am wondering where the boy's father is though. That house looked to be of moderate wealth. Is she another child support and welfare collector?
Children need their mothers and fathers. Lots of things to pick apart here.
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The best post election video you will ever see concerning negotiations between the right and left (or anyone for that matter).
https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/videos/598130190359668/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED
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All of a sudden. Where were these leftist shrinks all these years of media depravity and sexual exploittion and vulgarity? How about when Clinton refused to resign despite his DNA on the young lady's dress? On so on:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-trump-effect-psychologists-warn-that-children-are-watching-201915771.html
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.33 Blood Alcohol Drunk Driver Blames Donald Trump
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/11/drunk-driver-blames-donald-trump.php
But wasn't Trump's win Comey's fault?
.33% is more than 4 times the legal limit in MN.
She couldn't spell her name but she was able to articulate the motivation for her intoxication.
“I am upset over the outcome of the election and you should let me go home,”
No word on whether or not that is excusable situation in St. Paul.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/11/levin-why-isnt-this-national-news
The DNC is stepping up their anti American revolutionism.
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When the Dem Party is in tatters with its Old Guard seemingly done for and all attention is on Trump it is a perfect moment for this seditious crap. In the long run this may play to our benefit. Even Schumer, who heavily depends on support for Israel and attendant Jewish support in NY, seems likely to have to square off with him when Trump makes a pro-Israel move.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/11/levin-why-isnt-this-national-news
The DNC is stepping up their anti American revolutionism.
Ellison was on one of the big Sunday shows (Meet the Press or Face the Nation). They went through a big election recap deciding that Democrats never reached out to rural America. The host wondered what Dems were going to do about that. Next up was Keith Ellison, possible choice to head up the party, 'we'll ask him what his party plans to do about this', nothing. Ellison told them essentially he would double down on all the progressive ideas they already were committed to. Good for him, as they say.
Funny thing is, I can find no public record that Keith Ellison has ever been to rural area in the United States. No record I can find he has ever set foot in a red county as defined by the Trump vote map.
Ellison was born and raised in Detroit. Went to college in Detroit, law school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Lived in and represented north Minneapolis (where my rental properties are) in the state legislature, downtown St. Paul. He most certainly knows Washington DC, the Capitol Building, CAIR headquarters etc. He has visited Iraq (to oppose the war, during the war). He's traveled to Mogadishu, Gaza, Mecca and Guantanamo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/us/politics/keith-ellison-minnesota-congressman-visits-somalia-and-meets-president.html
https://ellison.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/press-release-ellison-visits-guantanamo-to-review-detainee-conditions
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-07-30-ellison-iraq_N.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100885553
http://www.meforum.org/2756/keith-ellison-stealth-jihad
The Trump map has better coverage than Verizon wireless. Democrats won the big cities and about two other areas. To my knowledge, their is no public record or press account that Keith Ellison has ever set foot in a county marked red. Yet he is the 'right person' to lead a national party that wants to connect with all of us...
[img]https://dohdeick6sqa6.cloudfront.net/screenshots/production/live-president-counties/00@lg.png[img]
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/35862/does-trump-have-better-coverage-than-verizon
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"They went through a big election recap deciding that Democrats never reached out to rural America. The host wondered what Dems were going to do about that. Next up was Keith Ellison, possible choice to head up the party, 'we'll ask him what his party plans to do about this', nothing. Ellison told them essentially he would double down on all the progressive ideas they already were committed to."
Well said Doug. Yes, the Dem response is for *more* propaganda that blames America for everything, more government, more dividing us into groups and pitting non whites against whites
and females against males Spanish vs Anglos etc.
Astounding.
Just shove the one world government with control from a few at the top onto the rest of us and buy off enough voters to do it. and phony proclamations to make the middle class believe they for them as obama has done for 8 yrs.
We may be able to find an occasional common ground but we must never compromise (anymore). The two are not the same.
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The media and the left are overlapping threads.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/23/colin-jost-faces-furious-backlash-after-transgender-joke-on-saturday-night-live/#comments
37 genders night be why they "we" lost the election. Not funny to sensitive leftists.
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They had a name for it and it guaranteed that they had the advantage in all presidential elections. They called it "The Blue Wall" and no ordinary Republican would ever again be able to climb past it. Oops.
All you have to do to get rid of the EC is get 38 smaller states agree to give up power to NY and Calif. They never talk of amending the Constitution, just 'getting rid of' things they don't like.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/dems-inaction-over-2m-vot_b_13199450.html
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Progressives without Power
Hard times for the Sanctimonious White Lady Party
By Kevin D. Williamson — November 26, 2016
A very nice liberal broadcaster asked me earlier this week whether I am worried about the future of the Republican party.
Funny question.
There are 25 states in which the state legislatures and governorships are controlled by Republicans, and two states with executive/legislative divides in which there are Republican legislative majorities large enough to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Sixty-eight of the country’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers are Republican-run. There are only four states with Democratic governors and legislatures; it is true that these include one of our most populous states (California), but the majority of Americans live in states in which there are Republican trifectas or veto-proof legislative majorities. Two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control. Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just won the presidency.
Democrats control the dean of students’ office at Oberlin.
And Democrats have responded to their recent electoral defeat with riots, arson, and Alex Jones–level conspiracy theories. Progressives have just raised $5 million to press for a recount in several states. Clinton sycophant Paul Krugman, sounding exactly like every well-mannered conspiracy nut you’ve ever known, says the election “probably wasn’t hacked,” but “conspiracies do happen” and “now that it’s out there” — (who put it out there?) — “an independent investigation is called for.”
Maybe it isn’t the Republican party whose future needs worrying about.
In one sense, what is happening in American politics is a convergence of partisan styles.
Beginning with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and thanks in no small part to the efforts of many men associated with this magazine, the Republican party spent half a century as a highly ideological enterprise. But highly ideological political parties are not the norm in the English-speaking world, especially not in the United States, and the conservative fusion of American libertarianism, social traditionalism, and national-security assertiveness probably is not stable enough to cohere, having now long outlived the Cold War, in which it was forged. Trump’s lack of conservative principle is unwelcome, but it points to an ideological looseness that is arguably more normal, a return to the model of party as loose coalition of interest groups.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way.
For the moment, the stylistic convergence — the Republicans becoming a little more like the selfish-coalition Democratic party, and the Democrats becoming a little more like the ideological Republican party — works to the Republicans’ advantage, though there is no reason to believe that always will be the case. The GOP had a very good run of it as a highly ideological enterprise.
The longer-term problem for the Democrats is that they are finding out that they have to play by their own rules, which are the rules of identity politics. This is a larger problem for the Democratic party than is generally appreciated. The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union. They are more likely to be cutting the grass in front of Elizabeth Warren’s multi-million-dollar mansion than moving into one of their own. They roll their eyes at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s risible “abuela” act, having actual abuelas of their own.
As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democratic base is not made up of little old liberal white ladies with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure bank balances, but the party’s leadership is. It is worth noting that in a year in which the Republican candidate painted Mexican immigrants with a rather broad and ugly brush, Mrs. Clinton got a smaller share of the Hispanic vote than Barack Obama did in 2012. She got a significantly smaller share of the black vote, too. Interestingly, Mrs. Clinton’s drop in the black vote came exclusively from black men. Many black Americans had very high hopes that an Obama administration would mean significant changes in their lives and in the state of their communities. but that has not come to pass. There is nothing about Mrs. Clinton that inspired similar hopes. “She’s not right, and we all know it,” the comedian Dave Chappelle said.
It is far from obvious that Senator Cherokee Cheekbones or anyone standing alongside Debbie Wasserman Schultz will feel more “right” to Democratic voters who have almost nothing in common with them. A coalition in which elderly rich white faculty-lounge liberals have all the power and enjoy all the perks while the work and money come from younger and browner people is not going to be very stable.
Especially when it has been stripped of the one thing that has held that coalition together so far: power.
— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been emended since its publication.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/367058.php
Ode(s) To A Dead Guy
Masks are coming off all over. One of the most repressive and bloodthirsty tyrants that the Western Hemisphere has ever seen has finally exited this world and gone on to his reward in the next, and you can learn a lot about people by how they responded.
For example, here is the statement by President Obama:
At this time of Fidel Castro's passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans - in Cuba and in the United States - with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.
From this, someone who has never heard of Obama before can conclude that he is a cowardly little pussy. All he can say about a murderous psychopath who spent most of his life increasing the suffering of the Cuban people is that he had "enormous impact"? I mean, really, what is he afraid of? Is there some massive pro-Castro voting bloc that Obama doesn't want to risk offending?
So, too, Jimmy Carter:
Rosalynn and I share our sympathies with the Castro family and the Cuban people on the death of Fidel Castro. We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country. We wish the Cuban citizens peace and prosperity in the years ahead.
Carter is another mewling quim. He spent most of his (mercifully brief) time in office whining about "human rights." Too bad he couldn't spare any for the long-suffering people of Cuba, to at least acknowlege their long suffering. But no, he couldn't do that. Not even now.
And Jesse Jackson's statement is guaranteed to infuriate you:
In many ways, after 1959, the oppressed the world over joined Castro's cause of fighting for freedom & liberation-he changed the world. RIP
I... can't... even... What a tool. What a complete f* tool. I've always wanted to take Jackson out into an alley and just bitch-slap him, first with my forehand, then backhand, back and forth, over and over again until- well, until my hand hurts too much to continue.
And even that wouldn't be enough. At the end, when I'd have to leave to go to the ER to get my hand bandaged up, he'd still be a stupid f* tool.
(no, I'm not serious about slapping Jesse Jackson around. Even though he deserves it)
Yuu can read more here, 5 Most Embarrassing Statements on Fidel Castro's Death from America's Political Leaders.
I didn't even bother reading Justin Trudeau's, which I hear is equally cringe-worthy.
Contrast these with the statement made by Donald Trump. First he tweeted "Fidel Castro is dead!"
And then he said this:
Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.
Fidel Castro's legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.
While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.
Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.
I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.
There. That's the way you do it. I can well imagine this would be a statement Ronald Reagan would make were he alive today. It is a breath of fresh air, and a welcome relief after 8 years of mediocrity and incompetency.
Also, the schadenboner I had from the election, that was just starting to subside, is now powering through again and is requiring so much blood that I think I migh
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Taking tips in snarkiness from a pro....
When Osama was killed, I smoked a Cuban Monte Cristo.... for the first time in my life.
U think I'm going to enjoy another one tomorrow.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/27/castro-cuba-chavez-venezuela-socialism-glenn-reynolds/94485906/
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http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/11/14/a-handy-guide-for-liberals-who-are-suddenly-interested-in-gun-ownership/
A Handy Guide For Liberals Who Are Suddenly Interested In Gun Ownership
November 14, 2016 correia45
That title isn’t joking. This post is aimed at my liberal readers. I’m a libertarian leaning Republican and gun expert, who thinks you are wrong about a lot of stuff, but I’m not writing this to gloat about your loss. For the record, I disliked all the presidential candidates.
Judging by your social media over the last few days many liberals have been utterly terrified that your government might turn tyrannical or that evil people will now be emboldened to hurt you. I’m going to let you in on a little thing the other half of the country is familiar with to keep those unlikely, yet catastrophic, events from happening.
And that my lefty friends, is 2nd Amendment.
Having just gone through a war against a tyrannical government, the Founders understood that governments can go bad, so they made sure to note our God given right (or we’ll say naturally occurring right, since a bunch of you are atheists) to keep and bear arms in order to defend ourselves. The 2nd Amendment isn’t about hunting or “sporting purposes”, it’s about having weapons that you can fight with. As an added bonus, being able to protect yourself from a tyrannical government means that you’re a lot better equipped to deal with any common criminal who decides to hurt you.
Before I get into the details about how to enjoy your newly discovered 2nd Amendment rights, let me just say that I get you’re sad, angry, bitter, and fearful. But just like my people over the last few elections, you’ll get over it. The really hyperbolic freak outs about Literally Hitler make you sound just like the Alex Jones crowd worried that Obama was going to herd Christians into FEMA camps last time. So take a deep breath and relax. Your friends and neighbors are the same as they were last week. The vast majority weren’t voting because racism, they voted against the status quo and a really unlikable Democrat. And no, they aren’t going to round you up into cattle cars.
But in the off chance they do, let’s get you prepared!
WHAT GUNS ARE FOR
I’ll start out with the far more likely threat, violent criminals who would assault, rape, or murder you, and how to deal with them.
Many of you have been sharing every second hand account, rumor, and urban legend about some random doofus in Somnambulant, Wisconsin or Bumfight, Louisiana, shouting an ethnic slur or spray painting a swastika on a wall. Newsflash, in a country with a third of a billion people, some percentage of them are going to be assholes. I hate to break it to you, but the assholes were there before, and they will be there forever. Just right now the news has a self-serving incentive to report about these assholes in particular.
But Correia! You’re not a marginalized Mexican transsexual Muslim! What do you know!?
I know that anybody can be “marginalized” if they walk into the wrong neighborhood. Violence can happen to any of us, and it does, all the time. Whether your odds of being a victim are good or bad, it still sucks when you draw the short straw and somebody tries to hurt you. Whoever you are, you are correct to be concerned for your safety. Anybody can be attacked, and everybody should be prepared to deal with it.
Since this is addressed to liberals, spare me the usual nonsense about “Victim Blaming”. We don’t have time for silliness. If you’re banking on the goodwill of evil people to keep you safe, you are a sucker. If I urge you to look both ways before crossing the street, I’m not victim blaming, I’m trying to keep your stupid ass from getting hit by a bus.
Whether you are being attacked because some jerk doesn’t like your head scarf and you voted for Hillary, or getting pulled out of your car and beaten because the local hooliganry thinks you voted for Trump, or some dude with no coherent political philosophy beyond the voices in his head told him to murder you and rape your dog, it doesn’t matter… There are evil people in the world, and they will hurt you simply because it amuses them.
So there are bad people who want to hurt you. Now what do you do?
Regardless of what you worship, who you love, or you skin tone, you have the unalienable right to self-defense. The 2nd is an equal opportunity amendment.
Calling the cops is awesome. If they get there in time they will be happy to save your ass, but that’s assuming they get there in time. Violent encounters usually happen very quickly. Good police response time is measured in minutes. You can be dead in seconds. Plus, your side is the one that doesn’t trust the cops anyway. It isn’t Republicans out there protesting the police. So why is it you expect agents of the state to risk their lives to save you? Gratitude?
What most of us in the right side of the country understand is that responsible adults need to be able to defend themselves. That means owning guns and learning how to use them. (To be fair, many on the left have also come to this same conclusion already, but they have to keep that opinion to themselves so the rest of you don’t yell at them).
Unarmed self-defense is great, when it works. I’m a fan. Less-lethal devices like pepper spray are great, when they work. But trust me on this, everybody who does this professionally, who has spent years learning about how violence really works, we all have guns.
You’ve probably been taught that guns are frightening murder rods, just itching to go shoot up a school. You want to survive, get over that nonsense. I know that most of the stuff liberals think they know about firearms is flat out wrong. I’m here to tell you as a retired professional firearms instructor that sadly everything Occupy Democrats memes have taught you is incorrect. Whatever you think you know, check those preconceived notions at the door, because it is probably biased garbage.
Firearms are not magic. They are neither evil nor good. They are just tools that throw a projectile. That’s it. There’s no voodoo involved. They are items that allow a physically weak person to survive a confrontation against somebody who is stronger, or there’s more of them, or whatever other nightmare scenario you come up with. I know many of you are scared of guns, but just think of them like fire extinguishers, but for murderers.
HOW SELF-DEFENSE WORKS
Just because you have a gun doesn’t mean that you can just go and shoot whoever you feel like. I see this pop up all the time amongst my liberal friends. Like if a redneck sees a black dude, he can just blast him because the redneck felt uncomfortable. First off, no, that’s not how the laws work. Second off, maybe if you’d quit proclaiming everybody who isn’t part of your clique is a racist murderer, you’d win more elections.
Here is another article where I go into a great deal of detail about when it is legal to shoot somebody. http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/11/25/the-legalities-of-shooting-people/ I taught this stuff for a living. Trust me, I know more about this than the staff writers at Salon. Almost everything I’ve ever seen from a liberal publication concerning self-defense laws is incorrect. And I’m not just talking like I enjoy guns and they don’t, I mean they have such a basic, elementary misunderstanding of the legalities of shooting people that we aren’t even inhabiting the same reality. My reality is the one that the jury instructions will be issued from.
The short version is that in order to be justified in using lethal force against another human being, they need to be demonstrating the ability to seriously harm you, the opportunity to do so, and acting in a manner that a reasonable person would believe they are an immediate threat.
So no, you can’t just shoot somebody walking down the street in a Trump hat. That would be Murder. Or considering most liberals don’t understand basic marksmanship, more likely Attempted Murder. However, if somebody dressed entirely in Confederate flags walks up, screams DIE GAY ABORTION VEGAN and tries to stab you with his commemorative Heinrich Himmler SS dagger, it’s game on (don’t blame me, I’m basing this hypothetical scenario on what most of your facebook feeds sound like).
Go read that article. As a bonus once you understand how use of force laws actually work, you won’t be able to get as spun up with outrage over every shooting that makes the news.
LEARN HOW GUNS WORK
Now that you’ve decided that you should be able to protect yourself from sexist war bands, and you know the basics about when it’s okay to shoot people, you want to go get strapped. But hold your horses there, Che. Guns are tools, but they are also very unforgiving of stupidity, and the last thing I want to have happen is one of you liberals shoot somebody on accident, because then you’ll be trying to pass more laws to punish people like me. First you need to learn how to be safe.
Seek out your local gun range. Sadly, for those of you living in deep blue areas, this will be difficult because the politicians you have voted for have run off most of your local gun ranges. Now that you’re afraid the state can’t/won’t protect you, I hope you realize that was a bad call.
But if you do have one in driving distance, most ranges will have ads posted for upcoming basic classes. Contrary to what you’ve been told about the ultra evil National Rifle Association, the majority of what the NRA does is conduct basic safety training to keep newbies from shooting themselves in the foot. They will walk you through the fundamental rules of gun safety, mechanics, and storage.
Here is another mind blowing factoid for you liberals, the NRA was actually started by Union army officers to train recently freed blacks how to defend themselves from the Democrat KKK. The first gun control laws in America were racist in origin, and aimed at disarming “undesirables” like blacks or the Irish. So in that respect, not much has changed.
For those of you in the LGBTWTFBBQ community, in the aftermath of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, a transsexual friend of mine started Operation Blazing Sword. https://www.facebook.com/OperationBlazingSword/ It is a network of firearms instructors across the country who are volunteering to help out gay and trans people who are new to guns learn about basic safety and firearms familiarization. I helped them get started. Check their map. They’ve probably got somebody near you willing to help.
If you haven’t blocked all of them yet for having dissenting opinions, you can ask your gun owning friends and family for advice. I would still recommend talking to actual experts though, just because we know what we’re doing, and we personally haven’t had to listen to you talk about how we’re all baby murdering psychopaths over Thanksgiving dinner. But if they love you, they’ll be happy to help you learn about how guns work. If you don’t have any friends who own guns, you may want to ask yourself how you live in such an echo chamber.
Again, most of what you’ve been told about the gun culture is a myth. We want you to be able to defend yourself, and we want you to be safe and responsible doing it.
HOW GUN LAWS WORK
Now it gets really complicated. And that’s entirely your fault. See, traditionally Democrats don’t like the 2nd Amendment and historically have done everything in their power to screw with it. Your gun laws are going to vary dramatically based upon where you live. It might be really difficult and expensive for you to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights, or it might be relatively easy.
But you’re scared right now! Well, that’s too bad. Because for the most part Democrats have tried to make it so that citizens have to abdicate their responsibilities and instead entrust that only state can defend everyone… That doesn’t seem like such a bright idea now that you don’t trust who is running the state, huh?
You might get attacked in your home, but let’s be realistic, you’re way more likely to be attacked out in public. Accordingly, democrats have made it way harder to have a gun where you are most likely to need it. If your state is red or purple, you probably have an inexpensive way to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon so that you can be armed everywhere. The bluer your state, the more unlikely/expensive that becomes, and in the most exclusive cities, unless you are a politician, movie star, or body guarding a politician or movie star, you are basically out of luck.
Oh yeah, it kind of goes without saying by this point, but most of what you think you know about what gun laws do is wrong. I know you think you’ve been helping with your demands to Do Something, but you aren’t. I wrote this article a few years ago in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. It is one of the most widely read articles on gun control laws ever written. http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/23/an-opinion-on-gun-control-repost/
I am a big fan of concealed carry, and if you are honestly worried about murderous racists being emboldened, then you should be too. If your state has a concealed weapons permit, I would recommend taking that class. Even if you are not personally ready to take that big step of actually keeping a firearm on your person, the class should provide a great primer on your state and local laws.
There are thousands of onerous little gun laws. I won’t overcomplicate this, but you guys have been sticking extra gun laws on the books all over the country at every opportunity. In your area you might not be able to buy certain guns, or you’ll have to lock them up in a specific manner, or you’ll have to register them with the state. (now that you’re worried about the state rounding you up, having a registry of which of you own guns seems kind of dumb huh?)
HOW TO BUY A GUN
Now that you understand basic safety and marksmanship, let’s get you armed.
Contrary to what Barack Obama told you, Glocks are not easier to get than books. Hell, I’ll trade an autographed copy of each of my published novels for a Glock if you’ve got any spares lying around.
If you haven’t completely alienated all of your pro-gun friends by blaming them for every mass murder that’s ever happened, now would be a great time to ask them to come shopping with you.
Find your local gun store. Go there. Ask the nice people behind the counter questions about what is the best gun for you needs. They are usually very helpful, however, don’t tell them that you are a liberal, because since you’ve previously tried to ban everything you’re now buying, they will probably laugh at you. That’s expected, because your people do kind of malign them constantly and have repeatedly tried to ruin their livelihood. Oh well, live and learn. You know better now.
Shockingly, you will quickly discover that the gun best suited for your home self-defense needs is probably one of the guns that the news would call “assault weapons”. In reality that’s a gibberish term to scare newbs, but remember, most of what you’ve been taught is complete bullshit. You want the best tool for the job. Yes. It looks scary. That’s kind of the point.
If you live in a place with concealed carry laws, you will probably want one of those deadly high capacity assault pistols too. In regular America we just call those handguns. Have the experts help pick one out that suits your lifestyle and manner of dress. Then make sure you get a good holster to carry it safely. Common newb mistake is to get a decent gun and a crap holster. Don’t do that.
Once you’ve picked your firearms, you will need to fill out a federal 4473 form, provide ID (gasp! Racist!), and the shop will call in your background check to make sure you aren’t a felon, illegal alien, or otherwise prohibited person. Since this check is computerized it only takes a few minutes.
Now that is how it works in most states. If you are lucky enough to live in a blue state liberal paradise, then you may have to deal with extra laws. Like mandatory waiting periods, special permits, or you’ve got to jump through a bunch of other onerous hoops before you are allowed to defend yourself… But hey, you voted for that. Suck it up, buttercup.
GET BETTER
Now you need to learn to shoot. It doesn’t work like the movies.
There are a lot of people out there who do what I used to do, so find the professional firearms instructors in your region and take some classes. Your local ranges and stores will know who is teaching or will have ads posted. A good instructor won’t just teach you how to hit the target, but will teach you basic tactics, and when/how to use your gun. I spent a big chunk of my time teaching people how to avoid fights and not make stupid decisions.
The more you shoot, the more you train, the more comfortable you will become. Your confidence will grow. If something awful happens you can be part of the solution instead of just another victim. You won’t rise to the occasion, you will default to your lowest level of training. So get trained.
Oh yeah, this training part gets expensive too. Government regulations have driven up the cost of ammunition. You get one guess which party is responsible for that. And around the blue cities you’ve closed all of your shooting ranges because guns are scary and loud (oh yeah, we could fix that, but Democrats made it illegal or really expensive to make guns quieter), so you’ll have to drive further in order to train. Let me check… Nope, I’m still fresh out of pity.
WHAT ABOUT DOOMSDAY?
Now the elephant in the room. I’ve seen a lot of you going on about how terrified you are for all your “marginalized” friends, that the government is going to turn tyrannical and genocidal, and murder them by the million. I don’t think that’s actually going to happen, but let’s say it did. We’re talking full on Gestapo Stasi jack boots and cattle car time. Bear with me through this hypothetical situation, that stuff about ability/opportunity/immediate threat is actually happening, but it is systematically being carried out by agents of the state against its own citizens. I’m talking war in the streets.
I keep seeing you guys saying that you’re going to “fight harder”. No offense, but bullshit. What are you going to do? Call more innocent bystanders racists? Post more articles from Salon even harder? Have a protest and burn your local CVS? Block more freeways with your bodies? Guess what. If the government has actually gone full tyrannical they’re just going to machinegun your dumbass in the street. They are going to drive through your roadblock, and your bodies will grease the treads of their tanks.
That’s what actual tyrants do. So despite your bitching, virtue signaling, and panic attacks, we’re a long way off of that.
There is a saying that has long been common in my half of the country. There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty, soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. You can debate, vote, and go to court in order to get things changed. You only go ammo box when those other things no longer work, because once you do, there is no going back.
God willing, America never gets to that point, because if we ever go to war with ourselves again, then it will be a blood bath the like of which the world has never seen. We have foolishly created a central government so incomprehensibly powerful, that to stop it from committing genocide would require millions of capable citizens to rise up and fight.
Congratulations. Now you understand why the Framers put the 2nd Amendment in there. It is the kill switch on the Republic, and everyone with a clue prays we never have to use it.
Right now you guys are angry and talking a lot of shit. This is all new to you. My side is the one with the guns, training, and the vast majority of the combat vets, and we really don’t want our government to get so out of control that this ever happens. Only fools wish for a revolution. But that big red button is still there in case of emergency because if a nation as powerful as America ever turned truly evil then the future is doomed. As Orwell said, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
That’s the real meaning of the 2nd Amendment. So don’t screw around with it. If you do you’re no better than the fat wannabes running around the woods in their surplus camo and airsoft plate carriers… You don’t get that, but all my gun culture readers know exactly who I’m talking about. They are the morons CNN trots out whenever they need to paint all gun owners as irresponsible inbred redneck violent dupes for your benefit.
And spare me the typical talking points about how an AR-15 can’t fight tanks and drones… It’s way beyond the scope of this article, but you don’t have a flipping clue what you’re talking about. Every HuffPo guest columnist thinks they are Von Clauswitz. They aren’t.
This Doomsday option is something we never want to use, but which we need to maintain just in case. It is also another reason Hillary lost. One motivator for Americans to vote for Trump was that Hillary hates the 2nd Amendment. Her husband put the biggest gun ban we’ve ever had in place, and she has been exceedingly clear that she hates guns and would get rid of all of them if she could.
And doing that would push that big red button.
When the already super powerful government wants to make you even more powerless, that scares the crap out of regular Americans, but you guys have been all in favor of it. Take those nasty guns! Guns are scary and bad. Don’t you stupid rednecks know what’s good for you? The people should live at the whim of the state!
But now that the shoe is on the other foot, and somebody you distrust and fear is in charge for a change, the government having all sorts of unchecked power seems like a really bad idea, huh?
Absolute power in the hands of anyone should terrify you. The 2nd Amendment is there to make sure some of that power always remains in the hands of the people.
CONCLUSION
So that’s it. That’s how you go down the path of responsible gun ownership.
I don’t care how marginalized you think you are. Get armed. Get trained. Be prepared to defend yourself and your loved ones. That’s part of being a responsible adult.
And quit trying to disarm the rest of us.
##
The guide is over. Quit reading if you are easily offended. I’ve already heard enough crying last week, I don’t need it in my blog comments.
Now, it’s my blog, I get to rant because I feel like it. As a personal favor in exchange for all this helpful free advice, quit friggin’ yelling at everybody. Damn, libs, people came to a different conclusion than you did, that doesn’t make them sexist, racist, homophobic, or evil. If you hadn’t let the DNC sabotage Bernie Sanders you’d probably be celebrating your victory today. You ran a hideous candidate. Get over yourself and quit blocking traffic. Protesting doesn’t give you the right to burn other people’s property, no matter how butt hurt you are. And just because you saw a picture of racist graffiti: A. For all you know it was put there by Shaun King’s lying ass to get his old job back. Or B. It was put there by an actual racist doofus, and you’re giving a dimwitted shitbag with a $3 can of spray paint power over your emotions. Random scumbags on the right always represent everybody you disagree with, but when an asshole from Black Lives Matters murders five cops or a Muslim blows somebody up they are anomalies and we shouldn’t paint with a broad brush—No shit, thanks Hypocrite-Einstein! People who know dick about the military sound like idiots when explaining to people who actually know how security clearances work how Hillary did no wrong, because we know we’d be in jail for far less. When he was leaking things that made Bush look bad you loved Julian Assange so hard that Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie. And no, people don’t want your kid/grandma to die, but Obamacare is taking another $300-$900 extra out of everybody’s pocket for crappier insurance and they’re broke and pissed. Madonna offering free blowjobs isn’t the incentive you’d think it is. Jerkoff celebrities saying they’d move if Trump won made me want to vote for him just to spite them and I can’t stand the man! Trump sucks, but everybody on your side is such a douche that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t some righteous battle between good and evil, it was choosing between brain or colon cancer. Hillary was a reptile piloting a lifelike human suit, with zero charisma, and entitlement issues, who got the candidate she wanted to run against the most and she STILL LOST. Get over it.
Whew…
And finally, don’t blame me. I voted for ice cream.
Peace out.
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I don't know how the left can keep thinking we need millions of unskilled new immigrants who invariably take the low wage jobs and decry how low the minimum wage is. If there was not excessive labor for these jobs then wages would go up. These jobs are supposed to be entrly level jobs and were never designed for adults to support families on 15 thousand per year.
Who in their right mind would get a job a Mcdonalds planning on staying more then needed unless expecting to move up in ranks?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/11/29/thanks-to-fight-for-15-minimum-wage-mcdonalds-unveils-job-replacing-self-service-kiosks-nationwide/#78a4f3d0762e
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John Schindler ✔ @20committee
MSM's right to discuss Trump's conflicts of interest. Just wish they'd been this interested in Clinton Foundation when Hillary was SECSTATE.
5:04 AM - 30 Nov 2016
82 82 Retweets 109 109 likes
Standards.
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http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/obamas-real-legacy-summed-up-by-9-brutal-charts?utm_source=FBLC&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=LC
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"MSM's right to discuss Trump's conflicts of interest"
Yes. Does anyone think for one second Trump is not going to have his business interests cloud his thinking whenever it comes up?
It is real cause for concern.
How is this cleaning up the swamp?
The potential is one swamp for another.
On the LEFt the swamp continues with Pelosi though I didn't think for one second anyone could get rid of her. She is every bit as corrupt as Clinton.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12/15/madoff-hefty-political-contributions-officials.html
Madoff Made Hefty Political Contributions to Top Officials
Published December 15, 2008
It reads like a who's who of liberal Democrats: Clinton, Corzine, Dodd, Schumer, Kerry, Markey, Rangel, Bradley, Lautenberg ... and yes, even Obama.
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NFL is corrupt for marketing its product like big tobacco. Football is now labelled an addiction.
Football is hazardous to body and brain? Who knew or would have guessed that a 200 to 300 pound person crashing into you at full speed knocking you off your feet and smashing you to the gourn could cause serious injury?
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/nfl-football-moms-kids/
If someone likes to play tennis and watch that all the time why would that not be called an addiction?
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"NFL is corrupt for marketing its product like big tobacco. Football is now labelled an addiction.
Football is hazardous to body and brain? Who knew or would have guessed that a 200 to 300 pound person crashing into you at full speed knocking you off your feet and smashing you to the gournd could cause serious injury?"
While the left works to ban it, they continue to subsidize it, building stadiums for billionaire owners, millionaire players and mostly rich people who buy tickets, hence the thread name cognitive dissonance!
"If someone likes to play tennis and watch that all the time why would that not be called an addiction?"
Actually they do, but at least we don't subsidize it. Or treat it or cure it. Tennis addiction causes you to live longer, costing the country billions...
[Tennis trivia for ccp, what do we call a 90 mile an hour fastball in tennis? A soft second serve. )
http://www.topix.com/forum/tennis/andy-roddick/TJ8FHK64V5B309G2S ]
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“Pelosi is 76. Her second-in-command, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, is 77. Jim Clyburn, the 3rd ranking House Democrat, is 76.” Nothing says “forward-looking leadership” like a trio of septuagenarians at the top of the food chain."
- Chris Cillizza
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/loose-ends-14.php
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http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-02/democrats-are-headed-down-the-wrong-track?emailed=1&src=usn_thereport
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James Taranto: "Conly's greatest contribution to philosophy may be the slippery-slope argument against slippery-slope arguments."
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I would like to point back to this before it slips off the internet. James Taranto's column alone often makes the WSJ subscription worth the money. They take news tips at 'Best of the Web' at the WSJ and I sent this email to Mr. Taranto, online editorial page editor, on Feb 12, 2013, knowing that his sense of humor might do wonders with it:
Subject: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, It’s For Your Own Good!
A must read if you missed it. Honest thoughts of leftists are on rare, open display here, why government should make personal decisions for you. You could base an entire column on this.. - Doug MacGxxxxxx
NY Review of Books: Cass Sunstein reviewing "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism", by Sarah Conly
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/
A month later he published the following and listed me in the credits: )
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324105204578382572446778866
BEST OF THE WEB
Don't Nudge Me There
If government may dictate soda size, why not sexual behavior?
By JAMES TARANTO
March 25, 2013
If you want to get published on the op-ed page of a major newspaper, a good way to go about it is to make a reasonable, or at least reasonable-sounding, case for an unpopular and outlandish position. It's important that the issue be trivial, so that readers will get riled up but no one will really feel offended or threatened.
Philosopher Sarah Conly, author of a new book called "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism," has discovered the formula. In a New York Times op-ed titled "Three Cheers for the Nanny State," she defends Mayor Michael Bloomberg's almost universally ridiculed (and judicially enjoined) ban on large sodas and other sugary beverages.
Conly's argument doesn't seem unreasonable, though it is incoherent in places. In a parenthetical aside, for example, she mocks opponents for objecting over such a trivial matter: "Large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?" (Note to the editors: That "Really?" is lazy writing. Why not let a rhetorical question stand on its own? See what we mean?) But of course she wants us to take her defense of this silly policy as a serious philosophical argument.
Then there's this priceless passage: "Do we care so much about our health that we want to be forced to go to aerobics every day and give up all meat, sugar and salt? No. But in this case, it's some extra soda. Banning a law on the grounds that it might lead to worse laws would mean we could have no laws whatsoever."
Oddly, Conly bases her reductio ad absurdum on false empirical premises. The benefits and risks of exercise, and of particular forms of exercise, vary from individual to individual. And giving up all meat and salt, unlike sugar, is likely to harm your health.
The best part is that conclusion. Essentially she's saying that if you accept one slippery-slope argument, you have to accept all slippery-slope arguments. Therefore, slippery-slope arguments are unsound.
But wait, that's a slippery-slope argument! You've heard of the liar's paradox? Its simplest form is the statement "This statement is false." Conly's greatest contribution to philosophy may be the slippery-slope argument against slippery-slope arguments. Call it the slipper's paradox.
We're less impressed with Conly's argument in favor of the soda ban and measures like it. She rebuts John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century liberal philosopher who established the "harm principle"--the idea that coercion is generally justified only to prevent individuals from harming others. Mill also allowed that there were unusual cases in which government would be justified in restricting an individual's behavior for his own good--"when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we'll pretty definitely regret." Since it's common knowledge that large quantities of refined sugar are bad for you, that wouldn't justify the soda ban.
Conly thinks Mill didn't go far enough in justifying coercion. Science has shown "that we often don't think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends," she writes. "We make errors. . . . We are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations." Thus we should surrender a measure of autonomy and yield to rules promulgated by experts, who presumably know what's good for us: "Giving up a little liberty is something we agree to when we agree to live in a democratic society that is governed by laws."
Again she brings up the slippery slope: "What people fear is that this is just the beginning: today it's soda, tomorrow it's the guy standing behind you making you eat your broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch 'PBS NewsHour' every day."
Crazy, right? Maybe not. Conly's op-ed never mentions smoking, but in a sympathetic review in the New York Review of Books, Cass Sunstein reports that in "Against Autonomy" she argues "that because the health risks of smoking are so serious, the government should ban it." (Sunstein, a legal scholar and former Obama administration official, is coauthor of the 2008 book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," which makes an argument similar to Conly's.)
What's interesting about the smoking-ban proposal is that while it is culturally radical, it is not philosophically radical. Is there any doubt that if cigarettes were a new invention, lawmakers would quickly ban them? Libertarians would object, on the same ground that they argue for the legalization of other drugs. But their point of view would command little public support, at least unless and until illicit cigarette smoking became as widespread as illicit marijuana use is today.
That is to say that a moderate form of Conly's philosophy has long prevailed, even in as freedom-loving a country as America. While we may bridle at being told we can't do something we are used to doing or didn't realize we weren't supposed to do, generally we don't do so as a matter of principle. (Libertarians, you're off the hook on that observation.) Generally speaking, Americans accept a wide variety of regulations on their personal behavior that are designed to be in their own good.
So what does Conly have to say that is original? Well, her book is called "Against Autonomy" and subtitled "Justifying Coercive Paternalism." That makes it sound as if she is advocating aggressive and thoroughgoing government intrusion into individual decision-making. Her positions on the soda ban and tobacco prohibition seem to bolster that. But those take her only slightly beyond the views that today prevail among the left-liberal elite.
Similarly, according to Sunstein, she endorses Bloomberg's ban on trans fats as well as "regulations designed to reduce portion sizes"--presumably of solid food as well as dissolved sugar. But in areas in which her philosophy would seem to conflict with prevailing left-liberal views, she's less adventurous than Bloomberg:
She is far more ambivalent about Mayor Bloomberg's effort to convince the US Department of Agriculture to authorize a ban on the use of food stamps to buy soda. She is not convinced that the health benefits would be significant, and she emphasizes that people really do enjoy drinking soda.
You'd think the logic of "coercive paternalism"--of government-imposed restrictions designed to promote individual welfare--would apply more strongly when individuals are dependent on government for financial support of their welfare. To put it another way, someone who is financially autonomous has a stronger argument that he ought to be personally autonomous. We're not sure what Conly thinks of that argument--the $95 cover price (0% off at Amazon) has nudged us away from acquiring her book--but we suspect she adheres less strongly to "coercive paternalism" than to the orthodoxies of contemporary left-liberalism.
An even better example is this observation from Sunstein's review: "Because hers is a paternalism of means rather than ends, she would not authorize government to stamp out sin (as, for example, by forbidding certain forms of sexual behavior)."
What a staggering cop-out. The past 50 years or so have seen a massive deregulation of personal behavior in the sexual sphere, a revolution of law, technology, custom and economics, all in the name of personal autonomy. Never mind "sin"--this has had bad consequences for public health (AIDS and other new sexually transmitted diseases), for children (far more of whom are born out of wedlock and reared without fathers), and even for the future of the welfare state (since declining fertility makes old-age entitlements unsustainable).
It may be that the sexual revolution is irreversible and the concomitant problems are intractable. If Conly lacks the imagination to come up with policy solutions, so do we. But if she dismisses this enormous question as a matter of "sin" and focuses instead on trivia like soda-size regulations, why should we take her philosophy seriously?
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What costs more? Treating type II Diabetes or HIV infection?
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Moving Doug's post to here:
It was leftist derangement and the only msm discussion that followed the debate when Donald Trump said we would have to 'wait and see' whether he would accept the election result, a question never asked of Hillary. Hillary painted that attitude as un-American and unpatriotic. Does anyone have a mirror for her?
Since then,
1) Hillary lost and did not concede that night or address her supporters.
2) Jill Stein spearhead the re-count movement, even though the race was not particularly close (especially for her) in any of those states, and Hillary joined the effort.
3) Trump gained margin in the Wisconsin recount. Courts struck down others. No grounds.
4) Liberals started bashing the electoral college. I wonder what other parts of the constitution they also don't like... Liberal before that adored the electoral college, even had their own pet name for it, THE BLUE WALL.
5) Now it's the Russians, even though the leakers say they weren't the hackers.
6) And last, since they lost the House of Representatives where an incomplete recount could have pushed it, they want to suborn the Electors.
7) Did I already say last, impeachment is never off the table even though Republicans never did that for any of Obama's crimes, IRS targeting of opponent groups, for example.
Not surprised at leftist hypocrisy, just trying to document it.
For the record, Trump accepted the election result.
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Doug writes,
"7) Did I already say last, impeachment is never off the table even though Republicans never did that for any of Obama's crimes, IRS targeting of opponent groups, for example."
I just had a conversation in a store after running in to one of my colleagues and the conversation somehow turned to politics when he made a comment about the election and I stated I voted for Trump before he went on his Leftist diatribe when he hinted he voted for her
He actually did say that she had no accomplishments other then being married to Bill and having both a Senate Seat and Sec of St gifted to her. She was clearly not his first choice though I did not pursue who was.
After I pointed out that Trump was not my first choice either he said this, that Trump will likely be impeached and more or less the Never Trump Repubs will side with the Left on this to get rid of him and prop up Pence.
So, bottom line:
Impeachment ABSOLUTELY IS the Left's dream going forward.
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ccp: "So, bottom line:
Impeachment ABSOLUTELY IS the Left's dream going forward."
Very true that Republicans will turn against Trump quickly IF he commits impeachable offenses.
One leftist professor, the only one who predicted Trump would win, also predicted he will be impeached on the reasoning that he built his business by lying, cheating and stealing, and whatever analogy you choose, a tiger cannot change its stripes so he will do it again and get caught and thrown out.
I'm not a big fan of Trump's personal character but I think this is all wrong. He built big things by being highly ambitious and highly disciplined. It is leftists who must conceal their true motives and actions. He is exactly the opposite on this, saying what he intends to do and hopefully doing it. I think he has no tolerance for any of the crap that plagued Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Debbie Wasserman Schultz etc. Instead of setting up private servers to conceal his inner thoughts, he tweets them out to the world nightly.
If we view him negatively as a total self centered, narcissist, egotist, etc. it would drive his huge self image far further to enrich this entire country for all history to see than to put a couple of more billion into the Trump business and personal accounts.
Making America Great Again really is what he wants to do and exactly what will make him the most popular, also what he wants to do. Leftists don't get the connection between acting in your own self interest and helping others.
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Obama Skipped 62.5 Percent of Intelligence Briefings this Year
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-skipped-62-5-percent-of-intelligence-briefings-this-year/
President Barack Obama has only attended roughly 40 percent of his daily intelligence briefings throughout his presidency, according to the Government Accountability Institute
http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/GAI-Report-PDB-Update-9.29.2014.pdf
That was a headline of the Washington Free Beacon, not the Post or NY Times.
Now they (including President Obama) are up in arms because not-President-yet Trump who has no finger on the controls is skipping his. Good grief.
For the record, I criticized Obama for this, but I am tired of holding people on different sides to two different standards. They reelected a President who did the same thing. If this is lowering the bar, they did it. They didn't even hold theirs accountable for results.
When they beg and beg and beg for more security like they did from Benghazi to Sec Clinton and got no response and ended up being attacked and killed with no backup sent, then we know they handled security wrong.
Of as leftists said in the Benghazi aftermath, four more years!
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Obama the slick's spokesperson "earnest" (what a ironic joke that is) claims Brock reads his intelligence reports and does not meet with intelligence officers. In other words he gets the imformation every day . Presumably he is reading them in between gold swings.
And who can say THIS is not true?
OBama is just another slickster, like Clinton.
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Are there no "good" Democrats? From one sleaze to another:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/16/dnc-chair-candidate-tom-perez-had-his-own-clinton-style-email-scandal-at-dept-of-justice/
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Blue wall falling down?
I thought Democrats defend each other to the death in public . This is out of their character:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/22/harry-reid-dnc-worthless-wasserman-schultz-was-a-problem.html?via=desktop&source=copyurl
"not someone like we had with that congresswoman from Florida"
" I did not have sex with that woman!"
:lol:
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443195/electoral-college-2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-democrats-leftists-subvert?utm_source=nr&utm_campaign=leftists&utm_medium=satemail&utm_content=murdock&utm_term=VDHM
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If such tapes existed then the LEft would have paid millions for them:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/23/apprentice-staffers-respond-to-tom-arnold-claims-of-racist-trump-tapes-wtf.html
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Havard's new propaganda gift to Muslims. $60,000 a year sharia law fellowships "just in time" for pushback against Trump.
We need harvard to tell us what to do and right from wrong. BTW white Western men need not apply . We don't want you.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/25/harvard-university-launches-fellowships-islamic-law-influence-u-s-policy/
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http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4898781,00.html
Trump’s Jewish grandkids light Hanukkah candles
US president-elect’s daughter Ivanka shares a photo of her family celebrating the Jewish holiday in Hawaii. ‘As we light the candles, sending love from our family to yours this holiday season! Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah!’ she writes.
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head on backwards:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-28/george-soros-conjures-hitler-attack-ascendant-populists-warns-democracy-now-crisis
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http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/12/29/some-new-years-resolutions-for-our-progressive-pals-n2264089
Some New Year’s Resolutions for Our Progressive Pals
Kurt Schlichter Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Dec 29, 2016 12:01 AM Share (903) Tweet
Some New Year’s Resolutions for Our Progressive Pals
The year 2016 was a great one for our progressive friends – except for that whole utter repudiation unpleasantness of last November. Now, as a concerned conservative friend eager to help, let me offer you some New Year's resolutions that will keep you on the path to success. The bottom line: stay the course!
Keep Reaffirming the Racism/Sexism/Homophobia and Other Moral Failings of Everyone Who Doesn't Obey the Rigid Yet Constantly Mutating Laws of Political Correctness: It's vital that you continue, at every turn, to label normal Americans "racists," “sexists” and all the other “-ists” and “-phobes” in your Big Book O’ Liberal Slurs. Remember, concerns about crime are secret dog whistles to the tens of millions of wannabe KKK members lurking out there. Americans actually love being robbed! You know why we pretend we don't like dismembering babies and selling their parts? Because we hate strong women. You caught us! And having people smash airplanes into buildings and open fire at random citizens are just a few of our favorite things. We only blame these acts on the radical Muslims who are actually doing them because of our unreasoning hatred of Muslims. There's no fooling you! If we weren’t such Islamophobes, we’d focus on the bloody death toll from those radical Baptists. So keep it up, and never, ever, pass up an opportunity to tell normal Americans how they fail to meet your exacting standards. With enough abuse, those Trump voters you lost last time will definitely come around and start supporting Democrats again!
Slam Israel: Who needs Jewish voters in your coalition anymore? You’ve got urban hipsters and illegal aliens, frigid divorcees and welfare cheats, plus a declining number of blacks and more urban hipsters, so those embarrassing friends of the Zionist Entity are totally expendable. Let them go join the GOP, with its unflinching support for evil Israel against the uncorrupt democracies surrounding it. When your delegates booed Israel (and God) at your convention, it was a great way to start this super-helpful conversation. Keep it up. Remember, every time you stab Israel in the back, several CAIR members will escort their wives out to go vote for Democrats.
Leverage Hollywood Star Power: As you know, all normal Americans believe Hollywood stars are powerful role models who we should emulate in our personal and political lives. Want to energize new voters? Well, those tatt-ridden, gangsta rap stars supporting Hillary sure made me want to bust a move – right into the voting booth to elect some Dems! And don’t forget to have Lena Dunham go out there to lecture us about her personal insights on politics and childcare. She’s America’s preeminent feminist icon – I know that pic of her lolling on a beach dressed as a manatee made me reconsider my standards of female beauty. After that, I’ll never again deploy my male gaze!
Jesusplain More: Christians definitely appreciate it when they get instructed on the tenets of their faith by someone whose most recent religious observance was driving past a Church's Fried Chicken. We believers somehow missed how the RNC was calling Trump “Jesus,” but it didn’t get by you theologians! Good catch! Clearly, people you hold in contempt for being dedicated to Christ are going to commit blasphemy by labeling Trump “Jesus” because…reasons. Way to untangle that cunning plot to do…something. Anyway, thanks to you, I now also know that Jesus was a free n' easy hippie whose teachings just happen to correspond exactly to the tenets of the Democratic Party – except for some of that awkward stuff that requires actual belief in Jesus. Under your tutelage, I finally get that thou shall not demand that deadbeats worketh, nor shalt thy resisteth 7th Century savages. Also, apparently He demandeth that grown men dressed like women shall exposeth themselves aroundeth our young daughters. Who knew? You guys should keep this up. You're building a lasting impression among religious Americans – you know, the key segment of the American population that isn’t barren.
Remember, You Know Best for Us. You should do as much as you can to compel us to comply with your enlightened views. Force innocent bakers to bake cakes just because you can. People love that – especially when you simultaneously discover the moral necessity of allowing employees on a chorus line to opt out of entertaining those you deem unacceptable. Also, try to disarm us even as crime rates have entered a dizzying climb thanks to your cavorting with quasi-terrorist mobs and trashing the police – remember, it’s not the fear of being raped or murdered that inspired us to exercise that musty old Second Amendment, it’s racism! Oh, and perhaps concern about the future should you retake power. Just ensure that you keep reacting to any criticism with scathing personal attacks upon those who defy you. Normal Americans love that.
Heat-Up the Climate Change Frenzy: It must be frustrating when stupid #Science-hating normals refuse to accept that global warming is a crisis requiring we immediately give you liberals more power and money. This isn’t the first time these dummies have refused to listen to the settled #Science – they didn’t listen in the 70s when you demanded more money and power to stop the imminent ice age, or in the 80s when you demanded more money and power to stop the ozone hole apocalypse, or in the 90s when you demanded more money and power to stop the acid rain Armageddon. Keep it up! Who knows, maybe it will actually get hotter and you’ll have some evidence – it totally could happen this time!
Don't Hide Your Feelings On Social Media. Social media allows you the opportunity to freely express what you really think to a vast audience – use it! Once, you could only say what you really think in little groups at Manhattan cocktail parties or cafés in Los Angeles, or publish it in obscure magazines no normals ever read. Well, now you can tweet your innermost thoughts and have those views go viral! It used to be a secret that you thought we are idiots for having religious beliefs, but not anymore! Your desire to confiscate guns had to be hidden with weasel words in public, but now you are no longer restrained. In fact, you can loudly and publicly wish us harm – we love being told you can’t wait for us to die off so you can take total control of the country (except, being breeders, we have kids, but that’s another story). This open exchange of ideas is wonderful, and we urge you to continue it.
Keep Nominating Ancient Leftists Whose Massive Criminal Endeavors Appall All Decent Folk. Let me say it – Hillary Clinton was a terrific candidate for the Democrats, at least from my perspective as a Republican. Honest, warm, self-less, able to connect with regular people – these qualities are totally overrated in a nominee. Okay, she had some baggage, but the problem with Hillary wasn’t her corruption – it was that the darn FBI and those darn Russians kept telling people about her corruption. Work harder with the mainstream media to ensure that we are no longer exposed to the kind of “fake news” that reveals what your candidates are actually doing. Most journalists will be eager to help!
Be the Sorest of Sore Losers: Or should I say, sore winners, since Hillary obviously crushed Trump in the popular vote election we didn’t have. Keep being angry! Talk nonstop about how Trump is illegitimate – we’ve already totally forgotten that whole thing about how not promising to recognize the validity of the election results is un-American. And oppose everything Trump does – everything! After all, people don’t want change. The last eight years have been terrific for everyone who matters – just ask Obama!
Look, you hit a few unexpected bumps in the road in 2016 – I mean, who could have foreseen that nominating someone under FBI investigation might turn out badly? But there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing – the problem isn’t you. It’s everyone else, especially those stupid, racist, gun nut Jesus people who aren’t bright enough to understand that you are entitled to rule over them. So don’t ever change. Stay the course. Oh gosh, please, please, please, by all means, stay the course.
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What the Russia thing is really all about with useful idiots Graham and McCain playing along:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-trump-made-russias-hacking-more-effective/511880/
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By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. - Paul Krugman, 1998
http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html
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"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. - Paul Krugman, 1998"
yet he is all over the news as though any thing he says has any credibiltiy
the Nobel guy. Another example of what a joke the nobel prize has become
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:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Omar:
"“My election win offers a counter-narrative to the bigotry in the world,” Minnesota State Representative-elect Omar, 34, says in the new issue of PEOPLE. “This is a land of immigrants, and most come here for opportunity, a second chance. It’s our time to fight for the America we know we can have.”
Me: You already have the America that you succeeded in, SCHMUCK. F off.
You come here from your Muslim nation to give us lectures about freedom and bigotry and we should all exist for immigrants first? And you wonder why you may not be appreciated in some quarters?
******Meet Ilhan Omar, the First Somali-American US Legislator: My Win ‘Offers a Counter-Narrative to the Bigotry in the World’
Jeff Nelson,People 14 hours ago Comments Sign in to like Reblog on Tumblr Share Tweet Email
On Nov. 8, Ilhan Omar made history when she was elected the first Somali-American lawmaker in the U.S.
“My election win offers a counter-narrative to the bigotry in the world,” Minnesota State Representative-elect Omar, 34, says in the new issue of PEOPLE. “This is a land of immigrants, and most come here for opportunity, a second chance. It’s our time to fight for the America we know we can have.”
Omar herself is an immigrant, having fled her civil war-torn home country of Somalia as a child.
“The war started when I was 8,” says Omar, who recalls witnessing the terrors of conflict. “One night militia tried to break into our home, and the exterior was riddled with bullets. My family left our neighborhood, passing through dead bodies and debris.”
Not long after, Omar says she and her family left their home and relocated to a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya.
“I no longer had a bed of my own, the privacy of a shower in my own bathroom — we were essentially homeless,” Omar says. “I would fetch water, and my family would reward me with a shilling at the end of the day, so I would go see a movie in the village next door in a makeshift theater: a hut.”
After four years years in that Mombasa refugee camp, Omar and her family were sponsored to move to the United States, arriving in New York before moving to Arlington, Virginia, where Omar, then 12, began middle school.
“ had missed years of education, so I didn’t really speak English,” Omar says. “My sisters and I learned by practice, watching TV with the captions on, reading and trying to repeat words back to each other.”
After two and a half years, the family moved once again, this time to Minneapolis, where Omar faced another difficult adjustment: high school.
“Not a lot of the kids knew how to coexist with people of a different background, so we created a unity and diversity program,” Omar says. “We’d have meals together and connect through experiences and stories. I was finally just ‘Ilhan,’ not ‘that Somali girl.'”
For more on Ilhan Omar, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere now.
That United Nations-esque group in high school laid the groundwork for Omar’s future in community organizing and politics, which she continued to nurture by studying political science and international policies at North Dakota State University.
“I believe women and minorities often wait for permission to be invited to something; we need to stop doing that,” says Omar, who managed a 2013 city council race and was hired on to work at city hall in Minneapolis before getting elected by Minnesota’s District 60B in 2016.
While she’s always been passionate about politics, Omar’s fervor has only been compounded since becoming a mother.
“My kids are the reason I continue to strive for something better,” she says of her children with husband Ahmed Hirsi: son Adnan, 11, and daughters Ilwad, 4, and Isra, 13. “They know, as kids who are Muslim, Somali, black Americans, that they’ve always been part of a struggle and that change isn’t easy.”
Even so, Omar hopes to use her new statehouse position to make a change. And despite the turbulent political year leading up to President-elect Donald Trump‘s election in November, Omar remains hopeful.
“I find hope,” she says, “in knowing that I belong to a state that has a lot of people who are champions of change and progress; that we will rise up and fight for justice and equality; that ultimately love will trump hate.”
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/367711.php
January 03, 2017
Josh Earnest: Why Didn't We Punish China for the Millions of Sensitive Personal Disclosures Stolen in the OPM Hack? Because F*** You, That's Why
Here's the real reason:
It's because the OPM hack chiefly affected military personnel, who are not People Who Count.
But Russia -- or whoever -- screwed with People Who Count when they hacked the DNC and Jon Podesta.
"What we've seen is that these are two cyber incidents that are malicious in nature but materially different," Earnest said, defending the administration's decision to issue sanctions in response to the Russian hack but not the Chinese hack.
The OPM hack was one of the largest data breaches in the history of the United States. More than 20 million people were affected, with the Chinese gaining possession of names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, places of residence, and sensitive information from background investigations.
"I'm just saying that it's different than seeking to interfere in the conduct of a U.S. national election," Earnest said.
"It's different because I said so" is pretty much the most contemptuous answer you can offer. You might as well just take your dick all the way out and say, "Because some people just matter more in this world."
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Good analogy though Huff post cream puffs; response is "huh":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-oreilly-reverse-mccarthyism_us_586ccc87e4b0eb58648b3802
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This is why I believe Keith Ellison will be made the next DNC head. Precisely because he is black and muslim.. Anybody who criticizes him for reason whatsoever will be trolled with the lib attack lines:
racist
islamophobe
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/01/07/joy-reid-being-black-and-muslim-puts-you-in-the-crosshairs-of-trumpworld/
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The entertainment thread would not let me post there ; kept telling me "notify" not reply.
Now a "beautiful person " of the beautiful people at another of the endless self congratulatory beautiful people events insults football and mixed martial arts fans which is "not an art":
https://www.yahoo.com/tv/golden-globes-review-trump-fallon-streep-042029462.html
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This is why I believe Keith Ellison will be made the next DNC head. Precisely because he is black and muslim.. Anybody who criticizes him for reason whatsoever will be trolled with the lib attack lines:
racist
islamophobe
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/01/07/joy-reid-being-black-and-muslim-puts-you-in-the-crosshairs-of-trumpworld/
That decision will come up shortly. You are partly right IMHO. His rise to power and fame, like Barack Obama, is the combination of looking different and slick delivery. Ellison is a (fake?) Muslim who loves gays, Jews, peace on earth, etc. Good for him, as Elizabeth Warren might say.
I can't believe he'll be picked, but we'll find out soon enough. He is perfect for the part of the party that wants to double down on all the current, failed policies. Just like the Presidential race, not running is the alternative who has visited the heartland, is experienced, moderate and would help them to reach out to the voters they are losing.
Those voting for leadership I assume will be all the people in party power who think the policies pursued over the last, failed ten years were perfect.
So we get someone all calm and articulate in a suit and tie who pioneered the movement of assassinate cops to lead a major political party.
"We don't get no justice, you don't get no peace."
Let's see how that sells in Heartland America and how he holds up to national scrutiny tougher than the Red Star and Sickle, the monopoly media here.
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NY Times, surely you jest!
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/sunday/as-donald-trump-denies-climate-change-these-kids-die-of-it.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
Global warming caused the drought in Madagascar.
Let's back track. Burning fossil fuels is causing global warming aka climate change because carbon dioxide emitted in combustion is a trace element greenhouse gas. See the octane combustion equation:
2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 16 CO2 + 18 H2O
More water vapor is emitted than CO2.
Adding water vapor to the atmosphere (in the US) is causing droughts worldwide. Good f'g grief.
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It's causing flooding in Nevada and California right now. Is there anything Climate Change can't do?
NY Times, surely you jest!
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/sunday/as-donald-trump-denies-climate-change-these-kids-die-of-it.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
Global warming caused the drought in Madagascar.
Let's back track. Burning fossil fuels is causing global warming aka climate change because carbon dioxide emitted in combustion is a trace element greenhouse gas. See the octane combustion equation:
2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 16 CO2 + 18 H2O
More water vapor is emitted than CO2.
Adding water vapor to the atmosphere (in the US) is causing droughts worldwide. Good f'g grief.
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It's causing flooding in Nevada and California right now. Is there anything Climate Change can't do?
Right, a lot like the dogs saying the Russians pooped in the hallway.
If you live on an island in a global economy more than 2000 years after the invention of desalination and die of a drought, your cause of death is poverty, not someone else's prosperity.
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http://amgreatness.com/2017/01/09/meryls-bad-memory/
Meryl’s Bad Memory
January 9, 2017 by Boris Zelkin
“I am a righteous bitch, aren’t I?” –Meryl Streep as Kate Mundy in “Dancing at Lughnasa”
Meryl Streep on Sunday brought all her righteousness to bear at the Golden Globes where she excoriated President-elect Trump and passionately spoke to the necessity of a free and brave press in order to fight, what I can only imagine she sees as an impending Fourth Reich.
She said:
OK, this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
Streep is a symbol of American greatness. She is a national treasure, a woman whose acting ability is considered by most to be second-to-none in the entertainment industry. But it’s curious. Given her immense accomplishments and body of work, she must—just as an empirical matter—have a keen memory. Yet here we see that she appears unable to remember a great many things.
For instance, while touting freedom of the press, she seems to have forgotten that time when current Secretary of State John Kerry defended the rationale of the Charlie Hebdo killings in contrast to other, in his view, less “justifiable” types of terrorism. Perhaps it is similar for Streep to the time her friend Whoopie Goldberg dismissed the sexual assault charges against director Roman Polanski by noting that his 1977 hot-tub episode with a 13-year-old girl whom he drugged and sodomized wasn’t rape-rape. In any case, Streep either forgets, or is somehow fine with, a cabinet-level representative of the U.S. government saying, essentially, that killing journalists who mock a religion isn’t really terrorism-terrorism.
Speaking of Polanski, it’s telling that in 2003 when Polanski received an Academy Award for “The Pianist,” Streep gave the convicted child-rapist a standing ovation, showing that, as far as she’s concerned, art trumps rape—especially when it’s not rape-rape.
Streep also seems to have forgotten that journalists such as former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson and Fox News’s James Rosen were bullied, tracked by the administration, and even hacked. In 2013, CBS confirmed that Attkisson’s computers were hacked before she left the network. Rosen’s whereabouts were monitored by Obama’s Department of Justice and his questions during news conferences were edited out by the government. Federal agents even obtained Rosen’s personal emails (all of this without the help of the Russians and despite the fact that his password was probably not “password”). Rosen later opined that the Obama administration had an “authoritarian impulse” that he hadn’t experienced in other administrations. “There’s no doubt,” Rosen wrote, “that the Obama administration has maintained an animus towards Fox News and specifically towards me across the two terms.”
Streep also seems to forget about the Obama Administration’s ruthless strong-arming of journalists to reveal sources. In 2014 the Committee to Protect Journalists—the group that Streep endorsed in her speech on Sunday—wrote a scathing report on the Obama Administration’s relationship with the press:
U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.”
That same report quotes David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times as having said, “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
The most egregious of her memory lapses, however, is her seeming inability to recall Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the immigrant filmmaker who made a small movie called “Innocence of Muslims.” This was the movie that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama blamed for the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012. Streep seems not to be able to recall—maybe on account of his skin color, or immigrant status…who knows?—a man who the administration would eventually see jailed on a technicality. Namely that Nakoula, who was barred by parole from using pseudonyms, used one while making a movie critical of Mohammed and Islam. Considering Streep can’t be bothered to remember Charlie Hebdo or even Theo Van Gogh, and seems to forget what happens to people who mock Mohammed, we shouldn’t expect her to understand why someone would want to use a pseudonym to make such a movie. But surely Obama and Clinton and law enforcement might reasonably be expected to understand that motivation.
Sunday’s awards ceremony and Streep’s speech centered on filmmaking, free speech, and freedom of the press. Streep in her speech noted, “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing…”
Yet this great American actor couldn’t be bothered to think about the fact that a sitting president, his whole administration and the State Department brought all their power to bear on an immigrant filmmaker to give themselves political cover. Nakoula is living in a homeless shelter now, earning $300 a month, his life destroyed by the powerful in government—and Meryl Streep has the temerity to worry about the possibility of a maybe during the next administration.
A dogged and committed press corps with an adversarial relationship to the powerful is something we all want. But maybe instead of projecting her fears into the uncertain future with a president-elect who has yet to actually do anything with respect to policy or the press, Streep might do well to examine the premises under which she and much of the media have operated these past few years—fawning over those in power which has led her to stay silent during some of the most egregious abuses of government power with regards to free speech and the press by one of the most opaque administrations in modern history. She might come to some self-realization that she’s been duped and that she didn’t actually speak truth to power on Sunday night, but rather she acted as a megaphone for the powerful to preach to their choir.
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Gaia be praised!
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/01/09/california-storms-fill-drought-parched-reservoirs/
It's a Global Warming miracle!
It's causing flooding in Nevada and California right now. Is there anything Climate Change can't do?
Right, a lot like the dogs saying the Russians pooped in the hallway.
If you live on an island in a global economy more than 2000 years after the invention of desalination and die of a drought, your cause of death is poverty, not someone else's prosperity.
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Gaia be praised!
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/01/09/california-storms-fill-drought-parched-reservoirs/
It's a Global Warming miracle!
It's a miracle, drought, flood, you name it. Here's a big one, the Great Lakes:
https://thinkprogress.org/the-great-lakes-go-dry-how-one-fifth-of-the-worlds-fresh-water-is-dwindling-away-e9efe2c72891#.mu9j15ecq
Jan 2014: For the past 15 years, islanders have watched Lake Michigan slowly disappear. Last January, the lake hit a record low, 29 inches below the long-term average as measured since 1918... Increasingly, scientists believe that climate change is driving the warming waters and setting up a new regime in the Great Lakes that may lead to lower lake levels and a permanently altered shoreline.
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/great-lakes-water-levels-fastest-recovery-history
Dec 2014: Great Lakes Water Levels Recover Faster Than Ever Before
"ice cover that stuck around from several harsh winters prevented some of the usual evaporation from occurring."
Unusual ice cover accelerated the rise. Who knew that the side effects of warming would be harsh winters and increased ice coverage?
Climate change, formerly known as weather, is amazing. You only have to believe.
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Can't get any more hypocritical then this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/growing-list-house-dems-boycott-trump-inauguration-083301964--election.html
compared to:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/us/politics/campaign-election-trump-clinton.html
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Why doesn't the Democratic party really show inclusive they are and vote for the first cockroach as their party chairman(chairbug):
https://www.yahoo.com/news/al-sharpton-the-process-that-elected-trump-was-not-legitimate-162351096.html
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David Burge
@iowahawkblog
"We're protesting fascism" - people dressed in all-black uniforms smashing windows and starting fires
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
[youtube]"We're protesting fascism" [/youtube]
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*****"We're protesting fascism" - people dressed in all-black uniforms smashing windows and starting fires*****
The real fascists are deniers calling the other side , those for freedom, the fascists.
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http://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/rain-snow-cause-red-rock-scenic-loop-some-mountain-roads-close
It snowed on the Joshua trees just outside of Vegas today. Damn you, global warming!
We have always been at war with eastasia!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/
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moving front and center:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-rep-kennedy-democrats-must-heed-voters-economic-161117541.html
Just doesn't end.
The journolist/Dem pol complex mantra - we need to be bipartisan and Trump is not inclusive .
Now they don't hold majorities we need to do what they never do when they are in power.
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moving front and center:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-rep-kennedy-democrats-must-heed-voters-economic-161117541.html
Just doesn't end.
The journolist/Dem pol complex mantra - we need to be bipartisan and Trump is not inclusive .
Now they don't hold majorities we need to do what they never do when they are in power.
When the left wins, it's I won! When they are out of power, then we need to compromise.
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/c22a5o5veae1ddt.jpg)
Forward to all your lefty contacts.
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No ethniphobia here folks. Probably because she is a legal immigrant and didn't toe the Democrat party line:
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/01/24/chelsea-handler-says-melania-trump-barely-speaks-english-despite-first-lady-speaking-six-languages.html
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The "emotional card " the LEFt keeps playing now. Why not send her message to the butcher Assad or Isis or Putin? Just taking in hundreds of thousands of people from the middle east to the US is not the answer. We could bring in the 3.8 billion people here from around the world whose collective wealth is equal to the top 8 richest people in the world. Would the left be happy then?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bana-alabed-asks-trump-help-syrian-children-if-you-can-i-will-be-your-best-friend-200209008.html
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Coming from Columbia of course. :roll: The country will survive Trump so say Gates and Buffett. And the example they use for immigrants includes Einstein for God's sake. He single handedly saved the world from a nuclear Germany. Using the logic of the LEFT he could also be blamed for the "murder" of tens of thousands at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The LEFT now tell us that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong yet now these two libs would then use the same example to promote immigration.
The bottom line of course is always the same. Einstein came here legally . What is it about "illegal" the LEFt will refuse to recognize? If these people came over and eventually mostly voted Republican we wouldn't even need to fight over this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/buffett-gates-hope-america-trump-ascension-222131625--sector.html
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/28/how-george-orwell-predicted-donald-trump.html
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/28/vincent-tolliver-candidate-dnc-chair-blames-clinto/
No. It was President Obama's fault, candidate Clinton's fault, and the fault of the policies of the entire Democratic party.
Tim Kaine was a complete jerk in the VP debate. His debate strategy came from the Clinton campaign. Had they picked someone else, they would have given him or her the same, failed mission.
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Does not surprise me the Dem party will respond to their losses by moving farther left. Tolliver who is apparently running for the DNC chair is presently s "substitute teacher" according to this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/vincent-tolliver
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Does not surprise me the Dem party will respond to their losses by moving farther left. Tolliver who is apparently running for the DNC chair is presently s "substitute teacher" according to this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/vincent-tolliver
The path to certain victory!
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Gaia be praised!
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/01/09/california-storms-fill-drought-parched-reservoirs/
It's a Global Warming miracle!
It's causing flooding in Nevada and California right now. Is there anything Climate Change can't do?
Right, a lot like the dogs saying the Russians pooped in the hallway.
If you live on an island in a global economy more than 2000 years after the invention of desalination and die of a drought, your cause of death is poverty, not someone else's prosperity.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/heavy-snowfall-in-oregon-idaho-alaska-is-causing-buildings-to-collapse/
Damn you, Global Warming!
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It really doesn't make our cause any easier when we have the Gods of the World working for the other side. So just by chance we need celebrate this obscure guy's birthday today:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Fred+Korematsu&oi=ddle&ct=fred-korematsus-98th-birthday-5528997722062848-hp&hl=en
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/diaz-balart-where-was-the-outrage-when-obama-blocked-cubans/article/2613355?custom_click=rss#!
Diaz-Balart: Where was the outrage when Obama blocked Cubans?
By Susan Ferrechio (@susanferrechio) • 1/30/17 12:17 PM
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., accused critics of President Trump's immigration ban of hypocrisy, pointing out that few complained when former President Barack Obama ended the nation's asylum program for Cubans just days before leaving office.
"I am struck by the double standard and hypocrisy of those who are offended by this executive order, but who failed to challenge President Obama when he took similar action against Cuban refugees, especially since President Obama's action was meant to appease the Castro regime and not for national security reasons," Diaz-Balart said in a statement Monday.
Diaz-Balart, a Cuban American, is a Republican who represents South Florida, which is home to many Cuban migrants.
Obama on January 12 ended the nation's "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy which for the past two decades had allowed Cubans to remain legally in the United States if they were able to set foot on U.S. land. The Cuban government had been seeking an end to the policy and it followed Obama's decision to renew diplomatic and economic ties with the country, which is still controlled by a dictatorship.
Subscribe today to get intelligence and analysis on defense and national security issues in your Inbox each weekday morning from veteran journalists Jamie McIntyre and Jacqueline Klimas.
Diaz-Balart said he supported Trump's decision to temporarily ban refugees from seven countries with terrorism problems.
"While it is always legitimate to express concerns with presidential executive orders, I understand the president's primary responsibility is to keep the American people safe," Diaz-Balart said. "The ban is only temporary until the administration can review and enact the necessary procedures to vet immigrants from these countries. The ban is based on countries the Obama administration identified as 'countries of concern' and not based on a religious test."
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The flaming lib academics making me crack up here:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Can-she-eat-more-kale-Hordes-of-liberals-want-10903762.php
Oh I have same blood type and will be ready to donate if needed.......... :roll:
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How is making America great again 1984? You mean having liberal academics and leftist media and globalists and thought police and infinite political correctness and tech titans controlling the dialogue is freedom?
http://variety.com/2017/legit/news/1984-play-broadway-1201977171/
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/223736/the-fake-news-problem
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https://www.unwatch.org/walk-shame-swedens-first-feminist-government-don-hijabs-iran/
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Democrats can’t win until they recognize how bad Obama’s financial policies were
He had opportunities to help the working class, and he passed them up.
By Matt Stoller January 12
Matt Stoller is fellow with the Open Markets Program of New America.
Here's Obama's advice to the Democratic Party
Play Video4:00
At a news conference at the White House, Dec. 16, President Obama shared his advice to Democrats following their defeat in the 2016 election. (Reuters)
During his final news conference of 2016, in mid-December, President Obama criticized Democratic efforts during the election. “Where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, you know, politically correct, out-of-touch folks,” Obama said, “we have to be in those communities.” In fact, he went on, being in those communities — “going to fish-fries and sitting in VFW halls and talking to farmers” — is how, by his account, he became president. It’s true that Obama is skilled at projecting a populist image; he beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa in 2008, for instance, partly by attacking agriculture monopolies .
But Obama can’t place the blame for Clinton’s poor performance purely on her campaign. On the contrary, the past eight years of policymaking have damaged Democrats at all levels. Recovering Democratic strength will require the party’s leaders to come to terms with what it has become — and the role Obama played in bringing it to this point.
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Two key elements characterized the kind of domestic political economy the administration pursued: The first was the foreclosure crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts. The resulting policy framework of Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department was, in effect, a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power. The second was the administration’s pro-monopoly policies, which crushed the rural areas that in 2016 lost voter turnout and swung to Donald Trump.
Obama didn’t cause the financial panic, and he is only partially responsible for the bailouts, as most of them were passed before he was elected. But financial collapses, while bad for the country, are opportunities for elected leaders to reorganize our culture. Franklin Roosevelt took a frozen banking system and created the New Deal. Ronald Reagan used the sharp recession of the early 1980s to seriously damage unions. In January 2009, Obama had overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, $350 billion of no-strings-attached bailout money and enormous legal latitude. What did he do to reshape a country on its back?
First, he saved the financial system. A financial system in collapse has to allocate losses. In this case, big banks and homeowners both experienced losses, and it was up to the Obama administration to decide who should bear those burdens. Typically, such losses would be shared between debtors and creditors, through a deal like the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s or bankruptcy reform. But the Obama administration took a different approach. Rather than forcing some burden-sharing between banks and homeowners through bankruptcy reform or debt relief, Obama prioritized creditor rights, placing most of the burden on borrowers. This kept big banks functional and ensured that financiers would maintain their positions in the recovery. At a 2010 hearing, Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the independent Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the bailouts, told Obama’s Treasury Department: “We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.”
Second, Obama’s administration let big-bank executives off the hook for their roles in the crisis. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) referred criminal cases to the Justice Department and was ignored. Whistleblowers from the government and from large banks noted a lack of appetite among prosecutors. In 2012, then-Attorney General Eric Holder ordered prosecutors not to go after mega-bank HSBC for money laundering. Using prosecutorial discretion to not take bank executives to task, while legal, was neither moral nor politically wise; in a 2013 poll, more than half of Americans still said they wanted the bankers behind the crisis punished. But the Obama administration failed to act, and this pattern seems to be continuing. No one, for instance, from Wells Fargo has been indicted for mass fraud in opening fake accounts.
Third, Obama enabled and encouraged roughly 9 million foreclosures. This was Geithner’s explicit policy at Treasury. The Obama administration put together a foreclosure program that it marketed as a way to help homeowners, but when Elizabeth Warren, then chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, grilled Geithner on why the program wasn’t stopping foreclosures, he said that really wasn’t the point. The program, in his view, was working. “We estimate that they can handle 10 million foreclosures, over time,” Geithner said — referring to the banks. “This program will help foam the runway for them.” For Geithner, the most productive economic policy was to get banks back to business as usual.
Reckoning with Obama’s legacy won’t be easy for Democrats. But it has to be done. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)
Nor did Obama do much about monopolies. While his administration engaged in a few mild challenges toward the end of his term, 2015 saw a record wave of mergers and acquisitions, and 2016 was another busy year. In nearly every sector of the economy, from pharmaceuticals to telecom to Internet platforms to airlines, power has concentrated. And this administration, like George W. Bush’s before it, did not prosecute a single significant monopoly under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Instead, in the past few years, the Federal Trade Commission has gone after such villains as music teachers and ice skating instructors for ostensible anti-competitive behavior. This is very much a parallel of the financial crisis, as elites operate without legal constraints while the rest of us toil under an excess of bureaucracy.
With these policies in place, it’s no surprise that Thomas Piketty and others have detected skyrocketing inequality, that most jobs created in the past eight years have been temporary or part time, or that lifespans in white America are dropping . When Democratic leaders don’t protect the people, the people get poorer, they get angry, and more of them die.
Yes, Obama prevented an even greater collapse in 2009. But he also failed to prosecute the banking executives responsible for the housing crisis, then approved a foreclosure wave under the guise of helping homeowners. Though 58 percent of Americans were in favor of government action to halt foreclosures, Obama’s administration balked. And voters noticed. Fewer than four in 10 Americans were happy with his economic policies this time last year (though that was an all-time high for Obama). And by Election Day, 75 percent of voters were looking for someone who could take the country back “from the rich and powerful,” something unlikely to be done by members of the party that let the financiers behind the 2008 financial crisis walk free.
This isn’t to say voters are, on balance, any more thrilled with what Republicans have to offer, nor should they be. But that doesn’t guarantee Democrats easy wins. Throughout American history, when voters have felt abandoned by both parties, turnout has collapsed — and 2016, scraping along 20-year turnout lows, was no exception. Turnout in the Rust Belt , where Clinton’s path to victory dissolved, was especially low in comparison to 2012.
Trump, who is either tremendously lucky or worryingly perceptive, ran his campaign like a pre-1930s Republican. He did best in rural areas, uniting white farmers, white industrial workers and certain parts of big business behind tariffs and anti-immigration walls. While it’s impossible to know what he will really do for these voters, the coalition he summoned has a long, if not recent, history in America.
Democrats have long believed that theirs is the party of the people. Therefore, when Trump co-opts populist language, such as saying he represents the “forgotten” man, it seems absurd — and it is. After all, that’s what Democrats do, right? Thus, many Democrats have assumed that Trump’s appeal can only be explained by personal bigotry — and it’s also true that Trump trafficks in racist and nativist rhetoric. But the reality is that the Democratic Party has been slipping away from the working class for some time, and Obama’s presidency hastened rather than reversed that departure. Republicans, hardly worker-friendly themselves, simply capitalized on it.
There’s history here: In the 1970s, a wave of young liberals, Bill Clinton among them, destroyed the populist Democratic Party they had inherited from the New Dealers of the 1930s. The contours of this ideological fight were complex, but the gist was: Before the ’70s, Democrats were suspicious of big business. They used anti-monopoly policies to fight oligarchy and financial manipulation. Creating competition in open markets, breaking up concentrations of private power, and protecting labor and farmer rights were understood as the essence of ensuring that our commercial society was democratic and protected from big money.
Bill Clinton’s generation, however, believed that concentration of financial power could be virtuous, as long as that power was in the hands of experts. They largely dismissed the white working class as a bastion of reactionary racism. Fred Dutton, who served on the McGovern-Fraser Commission in 1970 , saw the white working class as “a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.” This paved the way for the creation of the modern Democratic coalition. Obama is simply the latest in a long line of party leaders who have bought into the ideology of these “new” Democrats, and he has governed likewise, with commercial policies that ravaged the heartland.
As a result, while our culture has become more tolerant over the past 40 years, power in our society has once again been concentrated in the hands of a small group of billionaires. You can see this everywhere, if you look. Warren Buffett, who campaigned with Hillary Clinton, recently purchased chunks of the remaining consolidated airlines, which have the power not only to charge you to use the overhead bin but also to kill cities simply by choosing to fly elsewhere. Internet monopolies increasingly control the flow of news and media revenue. Meatpackers have re-created a brutal sharecropper-type system of commercial exploitation. And health insurers, drugstores and hospitals continue to consolidate, partially as a response to Obamacare and its lack of a public option for health coverage.
Many Democrats ascribe problems with Obama’s policies to Republican opposition. The president himself does not. “Our policies are so awesome,” he once told staffers. “Why can’t you guys do a better job selling them?” The problem, in other words, is ideological.
Many Democrats think that Trump supporters voted against their own economic interests. But voters don’t want concentrated financial power that deigns to redistribute some cash, along with weak consumer protection laws. They want jobs. They want to be free to govern themselves. Trump is not exactly pitching self-government. But he is offering a wall of sorts to protect voters against neo-liberals who consolidate financial power, ship jobs abroad and replace paychecks with food stamps. Democrats should have something better to offer working people. If they did, they could have won in November. In the wreckage of this last administration, they didn’t.
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To me this is remarkable. This guy has to go across the country to speak to Trump supporters to understand why he and the rest of the LEFT is so despised by the rest of us:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/im-silicon-valley-liberal-traveled-163400168.html
They really just refuse to get it. They just cannot understand how anybody doesn't think like them. Globalism political correctness, elites immigration loss of borders and idea of out country first, freedom from government telling us what to do all day and excessive taxation and redistribution and the rest
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Ghost Inside Your Haunted Head
by David Cole
February 23, 2017
In my column several weeks ago, I took a swipe at certain types of Christian conservatives, suggesting that their belief in the reality of “demonic possession” leads them to accept wild notions about how the entertainment industry can magically influence the voting preferences of average Americans. I was trying to make the point that conservatives, especially those in the Midwest and Deep South to whom Hollywood is a foreign, bizarre, unknown entity, get a little magical in their thinking regarding the entertainment industry’s ability to “possess” people and influence or control their thoughts and lives.
Naturally, I heard from a couple of my left-leaning readers, congratulating me for sticking it to those “superstitious religious Neanderthals” on the right. It was not an unexpected response. If today’s leftists pride themselves on anything, it’s their supposed rationalism. Leftists see themselves as enlightened and logical. They “fucking love” science and reject religious hokum, in contrast to the superstitious buffoons on the right, who live in, to quote Carl Sagan, a “demon-haunted world” of their own making. With every leftist I know, this is the characteristic about which they are most proud: They are rationalists and skeptics, with shibboleth-shorn minds free of bewitchment. The problem is, leftists who consider themselves rational and non-superstitious are like scrawny nerds who look in the mirror and see a chiseled Adonis in the reflection. One almost feels bad for people so possessed of a delusion.
Let’s examine a few of the ways in which the wrongheadedness of leftists resembles the religious bunkum they claim to reject.
To begin with, leftists believe in the power of money to solve all problems, much the same as Christians believe in the power of prayer to do the same. Leftists believe that the solution to everything is to throw more money at it. Failing schools? Recession? Institutionalized poverty? If the government simply throws more money at it, all will be well. It matters not how many times throwing money at something has failed to solve a problem; for leftists, the money solution is a matter of faith. Here in bluest-of-blue California, every few years, the teachers’ union demands money to “save our schools” in the form of new bonds, taxes, and ballot propositions. And still, even after voters approve whatever the hell the union asks for, our schools continue to lurk in the lowest-third rankings in the nation. So of course the solution is to ask for more money in the form of new bonds, taxes, and ballot propositions. To the religious, the proper response to a prayer that fails is more prayer. For leftists, even briefly entertaining the notion that money isn’t a guaranteed cure-all is not allowed, lest ye be seen as turning your back on your faith.
“Just as Christians take comfort from the very act of praying, so too do leftists take comfort in government spending.”
Following the deadly Philadelphia Amtrak derailment in 2015, L.A. Times editorialist and letters editor Paul Thornton wrote an op-ed in which he claimed that the head of the Association of American Railroads had stated that “financial hurdles”—lack of money—were the reason Amtrak hadn’t installed the safety features that could have prevented the crash. I emailed Thornton, pointing out that the AAR head had, in fact, stated that money was not the problem, but rather “regulatory issues” were to blame. To his credit, Thornton admitted his error, confessing that he had just assumed that lack of money was the reason. And why did he make that assumption? A belief system that teaches that all problems are caused by a lack of government money, and are solved by an increase in government spending. Just as Christians take comfort from the very act of praying, regardless of whether or not the prayer is fully answered, so too do leftists take comfort in government spending. The act has as much meaning as the results.
If spending is the equivalent of prayer to a leftist, “climate change” is the equivalent of Christian “end-time” cultism. Let me share with you a very recent, and very relevant, example. Over the past week, we here in sunny insane California have faced the prospect of a major calamity as three merciless months of near-nonstop rainfall have led to the possibility of a massive failure at the tallest dam in the U.S., in Oroville, near Sacramento. It’s a big deal; 188,000 people have been evacuated. Concerns about how the aging Oroville Dam would fare in the face of record rainfall were raised years ago, but the state and the feds ignored them.
The story has been amply reported locally and nationally. But what the press conveniently leaves out of its coverage is the underlining theory behind the dam inaction: climate-change apocalyptics had convinced the Silly Putty-brained California powers-that-be that rain was never returning to the state. Quite literally, new dams, and improvements on old ones, were rejected because a doomsday cult had convinced politicians that water was “over,” that the drought that began in 2012 was not a passing thing but an “era,” something that would last decades if not a century. And why build new dams if there’ll be no water for them to hold? Why refurbish old ones if there’s no chance they’ll ever be filled again?
From the L.A. Times, July 2015:
Dams are a relic of the Industrial Age…. They’re particularly ill-suited to the era of extremes—heat waves, floods and droughts—that climate change has brought on.
The New Republic, April 2015:
The Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick said: “Even if we built a couple of dams, we don’t have water to fill them. We’re tapped out. The traditional answer of building more reservoirs won’t solve our problems.” Building additional reservoirs does little when there’s no snow or rain to fill them.
California governor Jerry Brown in August 2015, responding to calls from GOP presidential candidates to build new dams and renovate old ones:
I’ve never heard of such utter ignorance. Building a dam won’t do a damn thing about fires or climate change or the absence of moisture in the air and ground of California. If they want to run for president, they had better do eighth grade science before they made such utterances.
The Sacramento Bee summed it up succinctly: “Questions loom about the value of such projects in an era of scarcity.” Because indeed, leftist voodoo practitioners had brainwashed the state into believing this was an “era of scarcity.” We were told that Mother Earth was punishing us for our CO2 sins by withholding her precious water, and rainfall would only return once we submitted to cap and trade and international climate-change treaties. And anyone who dared suggest that the drought was a passing thing, that weather was not permanent but fluctuating, was ridiculed for not knowing “eighth grade science.”
Witch doctors in white coats who study tree stumps like gypsies read tea leaves told The San Jose Mercury News in 2014 that the drought might last over one hundred, maybe even one thousand, years. If you Google “California,” “drought,” and “will last” or “may last,” you’ll see endless links to left-certified “scientific” snake-handlers who claimed, right up until a few months ago, that the drought may last hundreds of years, or thousands of years, or “forever.”
Yet here we are in February 2017, with the drought completely over in Northern Cal and close to being over in the South. The rainfall of the past few months has shattered all records. The last “abnormal” California winter, 1982/1983, saw rainfall that was 88% higher than the 30-year average. Winter 2016/2017? 120% higher. Cities like Long Beach have seen rainfall at levels never before recorded. The end-time apocalyptic cultists were wrong, but you won’t hear any of them admit it. Just as Christian doomsday cultists never apologize when their Rapture clock turns out to be broken, so too do the macumba practitioners of the “IFL Science” left feel no need to explain themselves. Because the members of their parish—the smug Rachel Maddow-watching, NPR-listening atheist Democrat soft-skulls—demand no explanation. Again, it’s a matter of faith. If the Rapture doesn’t happen as prophesied, it’s not because Pastor Looneybird was wrong in his calculations. It’s because God changed His mind at the last minute and rescheduled the blessed event, and now we must double our faith in our beloved pastor as he attempts to figure out the time and place of the new Rapture.
And if the tree-ring-circus necromancers of the left got the duration of the California drought wrong, it’s not because their models and methodologies were faulty; it’s because Mother Earth cried tears of sympathy on our state to buy us a little more time to confiscate asthma inhalers so that we may regain her favor.
That last sentence may seem a bit over-the-top, but it isn’t. Never forget that the voodoo priests of the left banned the most effective types of asthma inhalers because they were “killing the earth,” even as leftist billionaires were allowed to continue flying private jets all over the world in order to play golf and screw fashion models and conduct similarly important business. There is no way this is any saner than the faith healing and tongue-speaking of the charismatics and evangelicals. Indeed, it’s worse, because it’s way more invasive, way more intrusive, in the lives of bystanders. No right-wing Christian ever forced me to anoint with oil. But leftist charlatans posing as scientists banned the only type of inhaler that helped my elderly mom’s asthma, because the act of her going “puff puff” so she wouldn’t die was bringing about the end of days, while Al Gore’s totally unnecessary private jet oddly had no effect on the environment.
That’s science? No, that’s an Indian rain dance.
There are so many additional ways in which the left embraces superstition and rejects science as much as, if not more than, conservative Christians. During the election last year, leftists attacked Trump for suggesting that intelligence has a genetic component, even though, according to every legitimate expert on the subject, intelligence has a genetic component. Trump had not claimed that intelligence is determined by race; he had only suggested that genetics play a part. And overnight, the notion of a genetic role in intelligence went from undisputed fact to heresy, all because Pope Huffington issued a papal bull(shit) declaring that Trump’s belief that genes contribute to intelligence “may be the most horrible thing that Donald Trump believes.”
Expect more superstitious nonsense from leftists in the years to come, because if leftists have demon-haunted minds, Trump is the ghost rattling around inside, clouding all judgment and giving rise to visions and fever dreams. Undeservedly famous leftist comedians are seeing signs and wonders. Sarah Silverman’s phantom pavement swastikas were nothing more than the leftist-Jewish version of seeing Jesus in a tortilla.
Silverman’s response after being told that her “swastikas” were simple construction markers boiled down to “I’ve been driven to lunacy by Trump’s anti-Semitism.” In other words, she’s possessed; a demon made her do it.
These days, the left has no moral high ground over the religious right. In fact, I’d take a conservative Christian over a demon-haunted leftist any day, because at least conservative Christians admit that their beliefs are faith-based. They don’t go around screaming “science! science! science!” while drinking sacrificial goats’ blood Santeria-style because the rain gods are angry.
I have nothing against people of faith. But hypocrites? They piss me off like a sonofabitch.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445257/tom-perez-dnc-chief-hardcore-progressive
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For actor Samuel Jackson:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/07/sorry-ben-carson-critics-obama-also-referred-to-slaves-as-immigrants/
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“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there. The resource will be developed."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/03/oh-trudeau.php
--------------------------------
A liberal favors the Keystone XL Pipeline. Favors exploration, drilling, extracting and transporting a CO2 producing fossil fuel.
Previously from Trudeau:
Canada must "phase out" Alberta's oil sands and end the country's dependence on hydrocarbons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-trudeau-canada-oil-sands-phased.html
Oops.
Makes me wonder if man-made, catastrophic, global warming is a farce. Isn't Canada dangerously close to the melting Arctic? ) Actually, I can see Canada from my living room and can tell you that a warming planet might be the best thing that could ever happen to Canada!
This reminds me of President Obama continuing a campaign of drone strikes against al Qaida targets. Imagine his opposition to that kind of warfare if he was not in power. Every once in a while, being elevated to the highest position of power and authority causes a person to do the right thing.
And so often it doesn't.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/projectionists/
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/comic/projectionists/
If Russia was still the Soviet Union, the left would do nothing but sing their praises, just like they used to do.
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"If Russia was still the Soviet Union, the left would do nothing but sing their praises, just like they used to do."
Right. The fascination right now with Russia is strange. Yes, Putin is a force of evil and in their eight years they did nothing to stand up to him. We cancelled missile defense in Eastern Europe and handed him Crimea, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Now, out of power, the Left sees him as Voldemort.
We squeezed him with oil and gas production and the lowering of energy prices, and the Left did everything they could do to oppose all that.
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Just as much a lying conniving deceitful crook as her boss lady Hillary,
"I am sorry" (NOT for cheating in the debate) for being so stupid as to leave an evidence trial in the form of emails that proves she cheated:
http://thehill.com/media/324580-brazile-sending-clinton-town-hall-topics-mistake-i-will-forever-regret
They have no shame. And as they always do they simply get away with it by being moved around the political network within the criminal Democratic organization / machine.
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Just as much a lying conniving deceitful crook as her boss lady Hillary,
"I am sorry" (NOT for cheating in the debate) for being so stupid as to leave an evidence trial in the form of emails that proves she cheated:
http://thehill.com/media/324580-brazile-sending-clinton-town-hall-topics-mistake-i-will-forever-regret
They have no shame. And as they always do they simply get away with it by being moved around the political network within the criminal Democratic organization / machine.
The Russians made her do it.
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adding work requirements is "controversial"
Of course people who don't work who seek benefits will have excuses why they can't work . Some legitimate some not. What is controversial about asking people who seek tax funded medical care paid by others to try and work?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/what-medicaid-work-requirements-mean-in-the-obamacare-repeal-bill-ahca-155027229.html
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https://www.prageru.com/whats-wrong-socialism
The American Left's thoughts vs Reality and People that have been there and done it.
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http://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-hope-susan-rice-was-keeping-tabs-on.html
April 4, 2017
"I hope Susan Rice was keeping tabs on Trump’s Russia ties."
By Michelle Goldberg at Slate.
I love the way the messaging turns on a dime.
One minute it's ridiculous to think that the Obama administration was doing surveillance on the Trump campaign. The next minute the Obama administration was doing the right thing if it did surveillance on the Trump campaign.
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http://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-hope-susan-rice-was-keeping-tabs-on.html
April 4, 2017
"I hope Susan Rice was keeping tabs on Trump’s Russia ties."
By Michelle Goldberg at Slate.
I love the way the messaging turns on a dime.
One minute it's ridiculous to think that the Obama administration was doing surveillance on the Trump campaign. The next minute the Obama administration was doing the right thing if it did surveillance on the Trump campaign.
Very astute and exactly so. Reminds me of criminals caught in a lie, and then have smoke pouring out of their heads trying to find a way to clean it up.
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https://twitter.com/hale_razor/status/850440735778250752
Bush "wrong" on WMDs: LIED, PEOPLE DIED!
Obama/Rice wrong on WMDs: crickets.
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Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn about the NE Patriots or any of them: :-P
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/patriots-slam-york-times-photos-132700314.html
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remember when the two gay guys tried to disgrace the portrait of Ronald Reagan at the White House and how the left wing media loved it . Well they don't love this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-apos-photographer-takes-down-210047166.html
I cannot turn on the news whether on TV or internet without seeing a whole litany of Trump bashing.
I am so glad I don't have to see Brock after 8 yrs of him yet the LEFt keeps hoping for him to jump back. They have no one else.
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http://thedailychrenk.com/2017/04/26/nyt-style-guide-alt-culture/
The New York Times Style Guide to Alternative Cultural Practices
Posted on April 26, 2017 by Arthur Chrenkoff
“The New York Times” decided it will now refer to “female genital mutilation” as “genital cutting”, a term that brings to mind something as harmless as male circumcision (which is why “female genital circumcision” is just as misleading).
“There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm,” NYT science and health editor Celia Dugger explained Friday. She also said the widely used term (FGM) is “culturally loaded” in the explanation, which came as a result of inquiries from The Daily Caller News Foundation regarding a reporter’s decision to use the term “cutting” in a recent story about a doctor in Michigan.
We couldn’t possibly have “culturally loaded” terms in case they “widen the chasm” between the supporters and opponents of certain practices – or right and wrong, as some unsophisticated commentators would call it. All cultures are, after all, equal, so we shouldn’t be judgmental.
Because here at The Daily Chrenk we always try to be helpful to our mainstream media colleagues, we prepared this handy style guide to avoid other “culturally loaded” terms in print and broadcast:
Sati – post-marital grief immolation
Infanticide – fourth trimester termination
Female infanticide – gender-determined parenting
Wife beating – hands-on relationship counselling
Cannibalism – hard paleo (also: human protein supplementation)
Honour killing – permanent grounding
Spousal rape – consent-alternative marital intimacy
Scalping – complete ritual depilation
Killing old and infirm – extreme palliative care
Grooming underage girls – community-based, practical sex ed program
Child marriage – age disparate matching
Cousin marriage – kin inter-relationship enrichment
Human sacrifice – spiritually-motivated population reduction
Jihad – faith community self-defence
Slavery – compulsory, exclusive services contract
Sexual slavery – compulsory intimacy arrangement
Stoning adulterers – petrological divorce procedure
Throwing homosexuals off buildings – vertical monosexuality enforcement
Polygamy – concurrent monogamy
Child labour – premature apprenticeship
Headhunting – per capita loss (also: non-literal recruitment)
Torture – alternative investigation aid
Inbreeding – reproductive autarky
Witch-hunting – non-Carthesian threat reduction
The Daily Chrenk wishes you happy, chasm-reducing reading. And remember: we don’t judge!
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http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/04/27/far-left-austrian-president-all-women-must-wear-headscarves-fight-islamophobia/
No, but I think every muslim must wear a yamukah and a cross around his/her neck for a day !
What a schmuck.
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0417/kass042717.php3
Activist finds left's silence on genital mutilation case dismaying
image: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/images/kass.jpg
By John Kass
Published April 27, 2017
Imagine what the American left would do if conservative Republican Christians engaged in a barbaric practice to mutilate little girls, to kill off their sexual desire while leaving them fertile when they come of age.
American feminists and their allies of the left would be outraged. Op-ed writers from establishment newspapers would seethe, and a few, I suspect, would draw some link to the ascension of Donald Trump and angry white men.
We'd witness a social media firestorm condemning the act, with tweets and hashtags.
But the other day, a Michigan physician was charged in a federal indictment for allegedly conspiring to perform female genital mutilation. It is a practice that predates Islam, but one that remains prevalent in many North African and some Middle Eastern predominantly Muslim countries.
In the Michigan case, the alleged victims are two 7-year-old girls.
American feminism has been mostly quiet about the girls. And the left in general has not engaged. It is so quiet that you can't even hear crickets hiding under the leaves. But silence can often hold the truth of things.
"It's all so very sad and depressing. I find this silence extremely painful," renowned feminist and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me in an interview. "It's been inculcated into them (the left) not to engage.
"The left can easily and comfortably condemn the misogyny of white men, but not of men of color, not of Muslims," Hirsi Ali said. "They are afraid of being shunned. They're afraid of being put into a basket of deplorables. So they're silent.
"And what are they being silent about? They are being silent about the mutilation of young girls."
Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. She was subjected to genital mutilation. Now an American citizen, she runs the AHA Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting young girls from mutilations, honor killings and forced marriages. You can find more about them at their website, http://www.theahafoundation.org.
Her group estimates that in the U.S., some 500,000 women and young girls have suffered genital mutilation or are at risk of the practice. The federal case in Michigan is the first of its kind. Female genital mutilation (FGM) became illegal under a federal law in 1996, but at present, 26 states do not outlaw the practice, Hirsi Ali said.
"I come from Somalia, and 98 percent of Somali girls, Egyptians, Sudanese, this happens to them," Hirsi Ali said. "In Muslim communities there is the demand that women, girls, should be virgins and a woman's sexuality is to be controlled, and this is an effective and brutal way of doing that."
And what of the immigrant groups here in America?
"It's naive to think that in some communities, traditions like this are going to be left at the airport," Hirsi Ali said. "These traditions are not left at the airport."
According to the federal indictment of Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who has denied the charges against her, the two girls were brought to Michigan by their parents from Minnesota in February. Their genitals were mutilated in accordance with an ancient and barbaric custom known throughout Muslim Africa and parts of the Islamic Middle East, to remove sexual desire and, therefore, make them fitting brides in the eyes of some.
According to the United Nations, the practice isn't confined to Muslim North Africa. Some Egyptian Christian Copts are also said to engage in it.
Dr. Nagarwala's attorney, Shannon Smith, said her client gave the material she had removed from the girls to the parents for burial, following a custom practiced by a small sect of Indian Muslims known as the Dawoodi Bohra.
"This practice does take place in a small amount of countries where Muslims reside, but not all Muslim countries," Dawud Walid, executive director of Michigan's Council on American Islamic Relations, told me by phone.
"Whether it is Islamic or not is a moot point. Obeying the law of the land is Islamic and overtly violating the law of the land is not Islamic," said Walid. "And we obey the law."
I left repeated messages for the National Organization for Women's Michigan chapter, but they did not return my calls or emails.
Another aspect of the politics of all this is the decision by The New York Times -- the arbiter of all things liberal in America -- not to use the term female genital mutilation.
The Times opted for an Orwellian phrase, "genital cutting," not to spare the Victorian sensibilities of its readers, but because it is politically palatable to the left.
But the United Nations uses "female genital mutilation." The World Health Organization uses "female genital mutilation."
It is not merely a cut. You can cut your fingernail. This is mutilation for a cultural purpose, to rob women of sexual joy and render them as breeders.
All of this -- the application of a politically correct filter by The New York Times, the avoidance of the issue by the left, even the destruction of female sexuality by ancient cultures -- is political.
And who suffers? Political wits and activists don't suffer. Girls suffer.
The number of women worldwide estimated to have been subject to female genital mutilation has reached 200 million in some studies. Many thousands of young girls develop infections and die.
"The decision of The New York Times illustrates the terrible trade-off they've made," said Hirsi Ali. "They're concerned about politics, about protecting a group versus the individual rights of the child or the woman.
"Groups don't have rights. Individuals do. Individuals have bodies. You can lock them up, cause them pain, and break their spirit. And so the talk is about groups and identity politics. When what is being done is actually mutilating the genitals of a little girl."
Read more at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0417/kass042717.php3
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"Imagine what the American left would do if conservative Republican Christians engaged in a barbaric practice to mutilate little girls, to kill off their sexual desire while leaving them fertile when they come of age."
!! It makes more sense in reverse if you believe what they would like everyone to believe. Conservatives advance religious liberty to an extreme while liberals care about people, about women, about children. But no, Muslims, gays, Jews, felons, illegals, SJWs, civil libertarians and general leftists all share a common political allegiance and will go to all lengths to maintain it.
Imagine next if the sides in the abortion debate were reversed, if conservatives liked the welfare reducing effect of persuading poor women to kill off their children under the guise of liberty and choice. Imagine if liberals saw that these conservatives policies were killing off black unborn babies at 5 times the rate of whites. The left would be ruthless with those facts and conservatives would be destroyed trying to make the flimsy arguments leftists put forward.
I was having a political argument with a liberal friend who was a former federal prosecutor in the Manhattan US Attorney's office. A very sharp guy with a sparkle and a smile, I can imagine him making devastatingly persuasive arguments to juries. But on the political issue at hand he was reduced to making weak, worn out arguments that liberals fall back on to defend the indefensible. With the facts on my side and me floundering, I generously offered that he switch sides with me. It would have been a treat to see him make the case that should have been so easy to make.
Liberals have the skills in messaging; conservatives usually have the facts quietly on their side, but can't make their case. The case against mutilating young girls, if you're going to have any limit on any behavior, should be an easy one.
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Calling this the left rather than the media where no distinction exists, it is quite humorous to see how gentle they can be while daring to criticize the master.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/opinion/the-cost-of-barack-obamas-speech.html?ref=opinion
"we have the audacity to hope he’ll set a higher standard for past presidents"
What did he EVER do that set a higher standard for ANYTHING? Keep your health plan, stopping Iran from going nuclear, the Madrid trip, flying the family dog on a separate plane to Martha's vineyard, Benghazi was the result of a video, Iraq was his greatest accomplishment, marriage is between a man and a woman, IRS targeting, and bugging his successor. Set a 'higher' standard sounds like cannabis joke from the choomg gang.
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WP going after Horowitz:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/01/i-wrote-a-best-seller-about-trump-so-now-the-left-is-coming-after-me/
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https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/05/08/the-cruelty-of-blue/
The Cruelty of Blue
Years of false promises, years of “compassionate government”, years of ignoring arithmetic, comes to this: Puerto Rico in the grip of a massive, man-made disaster. The New York Times:
Angel González, a retired schoolteacher facing a 10 percent cut to his pension, is beginning to wonder whether his three-person household will have to cut back to one cellphone and take turns using it.
Santiago Domenech, a general contractor with $2 million of his savings tied up in bonds Puerto Rico just defaulted on, once had 450 employees. Now he has eight. His father-in-law, Alfredo Torres, owns Puerto Rico’s oldest bookstore, but it has been going downhill for two years.
“The government is bankrupt,” said Bernardo Rivera, 75, a private bus driver who sometimes earns only $40 all day. “Everyone is bankrupt. There is nothing left. People who do not have jobs do not take the bus to work.”
This could have been avoided by sensible and timely cuts, by turning a deaf ear to public sector union demands for wages and salaries, by a series of small but definite steps away from the blue model, welfare state governance. But the press, certainly including the NYT which is now reporting the disaster, would have attacked any politicians taking these steps as “harsh”, or “cruel to the poor”.
Now Puerto Rico is in a deeper hole, with much more suffering than any of the moderate cuts would have imposed.
Unfortunately, a number of cities and states on the mainland are walking down the Puerto Rican highway toward bankruptcy and disruptive adjustment. There, the liberal press is still hailing the politicians who are willing to plunge their cities and states into chaos for the sake of popularity: the press often calls them bold, innovative and visionary. They have a lot of ideas about the things they want to do with other peoples’ money, while people who insist that budgets must be cut, and that pension obligations be met, are still being attacked for everything from racism to sadism.
It is a lot of fun until the music stops.
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http://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/ice-arrests-moco-student-el-salvador-citizen-accused-of-bringing-rifle-to-school-grounds
ICE blasts Montgomery Co. for releasing accused felon despite immigration detainer
by Kevin Lewis/ABC7
Mario Granados-Alvarado. (Montgomery County Police Department)
AA
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. (ABC7) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is lambasting Montgomery County after jailers knowingly released an 19-year-old undocumented immigrant accused of bringing an AR-15 assault-style rifle onto school property, despite an immigration detainer lodged against the teen.
On Saturday, April 29, Mario Granados-Alvarado, 19, a citizen of El Salvador, allegedly broke into a Rockville police car, snagging a shotgun, AR-15 rifle and ammunition from the vehicle's trunk. The unmarked Chevy Impala was parked outside of an off-duty officer's house at the time of the overnight break-in.
On Monday, May 1, a school resource officer assigned to Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, stopped Granados-Alvarado. The 19-year-old, who is enrolled as a junior at the public school, reportedly ran away while shouting, "I scared. I scared." Officers were ultimately able to handcuff Granados-Alvarado and later located the AR-15 in the trunk of a blue Mazda he had been driving.
On Tuesday, May 2, ICE filed an active immigration detainer with the Montgomery County Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for Granados-Alvarado. The legal document was cut and dry and customary.
On Wednesday, May 3, Granados-Alvarado posted his $2,000 bond set by a Montgomery County District Court judge. However, instead of abiding by ICE's pending request, Montgomery County officials let the accused criminal walk out of jail and return to the community.
On Thursday, May 4, ICE agents working on their own intel, managed to locate and arrest Granados-Alvarado. He is currently being held at the Howard County Detention Center in Jessup.
On Monday, May 8, ICE issued a pointed press release, taking Montgomery County to task for "frequently" ignoring "legally authorized detainers."
"Keeping people safe means not tolerating the release of aliens that present a clear public safety threat back into our communities," said Dorothy Herrera-Niles, field office director for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Baltimore. "ICE is committed to fostering positive collaboration with our local law-enforcement partners, and welcomes changes from county officials that would prioritize public safety."
ABC7 contacted Montgomery County Council President Roger Berliner, Council Vice President Hans Riemer, Councilman George Leventhal, Councilwoman Nancy Navarro, Chief County Spokesman Patrick Lacefield and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation seeking comment about why the county felt it necessary to disregard the request of a federal agency. As of Monday evening, ABC7 had not received a response.
According to ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol first encountered Granados-Alvarado on March 6, 2014 in the area of Falfurrias, Texas, about 80 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. Agents determined he had traipsed through Mexico before entering the United States illegally. ICE says Granados-Alvarado was issued a notice to appear in immigration court. ICE also reports that the teen has "multiple criminal arrests" on file.
The national debate over illegal immigration has mushroomed since President Donald Trump secured his reign in the White House. Jurisdictions, including Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, have publicly stated they have no interest in cooperating with federal authorities. ICE argues that such behavior puts communities and law-enforcement directly in harm's way. ICE adds that with many undocumented immigrants using aliases and providing false addresses, the task of tracking them down is incredibly costly to taxpayers.
During fiscal year 2016, ICE reports it removed 240,255 undocumented immigrants. Roughly 73 percent were caught at, or close to, U.S. borderlines, while the remaining 27 percent were caught in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The overwhelming majority of those interior captures, ICE asserts, were convicted criminals.
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with the blatant anti semitic remark is thrown in. And "Blumenthal" , almost surely Jewish, acquiesces to this extortion thus encouraging more of this.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32561/
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A gaffe for Republicans is when they say something that's wrong. For Democrats, it's when they reveal what they really think - like Jonathon Gruber selling Obamacare to the "stupid". In this case, it is more about the "deplorables", the "bitter clingers". The more refined, liberal, urban coastals like Rep. Eshoo believe you know-nothings in Podunk are an embarrassment.
http://freebeacon.com/politics/democrat-refers-middle-america-podunk-usa/
(http://s3.freebeacon.com/up/2017/05/eshoo.jpg)
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/05/10/john-olivers-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week/
John Oliver's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
BY DEBRA HEINE MAY 10, 2017 CHAT 25 COMMENTS
Late-night comedian John Oliver sure is having an interesting week.
It started with him blasting the FCC on his HBO show on Sunday, rallying viewers to flood the FCC with calls and comments defending net neutrality. Oliver is apparently a huge fan of the Obama-era regulatory structure that calls for Internet service providers to be treated like public utilities. The Republican chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, wants to throw it out.(Watch Pai explain why on Reason TV here.)
During the segment, Oliver beckoned his audience to take action and compared Pai to a serial killer: "When the Code of Federal Regulations looks out its window at night, there’s just Ajit Pai, standing silently, holding his weed whacker, waiting for his chance,” he said.
In related news, professional net-neutrality activists invaded Pai's neighborhood on Sunday to distribute door hangers resembling "wanted posters" to his neighbors. The flyers featured a black-and-white photo of Pai with the words "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?" written above the photo. Pai talked about the stunt on Matt Lewis' radio show earlier this week, dismissing the activists as "sort of annoying" while noting that they did "scare his children a little bit."
"Sadly, it seems once more we the people must take the matter into our own hands," Oliver said on his show Sunday. "Because the FCC are again going to invite public comment on their website — and conveniently for them, the process is actually a lot more complicated this time than it was three years ago."
After describing the complicated process people now have to go through to comment on the FCC site, Oliver told his viewers that his show had created the URL "gofccyourself.com," which could take them more directly to the page to leave a comment.
“Do not tell me you do not have time to do this,” Oliver said. “If the internet is evidence of anything else, it’s evidence that we all have too much time on our hands.”
Not long after the segment aired, the FCC’s website crashed, prompting many in the media to approvingly credit Oliver's viewers for crashing the site.
But it turned out that the website crash had nothing to do with comments. According to a statement posted on the FCC’s website, it was a deliberate Denial of Service attack.
Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.
On Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon reviewed the Oliver-inspired FCC comments and found that they were riddled with bots leaving fake messages and liberals making racist comments and threatening violence against Pai.
...an analysis of comments to Pai's Restoring Internet Freedom filing, which Oliver has dubbed " Go FCC yourself," shows thousands of comments using fake names and bots posing as "Jesus Christ," "Michael Jackson," "Homer Simpson," and " Melania Trump."
For instance, as of Tuesday evening, there were 1,761 comments filed under the name "John Oliver," 998 separate comments using the name "Yoni Schwartz," and 611 comments filed using "1" as the name.
Over 500 were submitted using Chairman Pai's name, as well as 189 from "Donald Trump" and 8 from "Obama."
Eleven submissions used some version of the word "f–k."
Pai also received death threats in several submissions. One commenter said, "[F]—k you Ajit Pai for what you're are trying to do and I hope you die a horrible painful death with no remembrance to your name you cocksucka [sic]."
Another said failure to keep net neutrality would "cause me to pray for the slow and painful death of Chairman Ajit Pai and every living member of his family, direct or indirect."
"Save internet and fuck this Ajit guy," said another. "He's from India, deport that asshole. We will take care of him when he's back."
Other comments used racial attacks against Pai, the son of Indian immigrants.
"Can you guys stop being complete greedy little s–ts and work for the American people and not for your wallets," said one commenter using the name " Andromeda Titan." "Also, f–k you Ajit Pai (a disgrace to all Indians). And f–k Trump too."
Another commenter said, "Ajit Pai looks and sounds like an Indian fraternity brother who exclusively f–ks underage women."
Wow, John Oliver's fans are a charming bunch, aren't they?
The most awkward moment for the left-wing comedian came on Wednesday when an expose in the NY Observer revealed that the he had used his wealth and connections to dodge New York property taxes on his multimillion dollar penthouse. It wouldn't be so bad if Oliver wasn't always presenting himself as a champion of the little guy and critic of the rich and powerful.
For years, Oliver has criticized the estate tax, which defenders, in a smart linguistic move dreamed up by Frank Luntz, long ago labeled the “ death tax”; and the tax code’s raft of loopholes that benefit special interests he identified as oil companies and hedge fund managers. Oliver even briefly established the bogus Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption to draw attention to tax-exempt status granted to churches and charities.
Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the Wealth Gap in America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts.
So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author.
I can't wait to find out what Thursday, Friday, and Saturday have in store for Oliver.
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Texas Veteran · @TexasVet
21 hours
So, you want to tear down historical symbols of slavery huh?
(https://kek.gg/i/4G4H3V.jpg)
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according to John Lewis there was a greater sense of hope and optimism during the JFK years.
me - what?????
So he is saying their is less opportunity for Blacks today compared to then?
If that is the case then why did we need civil right legislation?
Because of Trump all their lives are ruined?
Lewis pushed for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens before saying: “There’s a mean spirit in America today.”
Does anyone think for one second that if these 4 million were to become republicans he would say that?
Yeah right. Love everyone as long as they vote the Demorcratic-socialism-big government way.
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http://americanmilitarynews.com/2017/05/chelsea-manning-to-remain-active-duty-receive-health-care-after-prison-release/?utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=alt&utm_source=amn
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Another scandal brewing: :wink:
PS: The left doesn't cite MLK for his plagiarism.............
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/sheriff-david-clarke-reportedly-plagiarized-021621668.html
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Another one of the world's great human beings (behind Obama himself) has spoken. He is rich with brilliant ideas:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/mark-zuckerberg-joins-silicon-valley-202800717.html
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The libs are upset Trump did not tweet about the murder in Portland of 2 people who came to the verbal defense of a hibab wearing person:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-had-least-15-chances-042859212.html
Sarcastically I respond:
How do these libs know the person was not just mad about his job or stressed out. Why would anyone think this is a hate crime?
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Pasting this from the Islam in America thread:
http://www.chicksontheright.com/anti-muslim-guy-stabbed-three-men-portland-hes-bernie-supporter/?ref=Ads
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Bernie supporter!
we won't hear that on stinking CNN a political outlet staffed with and for progressives
and the free shit and hate all whites crowd will be screaming this is due to Trump and his band of deplorables.
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/05/29/liberals-are-shocked-to-find-were-starting-to-hate-them-right-back-n2332712
Liberals Are Shocked To Find We’re Starting To Hate Them Right Back
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: May 29, 2017 12:01 AM
Liberals Are Shocked To Find We’re Starting To Hate Them Right Back
I know it’s theoretically wrong for a Republican candidate to smack around an annoying liberal journalist, but that still doesn’t mean that I care. Our ability to care is a finite resource, and, in the vast scheme of things, millions of us have chosen to devote exactly none of it toward caring enough to engage in fussy self-flagellation because of what happened to Slappy La Brokenshades.
Sorry, not sorry.
And that’s not a good thing, not by any measure, but it is a real thing. Liberals have chosen to coarsen our culture. Their validation and encouragement of raw hate, their flouting of laws (Hi leakers! Hi Hillary!) and their utter refusal to accept democratic outcomes they disapprove of have consequences. What is itself so surprising is how liberals and their media rentboyz are so surprised to find that we normals are beginning to feel about them the way they feel about us – and that we’re starting to act on it. If you hate us, guess what?
We’re going to start hating you right back.
Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks’ sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, “We’re better than that,” and one has to ask ,“Who’s we?” Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and – guess what? –the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.
We don’t like the new rules – I’d sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path – but we normals didn’t choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and “Punch a Nazi” – which, conveniently for the left, translates as “punch normals.” And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate – jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.
So when we start to adopt their rules, they’re shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? It’s not a surprise. It’s inevitable.
Team Fredocon, when they aren’t, “Oh well, I never!-ing” about Trump and his uncouth supporters, moan about the threat of “Whataboutism,” the tendency for people to explain their sub-optimal behavior by asking, “What about so-and-so? He did the same thing and you didn’t care.” But while “whataboutism” may be a logical fallacy, it’s still a devastatingly compelling argument.
Humans – especially normal Americans – won’t tolerate a double standard. But double standards apply all the time to liberals – they do it and it’s fine, but we do it and it’s Armageddon. The same jerks screaming for O‘Reilly’s scalp worship Bill Clinton and his drunken, perv-enabling pseudo-wife.
Or take the Trump-Russia black hole of idiocy – please. Remember how Obama whispered to the Russkies, “I'll have more flexibility after election” and that was cool? But – according to an anonymous source reading a bar tab over the phone to some credulous WaPo hack – one of Trump’s relatives ordered a vodka once and it’s TREASON TREASON TREASON!!!!!!
It certainly applies to, “What about when they hit conservatives with a lock in a sock and the liberal media didn’t care?” Yeah, what about that? Where was the sackcloth and ashes act from Schumer, Pelosi, and Felonia von Pantsuit when our side was being bloodied and beaten? There wasn’t one, because the left supports us getting bloodied and beaten. It likes the zesty zing of violence. It makes them feel big and tough and edgy, except that it starts being a heck of a lot less fun when we right-wingers start adopting the same rules and punching back.
The left is shocked that the right has now stopped caring about the old rules, since for so long the left relied on the right to subordinate its human instincts and conform to those rules even when the left ignored them. We refused to stoop to their level, and for a long time, we were “better than that.” But you can only have one side being “better than that” for so long before people get sick of being the butt of the hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is poison not because it makes people stop knowing right from wrong, but because it makes its victims stop caring about right and wrong. Ben Jacobs got smacked around, and millions of us just don’t give a damn.
We all know it was wrong for Greg Gianforte to beat up Ben Jacobs. But we also know the general attitude of the media is that when we conservatives get beat-up by leftists it’s perfectly excusable – even laudable – and thanks to the fact that Twitter is forever, we now know that Ben Jacobs himself specifically thinks it’s A-OK to slug conservative kids. So can someone tell me why anyone should be shocked that we conservatives refuse to devote one iota of caring to poor Ben’s wedgie?
This isn’t a good thing. This is nothing to be proud of. We should not be happy that our society is heading toward the lowest common denominator, which itself is in freefall. But the alternative is worse. Should we allow ourselves to continue to be figuratively and literally beaten up while smiling at our own purity, secure in the knowledge that even though our dignity and freedom are stripped from us, we have not fought back? Not happening. Letting these bastards play by their own rules, and thereby crush us, seems a pretty high price to pay just to gain the approval of the smug and sanctimonious David Frums and John Kasichs of the world.
We conservatives have been warning for a long time that liberals are not going to like it when everyone plays by the new rules, and – surprise! – they don’t. But guess what? Most of us don’t like the new rules either. Yet it’s ridiculous to expect human beings to remain in perpetual denial about the situation they face, and to forever live under a double standard that results in their faces getting pressed into the dirt.
The hypocrisy has become intolerable, and we have stopped tolerating it. This is just the beginning of the reaction, and - make no mistake – this entire situation is a bad thing. Our society is making choices that can lead only to ruin (and my new novel describing the consequences drops later this week).
Lincoln mentioned “the better angels of our nature” – also at a time when Democrats were rejecting the rule of law in order to promote their subjugation of those they considered lesser beings – and the important thing to note is that “angels” is plural. You need two angels, not one angel and one demon. But that’s what we have, and if it doesn’t change we’ll have two demons, and everyone should care about that.
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http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/state-dept-350k-group-built-campaign-structure-used-against-election-israels
http://dailysignal.com/2016/12/14/ted-kennedy-made-secret-overtures-to-russia-to-prevent-ronald-reagans-re-election/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/22/barack-obama-brexit-uk-back-of-queue-for-trade-talks
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/05/23/there-remains-no-evidence-of-trump-russia-collusion/#140fd11a242c
Which offends the left the most?
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Doug,
I take it you have seen Brietbart today and thus this :
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/05/30/exclusive-sarah-palin-condemns-sick-audacity-of-kathy-griffins-trump-beheading-photo/
Could anyone imagine the outrage if someone did this with Baraq? ?? The LEFT media would be 24/7 manic rants screaming and yelling for that person to be fired and shunned and never to work again and to get on his or her knees and beg to forgiven.
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Doug,
I take it you have seen Brietbart today and thus this :
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/05/30/exclusive-sarah-palin-condemns-sick-audacity-of-kathy-griffins-trump-beheading-photo/
Could anyone imagine the outrage if someone did this with Baraq? ?? The LEFT media would be 24/7 manic rants screaming and yelling for that person to be fired and shunned and never to work again and to get on his or her knees and beg to forgiven.
ccp, I heard the apology before I saw the picture. Didn't know who she was by name but now I recognize her.
While there is a huge double standard, we just found out there is a line leftists shouldn't cross. This actually did get a reaction and outrage from almost all.
The apology was quite well written and delivered but I think the last line of her apology was that she 'went too far'. Went too far?? That line opens more questions than answers. Behead without the blood on it was okay? Stabbed, shot, hung okay?
She has been fired by CNN by the time of this writing I think. A (leftist) comic worked for CNN? Why??
I don't know the totality of her work. ALways left, sometimes funny, I would guess. I don't think much of apologies. Apologizing is better than not, but doesn't erase the act. People shouldn't normally lose a lifetime of achievements for one mistake, but it happens. She apologized because she saw the reaction, not because she thought it was wrong. The apology was for career survival, self interest, not because they don't all wish him dead. The firing was CNN doing the same. Subtle leftism on the networks is what works, not the outrageous stuff. This incident is memorable and will symbolize the horrible treatment this President gets. The fact that leftist operatives posing as mainstream media, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, Washington Post, and LA Times all have 87-93% negative coverage of Trump in the subtle form, just reporting the news, is far more effective.
It is hurtful to Melania, 11 year old Barron and others. It is probably helpful to Trump's reelection for the derangement syndrome to gain a graphic image. It could inspire one more crazy person to do a bad thing.
Mostly it means two more days or a week that healthcare and tax reform fail to gain momentum.
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I would like to thank Ms. Griffin for reminding the American public of what the left is really like.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/kathy-griffin-scolds-elisabeth-hasselback-over-obama-question-take-it-down-a-notch-btch/
Kathy Griffin Scolds Elisabeth Hasselbeck Over Obama Question: ‘Take It Down A Notch, B*tch!’
by James Crugnale | 9:19 am, May 18th, 2012
During a segment on Bravo’s Kathy on Thursday, Kathy Griffin tore into Elisabeth Hasselbeck‘s critical question to President Obama on The View about gay marriage, where Hasselbeck asked the president how he would “move things forward any more than Mitt Romney.” With Hasselbeck’s “attitude to the president, who was a Harvard Law professor, I’m, like, take it down a notch, bitch,” Griffin said.
“That body language,” Griffin added, “I don’t like that. I don’t like Jan Brewer in Arizona going like this to the President on the tarmac. I don’t like that. When I was on The View, Barbara Walters said you respect the office.”
http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/31/flashback-bloody-head-wielding-kathy-griffin-blamed-sarah-palin-az-shooting/
If the left didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
Doug,
I take it you have seen Brietbart today and thus this :
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/05/30/exclusive-sarah-palin-condemns-sick-audacity-of-kathy-griffins-trump-beheading-photo/
Could anyone imagine the outrage if someone did this with Baraq? ?? The LEFT media would be 24/7 manic rants screaming and yelling for that person to be fired and shunned and never to work again and to get on his or her knees and beg to forgiven.
ccp, I heard the apology before I saw the picture. Didn't know who she was by name but now I recognize her.
While there is a huge double standard, we just found out there is a line leftists shouldn't cross. This actually did get a reaction and outrage from almost all.
The apology was quite well written and delivered but I think the last line of her apology was that she 'went too far'. Went too far?? That line opens more questions than answers. Behead without the blood on it was okay? Stabbed, shot, hung okay?
She has been fired by CNN by the time of this writing I think. A (leftist) comic worked for CNN? Why??
I don't know the totality of her work. ALways left, sometimes funny, I would guess. I don't think much of apologies. Apologizing is better than not, but doesn't erase the act. People shouldn't normally lose a lifetime of achievements for one mistake, but it happens. She apologized because she saw the reaction, not because she thought it was wrong. The apology was for career survival, self interest, not because they don't all wish him dead. The firing was CNN doing the same. Subtle leftism on the networks is what works, not the outrageous stuff. This incident is memorable and will symbolize the horrible treatment this President gets. The fact that leftists operatives posing as manstream media, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, Washington Post, and LA Times all have 90% coverage of Trump in the subtle form, just reporting the news, is far more effective.
It is hurtful to Melania, 11 year old Barron and others. It is probably helpful to Trump's reelection for the derangement syndrome to gain a graphic image. It could inspire one more crazy person to do a bad thing.
Mostly it means two more days or a week that healthcare and tax reform fail to gain momentum.
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Griffen now with the lib lawyer:
https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/kathy-griffin-hold-press-conference-address-controversial-photo-012302576.html
CNN fired her but we know some other left org will hire her.
Maybe she can get a job with Clinton mafia , inc.
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Rush L has pointed out it is no longer the media and the academia carrying the water for liberal Democratic politicians, it is now the other way around. The thought leaders of the left aren't the elected politicians. The driving ideas like central planning, government healthcare, redistributing income inequality and world government come out of academics and media. The politicians are the pigeons who carry it out, put it in law.
This VDH article makes a similar point:
"The Democrats are following the lead of the progressive media"
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448084/progressive-media-democrats-form-new-anti-trump-party
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"driving ideas like central planning, government healthcare, redistributing income inequality and world government come out of academics and media"
Indeed. As I have posted examples on DGB over the past few years the same Harvard Yale Columbia etc academics are shoving the liberal agenda down the throats of the medical personnel too.
It is a real onslaught. Some of the foreigner born in the medical field have taken up the calling with determination. It is often racial for them I am afraid. Not all are into it but many are.
The same issues about women, sex orientation, racial this or that , cultural , just keep on popping up all over. And climate change too. That is getting into many med journals ever increasingly.
I could guess that at least half of the leading journals have something in them that is right out of the progressive play book furthering their agenda or in some cases propaganda making cases for their "issues ".
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/06/01/the-left-freaks-out-as-everything-it-tries-makes-it-look-stupider-n2333860
The Left Freaks Out As Everything It Tries Makes It Look Stupider
Kurt Schlichter Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Jun 01, 2017 12:01 AM
Name one normal person who has watched the leftist freak out and said, “Yeah, I’m convinced. That severed Trump head Kathy Griffin is hauling around? Really makes you think.” It sure does – normal people think, “Thank you, Lord, for helping America dodge that drunken, malignant bullet the liberals fired at us.”
But then nothing the liberals have done since last November’s humiliation has sought to expand the Democrats’ constricted base to include us normals. Instead, everything they have done seems designed solely to appeal to the coastal snobs and welfare cheats who are already committed to liberal fascism, and to demonstrate to everyone else how right we were to reject that pant-suited Chavez wannbe.
When you watch what they’re doing in response to normal Americans standing up and asserting the right to govern ourselves, you see the progressives making the losers’ choice at every turn. From concocting elaborate Russian fantasies – I keep expecting someone to demand Trump make Moscow General Hospital release his original birth certificate – to applauding performance art designed to make regular people gag, they choose wrong. And we can safely point this out because they’re too smug and/or stupid to listen.
This has been going on for a long time. A few years ago it was their collective swoon over the scuzzy shenanigans of the filthy lowlifes of what they called the “Occupy Movement.” But that Astroturf farce was only a “movement” to the extent that progs imagined that footage of its coterie of clowns executing bowel movements against cop cars was going to win over normal people.
Okay, that didn't work, so the next brainstorm was to decide to refuse to recognize the results of the 2016 election – no doubt the people who left the Democrats would be convinced to return to a party that has made its centerpiece #TheResistance to what those voters voted for. And how better to appeal to the regular folks who chose Trump over Felonia von Pantsuit than, “Why, let's have thousands of hideous crones wearing hats evoking genitalia march around talking about how working class men are bad.”
Yeah, no. That failed too. Have you seen any v-caps lately? Gyno headgear is now “La Macarena” of political novelty acts.
When wearing lady parts on their pointy skulls somehow didn't make normal Americans think, "These are sane people and I should take one of their brochures to learn more about their political teachings," they got onto the Russia kick. It was sure great to see liberals finally taking the side of the USA against Russia for the first time since, you know, ever.
But these born-again, left-wing McCarthys, without Tailgunner Joe’s trademark sanity or smarts, have somehow managed not to turn normal Americans into a mob demanding impeachment. It didn't help that the Russia-mania media reports are always 99 percent baloney. Anonymous bombshells like Trump planning to give Putin our missile codes in order to nuke Planned Parenthood always end up being walked back to something like, “Donald Trump once watched Rush Hour 2 on pay-per-view and totally laughed more at Jackie Chan than Chris Tucker because RACISM!"
But Russia spazzing doesn't create jobs, and it doesn't address the underlying issues that led people who could've been voting for Hillary to diss her. So, especially after 12 months with no leaks of damning evidence and the reluctant admissions even from leading Democrats that there is no evidence of TRUMP LOVES PUTIN BECAUSE TREASON! at all, damning or otherwise, no one cares who wasn’t already offended to the core by normal people daring to make themselves heard last November.
And having that insane political Sasquatch wandering out of the woods every once in a while to insist that she actually won the election does not help. Which is why we should heartily encourage her to continue her bizarre quest for the presidency. Who knows, it might just work – she does finally win in 2020 in the new prequel to my novel People’s Republic, Indian Country, and promptly destroys our country just as we feared she would had she not been so humiliatingly crushed.
Lately liberals have tried some new tricks. One is feigning a newfound dislike of violence. A Republican smacking around a liberal reporter is the worst thing on earth. Then the aforementioned Kathy Griffin rises from her cesspool of obscurity with a pic of her holding Trump’s bloody noggin in eager expectation of liberal acclamation because, well, Trump.
Nobody's buying it (including, to her credit, Chelsea Clinton).
Fun story: As a young lawyer in a big LA firm 20+ years ago, Kathy Griffin came in as a temp – that was before she hit it mediocre. I remember talking to her once and she was pleasant enough, but little did I know someday she’d be both on CNN and channeling ISIS.
Then we had the latest liberal Great Right Hope failure when that jerk in Portland turned out not to be a conservative (They never are) but a Sanders supporter. Regardless of his politics, we normals still want him to feel the burn … in the electric chair.
The funniest liberal pose is “Patriot Liberal,” and that's their newest thing. They'll start talking to you about honor and patriotism and Country First and the flag, but they do it hilariously awkwardly, like how a slow child walks for the first time. They’re just not used to taking America’s side – or, more accurately, pretending to.
But none of it's working. The numbers are not shifting. Donald Trump remains about as popular as he was on Election Day, and leftists isolated in their coastal echo chambers just don't understand that normal people really don't get upset when our president tells the deadbeat Germans that before they spend their money on rape-inclined foreigners they need to keep their word to the people whose blood and treasure defends them. If you think the American people are going to be upset because the Euros are pouting about Donald Trump demanding that the Krauts ... wait for it … pay their fair share, you've probably never met a real American.
Apparently, only rich fellow Americans must “pay their fair share.” Rich, liberal globalists from other countries who buy into the climate change scam, well, apparently they get a pass on paying their fair share. Liberals always do “Country First” wrong.
It used to be easy to feel like we were losing with all the noise and lies in the media, but not so much anymore. We are woke to the okey-doke; we know we’re supposed to be the marks and we just aren’t playing along with the scam. We get that the media lies. We get that liberals’ only concern is their own power. And now we’re laughing at them.
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I didn't even know that lisa bloom is gloria allred's daughter !
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Chelsea, Mika, Lisa, WHITE PRIVILEGE!!!! :evil:
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no need to be able to speak English in US anymore and even suggesting it is wrong:
http://fox43.com/2017/06/06/phillies-legend-mike-schmidts-comments-on-odubel-herrera-land-him-in-hot-water/
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hoisted onto shoulders of liberals with leftist guns blazing and no shortage of supplies of ammunition and logistical, media, financial support probably from Soros on down:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/09/kamala-harris-2020-239318
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https://mishtalk.com/2017/06/14/unable-to-pay-bills-illinois-sends-dear-contractor-letter-telling-firms-to-halt-road-work-on-july-1/
Does anyone on the left see a problem here? Is this working?
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http://informedfolks.com/this-msnbc-host-went-off-script-and-admitted-the-truth-that-no-trump-hater-wants-to-admit/
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http://informedfolks.com/this-msnbc-host-went-off-script-and-admitted-the-truth-that-no-trump-hater-wants-to-admit/
Milagro!
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People are laughing at someone who is begging for his life? :x
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2017/06/19/flashback-comedy-central-huffpo-mocked-capture-otto-warmbier
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Tucker Carlson let rip on this tonight.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/whats-wrong-with-the-democrats/528696/
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What is wrong with the Democrats? - Don't get me started... )
The Atlantic: "If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class."
But they are selling grievances against whites, penalize work and eliminate employers.
Last times they won this group they believed that a rising tide meaning tax cuts for the wealthy lifts all boats [JFK] and chose two southern Governors for President promising to triangulate against liberalism. The popular one [Bill Clinton] tightened welfare, cut capital gains tax rates, contained spending and balanced the budget, which puts him to the right of Bush, McCain, Romney and Trump. Now they favor getting more and more people on more and more programs, raising taxes on income and investments and exploding the deficit.
I don't see why it's not working.
"Clinton neglected to make a robust economic argument"
- No, she chose the wrong economic argument. She faced a choice of adopting Bernie Sanders economic insanity or losing the Democratic nomination. If she wanted to make a coherent, science-based, economic growth policy in this environment, she wouldn't be a Democrat.
The Atalantic: "...the party has no scaffolding"
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http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=56939
Imagine if it had been a non-muslim white male...
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When bamster reigned 2009 - 2017 we on this board cited ORwell's classic. Now the LEft is citing it against Trump:
https://heatst.com/culture-wars/nineteen-eighty-gore-people-are-throwing-up-fainting-and-screaming-at-george-orwell-play-on-broadway/
Amazing how they twist everything around to suit themselves .
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/liberal-fever-swamps/530736/?utm_source=twb
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Leftist Federal employee quits and denounces Trump and her story soars to the top of the Huffcompost:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/justice-official-quits-because-apos-071353059.html
I say good riddance.
What does what Trump say or do have to to with corporate crime?
I am not looking for Federal officials to demand gentlemen and lady like behavior from corporate people. I want them to go after criminal behavior.
Just another leftist official who is pissed he is President most likely.
You don't like your boss? So leave . Take your pension and go. Good riddance to you No loss.
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From Glibness thread:
He's just ...hurt that his failed presidency's only real accomplishment is President Trump. (And the R. congress, legislatures, governorships, judiciary, etc.)
From somewhere else on the internet today:
The greatest fear of liberals isn't the failure of the Trump administration. Their biggest fear is its success.
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"He's just ...hurt that his failed presidency's only real accomplishment is President Trump. (And the R. congress, legislatures, governorships, judiciary, etc.)"
That's even more reason he should shut the "h..l" up about disrespecting the United States and stick to charity work ala Jimmy Carter (just without the antisemitism).
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in Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii or other exotic location when we had crises:
now for a UN ambassador (which is basically next to worthless) it is :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-n-ambassador-haley-gets-backlash-tweeting-july-4-work-141101744.html
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in Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii or other exotic location when we had crises:
now for a UN ambassador (which is basically next to worthless) it is :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-n-ambassador-haley-gets-backlash-tweeting-july-4-work-141101744.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CJBuUwd0Os
https://townhall.com/columnists/jimhanson/2015/11/09/state-dept-watch-logs-show-hillary-obama-mia-during-benghazi-attack-n2077957
Missing.
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DNC was hacked by Russia (allegedly). Democrats are obsessed with breaches of this sort by Russia. What has the FBI and security agencies learned by examining the hacked server? Nothing. The DNC won't turn it over to them.
The left and the media (redundancy alert) say Trump is nuts to say millions of illegals voted. The states have the records. A commission was formed to investigate and the states won't turn records over to them for examination. MN Sec State Democrat Steve Simon: “I will not hand over Minnesota voters’ sensitive personal information to the commission”.
http://www.twincities.com/2017/06/30/minnesota-refuses-to-hand-over-voter-information-to-presidential-commission/
Herr Zeller: I've not asked you where you and your family are going. Nor have you asked me why I am here.
Captain von Trapp: Well, apparently, we're both suffering from a deplorable lack of curiosity.
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Funny . Hollywood never had a problem with it during the 50s when McCArthy was sounding the alarm and going after the ex european communist and socialist among them
many of whom like Reiner were Jewish.
Now suddenly Russia is the big bad enemy. We know it ain't . It is Republicans and Conservatives who are.
The rest is a ruse.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/07/07/rob-reiner-russia-invaded-united-states/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNMAp8kXWrc
[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNMAp8kXWrc [/youtube]
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, in English: National Socialist German Workers' Party
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Barone has this right. The latest shiny object has the derangement crowd in over-excitement mode. The rest of the country seeing that more than it sees an underlying crime of which there was none. Impeachment and removal occurs when your own side gives up on you. It's not a measure of how hysterical your opponents get.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/michael-barone-anti-trump-overreach-could-backfire/article/2628477
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Good quote from the clever folks at PJ Media Instapundit in conjunction with this flashback where we do have the the quid, the pro and the quo fully documented:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html
"Take away projection and all they’d have left is lies and hate."
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Her substance is as screwed up as her delivery. Nancy Pelosi on drugs or is this the best she can do...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKRDAMvTbsU
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JULY 18, 2017
ON THIS DAY IN 1969: “Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours.”
Still though, as Charles Piece of Esquire infamously wrote in the Boston Globe in 2003, “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”
- Instapundit
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" Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age. "
what an outrageous disgusting statement for that self serving bastard who beat a manslaughter rap DUI and was repeatedly and serially re elected by those jerk libs in Mass
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/370773.php
July 20, 2017
Al Gore, When Asked If We've Hit a Point of No Return Like He Previously Predicted We Would: Well, In Some Ways. But the Paris Accords Changed So Much!
God's gonna take me home unless you donate $100,000 to my ministry.
Wait -- we're at $90,000. God now says you have a two week extension to donate, and if you donate now, He'll give you Heavenly Oven Mitts, free of charge. (Shipping costs extra.)
Back with a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore reflected on his 2006 prediction that “the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years” if “drastic measures” were not taken to combat climate change.
Gore was asked why he made that prediction in the first film and if he has another prediction to make about climate change now 11 years later.
“First of all, we’ve seen a lot of progress since the first movie came out. We have the Paris agreement now. The cost of renewable energy has come down so quickly that people are switching over. Unfortunately, some levels of the Earth system have crossed a point of no return,” Gore said during an interview with PJM on the green carpet of the An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power screening Wednesday evening at the Newseum.
Video of a fat man sweating at the link.
Oh by the way: Science-denying transexual advocate Bill Nye says the only way now to save the earth is to hope for old people to die.
I assume he doesn't mean himself or Al Gore, who are old. And also, unattractive.
Just pointing that out.
"Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It's generational," Nye told the Los Angeles Times. Nye said that he is calling them out with "due respect," acknowledging that he is "now one of them."
"We're just going to have to wait for those people to 'age out,' as they say," Nye went on, adding that "age out" is a euphemism for "die." "But it'll happen, I guarantee you — that'll happen."
By the way -- remember that cringepocalypse "song" and "dance" number Bill Nye had on his show, celebrating transexualism and deviant sex of all varieties?
On a show that seems primarily interested in propagandizing to children? (Both of the "real children" type and Adult Baby Monster type?)
It was "sung" by Rachel Bloom, a "comedienne" chiefly famous for having big jugs, singing stupid children's songs about want to have nerd sex, and not being so attractive that nerds think they couldn't maybe have a shot with her.
“Sexuality’s a spectrum, everyone is on it. Even you might like it if you sit up on it,” Bloom sings on stage as Nye can be seen off-stage dancing. “Drag king, drag queen just do what feels right.”
Yeah -- he got an Emmy nomination for that shit.
Trust your betters.
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/19/louisiana-democrats-purge-thomas-jefferson-man-acquired-louisiana/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTjJNMllUTmhaV1pqWXpObCIsInQiOiI2U3g5NytBVGtLWDQxXC9KRjJnY0dIb01vRFRZUWNzRGg3N0d3NzIyclVXSFN3VWZnOWhcL0gyWVVJblZQTWpCbU9Pdkp5S1VXM29sQmd3OGdoSWx1TGlybHQwUFJaQ29cL0x3eDQ4NFJPSVlaa0tDb0JpaGdiaUEwdzVkZFg3UjhTcCJ9
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https://twitter.com/sensanders/status/708041019359625216?lang=en
Bernie Sanders Verified account
@SenSanders
Follow
More
A nation is judged not by how many billionaires and millionaires it has but by how it treats the most vulnerable people among us.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/06/sen-sanders-wife-tried-evicting-disabled-group-home-residents-closing-shady-college-deal-fbi-probe/
Sen. Sanders’ Wife Tried Evicting Disabled Group Home Residents after Closing Shady College Deal Under FBI Probe
JUNE 29, 2017
Amid a deepening federal investigation of Jane Sanders, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ wife, Judicial Watch has obtained records that paint a rather disturbing personal portrait of a heartless spouse—and longtime political advisor—of the Democratic Socialist candidate for president of the United States. During the Obama administration, the FBI began investigating Jane for falsifying documents to obtain a $10 million loan to expand a now-defunct liberal arts college in a town where her husband once served as mayor while she was the school’s president.
The school, Burlington College, was in a small city with the same name in northwestern Vermont. It’s a quaint town of about 42,000 that sits on the eastern shoreline of Lake Champlain and prides itself on having “diverse, forward-thinking citizens” that are “steeped in arts and culture.” Jane was president of the troubled college from 2004 to 2011 and in 2010, she had an ambitious plan to expand the campus by 33 acres, despite low enrollment and financial difficulties. The then-president of Burlington College drastically overstated donation amounts in loan applications, according to the Vermont news website that broke the story, to obtain a $10 million loan. Jane indicated there was $2.6 million in pledged donations but the school only got $676,000 in four years.
The loan went through, some allege after her husband’s senatorial office pressured the bank to approve it, and Jane masterminded a deal to purchase an undeveloped, 32-acre parcel of land and a 77,000-square-foot facility from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington. The purchase included a facility that served as a group home for disabled people and, under the terms of the deal, Jane was supposed to negotiate the transfer of the disabled residents before the school took over the property. Instead Jane tried to kick the disabled people out of their group home, records obtained by Judicial Watch show. The records, part of an ongoing Judicial Watch investigation into the Jane Sanders fraud case, include electronic mail exchanges between Jane when she was president of Burlington College and two former mayors of the city of Burlington.
In a lengthy letter to the attorney (Todd Centybear) representing the group home for the disabled Jane indicates that she’s having trouble evicting the 16 residents from their building on the newly purchased property after the college had acquired the land. She writes: “It is simply not fair to expect the College to continue to carry the burden of the expenses associated with housing both your population and ours until February 2012.” The home for the disabled was being leased from the diocese and Jane was supposed to help relocate the residents, not evict them. The exchange shows, not only Jane’s heartlessness, but also her incompetence as the college president for not ensuring the negotiated transfer of those disabled people before the school took over the property.
In a separate email to then Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss, Jane forwards a laughable press release issued by the college announcing her resignation. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” she writes to the mayor. “It’s a good decision.” The press release announced that “In honor of her significant accomplishments, the College has given Sanders the title of President Emerita…” It adds that “The Board credits Sanders with negotiating the acquisition of its beautiful new 32-acre lakefront campus, a transformative achievement for the College.” In reality, the acquisition of that property bankrupted the College, and Sanders is now being investigated for bank fraud by the FBI for misrepresentations she made on loan documents to purchase the land for the campus.
Senator Sanders, who is up for reelection this year, hit the media circuit this week to defend his wife, assuring that she’s the most honest person he knows and that the investigation is politically motivated. “When you go after people’s wives that is really pathetic,” he said in a recent interview, adding that “it’s fairly pathetic that when people are involved in public life, it’s not only that they get attacked, but it’s their wives and their families that get attacked. That’s what this is about.” The couple lawyered up this week, hiring two prominent attorneys, one in Burlington and the other in Washington D.C. Also, this month, Jane launched a nonprofit organization, the Sanders Institute, to “revitalize democracy” with progressive policies aimed at racial and social justice as well as environmental and economic issues.
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" Podesta: Trump keeps bringing up Clinton because popular-vote loss ‘bugs the hell out of him’ "
anyone can see Podesta is playing the psychological game of baiting Trump's ego . Will Trump be able to control his ego, see through this and just ignore it ? Or as he always has done just jump right in and take the bait:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/clinton-campaign-chair-trumps-popular-vote-loss-bugs-hell-151246209.html
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“If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
The answer is four: calling a tail a leg does not make it so.”
- Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen Douglas
Today's Left uses control of the language to control the issue.
a woman's right to choose
affordable healthcare
affordable housing
smart growth
undocumented workers
minimum wage
$800 billion in Medicaid cuts
giving it all to the wealthy
tax cuts for the wealthy
diversity
marriage equality
black lives matter
gender studies
welfare rights
climate change
sustainable
green
CO2 a pollutant
income inequality
benevolent paternalism
embrace the discomfort of the transformation
Transgender man shares his joy after giving birth to a baby son with his gay husband after suffering a devastating miscarriage last year (Huh??)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4747200/Transgender-man-gives-birth-son.html
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/08/lincoln-the-hate-speaker.php
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Watch Alinsky' son and Ralph Benko (head of Alinsky organization) try to deny Alinsky was a socialist thug when they debate Dinesh D'Souza.
Dinesh is correct. I do not hear Benko or Alinsky Jr truly refute D'Souza's charges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFZid63n1PI
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Secession looks more interesting now that it is the Left proposing it. It makes me think, what if they did secede?
VDH often points out that Calif is really two states, not north and south but coastal versus all the rest. If the liberals on the coast want out, and if liberal geographic blocs elsewhere want out too, what if we let them?
They would take with them some of America's greatest assets, Silicon Valley, the Bay area, L.A, NYC, Wall Street, Boston, even Chicago. They would get many of the greatest universities and largest newspapers (good riddance). We would have to innovate and replace what we would lose, like the colonists losing Britain.
We would need new ports granted as part of the settlement and to keep at least our fair share of our military assets. They probably don't want them anyway. Both sides would need some form of free trade agreement and reasonable freedom of travel privileges, or right to migrate upon accepting the rules.
I'm sure there are many good reasons not to do this, but how else in our hopelessly divided country can we restore self determination, choice and consent of the governed?
I don't want to live under their socialist, Utopian, coercive government based system and they don't want to live in an individual freedom centered society. Can we look for a win-win, live under two separate systems?
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This was supposed to be a blockbuster. Before I knew it was already out it has dropped to 18th in a field of disappointing movies
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?view=main&yr=2017&wknd=32&sort=rank&order=ASC&p=.htm
even though the left and the media (redundancy alert) promoted the hell out of it.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/aly-nielsen/2017/08/15/gores-latest-climate-film-inconvenient-flop
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/cope-president-trump-stress-disorder-article-1.3414933
There was also an example in last issue of American College of Physicians in an article on depression about some old guy who was "depressed over the 2016" election
Never mind none of these Shrinks seem to have never heard anyone on the right being depressed during the clinton or obama years
It only counts now we have Trump.
My therapy during Clinton and Brock was Dr Limbaugh.
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http://www.jammiewf.com/2017/irony-alert-charlottesville-candlelight-vigil-features-song-from-racist-son-of-a-klansman/
Irony Alert: Charlottesville Candlelight Vigil Features Song From Racist Son of a Klansman
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http://www.jammiewf.com/2017/irony-alert-charlottesville-candlelight-vigil-features-song-from-racist-son-of-a-klansman/
Irony Alert: Charlottesville Candlelight Vigil Features Song From Racist Son of a Klansman
http://www.laweekly.com/music/little-known-fact-woody-guthrie-was-a-big-ol-racist-2412272
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEIsreNjN1E
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/12/03/reminder-president-obama-marched-with-the-black-panthers-n1926857
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GM posted :
" What if we had a president who marched with a racist group? "
GM you know the Left's response to allegations that anyone Black or in any minority could not by definition possibly be racist prejudiced or bigoted
Because they don't hold the "power"
Can't be bigot if your a "victim"
It is a white man's work ONLY. End of discussion and anything you say is WRONG and due to your bigotry and bias and being stupid - comprende ? (playing the devil's advocate of course)
( unless you are a white 'Liberal' man who votes for Dems and thus you are somewhat off the hook )
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHcdogQXoAAEY3g.jpg
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHcdogQXoAAEY3g.jpg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/371190.php
August 18, 2017
Flashback: When Obama Declared That There Were "Many Sides" to Blame for Islamist Terrorism -- Especially Christianity -- Media Not Only Defended Him, But Castigated Critics Who'd Dispute Obama's "Many-Sides-ism"
Let's go all the way back through the mists of time, to a forgotten era of dinosaurs and wizard-kings, an age of wonder and mystery called "February 2015."
In this mythological age, evoking "many sides" to blame for violence was not considered "racist," but in fact was hailed as the very pinnacle of rationality and cosmopolitanism.
Despite the fact that it is always Islamists responsible for Islamist terrorism (see the name; just what it says on the tin), President Lord God Obama proclaimed that many sides were in fact responsible for the rivers of blood spilled by Islamists, including, most notoriously, the Christians.
His latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be the ones who cast the first stone.
"Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history," he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. "And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
When Trump spoke of "many sides" offering violence, he was referring to the fact -- the fact -- that antifa thugs attacked the Nazis and, when the cops drove the Nazis from the park, surrounded them and attacked them with apparent police complicity.
When Obama spoke of many sides being to blame, he was going back to... the Crusades between 1100 and 1350 AD. Oh, and, of course, the famous Christian enslavement of Muslims, which did not happen.
The response from the media was not -- get this -- anger and bitter denunciation, but rather a moistened-crotched panting, along with a sneering dismissal of critics of the "many sides" talk as "the usual quarters."
President Obama is drawing some heat -- mostly from the usual quarters -- for invoking the Crusades while talking about Islam and terrorism on Thursday.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama noted there was a time when people mass-murdered in the name of Christianity, too:
And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
As many were quick to point out, the Catholic church's Crusades began more than 900 years ago, and the Inquisition began in the 13th century.
In the context of Obama's long-standing remarks on Islam and terrorism, though, invoking the Crusades and the Inquisition are wholly unsurprising. What is more surprising is that he hasn't done this sooner.
I'm not surprised the leftwing media has completely ignored its own history of defending "many sides to blame" arguments from the president.
I am surprised, however, that so many members of the #FakeNews "rightwing" media have, however.
More: At the eulogy for five dead Dallas cops assassinated by a Black Lives Matter terrorist, Barack "Many Sides" Obama offered this observation:
"We have all seen this bigotry in our lives at some point," obama told an audience of about 2,500 at a concert hall in Dallas. "None of us is entirely innocent. No institution is entirely immune. And that includes our police departments. We know this."
Telling cops they're racist at a funeral for their own was, by the media's estimation, the height of cosmopolitan nuance and sophistication.
Thanks to Soothsayer for that quote.
digg this
posted by Ace at 07:01 PM
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" I am surprised, however, that so many members of the #FakeNews "rightwing" media have, however. "
Agreed . Very sickening. Just another example of why the right keeps losing and will keep losing.
Trump with all his horrible flaws is one of the few who will stand up to the Left . The others are all standing down.
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This was referenced by the pollster in GM's income equality Venezuela video. A keeper for all threads.
We must pursue sameness, no matter the cost. In 2011, we had not turned far enough left; we had not yet redistributed enough income. Venezuela was on a better path! For his clairvoyance, Sanders went on to become the leader of the American Left.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america
Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America, Bernie Sanders
Friday, August 5, 2011
Washington, it seems to us, is focusing on one gap -- between spending and revenue -- to the exclusion of others. That's unwise, because these other gaps also pose threats to America and its social structure. They, too, ought to be closed.
Take the jobs gap, which doesn't need much explanation. There are far fewer jobs than people seeking work, which is why unemployment is close to 10 percent or higher, if you count those who would like a job but have given up looking. According to economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson, writing last week in The New York Times, the U.S. economy would have to add about 12.3 million jobs to return to employment levels that existed before the 2008-2009 recession blindsided America. A quarter of a million people enter the labor force each month. At the current pace of recovery -- which is to say slower than slow -- closing this gap could take 10 years or more. Talk about a lost decade.
Closing the jobs gap might be easier if there were a solid commitment to closing the investment gap. Unlike other rich nations and, we hasten to add, developing countries such as India and China, the United States doesn't spend nearly enough on education and work force training; research and development; and vital infrastructure such as bridges, roads and air traffic control. This is what's known as "non-security discretionary spending," which is a misnomer. Investing in these areas would actually help strengthen America and secure the future. Yet spending in these categories accounts for less than 10 percent of all federal expenditure, and the share has been falling and is likely to fall further in the grip of the Scissorhands caucus that has taken control of Congress.
Finally, and most worryingly, there's the widening wealth gap. The inequality of incomes in this country has been well documented and much commented on, to wit: The richest 1 percent of Americans now account for almost a quarter of the nation's income, creating an imbalance even worse than the days of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts.
Less remarked, however, is the fact that America's wealth gap is also a race gap. As the Pew Research Center reported last week, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. Think about that. In 2009, the typical black household had $5,677 in wealth -- defined as assets minus debts; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325; the typical white household, by contrast, had $113,149.
The disparity is twice as large as it was in the two decades prior to the Great Recession and the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago. The downturn has been particularly hard on blacks, who are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.
Moreover, according to the Pew analysis, the wealth gap widened between 2005 and 2009 because minorities disproportionately reside in states hit hardest by plummeting house values -- Michigan, California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada, where median house prices fell as much as 50 percent .
White households saw house values decline as well, of course, but they tended to be cushioned by other assets that many black and Hispanic households don't have, including savings accounts, pensions and stocks.
"What's pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African Americans who bought homes in the last decade -- because that was the American dream -- are seeing big declines," Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin told The Associated Press.
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?
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Funny how Asians aren't mentioned in Bernie's speech? Why?
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http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans-graphics/
Oh, now I know why.
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will be a lifelong project...
"These days [2011], the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?"
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america
Answering Bernie:
May 30, 2016
http://www.libertynewsdaily.com/blog-929-flashback:-bernie-sanders-praised-socialist-venezuela-as-model-for-ending-income-inequality
In an essay lamenting what he described as the intractable income inequality of the American economy, Senator Sanders declared: “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger.”
Despite receiving trillions of dollars in oil revenue over recent decades, Venezuela is in the midst of an unprecedented economic collapse, owing precisely to the redistributionist programs that Sanders has extolled as a model for the U.S. economy. Grocery store shelves are barren, hospitals have no access to vital medicines, rationing is under way, and riots have begun to coalesce in the streets of Caracas.
Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, is preparing to leave a country mired in a deep recession and facing a currency crisis. Like Venezuela, Ecuador has been ruled by a socialist government that was able to subsidize its social engineering projects through oil revenues. The end of the oil boom has left the government without the means of paying for its programs, and as Correa prepares to leave office – most likely turning it over to Vice President Lenin Moreno – he used a recent earthquake as a pretext for a huge tax increase.
Argentina, the third of Sanders’ economic role models, is a country with immense natural and industrial wealth that has seen its economy strip-mined by a kleptocratic government. Under President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the government’s official statistics agency, Indec, released a steady stream of fabrications to disguise the country’s decline – which were accepted at face value by credulous people like Bernie Sanders. Now that Kirchner is out of office, Indec has corrected the statistics, and the story they tell of the country’s economic reality is frightening.“Commiserations Argentines, ”began a recent essay in the Financial Times. “You are now poorer than the Chinese, Bulgarians, Azerbaijanis, Turkmen, Mexicans, Malaysians and Gabonese, not to mention your beloved neighbours in Brazil. All is not lost, though. You are still a smidgen better off than those in Botswana and war-torn Libya.”
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/23/american-anarchy-parallels-chinas-cultural-revolution/
How American Anarchy Parallels China’s Cultural Revolution
Both movements started on college campuses, with students who wanted to re-make history according to their own ideology.
Helen Raleigh By Helen Raleigh
AUGUST 23, 2017
I’ve been avoiding the news lately because it pains me to see my beloved country so divided, with people so bitterly angry at each other. All the shouting, violence, and destruction of historical monuments have only brought up a feeling of déjà vu.
America is clearly undergoing a Cultural Revolution that is eerily similar to Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which took place in China in the 1960s. Maybe Karl Marx was right after all when he declared that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Both Movements Started On Campuses, And Spread
China’s Cultural Revolution was triggered by a group of students at Beijing University, the most elitist college in China. They called themselves the Red Guards because they worshiped China’s communist dictator Mao and his socialist/communist ideology feverishly. In their manifesto, they questioned the usefulness of knowledge, and condemned their professors and university administrators for harboring “intellectual elitism and bourgeois tendencies” and for stalling China’s progress towards a communist utopia.
Mao immediately realized that he could use these over-zealous and ignorant teenagers as a political tool to purge his enemies and shape society to his own liking. He elevated the Red Guards’ status by appearing at a massive Red Guard rally on August 18, 1966 at Tiananmen Square. This event lent Red Guards political legitimacy, and officially kicked off the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards’ ideas quickly spread from colleges to high schools.
No one on campus dared challenge the Red Guards. Capitulations from school authorities only emboldened them. They led students to strike, refusing to take classes from people who were deemed less than ideologically pure. Professors, teachers, and school administrators were paraded and forced to make numerous public self-criticisms about “transgressions” against government-sanctioned orthodoxy. Soon, college entrance exams were suspended and many schools, from universities to high schools, were closed. The entire education system was paralyzed.
Without schools to go to, the Red Guards traveled all over China to spread their ideas and tactics to the “real world.” Other people, such as factory workers unhappy with the shortages, organized their own groups to challenge leadership of their own work units. Since no one was working, businesses, factories, and many government agencies were shut down. The entire country fell into lawlessness and chaos.
American College Students: Resurrecting The Red Guard?
Like Mao’s Red Guards, some American college students and their supporters have been shouting down anyone who dares to disagree with them. These modern-day Red Guards demand that college campuses be an inclusive and safe place, but are bent on making sure the campus is an unwelcoming and unsafe place for anyone who doesn’t show unconditional support for students’ sanctioned orthodoxy. From Yale to Middlebury, college professors and administrators have caved to these students mobs’ preposterous demands. Exhibit A is Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman master at the center of Yale’s debate over Halloween costumes. His very public self-criticism probably would have won over Maoist Red Guards in China, but failed to gain sympathy from privileged Yale students.
Now that kind of zealous demand for thought conformity has expanded outside campuses to the “real world.” When James Damore, a Google employee, raised questions about Google’s diversity training in a memo, he was fired by Google. As Sumantra Maitra wrote, “Nothing could be more dystopian than the largest information, communication, and documentation hub controlling your thoughts and punishing you for wrong think.”
Both Movements Sought the Destruction of History
The Red Guards firmly believed that in order to build a new world, they had to wipe out the old one. So they traveled around the country, eradicating anything representing China’s feudalistic past: old customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas. Museums, temples, shrines, heritage sites, including Confucius’ tomb, were defaced, ransacked, or even totally destroyed.
One of the worst instances of destruction took place at the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644) tombs near Beijing. The Red Guards dug up the remains of Ming emperors and empresses, denouncing their oppression against Chinese people, before burning the remains with burial treasures, including priceless ancient artifacts, books, and manuscripts. Much personal property, including my own family’s genealogy book—containing 50 generations of information—was confiscated and ended up in the fire. In the meantime, many cities and towns renamed their streets with new revolutionary names. Mao pictures and statues were everywhere. Such drastic efforts to erase the influence of the past and remake the society in a revolution-sanctioned image have left irrevocable damage to Chinese culture and people.
That intensity and zeal to cleanse the past is repeating itself in America. Since recent events in Charlottesville, calls to remove or destroy Confederate statues in the U.S. have only gotten louder. Some places, such as the city of Baltimore and Duke University, already took actions to remove Confederate statues. Over the weekend, however, more and more historical monuments, some having nothing to do with the Confederacy, were vandalized.
It’s true that Confederate soldiers and generals fought to maintain an immoral system. They should not be celebrated. But as Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal wrote over the weekend, “when a nation tears down its statues, it’s toppling more than brass and marble. It is in a way toppling itself. When you tear down statues, you tear down avenues of communication, between generations.”
I always believe if we want to define our future, we have to learn from the past. But if we don’t have a complete picture of the past, how can we make sure we learn the right lessons? Every civilization, every country, every generation of people, has its own good, bad, and ugly. “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” We owe it to ourselves and future generations to preserve a full picture of the past and make sure lessons in full context are passed on.
Both Movements Justify Violence on the Basis of Their Perceived Moral Authority
The Red Guards were fanatic about social classes and political identity. They believed they were the rightful heir to Mao’s socialist revolution and that only they and their chairman were on the right side of the history. Thus, they shouted down anyone who dared to show the slightest disagreement with slogans, such as “a complete confession is the only road to survival. Anything less will lead to death!”
The Red Guards were sources of terror. Professors, writers, scientists, artists, and even government officials were publicly paraded, denounced, humiliated, and tortured in public by the Red Guards and their supporters. Suicides among the persecuted were very common. The Red Guards even amplified their militant and violent nature by wearing special outfits: olive green People’s Liberation Army’s uniform with a red arm band.
As the Red Guards spread from schools to the rest of the society, they also increased their use of force. They didn’t just fight with their fists, either: they fought with real weapons. Some Chinese cities were engulfed in violence to such an extent, order was only restored through military takeover.
If you think that level of violence and lawless will never take place in America, just watch the videos of violent protests at Yale, Berkeley, and Middlebury College. Fringe groups such as Antifa insist that violence is justified against anyone they deem to be haters, racists, or fascists. Once again, after these groups honed their vicious tactics on college campuses and faced little consequences or push back, they took their tactics to the “real” world. During a 2016 campaign rally in San Jose, anti-Trump demonstrators violently attacked Trump supporters and local police. Since Trump’s election, such belief in “righteous beating” have received support from mainstream left leaning media, even some politicians. This so called “legitimate violence” from radical left fueled the violent response from far right groups, which led us to Charlottesville.
We Have To Learn From Mistakes Of The Past
Our nation has fallen into a vicious cycle: violence from one side induces a violent response from the other side, which becomes an excuse to justify more violence.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution movement was the darkest chapter in China’s history. It should be called “Cultural Destruction.” It brought the Chinese people nothing but misery. It did fundamentally transform Chinese society: millions, including a generation of China’s intellectual backbone, perished, and an entire young generation grew up without any formal education. It tore the social fabric that used to unite people, and overturned traditional close relationships among families and communities. Its irreplaceable destruction of China’s cultural heritage left Chinese people in a spiritual and moral vacuum.
“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” We should be alarmed by the similarities between today’s American cultural revolution to China’s Cultural Revolution. Let’s never forget that evil can come from the pursuit of progress. American’s cultural revolution is endangering the Republic we hold dear. To preserve it, we have to find “the energy of a common national sentiment” and re-affirm the “uniformity of principles” that once united us as Americans.
Helen Raleigh owns Red Meadow Advisors, LLC, and is an immigration policy fellow at the Centennial Institute in Colorado. She is the author of several books, including "Confucius Never Said" and "The Broken Welcome Mat." Follow Helen on Twitter @HRaleighspeaks, or check out her website: helenraleighspeaks.com
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450754/paul-ryan-answered-nun-question-catholic-social-teaching-government-programs
Perhaps we should make this nun, or even the Pope the Congressional majority leader and then we can see *everyone* become poor. (except for the Church of course)
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“If Millennials ever wake up to how badly they’ve been robbed and by whom, the political reckoning will be earth-shattering.”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/254456/
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Millennials are falling behind their boomer parents. JANUARY 13, 2017
With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.
The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/13/millennials-are-falling-behind-their-boomer-parents.html
If Millennials ever wake up to how badly they’ve been robbed and by whom, the political reckoning will be earth-shattering. - Stephen Green at Instapundit
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While the left dreams of going back to the wonderful days of the Obama administration, they might recall that the number of people added to the food stamps roll increased by a number equal to the population of 13 states. The number who newly entered government healthcare was of course greater than that.
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1467.msg96549#msg96549
The years under Mr. Obama have not been kind to Democrats. When he took office in 2009, Democrats had an effective 58-seat majority in the Senate, had a staggering 256 seats in the House and held 28 governorships.
They lost the House and ceded the majority of governorships in 2010, held serve in 2012 with Mr. Obama’s re-election, then lost control of the Senate in 2014 and control of the White House this year. All told, Democrats have shed 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 12 governorships.
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/14/obamas-legacy-democratic-losses-party-chaos/
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" If Millennials ever wake up to how badly they’ve been robbed and by whom, the political reckoning will be earth-shattering. "
The Left is desperately trying to convince them it is all the "rich white racists" who have robbed them thus the answer is socialism and militancy to get back what is rightfully theirs.
Millennials will not wake up till it is too late and the pain is far worse IMHO.
Obama has / is doing all he can to foster this.
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May I suggest to Melania Trump that if she goes to a "hurricane" zone this is what she should be wearing. Indeed her closet should be filled with this sort of wardrobe if she is the please the LEFT:
https://www.google.com/search?q=peasant+woman+photo&tbm=isch&imgil=nr44FfyOqyjwDM%253A%253BgpyKIhvp7NH-hM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.123rf.com%25252Fphoto_37839647_old-peasant-woman-with-basket-outdoor.html&source=iu&pf=m&fir=nr44FfyOqyjwDM%253A%252CgpyKIhvp7NH-hM%252C_&usg=__Gd54Z5yKSzDDcn9qCuhYw7YWiw4%3D&biw=1440&bih=803&ved=0ahUKEwjK8dX5tP3VAhWEVxoKHQiXCGMQyjcISw&ei=IeClWYrdF4SvaYiuopgG#imgrc=nr44FfyOqyjwDM:
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https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2017/08/31/merica-redneck-army-saves-natl-guard-video-from-texas-brought-to-attention-of-a-certain-cartoonist/
Has anyone ever been saved by a Prius? Ever?
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:-D :-D :-D
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https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2017/09/Salon-Hedlines.jpeg
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2017/09/Salon-Hedlines.jpeg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/371555.php
A couple of weeks ago progs were claiming it was insane to ask if antifa and Black Lives Matter would next come for the statues of Jefferson and Washington. This was obviously insane and deranged to ask, because Trump had asked it.
Well, guess what -- they came for the Thomas Jefferson statue at UVA. You know, the one that antifa claimed they were "protecting" from hypothetical harm from Nazi contamination.
Mostly lost in the general hysteria surrounding President Trump’s post-Charlottesville press conference a month ago was an excellent question he posed. Regarding the growing demand nationwide to tear down monuments to the Confederate States of America, he asked: "I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"
His remarks were characterized by historians as "absurd" and "unacceptable" and "ignorant" and dismissed as a "red herring." At The Daily Beast, John Avlon called Trump's comparison "immoral" and "dangerous." At Slate, Jamelle Bouie claimed Trump's question was "dumb," arguing that statues of Washington and Jefferson were safe because "the reason we memorialize them is not because of their slaveholding."
Well. Earlier this week around 100 "students, faculty and community members" gathered at of the University of Virginia and "[covered] a statue of Thomas Jefferson in a black shroud…adorning it with signs that dubbed the former president a 'racist' and a 'rapist.'" The protesters derided the statue as "an emblem of white supremacy," and demanded that it be "re-contextualized," lambasting the people who "fetishize the legacy of Jefferson," calling on the community to 'recognize Jefferson as a rapist, racist, and slave owner."
As George Orwell often said, always put your faith in mobs and angry racist propagandists.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/371650.php
September 19, 2017
ABCNews' Chief Foreign Correspondent Terry Moran: Trump's UN Speech "Bordering on Threat" of a "War Crime"
Ohhh.
Trump told the United Nations that if America is "forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea." In response, Moran freaked out: "The words 'totally destroying' a nation of 25 million people, that borders on the threat of committing a war crime."
Terry Moran was joined in freaking out by his Twitter Bubble Buddies at the SJW National Laughingstock and SJW Atlantic Magazine, who had all sorts of GAINZZZ as far as nervous disorders.
Strangely enough, the media -- get this -- praised Obama's steely toughness and girthy penis when he said the US could use its nuclear arsenal to "destroy" North Korea in 2016.
President Barack Obama delivered a stern warning to North Korea on Tuesday, reminding its "erratic" and "irresponsible" leader that America’s nuclear arsenal could "destroy" his country.
...
Mr Obama gave warning of the possible consequences. "We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals," he told CBS News. "But aside from the humanitarian costs of that, they are right next door to our vital ally, [South] Korea."
I guess it's hard to mount a sustained criticism of a man who's got his dick three and a half deep in your mouth.
Thanks to Jane D'Oh. For the link. Not for all the penis stuff.
BTW, I don't know who came up with "girthy penis" but I think it was a commenter and it's hilarious.
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"The lucky ones just got sent to Siberia. Some were spared torture others were beaten into confessing "their crimes" to the Party ot the State, real, imagined, made up , or infinitely trivial."
Whether Stalin, Chavez or the American Left, coercion is a necessary component of socialism, required to move people away from a natural state of freedom. The policy designers of the Left admit it, from Jonathon Gruber's mandatory healthcare to Cass Sustein's more general concepts of justifying coercive paternalism. If they are in power, you will do as they say.
Leave people with freedom and (dreaded) inequality will result.
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"The lucky ones just got sent to Siberia. Some were spared torture others were beaten into confessing "their crimes" to the Party ot the State, real, imagined, made up , or infinitely trivial."
Whether Stalin, Chavez or the American Left, coercion is a necessary component of socialism, required to move people away from a natural state of freedom. The policy designers of the Left admit it, from Jonathon Gruber's mandatory healthcare to Cass Sustein's more general concepts of justifying coercive paternalism. If they are in power, you will do as they say.
Leave people with freedom and (dreaded) inequality will result.
http://www.disappearingman.com/communism/men-wouldnt-stop-clapping/
The Men Who Wouldn’t Stop Clapping
By Doug Peterson - October 22, 2016
The audience exploded into applause. Every person in the room jumped up and began to wildly clap, as if racing each other to see who could get to their feet the fastest. The applause was all to honor the dictator Joseph Stalin at a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.
But the big question soon became: Who would have the nerve to be the first person to stop clapping in honor of Comrade Stalin? No one had the courage, so the clapping went on…and on…and on.
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would be afraid to stop clapping for any leader. To understand this, you need to know Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Although no one knows the precise number of political prisoners he executed, estimates usually reach well over a million.
Historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev estimated that Stalin had about 1 million political prisoners executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 alone. That doesn’t even count the 6 or 7 million who died in the famine that Stalin created through his policies, or the millions who had to do long, hard sentences in the Gulag labor camps.
So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.
Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:
“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.
That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
Solzhenitsysn himself was a victim of Stalin’s because he was sent to the Gulag labor camps for eight years for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. The goal of the labor camp was to brainwash prisoners and change them into good, obedient Communists. But an amazing thing happened to Solzhenitsyn: He came out of the camp a Christian. While he was in a prison hospital bed, one of the doctors sat at his bedside and told him the story of how and why he became a follower of Jesus.
That night, the doctor was clubbed to death, but Solzhenitsyn never forgot him. Solzhenitsyn went on to devote his life to Christ and to speaking the truth about what had been happening in the Soviet Union. His Gulag Archipelago, Parts 1 and 2, were perhaps the most influential books of the 20th Century. After all, those books, in telling the story of Stalin’s Great Terror, helped to topple the Communist empire.
Solzhenitsyn shocked people by saying that he was actually thankful for his time in prison because it taught him about the nature of good and evil. “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts,” he wrote.
Ironically, he emerged from prison stronger—a resurrection of sorts.
One of Solzhenitsyn’s many books was called The Oak and the Calf—a title that refers to an old, Russian fable about a calf that kept butting its head against a big oak tree again and again and again until the huge tree finally toppled. Solzhenitsyn was that calf, and so were many heroic people, who kept butting their heads against the giant oak that was once the Soviet empire. They didn’t give up, and that tree eventually fell.
It takes courage to be the person who doesn’t give up. It takes courage to be the person who is willing to stop applauding evil, when everyone else in the room just keeps on going. There is often a price to pay for this kind of courage, but there’s also a reward beyond measure.
By Doug Peterson
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From 2006, Ted Turner praising North Korea bike trails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA2UVgmydZc
Chris Matthews praises North Korea's "Beautiful Subway System" Sept 2017:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/26/msnbcs-chris-matthews-praises-north-koreas-beautiful-infrastructure/?utm_campaign=atdailycaller&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social
Instapundit [not the left] praises NK policy of earth day everyday:
Map dark all night.
Only Un owns a lamp.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/276678/#respond
Maybe we can find some nice celebrity endorsements of Chavez too. Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Jesse Jackson, and ...
(https://static.pjmedia.com/lifestyle/user-content/36/files/2014/02/2009-04-21-ObamaChavez.jpeg)
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/2/25/7-famous-supporters-of-the-chavez-regime/
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Weinstein for crying out loud
gets busted for being a predator then blame it on the 60's and 70's then the obligatory apology and he is in therapy (Bloom sounds like she got him all tide up if you ask me)
and states he will dedicate his life to going after Trump!
Then sue Pravda on Hudson. libs suing libs all with lib lawyers. The latter group wins.
crazy celebrity libs.
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did not go to Iran or kerry
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2017-nobel-peace-prize-ican_us_59d71ec1e4b072637c4327ba?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
A group against nuclear weapons. What progress are THEY making in Iran (or NK)?
If the peaceful people disarm, the rogue states win. Leftist logic leads to unintended consequences.
What year did Reagan and Thatcher win the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing down the Soviet Union? What would Norway look like if the US and NATO had not contained them?
Carter, GORE and Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, but not Reagan. Good grief.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/who-are-the-american-recipients-of-the-nobel-peace-prize/447924/
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THIS explains reason for prize ; winner is anti trump and a leftist :
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/06/nobel-peace-prize-winner-calls-donald-trump-a-moron/
*3* countries signed up.
Some of the heroes of Vegas are far more deserving............
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https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2017/10/Confused-Liberals.jpeg
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2017/10/Confused-Liberals.jpeg)
Pick one.
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They are anti YOU having a gun.
http://ijr.com/the-declaration/2017/10/993514-dem-charlie-rangel-says-law-abiding-citizens-dont-need-guns-stuns-asked-deserves/
Dem Charlie Rangel Says Law-Abiding Citizens Don't Need Guns, Stuns When Asked About What He 'Deserves'
BY JASON HOWERTON
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is taking a controversial stance on the Second Amendment, claiming law-abiding American citizens don't need to carry firearms for protection.
Rangel told the Daily Caller he was “glad” to hear that it was difficult to get a concealed permit in his home state of New York. He even went on to say he wouldn't want the law-abiding residents of his Harlem district to be able to carry.
“I wouldn’t want them to have it,” he said.
Rangel's comments come amid reports that NYPD officials accepted bribes in exchange for gun licenses and special privileges.
“Law-abiding citizens just shouldn't have to carry a gun,” Rangel added. “You're not gonna push me in that direction.”
But when the Daily Caller reminded Rangel that he and other members of Congress are protected by armed U.S. Capitol Police, he revealed his true feelings on the subject.
“Well, that's a little different. I think we deserve — I think we need to be protected down here,” the Democrat admitted.
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I was looking for something else and found this tidbit:
[Gwen] IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?
BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that [gay marriage]. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.
The bottom line though is, and I'm glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that's the case, we really don't have a difference.
IFILL: Is that what you [Sarah Palin] said?
PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.
IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let's move to foreign policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/president/debates/transcripts/vice-presidential-debate.html
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In the calendar of so-called human rights, that's not very long ago!
Can anyone remember when gay marriage finally passed. That's right, it didn't. It was decided by one Justice (Anthony Kennedy) in a 5-4 divided Supreme Court. Biden, chair of the senate judiciary committee, opposed Bork for his "originalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomination Leftists take a long and deceptive path to advance their agenda.
Oddly 'Republican' Donald Trump is the first President to run and win the Presidency while supporting gay marriage.
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Surprised this wasn't memory hole-ed.
I was looking for something else and found this tidbit:
[Gwen] IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?
BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that [gay marriage]. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.
The bottom line though is, and I'm glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that's the case, we really don't have a difference.
IFILL: Is that what you [Sarah Palin] said?
PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.
IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let's move to foreign policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/president/debates/transcripts/vice-presidential-debate.html
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In the calendar of so-called human rights, that's not very long ago!
Can anyone remember when gay marriage finally passed. That's right, it didn't. It was decided by one Justice (Anthony Kennedy) in a 5-4 divided Supreme Court. Biden, chair of the senate judiciary committee, opposed Bork for his "originalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomination Leftists take a long and deceptive path to advance their agenda.
Oddly 'Republican' Donald Trump is the first President to run and win the Presidency while supporting gay marriage.
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Very funny!
Times change rapidly. This was just 9 years ago, the two Republicans at the top of the ticket opposed gay marriage, the two top Democrats including the left-most member of the Senate promised they also oppose gay marriage, same as the Republicans. The NPR moderator says "wonderful" to we all oppose gay marriage, "let's move on". Gays hear that and vote Democrat because they know Republicans are telling the truth and Democrats are just saying that to get elected.
In a sense, nothing has changed.
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/10/12/behold-our-betters-n2393375
Behold Our Betters
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Oct 12, 2017 12:01 AM
To be a normal American is to constantly be scolded, to be lectured, to be treated as a morally bankrupt simpleton in need of the guidance and direction provided by an urban elite ruling class notable for its empty academic credentials, its track record of incompetence, and its idolization of people who erotically abuse the foliage.
If we are to have betters, is it so wrong for us to demand that they actually be better? Superiors should be distinguished by their superiority – if you presume to take charge shouldn’t you demonstrate tactical, technical, and moral mastery? So what has our ruling class mastered lately? What is the skill set that sets the smart set apart?
Are they our betters because of the degrees they hang on the walls of their over-priced, open-floor plan townhouses? Going to college used to mean something more than you had nowhere else to go after high school. It was a training ground for the leadership class. A college student was an invitee to an intellectual banquet where he could sample the best of Western civilization, of art and literature, of civics and philosophy. But today, it’s all gender studies and grade inflation, with whiny social justice warriors drowning out any voice that won’t sing in tune. It is steam table trays heaped with gray, fatty meat and limp asparagus - the Golden Corral of the mind.
Our aspiring leadership class leaves college with an anchor of debt and the itch of chlamydia, poisoned by a politically correct hook-up culture that amazingly manages to combine the most boring and annoying aspects of both leftism and debauchery. Out go these future leaders on their “slut-walks” and the rest of us look at them and think “Hard pass.” We’ve raised a generation of immoral puritans, living their lives in constant fear that somewhere, somehow, someone is having a normal sex life.
Where are the elite’s achievements? Our betters have been running things and yet they are the ones crying loudest about how awful things are. It’s another scam, of course. Things are awful, but not for them – do you think the Westside Los Angeles folks I dwell among are hurting? No, let the good times roll – on the backs of the people east of I-5. Things are hard out there in actual America (but improving under Donald Trump, the quintessential Anti-Better), and our ruling class is demanding action. That action is to direct more money and power to the ruling class. That’s the answer to every policy question. Yeah, they’ve failed, but if you reward them, well, then they’ll totally start succeeding.
Iraq, the 2008 financial meltdown, health care…the hits keep coming, and the answer for the last failure is always the same. Trust us, and double down. Accountability? That’s for us suckers.
The bipartisan ruling class knows what’s up; it’s just deeply cynical and thinks we’re too stupid to spot the scam. Take Bob Corker, please. So, this guy is supposed to be one of the honorable mandarins of the Senate, a deeply committed public servant standing up to that big meanie Donald Trump? This is one of our betters? He mouths off at Trump and Trump, being Trump, shoots back on Twitter. And here come the vapors – how dare Trump not just stand there and take his dressing down from this paragon of pargonness?
Then the media, the enabling Felonia von Pantsuit to the establishment’s Bill Clinton, starts talking about how Trump needs Corker’s vote for tax reform and how it was totally stupid and dumb and stupid for Trump to insult a guy whose vote he needs and … wait a minute. Did you detect a troubling premise within that line of reasoning? Did you notice how the media simply assumes that it’s just fine for Bob Corker to block critical reforms that will help normal Americans because his feelingz are hurted and he haz the sadz?
We normals are expected to tolerate a crushing tax system even longer because one of the elite is pouty, and that’s perfectly okay. Because us normals are not the priority. The elite is.
It’s the ruling class’s country and we just live in it – at least until the elite can import an entirely new and docile electorate from the Third World to replace us.
You can tell a lot about a people by who they hate and who they idolize. They hate Donald Trump, and it’s because he has no allegiance to them and because he knows them so well from first-hand experience that he has absolutely no respect for them. All their hard-earned status within the hierarchy of the elite? He doesn’t give a flip, and the normals love it. Finally, someone is holding these pompous perfumed princes to account.
But who does the elite idolize? The aspiring elite, college students, seem to idolize Che and Bernie Sanders, as if we needed more evidence of their terribleness.
Our allegedly grown-up elite admired Ted Kennedy, the scummiest scion of America’s scummiest family – you should get a waterproof edition of Howie Carr’s astonishing Kennedy Babylon so you can save time by reading it in the shower. Camelot? More like Clap-a-lot. That bulbous scuzz didn’t just fix a waitress sandwich with Chris Dodd – who, of course, left the Senate to work as a lobbyist for…wait for it…Hollywood. No, he actually killed a woman on a drunken bender, skipping off to new sordid triumphs with barely a slap on the wrist.
And the bipartisan establishment hailed him as “The Lion of the Senate,” never mind the body count.
Don’t forget their other idol, the Stogie-Stasher-In-Chief, Bill Clinton. He was such an icon that the ruling class offered up his wife as its presidential candidate twice. Oh, and plenty of alleged Republicans were cool with that – class solidarity controls, after all.
But the ultimate documentation of the utter moral vacuum in which our elite dwells is noted Hillary donor Harvey Weinstein. Hollywood has, for decades, taken upon itself to chide and chastise us normals for our many, many, many faults, because when you want to learn the difference between right and wrong, you need a movie star to help you out. And, to the surprise of no one, it was all a crock.
They knew. They all knew, and they didn’t care. Meryl Streep’s Sophie’s choice was between her career and her conscience, and let’s just say she didn’t agonize over her pick. Others took his cash to shut up, leaving other ingenues to his sweaty clutches because getting the gigs trumps sisterly solidarity every time.
Hillary Clinton managed to put down her super-sized Chardonnay goblet long enough to issue a 38-word comment/cliché on her pal and benefactor’s icky adventures in gardening. In her defense, she was probably thinking, “I was married to Bill. This guy’s an amateur.”
So why should we normal Americans respect these people? Why should we submit to being constantly scolded, lectured, and treated as morally bankrupt simpletons anymore?
We shouldn’t, and we aren’t, not anymore.
They wonder why they got Trump.
They are why they got Trump.
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If only the music industry could be exposed for the total fraud it is.
all of those bastards singing stolen material for Stevie Wonder to Shania Twitt. They all know they didn't write the stuff they claim. Total conspiracy of silence. No law enforcement doing anything about it. No outcry because the victims have no pull not enough money and no connections to the entire entertainment community or the politicians or the unions all looking the other way while white collar professionals make good livings stealing intellectual property
This is how it happens that so many people look the other way. They are bribed, want to be in it, make deals, million dollar lawyers armies, the media is part of it because they are part of the entertainment community , or the extraordinarily few that may be honest enough to not want to get involved simply do not get involved and come forward with the truth:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452554/harvey-weinstein-scandal-hollywoods-silence
If only there could be a similar day of retribution in the music industry
like what we are seeing with winestine........I dream
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Anyone can make an accusation against someone else and suddenly it is splashed on the the internet. How do we know which one of these allegations are true? We don't.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amazon-tv-producer-goes-public-harassment-claim-top-exec-roy-price-1048060
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Islamsplaining.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Islamsplaining.jpg)
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more young people now believe out own leaders (recent Republicans and founders) are associated with crimes against humanity then Pol Pot. Stalin , Lenin , Mao.
Or have simply never heard of the Stalin, Lenin , Mao.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453223/russian-revolution-100-years-anniversary-communism-joseph-stalin-far-left-europe-united-kingdom-jeremy-corbyn
What the heck are they teaching in our schools ?
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Paul Krugman Says Markets Will ‘Never’ Recover From Trump; Dow Hits Record High
11/09/2016
(http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/kaavio.Webhost/charts/big.chart?nosettings=1&symb=DJIA&uf=0&type=2&size=2&sid=1643&style=320&freq=1&entitlementtoken=0c33378313484ba9b46b8e24ded87dd6&time=8&rand=709150215&compidx=&ma=0&maval=9&lf=1&lf2=0&lf3=0&height=335&width=579&mocktick=1)
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If Brock were still Prez Krugman would be lauding his achievements and holding up the record markets as the bellwether of his genius.
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Would we have ever been subjected to this dribble if Hillary won the Presidency? rights bought in oct 16 just before trump won but spielberg gets in the act after trump wins:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)
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If Brock were still Prez Krugman would be lauding his achievements and holding up the record markets as the bellwether of his genius.
Hard to believe this guy was a Nobel Laureate, although Arafat, Carter, Gore and Obama all won versions of it too. Someday (if I live to a million) I will go back and read his scholarly work from before he became a blowhard, all-bias, pundit and see if there is a brain behind the mouth and typewriter.
"The market will never recover from this and it recovered before opening and kept going up and up and up -
until Republicans failed to pass tax reform.
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The current counter argument is that Trump is lucky-- the whole world economy is going up, indeed other countries' markets are outperforming the US.
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The current counter argument is that Trump is lucky-- the whole world economy is going up, indeed other countries' markets are outperforming the US.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/11/09/thoughts-and-prayers-for-antigun-freaks-grieving-over-death-of-their-narrative-n2406128
Thoughts and Prayers for Anti-Gun Freaks Grieving Over Death of The Narrative
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Nov 09, 2017 12:01 AM
The synchronized leftist response to this latest attack on normal Christians was pre-planned, and it didn’t matter that this time it was another militant atheist weirdo instead of an ISIS-loving foreigner. The memes and the lies were all prepped and ready, and the villain was already chosen. No surprise – once again, it was you, the normal American who keeps and bears arms to protect yourself, your family, your community and your Constitution.
But this time it didn’t go the way they wanted. Sure, they were giddy at first – the liberals got to trash people of faith for praying, they got to tell NRA members that there was blood on their hands, and they got to demand some sort of unspecified action. But then their lying narrative took a bunch of rounds and bled out just like that useless little creep.
That’s what they are really mourning – the loss of what they saw as an opportunity to spread their poisonous lies in support of their effort to disarm Americans and change us once and for all from citizens into subjects.
Some still found something to cheer about. One Twitter low-life pointed out, “Sutherland Springs is in rural Texas, these were all likely 45 voters. This is karma in action. Good riddance.” Yes, that’s the kind of person who wants you disarmed, the kind that thinks it’s A-OK to murder little kids because their parents might like a different candidate.
Show of hands. Who is up to give up your ability to protect yourself because the same people who celebrate us being murdered demand it? Anyone? Hello? Bueller?
Once the news hit, the ghouls rubbed their hands and started with their coordinated demands that we “do something.” But did you notice how no one said exactly what we were supposed to do? That’s their new thing – no specifics, just some sort of ambiguous, amorphous demand that we wave a magic wand and dispel evil from our midst. They’ve been burned before, hard. They always start babbling about background checks and it always turns out that the scumbag got his guns legally or passed the check when he shouldn’t have. This pudgy meat sack was barred from buying a weapon, but he passed the background check because the government – you know, the same entity the gun-grabbers want to be the only people with guns – again screwed up and failed to put his domestic violence conviction into the database. BTW, want to know how many attempted illegal gun buyers Obama’s DoJ prosecuted out of 48,000? 44.
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty confident. I’m sure eventually the government will figure out how to tell if a nut or a felon is a nut or a felon. In the meantime, I don’t need the ability to protect myself or my family. Here, take my guns. Government, you got this.
Then, of course, the killing spree got stopped by the very thing that liberals insist doesn’t exist except for all the times it has existed – a good guy with a gun. A Texan exhibiting something liberals are unfamiliar with – manhood – took his rifle and went one-on-one with that walking chamber pot and put a round in him. The tubby terrorist, confronted with an armed American citizen instead of little kids, dropped his rifle and ran, gut shot. Let’s hope he suffered good and hard before he checked himself out like the coward he was.
It gets better, though it’s hard to imagine anything better than him with a bullet in his ample belly. The hero who plugged him was not only one of the normal Americans our fern-fertilizing betters in the coastal cities are so fond of looking down upon, but he was an NRA shooting instructor. You know, the focus of evil in the world – except he actually confronted evil and defeated it.
Bullseye, right between the eyes of the lying liberal narrative.
And as their narrative twitched, they still had to display their ignorance for the world. Professional anti-gun liar Shannon Watts really knows her audience – drooling idiots. She claimed, “That means he’s prohibited purchaser, but there’s absolutely no regulation of long guns (AR15s) in Texas. No background check required.” Um, no. And leave it to Alyssa Milano to parrot her pal’s lies: “There are no background checks on long guns (AR15s) in Texas. Thanks for the info @shannonrwatts.” Alyssa, time for some real talk. You need a better firearms advisor, just like you need a better tax advisor.
Oh, and the social media rando platoon piped up with their useful input. One suggested, “No one should have semiautomatics and large ammo rounds.” Time for some commonsense large ammo round control, I guess. That’s the kind of smart take by a trained pro worth listening to, says Chet, who is my unicorn.
These events are an opportunity for clarity. They bring out exactly what is in the hearts of our elite would-be masters. And what is in there is hate and contempt for normal Americans. From Hollywood, we got Michael McKean weighing in with, “They were in church. They had the prayers shot right out of them. Maybe try something else.” You know, I was thinking about no longer watching Better Call Saul because it turned Saul into a boring whiner, but now Mikey’s made my decision easy!
And then Wil Wheaton, who you might know if you watched some Star Trek show where he was a Spock or a Jedi knight or something three decades ago, tweeted, “The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they'd still be alive, you worthless sack of [liberalism].” You know, I was thinking about no longer watching whatever he’s in, but Wil’s total lack of a career made my decision easy!
And what’s a tragedy without anti-Christian hack Stephen King weighing in? “Enough with the prayin'. Time to start legislatin'.” Well, I reckon someone’s drinkin’ again.
So, let’s review. We’re supposed to demand laws that make it illegal for human suppositories like this to have guns, even though it was already illegal for him to have guns. We’re supposed to rely on government background checks to protect us even though the government keeps failing at that. We’re also supposed to disarm at the behest of people who know literally nothing about guns or existing gun laws. And we’re supposed to not believe that we have the ability to defend ourselves, even though normal Americans do so every day – here, an instructor from the NRA literally ended this bloodbath. But we should ignore that for reasons and because.
But wait, there’s more. We’re supposed to disarm in the face of people who celebrate when we are murdered. The Hollywood types, taking a break from molesting each other, didn’t exactly celebrate our deaths, but they couldn’t help spewing their hatred for our faith. I bet if we were disarmed, and a government controlled by liberals had a total monopoly on force, they’d be totally cool and respect our religious rights. I checked with Chet and he thinks so – it’s not like right now they want to bankrupt people for not baking cakes.
Here’s the sad fact – the people who want us disarmed don’t care if we get murdered. Not at all. Chicago has a slow motion Sutherland Springs every two weeks and the smarmy Democrats who run that hellhole don’t care. If they did, they would unleash the cops, who know exactly who the crooks are. Remember how liberals howled about “stop and frisk?” That took illegal guns off the streets, but progressive politics always take precedence. Our lives don’t matter except as a tool to be exploited when they want to take normals’ rights.
Our elite doesn’t want gun control. It wants us control.
It’s no coincidence that the “common sense” measures they used to demand would never stop any of these killers. Killers are killers – they don’t care about the law. Only we do. And the gun fascists don’t care if we are at the killers’ mercy – that’s a risk they’re happy to take.
They lie when they tell you, “No one want to ban your guns.” They think you are too stupid to believe your ears when they advocate just that. Let’s be absolutely clear – if they had their way, that NRA instructor hero would not have had a gun, because he is a law-abiding citizen. But the killer would, because he was a criminal and criminals don’t obey laws. If you think we can ban guns and get them out of the hands of criminals, you’re a moron or a liar. If they don’t smuggle them in – gee, isn’t there a drug crisis? - they’ll just make them.
Of course, that assumes that liberals win the civil war they would spark and somehow manage to confiscate all 300 million of our guns. I’m not betting on Kaden or Ashleigh taking time off from coffee-slinging or their Feminist Mime masters studies to suit up in Kevlar and kick in doors in Red America.
Liberals so desperately want us disarmed because they hate that we hold a veto over their Venezuelan dreams. But they also want us disarmed because they hate us, and they yearn to break us and humiliate us and make us give in. When you own a weapon and can defend yourself and your rights, you are a citizen. When you do not, you are a subject. Your dignity gnaws at them.
They want to convince you to submit, but that only happens if you allow it. Their tool is the narrative, but a proud American with courage and a rifle just shot their narrative dead. And that’s the real reason the gun grabbers are grieving.
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/hypocrisy-obama-clinton-long-history-meddling-foreign-elections/
Hypocrisy: Obama, Clinton Have Long History of Meddling in Foreign Elections
1: Team Obama tried to defeat Bibi Netanyahu in Israel
2: Team Obama tried to bring down the right-of-center government in Macedonia
3: Team Obama built up the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and helped to overthrow Hosni Mubarak
4: Bill Clinton helped Boris Yeltsin stay in power in Russia
5: Barack Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod tried to help Labour win elections in Britain
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http://thedeclination.com/the-cultural-borg/
The Cultural Borg
by Dystopic | Nov 15, 2017 | Culture War, Decline
We are the Cultural Borg.
You will be assimilated.
Existence, as you know it, is over.
Lower your borders and surrender your guns.
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Your culture will adapt to service us.
Resistance is racist.
Democrats were celebrating in the months up to the election in 2016. The emerging demographic hegemony of Democrats had finally come. They could taste victory. The time of Socialism could begin, at last. Sure, they were more enthusiastic about Bernie than another stuffy old Clinton. Hillary was to the right of where the True Believers really wanted the United States to be, and she had snagged the nomination from the Bernie Bros with her iron grip on the DNC. But she would serve her time, and drive American further Left, and no Rightist would ever win that office again.
The election of Trump shattered those dreams, and destroyed the minds of many of the Hard Leftists since then. They’ve been raging, screaming, and lighting trash cans on fire, throwing a temper tantrum. After a year of this juvenile behavior, we’re seeing signs that they are reengaging. Some of the brighter ones have realized that nothing has really changed. Trump stood in the way of the final demographic transformation necessary to bring about a Socialist United States, but he was stymied by his own party and facing constant press opposition on a scale unheard of in our history. I don’t think even Nixon had it this bad.
And there was a day most of us would have accounted Trump a moderate Leftist. That’s how far things have gone off the rails.
I don’t know that America has another hail Mary pass like 2016 left in her. If Trump fails to stop the deliberate demographic transformation of America, it will result in full-on Socialism soon enough. A sufficiently bold amnesty plan combined with some resettlement could turn Texas blue, and that’d be the end. Democrats often complain of Republican gerrymandering, but this is projection. The Democrats don’t even have to redraw districts, they just bus in new Democrats, settle them in the district, and turn it blue that way. Gerrymandering with immigration and amnesty programs, in essence.
All this bleating about racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and why America is guilty of… whatever… it’s all just a ploy to bring about more Socialism and to wipe out existing cultures. They often accuse the Right of imperialism, colonialism, etc… but they are the ones shifting people around to political ends. If you can’t make Americans vote Marxist, import Marxists from someplace else. But they’ve also done the former to great degree, too. Education and media have long been bastions of Leftism. The current crop of 20-somethings is exceedingly Marxist.
Either way, the Cultural Borg will come for you. You will have to exchange your values for theirs if you are to survive. Bake the cake, cater the pizza, obey the government, give up your shit.
Up until now, Americans moved around to escape the Cultural Borg. If your neighborhood was going bad, if crime, drugs, and section 8 made their appearance, you sold at a loss, packed your shit, and moved someplace else. My father lamented that the neighborhood he grew up in is just a ghetto shithole now. A lot of Americans share this experience. I’ve seen it happen to an old working class neighborhood I once lived in, too. Now, it’s just another cesspit. But I moved to escape it. Talk to most regular Americans, and they have plenty of stories like this.
SJWs would probably say I’m racist for doing that, likening it to white flight or some such. But what do you do when the house a block down the street becomes a crack house? What do you do when squatters come in, and the shootings start? The Cultural Borg marches on. I’m sure they’ll eventually come for the neighborhood I’m in now.
They do this to whole cities, sometimes. Even whole states, in their own way. Once they turn a state blue, they’ll impose the usual formula of high taxes, high regulation, and absurd restrictions on things like cigarettes and fountain sodas. To escape the consequences of their own policies, drones flee to red states, and begin the process of turning them blue. Salt the influx with some illegal immigrants, some refugees, and a sprinkling of amnesty, and a new blue state is created. Repeat the process until no combination of red states could exist to pull off a Trump.
Oh, 2016 saw a reversal in some areas, most notably Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It was a truly amazing thing to witness. But look at the effort required to pull it off, the sheer balls on Trump to do what he did. I’ve never personally liked Trump. But I respect the hell out of him for doing something I didn’t legitimately think was possible anymore. It’s like for a moment, the Cultural Borg Collective was disrupted and there was a balls-to-the-wall effort to fight its pervasive influence.
I heard it said once, I forget where exactly (and I’m too lazy to look it up right now) that when you live in a culture, you forget you’re embedded in it. Like just a fish thinks of water as the normal state of being, like how we don’t have to be conscious of breathing air. What a lot of Americans have been feeling – and what I suspect was behind Trump’s surprising wins – is that the culture has changed so much it’s like dropping a freshwater fish into a tank of saltwater.
It’s not the same, anymore. SJWs celebrate this, of course. They like to extol the great browning of America. But by this don’t mean race, per se. To them, the virtue of a particular people isn’t in their culture, or their gifts, or any of that. It’s in their voting patterns. If Mexicans suddenly started voting Republican, Democrats would be demanding Trump’s wall tomorrow. So by celebrating the ‘browning’ of America, they are really celebrating the triumph of Socialism. Any Mexican, or member of any minority really, who doesn’t want Socialism is, of course, a race traitor or an Uncle Tom, or some such.
It is the culture the new Borg are after. They want to erase any and all cultural elements that are incompatible with Socialism. They want an all-powerful, omnipresent government to run everything. We’re fast approaching a point where fleeing the influence of the Cultural Borg won’t work anymore. Only in the rural areas is their rule still openly scorned. In the suburbs, people have to at least pretend to be Socialist-lite. And in the cities, if you are to the right of Stalin, forget it. Even then, they’ll come out to some pizza shop in the sticks to ask about gay wedding catering services in an effort to paint them as unBorgified, and in need of assimilation.
The Borg either assimilate you, and convert you into Borg yourselves, or they get rid of you. Think about that before consider caving in to more gun restrictions. You’re probably going to need them sooner or later.
More and more, the old guard establishment wings of both parties are starting to look like merely a bunch of Trotskyites. Maybe not quite as bad as their Hard-Left brethren but still sympathetic to Marxism, in the end. A lot of people were happy about Donna Brazile’s revelations of Hillary’s cheating, and control of the DNC. But to me, this looks like bad news. Yes, we get to watch the Clintons squirm, which is always fun. But it means the Trotskyite wing of the party is collapsing. The Hard Left, the Antifas, the BLMs, the “Democratic Socialists”, and the outright open Communists are gaining control.
In the ordinary course of American politics, this would alienate them from the moderates, but these days the moderates are often guilted via weaponized empathy into buying into the Hard Left SJW agenda. If you don’t hate white people, and constantly bitch about white men, you’re probably racist against [insert any other race here]. If you don’t agree with the Hard Left’s demands for demographic transformation, you’re a bigot of some stripe or another. This holds even if, paradoxically, you are one of the sacred victim groups yourself. A Clarence Thomas is as likely to get hit with it as a Rand Paul. Stop manspreading you Uncle Tom self-loathing racist Islamophobe.
It’s the deliberate dismantling of Western civilization in the attempt to remake it into a global Orwellian Socialist technocracy. It used to be that if your country fell under the Marxist bootheel, you could escape here, as my father-in-law did, and as many others have. It used to be that as it crept into America, you could leave the blue state for a red state. You could stay a step ahead of the Cultural Borg. Now, there’s really nowhere left to go. The Cultural Borg, meanwhile, continue marching on. And they are showing signs of adapting to Trump’s weaponry. I don’t know how long his rhetorical combativeness will continue to work on them.
The Cultural Borg think resistance is futile. Or, perhaps, resistance is racist. It’s up to us to disabuse them of this notion.
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"Now, there’s really nowhere left to go"
maybe Greenland , Antartica , or Pitcairn Island
Lenin got what he wanted though not the exact model he was thinking - A world wide socialist revolution.
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"Now, there’s really nowhere left to go"
maybe Greenland , Antartica , or Pitcairn Island
They will find you and rule you there too. Bake the cake, pay for other peoples' gender changes and turn in your weapons.
Borg - devours everything in its path
http://www.yourdictionary.com/borg
"I’ve never personally liked Trump. But I respect the hell out of him for doing something I didn’t legitimately think was possible anymore."
Isn't that the truth. He wasn't better than the other candidates but there was something about him - he didn't let himself get put in the defined labels and categories of politics.
Trump opened a door but the world still badly needs new leaders and new direction.
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https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chappaquiddick/
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Just as various elements of the Left are disowning Bill Clinton now that he sits powerless, various others are stepping forward to say that a powerful man abusing a woman should be judged by his power, not his behavior.
A typical letter to the editor, Mpls Startribune: "I must balance that against the good he has done in the intervening years, the good he does every day, and the good I hope he will continue to do in fighting against bad public policies and officials and in supporting public policies I believe will continue to make America a great and compassionate nation."
http://www.startribune.com/readers-write-sen-al-franken-republican-tax-cuts/458344533/
In other words, the good he is doing excuses the bad.
Ask Whoopi [re Roman Polanski], "It wasn't rape rape."
https://jezebel.com/5369395/whoopi-on-roman-polanski-it-wasnt-rape-rape
This was really just 'First Base Rape', or whatever base forced kiss and groping boobs is.
They could just say that joking about touching women in their private areas is nothing except they just finished a year of saying it was a complete disqualifier for any kind of respect much less public office.
Al, maybe you can explain to us all how it was funny.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/17/im-a-feminist-i-study-rape-culture-and-i-dont-want-al-franken-to-resign/?utm_term=.df2d09f3a5e4
" I don’t believe resigning from his position is the...consequence...that’s best for American women."
Looking for leftist hypocrisy is really just a matter of reading the news.
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THAT’S NOT AN ACCIDENT: Andrea Peyser: #MeToo has lumped trivial stuff in with legitimate sexual assault.
Conflating these serves two agendas: It dilutes genuine assaults by powerful Democrats, while supporting the feminist agenda that all men are abusers
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Apple’s vice president for diversity and inclusion had transgressed the catechism of political correctness by saying a group of white people could bring diversity because—imagine this—white people can actually be different from one another and have different experiences and perspectives:
"And I’ve often told people a story– there can be 12 white blue-eyed blonde men in a room and they are going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation. The issue is representation and mix and bringing all the voices into the room that can contribute to the outcome of any situation. So I focus on everyone. . ."
Even though Denise Young Smith, Apple’s diversity doyenne, apologized profusely, she is now gone as Apple’s VP of diversity and inclusion after only six months on the job.”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/11/only-one-kind-of-apple-apparently.php
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5093985/Apple-s-diversity-chief-steps-six-months-job.html
Why not fire all white males and hire all women and minorities if that kind of diversity is your goal rather than experience, competence, creativity. Let your competitors hire all those white males who built the best product and most valuable company in history.
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" I am for watching the Democrats squirm in their hypocrisy. "
Absolutely
Bill was one of the worst Presidents - not above average. He diminished the dignity of the office (nd the Dems helped him along).
Now only since they want to "get " Trump are they feeling remorse.
To see articles in the NYSlimes that state that his party should have forced Bill to resign NOW is so pathetic.
They have NO shame. None of them .
I watched the panel clip of yestereday's "This Week" and watched them squirm. (minutes of my life I will never get back)
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/11/19/this_week_roundtable_combatting_sexual_harassment_in_multiple_industries.html
They went through all the points, these incidents are all different. We must believe the women. This has nothing to do with 'jersey' you wear. Trump has no moral authority to do anything on this. We must all join hands and stop this. Even the token Republican Lanhee Chen, who I like, said R's are better off to lose the senate seat in AL and work with a majority of 51 rather than be asked about Roy Moore every day, every minute.
Then came the awkward mention of Bill Clinton. They played the Gillibrand clip. Even she hesitated; it is about what to say now. No one in the Clinton political camp turned on him then. Three credible allegations of forcible rape. Believe the women. Whatever. These are different times? No they aren't. Stephanopolous had NOTHING firsthand to say, like regrets. Stephanie Cutter said she worked for him for 8 years in her career formative years and now is struggling to deal with that.
On the other side of it they (Mathew Dowd) speak of Anita Hill like she was treated badly. I thought it was obvious she was lying. Anita Hill didn't side with the accusers of Clinton. War Room and Stephanopolous' role in trashing the accusers, unmentioned. They have all the answers until it confronts them. Then they are as partisan and two faced as it can get. The good of abortion makes up for the bad of rape to them.
------------------
Wrong in this among so many other things is 'believe the women'. When timing and motive are suspect and evidence and credibility are missing, believing accusers does not blindly come ahead of innocent until proven guilty and due process.
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/52505
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amazing how liberal lawyers will spend all day telling us why Bill or Hill are not guilty of laws but spend all day telling us why Trump is:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-mueller-primary-target-flynn-151719935.html
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The long knives for Billary now are to:
a) get the inconvenient Billary out of the way; and
b) prepare the way to go after pussy grabbing Trump.
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/image0062.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/image0062.jpg
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:lol: :lol: :lol:
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http://thedeclination.com/bigotry-the-ultimate-sin/
Bigotry: The Ultimate Sin
by Thales | Nov 28, 2017 | Marxism, SJWs, Weaponized Empathy |
Bigotry is the ultimate sin in modern American Leftism. Racism and sexism are the most commonly cited varieties, of course, but other permutations exist. Homophobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia, ageism, and presumably a whole host of other possible violations.
Being the ultimate sin provides the Leftist with a moral club with which to browbeat his opponents. If one accepts the proposition that these are the worst sins of humanity, and one also accepts the proposition that all humans are biased (which is true – humans categorically cannot be fully objective), then everyone is guilty of the ultimate sin. Weaponized empathy is then applied. You are guilty, look at all the horrible things that happened in the world, which are now your fault because you’re guilty of the ultimate sin.
Redemption is only possible through the application of Progressive policies. Give up your wealth, give up your possessions. Surrender your country, vote the way the Progressive technocracy wants. And even then, the intercession through political submission is only temporary. Tomorrow you will still be a racist, and more will be required of you.
Take this Leftist example on Twitter. Admittedly, he is not exactly the brightest bulb even in the ordinarily dim Progressive world. But does a nice job of illustrating this view of the Ultimate Sin ™.
thales2
Read it very carefully. “Someone who is not racist is a better person than someone who is.” And then our intrepid Leftist attempts to escape by taking issue with my application of “a tad.” The application, of course, was very deliberate, as was my example. We’ve already had plenty of real life examples of highly intelligent, useful, inventive people being tarred and feathered because they were deemed guilty of the Ultimate Sin ™. Remember the case of Brendan Eich? Remember Tim Hunt? So a man can do something, accomplish something great, but everything is rendered null and void with even a minor violation of the Progressive narrative. You could cure cancer, but if you made a joke about “chinks” you’re now accounted as lower than every person Progressives see as not-racist.
Let me rephrase that a bit. The person Progressives deem as not-bigoted (and this is a temporary license which can be revoked at any time) is automatically a better person than some of the brightest, most accomplished people in history.
Worse, bigotry is seen as a binary state with them. You are either bigoted, or you are not. Gradations are meaningless. The man who makes a politically incorrect joke about “wetbacks” is as evil as Hitler, because both are “bigots.” This is one of the convenient tools of Antifas who see Nazis in their breakfast cereal, all Ultimate Sinners are bigots, all bigots are Fascists, all Fascists are Nazi, all Nazis are Literally Hitler. They misunderstand why Hitler was evil. He wasn’t evil because he didn’t like Jews, he was evil because he killed them by the millions. It is the physical action not the thought which rendered him evil.
Progressives lump both into the same category and call it all bigotry, but one of these is not like the other. If you have a bad thought you must feel guilty for the thought. If the badthink turns into speech, you are a Nazi, because speech is synonymous with physical action (except when they are talking, in which case it isn’t). They are like Neo in The Matrix, dodging sense and consistent definition like the protagonist dodged bullets.
Everybody has inappropriate thoughts of some kind or another. The sensible person dismisses them and does not allow them to unduly affect his life. He need not feel guilty about them. He merely needs to not act on them. Do not allow weaponized empathy to hijack your brain and make you feel guilty for bad thoughts (some of which aren’t even bad in any objective sense – they are just un-PC). Do not fall into the trap of bigotry as the Ultimate Sin ™. And certainly there is no need to submit to Progressives so that they may conduct intercession for you or grant you a temporary, revocable license as a non-bigot.
Consider the extreme endpoint of the Progressive train of thought. An equal-opportunity murderer is better than the man who cures cancer but makes a politically incorrect racial joke. The Marxist roots of this line of thinking should be evident by now. It’s the same strain of ideological madness that led to Communist regimes prioritizing political criminals over violent ones. Fidel Castro released many murderers and employed them as guards and executioners for political prisoners. After all, the murderer is better than the political opposition.
Progressives think this is getting to the root of the problem; that by attacking the thought, the bias, they are somehow curbing the action. Except that this doesn’t work. Controlling thought at this level is impossible short of deliberate brainwashing; short of making everyone functionally identical drones. The proper way of heading off bad behavior is to not act on something inappropriate. When a man gets mad at someone over something small, he may think about beating the stuffing out of that person. But should he act on the thought, or dismiss it and calm himself down?
This is part of simple human maturity. The Progressive must treat humans as children, incapable of walling off thought and action; that each thought must turn into corresponding action, so one must be constantly on the lookout for biases, wrongthink, or otherwise. Some of the smarter ones attempt to escape this trap by (truthfully) admitting that this isn’t actually possible. But then they turn around and say we must now compensate for these implicit biases; for these thoughts. They believe that the thoughts must somehow be turning into unconscious actions that are small and immeasurable as single units, but still causing a collective effect. Since clearly [insert demographic group here] are worse off than another, the Progressive might say, we must compensate for the difference, because the cause of the difference must be collective wrongthink; collective bias against [demographic group].
There is an unfounded assumption baked into that: namely, that such small, unconscious actions are the primary cause of such inequity. Many other explanations exist. With the famous “77 cents on the dollar” comparison with women, different personal career and life choices probably play a role. With regards to black people, Thomas Sowell points to the welfare state as the primary cause. He has explained that by subsidizing the destruction of the black family, the black middle class has been wiped out, and this, accordingly to him, has resulted in the inequity. Some suggest nutrition and dietary choices play a role; that people who eat like crap don’t develop as well. Others suggest general biological differences as another possibility (and not merely racial – but also sexual). Progressive brains explode into rage at the mere hint of this notion. It is considered beyond the pale to discuss. Cultural differences are also often cited, with the famous Asian stereotype being a common example (“you study to be doctor NOW!”).
Point is, whatever the reason(s), the Progressive assumption is that it must be the fault of wrongthinking bigots, and we must transfer their ill-gotten, bigoted gains to the poor, oppressed people of… whatever. Naturally, as intercessors on your behalf (and they get their cut, accordingly), you must submit to their will, or your non-bigot license will be revoked and you will be considered worse than literal murderers.
Because bigotry, you see, is the Ultimate Sin ™.
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https://medusamagazine.com/i-created-medusa-magazine-and-i-am-shutting-it-down-because-feminist-stupidity-has-surpassed-satire
Yes, satire has become impossible in 2017.
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http://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhle/watch/the-mythical-3-gdp-growth-954314307998
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http://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhle/watch/the-mythical-3-gdp-growth-954314307998
Well, if Obama couldn't do it, it must not be!
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proven totally wrong. But after she gives political speech to Harvard who I am sure adore her attempted FU to Trump:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/04/sally-yatess-rebellion-ends-whimper/
Gee I wonder if someone at DOJ refuses to carry out the boss's orders would have been invited as speaker if it were their beloved Obama who was boss at the time. :x
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proven totally wrong. But after she gives political speech to Harvard who I am sure adore her attempted FU to Trump:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/04/sally-yatess-rebellion-ends-whimper/
Gee I wonder if someone at DOJ refuses to carry out the boss's orders would have been invited as speaker if it were their beloved Obama who was boss at the time. :x
They are not "resisting" Trump, they are violating their oaths to the Constitution.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-vegas-transplants-20171203-story.html
Column They're leaving California for Las Vegas to find the middle-class life that eluded them
Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations for those who leave California. It’s close, it’s a job center, and the cost of living is much cheaper. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Steve Lopez S
The rent steals so much of your paycheck, you might have to move back in with your parents, and half your life is spent staring at the rear end of the car in front of you.
You’d like to think it will get better, but when? All around you, young and old alike are saying goodbye to California.
“Best thing I could have done,” said retiree Michael J. Van Essen, who was paying $1,160 for a one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake until a year and a half ago. Then he bought a house with a creek behind it for $165,000 in Mason City, Iowa, and now pays $500 a month less on his mortgage than he did on his rent in Los Angeles.
Van Essen was one of the many readers who responded in October when I reached out to people who got sick and tired of the high cost of living in California. I heard from someone in Idaho and others who moved to Arizona and Nevada.
Solid recent data is hard to come by, but 2016 census figures showed an uptick in the number of people who fled Los Angeles and Orange counties for less expensive California locales, or they left the state altogether.
“If housing costs continue to rise, we should expect to see more people leaving high-cost areas,” said Jed Kolko, an economist with UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations for those who leave California. It’s close, it’s a job center, and the cost of living is much cheaper, with plenty of brand-new houses going for between $200,000 and $300,000.
So I went to Sin City to see whether, when you add up all the pluses and minuses, there is life after California.
Cyndy Hernandez, a 30-year-old USC grad who grew up in Fontana, says the answer is yes, absolutely.
“It’s easier to live here and have a comfortable lifestyle,” said Hernandez, a community organizer with NARAL Pro-Choice Nevada.
Cyndy Hernandez chose Las Vegas over California to save money on housing
Cyndy Hernandez, a 30-year-old USC grad who grew up in Fontana, moved to Las Vegas because of the cheaper housing costs.
I visited Hernandez in the two-bedroom, mountain-view “apartment-home” she shares with a roommate. Each pays $650 a month in a gated development with free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool and cabana-shaded deck, fitness center, media room and complimentary beverages. It’s like living at a resort.
Like other transplants I spoke to in Nevada, Herndandez didn’t want to leave California. It’s home. It’s where she went to school and where her parents still live in the house she grew up in. But unless you choose a career that will pay you a small fortune to manage costs driven higher by a stubborn shortage of new housing, California is not a dream, it’s a mirage.
Moving to get a better job or move up the workplace chain is nothing new. But what’s going on here seems different — people leaving not for better jobs or pay, but because housing elsewhere is so much cheaper they can live the middle-class life that eludes them in California.
After college, Hernandez worked as a congressional staffer in Washington, D.C., and then went to Chicago for a few years. But the West drew her back. Not California, but Nevada, where she worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in Las Vegas and then joined the staff of a state legislator in the state capital.
“I started looking at the bigger picture in Carson City, where I was able to pay the rent, have a car and a comfortable life and put some money into a 401(k),” Hernandez said. “Would I be able to do that in California? Probably not.”
She moved to Las Vegas in June, enjoyed exploring the city beyond the Strip and made new friends, and her financial stress melted away in the desert sun. Now she’s saving up for a house, which she doesn’t think she would ever have been able to do in California.
Hernandez connected me with Arlene Angulo, 23, who grew up in Riverside, worked as a cast member at Disneyland, loved the L.A. culture and got her teaching credential at UC Riverside. She had her pick of two teaching jobs — one in the Los Angeles area and one in Las Vegas.
“L.A. would have been my first choice, and I didn’t want to have to leave California,” said Angulo, an English teacher who understands basic math. She knew that on a starting teacher’s salary, “I couldn’t afford to stay there.”
In Summerlin, a Las Vegas suburb, Angulo and a roommate each pays $600 for a big three-bedroom apartment. Angulo is in graduate school at the University of Nevada Las Vegas while teaching by day, and said she’s going to start saving up to buy a house in the area.
Jonas Peterson enjoyed the California lifestyle and trips to the beach while living in Valencia with his wife, a nurse, and their two young kids. But in 2013, he answered a call to head the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, and the family moved to Henderson, Nev.
Jonas Peterson
Jonas Peterson, in front of a billboard promoting Las Vegas, moved to Henderson, Nev., with his family from Valencia. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“We doubled the size of our house and lowered our mortgage payment,” said Peterson, whose wife is focusing on the kids now instead of her career.
Part of Peterson’s job is to lure companies to Nevada, a state that runs on gaming money rather than tax dollars.
“There’s no corporate income tax, no personal income tax...and the regulatory environment is much easier to work with,” said Peterson.
Some companies have made the move from California, and others have set up satellites in Nevada. California, a world economic power, will survive the raids, and it will continue to draw people from other states and around the world. Its assets include cutting-edge tech and entertainment industries, major ports, great weather and dozens of first-rate universities.
But the Golden State is tarnished and ever-more divided by a crisis with no end in sight, and this year’s legislative efforts to spawn more housing for working people lacked urgency and scale. Slowly, steadily, and somewhat indifferently, we are burdening, breaking and even exporting our middle class.
Breanna Rawding, 26, felt the squeeze. She grew up in Simi Valley and until recently worked in Anaheim as a marketing coordinator, but lived in Burbank because family friends let her stay in a tiny backyard cottage for just $400 a month.
Breanna Rawding
Breanna Rawding, 26, manager of marketing communications of Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, spends time with her dog Bodie in her apartment in Las Vegas. She moved from Burbank to escape a long commute. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Her commute, by car and train, took between 90 minutes and two hours each way. She wanted to move to the Platinum Triangle area, near her job, but scratched the idea when she saw that studio apartments were going for as much as $1,700.
Rawding endured the commute, as well as a long-distance relationship with a boyfriend who was raised in Torrance and went to UCLA, but lived in Las Vegas. There, he could afford a nice apartment on his teacher’s salary, and he recently signed papers to buy a house in a new development.
“I didn’t want to leave California. I love the weather, I love the outdoors, I love my family and friends,” said Rawding, a Chapman University grad.
But in California she saw a future in which she’d be trapped, indefinitely, by high rents, ridiculous commutes, or some combination of the two.
“I saw articles about millennials leaving California because they were never going to be able to have houses they could afford,” she said.
In June, everything changed for Rawding.
She got a marketing communications job with the Global Economic Alliance in Vegas and rented a lovely $900-a-month apartment that’s so close to work, she goes home at lunch to let her dog Bodie out. And it’s near her boyfriend’s place.
Nevada’s gain, our loss.
California, the place where anything was possible, has become the place where nothing is affordable.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know , , ,
:-D
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know , , ,
:-D
States have political differences by design but you shouldn't have to leave your home anywhere in America to live in Freedom.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know , , ,
:-D
States have political differences by design but you shouldn't have to leave your home anywhere in America to live in Freedom.
You shouldn't. But increasingly, you have to.
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313 million google results on the women should be believed, including Hillary Clinton:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/14/hillary_clinton_women_should_be_believed_when_they_claim_rape_have_to_increase_prevention.html
(Roy Moore supporter?) Al Franken put it just a little buit differently: "The women deserve to be "heard".
Sounds about the same, right? Not exactly news or cutting edge post-1913 that women deserve to be heard...
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Who do these H wood jerks think they are kidding ?
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/anita-hill-anti-sexual-harassment-commission-hollywood/2017/12/16/id/832144/
I don't suppose this committee will eventually recommend Trump resign?
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CNN looks to China as the model we should admire. :roll: And of course the "tax cut for the rich" phrase is in there. And the "trillion dollars added to the debt" phrase (as if it is the government's money to start with and the wealthy are confiscating it from them) that was never mentioned while Brock nearly doubled it:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/02/opinions/gop-tax-plan-brainless-sachs-opinion/index.html
Today Trump gets to shove it in their faces . He body slammed em again. :-D
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As I argued with a liberal friend recently over tax rate cuts and the US having the highest corporate rates in the world the thought occurred to me, why did this happen? How did it come to be that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we had the most burdensome business taxes in the world - just as the economy had become the most globalized ever? But this happened and it worsened under Democrats watch and their refusal to deal with it cost them power.
This argument is documented by the fact that corporate tax rates are 80% higher than the OECD average in states like mine, MN or NY, Calif, etc., while other countries were cutting their rates. 4700 companies nationwide have left the US. https://businessroundtable.org/sites/default/files/EY%20BRT%20Cross-border%20MA%20report%202017%2009%2007%20FINAL.pdf
My liberal friend wrote back to me, " This may surprise you but I agree with you on the corporate tax side of it", and he included a New York Times link, "The Right Way To Cut Corporate Taxes" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/opinion/corporate-tax-cuts-gop.html
The piece is misguided in several ways, but one point they make is crucial:
If Republicans worked with Democrats, they could reach a compromise to lower the top corporate tax rate to between 25 percent and 28 percent, eliminate loopholes and reduce the incentive businesses have to take on debt, rather than to use equity to expand.
But that applies the other way around as well. From a Democrat point of view, this whole debacle didn't have to happen. They didn't have to wait for Republicans to fix what was broken. They had their own obligation and responsibility to govern, not just transform us. Democrats gained power in Congress in 2007, the White House in 2009, had divided power starting in 2011 and in 2015, yet they let this economic waste happen under their watch until all the branches of government fell to their opponents' control.
A corporate tax rate reduction from this high rate costs us nothing. http://taxfoundation.org/article/economic-effects-adopting-corporate-tax-rates-oecd-uk-and-canada
We left our marginal rate at 35% while the rest of the world was lowering theirs and we were only collecting 18.1% from it, the "effective" rate. That is the measured rate at which corporations no longer jump through hoops to avoid the tax.
During President Obama's second term, Sen. Chuck Schumer worked with moderate Republican Rob Portman on a corporate tax rate reduction that could have passed with bipartisan support and the negotiations failed. It wouldn't have cut the rate all the way to 21% and it wouldn't have ended the treasured state and local deduction. It could have been done along the lines of the NYT advice above. It failed because President Obama, among others, had a different view. They wanted to penalize companies for leaving, not repair the rate disparity. http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/213780-republicans-block-bill-to-end-tax-breaks-for-outsourcing
While we focused in the campaign on Hillary's 'damn emails' and Trump's crude remarks, this close election was actually determined by the stagnation of the Obama economy. President Obama was never able to muster up growth beyond an anemic 2%, he was never able to support a single pro-growth policy, and he explicitly didn't care about that. For him, punishing wealth came ahead of growing the economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJimLZRC9N8
Hillary embraced Bernie Sander's views and policies on economics, not her husband's. She did nothing to set herself apart from Obama's quest to transform us into some version of socialism rather than the rekindle the dynamic capitalism that fueled the economy during her husband's second term.
If you are on the moderate side of the Democratic party (if there still is a moderate side), you should recognize that this whole thing, the Trump Presidency, the Republican congress, and the loss of the state and local deduction - all of this did not have to happen!
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https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/democratic-sen-chuck-schumer-says-top-priority-for-next-year-is-giant-corporate-tax-cut/?comments=1#comments
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Mass extinctions - I think they were four . I believe one was due to volcanoes and others may to asteroid hits .
Next one is due to Donald Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-could-destroy-entire-human-133625198.html
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Mass extinctions - I think they were four . I believe one was due to volcanoes and others may to asteroid hits .
Next one is due to Donald Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-could-destroy-entire-human-133625198.html
Funny and pathetic.
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Mass extinctions - I think they were four . I believe one was due to volcanoes and others may to asteroid hits .
Next one is due to Donald Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-could-destroy-entire-human-133625198.html
Funny and pathetic.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/left-wants-talk-mental-health-lets-start/
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Twitter:
Al Gore
@algore
It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. http://ow.ly/Gdm230hAFv4
4:50 PM - Jan 4, 2018
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" Let’s start with the record five-plus feet of snowfall accumulation in Erie, Pennsylvania "
I ask , are there not multiple points on Earth where someone can measure the most, the least, the coldest, the driest, the wettest, the windiest on record and then hold these up as examples to declare , SEE I TOLD YOU SO!
If we had records to measure every single square foot on the planet I bet for the last several billion years we can point to records and screamm - this is due to Donald J Trump
(then add we need Opray - the OTHER O)
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ccp: " Let’s start with the record five-plus feet of snowfall accumulation in Erie, Pennsylvania "
BBC: Will snow become a thing of the past:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160127-will-snow-become-a-thing-of-the-past-as-the-climate-warms
14 ft so far where I skied in untracked all week, last week in British Columbia.
We skied Whitewater on 1/3 and Valhalla (back country) in the Kootenays Th-Sun.
http://bctvkootenays.com/2018/01/04/breaking-news-avalanche-injures-skier-near-whitewater-ski-resort-south-of-nelson/
http://bctvkootenays.com/2017/12/31/avalanche-buries-skier-on-kootenay-pass-in/
"On the date of the incident Avalanche Canada was rating the backcountry hazard as Considerable at tree line elevation, which is where the incident occurred. "
Maybe the snow is because of the warmth, lol. It should be -20 in Mpls for the morning of the playoff game this Sunday and the NFL commentary. Maybe they can get Al Gore or DR. Michael Mann in the booth to explain it.
My point with anecdotal BS is that people who say they remember it being colder when they were younger are talking about tenths of a degree over decades, not a humanly noticeable change, while the body is capable of functioning pretty well from -25 to +125?, a 150 degree range? without that much difficulty.
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mark-wahlberg-refused-christopher-plummer-020222004.html
I have one question
people may be drawn to a movie if Mark Wahlberg is in it but does any one care if Michelle Williams is replaced ?
He was able to demand 1 miilion and he got it because the produceres thought he was worth it.
Is Williams worth an extra mill? doubt it.
Maybe Angela Jolie ....... Maybe Streep but who ever heard of Williams before this free publicity ?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFv_v16Orqw
Sen barack Obama on illegal immigration
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I'm wondering if these words, her insensitivity and economic illiteracy will come back to haunt her.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/pelosi-tax-reform-wage-increases-bonuses-are-crumbs-pathetic/
Pelosi is famous for: 'we must pass the bill to find out what's in it.'
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/over-100-companies-giving-trump-bonuses-after-tax-victory-tsunami-building/article/2644944
Hundreds of companies paying thousands more to employees, crumbs. Wage stagnation for ten years, fairness.
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you parent slipped into the country illegally and delivered an anchor baby probably at taxpayer expense and now the richest man will help out the kids:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/jeff-bezos-jumps-into-dreamer-fight-with-gift-for-scholarships.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=3&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F01%2F12%2Ftechnology%2Fjeff-bezos-jumps-into-dreamer-fight-with-gift-for-scholarships.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
:x
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This site sometimes overstates things:
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/kamala-harris-went-to-bat-for-dirty-prosecutors-as-california-attorney-general/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/17/the-80-questions-white-house-reporters-asked-dr-ronny-jackson-about-donald-trumps-health/
:x
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psssssssst: Sanjay -> this is why the President is on aspiring and a statin cholesterol drug
Remember when Obama kept telling us his favorite food was "burgers" and probably coke.
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/01/17/watch-cnns-sanjay-gupta-diagnoses-donald-trump-heart-disease/
If Sanjay hasn't noticed, 70% of Americans are overweight
Very few 71 yo are as vigorous as Trump . In fact few people of any age are.
Could he have a heart attack tomorrow , sure. He ain't 20 years old. He probably had a stress test.
What is your point Sanjay? I can no longer take him as the rest of anyone at CNN seriously.
Actually they should not be worried about Trump's health. Wouldn't his death delight the LEFT beyond winning the lottery? Parties would be all over Hollywood and the msm news rooms.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455590/hbos-final-year-samantha-power-reflects?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202018-01-20&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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It would be governmental chaos, if we did what we just did.
"You know we could do the same thing on immigration. We believe strongly in immigration reform. We could say ‘We’re shutting down the government. We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling until you pass immigration reform.’ It would be governmental chaos. "
2:52 on the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=172&v=yuCuuYUQFXM
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455674/final-year-review-obama-administration-foreign-policy-arrogant-naive
(from previous post0 In gallows and tragedy humor, this is a great read, important for people to know what failures they were and what rubbish we were fed.
The author accuses the Obama foreign policy team of being naive and arrogant. Then he proves those points over and over with stories and quotes. Quite amazing.
"Power travels to Cameroon to offer photo-op comfort to families terrorized by Boko Haram — only to have her motorcade kill a seven-year-old boy. The boy had run out into the road to gape at a helicopter pulling security for Power’s team of VIPs." [Tragic, but kind of symbolic of their reign.]
Ben Rhodes, speechwriter, novelist, upon hearing Trump won: “I mean, uh, I can’t even [long pause] I can’t, I ca— [long pause] I mean I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words. I don’t know what the words are.”
...
it appears that Rhodes, not Kerry, was running U.S. foreign policy in 2016, and perhaps for some time before that. At an event in Vietnam, for instance, Rhodes is seen giving orders to Kerry...
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Rhodes’ rhetorical trick, which he shared with Obama, was to use a favored trope of the center-right in service of knocking down a strawman.
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Rhodes is an arc man: There’s this Mighty Arc of History (™), see, and everything naturally bends toward it. (In Vietnam, Rhodes coaches Kerry how to talk about the trip: “I think the main thing for them is drawing the arc of progress
...
Kerry, after Russia breaks the ceasefire in Aleppo in 2016: “It’s just so frustrating because we really had an agreement that could have worked. And unfortunately we have some people [Putin] who didn’t want to cooperate.” [No kidding!]
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Power: “My world is a world where you have 65 million displaced. Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, you know, the list, Afghanistan, of course, Venezuela imploding . . . There are concerns about terrorism and there is a fear of the other and . . . all the trendlines — on democracy, right now, at least — are going in the wrong direction.” [Truth slips out.]
Thank God they are gone [for now].
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I dunno. If you ask me the racism these days is mostly from the LEFT:
https://www.bet.com/shows/angela-rye-sotu/content/photos/bet-news-presents-angela-ryes-sotu.html
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/jersey-official-resigns-uproar-over-racist-facebook-post-171502950--abc-news-topstories.html
oh, but he made joke about someone voting for OBama - therefore he MUST be racist. :roll:
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No Hillary was not one of the most hated and polarizing corrupt nominees in history
It was all the Russians fooling us to think that . We never got to see the "real Hillary". Oh yes CNN was right all along :wink:
https://www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeniable/
amazing how the media is trying to rewrite history.
What an onslaught of BS.
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" What Obama offered Harvard, the liberal think tank universe, and the media elite was the promise of power. A bigger government that managed more of its citizens’ lives would have greater need for experts to do the managing. At some point even independent “experts” stopped serving the country, or the cause of truth, and began serving the Obama administration."
I agree with this except it didn't start with Obama.
Harvard believes they should rule the world:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/27/harvard-magazine-targets-trump-claims-end-expertise-america/
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http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/03/just-coincidence-im-sure.html
(https://i.imgur.com/Eo7JQyn.jpg)
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russiagate-trump-putin-mueller-and-targeting-dissent-w517486
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who would have thought she would be back on some lib show? :wink: :roll:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kathy-griffin-shows-9-months-trump-photo-193433386.html
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/03/new-york-governor-andrew-cuomo-takes-part-anti-gun-die-protest-surrounded-armed-guards/
They are anti you having a gun.
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http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/03/new-york-governor-andrew-cuomo-takes-part-anti-gun-die-protest-surrounded-armed-guards/
They are anti you having a gun.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/14/bernie-sanders-anti-gun-speech-armed-guards/
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This was Hillary, but it is a central bragging point of the Left. The states (or counties) that the Dems win (in a losing election) account for 2/3rds of the GDP of the US.
"I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product,” Clinton said. “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, 'Make America Great Again,' was looking backwards."
Let's take that at face value. People who are "optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, produce more. People who are looking backward, stuck in their old ways, refusing to move forward or adjust to new circumstances - produce less and earn less.
But income inequality, worst in Dem areas and states, is the (pretend) economic enemy of the Democrats. Everyone should make the same, or make closer to the same, whether you work, study or smoke crack.
Actually income inequality is the fact of life that Democrats can always use to say their redistributionist efforts are still needed. People are not the same and will never will all be worth the same. They can only have equal outcomes under a totalitarian coercive government apparatus.
People such as in Democratic Silicon Valley who know how to invent, innovate, raise venture capital, start companies, build companies finance companies, hire people, and take those companies public and win global market share make more money than people who don't - because they add more value. People with a specific education and training who open blocked arteries make more money that people who open blocked kitchen drains, even if the time for the procedure is the same. People who put more money and time into the right kind of education and training make more money than people who don't.
But making more money because you deserve to is the OPPOSITE of Leftist rhetoric. They compare the 4th and 5th quintiles of income with the first or second groups and say this is wrong and unfair, even if they are pointing to the same person at different points in their life.
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My God
even wigs should be ok in a mug shut as long as face is visible
This is not religious freedom . This is public safety. Watch some court rule on the side of the hibabs. And they win damages courtesy of tax payers
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/muslim-women-hijab-nypd-mugshots-lawsuit_us_5aafe91ce4b0e862383a206b
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As written in the Elliott Abrams article last week (was that posted yet?), if the US indicated we knew the existence of the Syrian nuclear facility, they could move a kindergarden into it before we could bomb it and prevent its destruction.
Was the march yesterday the same strategy?
The march was standard leftism with (adult) sponsors that included the Democrat party, move-on.org, and believe it or not, Planned Parenthood. Yes, the nation's largest abortion provider sponsored the March for Lives! But mostly the theme was that this is students speaking, children, and they are victims of being shot at and losing their peers, still grieving and so on and cannot be refuted or argued with. Their view is valid even if they call you a mass murderer for disagreeing.
How different is that from moving a kindergarden into weapons factory to prevent your enemy from attacking it?
There is something awful and wrong with that. I wonder if they went too far and it will backfire or if it will mostly be forgotten and ignored.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/381946-michelle-obama-my-husband-was-the-good-parent-compared-to-trump
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I am sorry for his being in a concentration camp at the age of 5. Other then that this guy is a fool:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-apos-m-holocaust-survivor-133308232.html
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http://thedeclination.com/the-patriarchy-is-projection/
Read it all.
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The MSM reaction to this will be it is a "cynical move" IF they mention it all:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/04/13/trump-nominates-first-black-woman-lorna-mahlock-brigadier-general/
If Brock did this he would be hailed as Obama the Great with radio signals sent out in every direction into deep space.
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New Yorker:
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/04/New-Yorker-hed.jpeg?resize=768%2C155)
Oddly, Nate Bronze (Downgraded for 2016 predictions) gets this one right.
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/04/Silver-on-New-Yorker.jpeg?resize=768%2C337)
The company is "creepy" because they are Christian!
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/have-we-reached-peak-liberalism.php
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Big snow in MN this week and more coming. I can't get my own photo to post but this one tells the same story:
(https://swtransit.org/cms-files/size-992x992/cars-parked-in-snow.k.jpg)
Saturday I was stuck on a major route while driving an all wheel drive with snow tires because I did not have enough clearance and my state and county had given up on plowing during the storm. Meanwhile my 50 mpg Prius, way ahead of the CAFE standards, was buried in snow in the driveway, of no use in these conditions.
While the smart planners in government want to tell us what mileage cars should get, people that want to carry things and get places in all conditions are buying trucks, where those standards don't apply.
When you drive a car with 5 inches of clearance in heavy snow of 1-2 feet, the tires don't reach the ground and you don't get where you are going.
When they design a storm sewer, it isn't to handle the runoff of an average rain. It needs to accommodate the hundred year storm or else major damage results.
Many people want to get where they need to go in spite of weather and conditions. We had a family emergency last night while the authorities were saying stay home if you can.
Tradeoffs between vehicle function, size, weight, height, price, fuel economy and safety need to be left to the market in a free society, not decided by the bureaucrats and technocrats.
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(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/04/AK-47.jpeg)
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Left dissonance alert:
"former top Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, among others, wants their liberal allies to shut up about impeaching President Trump."
Axelrod tweeted recently: “Dems should NOT commit to impeachment unless & until there’s a demonstrable case for one…."
Eric Holder: “Ax is exactly right. ... Midterms should not be centered around questions of impeachment.”
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/04/13/democrats-are-eager-to-impeach-trump-heres-why-their-dream-could-backfire-big-time.html
---------------------
Democrat impeachment talk boosts Republican turnout, but it's hard to tell derangement syndrome victims to wait for an impeachable offense to impeach.
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who could get a flattering "documentary" from HBO. Obviously we know what is coming down the pike and we know the reasons for this:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/04/17/hbo-gets-special-access-john-mccain-documentary/
I can hardly wait for his self serving book coming next.
With Repubs like him who needs Dems?
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/men-arrested-starbucks-were-business-meeting-hoping-change-114103068--abc-news-topstories.html
they were asked to leave and were only arrested when they refused . Why could they not go outside and wait ?
or simply order a freakin coffee?
I have been advised in my lifetime not to loiter at a place of business when not ordering something. Indeed I have on occasion ordered something I really did not want just to justify my being there .
This whole thing is BS.
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Is this the incident that caused the racial bias day off?
I would like to see the store camera. In Phillie I'm guessing the people not arrested that morning were of color too.
The Onion has a take on that:
Impoverished Kenyan Coffee Bean Picker Can’t Wait To See What Starbucks Has To Say About Racial Sensitivity
Hat tip Glenn Reynolds
I have also met at starbucks and ordered something I didn't want as an excuse to occupy their chairs and tables. I did not know that because I am white, I didn't have to. Now they must be consistently mean to everyone or can we all just use their chairs, tables, heat, ac and wifi and not buy anything?
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"Now they must be consistently mean to everyone or can we all just use their chairs, tables, heat, ac and wifi and not buy anything?"
Starbucks , being Starbucks caved too early.
" I did not know that because I am white, I didn't have to."
I wish I knew that too. I could have saved a few dollars .
But that is the point. I am privileged, but just too blind or dumb to know it. :roll:
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The civil rights movement was about black people wanting to be treated like everyone else. Now, this is about demanding special rights.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/20/democratic-party-files-suit-alleging-russia-the-trump-campaign-and-wikileaks-conspired-to-disrupt-the-2016-election-report.html
don't piss off the intelligence community but what about the bar association.
The media
the Wash insiders
Academia
and the Democrat lawyers
I want a countersuit that the DNC, CNN, Comey Brennan, McCabe, Lynn, Obama, Clinton campaign conspired to damage a Trump Presidency against the will of the People .
Watch - > Sessions will do nothing he needs to go . We need a warrior. Not a nice guy (which he is !)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FvwMsb9CRg
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/5ad8ed808e6ae.jpeg?w=500&h=750)
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/5ad8ed8105f46.jpeg?w=500&h=386)
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/5ad8ed80e511d.jpeg)
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https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/black-coffee-starbucks-story-trash/
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https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/black-coffee-starbucks-story-trash/
From the article: these two jokers, according to their own version of events, refused to follow the store rules and make a purchase. They were asked to leave by the manager, Holly, a "social justice feminist." When they refused, she called the police and calmly reported, "I have two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave.” The police arrived and likewise asked the guys to leave and they refused to obey the police. So they were taken out in cuffs, though never charged.
"America is not racist. There are simply too many Democrats in American journalism. And they should stop acting like buffoons."
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psssssst : the recent Libby pardon was a covert message to Cohen. This is a big new revelation that should revolt everyone and be fron page news for the upcoming week:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scooter-libby-prosecutor-says-trumps-pardon-loyalty-message-cohen-171831238.html
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Dropped to 46%. Down 9 points in two years, that's nearly free fall.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/exclusive-democrats-lose-ground-with-millennials-reuters-ipsos-poll/ar-AAwx9Ja?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.
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That is very good news!
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That is very good news!
Yes! We haven't even started to reach these people and they are leaving the Left on their own. Same is true for blacks, gays, Hispanics and others. I hate group analyses and I think they do too.
Paraphrasing the rapper, you don't have to be Democrat.
If they will think for themselves and hear both sides, and they're starting to do that, then it comes back to us - with messages and messengers.
We have an aging population and people get more conservative with age. So why do they keep saying demographics are against us? Facts are against them.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/median-age.html
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now if only the rest of the Republicans can give them a reason to go right besides ( for some despite) Trump.
:-P
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The leftist plan is to flood the country with unassimiable 3rd world hordes that will eagerly vote for the dems. That's what they mean when they say the demographics are against us.
That is very good news!
Yes! We haven't even started to reach these people and they are leaving the Left on their own. Same is true for blacks, gays, Hispanics and others. I hate group analyses and I think they do too.
Paraphrasing the rapper, you don't have to be Democrat.
If they will think for themselves and hear both sides, and they're starting to do that, then it comes back to us - with messages and messengers.
We have an aging population and people get more conservative with age. So why do they keep saying demographics are against us? Facts are against them.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/median-age.html
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Following our coverage of young people leaving the Left, Michael Barone has a great, long, detailed article today documenting minorities leaving the Left.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/michael-barone-democrats-are-taking-minorities-for-granted,
Black vote for Obama (half-black, identified black) fell from 95% to 93% in 4 years, I would add to that with less enthusiasm. 4 more years later that dropped to 88% for Hillary with far lower turnout.
These small moves, 9 point drop with young voters and 7 point drop for blacks and 6 point drop for Hispanics (71 Obama down to 65% Hillary) make a big difference in close elections. Also the trend line matters if it continues.
Chance the Rapper: 'Black people don't have to be Democrats'
Confounding the minority voter analysis: Kanye West is re-tweeting Thomas Sowell today. ) !!
Hispanics as a group, and they aren't one group, put economic issues ahead of immigration. They are still majority liberal, 15-20 points to the left of the total in their state, but not out of the reach of the economic arguments Republicans need to make to all voters. Bring real, hard-earned prosperity to within their reach and their vote will not be all about welfare and free sh*t.
Meanwhile over in the new minority: [Barone] "Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent among white voters was the lowest Democratic percentage among that bloc since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot, and her fall to 28 percent among white non-college graduates may be the worst Democratic showing in that group in the party’s history."
-----
Not mentioned is that any national candidate who goes after the latter, white Trump voters, is going to be vehemently opposed by party activists and leadership.
The so called blue wave is not on a very clear or consistent path. Look for swirling seas ahead.
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Worthwhile read about real world Left failure
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/after-14-years-ive-had-it-im-leaving-seattle/
" millennials can forget about homeownership entirely."
" the most recent study last summer revealed that when the minimum moved from $11 to $13 an hour, low-wage workers lost about $125 per month. That means that the law raises costs for businesses and customers while actually harming employees it was meant to help."
"stubborn facts and a hurting middle class don’t seem to faze the City Council, which seems far more concerned about issues over which it has zero control — such as climate change and foreign policy — than it does about issues over which it has at least a modicum of control, such as the cost of living, homelessness, crime, traffic and potholes. For our City Council, virtue signaling is more important than governing."
-----------------------
Same goes for a whole lot of other Left-governed places.
Kudos to the Leftist Seattle Times of this Leftist city for publishing this dissent.
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https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2018/05/large-leftist-towns-are-high-priced-hoas.html
Now they are getting what they voted for, good and hard!
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https://apnews.com/1a17a392f53f4b719bac5933d13b2ebb/Tech-companies-not-hiring-blacks-despite-ownership-rates
If this is due to white supremacy
then why do we see so many Asians in tech the field ? :-P
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/what-kanye-cant-do.php
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/deafening-silence-around-police-violence-120132608.html
as always the Black customer was nothing more then a friendly pleasant customer who for no reason (other then Black) was picked on and abused and disrespected.
as usually the full true nature of the event is conveniently not shown or explained,
or the I phone video starts to roll only when police show up and have to confront a very confrontational or refusing to cooperate patron.
as though we are supposed to believe the customer politely complained about fee for plastic utensils and immediately had police called and they just walked in and threw her to the ground out of no where.
here we go again
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/battle-of-the-sexes-take-the-stairs-next-time.php
https://www.chronicle.com/article/he-makes-a-joke-she-isn-t/243350#.Wu_cS6KbQ_w.twitter
"Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College ended up in the same crowded elevator.
She offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator whom she described as mostly conference attendees. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” ... she wrote to the association’s executive director...forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code"
Take the stairs next time.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/battle-of-the-sexes-take-the-stairs-next-time.php
https://www.chronicle.com/article/he-makes-a-joke-she-isn-t/243350#.Wu_cS6KbQ_w.twitter
"Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College ended up in the same crowded elevator.
She offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator whom she described as mostly conference attendees. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” ... she wrote to the association’s executive director...forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code"
Take the stairs next time.
Weird, I thought feminism was about being strong. Sounds like she needs to find a strong man to guide her through life.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/05/16/daily-202-the-far-left-is-winning-the-democratic-civil-war/5afb5fe230fb042588799528/?utm_term=.8b5d5bd57d44
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summer vacations:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/25/3-reasons-americans-wont-take-a-vacation-this-summer.html
49 % cannot afford - > scandal - > because the 1% make then work too hard -> remedy - > law -> all people in American (illegals too) must have 2 weeks paid time off for vacation . If you don't work then taxpayer should pay for cruise to Cuba.
heavy on the sarcasm
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West Hollywood's gay mayor who presented his hero , Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford with "key to city" sued for sexual harrassment:
https://www.spartareport.com/2018/05/mayor-who-honored-stormy-daniels-settled-500000-sexual-harassment-claim-in-2016/
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It is not racist (or wrong) to compare Trump to an orangutan:
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQoov1ymZ2EN_I7YYEkjhQVJ5cUSSHesNuGU77TJh9J3V32xyu9Pg)
If it is racist to make a word connection between a black and a primate, isn't it also racist of the racism accuser to believe everyone should know about a similarity that does not exist?
Any disdain for Valerie Jarrett's problem is not reasonably directed to her looks, and her skin color to me is neutral to race:
(https://cdn.britannica.com/300x300/47/127447-004-8F4F4BB0.jpg)
Who cares about her race? Who even knew?
MS13 gang members are not comparable to "animals' in the wild. That comparison is unfair to animals who kill for survival, not sport.
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I take the usage of "animal" to mean "no longer deserving of human treatment or efforts at rehabilitation".
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I take the usage of "animal" to mean "no longer deserving of human treatment or efforts at rehabilitation".
Then it would be very appropriate to use for MS-13.
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The largest symbol of the cultural Left revolution in our lifetime is abortion, the elevating and glorifying of the right of women to not be a part of the reproductive necessity of our society and species up to the point of the 'right' to kill off their unwanted young.
Now the US and Europe follow Russian with non-replacement demographic trends.
The Left's answer to non-replacement demographics is mass immigration of those with opposite views and values to replace, destroy and end western culture and civilization.
See Michael Walsh's book, Fiery Angel, or listen to podcast with Steve Hayward at:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/the-power-line-show-ep-73-michael-walshs-fiery-angel.php
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Doug writes,
"The largest symbol of the cultural Left revolution in our lifetime is abortion, the elevating and glorifying of the right of women to not be a part of the reproductive necessity of our society and species up to the point of the 'right' to kill off their unwanted young"
I have posted that in the medical field's journals are more and more leftist political positions.
nothing but opposition to guns, LBGT issues, women's "rights", we need more women in this and in that, minorities are not represented enough and it is everyone else's fault etc.
The past issue of American College of Physicians there is an article about how women doctors are underpaid compared to men and even controlling for their choices (less hours more child rearing time, picking less time consuming fields , being employed with finite hours) they are not pain equal
then it goes on to tell us the difference is 5 thousand say out of 200 or thereabouts.
The point alluded to but not explicitly stated is that the difference can only (in my mind) be accounted for by disparities in ACADEMIC medicine with fewer appointments going to women (or maybe in corporate administration).
For the vast majority of doctors get pain by what the insurances pay , Medicare , Medicaid pays or through cash. Rates are not based on the sex of the provider.
So how ironic a light disparity would be from the very same Academics who run around spouting liberal policies
In the same issue the ACP's senior front man goes on to state how they cannot take any position without offended a significant portion of their membership ( you know the old woe is my excuse) but then proceeds to spout nothing but Democrat liberal dogma insulting all of us who are conservative.
I make this point here for this reason:
I have never seen an article in their journals that promoted the rights of the unborn. Never.
Indeed if anyone has a good well written piece that argues for the rights of the unborn I would submit it to test the veracity of what they claim. Would they be willing to publish a piece? I sincerely doubt. Liberals are ok insulting conservatives all day long and then claim free speech and science etc. But the other way around is never accepted.
I have decided not to renew my membership . I did not join so I can read an offshoot of Huffpost by snooty academics .
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Good points ccp. Very strange that Leftism permeates medicine, in addition to so many other fields, jounalism, academia, arts, government, law and (psuedo) science. Yet they can't seem to push past 50% support no matter how much they control the flow of information.
"if anyone has a good well written piece that argues for the rights of the unborn"
My short, definitive article paraphrases President Reagan but the plagiarism cannot be uncovered by a liberal-bias search engine.
Unborn rights fall under human rights for three reasons proven in Science. The unborn is 1) alive, without question, 2) human, with no doubt, and 3) possessing unique DNA provably different and distinguishable from both the mother, the father and all other humans.
Denial of Science is required to make born versus unborn the definitive difference in viability or anything else. Plenty of born humans such as newborns, disabled and elderly also require support of others for continuing life and plenty of unborns continue to live if removed from the mother without killing them.
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It's funny how quickly the Roseanne deal is old news. I had one more observation I didn't see mentioned anywhere else.
She tweeted a bad joke about Valerie Jarrett who is not obviously black and not Muslim being the result if ‘Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby’.
The world and the Left went nuts over "racism". The Left thinks black people look too much like apes to get anywhere near that comparison?
Apes don't have race, but fine. Apes are humanity's closest living relatives. In fact, people are apes.
https://www.livescience.com/51017-ape-facts.html
My problem is this:
Isn't comparison to Terror Group Muslim Brotherhood far more offensive than anything to do with God's natural creatures living in limited habitat of a planet dominated by humans?
The Obama administration, perhaps led by Valerie Jarrett, behind the scenes, were partners in crime with the Muslim Brotherhood:
http://www1.cbn.com/ibrahim-64
MB is a Terror Group: S.68 - Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2017
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/68/text?format=txt
Every Brotherhood chapter wants their local governments to implement Islamic law
(Anti-constitutional in America, anti-gay, etc.)
The Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, represented by Hamas, routinely uses terror tactics against Israel, which is why it is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State. The Egyptian Brotherhood conducted terror attacks against the Egyptian government in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/01/30/should-the-muslim-brotherhood-be-designated-a-terrorist-organization/
The intent of the Brotherhood is stated within its Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America; “The process of settlement is a Civilization-Jihad process…The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2953
But to VJ, the media and the Left, the problem with the nonsensical tweet never went past the peace-seeking primates. The jihad supporting terror group is their ally in the fight to tear down western civilization as we once knew it.
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The left is just fine with the MB and the destruction of western civilization. It’s a shared interest.
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I take a harder line on the Roseanne tweet.
Blacks achieve less than whites by certain criteria.
Why?
Possible answers include:
a) Racism, bigotry, etc;
b) the are dumber-- are halfway between gorillas and humans, just look at the physical similarities!
Roseanne's tweet calls to the latter.
As such it is nasty.
It is not the first time she has gone down this road, a prior tweet referenced AG Lynch's "monkey balls" or something like that.
Opprobrium was and is appropriate.
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quote author=Crafty_Dog
I take a harder line on the Roseanne tweet...
-----------
Agreed on all with the ape part, fair enough. Just saying the silence on the second part was telling. Wasn't the tweet offensive on both counts?
FWIW, my name translated means something like 'son of a [lesser ape]'. I offer some self deprecating humor when called out on it, most intelligent of the primates etc. I don't report them for a hate speech crime - but I'm not black. Or white. One sister calls me a knuckle dragging neanderthal, but that is another matter...
In the case of VJ, her intelligence is not suspect - to anyone.
[Nor are her looks. She is a fine looking and articulate 61 year old woman.]
Education Stanford University (BA)
University of Michigan (JD)
The right to fire is what went right in this whole, bizarre ordeal. If the employer wants her out and this is plenty of cause, out she goes.
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VJ's intelligence may not be in doubt, but her American loyalty may be. Refresh my memory someone about her parents and how she came to be born in Iran?
Regarding Roseanne's firing, somehow her racism got pinned on Trump even though she ran for the Green Party for President (do I have this right?) and supported Occupy Wall Street.
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"Regarding Roseanne's firing, somehow her racism got pinned on Trump even though she ran for the Green Party for President (do I have this right?) and supported Occupy Wall Street."
Right!
"...her American loyalty may be [in doubt]. Refresh my memory someone about her parents and how she came to be born in Iran?"
My understanding is that her parents were in Iran temporarily as teachers for at least ostensibly good reasons, neither of them Muslim and Iran was a US ally at the time, pre 1979. In other information below it seems that nearly all her male relatives at least were allegedly radicalized communists. The response to that: unfair to hold against her what others do or believe.
Essentially she was Barack Obama's brain or else his ideological clone if they are equals. Her loyalty would be exactly the same as whatever one thinks of Obama's, apologize for America, hold others' interests above ours and wants the US to be fundamentally changed from the inside out. It's wrong that we have the biggest military, and most wealth here is wrong. The first two hundred years or so we were a force of evil. Tony Rezko is mentioned but think of her as tied to all the radical connections from his past and still his closest adviser.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/06/communism-in-jarretts-family/
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.
Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.
According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.
Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”
It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.
JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett’s many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.
In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.
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That is the intel on her parents that I was thinking of. Thank you.
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https://quillette.com/2018/06/04/prison-house-political-language/
The Prison-House of Political Language
Read it all.
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https://quillette.com/2018/06/04/prison-house-political-language/
The Prison-House of Political Language
Read it all.
What a great documentation of what I have been calling Leftists stealing our language. He admits his own great list is but a teaser:
"This table might go on for pages, but just the few terms I’ve included do enough to demonstrate the subtle reframing of everyday terms to obscure radical ends"
There are SO many more:
Affordable means anything unaffordable, needing subsidy.
Clean energy means requires subsidy.
Universal access means requires subsidy.
Scandal projection, anything they say we are doing, they are doing.
Unemployment, not a measure of people not working.
Poverty, not a measure of the income of low income people.
Fairness, anything not fair.
Net neutrality means take the greatest private innovation ever and make it a government utility.
Choice = kill.
Consensus means can't be argued on the evidence.
Keep your doctor means lose your doctor, keep your plan meant lose your plan AND EVERYBODY KNEW IT.
Market will never recover means hang on to your seat, we're heading to new heights.
The new normal like slow growth means Leftist policies can't fix this.
First black President had a white mother from Kansas.
Muslim Brotherhood is a secular group.
A fundamental constitutional right should be safe, legal, and rare.
Roll back voting rights means to require ID.
Right to Marry means change the definition of the most successful human institution ever.
Parent One, Parent Two, Parent Three, Parent Four, we used to have just a couple of words for that, mom and dad.
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https://www.acponline.org/advocacy/acp-advocate/issue/article/734633
" "Women's health is linked to population health and policies that adversely affect women will adversely affect the population," said ACP President Ana María López, MD, MPH, FACP. "Women are not just men with breasts and ovaries, and we are still trying to advance science and learn more about women's health."
Well wait a second. I thought they were men who happen to have larger breasts and ovaries and no penis and testicles.
I am confused , which is it?
Answer : it is which ever is convenient for the LEFT at that moment in time or that particular cause.
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https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/wayne-allyn-root/commentary-on-democrats-walls-and-voter-id/
COMMENTARY: On Democrats, walls and voter ID
By Wayne Allyn Root Review-Journal
April 21, 2018 - 9:00 pm
Please ignore the advertising slogan “What happens here, stays here.” It’s not true. Las Vegas is the crossroads of America. What happens here is happening everywhere. And I’ve uncovered the biggest liberal scam in America going on right here in Las Vegas.
It revolves around my home community in Henderson. I live in Anthem Country Club. There are about 1,500 beautiful homes behind the gates of Anthem.
What’s the appeal of Anthem Country Club? It’s got a big, beautiful wall around it. And thick iron gates in front, protected by armed guards. There is virtually no crime inside walled, gated, armed Anthem.
I’ve lived here for almost 17 years. My kids grew up here. They played outside every day from morning till night, and I never worried for one moment. Because of the wall, the gates and the armed guards, my kids were as safe as if they lived in “Mayberry R.F.D.” Life is good behind the gates of Anthem.
In the rest of Las Vegas … not so much. In the rest of Vegas … lots of crime and fear. This proves walls, gates and armed guards are good if you want your family to be safe.
But wait. Anthem recently added a new feature to keep our residents safe. Drivers entering our gates must show a government-issued photo ID. Anyone entering our community — guests, gardeners, maids, nannies, pool cleaners, handymen, plumbers, electricians, delivery persons — must provide state or federal government-issued photo ID or they will be denied entry. Every single one of them.
There are many lessons we can learn from studying Anthem.
■ If you want your family and children to be safe, build a wall. Preferably a wall that is also surrounded by armed guards. The Vatican understands this lesson. Mexico understands — it has a wall on its southern border. Many rich liberals in America who live in gated communities — or gated private estates or buildings with doormen — understand this lesson, too. They just don’t want you to have a wall. They clearly think their children are more important than yours. They clearly think you’re stupid, as they argue walls and guns are unnecessary.
■ Liberal Democrats are hypocrites. Guess who lives inside the protected walls of Anthem Country Club? Harry Reid. You know, your former U.S. senator. The former chief water carrier for President Barack Obama, who spent his entire Senate career fighting viciously against a wall. Harry argued walls were terrible and unnecessary.
Harry could have retired anywhere in Vegas — or anywhere in America, for that matter. But he chose to live behind the walls … and gates … and armed guards of Anthem Country Club. Harry is my neighbor. Welcome to the neighborhood.
But, Harry, don’t liberals hate walls and gates and armed guards and photo ID? Don’t liberals call those things “racist”? Yet here sits Harry Reid and the entire Reid clan. Interesting.
■ The argument against Voter ID is a total scam.
How do all those gardeners and maids and pool cleaners and handymen drive through the gates of Anthem every day? The answer: They all already have government-issued photo IDs. So I guess it’s a lie when liberal politicians claim minorities don’t have photo IDs, or they’re too difficult for them to get or it’s “racist” to ask them for it.
I guess we just proved the liberal argument is a scam. Voter ID is an issue because liberals want election fraud. They can’t win without it. They want illegals to be able to vote by the millions for Democrats.
Folks, we’re being scammed. Anthem Country Club is the proof. What happens here is happening everywhere.
Contact Wayne Allyn Root at Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com. Hear or watch the nationally syndicated “WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show” from 3 to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now and at 5 p.m. on Newsmax TV.
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Liberals and hypocrisy: Busted. Again and again and again.
Nice post. I remembered the part of Harry Reid living behind the same neighborhood wall as Wayne Allen Root. The part about how the rich liberals all know that their maids and yard care workers will have no trouble presenting ID to enter the gate adds a nice touch to the story. Of course they need iD to enter; that is the point of the wall and the attended gate. They need ID for gun sales, a constitutional right, and they need ID to enter any DNC event. They need ID to get near their homes to work, no problem, but it is "racist" to require iD to vote.
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But you shouldn't need a valid ID if you are delivering pizza to a military base and when you don't have one and are found to illegal with a warrant out for not abiding by immigration laws and leaving the country as you were ordered to do - the libs show him with photos of his kids and tell as what a darling of the community he is .
And NY governor cuomo ( the lib as his old man) does not condemn the breaking of the law but those who enforce it.
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But you shouldn't need a valid ID if you are delivering pizza to a military base and when you don't have one and are found to illegal with a warrant out for not abiding by immigration laws and leaving the country as you were ordered to do - the libs show him with photos of his kids and tell as what a darling of the community he is .
And NY governor cuomo ( the lib as his old man) does not condemn the breaking of the law but those who enforce it.
Not only are Dem politicians exempt from the laws, so are their illegal alien supporters.
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On the Left, they try to tell the story that Trump is taking credit for a recovery that Obama started. Partly true but Obama couldn't get 2% average growth and Trump is approaching 3%, a 50-100% increase.
Ask the largest economic research firm in the world, The Federal Reserve Bank.
For more than 7 years out of Obama's 8, the Fed believed the Obama "recovery" was too nascent and fragile to risk raising interest rates above roughly zero, nominally 0.25%. As the Trump economic plan takes hold, the Fed is fearless with raises intending to restore interest rates back to 'normal'.
In other words, the Obama recovery was weak and the Trump recovery is strong,
according to the Fed and judged by their actions.
https://www.thebalance.com/current-federal-reserve-interest-rates-3305694
Update: NYT agrees with me?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/us/politics/federal-reserve-raises-interest-rates.html
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no longer the NFL but now the Democrat Football League
yea go ahead with your protests and of course lawsuits from Dem lawyers but we don't have to waste our money for these prima donnas which is surely what they are:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/14/fox-news-poll-political-correctness-has-gone-too-far-nfl-fumbling.html
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no longer the NFL but now the Democrat Football League
yea go ahead with your protests and of course lawsuits from Dem lawyers but we don't have to waste our money for these prima donnas which is surely what they are:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/14/fox-news-poll-political-correctness-has-gone-too-far-nfl-fumbling.html
Alienating your core audience is usually not good for business.
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"Alienating your core audience is usually not good for business."
Not smart but networks and newspapers do it all the time, lose half their audience and half their revenues to pursue an agenda.
DFL.org already registered as a Dem site: https://www.dfl.org/
I would call it Leftists Football League, separate out the well meaning, nation-loving Democrats who don't really hate their country - and might someday side with us.
"You Didn't Build That." Colin Kaepernick and the rest can use their fame gained through NFL to hold their own rallies, conferences, demonstrations, townhalls, buy billboards, etc.. Jack Kemp ran for office after football and made a difference.
The act of disrespect and contract violation is to do that while at work on their employer's dime. People didn't start paying big money to see football because of Colin K or politics, but they may keep patronizing the sport if people of great talent continue to play great football in ways that bring entire communities together as many teams have. What the anthem protesters are doing does not bring communities together nor add to the entertainment value. It measurably lost customers and business.
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/shakira-shocker-singer-stops-selling-necklace-bears-unintentional-resemblance-neo-nazi-imagery-192259002.html
I always knew that deep down in her heart Shakira was a viscous bigoted anti semite .
(heavy on sarcastic tone :roll:)
Unusual looking skin head though
probably has swastika tattooed on her rear end
and that is why she shakes it all around
(more sarcasm)
Let me go and ask some grammar school mates of hers and find out how craven she really is.........
Probably good thing I don't twitter.......... :lol:
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I know of this term since probably 6 yrs old and from old TV shows and maybe movies.
I admit I had absolutely NO IDEA it had anything to do with racism.
Never thought about it or knew anything about it.
Obviously the commentator who used it didn't either.
But the LEFT will use this to their advantage like they do anything that can be blown WAY out of proportion:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/365ac04a-0dab-3f72-9749-3cdde3af2b7e/ss_ex-trump-campaign-aide-hurls.html
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I know of this term since probably 6 yrs old and from old TV shows and maybe movies.
I admit I had absolutely NO IDEA it had anything to do with racism.
Never thought about it or knew anything about it.
Obviously the commentator who used it didn't either.
But the LEFT will use this to their advantage like they do anything that can be blown WAY out of proportion:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/365ac04a-0dab-3f72-9749-3cdde3af2b7e/ss_ex-trump-campaign-aide-hurls.html
I'm sorry, your race card is maxxed out.
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G M: "I'm sorry, your race card is maxxed out. "
Very Funny! And true.
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http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2018/06/26/nba-legend-oscar-robertson-asks-where-are-white-athletes-when-injustices-are-happening.html
Well I played some sports and am white.
I stand up now and speak out about the injustice of a Dominican gang stabbing to death a young man who simply went to the grocery store in the Bronx a few days ago!!
But no I don't need to take a knee during the anthem to do this.
Feel better Oscar?
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Give credit to the very few journalists and opinion writers who link the economics of Bernie and the American Left to the socialism in Venezuela and it's horrible, inhumane results. Nearly all of the media has been silent, in denial of the connection.
James Freeman, WSJ
Bernie Sanders and the Misery of Socialism
Will Democrats in the U.S. embrace ideas just as they fail again overseas?
"American media consideration of Mr. Sanders largely occurs without reference to the real-time failures of socialism in other countries." ...
"Meanwhile Venezuela’s tragic experiment in socialism is ending the way such experiments always do: with crushing poverty and violence." ...
"As for Democrats, even if this horrific history doesn’t give them pause, they ought to wonder who can get elected by promising to bring a sad socialist story to America."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-and-the-misery-of-socialism-1529959476
Richard patterson, Boston Globe:
Mr. Sanders “has sharp skeptics on the nonhallucinatory left.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/06/25/the-trouble-with-bernie-sanders/Na8UviG6x4P9lwKjk0eszI/story.html?mod=article_inline
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, WSJ
"If anything was more predictable than the mess created by Hugo Chávez’s Marxist Bolivarian Revolution, it is the pathetic effort by socialists to deny responsibility." ...
"Chávez was inaugurated in February 1999, in the midst of a recovery in oil prices and with the bolivar at 576 to the dollar. He tripled down on socialism, exacerbating a long history of destroying capital that would lead to today’s disaster."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-long-road-to-hell-1528652625?mod=article_inline
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It’s interesting to think about how impossible it would be to abolish profit without a level of police state authoritarianism that would make even their caricature of ICE seem like mall cops.
- Jonah Goldberg via tweet
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It’s interesting to think about how impossible it would be to abolish profit without a level of police state authoritarianism that would make even their caricature of ICE seem like mall cops.
- Jonah Goldberg via tweet
The left loves authority, just as long as it is theirs.
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"The left loves authority, just as long as it is theirs."
- Yes, trying to point out in as many ways as possible, they are pro-authority, their system requires authority, oppression. It's a feature not a bug. Stalin, Mao, Chavez, now AMLO, the people in political prisons in the hiermit kingdom, their proposals require state force to move things away from their natural human state of freedom and individualism. If you are pro-"equality" you are pro-totalitarianism. There isn't some kind, friendly, fair version of socialism anywhere in the world or in history except in their imagination.
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In Nov 2006, Dems took the House and Senate and control of Washington away from a lame duck Republican. They destroyed the economy but were able to blame it on Bush. By the time of the election of Barack Obama they had consolidated control of everything including complete political control of all growing demographic groups - and two Supreme Court picks. This political advantage was believed to be permanent. And then what?
They abused power and screwed up everything. They lost the House in 2010, never yet to get it back. They passed Obamacare with a cheated 60th vote and by deeming it passed, got the unconstitutional part upheld by calling a penalty a tax. Except for the delay of a couple of cycles in losing the Senate, the only election they really have won since then was Obama's cheated re-election.
They changed the rules of the Senate only to have it backfire in their face and now they are already protesting the Supreme Court nominee for being out of the mainstream - BEFORE HE OR SHE IS EVEN NOMINATED!
Assuming one thinks as all Dems do that Donald Trump is not the greatest man ever to be President, the underlying reason he won is because of weak opponents. Democrats didn't groom a leader to follow their two term President and they didn't even try to pick a western state or purple state governor to try to split the difference between Republicans and the rest of the country. They screwed up the Senate for minority opposition before they took the minority and they nominated a crook who has never succeeded at anything for the highest office to pick the next Supreme Court nominee if elected and lead the free world. Among other gaffes like not even going to Wisconsin, Hillary turned Trump into the moderate on illegal immigration, his most controversial issue.
And now they moan, scream, shriek and occupy what is not theirs.
In the Supreme Court confirmation process, they may pick off one or two republicans based on a mother's right to slaughter her young, but they also have to hold the vote against Trump and against upholding the constitution of 10 Democratic Senators running for reelection in red states where Trump won and is more popular now.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/susan-collins-supreme-court-abortion_us_5b3b5ff7e4b09e4a8b275b59
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/hawley-launches-website-on-mccaskills-supreme-court-votes
Good luck with that. They should've thought of that when they rammed O'care down our throats, ended the filibuster, let the world go to hell, and narrowed the Democratic Presidential choices down to a lunatic and a crook.
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Vox: "the American Revolution was a mistake"
I'd like to see this issue brought forward in 10 red states where Dem Senators are running for reelection.
1. Bad for blacks, we would have gotten rid of slavery sooner under the Brits. Wouldn't have needed a Civil War. Really?
2. The American revolution was bad for native Americans. Maybe we should still go back to Britain.
3. Brits have a better form of government. Parliamentary governments spend more.
It is rare that you see Leftists tell their real view. They would rather be governed from far away if it means that spending would be higher. I kid you not.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake
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They may have US citizenship, but they aren’t Americans.
Vox: "the American Revolution was a mistake"
I'd like to see this issue brought forward in 10 red states where Dem Senators are running for reelection.
1. Bad for blacks, we would have gotten rid of slavery sooner under the Brits. Wouldn't have needed a Civil War. Really?
2. The American revolution was bad for native Americans. Maybe we should still go back to Britain.
3. Brits have a better form of government. Parliamentary governments spend more.
It is rare that you see Leftists tell their real view. They would rather be governed from far away if it means that spending would be higher. I kid you not.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/5b3fa15e695a6.jpeg)
Let us know how that works out for you.
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They are also building a wall around the Obama Compound in Washington DC.
Do as I say, not as I do.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/obama-home-renovations
Surprisingly, twitter took down the picture of it.
"the Obamas' $5.3 million new home is getting some last-minute mandated security upgrades.
According to PopSugar, a brick wall is being built in front of the house—a development that seems a bit ironic given Donald Trump's promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. "
"Improvements" to a 3.5 million dollar home? I remember they had success in the private sector before going into 'public service' in the _______ industry. Oh, skip it.
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Dick Durbin on Meet the Press today
I will update this with an exact quote and a link when the transcript comes out. Will be interesting to see who else picks up on this.
Talking about the Supreme Court nomination expected, Roe v Wade and the pro-choice argument in terms like it is just families deciding what color to paint their living room ,Dick Durbin said, these are life and death issues, hesitating a little bit on the word death is he may have realized what he was saying that abortion is.
These are life and death issues. Yes they are!
Leftist gaffe is when they accidentally tell the truth. This was a doozy.
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"Child murder, oops, I meant to say women's healthcare!"
Dick Durbin on Meet the Press today
I will update this with an exact quote and a link when the transcript comes out. Will be interesting to see who else picks up on this.
Talking about the Supreme Court nomination expected, Roe v Wade and the pro-choice argument in terms like it is just families deciding what color to paint their living room ,Dick Durbin said, these are life and death issues, hesitating a little bit on the word death is he may have realized what he was saying that abortion is.
These are life and death issues. Yes they are!
Leftist gaffe is when they accidentally tell the truth. This was a doozy.
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Previously: Leftist gaffe is when they accidentally tell the truth. This was a doozy.
quote author=G M
"Child murder, oops, I meant to say women's healthcare!"
---------------------------------
Here is the quote and the link:
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-july-8-2018-n889676
"This court will decide the future of women's health care and the freedom of women to make choices about the future of their families. That is a critical decision this court will face. So beyond the procedure, beyond the gamesmanship, it is a life and death important decision to be made by this court"
- Yes, that's exactly what it is, a life and death decision, not the freedom of women to make choices about the future of their families.
If it was a decision about the future of their family, why would the power rest only in the women? Imagine if that power were granted only to the man.
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This unfortunately is his predictable starting point as the protest signs were all pre-printed for all of the short list candidates before a nominee was selected. But it begs a couple of questions:
1) Chuck Schumer, where is your mainstream? Justices who join a team instead of call balls and strikes?
2) What are you saying about your 5-10 Dem colleagues who are actively considering supporting him? Far right lunatics?
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agree with Doug.
It was sad to see the Trump announcement and the heartwarming speech he gave for the Judge and then Judge Kevanuagh give his impressive speech
and the high five to his youngest extrovert daughter and proud mention of the more quiet one THEB TURN to MSLSD and watch Mad cow trying to demolish him with he only is where he is because he took Garland's spot. That is their new attack mode - the seat was stolen.
Savage had a good point Ruth Ginsberg was the main lawyer for the communist ACLU and was nominated for Supreme Court in 1993 and the Repbulican held Senate still approved 97 to 3 (or something like that)
The Dems have turned everything about the nominations into a political slugfest.
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secret service needs to shut down this "exhibit" as a threat to a sitting President.
Yeah I know , free speech etc yadda yadda
Thousands were slaughtered this way by those Jihadist sadists with Isis . This is not artwork .
https://www.infowars.com/fck-trump-art-gallery-under-fire-for-isis-style-trump-beheading/
Can you imagine what would happen if this were Brock? The MSM outrage we would be seeing . Don Lemon and the rest of the gang.
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In what kind of world is it that Whoopi Goldberg is the respected host of a long-running, mainstream show and Judge Jeanine is a crazy guest from a fringe network?
https://pagesix.com/2018/07/19/whoopi-goldberg-and-jeanine-pirro-get-into-explosive-argument-at-the-view/
The strange thing about a Leftist in any argument is that their first sentence of their first argument contains a lie. Isn't Trump a bad enough guy that you could disparage him with the truth?
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" In what kind of world is it that Whoopi Goldberg is the respected host of a long-running, mainstream show and Judge Jeanine is a crazy guest from a fringe network? '
In the make believe delusional world of leftism.
I would love to see them in a bikini mud wrestling match over a few beers
My money is Justice J.
For her age she is hot. :-D
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Her voice irritates the hell out of me and mentally I find her to be a mediocrity, even when I agree with her.
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Her voice irritates the hell out of me and mentally I find her to be a mediocrity, even when I agree with her.
CD,
sometimes I know what you mean . Sometimes I feel that way about Hannity. I usually agree with both but they sometimes go a bit far .
In any case this is as close as we will get to mud wrestling so the rest is up to on's imagination:
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2018/07/20/exclusive-jeanine-pirro-whoopi-goldberg-got-in-my-face-yelling-get-the-fk-out-of-here/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/god-bless-the-deep-state/2018/07/19/de36bd00-8b8a-11e8-85ae-511bc1146b0b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a94c81dadfe2
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Eugene Robinson no less
he is always objective and nonpartisan :-P
he is of the reparations crowd. :roll: Everything race from time he gets up till time he goes to sleep.
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I don't feel like giving money to Pravda on the Potomac. Would it be possible to paste the article here?
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I don't feel like giving money to Pravda on the Potomac. Would it be possible to paste the article here?
God bless the ‘deep state’
President Trump. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Eugene Robinson
Columnist
July 19
Before this harebrained and reckless administration is history, the nation will have cause to celebrate the public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed “deep state.”
The term itself is propaganda, intended to cast a sinister light upon men and women whom Trump and his minions find annoyingly knowledgeable and experienced. They are not participants in any kind of dark conspiracy. Rather, they are feared and loathed by the president and his wrecking crew of know-nothings because they have spent years — often decades — mastering the details of foreign and domestic policy.
God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.
Witness, with horror and shame, Trump’s disgraceful performance on the world stage during the past week. The lowest of several low points was his joint appearance Monday in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who smirked with obvious glee as the president of the United States soiled himself. Metaphorically, I mean.
Trump said that Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and other officials had told him “they think” Russia meddled with the 2016 election. But Putin issued an “extremely strong and powerful” denial when the two leaders met privately, and Trump concluded that “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia. Coats fired back within hours, issuing a statement that reiterated the intelligence community’s consensus view, which is not “we think” but “we know.” Trump’s ridiculous claim Tuesday that he meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would” amounted to nothing more than a moment of comic relief.
Thanks to a New York Times article published Wednesday night, we now know that the nation’s top intelligence officials briefed Trump in detail about the Russian meddling on Jan. 6, 2017 — two weeks before his inauguration. According to the Times, the officials shared with Trump powerful evidence that the interference, meant to boost Trump’s chances of winning, was ordered by Putin himself.
Watch Coats learn that Putin is invited to visit the White House
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats reacted to breaking news that Russian President Vladimir Putin could be visiting the White House in the fall. (Aspen Security Forum)
So we know that when Trump casts doubt on Russia’s culpability, he’s not speaking from a position of ignorance. It’s not that intelligence officials have asked him to take their conclusion on faith. They’ve shown him the goods. He’s just lying.
Who were the anonymous sources for the Times story? I have no idea. But if I had spent a career fighting for my country in the secrets world, and I heard my president give more credence to the former KGB officer who rules an undemocratic Russia than to his own intelligence chief, I would be angry.
And if I had also heard my president welcome what he called an “incredible” offer from Putin — that he would allow special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to observe questioning of the 12 Russian spies he indicted last week if Russian authorities were also allowed to interrogate Americans they speciously accuse of crimes, including a former ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul — I would be furious and alarmed. I would have to wonder about the loyalty of my commander in chief. And I would have to think about my duty to the nation.
Russian officials have said publicly that they are ready to begin implementing agreements reached by Trump and Putin during their two-hour private meeting, which only one Russian and one American translator were allowed to attend. But according to The Post, in an article also published Wednesday night, high-ranking U.S. diplomatic and military officials did not know what those agreements were.
Did they reach some sort of understanding about nuclear arms? About Syria? About Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea? If you worry, as I do, that Trump may have intentionally or unintentionally given away the store, you have to root for the deep state to find out what transpired in that room — and find ways to reverse, or at least mitigate, the damage.
FBI chief: Russia 'continues to engage in malign influence operations'
FBI Director Christopher Wray on July 18 said Russia "continues to engage in malign influence operations," and pledged to continue pursuing the perpetrators. (Reuters)
Is Trump so obsequious to Putin because his ego will not allow him to acknowledge that the Russian strongman helped him beat Hillary Clinton? Or does Putin have something on him? We will get answers at some point, but we can’t ignore what we appear to be seeing right now: ongoing collusion, between Trump and Putin, to impede and denigrate the Mueller investigation. It’s happening before our eyes.
Democrats in Congress are powerless; the Republican leadership, spineless. Experienced government officials know that their job is to serve the president. But what if the president does not serve the best interests of the nation?
In this emergency, the loyal and honorable deep state has a higher duty. It’s called patriotism.
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but this moron is being held up as some sort new leader of the party:
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/20/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-compares-electing-democrats-to-ending-slavery/
and with a major news channel comparing female slavery and subjugation to Trump because he says America first
It is happening here in America.
And what is the rinos and Bushes of the party's answer to this:
"compromise and having conversations"
-
Obama has same philosophy but was less outspoken.
If we needed a candidate to operate for total destruction of the United States , Maxine polluted thinking Waters aside, this is it :
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-carbon-tax-trillions-renewable-energy-economy/
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http://michellemalkin.com/2018/07/18/ms-diversity-conartista-boston-universitys-fake-o-nomics-darling/
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They have asked the mayor not to endorse the protest because if the mayor endorses it, it just becomes a parade, not a protest.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/399613-activists-call-on-chicago-mayor-to-resign-ahead-of-massive-anti
Protesters also call for the racist Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to resign. Oops, he's black.
To me it all just says, cognitive dissonance of the Left. Their policies caused it and they have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it. If it's like Minneapolis, you have far Left and you have farther Left, there are no other voices or opinions.
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https://heavy.com/news/2018/08/sarah-jeong/
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or mimicking her online white male harassers which existence as per Sulzbeger Jr. because of Trump:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/ny-times-sarah-jeong-tweets/2018/08/02/id/875183/
:roll:
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http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/the-dogs-dont-like-it/
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https://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/08/07/trump-standard-means-these-hwood-leftists-lose-walk-of-fame-stars-bye-john-lennon/
We all know he is removed because he is a Republican who wins.
If moral standards were applied to the rest of the stars on H boulevard then at least half would have to be removed.
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Rush had good talk today about the Lefts strategy of identity politics
mostly any group other then cis hetero white males and can throw Christians on top as the cherry
He mentioned identity politics and Jordan Peterson:
https://sovereignnations.com/2018/01/30/jordan-peterson-marxist-lie-white-privilege/
if the LEFT cannot import enough foreigners promising to give them our money as free benefits they can , soon be able to bring back the Neanderthals and make them a discriminated group by white male cis hetero homo sapiens.
GEico insurance's cave man can be seen holding a Ocasio sign.
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/timothymeads/2018/08/10/first-woman-us-border-patrol-chief-appointed-n2508870
another glass ceiling broken with dead silence in MSM
as of course would be expected for any female that runs counter the Democrat Party story line.
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The top outbound states for 2017 were:
1. Illinois
2. New Jersey
3. New York
4. Connecticut
unitedvanlines.com
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https://freebeacon.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-visits-restaurant-closed-policies/
Restaurant Closed by Her Policies
Company employed 150 people before minimum-wage hikes
--------------
Cognitive dissonance of the Left is not very hard to find.
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David Hogg plans to be elected to congress when he is 25.
Using his theory that the younger you are, the more you know, he will have seven years lost wisdom by then, starting with very little. Soon he will be no better than Nancy Pelosi.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/david-hogg-is-taking-his-gap-year-at-the-barricades.html
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Mueller got his convictions on Manafort. It's not Russia, it's not collusion and it's not during anytime he was connected to Trump, but it makes Trump look bad by association. Cohen pleaded guilty, says he was told to break laws. If there is something there that implicates Trump, we don't know it yet. Duncan Hunter and his wife were indicted for using campaign funds for personal purposes. These kinds of stories make Republicans and all elected officials look bad and Power at the moment is with the Republicans. It was an exciting if not giddy day on liberal radio and TV yesterday. The gang on PBS NewsHour could barely contain themselves, "These are serious crimes".
Meanwhile, their policies don't work.
-
Monkey with and monkey around are expressions that go way back and have nothing to do with race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-3_l5iWTP0
Candidate Obama in 2008: “I come from Chicago. It’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past. Sometimes Democrats have, too. You know, whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to tilt things in their direction.”
------------
An ESPN announcer was fired for saying that Serena Williams was using guerrilla tactics in her match.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare.
Was Obama being racist? It's hard to tell guerrilla from gorilla in audio but what is a gorilla tactic in tennis? Good grief.
Meanwhile, Andrew Gillum wants massive taxpayer funding for an organization that aborts (kills) black unborn at five times the rate of white unborn. He supports not just the right to do that but funding to do more of that. Which candidate is racist?
Trust the MSM to sort it out?
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"trust the MSM to sort it out?"
right
MSM are phony ass shits
they know full well this guy is not speaking "code" to whites
they love to stir up anger in their minority base
I gotta believe many minorities are seeing thru this bs.
even cnn reluctantly admits he has made gains and we all know they would suppress this so it is probably more then they care to admit
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/18/politics/poll-of-the-week-trump-black-voters/index.html
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"trust the MSM to sort it out?"
right
MSM...
they know full well this guy is not speaking "code" to whites
they love to stir up anger in their minority base
I gotta believe many minorities are seeing thru this bs.
even cnn reluctantly admits he has made gains and we all know they would suppress this so it is probably more then they care to admit
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/18/politics/poll-of-the-week-trump-black-voters/index.html
As GM wrote, their race card is maxed out.
Even in this article admitting that his support has doubled with blacks (and perhaps 7 times greater than previous Republicans), their point is to diminish other polls that show even stronger support. They refer to live interview polls as higher quality, but the actual voting booth tends to be anonymous like the polls they are slamming.
When one person switches sides, that is a two-point move. When the movement happens at this fast pace pace with the strongest, most reliable part of your base, that must be scary.
CNN's way of reporting the 30% black Trump support poll is to wait and cite polls they believe prove it wrong, rather than report news as it come out.
In what recent election was Quinnipiac more accurate than Rasmussen? Only in a democratic wave and that last happened in 2006, 2008. Higher quality? Not really.
We are very lucky to have a president calling out fake news. Their reaction to it should be to get their act together instead of to fight back proving him right.
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/08/22/former-democrats-are-leaving-their-party-in-droves-conservatives-should-pay-attention/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5?&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWWpKaFpHSmxOVGswTWpGbSIsInQiOiJ4N21NcFBSbmVCSjRNVkpUUlRtakZpVlJqQlc4MlhFODg3dDlrakRWdnM1YTlQbzZ6a0NCdmM5MEtJK1ZHVWZEb0x3OTVhMWpBbWZVY3BFTjFDTjlHcVZRZ0k1WEUzeHN1TEtFSjdncExjN3pCVjFySjBnd2tSblRNY3RMTlp4dSJ9
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/and-the-paul-wellstone-memorial-award-goes-too/
now put self serving Arianna Grande the donut licking funeral attendee who shows up in a miniskirt with her ass exactly in front of Bill's face
and the hearsay I recall a past Franklin back singer telling me how she rudely ordered her to get her white ass out of her way and all I can do think:
"Que Sera, Sera "
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/mccain%20funeral%20week%209.jpg)
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-09-02-at-18.27.59-600x309.png)
(https://i.imgflip.com/2gobzn.jpg)
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/christian-toto/2018/09/01/flashback-whoopi-goldberg-tied-mccain-slaverys-return
Flashback: Whoopi Goldberg Tied McCain to Slavery’s Return
By Christian Toto | September 1, 2018 1:30 PM EDT
Whoopi Goldberg led a celebrity wave of tributes to Sen. John McCain this weekend.
Actors, who spend most of their online efforts slamming conservatives, took a pause to mourn McCain’s passing at the age of 81.
Goldberg’s tribute was clear, concise and heartfelt.
It’s a rare moment when ideological foes drop their weapons.
Only she wasn’t always so magnanimous toward the Arizona senator. Consider his appearance on The View circa September 2008. The presidential campaign was in full swing, and Sen. McCain had selected Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
That led to a debate about the Constitution. Sen. McCain said he preferred Supreme Court justices who strictly interpreted the Constitution. It’s a familiar position for most right-leaning souls, including President Donald Trump.
It’s hardly an out of bounds take. Goldberg saw it differently.
“Did you say you wanted strict constitutionalists? Should I worry about being a slave? A return to slavery? Because there are things in the Constitution that (should have changed.)”
That was beyond the pale then, and it drew some headlines. Today, reporters, liberal pundits and Hollywood types routinely slam GOP members, including President Trump, as white nationalists eager for slavery’s return.
How times have changed, or so one would think.
Vice President Joe Biden evidently agreed with Goldberg’s fears. During the 2012 presidential race Biden warned a mixed race audience the GOP ticket’s Wall Street schemes would “put you all back in chains.”
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"Sen. McCain said he preferred Supreme Court justices who strictly interpreted the Constitution. It’s a familiar position for most right-leaning souls, including President Donald Trump.
It’s hardly an out of bounds take. Goldberg saw it differently.
“Did you say you wanted strict constitutionalists? Should I worry about being a slave? A return to slavery? Because there are things in the Constitution that (should have changed.)”
It's possible she didn't read into it as far as Article 5 that defines the amendment process and the 14th amendment that repealed slavery.
I don't think the Left would support the living Constitution theory, Define it any way we want to approach if it was the right governing by judicial activism.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-exhaustion-of-american-liberalism-1488751826
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Serena was treated differently because she was a woman. Her opponent whose historic victory she stepped on was also a woman, but didn't break a racquet or holler or berate the official.
The 20 million dollar athlete Serena bullied an Umpire who makes $600 per match. Isn't she courageous. The Umpire stole the match from her but her opponent outplayed her in the view of everyone watching and evidenced by the scoreboard.
Women make equal prize money to men in the US Open but play two out of three sets instead of three out of five, sometimes a little over an hour versus 5 hours. Ironically, if Serena really is the better player, she would have won a three out of five set contest and she wouldn't have been so panicked at losing a point or a game in the second set.
Colin Kaepernick will make 20 million with Nike and the child laborers who make the shoes will make $0.06(?) per hour. This is a victory for social justice? Whose social justice is he fighting for? He fights the country and the game that made him and all he gets for it is money. The more that he fights and wins, the more that the black-on-black murder rate goes up. Cognitive dissonance of the left.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/12/democrats-send-1278-questions-kavanaugh/
more screaming more noise more yelling and foot stomping, more flooding all the airways with Trump bashing and more s..t
thats it.
I feel sorry for us.
-
Except...
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/377029.phpSeptember 14, 2018
Male-to-Female Transgender Placed in Women's Prison, and You Won't Believe What Happens Next
Among the folks I talk with, we've been plotting to declare ourselves Transwomen the moment the fascist leftist government the NeverTrumpers are eager to empower come to round us all up.
So no one could have seen this coming, except for everyone.
A transgender woman serving time at an all-female UK prison sexually assaulted four inmates at the facility, according to new reports.
Convicted sex offender Karen White, 52, who was born a man and identifies as a woman, confessed this week to two counts of sexual touching at New Hall Prison, in Wakefield, The Sun reported. She denied the two other counts, according to the report.
All of the assaults happened last year, between September and November, prosecutors said.
During her hearing a Leeds Crown Court, she also pleaded guilty to the rape of a woman back in August 2003, when she went by her male name, Stephen Wood, according to the Telegraph.
She was also jailed back in 2001 for assault and gross indecency with a child, according to the Sun.
Tim Pool, who leans left on sexual issues, proposes a moderate theory here: This man (calling himself a woman) previously raped a woman while already "transitioning" to become a woman. Thus, in this particular case, the danger of this man-now-saying-he's-a-woman raping a woman was already pre-established.
You'd never, Pool says, put a male rapist in a prison for women; why would you change the rule for a transgender man-transitioned-to-woman who was raping women even as he claimed to be becoming a woman? The dude's strength advantage over actual women and his previous history of raping women make this too much of a hazard to actual female prisoners.
Maybe, he says, such people should be put in a special transgender lock-up. But, of course, the transgender lobby calls such special accomodations "transphobic" and insist on transgenders being treated in all ways and in all situations as the sex they claim to be.
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To make sure the Latinos get out and vote (the ones who can vote in Federal elections) got to make Trump look like he "let" thousands of Puerto Ricans die.
So they extrapolate to inflate the number.
Compare to Hurricane Sandy when Baraq was President. No such extrapolation as far as I can tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy
If there was such a difference it had nothing to do with Trump but with incompetence on the island and maybe the competence of Christie as governor.
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To make sure the Latinos get out and vote (the ones who can vote in Federal elections) got to make Trump look like he "let" thousands of Puerto Ricans die.
So they extrapolate to inflate the number.
Compare to Hurricane Sandy when Baraq was President. No such extrapolation as far as I can tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy
If there was such a difference it had nothing to do with Trump but with incompetence on the island and maybe the competence of Christie as governor.
http://fortune.com/2018/09/12/fema-unused-water-bottles-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-victim/
Tons of Water Sent to Puerto Rico's Hurricane Maria Victims Was Never Distributed
By KEVIN KELLEHER September 12, 2018
The United States is bracing for another hurricane season as Florence spirals toward the Eastern seaboard. And yet instances of the inadequate response to the destructive storms of 2017 are still coming to light. A vast shipment of water bottles that were intended to be delivered to victims of 2017’s destructive Hurricane Maria appear to be still sitting, unused one year later, on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico.
Abdiel Santana, a member of a Puerto Rican police agency tasked with emergency response, shared photos on Facebook of a vast number of boxes covered in blue tarp on an airport runway. The boxes, Santana said, were delivered before Maria’s arrival. “Will there be someone who can explain this?” he wrote in the Facebook post.
Santana’s photos began to go viral on the same day that President Trump called his administration’s response to Maria an “incredible, unsung success.” Data contradicts that assessment. Puerto Rico officials have estimated the death toll from Maria at 2,975 people. Other, independent estimates place the number at 1,270 and 5,740, with financial damages from the storm exceeding $100 billion in damage and some rural residents still lacking power.
A CBS reporter who picked up on the viral photos of the unused water bottles confirmed that they were brought to the island and turned over to Puerto Rico’s central government. “If [FEMA] put that water on that runway there will be hell to pay,” an unnamed senior FEMA official told CBS. “If we did that, we’re going to fess up to it.” CBS said that the number of unused water bottles could be in the millions.
@DavidBegnaud
· Sep 11, 2018
BREAKING: What may be millions of water bottles. meant for victims of Hurricane Maria, have been sitting on a runway in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, since last year, according to @FEMA, which confirmed the news to me, late tonight, after pictures, posted today on social media, went viral. pic.twitter.com/jidGJAvCyJ
✔
@DavidBegnaud
More Details pic.twitter.com/jyPGRqiIy3
8:12 PM - Sep 11, 2018
Santana told CBS that he also took pictures of the water bottles last fall, although he has not posted them. While FEMA is blaming the Puerto Rico government for dropping the ball, a Puerto Rican official claimed that distributing the water to Maria’s victims was FEMA’s responsibility.
While the finger-pointing won’t do much to help Maria’s victims or prepare for a new round of Atlantic storms, the incident is not the first instance of emergency-relief supplies not receiving those who needed them. Last month, the New York Times reported that 10 trailers of food and other supplies were found rotting in a parking lot in Puerto Rico, where they were devoured by rats.
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https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/17/keith-ellison-karen-monahan-democratic-party/
KEITH ELLISON ACCUSER, KAREN MONAHAN, SAYS DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOESN’T BELIEVE HER
12:39 PM 09/17/2018
Hanna Bogorowski | Reporter
Karen Monahan, the woman who accused Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of domestic abuse, said Monday that the Democratic Party does not believe her.
Monahan also wrote on Twitter that she’s been threatened and isolated by her own Democratic Party.
Her comments were made in contrast to the immediate attention Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser has received.
Karen Monahan, the woman accusing Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of domestic abuse, responded to a Twitter user on Monday who asked if Democrats believe Monahan’s allegations, saying they don’t, and that she’s been threatened and isolated from her own party.
The user was following up on a tweet about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Peter Daou, a Democratic strategist and former advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, tweeted on Monday that Ford will be “attacked, smeared, and demonized” and that people must “BELIEVE WOMEN.”
Peter Daou
✔
@peterdaou
Make no mistake: #ChristineBlaseyFord will be attacked, smeared, and demonized. She will sustain more venom and vilification than #Kavanaugh. That's how this works.
BELIEVE WOMEN.
John McCormack
@McCormackJohn
Susan Collins to @nytimes: “What is puzzling to me is the Democrats, by not bringing this out earlier, after having had this information for more than six weeks, have managed to cast a cloud of doubt on both the professor and the judge.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-sexual-assault.html …
5:02 AM - Sep 17, 2018
1,373
788 people are talking about this
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A Twitter user named Rose responded to Daou’s tweet, saying, “Democrats say believe women, do they believe you….” in reference to Monahan, who claims Ellison violently dragged her off a bed and yelled “Bitch, get the f*** out of my house” in a heated argument the couple allegedly had in 2016.
“No, they [Democrats] don’t,” Monahan responded back. “I’ve been smeared, threatened, isolated from my own party.”
Rose 🦅
@rosiebudpisces
· Sep 17, 2018
.@KarenMonahan01 Democrats say believe women, do they believe you.... https://twitter.com/peterdaou/status/1041658668255719425 …
Karen Monahan
@KarenMonahan01
No, they don't. I've been smeared, threatened, isolated from my own party. I provided medical records from 2017, stating on two different Dr. Visits, I told them about the abuse and who did it. My therapist released records stating I have been dealing and healing from the abuse
5:44 AM - Sep 17, 2018
530
445 people are talking about this
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Monahan has not appeared to receive the same international attention that other women have received in recent months as more women come forward with allegations against a number of men, from Harvey Weinstein to Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens to President Donald Trump.
“Four people, including my supervisor at the time, stated that I came to them after and shared the exact story I shared publicly, I shared multiple text between me and Keith, where I discuss the abuse with him and much more,” Monahan continued on Twitter.
“As I said before, I knew I wouldn’t be believed.”
Daou is just one of many who have aired their support for Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to drunkenly force himself onto her during at a party in high school, according to reports first issued by The New Yorker on Friday.
The allegation came one day after Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California released a vague statement referring to possible misconduct in Kavanaugh’s past. (RELATED: Kavanaugh Breaks Silence After Sexual Assault Allegation)
Calls to delay voting on Kavanaugh, which was set for Thursday, have been growing since Ford came public with her previously anonymous accusation.
Some Republicans said the timing is a political attempt to derail Kavanaugh rather than a sincere effort to address sexual assault, as the allegation is from nearly 35 years ago.
Monahan has insisted her decision to come forward against Ellison, who is also deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has no political ulterior motive and is for her own personal freedom and to help other survivors.
“I have nothing to prove to anyone, I simply shared my story. People can believe it or not. I don’t need anyone to affirm my humanity, I affirmed it,” she tweeted.
Rose 🦅
@rosiebudpisces
· Sep 17, 2018
.@KarenMonahan01 Democrats say believe women, do they believe you.... https://twitter.com/peterdaou/status/1041658668255719425 …
Karen Monahan
@KarenMonahan01
I didn't break my silence for validation or any outcome. I did it for my own internal freedom and to stand w/ other survivors. I have nothing to prove to anyone, I simply shared my story. People can believe it or not. I don't need anyone to affirm my humanity, I affirmed it.
5:53 AM - Sep 17, 2018
17
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Tom Perez, chairman of the DNC, almost immediately called for an investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh, but he has largely evaded the allegations against Ellison.
A thorough investigation is needed, Perez said Sunday.
The DNC announced on Aug. 14 that it would review the Ellison accusations, but has yet to announce the results of said review.
Another contrast is seen from Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who said he had “nothing” to say about the Ellison allegation when asked on Aug. 16, however, days after the Kavanaugh accusations surfaced, Sanders spoke up.
“The allegation from Professor Christine Blasey Ford is a serious one that deserves a full investigation,” he wrote on Twitter Sunday.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Monahan and will update if a response is received.
Ellison has denied allegations of abuse against Monahan.
Follow Hanna on Twitter
Email tips to hanna@dailycallernewsfoundation.org
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KEITH ELLISON ACCUSER, KAREN MONAHAN, SAYS DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOESN’T BELIEVE HER
Yes, when are the Ellison hearings?
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After he is elected State Attorney General
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here is one example:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-moore-fahrenheit-119-2018-midterms_us_5ba0edc2e4b046313fbf7e7e
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Most people don't realize that, like Judge Kavanaugh, Keith Ellison is a graduate of a Jesuit prep high school. Ellison's was in Detroit, MI.
So, all of the lefties who are condemning Kavanaugh for his elitist all-boys' high school education producing anti-feminist behavior are also condemning Ellison. Wonder if they realize that?
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Most people don't realize that, like Judge Kavanaugh, Keith Ellison is a graduate of a Jesuit prep high school. Ellison's was in Detroit, MI.
So, all of the lefties who are condemning Kavanaugh for his elitist all-boys' high school education producing anti-feminist behavior are also condemning Ellison. Wonder if they realize that?
Well, Ellison became a muslim, which is like totally feminist and woke! :wink:
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/kavanaugh%20kennedy.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/kavanaugh%20kennedy.jpg
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Stick you middle finger to the United States and anything Republican let alone Trump and the LEFT will see to it you are rewarded:
https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2018/09/20/harvard-university-honor-kaepernick-medal/
NIke knows who there customers mostly are - Dems
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(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/5ba6335fdbb75.jpeg)
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-defense-rich-lowry-voicemail-response/
makes me want to donate to NRO
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no surprise the same make up as jurnolisters:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-500-law-professors-condemn-010208585.html
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Her tweet has been saved, in case she might not want to share it later.
"Whatever happens, I'm just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh's life."
https://nalert.blogspot.com/2018/10/stephen-colbert-writer-brags-that-she.html?m=1
Back at you, liberal Minnesota native without a conscience.
A conservative gaffe is when they reveal they don't know something they should or say something false. A liberal gaffe is when they reveal something true about how they feel and think. Destroying people they disagree with is what they try to do on The Colbert Show, not entertain in a civilized sense.
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Here is the left answer 2 the Kavanaugh confirmation, just pack the court.
"The next time the left has some political power, why not just expand the size of the supreme court and add another handful of justices? Make Brett Kavanaugh a gifted and energetic member of a 10-to-5 minority. Don’t get mad, in other words: get even."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/kavanaugh-us-supreme-court-fight-back-court-packing
I guess this idiot means sometime in the future because right now it is the Republicans that have the majority's that could do this.
Do they ever put the nation first or play by the rules?
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
"The idea that North Dakota and New York get the same representation in the Senate has to change,"
Article 5:
"No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
Young lady, how do you propose that we do that? Violate the constitution to amend it?
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"The next time the left has some political power, why not just expand the size of the supreme court and add another handful of justices? Make Brett Kavanaugh a gifted and energetic member of a 10-to-5 minority. Don’t get mad, in other words: get even."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/kavanaugh-us-supreme-court-fight-back-court-packing
I find it hard not to resent any Leftist commentary from the British Guardian or its "United States" edition
who invited them to editorialize our politics
part of the globalist group
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While I have not been a big
fan of Kelly for some time now I don't like the PC crowd using their racial card to ruin her. Oh yeah Megan is an obvious racist who wants to go back to slavery and Jim Crow.
And of course leftist media pile it on and the corporates put their tail between their legs and shake in their boots and positively reinforce the bully tactics:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/nbc-news-chief-andy-lack-231724721.html
I suppose corporate may have just been using this as a convenient excuse to dump her anyway.......
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While I have not been a big
fan of Kelly for some time now I don't like the PC crowd using their racial card to ruin her. Oh yeah Megan is an obvious racist who wants to go back to slavery and Jim Crow.
And of course leftist media pile it on and the corporates put their tail between their legs and shake in their boots and positively reinforce the bully tactics:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/nbc-news-chief-andy-lack-231724721.html
I suppose corporate may have just been using this as a convenient excuse to dump her anyway.......
I agree. Sounded to me like she meant no harm. She wasn't talking about demeaning blacks or anyone else. I wasn't aware of the controversy. If this is a big deal, she drew attention to it, apologized, has no history of racism, etc. I'm no fan of hers either, but she can rise and fall on her talent and ratings.
I'm still waiting for the ESPN commentator who properly described guerrilla, not gorilla, tactics of a black athlete to get his job back. https://nypost.com/2017/02/14/espn-fired-me-for-guerrilla-comment-on-venus-williams-suit/
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:roll: :roll: :roll:
I guess if a college student wearing a "hat" shaped like a uterus is offensive?
https://www.westernjournal.com/universities-going-extreme-lengths-prevent-racist-halloween-costumes/
BTW I stopped "celebrating" halloween and wearing outfits when I was ~ 12 yrs old. I never that crap in college anyway......
what a bunch of babies in college now.
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https://spectator.org/is-it-hate-speech-to-tell-the-truth/
Special Report
Is It ‘Hate Speech’ to Tell the Truth?
ROBERT STACY MCCAIN
October 31, 2018, 12:05 am
Democrats and their media allies seek to silence their critics.
Americans are no longer a free people, if debate on major public-policy issues is effectively criminalized, which is what the Democrats and their allies are attempting to do with regard to our immigration policy. We are now being told in effect that it is “hate speech” to express opposition to the open-borders agenda of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and such of their billionaire donors as George Soros. Democrats and their media allies have recently taken to declaring that it is a “dog whistle” of racism and anti-Semitism for any Republican even to mention the name of Soros in connection with the immigration issue. If you don’t think the United States should throw open its borders to welcome the caravan of Honduran migrants now headed north through Mexico, and if you call attention to how Democrats are cheering on this horde of would-be foreign invaders, well, you must be some kind of Nazi who wants to kill Jews. Or at least that’s the general drift of liberal rhetoric in the final week of the midterm election campaign.
CNN has spent the past few days insinuating that the gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue was incited to this act by President Trump. Republicans are not allowed to object to CNN’s one-sided coverage, however, because Florida madman Cesar Sayoc also hated CNN, and therefore anyone who criticizes the network is deemed a potential threat to public safety. Between the Pittsburgh shooter and the Florida bomber, basically anything said in favor of Republicans (or against Democrats) is now considered “hate speech” in the eyes of liberals. This is especially the case when it comes to immigration. Ever since the migrant caravan set off from Honduras, announcing their intention to march all the way to the United States, Democrats have been accusing the GOP of “exploiting” the issue. What are Republicans supposed to do? Pretend they don’t notice the lawless intentions of these so-called “refugees”?
After Mexican officials tried to stop the migrants by blocking a bridge across the Suchiate River at the Mexico-Guatemala border, they crossed the river illegally on rafts. “No one will stop us, only God,” a migrant named Olivin Castellano told an Associated Press reporter. “We knocked down the door and we continue walking.” Perhaps God will not stop this invasion, but the U.S. Army has a duty to defend the country, and Trump has ordered so many troops to the border that the deployment for “Operation Faithful Patriot” will exceed the U.S. force serving in Syria. And while these troops prepare to defend our border, CNN continues an around-the-clock propaganda campaign that accuses the Commander-in-Chief of inciting criminal violence.
Phrases like “hateful rhetoric” and “white nationalist” are part of the CNN script, conveying to the network’s viewers the idea that President Trump is responsible for the acts of deranged kooks like Sayoc, the steroid-addled Florida mail-bomber, and Robert Bowers, the high-school dropout who committed the Pittsburgh massacre. Never mind that Bowers denounced Trump by name in one of his anti-Semitic online screeds, and never mind that Sayoc is a mentally ill former male stripper whose bombs never exploded — no, these two lunatics must have acted on coded signals from Trump, the CNN viewer is led to believe. And then there is the problem of Soros, who was among the intended recipients of one of Sayoc’s non-exploding bombs.
George Soros has been a major funder of much of the institutional infrastructure the Left has built during the past 20 years. David Horowitz’s site Discover the Networks says that “a strong case can be made for the claim that Soros today affects American politics and culture more profoundly that any other living person.” Such organizations as Media Matters for America are beneficiaries of Soros’s vast wealth. While the total of his political expenditures over the years is perhaps beyond calculation, it is known that between 2003 and 2011, for example, Soros spent more than $48 million to fund media properties. Given his enormous influence on the Left, it is understandable that conservatives suspect that Soros is behind every allegedly “grassroots” left-wing activist group. It’s not a paranoid conspiracy, but a documented fact that, for example, the Black Lives Movement received more than $30 million from Soros’s tax-exempt organizations. Likewise, it has been documented that so-called “Antifa” groups, implicated in riots in Berkeley and elsewhere, got money from Soros-funded foundations. And it should surprise no one that Soros has spent many millions in support of an open-borders immigration agenda.
“Soros’s agenda is fundamentally about the destruction of national borders,” researchers David Galland and Stephen McBride wrote in a 2016 article titled “How George Soros Singlehandedly Created The European Refugee Crisis — And Why.” Galland and McBride documented the involvement of Soros’s Open Society Foundation in the crisis that flooded Europe with millions of Muslim migrants. When Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban took action to halt the influx of “refugees” into his country and named Soros as the sponsor of this invasion, Soros responded: “[Orban’s] plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”
This was a startling admission, and it is clear that Soros also views America’s borders as an “obstacle” to his plans. In their book The Shadow Party, Horowitz and his co-author Richard Poe explained that a massive 2006 pro-amnesty rally in Los Angeles involved no fewer than eight groups funded by Soros, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza. As for the current migrant caravan from Honduras, it is being supported by the so-called “CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project,” a coalition of four organizations, three of which receive funding from — you guessed, didn’t you? — George Soros.
To identity Soros as the sponsor of this open-borders agenda, however, is to be guilty of hate, as explained last week in a Washington Post headline: “Conspiracy theories about Soros aren’t just false. They’re anti-Semitic.” You will not be surprised to learn that the author of that article, Talia Levin, works for Media Matters, which is funded by Soros. Levin previously worked at the New Yorker, but was fired in June after falsely accusing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo (the agent, it turned out, is a Marine Corps combat veteran who lost both legs in Afghanistan). So here we have a Soros-funded writer declaring in the pages of the Washington Post that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to say that Soros is doing what he’s actually doing.
In other words, telling the truth is now “hate speech.”
You could get banned from social media for mentioning Soros’s role in promoting left-wing causes, thanks to a new effort to pressure tech companies to “reduce hateful activities on their platforms.” Guess who’s funding that effort? Yes — George Soros.
It is not yet illegal to tell the truth, however, and Republicans trying to prevent a Democrat takeover of Congress are telling the truth while it’s still legal. An ad targeting a Minnesota Democrat begins: “Prima donna athletes protesting our anthem. Left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets. Billionaire George Soros bankrolls the resistance — and Dan Feehan.” That ad was denounced by liberals as anti-Semitic, of course, but Feehan’s not Jewish and the ad says nothing about Soros being Jewish either. The Left keeps hearing dog whistles of hate that are inaudible to the rest of us, which makes you wonder who the dogs really are.
Last night on CNN, Chris Cuomo denounced Republicans as proponents of “xenophobia” and every other species of hate, while simultaneously accusing the GOP of “demonizing” its opponents. Who is demonizing whom? Cuomo and his media comrades have spent the past two years accusing Trump of being Hitler, thus implying that the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump are Nazis. If that’s not demonization, what is? Is it wrong for Americans to expect that their President should protect them from an invasion of hostile foreigners? Do citizens have no right to complain about the billionaire who’s funding the horde from Honduras? Is it impermissible to debate our immigration policy?
Here’s some news from yesterday: “Mexican authorities arrested two Hondurans who allegedly shot at federal police officers escorting the migrant caravan across the southern state of Chiapas. The attack follows shortly after government warnings about Molotov cocktail attacks around a second caravan near the border with Guatemala.” CNN didn’t report that story, for some reason.
Two days ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta wrote on Twitter: “We are not the enemy of the people. I am not your enemy. You are not my enemy. It is wrong to call your fellow Americans the enemy. We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” This was a lie, of course. If you vote Republican, you’re not on “the same team” as CNN. They consider you their enemy, because you refuse to acknowledge their authority to tell you what to think and how to vote. This is the real “hate” problem in America — the media elite’s hatred of anyone who disagrees with them.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/377897.php
NYT: A Huge Number of Hate Crimes Are Committed Against Jews in NYC, But They're Committed by Muslims and Minorities So We Liberals Don't Give a Shit
An entire article about how the problem of antisemitic attacks in New York City is not due to the left's only permissible Villain of Straight White Republican Men, and yet the article's top-rated comment is nevertheless: "Donald Trump has amplified hate and given it his stamp of approval. He's a disgrace."
A cute euphemism they employ is saying the attacks "do not conform to an easy narrative," which I take for code for, "The narrative is pretty straightforward and clear, but we don't like it, so it's not 'easy' for us to admit."
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https://outline.com/TXW6L8
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrLT97mXgAEFKgA?format=jpg&name=orig)
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hearing dog whistles in everything (though actually we can't hear dog whistles)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/jim-clyburn-says-some-dems-using-racially-charged-dog-whistles-to-thwart-leadership-bid
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Pet-Supplies-Dog-Whistles/zgbs/pet-supplies/2975423011
has whistling on his brain.
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"hearing dog whistles in everything (though actually we can't hear dog whistles)"
Funny. I guess they are calling their opponents dogs right while terms like apes and monkeys are way off limits. They are also saying their opponents are all already racists and just need to be called. If it's something they can't hear or see, how come they keep pointing it out?
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"hearing dog whistles in everything (though actually we can't hear dog whistles)"
Funny. I guess they are calling their opponents dogs right while terms like apes and monkeys are way off limits. They are also saying their opponents are all already racists and just need to be called. If it's something they can't hear or see, how come they keep pointing it out?
If you hear the dog whistle, you are the dog in question.
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on anything.
I have never heard her say anything that was of any substance, or meaning , or significance .
Yet they keep paying her to be on:
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2018/11/18/cnns-kirsten-powers-white-women-who-support-trump-are-all-racist/
I wonder what the Left would say about caravans if 90% of these people and their kids where future Republican voters.
Republicans are trying to stave off this country from being a one party fascist socialist state with total government control and loss of all our freedoms to the elites is the main reason to stop the endless illegals not racism not because we don't like immigrants but because we don't want to be dominated forever in every way possible by a power hungry corrupt American destroying Left.
And the Right should also stop just focusing on caravans. Not all illegals are walking over the boarder.
They are flooding from Asia , Africa, the Caribbean , S America, Middle East.
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Didn't she used to be on FOX as token Dem on the Special Report panel and sometimes getting cranky with Bill O'Reilly?
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yes
she was guest on Fox at times
That is when I first started asking myself "why is she on here?"
she dated Carlos Danger too:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-weiners-ex-kirsten-powers-he-lied-to-me
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Respect that she fully acknowledges the depth and breadth of her relationship with him.
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has won:
https://www.westernjournal.com/staggering-number-millennials-place-obama-george-washington-new-poll/
To think anyone would conclude Obama is more influential or better than George Washington is so sad........
I hope academia (the new socialist party ) will be happy as out nation continues its decline........................
I won't be around to see it much longer.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/378388.php
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Very good piece.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/news/williams-miseducated-or-stupid/
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https://www.conservativereview.com/news/williams-miseducated-or-stupid/
If you hate America, thank a teacher!
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Why? Obviously because they work harder! A classic American tradition. Those who work hard are rewarded.
Yet DeBlasio instead of teaching THOSE values has decided we ngo by skin color or whether the student is spanish :
https://www.westernjournal.com/de-blasio-plan-diversify-elite-schools-nyc-parents-suing/
And if the elite schools are private then that is another issue.
Why not force Dunkin Donuts to the correct number of donuts to its customers.
Say 68 % to minorities and only 32 % to whites?
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This will be up to 25 by mid '19:
https://www.wired.com/story/mueller-investigation-trump-russia-complete-guide/
If we think the attack anti - Trump media is obnoxious now one can only imagine the nightmare senario starting in January .
:-o :x
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This will be up to 25 by mid '19:
https://www.wired.com/story/mueller-investigation-trump-russia-complete-guide/
If we think the attack bring Trump media is obnoxious now one can only imagine the nightmare senario starting in January .
:-o :x
And still have not landed a punch. Their first point has Russian collusion without a Russian or collusion. They wander through wikileaks and Trump Tower over to obstruction of justice because Trump fired a man the LEft long wanted fired. In the worst they can point to, either Hillary or Obama did worse - with no consequence. The story is that they hope that among all the mud thrown at the wall something will lead to something.
If Mueller has something of criminal substance and had it from the beginning , something that justified all this investigation, he is incompetent and derelict in his duties for not informing the country sooner.
All they seem to want is to bog down the system and stop the discussion of issues.
Mission Accomplished.
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https://i.imgur.com/4CRGvpn.jpg
(https://i.imgur.com/4CRGvpn.jpg)
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then Russians:
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2018/12/17/google-funded-liberal-study-saying-russia-aided-gop-online
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Given what is likely to be fomented by these "reports", please post that in the Media thread as well.
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Socialism begins with questions like,
"Why can't we provide healthcare for everyone?"
It ends with questions like this:
"Can rabbit meat save Venezuela from going hungry?"
-----------------------------------------------------------
It really is that simple. Yet it always seems we are moving in the wrong direction.
Take the last US election for example. If Trump had failed to grow the economy, if deregulation and tax reform had stalled the economy, Trump and the Republicans would have been roasted for it. Instead Trump and these policies doubled the growth rate. The reaction is ho-hum. The economy became the third most important issue and people voted based on other things, see above, "why can't we provide healthcare for everyone?"
I wish we could shout from the rooftops and mountaintops,
You can buy better healthcare with prosperity. Better nutrition, longer lives, cleaner environment too.
Freedom, not socialism, brings prosperity.
We fight the deniers of economic truth every minute and they still win. Bad logic resonates: Why can't we have an Obama phone, free cell service for everyone? Isn't internet a human right? Water?
Or are the basics of life a human responsibility that you provide for your family if you can.
Why don't we instead make government free for everyone?
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Speaking of the shortest books ever written, where is our thread for when a person of the Left does or says something right? )
Cher demands Pelosi end partial government shutdown, fund border wall: ‘DON’T DIE ON THIS HILL’
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/cher-demands-pelosi-end-partial-government-shutdown-fund-border-wall-dont-die-on-this-hill
Flashback in time, 1991, LA Times:
Cher's Security Plans Send Coastal Panel Up the Wall : Development: 'It looks like San Quentin,' says one commissioner of the actress's proposal for 10-foot-high walls around her Malibu mansion.
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-13/news/we-32_1_security-wall
So gracious of President Trump to say rich liberals [like Obama] build big walls and fences because they love the people on the inside.
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https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/psychology-progressive-hostility/?fbclid=IwAR3vNIfcfd4drpusJ07mrSjt9EjRlVJmkxx5mcpfcAN86w6OCyuHTlUN8EQ
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https://www.westernjournal.com/michael-reagan-says-ted-kennedy-offered-help-kgb-oust-dad/
Of course Hillary and her mob would NEVER have resorted to having anything to do with Russia if they somehow could have assisted her win - no , not a chance :roll: :roll: :roll:
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just put a pink pussy hat on Cuomo's head (another of Mario's kids) and the message would be complete:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/22/one-world-trade-center-lit-up-in-pink-to-celebrate-ny-abortion-law/
nice tie :wink: :roll:
with the adoring smiling babes surrounding him.
ALL women should want to vote for this GREAT man, no?
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just put a pink pussy hat on Cuomo's head (another of Mario's kids) and the message would be complete:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/22/one-world-trade-center-lit-up-in-pink-to-celebrate-ny-abortion-law/
nice tie :wink: :roll:
with the adoring smiling babes surrounding him.
ALL women should want to vote for this GREAT man, no?
For the deniers of life science, nothing honors "women's rights" like slaughtering 100 million unborn girls around the world. Women and children are hit hardest by abortion. One dead, one injured, times 100,000 per year in one state alone, New York.
≈ 239 innocent & helpless children are killed by abortion EVERY DAY in New York.
https://abort73.com/abortion_facts/states/new_york/
Let's celebrate! A compassionate governor or a life scientist would call it genocide.
As Ted Cruz said, New York values. And they think southern conservative states are uncivilized, as they were well-pressed suits and rejoice in the 'right' to slaughter their young.
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So a few Somali-Minnesotan men wanted to blow up a few Americans... get over it.
https://lidblog.com/ilhan-omar-terrorism/
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Asked Judge For Compassion For ISIS Recruits
by Jeff Dunetz | Jan 25, 2019 | Foreign Policy/Terrorism, Politics
Recently, newly elected Congressional Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was featured in a Lid Report about the Antisemitism that has taken over the Democratic Party. What we now learn is that along with her support of the terrorists who want Israel destroyed, she seems to have an affinity for terrorists who want America, and the entire Western way of life destroyed.
In November 2016, Ms. Omar, then a state legislator, wrote one of thirteen letters to Judge Michael Davis, seeking “compassion” and a “restorative approach to justice” in the case of nine Minnesota men charged with planning to join the terrorist group ISIS.
Convicted following what is still considered the nation’s largest probe of terror recruitment, Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, Abdirahman Yasin Daud and Guled Ali Omar were the only three of nine defendants in the case to stand trial. Several others successfully made it abroad to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2015, at least three of whom are presumed dead.
Omar’s request wasn’t based on their innocence, but it was based on her perception that it was wasn’t really their fault, it was their youth and their environment.
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to throw down the the bottomless money pit for the free shit crowd:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/elizabeth-warren-to-propose-new-wealth-tax-economic-advisor.html
Easy to steal money to buy votes isn't it?
I am sure the founders who led the Revolution had this in mind when they were willing to die rather then pay taxes to the King. :roll:
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https://nypost.com/2019/01/26/jeff-bezos-gives-a-pitiful-amount-of-his-160b-fortune-to-charity/
well he does employ 613,300 employees and made a lot of money for those (smart and lucky) enough to hold onto shares
and providing cheap goods with fast deliver to anyone who wants it.
I guess that doesn't count for anything............... :|
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it will take many years to know and don't expect any honesty from academia about it:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6636879/Baby-twins-two-DIFFERENT-fathers.html
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Unborn Babies In New York Identifying As Convicted Criminals So They Can't Legally Be Executed
NEW YORK—According to a new report, unborn babies in New York have adopted a new strategy to help them stay alive under the state's barbaric new abortion laws: identifying as convicted criminals so they can't legally be executed under the state's constitution.
Since capital punishment in the state has been banned but abortion is legal pretty much whenever and however you want, unborn babies quickly formulated the survival strategy of identifying as murderers, rapists, and genocidal maniacs.
https://babylonbee.com/news/report-more-unborn-babies-in-new-york-identifying-as-convicted-criminals-so-they-cant-legally-be-executed
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guzzling carbon making millions off of telling the rest of us not to do the same:
https://www.barrons.com/articles/al-gore-bulks-up-on-apple-stock-at-a-discount-51548779357?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
Class act he ain't.
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What is wrong or morally inconsistent with his exercising his stock options?
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"What is wrong or morally inconsistent with his exercising his stock options?"
Well I guess making 100s of millions off of one's public "service" is normal these days
Most of this is due to connections maybe . Just more swamp stuff.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/ex-un-ambassador-nikki-haley-charging-200000-per-speaking-gig.html
sounds like Hillary Clinton.
paid for her connections and likely future run for something...................
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Very interesting, but is this the thread for it?
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"Rep. Ilhan Omar calls for sharp tax increases on the wealthy: 'We've had it as high as 90 percent'"
That's it. Turn us into Somali.
Just another form of piracy.
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Working from memory, the top rate under Eisenhower was 90% (a leftover from WW2?). The JFK rate cuts dropped it to 70% and by so doing raised revenues.
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Working from memory, the top rate under Eisenhower was 90% (a leftover from WW2?). The JFK rate cuts dropped it to 70% and by so doing raised revenues.
Correct. No one asks them if they want to go back to the minimum wage rates of the 1950s too, environmental laws of the 50s, social spending of the 50s.. Will they turn our global competitors back to the 50s too or just us?
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Reproductive Rights Under Siege Across the U.S.
Opinion headline in The Hill.
Someone's right to reproduce is under seige??
Changing the language turns the Left into liars.
The only reproductive rights under siege are those of hundreds of millions of unborn girls in the world who were killed before they could grow up and have fulfilling lives and children of their own.
The Left will protect mass murderers, illegals and chickens in coups but not the innocent and most vulnerable among us.
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Christine Ford law team now defending the Democwat in Virginia :
https://pjmedia.com/trending/justin-fairfax-sexual-assault-accuser-hires-kavanaugh-accusers-legal-team/
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Christine Ford law team now defending the Democwat in Virginia :
https://pjmedia.com/trending/justin-fairfax-sexual-assault-accuser-hires-kavanaugh-accusers-legal-team/
I was under the impression we were to believe all women!
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I get the glee for our side in all of this-- but in joining the mob's calls for scalps (sorry Forked Tongue Pocahantas , , ,) I fear in the longer run we participate in strengthening the reign of SJW terror.
Wouldn't it be better to congratulate the Dems on their return to the American belief in Due Process?
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I get the glee for our side in all of this-- but in joining the mob's calls for scalps (sorry Forked Tongue Pocahantas , , ,) I fear in the longer run we participate in strengthening the reign of SJW terror.
Wouldn't it be better to congratulate the Dems on their return to the American belief in Due Process?
You think the dems would return the favor? Gosh, we just haven't been nice enough to them I guess...
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I was thinking of something snarky :lol: to be followed up with more snark when they next play situational ethics-- and by so doing maintain our right to claim Due Process for our own-- for which our current tactics do not allow us.
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I was thinking of something snarky :lol: to be followed up with more snark when they next play situational ethics-- and by so doing maintain our right to claim Due Process for our own-- for which our current tactics do not allow us.
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
"A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
Due process NEVER applies to a target of the left. EVER.
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I get that-- but we must remember to keep our eye on expanding our credibility with the non-Left. The Trump base by itself is not enough to win.
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I get that-- but we must remember to keep our eye on expanding our credibility with the non-Left. The Trump base by itself is not enough to win.
The classic turtle strategy of W? "I refuse to fight because it's beneath me"? How did that work out? Remind me of the Romney administration's use of niceness...
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I'm failing to communicate. I'm not saying anything of the sort. YES we need to fight, BUT towards our ends.
Calling upon the Dems to abandon Due Process against their own because they were all for abandoning DP against Kavanaugh (or other Rep) has the net effect of aligning us against DP in the eyes of the Non-Left.
OTOH trolling the Left for its return to DP sets us up for asserting DP when one of our own is smear ambushed and pointing out the hypocrisy on their part in calling for DP for theirs, but not ours.
World of difference IMHO.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/04/the-insurgents-behind-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-224542?fbclid=IwAR0Z-2r112Ag-wcTJ0cltVln-W58FXRf7lZhuFIjTfxOfT94yNSB6pUUyKg
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https://nypost.com/2019/02/09/the-democrats-new-puritanism-will-lead-to-their-undoing/
The Democrats’ new puritanism will lead to their undoing
By Kevin D. Williamson February 9, 2019 |
If Democrats are willing to go back to old yearbooks to find skeletons, party bigs like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will no doubt regret it.
California Dems chair to seek treatment for alcoholism amid misconduct claims
Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam either did or did not appear either in blackface or in Ku Klux Klan robes 34 years ago in a yearbook photograph while he was a medical student. The picture appears with his name, he apparently once was jocularly known as “Coonman” and he certainly appeared in blackface on a different occasion as part of a Michael Jackson costume worn in a dance contest that — well, let’s just quote the governor himself here: “I actually won the contest because I had learned to do the moonwalk.”
Northam must go, as a matter of character. On that we have the word of such figures as Joe Biden, a plagiarist who once cited his ability to navigate the linguistic challenges of buying coffee at a 7-Eleven as evidence of his good relations with the Indian immigrant community; Terry McAuliffe, a former fixer for Bill Clinton; former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, who once used a government airplane to pay a private visit to a former softcore porn actress he appointed as a university regent; Sen. Bernie Sanders, author of bizarre rape-fantasy political tracts; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee impersonator; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, chief tactician of the “bimbo eruption” unit all those years ago.
If Northam goes, the governorship passes to fellow Democrat, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who now faces impeachment as two women have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct — at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and at Duke University in 2000.
The Democrats, hot off insisting that mere accusations of misconduct — as a high-school student — were sufficient to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, are thereby put in a pickle. They might turn to the second in line, Attorney General Mark R. Herring, also a Democrat — and also someone who recently acknowledged wearing blackface at a college party. That would bring the Dems to the third in line, House Speaker Kirk Cox, who insists he’s never donned the racist makeup. He is also a Republican.
One might well wonder if every young man attending college parties in Virginia in the 1980s wore blackface at some point. If you happen to be familiar with fraternity life in the South during that period, then you know that sort of thing was shockingly common. And it never entirely went away: In 2002 Zeta Psi and the Kappa Alpha Order were nearly removed from the University of Virginia entirely after a blackface incident.
The Democratic Party is in the grips of a moral panic having to do in part with Donald Trump and #MeToo. In another aspect, it is a belated and desultory reckoning with the fact that Democrats have for a long time been willing to overlook a great deal of bad behavior in pursuit of power: not only Bill Clinton’s shenanigans (and those of a couple of Kennedys and many others before him) but also the footsie-playing with anti-Semites that has been so lamentably common among African-American Democrats from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Barack Obama and Ilhan Omar. It is difficult to run a campaign of moral indictment against Trump when the best alternative you had to offer was a Clinton.
What’s lacking is perspective and judgment. Given his scurrilous campaign against his Republican challenger Ed Gillespie, Northam does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but no serious-minded person believes he is a closet white supremacist or that he hasn’t grown up a bit since he was a 24-year-old graduate student. The accusations against Fairfax are both more serious and more recent. But the new progressive puritanism, powered by social media, inhibits their ability to make such distinctions.
The irony is that the Democrats do not know how and when to move on. About 22 minutes into Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling scandal, Democratic activists formed a group called MoveOn.org, whose members argued that it was time to “move on” from the president’s misdeeds, which involved not only adultery but also perjury and suborning perjury — serious matters for the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. That was then. In 2019, MoveOn.org is calling for Northam’s resignation because of an episode combining callousness with bad taste 34 years ago — many years before the original event from which MoveOn.org wanted to move on.
The Democrats are simultaneously attempting to enforce a zero-tolerance approach to these scandals while also handing out plenary indulgences to such figures as Sen. Warren, whose career as a “professor of color” is in many ways more repugnant than literal blackface. Democrats want a zero-tolerance rule that doesn’t cost them very much — puritanism on the cheap, morally speaking.
That is not going to work out well.
Have a look at that 2020 Democratic presidential field and ask which among them has a clean hand to cast the first stone. Biden? Clinton? Warren? If Democrats think they are going to find an unblemished champion, they should think again.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/04/the-insurgents-behind-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-224542?fbclid=IwAR0Z-2r112Ag-wcTJ0cltVln-W58FXRf7lZhuFIjTfxOfT94yNSB6pUUyKg
https://www.indiaabroad.com/indian-americans/saikat-chakrabarti-the-techie-behind-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/article_75240282-0187-11e9-a432-93f98a2205ce.html
Suddenly she has become the mouthpiece for all the academic and other libs . Their "front" chick.
Even the blacks like Sharpton going to pay homage to work on strategies together.
Amazing . She is so determined to wreck the country.
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https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2019/02/09/megyn-kelly-vs-jimmy-fallon-nbc-and-double-standards
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https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article226280230.html
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https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article226280230.html
Ah, I predict a spike in the tattoo and malt liquor sectors of Sacto’s economy.
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"While there is truth to this argument, it is equally true that the new crop of Democrats are powerful not despite their radicalism and bigotry, but because of their radicalism and bigotry. Their ideological alignment with Obama’s consigliere and key donor groups and the party’s activist grassroots means that moderate Democrats lack the power to stand up to them."
With Obama closest supporter Jarrett and likely Bama behind them.
The anti semitism is besides the point.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/17/caroline-glick-ilhan-omar-co-were-elected-because-of-their-racism-not-in-spite-of-it/
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-19/warren-to-unveil-universal-child-care-plan-funded-by-wealth-tax
I have a really crazy novel idea
Whisper ssshhhh - maybe people who can't afford children should not have them.
Isn't that a nuts idea?
OTOH it is great to have the "rich" pay for everyone else's kids.
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And we were to #believeall women! Unless that puts a republican in the Virginia Governor's office.
#nevermind
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Well it was 30+ yrs ago and he would be good for black farmers:
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/meet-black-farmer-helped-advise-virginia-governor-ralph-215503774.html
But here is same guy on Kavanaugh who without and proof and zero corroborative evidence from something 30 + yrs ago:
https://tri-statedefender.com/do-african-american-farmers-support-kavanaugh-for-supreme-court/09/12/
NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCE
Sounds more like holding the Democrat Party line then anything to do with "black farmers".
Yea if northam goes and the second and third line go voila - it would be a Republican and we can't have that now can we?
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/380062.php
No ugly male money should contaminate it.
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Well it was 30+ yrs ago and he would be good for black farmers:
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/meet-black-farmer-helped-advise-virginia-governor-ralph-215503774.html
But here is same guy on Kavanaugh who without and proof and zero corroborative evidence from something 30 + yrs ago:
https://tri-statedefender.com/do-african-american-farmers-support-kavanaugh-for-supreme-court/09/12/
NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCE
Sounds more like holding the Democrat Party line then anything to do with "black farmers".
Yea if northam goes and the second and third line go voila - it would be a Republican and we can't have that now can we?
"I Have a Dream" "That One Day" [2019] We will be grouping farmers by the color of their skin? That is racist and pathetic. What does race have to do with farming?! The Left bitterly clings to identity politics while the center-right expands opportunity and prosperity for all.
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Dems to condemn hate . this is just so stupid I can 't help but vent here about it:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/06/dems-condemn-all-hate-not-anti-semitism-specifically-resolution/
This would be more acceptable as long as they put and asterik on bottom that states
*this does not apply to Christians, Republicans, Maga hatters, right wingers or Black conservatives
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"[Omar] did not understand the full weight of the words she used."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/07/pelosi_ilhan_omar_did_not_understand_the_full_weight_of_the_words_she_used.html
WHAT??!
A conservative gaffe is when they say something wrong, false, stupid or opposed to what they truly believe.
A Leftist gaffe is when they say in public what they truly believe.
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"A Leftist gaffe is when they say in public what they truly believe." continued
Leftists (again) call half the country stupid, "dumbest, most gullible people on earth".
"He [Trump] apparently believes his loyal supporters are the dumbest, most gullible people on earth. We shall see if he's right."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/08/trump_has_an_atrocious_report_card_but_will_he_fail_with_his_voters_139683.html
FYI to dumbf*ck Leftist journalist, in the binary choice of President Trump versus your person who opposes prosperity, country and freedom, we will be taking Trump with all his warts every time. See VDH: Case for Trump.
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"FYI to dumbf*ck Leftist journalis"
Oh you mean Eugene Robinson
he only understands two words in the English language
and they are black and white
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Infanticide
No more children
No more cows
No more cars
No more planes
No guns
No gender
No God
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Infanticide
No more children
No more cows
No more cars
No more planes
No guns
No gender
No God
Not exactly a message of optimism coming into an important election.
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yes , and can add no more freedom.
(but everything that sucks for free)
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Does anyone remember what the Left said about the tax rate cuts? Using static analysis, incentives don't change behavior, revenues would implode.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/looking-back-democratic-hysteria-over-trumps-tax-cuts-11145.html
Paul Krugman accused President Trump's economic adviser of a “completely boneheaded” approach to taxes. [And Trump started the namecalling??]
Obama Chief Economic Adviser, Harvard Prof. Jason Fuhrman:
"tax cuts put the country on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory"
https://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1791.msg108388#msg108388
Even Bob Corker and other R's were worried about the revenue loss caused by making US business taxes competitive with the rest of the civilized world.
Larry Lindsey offered to bet Larry Summers and Paul Krugman a total of $60,000 over the results of the legislation. They knowingly declined.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bush-economic-guru-bets-krugman-summers-60g-their-gop-tax-plan-slams-are-wrong
Lindsey wrote that he believes economic growth will be “far higher” under Trump than Obama, income inequality will decline and “real wages for ordinary workers” will rise. “I am willing to bet $10,000 on each of the three points above with both Messrs. Krugman and Summers that if the framework is passed, GDP growth will accelerate, real wages will rise and income inequality will fall.”
Now we see revenues up 10% in one year. It wasn't doomsday and the sky didn't fall. We have a deficit because we spend too much, not because we tax too little.
No one took the wager.
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The problem with America is too many people who are older who control everything and are more conservative ;
Frankly it will take decades for them to die off:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/america-baby-boomer-old-generation_n_5c82db8de4b0ed0a00136b0c
what is needed is more immigration since the birth rate is not increasing enough
to out populate the "older generation "
I don't remember growing up wishing my parents and grandparents generation would hurry up and die off! :x
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The sexist racist hateful left at it again :wink:
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-court-pick-neomi-rao-171516138.html
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Ocasio and others: FDR New Deal was racist:
“The New Deal was an extremely economically racist policy that drew little red lines around black and brown communities..."
Let's name our greatest initiative in 80 years the "Green New Deal".
Leftist studies say 20-50% of college women experience rape. The other biggest Left wing proposal, let's make that experience free and available to all.
Same for the border. Pew and others report 50-80% of women and girls crossing have been raped on the journey. Left proposal, let's preserve the status quo, crisis is manufactured, keep encouraging people to come, no changes needed.
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her father would be heartbroken from Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/reagan-daughter-patti-davis-gop-letting-trump-administration-destroy-country-123051966.html
Maybe, but as far as I knew him he would be FAR MORE heartbroken by the Left and its communism and socialism reawakening in America.
Just ask his oldest son.
not the younger lib son.
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"he'd be ‘heartbroken’ over state of the country and GOP"
Best employment market in a century. Corp tax rates improved from worst in the developed world to very competitive. Two conservative Supreme Court picks. When did liberal become synonym for moron?
Reagan would be thrilled with some or most Trump policies. The process since Reagan has been painful for all Reaganites. By 1990 he was betrayed and by 1992 we were screwed. In a moment of aging weakness and human loyalty in 1988, Reagan should have IMHO and did not endorse Jack Kemp over George Bush to carry on his legacy. Your successor matters. Bush veered left (as anyone could have predicted), removed the distinction between the parties and America lost.
Regarding truth, honesty and morality in our leaders, it was in 1992, not 2016, when America chose the low road over experience and good character.
Patti Davis protested his policies WHILE he was President. Apologized after he was lost to alzheimers. Bad politics. Bad timing.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2011/12/patti-davis-on-rebelling-against-reagan-107143
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just to piss of Trump
with this title :
Jeff Sessions, mocked then fired by President Trump, returns to Justice for applause and a chair
Certainly most of the DOJ people , being Federal Gov. employees are libs . So this means nadda but to think the leftist are applauding Senator Sessions is truly mind bloggling:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jeff-sessions-mocked-then-fired-201624229.html
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(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Screen-Shot-2019-03-27-at-17.24.37.png)
- Hat tip Glenn Reynolds
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Great article here:
Why Democratic Socialism can't work
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/2/why-democratic-socialism-cant-work/
"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to get the money by taxing those with incomes over $10 million per year at a 70 percent rate. That may be a fine policy, but it only raises about $70 billion per year. [And they need to raise 3-4 trillion for single payer and free college, not counting green new deal.] That’s barely enough to pay for free education, and it also assumes the wealthy don’t change or shift their income streams out of the United States though careful tax planning — and they will."
-------------------
Interesting that with Trump as President, Leftists are the new deficit hawks, lol. But with a new election approaching, out come the new socialism proposals. Free sh*t for voters that "the rich" will pay for.
''Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that man behind the tree.''
- Sen Russell Long, D-LA
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/russell-b-long-84-senator-who-influenced-tax-laws.html
In fact, raising the tax rates will bring in zero new revenues. We know that from recent and historic experiences. We are maxed out and already in deficit and debt. Growing the economy is the only way to raise more money for the government at this point. We already tried raising the rates and that killed the growth rate.
If you want "free college", great, what program of equal size are you going to eliminate? If you want free health care, ... oh just cut it out. No one believes $4 trillion a year, more than all other current programs, is free.
Of great irony, only conservative Republican pro-growth policies bring in more revenues to fund programs for the truly needy among us.
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Did everyone here survive equal pay day this week?
https://www.pay-equity.org/day.html
Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 2, 2019. This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.
FYI to Libs: Equal Pay Day was June 10,1963:
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/epa.cfm
Equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land for 56 years.
The idea that women make 77 cents on the dollar because of discrimination is a statistical fraud:
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/04/14/statistical-frauds
If men and women are otherwise doing the same work, same jobs, same experience, same hours, how do you explain the workplace death gap? 93% of on the job fatalities are men. Maybe men are more careless - or just refuse to ask for directions...
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/how-come-nobody-talks-about-the-gender-workplace-death-gap/
When they control for all other factors, now women make more then men:
http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/genevieve-wood/what-pay-gap-young-women-out-earn-men-cities-gop-p/
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We have 10 years to do something, revert to 1700s technology, or we're all gonna die.
Funny that life expectancy has increased exactly in correlation with the industrial age AND CLIMATE CHANGE?
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTJZky3GCwAvp27emHLO0mFWutLgjsHAtVymJC3xj5TSYwnnwMH)
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
(http://sustainabilitymath.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/life-expectancy-300x212.png)
http://sustainabilitymath.org/tag/inequality/page/2/
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https://www.breitbart.com/education/2019/04/05/george-washington-university-students-vote-to-kill-colonials-nickname-calling-it-offensive/
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The stupid is strong with them , , ,
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https://www.omaha.com/opinion/midlands_voices/bob-kerrey-how-did-department-of-justice-get-the-trump/article_7b68c700-f356-5cb8-8baf-bbbdc5375bf4.html
My fellow Democrats are suffering from two delusions that are harmful. The first is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government in our lives. That this is a delusion can be seen in the promises made by six successful Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan: three governors and three senators. Not one of them supported the Green New Deal, a tax on wealth or “Medicare for all.”
The second Democratic delusion is that Americans were robbed of the truth when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016. All evidence indicates that the full report will not change the conclusion that Donald J. Trump did not collude with Vladimir Putin to secure his victory in 2016.
Rather than investigating the president further, Congress needs to investigate how the Department of Justice got this one so wrong.
...
- Former Democratic Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey
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Giving (less than) equal time to the left here:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/a-new-road-map-for-progressive-democrats
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/new-rules-for-the-21st-century/
New Road Map for Progressive Democrats
By John Cassidy, New Yorker, April 11, 2019
Wednesday was an interesting day in progressive politics. At a press briefing on Capitol Hill, Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, launched the Medicare for All Act of 2019, which calls for a nationwide single-payer health-care system. After pointing out that the United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care as other countries, with unimpressive results, Sanders declared, “The current debate about Medicare for All really has nothing to do with health care. It has everything to do with greed and profiteering. It is about whether we continue a dysfunctional system which allowed the top five health-insurance companies to make over twenty billion dollars in profits last year, and the top sixty-five C.E.O.s in the industry to make $1.7 billion in compensation.”
Across town, the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, unveiled a new report that calls for a broad rebalancing of power away from big corporations—such as health-insurance companies—Wall Street, and other politically connected groups. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who is still deciding whether to enter the 2020 Presidential race, spoke at the event and endorsed the report, which is called “New Rules for the 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of the American Economy.”
The report reminds us that we inhabit a country where labor unions have been emasculated, giant monopolistic businesses dominate many sectors of the economy, C.E.O.s and other corporate executives routinely grant themselves huge compensation packages, corporations spend vast sums on lobbying and campaign contributions, many federal courts are packed with judges schooled in “anti-labor, anti-regulation jurisprudence,” and there are still huge disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor and whites and nonwhites. “Over the last half century, a calculated one-two punch has been used to shape our economy, and ultimately our democracy, at every level,” the report says. “First, government was used to build regulatory, tax, and procurement structures that multiplied wealth and power for a small subset of Americans. Second, public sector programs that served the rest of the country were intentionally and systematically eroded.”
It was Sanders, of course, who popularized a version of this narrative during his 2016 Presidential bid, stating repeatedly that the economy had been “rigged” in favor of the one per cent. At the time, the emphasis on the nexus between economic and political power marked Sanders out from many Democrats, as did his calls to replace the Affordable Care Act with a single-payer system and provide free college education. But the Democratic Party’s center of gravity has shifted, and the two events on Wednesday confirmed how the Party’s progressive wing is now driving the policy agenda. Fourteen Democratic senators have co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act of 2019, and four of them are running for President: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. Gillibrand appeared alongside Sanders at Wednesday’s press conference, and spoke in favor of the new bill.
Almost all the Democratic candidates have endorsed the concept of debt-free college. Warren, a leading progressive voice in the Senate since winning office, in 2012, has also laid out a series of detailed proposals that are directly aimed at rebalancing economic and political power. They include imposing an annual wealth tax on households with more than fifty million dollars in assets, breaking up big companies in the technology and agribusiness sectors, and forcing corporations to appoint worker representatives to their boards. Booker has proposed an innovative “baby bonds” program, which could help close the wealth gap between whites and blacks.
The Roosevelt Institute report is an effort to provide a unified analytical approach and coherent policy agenda for this progressive moment in the Democratic Party. It broadens the lens from the class-based analysis of Sanders circa 2016 to put a larger focus on race, gender, and antitrust. At the same time, however, it keeps attention firmly centered on which groups in society exercise power—market power, bargaining power, and political power. To “build a stronger, more inclusive economy and democracy, progressive policymakers need a one-two punch of their own,” the report says, “curbing the concentrated power in our economy and political system while also reclaiming public power and building on the strengths of government to directly address both the individual and collective challenges facing our nation.”
This broad focus makes sense. The conservative policy agenda that triumphed from the nineteen-seventies onward was an expansive one, and it will take an equally expansive effort to roll it back. In explaining how best to curb corporate power, the report groups its recommendations into six different areas: a “progressive tax policy,” including a higher top rate, a broader corporate tax, and a new wealth tax; “a new anti-trust agenda,” featuring strict limits on mergers and the regulation of technology monopolies; “corporate governance reform,” designed to give all of a business’s stakeholders a say in how it is run; “expanded financial regulation”; “the restoration of worker power,” including making it easier for unions to organize and confirming the right of employees to go on strike; and far-reaching political reforms, including strict limits on corporate contributions and a new Voting Rights Act, which would curb voter suppression.
Turning to spending programs, the report says that the federal government should “ensure universal access to essential goods and services,” a category it defines to include housing, health care, pre-kindergarten, a post-high-school education, and broadband access. The report doesn’t contain detailed spending proposals or detailed financing plans, but it endorses greater public investment and creating a “public option” wherever possible. It also takes a slap at the market-based approach underlying the Affordable Care Act, noting that “Subsidizing the market provision of health insurance (through employers and through private marketplaces), for example, leaves Americans paying more for worse coverage than any other advanced nation. Meanwhile, every estimate of direct provision single-payer health-insurance proposals, such as Medicare for All, shows that they would cost less and cover more people.”
Supporters of the A.C.A. would contest this characterization. They could also point out that Sanders hasn’t provided a full cost analysis for the Medicare for All plan or explained in detail how it would be financed. (On Wednesday, his office did provide a list of possible financing options, which included the introduction of employer and employee contributions, raising the top rate of income tax to seventy per cent for those making over ten million dollars a year, and “establishing a tax on extreme wealth.”) As the Democratic primary campaign proceeds, the issue of how to pay for the candidates’ various proposals is likely to become a flash point. For now, though, most of the candidates are focussing on their own plans, trying to insure that they are sufficiently ambitious and tailored to meet the unique demands of the moment.
In its concluding section, the Roosevelt Institute report strikes a hopeful note. “The task ahead is large, but it’s not impossible,” it says. “We are at a rare moment in our politics when older paradigms for how we govern our society and shape our economy no longer work, and a new worldview, though emerging, is not yet dominant. Americans are hungry for big, new ideas, and voters will reward leadership that is able to articulate those ideas clearly and put them into action.”
...
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Jamie Dimon needs to be the surrogate father to all the single mothers:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/chase-bank-shocking-response-single-132943178.html
what ever happened to not having babies when one is unable to afford one?
what ever happened to getting married?
what ever happened to two parents paying for their child as an expected responsibility?
when did it become other people's responsibility to raise the children of single parents?
when did it become a badge of honor to be single parent?
ten most expensive urban areas :
all liberal completely controlled Democrat strongholds:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2018/09/12/cost-live-america-most-expensive-cities/37748097/
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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/georgetown-votes-to-raise-tuition-by-27-to-pay-for-reparations.html
First I didn't know that students could vote to increase their own tuition
Second Georgetown is already one of the most expensive schools in the country. 30 yrs ago it was the most expensive medical school (or maybe second to George Washington ) both DC schools that has not state aid.
Third why make today's students pay for slave holders of 200 years ago ?
If these students are so . concerned why not pay into a till out of their own pockets rather then make every student cough it up through the tuition front? Could not the school come up with the money without increasing tuition?
And why should they 200 yrs later? Descendents have long been free.
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" .Two, few leftist revolutionary cycles ever halt in mid course, whether in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1946 China, or 1960 Cuba. The philosophy is always that today’s radical is yesterday’s sell-out to be replaced by tomorrow’s genuine far harder leftist — until the limits of reality are reached and the movement either implodes or leads to an authoritarian Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, or Fidel."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/progressive-revolution-ends-in-socialism/
And with all this it is easy to explain as Rush Limbaugh now points out the obvious as to why we still support Donald J. Trump. Because , as of now, he is the only thing that stands in front of the onslaught of this political revolution and the tide that it will continue till it implodes or we slowly descend into socialist / communist/ statist hell.
Could anyone imagine where we would be if Jeb were President?
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yup your right this time Cher
but the race baiting hustlers and the Dem party mobsters don't care:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/04/24/cher-doubles-down-excuse-the-fk-out-of-me-if-i-dont-want-murders-rapists-child-molesters-to-vote/
NO bernie you loon, the people in jail do not deserve to vote.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/381050.php
I doubt it.
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What the left hates most about Trump is that he uses their tactics. He calls people names and tries to accuse, mock and demonize them, Little Marco, Lyin Ted, Crooked Hillary.
But the left has been demonizing their opponents forever. Barry Goldwater was a warmonger. Reagan was a dunce.George Bush was a racist. So was McCain and Romney. By the time they got to Trump they had worn it all out.
They wanted Comey fired. Then they didn't. Mueller was the greatest thing. Then he wasn't. Betsy DeVos was the worst cabinet member ever. Now it's Bill Barr. What did he do wrong? Nothing.
Justice Thomas was a harasser. Kavanaugh was a gang rape organizer. False but they don't care. Anything to avoid debating the issues because their opponents aren't worthy of that, just barbarians.
All their opponents care about are God guns and gays, bitter clingers that make up a basket of deplorables.
Sen Hirono makes the nasty side of Donald Trump look like a fuzzy Teddy Bear:
https://youtu.be/mx-qLlAe8PM
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Who knew this was false?
Rediscovered in the 2000s, when the economy goes well under Republicans, change the conversation to income inequality.
Hickenlooper, over on the honest liberal LOL side of the Democratic party, repeated the lie that 40% of the people can't handle a $400 unexpected expense.
But the question on the Federal Reserve survey cited was how would you choose to pay a $400 unexpected expense. 97% had an answer or how they would handle it. 40% were choosing to charge rather than take from savings, some for the credit card points, and the percentages add it up to 140% as multiple answers were allowed.
https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-400-emergency-expense-0
It doesn't get much more dishonest than that. Or assume honesty, Democrats are that out of touch that they think 40% can't pay an expense when the correct answer is 3%. How do you know the path forward when you don't know where you are?
Even if America was in that bad of shape, the cause of holding back our prosperity is Democrats.
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"Rediscovered in the 2000s, when the economy goes well under Republicans - talk income inequality."
EXACTLY!
and when the economy is bad talk we need more taxes of the wealthy (but includes the entire middle class ) and social spending for free benefits
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We look for bumper sticker slogans sometimes to sum things up. This is from Steve Hayward writing on Powerline:
"Being a liberal must be exhausting..."
I think this sums every post on this thread, cognitive dissonance of the Left.
All we do is look for truth and apply common sense while they have to dart and weave, backtrack, change and hide facts and deny history.
It must be exhausting.
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as per Virginia Kantor "ethics" preacher :
https://pjmedia.com/trending/ethics-watchdog-claims-trump-video-blasting-deblasio-violated-the-law-but-theres-one-problem/
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amongst all the solicalist, communists, and gender denial specialists,
in Cananda:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ricardo-duchesne-white-nationalist-unb_n_5cdec3c8e4b09e057802c216
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It ain't the Right :
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/05/20/study-75-american-colleges-offer-black-only-graduation-ceremonies/
this is totally outrageous
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This belongs in the Socialism, Econ and Political Econ threads as well. I like when others puts to words to the thoughts I struggle to express. The sums up the bizarre, hypocritical, view of free enterprise that the Left has:
"It is sometimes said that the error of socialists is not that they have no faith in capitalism but that they have almost boundless faith in it. They think it can bear any burden they place on it and still stagger on delivering the goods."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/
Bear any burden they place on it? How's that working out in Venezuela? As one wise woman explained it, "Maybe they went too far."
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to investigate the President:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/9-times-the-obama-administration-fought-subpoenas-or-blocked-officials-from-testifying-before-congress/
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Interesting contradiction in Left-world unmentioned by 25 Democratic Presidential candidates:
Private sector union membership and influence is at an all-time low and wage growth is booming, wages have never been higher. Coincidence?
Reverse correlation or irrelevant?
No explanation from the anti- (economic) science wing of the electorate.
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They are running on Orange Man Bad!
Interesting contradiction in Left-world unmentioned by 25 Democratic Presidential candidates:
Private sector union membership and influence is at an all-time low and wage growth is booming, wages have never been higher. Coincidence?
Reverse correlation or irrelevant?
No explanation from the anti- (economic) science wing of the electorate.
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That's it.
Have some Black guy who made it big in movies and is worth more than nearly every white person in the United States
lecture us on the need for reparations:
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/danny-glover-net-worth/
Again - I ain't paying any.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgPGV1bXkOg
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4% of whites and 9% of blacks said they support federally-mandated busing in 1973.
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/28/joe-biden-kamala-harris-busing-integration-schools/?outputType=amp
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/gallup-finds-few-favor-busing-for-integration.html
Bring it on.
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I say bring it on.
Bring on reparations too. I ain't paying and neither will most Americans.
I wonder how Biden likes being called racist now ?
Michelle throws him under the bus. Can't even get herself to say one kind word never mind endorse him.
(after he kissed her husbands ass for 8 yrs+)
Nice.
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Is this an alinsky type tactic
accuse your political enemy of using the low blow tactics you are using?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html
The Left never stoops to such a thing.
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https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2019/07/21/bernie-sanders-finally-guaranteeing-workers-15hr-minimum-wage...by-cutting-hours
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For those who regularly read the Huffington Post, huffing exercises
can do at home and helps treat Trump derangement syndrome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uRfwNLijTI
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https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/07/27/msnbc-host-were-not-going-play-fair-put-trump-jail/
but, when have the Democrats and their propaganda machines in the media EVER played "fair"?
as though the left's onslaught forever has been "fair". and to say they have not been dirty and in our faces every single day is truly delusional
same with Geisseppe Scarborough.
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Sweden’s Economy Unexpectedly Contracts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-30/sweden-s-economy-unexpectedly-contracts-in-blow-to-central-bank?srnd=markets-vp
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getting together for a self righteous social event to mix and mingle with the world's celebrities and big wigs
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/31/irony-alert-global-elites-take-to-the-sea-skies-for-more-climate-talks/
and to chat over champaign discussing what is best for the rest of us.
If the never came home no one would miss them.
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I didn't watch the debates last night [don't have CNN] and I'm not very good at simplifying issues to bumper sticker size, but thinking of the agenda of these deniers of analytics here is one bumper sticker we never seem to see:
Actuarials for Open Borders and Free Healthcare
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getting together for a self righteous social event to mix and mingle with the world's celebrities and big wigs
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/31/irony-alert-global-elites-take-to-the-sea-skies-for-more-climate-talks/
and to chat over champaign discussing what is best for the rest of us.
If the never came home no one would miss them.
Plotting for Ebola to wipe the slate.
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/cory-booker-calls-migrant-countries-shholes-and-no-one-cares/
msm ignores
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I want to put it here for a time and date stamp on the internet.
Everyone following politics now knows what a RINO is, a Republican In Name Only.
So what do we call these open borders, international institution governing, sovereignty hating Leftists with literally no Pledge of Allegiance to our country?
AINO, American In Name Only
You heard it here first. Not catchy but true - with or without an acronym.
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I like it.
I want to put it here for a time and date stamp on the internet.
Everyone following politics now knows what a RINO is, a Republican In Name Only.
So what do we call these open borders, international institution governing, sovereignty hating Leftists with literally no Pledge of Allegiance to our country?
AINO, American In Name Only
You heard it here first. Not catchy but true - with or without an acronym.
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I think I may be using this one , , ,
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Oh my God more lunacy:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/university-bans-burgers-help-save-114859056.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZHJ1ZGdlcmVwb3J0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALGMkA_kRMdA1SJ9pPoZIMPb8MGrDDR_XqWcQ8ptbFUI-xKofzldjE45b3G-ssrr7nXlw33lqF_OTklHVW1A69vow7VAxyI6ww550HPOZK32EadgnMy0FLyONH4YCq_MWOxDwlmZA793ZufXyYhqvK00P1emIoHFZIGBS6jYgEU3
:x
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All four of those want to enter my device and track my location. Fk that.
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basically some university in England that is banning the sale of hamburgers in an effort to "save the planet"
no need to read the rest of it anyway
just more crap to piss us off.
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Europe's growth rate reads a lot like John Belushi's [Bluto] GPA in Animal House, 0.0. "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son. "
Even though last weeks crash already recovered and the inversion curve de-inverted, all the talk in the US MSM is collusion racism uh recession! Yet the Dem candidates openly want us to be more like Europe. Good, let's look at Europe:
"The Eurozone quarterly economic growth was confirmed at 0.2 percent in the second quarter of 2019, compared to a 0.4 percent expansion in the previous period. Germany's gross domestic product contracted mainly due to a slump in exports, while Italy's economy stagnated as both trade and domestic demand made zero contribution to growth. In addition, GDP growth slowed in France and Spain. GDP Growth Rate in the Euro Area averaged 0.38 percent from 1995 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 1.30 percent in the second quarter of 1997 and a record low of -3 percent in the first quarter of 2009."
https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/gdp-growth
-----------------------
Prior to election of the first Pelosi congress and the Obama administration, the long term compound growth rate of the US economy was 3.1%.
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anyone who thinks liberal Jews will abandon the Democrat party think again
this is how they think . no compromise no prisoners no dissent:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bette-midler-profane-kay-coles-james-koch
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https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/289871/democratic-party-becoming-unsalvageable?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=ed6da33e59-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_22_04_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-ed6da33e59-207194629
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On the Left they seem so concerned about the recklessness of Trump's words, yet the media, the opponents and my friends on the Left always seem to criticize him by misquoting him - and mis-stating facts and events. All along the lines of Tina Fey, not Sarah Palin, said, "I can see Russia from my home."
Trump didn't say, send them home.
Michael Brown didn't have his hands up, back turned or have hands up..
Trump didn't say there are good people among the white supremacists.
Trump didn't say he was ordering all American companies to exit China.
Trump tax cuts weren't mostly for the rich.
The widening deficit isn't from decreasing revenues or from tax reform.
Trump didn't start the trade war.
Trump didn't repeal any environmental law.
They can't seem to attack him without lying about what he said or what he did.
But Keith Ellison really did say "We don't get no justice, you don't get no peace."
Omar really did say, "it's all about the Benjamins, baby."
Biden really did say he would like to "beat the hell out of" Trump.
Ocasio really did say, ""Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs."
Pelosi really did say, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
Obama really did say, "Get in their face!"
"they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"
"I don't want [my daughters] punished with a baby."
"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"[my grandmother] is a typical white person..."
"You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan."
"This was the moment [my inauguration] when the rise of the oceans began to slow"
Is it that hard to find and use actual quotes, actual policies to besmirch the President?
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It's the two minute hate.
ORANGE MAN BAD!!!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvGmOZ5T6_Y
On the Left they seem so concerned about the recklessness of Trump's words, yet the media, the opponents and my friends on the Left always seem to criticize him by misquoting him - and mis-stating facts and events. All along the lines of Tina Fey, not Sarah Palin, said, "I can see Russia from my home."
Trump didn't say, send them home.
Michael Brown didn't have his hands up, back turned or have hands up..
Trump didn't say there are good people among the white supremacists.
Trump didn't say he was ordering all American companies to exit China.
Trump tax cuts weren't mostly for the rich.
The widening deficit isn't from decreasing revenues or from tax reform.
Trump didn't start the trade war.
Trump didn't repeal any environmental law.
They can't seem to attack him without lying about what he said or what he did.
But Keith Ellison really did say "We don't get no justice, you don't get no peace."
Omar really did say, "it's all about the Benjamins, baby."
Biden really did say he would like to "beat the hell out of" Trump.
Ocasio really did say, ""Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs."
Pelosi really did say, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
Obama really did say, "Get in their face!"
"they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"
"I don't want [my daughters] punished with a baby."
"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"[my grandmother] is a typical white person..."
"You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan."
"This was the moment [my inauguration] when the rise of the oceans began to slow"
Is it that hard to find and use actual quotes, actual policies to besmirch the President?
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/swedish-prof-urges-eating-human-flesh-to-save-the-climate/
I also have another great idea:
we force every human to have a little device that measures methane up our rear ends and we can then tax our flatus
those with more flatus then others are ruining the environment more and thus should pay more
(anyone who is not white male or hetero could be exempt or get a fart tax discount).
yrs ago I would never have even dreamed such a thing. Now it sounds in the same ballpark as other leftist "ideas".
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creating today's and tomorrow's future soldiers:
https://www.axios.com/climate-strikes-nyc-1m-students-can-skip-school-fdc414c6-1496-4107-85cb-ef6522e4d512.html
Watch. Deblasio will speak somehow at this "event" which is no more than kids cutting school and because it is a leftist event - it becomes a grand occasion not a juvenile offense .
CNN MSLSD will be there to give the "woke" kids their 15 minutes of glory , and another Hogg might emerge and be given a platform and path to Ivy league , help in establishing an organization, and roadmap to future public office.
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This comes from Crafty's patriot Post:
Protester sign:
“I dream women will one day have the same rights as guns.”
Also “If my vagina shot bullets it would have fewer regulations than guns.”
(https://lockedback.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/a321b1af91354a56bf8f2e14867d74be.jpg)
Let's be clear:
[I like the one, banned in polling places on the day of an election.]
Locked up when not in use.
Banned from airplanes.
Banned from public schools.
Businesses can post "No women allowed" signs.
Banned in major cities.
Not allowed anywhere alcohol is consumed.
A man can own multiple women only after a background check.
Noise reduction devices regulated.
A license with fee is required to be out in public.
Banned from polling places on the day of an election.
Banned from entering many buildings, like courthouses, schools, and colleges.
Banned from Washington D.C.
Cannot be sold across state lines without going through the government.
https://patriotpost.us/humor/65489-pete-and-meat?mailing_id=4531&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4531&utm_campaign=humor
https://lockedback.com/women-hope-many-rights-guns-wait/
We should treat our guns better than that!
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So Trump's team asking Ukraine to look into the appearance of corruption of Joe Biden and son
is now
made to be the corruption!
how the Left and its media hacks have ignored the clear conflict of interests of their guy and probably outright corruption
and suddenly are screaming through all their megaphones that Gulliani is the the corrupt one.
Bait and switch games :
https://www.spartareport.com/2019/09/what-was-trump-talking-to-the-ukrainian-president-about-the-burisma-holdings-scandal-involving-joe-and-hunter-biden-perhaps/
Now we are going to have to hear this shit all over the airwaves till Nov. 20. And listen to the partisans like Larry Tribe (of the democrat party tribe)
all day and night . :x
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OH NOES!
I am back!
Just wondering anyone's thoughts on all the REPOs and the current liquidity crunch going on.
Pat
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" .Just wondering anyone's thoughts on all the REPOs and the current liquidity crunch going on"
don't know anything about this but welcome back
good to see your website still alive and kicking (leftist behind)
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My Grandpa used to say, "Now we're cooking with gas." It was an expression for things going well on any project, way beyond cooking, because he remembered cooking before gas.
Now the Left wants to ban fossil fuels including clean natural gas. What are YOU going to cook with, solar and wind? Depend on the grid while they shut it down more and more often?
https://westernwire.net/no-more-cooking-with-gas-environmental-activists-going-after-the-appliances-consumers-love/
Democrats: Taking us back to the 1800s, only worse.
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What did socialists use before candles? Electricity.
My Grandpa used to say, "Now we're cooking with gas." It was an expression for things going well on any project, way beyond cooking, because he remembered cooking before gas.
Now the Left wants to ban fossil fuels including clean natural gas. What are YOU going to cook with, solar and wind? Depend on the grid while they shut it down more and more often?
https://westernwire.net/no-more-cooking-with-gas-environmental-activists-going-after-the-appliances-consumers-love/
Democrats: Taking us back to the 1800s, only worse.
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Would these same naive kids
include calling people Nazis, Fascists, bigots , terrorists , or saying anything negative about Christians Republicans white people or conservatives in general .
as "hate speech"
just curious
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Ah, the nostalgia of being a Leftist revolutionary on the streets demonstrating in an appropriate Che Guevara cap (no problem he was a viscous murderer) and all dressed in bright red (no prob with Mao Stalin et al). The romance of it all !!! :wink:
Oh, it is good to feel young again!
https://twitter.com/search?q=jane+fonda&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch
I so admire this brave, courageous woman's willingness to fight for principle , the world, the little people the forests . (heavy on sarcasm).
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The bad treatment of Katie Hill will keep future nice young women from seeking public office. Good grief.
Yeah, that's what happened, she was treated unfairly. Not that she cheated on her threesome and had two affairs with staffers against House ethics rules and resigned from Congress from the shame of it.
“You cannot even imagine this happening with a male congressman,”
Are these people nuts? [yes]
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/29/20936562/katie-hill-democrat-congress-resigns-revenge-porn
"Sexual misconduct allegations against men like Sen. Al Franken or Rep. Blake Farenthold were generally treated as political issues, not salacious stories about people’s sex lives."
- She was the one with the salacious sex life and the consensual photos. Private parts were covered in every photo I saw. It was not revenge porn if it was not porn, nice try. I wonder what part of going into public life she didn't understand? Bragging publicly of being bisexual opened the door. Her constituents [and Republicans] didn't bring her sex life, she did. And what lesson of the 'me too' movement she didn't understand. That it only applied to men in the workplace because they have all the power? SHE had the power. She could have divorced the "abusive husband" instead of just cheating on him and sleeping with staffers. If she wants us to judge all the players in her little sex drama, we will need all the information.
Who ever thought that a practicing bisexual would be faithful? Faithful to whom?
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any word on her district. if this helps repubs
I would be surprised since dems generally will circle wagons if it is a pol they need and would lose a seat.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/george-papadopoulos-convicted-trump-campaign-012412524.html
:-o :?
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/george-papadopoulos-convicted-trump-campaign-012412524.html
:-o :?
This young man deserves a fair chance to clevr his good name. I heard Jennifer Horn (sp?) comment on this on Sebastion Gorka yesterday. There are other good conservatives already running in the "jungle primary". At some timely point in the campaign, Republicans need to self-limit their choices to one or risk having two Democrats be the choices in the general election.
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CCP or Doug:
Please post in Congress thread.
TY
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no better example of the power of the Democrat-Media Complex . (*DMC*)
then this :
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/toast-town-toxic-facebook-ceo-060758941.html
"toast of the town"
while he was baraq fan
then zuckerberg made the fatal mistake of pissing off the DEms with Cambridge analytica
then he goes to "toxic"
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Has Elizabeth Warren Wrecked the Left?
The Warren Medicare for All plan shows that progressivism is undeliverable pie in the sky.
By Daniel Henninger
Nov. 6, 2019 6:58 pm ET
Opinion: Has Warren's Medicare For All Wrecked the Left?
The fallout from the release of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan is the biggest event so far in the 2020 presidential campaign. It’s big enough that Sen. Warren’s campaign may have buckled beneath the weight of her plan’s fantastic details. But it might be bigger than that. The Warren meltdown could prove to be the Democratic left’s Chernobyl, a lasting catastrophe.
In 2016, capitalizing on socialist Bernie Sanders’s strong performance in the primaries against Hillary Clinton, the organized left muscled the Democratic establishment out of the picture and captured the party’s levers of power and its ideological direction.
Recall earlier this year what happened when the party’s presidential candidates began their 2020 runs. Bernie was back, and in short order the progressives put down an array of policy markers and litmus tests—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free public college tuition, forgiveness of student debt.
The astonishing thing then wasn’t Bernie bellowing about Medicare for All or even Ms. Warren waving it forward. More surprising was how quickly more “moderate” Democrats, such as Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, saluted the left’s agenda. Both signed on to a Green New Deal resolution introduced in February by the left-wing social-media influencer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Recall also how the American Action Forum estimated that the Green New Deal, including its “social justice” policies, could cost $51 trillion to $93 trillion between 2020 and 2029. No matter. The bended-knee obeisances of the Democratic presidential candidates to most of this stuff were a testament to the progressive left’s ascendancy.
Then Elizabeth Warren began to introduce her “plans.” In retrospect, the purpose of her incredible policy detail seems clear: She would be competing with Mr. Sanders in the same lane for progressive primary voters. To distinguish herself from Bernie’s mystical left-wing status, Ms. Warren offered a welter of progressive policy detail.
Her schools plan, for instance, is a paint-by-numbers Valentine to the progressive-controlled teachers unions, a force in producing party voter turnout. She promised to “quadruple” federal spending on education, to $800 billion over a decade. (You almost have to admire a candidate who vows to quadruple spending.) This came after her $1.07 trillion “universal child-care” plan.
Somehow Ms. Warren was slipping by with all this maxed-out progressivism, including kid-glove media profiles—until last week and the release of her Medicare for All plan. Uh-oh.
So this is what nationalized health care looks like. We knew that half the U.S. population—some 177 million people—would lose their private insurance. Now we find out that federalized health care would cost nearly $52 trillion over 10 years, paid for by myriad bureaucratic “savings” and new taxes. There’d be a new Employer Medicare Contribution (i.e., a tax) plus an annual tax on the unrealized capital gains of the “wealthiest,” plus a threat to abrogate drug companies’ patents if they don’t comply with federal price controls. Doctors, some warned, might leave the profession.
If costs outpace economic growth (and they would), “I will use available policy tools, which include global budgets, population-based budgets and automatic rate reductions to bring it back in line.” The left may never forgive Elizabeth Warren for releasing all this detail.
Ms. Warren has let the cat out of the bag: Progressivism is basically undeliverable pie in the sky. Indeed, by stringing together in detail so many progressive wish lists, she has made clear how difficult, if not impossible, it is for them to survive the most basic tests of political or fiscal plausibility.
Mr. Sanders has always understood this, which is why he has risen by never offering anything more substantive than the wings and prayers of his stirring stump speech. His pitch to millennials and white gentry liberals is wholly emotional.
No wonder Ms. Ocasio-Cortez chose to endorse Bernie. Like him, AOC knows the progressive enterprise is about sailing into power on a river of aspirational rhetoric.
In the wake of Ms. Warren’s plan reveal, it just got a lot harder for the party’s presidential candidates to dismiss or duck questions about the price tag for their spending policies. Surely this is why Nancy Pelosi, a self-described woman of the left, warned this week: “What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan.”
The party’s “moderate” candidates—Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and the reimagined Pete Buttigieg—have been criticizing Ms. Warren’s health-care plan, but whether they will separate themselves from the party’s dreamland left remains to be seen.
President Trump has been telling audiences: You may or may not like me, but you’re going to have to vote for me to avoid the Democrats destroying the gains in your 401(k). It’s not a bad line. Now Mr. Trump can say—finally: Don’t take my word for it. Read for yourself what’s in the Democratic “plan” after he’s gone.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/laurence-tribe-donald-trump-defenders-090359249.html
recently read thread replies when one wrote he is a liberal and next poster denied it and said there is no such evidence for such an accusation
Trib(al) is on the board of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renew_Democracy_Initiative
and
"Tribe served as a judicial adviser to the Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign."
I wonder if he has helped one of his other students, Ted Cruz
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Needs to be posted in its entirety. The Left is still lying about it. You are not serious about truth and evidence if you side with Ford over Kavanaugh. Sadly all Dem politicians still do.
21 Reasons Not To Believe Christine Blasey Ford’s Claims About Justice Kavanaugh
https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/02/21-reasons-not-to-believe-christine-blasey-fords-claims-about-justice-kavanaugh/
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California recently presented Christine Blasey Ford with its Roger Baldwin Courage Award. Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape, nearly derailing his Supreme Court nomination.
Many Democratic politicians and members of corporate media proudly announce that they “believe” Ford and believe that Kavanaugh should be impeached.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is a profile in courage. One year later, I still believe her. pic.twitter.com/ufqGKm7QKr
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) September 27, 2019
It’s been one year since Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I believed her then and I believe it now: she is a true profile in courage. pic.twitter.com/bG36lOA7AD
— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) September 27, 2019
I still believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. And like the man who appointed him, Brett Kavanaugh should be impeached.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 28, 2019
I believed Christine Blasey Ford a year ago. I believe Christine Blasey Ford today. The default position should be to believe the women especially when they take on powerful men with nothing to gain.
— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) September 27, 2019
It is unclear why these politicians and pundits claim to believe Ford, given the lack of evidence in support of her serious accusations. Here are 21 reasons reasonable people may doubt Ford’s claims about Kavanaugh.
1. There Is No Evidence that Ford and Kavanaugh Ever Met
Apart from Ford’s claim, no evidence was ever provided that Ford and Kavanaugh had ever met, much less that the party she described had occurred, much less that the assault she described occurred.
2. Leland Keyser Said She Did Not Have ‘Any Confidence’ in Her Friend’s Story
Ford said a close childhood friend named Leland Keyser was a witness to the event where the alleged assault occurred, and later told people that she was sure Keyser had driven her home. While Keyser initially felt horrible that the assault had occurred unbeknownst to her, upon a rigorous examination of her memory of the summer in question, she came to lack confidence in the tale her friend told.
Keyser was a lifelong liberal who did not want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. This was first reported in our book “Justice on Trial,” and added to in “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.”
3. Friends Pressured Keyser to Change Her Story
When Keyser publicly said she had no recollection of the event in question, mutual friends of hers and Ford’s pressured her to change her story. She issued another statement, still noting she had no memory of the event while adding that she believed her friend. Later, the pressure campaign to get her to change her story rubbed her the wrong way.
A recent book revealed that these friends considered releasing disparaging information about Keyser because her public statements about her lifelong friend were such a “problem.”
4. All Alleged Witnesses Strongly Dispute the Claim
In addition to Keyser, the other alleged witnesses also said they had no memory of the event in question.
It wasn’t just that they said they had no recollection of the incident, but that the allegations were difficult to believe. For instance, P.J. Smyth said, “I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh. Personally speaking, I have known Brett Kavanaugh since high school and I know him to be a person of great integrity, a great friend, and I have never witnessed any improper conduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards women.”
5. Ford’s Father Supported Kavanaugh’s Confirmation
The Blasey family stayed conspicuously silent about the veracity of her allegations. A public letter of support for Ford that began “As members of Christine Blasey Ford’s family . . .” wasn’t signed by a single blood relative. Reached for comment by the Washington Post, her father simply said, “I think all of the Blasey family would support her. I think her record stands for itself. Her schooling, her jobs and so on,” before hanging up.
Privately, however, it appears the Blasey family had significant doubts about what Ford was trying to accomplish by making unsubstantiated allegations against Kavanaugh. Within days of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, a fascinating encounter took place. Kavanaugh’s father was approached by Ford’s father at the golf club where they are both members.
Ralph Blasey, Ford’s father, went out of his way to offer to Ed Kavanaugh his support of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to multiple people familiar with the conversation that took place at Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland. “I’m glad Brett was confirmed,” Ralph Blasey told Ed Kavanaugh, shaking his hand. Blasey added that the ordeal had been tough for both families.
The encounter immediately caused a stir at the close-knit private golf club as staff and members shared the news. The conversation between the two men echoed a letter Blasey had previously sent to the elder Kavanaugh. Neither man returned requests for comment about the exchanges.
Blasey never explicitly addressed the credibility of his daughter’s allegations, but he presumably wouldn’t have supported the nomination of a man he believed tried to rape his daughter.
It wasn’t just Ford’s father. The national drama played out on a decidedly local scale as the D.C.-based family and friends of Ford’s quietly apologized to friends and family of Kavanaugh, even as the toxic political environment made it punitive for them to speak up publicly.
6. Ford Doesn’t Know the Location
Ford was unable to identify the location of the alleged assault.
After being asked under oath whether she remembered any more details about the event, she said she did not. However, in later interviews with friendly journalists (for “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh”), she elaborated on her earlier description of the house where the event allegedly occurred, speculating that it was a bachelor pad and noting that it lacked a lived-in feel. She also has changed her description of the location of the event from within a 1-mile radius of the country club to between her house and the club.
7. Ford Doesn’t Know How She Arrived
Ford was unable to say how she arrived at the location of the party where she claimed the assault occurred. Her recent retelling of the story include new speculation that she arrived with Keyser and that Keyser was her entree to the party because Keyser knew Mark Judge, details she was unable to provide when asked at the hearing.
8. Ford Does Not Know How She Got Home
Ford was unable to say how she got home, although in later versions of the story she said Keyser drove her home. Ford was frequently driven around by Keyser and by one of Ford’s brothers, making their inability to support her story a particular problem.
9. Ford Does Not Know the Date or Even What Time of Week
Ford’s lack of memory about the event included no memory of whether the event took place on a weekday or weekend.
10. Ford Somehow Remembers She Had Only One Beer, But Not Other Details
While Ford didn’t remember the location of the alleged event, when it happened, how she got there, or how she got home, she claims to remember she had precisely one beer. Ford’s high school friends reported that she was a heavy drinker at the time. It was unclear why she remembered the one beer detail and almost no other details.
11. Kavanaugh’s Contemporaneous Calendars Support His Claim
While the lack of specificity about Ford’s claims made them difficult to dispute, Kavanaugh had surprising contemporaneous evidence. He kept calendars of his daily schedule, including specifics about who attended which gatherings noted after the events. He did not have a free weekend during the summer of 1982, limiting the possible dates for the gathering that was claimed. Nor were there any events recorded similar to the one Ford described.
12. Ford Changed the Date of the Incident by Years from Her Initial Stories
Ford’s story changed many details over the years, including the year in which the assault was alleged to have occurred. She initially stated that the event occurred in the “mid-1980s” when texting the Washington Post hotline, told Sen. Dianne Feinstein that it occurred in the “early 80s,” and then finally settled on the specific summer of 1982 in the article published by the Post. She was unable to explain why her assessment of the date changed or how she ultimately determined 1982 was the correct year.
13. Character Witnesses from the Time Support Kavanaugh
When the allegations of sexual misconduct broke in the Washington Post, Kavanaugh’s female friends from high school quickly attested to his character. Some 65 women he knew in high school signed a letter about his conduct that they released in his defense. Additional groups of women signed letters after additional allegations — such as that he was a serial gang rapist who roamed the streets of suburban Maryland — were made by a client of Michael Avenatti’s.
While many Holton Arms alumnae signed a letter in support of Ford, an alumna, few attended the school at the same time as Ford or even claimed to know her.
14. Ford’s First Mention of Kavanaugh’s Name is 2012, After He Became a National Figure
Kavanaugh had been a public figure since working on Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel in the mid-1990s. From there he worked in the George W. Bush White House and went through two contentious confirmation battles to be a federal judge.
By 2012, he was identified in The New Yorker as the next likely nominee to the Supreme Court under a Republican presidency. There is no record of Ford naming Kavanaugh until that year, at best. In recent accounts, she acknowledges this year was the one in which she realized Kavanaugh had a national profile.
15. False Claims Were Made about Ford’s Inability to Fly
When the allegations were published in the Washington Post, the Senate Judiciary Committee wanted to hear from Ford immediately. After her lawyers stated publicly that she was willing to testify, the Judiciary Committee offered to fly to her and hear her testimony in an open or closed setting. While the offers to fly to her were not responded to, her lawyers told the committee she could not make an early hearing date in DC due to her fear of flying.
Under questioning from Rachel Mitchell, a sex crimes prosecutor, it was revealed that Ford did in fact fly to DC and flies regularly for pleasure, including to support her habit of global surf travel to remote islands. It was unclear why the false claims about fear of flying were made, although recent reporting suggests it may have been part of an attempt by her lawyers to delay the hearing date because, contrary to their statements, they knew their client did not want to testify and needed more time to convince her to change her mind.
16. Ford Scrubbed Her Social Media
When Ford’s claim went public, there was no social media footprint for her, while she was repeatedly presented as not particularly political. Her high school friends found that curious since she had been an active Facebook user, described as being “crazy” liberal.
17. Ford Said She Wanted to Stay Confidential, But First Call Was to Washington Post
The claim was made that Ford desired to keep her claims private. However, the first call she made about the matter was to the Washington Post tip line. And when she didn’t receive a response quickly enough, she said she would go to The New York Times if they didn’t respond soon.
Her other contact was with her members of Congress, although she claimed that she wasn’t quite sure how to contact her senator yet was able to reach her House member. Ford is a university professor with a Ph.D.
18. Ford’s Attorney Admitted a Motive of Desiring an Asterisk by Kavanaugh’s Name
Ford’s attorney admitted that she and her client were motivated by their support for abortion. The admission, first reported in Ryan Lovelace’s new book “Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh,” was confirmed with video footage. The forthcoming pro-Ford book “Supreme Ambition” attempts to excuse Katz by claiming Lovelace misheard garbled audio of the event, but her words are in fact quite clear on the recording.
Tarnishing the reputation of a justice who would have the power to overturn abortion precedent Roe v. Wade “was part of what motivated Christine,” her attorney Debra Katz said. “Elections have consequences, but he will always have an asterisk next to his name,” she said of Kavanaugh.
19. Ford Has Benefited Politically, Financially, and Socially
The ACLU’s “Courage” award was not the first award bestowed on Ford. She has received several awards and accolades from liberal organizations, ranging from Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine to the YWCA, and near universal acclaim from the politicians whose views she shares. Nearly $1 million was raised for her in GoFundMe accounts. Ford has also been able to recast her troubled adolescence as a result of trauma at Kavanaugh’s hands.
20. Nothing in Kavanaugh’s Past Remotely Similar to the Claim for 37 Years
While sexual assailants usually don’t stop at one violent sexual assault, nothing in Kavanaugh’s past even remotely matches Ford’s claims. His dozens, if not hundreds, of female friends — including several ex-girlfriends — vouch for his character and have done so against unbelievable pressure campaigns. Even the anti-Kavanaugh authors of “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh” acknowledge that they were unable to find any evidence of sexual misconduct in the past 30 years despite extensive digging.
21. Memory Manipulation?
Believing, in keeping with the evidence, that Ford’s story is not accurate does not require a conclusion that she is lying. Scientific research shows that memories of traumatic events are malleable and that some types of therapy are particularly likely to introduce false elements into memory.
Ford has attempted to use discussions with her marriage therapist as evidence for her recalling this event as early as 2012, but has refused to release those notes to confirm that claim or to allow an assessment of whether therapeutic techniques known to introduce false memories were employed in those sessions. Without external corroboration of her story — and there is none — it is impossible to conclude that her allegations are true even if one believes she is completely sincere in making them.
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Major league abuse of power exposed at the highest levels of the FBI and previous administration and former prosecutor little Amy is not offended? What if this story was about a Republican administration concocting a false reason to surveil a Democratic candidate for President? How come no one is offended by two systems of justice? What if YOUR side were on the other side of it? They can't see that?
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/stunning-shift-as-amy-klobuchar-tones-things-down-after-ted-cruz-rants-about-beavis-and-butt-head-at-ig-hearing/
Simultaneously, she supports impeaching the victim of this abuse of power for abuse of power and not cooperating with the frame up.
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Of course not. Rules are for the little people.
Major league abuse of power exposed at the highest levels of the FBI and previous administration and former prosecutor little Amy is not offended? What if this story was about a Republican administration concocting a false reason to surveil a Democratic candidate for President? How come no one is offended by two systems of justice? What if YOUR side were on the other side of it? They can't see that?
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/stunning-shift-as-amy-klobuchar-tones-things-down-after-ted-cruz-rants-about-beavis-and-butt-head-at-ig-hearing/
Simultaneously, she supports impeaching the victim of this abuse of power for abuse of power and not cooperating with the frame up.
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-jersey-gives-illegals-drivers-licenses-how-long-before-they-get-the-vote/
well Joan of Arc
was only 19:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc
of course she commanded armies , showed great courage, won battles till she was betrayed by lesser men.
and then burned at the stake for her troubles
Who here thinks GT has as much or more courage?
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Says don't call Chris, Fredo ever again - you got it!:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/12/23/cuomo-vetoes-bill-allowing-federal-judges-to-officiate-wedding-because-of-trump-appointments-n2558441
despite :
The legislation, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Liz Krueger, passed the state Senate by a 61-to-1 vote. It passed the state Assembly by a 144-to-2 tally. Both the state Senate and the Assembly are under Democratic control
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[Consider giving to Center of the American Experiment.]
https://www.americanexperiment.org/2019/12/remember-that-time-the-end-of-net-neutrality-was-going-to-cause-the-end-of-the-internet-as-we-know-it-that-was-awesome/
Remember that time the end of net neutrality was going to cause “the end of the internet as we know it”? That was awesome
by John Phelan, December 19, 2019
Two years ago this month the FCC repealed the controversial net neutrality rules. At the time, our own Sen. Amy Klobuchar wrote
As a strong supporter of a free and open internet, I am opposed to the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to eliminate net neutrality rules. These important protections prevent internet service providers from blocking, slowing and prioritizing web traffic. This vote will harm consumers, particularly in rural areas. It will limit competition. And it will hurt small business entrepreneurship and innovation. I will continue to push for a free and open internet.
Sen. Bernie Sanders cranked up the hysterics even further…
This is the end of the internet as we know it. In Congress and in the courts we must fight back. #NetNeutrality pic.twitter.com/ExKx7LFZwj
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 14, 2017
Mysteriously popular British artist Banksy tweeted
I don’t know about you, but two years on I’m still not paying for my Google searches. The internet is still here. Indeed, as I wrote on this first anniversary of the repeal of net neutrality rules, it has continued improving.
Ditch the hysterics and try discussing things sensibly
The FCC’s net neutrality vote was never a threat to consumers, in rural areas or elsewhere, and it didn’t hurt small business entrepreneurship and innovation, as Sen. Klobuchar warned. It certainly didn’t risk “the end of the internet as we know it”, as Sen. Sanders said. So why did they say that it did?
One possible answer is that they didn’t know any better. American politics gives people power over things they often don’t understand. House Republicans drew laughs with their technologically inept questioning of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, but we should also be laughing at Sen. Klobuchar and Sen. Sanders. We should also question whether bigger government policies – which give ever more power over ever more of American life to people who cannot know enough to exercise it – are actually sensible.
Another possibility is that they did know better but said it anyway. Maybe Sen. Sanders and Sen. Klobuchar did know that the things they were saying were, at best, outrageous exaggerations, but said them anyway to fire up their base. If so, it worked. Like me, you might have seen friends on social media repeating Sen. Sanders’ risible claims.
But at what cost was this temporary enthusiasm bought? Politicians – of whichever party – cannot keep calling things which are not existential threats existential threats. For one thing, people will be less inclined to believe you when a real existential threat comes along. For another, a healthy society and polity cannot survive at that pitch of hysteria.
For the good of the country, calm it down.
John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
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https://reason.com/2019/12/17/eat-the-rich-house-democrats-plan-to-pass-huge-tax-break-for-wealthy-homeowners/?utm_medium=email
...congressional Democrats are set to vote this week to restore a huge tax break that primarily benefits wealthy Americans—one that effectively shifts the federal tax burden onto middle- and lower-income earners.
That tax break is known as the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction and it does exactly what the name would suggest. Taxpayers are allowed to deduct payments of state and local income and property taxes from their federal taxes. (In states with no income tax, taxpayers can deduct sales taxes instead.)
...
19 of the top 20 districts, ranked by the percentage of households claiming a SALT deduction in 2016, are represented by Democrats in Congress.
-------------------
Interesting. Democrats want to pay less in taxes. Who knew.
Try this: spend less.
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"Interesting. Democrats want to pay less in taxes. Who knew.
Try this: spend less."
Well this would help a lot of taxpayers not only the "rich"
that said this smacks of Democrat helping themselves rather than anyone else to help ease their high blue state taxes payers and the richer more
despite the fact I would like these tax breaks I am against it because it forces the Fed to subsidize high tax states disportionately with lower tax states.
Agree, the dems want lower taxes than reduce stated local income and property taxes and spend less.
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"Interesting. Democrats want to pay less in taxes. Who knew.
Try this: spend less."
Well this would help a lot of taxpayers not only the "rich"
that said this smacks of Democrat helping themselves rather than anyone else to help ease their high blue state taxes payers and the richer more
despite the fact I would like these tax breaks I am against it because it forces the Fed to subsidize high tax states disproportionately with lower tax states.
Agree, the dems want lower taxes than reduce stated local income and property taxes and spend less.
The people screwed are you and me, people who pay high taxes in 'blue' states but have consistently voted against over-spending and over-taxation at both the federal and state levels.
How that passes for consent of the governed is beyond me, when politicians sell higher taxes as something only a few, someone else not you, will have to pay.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/27/yale-psychiatrist-claims-pelosi-can-subject-trump-involuntary-mental-health-evaluation/#
Gotta love this part :
" Lee also believes that those surrounding Trump may be suffering from a “shared psychosis.” She said that “the severity by which others are affected is what induces me to believe that Trump is sometimes truly paranoid and delusional rather than merely lying.”
All his supporters are delusional.
Yet she clearly suffers from TDS herself as well as some personal narcism in thinking it is her job to save the World from the orange man.
Well Dr Lee I am far from deranged to see what would happen to me and my country if the LEft wins.
no delusions there!
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https://eand.co/the-left-is-dying-because-its-turned-into-a-bonfire-of-vanities-1f1f1efc28ab
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Previously by this author,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/sunday/as-donald-trump-denies-climate-change-these-kids-die-of-it.html
As Donald Trump Denies Climate Change, These Kids Die of It
----------------------------
Today, same author:
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/12/30/nicholas-kristof-why-has/
Why 2019 has been the best year in human history
[and the US under DJT led the way?]
Obligatory mentions of Trump and climate change in the column.
----------------------------
More:
Climate Change Is Already Killing Us
How Our Warmer and Wetter Planet Is Getting Sicker and Deadlier by the Day
By Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus September 23, 2019
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-09-23/climate-change-already-killing-us
Foreign affairs, seriously?
Yet humankind has never been so healthy and prosperous.
- Statement of fact. Source: any honest journalist.
Foreign affairs continued:
Photo: Women are treated for respiratory problems at a hospital in New Delhi, November 2018
s world leaders gather on Monday for the Climate Action Summit at the UN General Assembly, it is sadly clear that the prospect of rising global temperatures and sea levels has failed to generate a sufficient sense of urgency around climate change.
-------------------------------------
Indian Ocean sea levels rise 0.00mm over past century
https://cairnsnews.org/2019/06/15/indian-ocean-sea-levels-rise-0-00mm-over-past-century/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41748-017-0020-z
Analysis of the tide gauge data of Aden, Yemen shows that without arbitrary alignment of data, Aden exhibits very stable sea level conditions like those in Mumbai, India and Karachi, Pakistan, without any significant sea level trend.
The Indian Ocean is kind of a big one... You'd think this would get reported.
-----------------------------
"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"
- B. Obama, June 2008
In other 2019 news:
"Obama Ocean Mansion 3-10 Feet Above Sea Level"
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/08/obama-ocean-mansion-3-10-feet-above-sea-level-daniel-greenfield/
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/g22791064/barack-obama-marthas-vineyard-vacation-home-sale/
- mission accomplished.
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Hat tip PJ Media Instapundit
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screen-Shot-2019-12-30-at-3.59.31-PM.png)
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/cdc-confirms-vitamin-e-acetate-is-causing-vast-majority-of-vaping-illnesses-heres-what-else-we-learned-174356096.html
so of course the vape pushers will be all over the media claiming they removed this from their products
and American kids are good to go and start vaping their brains out again
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Hat tip PJ Media Instapundit
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screen-Shot-2019-12-30-at-3.59.31-PM.png)
Exactly!
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/linda-ronstadt-trump-hitler-073242716.html
right
Trump is Hitler and Mexicans are the new Jews
Wait I thought the Indians - doctors lawyers IT professionals business owners were the "new Jews"!
I wonder how many songs of hers were stolen?
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When Obama ordered drone strikes against terror targets in Yemen, Afghan, Pak... when Obama approved the killing of Osama bin Laden, conservatives for the most part applauded. Search 'giving credit where credit is due' on the forum. I may have mentioned that drone strikes are the same kinds of policies the same Obama would have criticized if he was not President, but we all agreed these were good and proper policies in these situations.
With Soleimani, Democrats are tripping over themselves to criticize. Isn't that strange.
Even more strange is that no one seems to argue the facts. This man was responsible for killing and injuring THOUSANDS of Americans, among his victims, and was actively plotting more.
It is provocative to kill someone who is killing us? Sorry about that. If you were storming the Obama White House or Oval Office with deadly weapons, what would the orders be? Shoot to kill.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/trump-has-produced-extraordinarily-dangerous-moment/604456/
https://spectator.org/the-democrats-strange-reaction-to-the-death-of-qassem-soleimani/
----------------------
Others noticed this.
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Screen-Shot-2020-01-05-at-12.29.58-PM.png)
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/white-women-draped-in-white-sit-while-trump-announces-lowest-minority-unemployment-numbers-ever/
ORiginal phrase :
"Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned"
changed in 1697 :
Take our opening phrase, substituting, of course, “woman” for “writer.” Not Shakespeare. It’s William Congreve, in his 1697 tragedy, The Mourning Bride. The actual line is “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d,/Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.”
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/385657.php
It's all staged for the cameras.
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https://cheezburger.com/2670356480
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Glenn Reynolds writes:
Pelosi keeps saying that Trump’s speech was full of lies, and that not one word was true. So the tremendous economic growth didn’t happen? Black workers aren’t doing better? The bottom quartile hasn’t progressed faster than the top 1%? Gen. McGee wasn’t really a Tuskeegee Airman? If you’re going to denounce lies, maybe name one? If we had an actual press, maybe someone would ask her about that.
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gobs of *red* lipstick
is totally appropriate :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squad_(United_States_Congress)
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-boys-same-disability-tried-081445840.html
what is the point of this article - that someone else should be paying for this person's child
the government should pay for this - taxpayers ?
every human on the planet can get first class treatment when they can pay for it for anything
and when one can't you get the best you can if "second class"
I can't hire several hundred dollar DC copyright lawyers either while I sit and watch the stars etc steal everything
talented lawyers cost money
as does the specialist educators who treat children with learning disabilities
no one works for free or provide the facilities that are needed. it cost MONEY and no it is not the responsibility of anyone else to cover this.
What does the parent do for a living ?
work for free?
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(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/98428AFD-D744-46FD-84D0-E25170FE2B4F.jpeg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386238.php
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386238.php
Some adviser told her she needed to endorse Biden if she wanted to be his VP.
Presidential Ticket: Slow and Slower.
Amy is just barely in triple digits but knew to endorse him the very first day.
Where is Warren? Afraid to give up her 3rd place finish in Massachusetts?
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It's easier to be anti-vax on a disease already stopped in its tracks - by vaccine.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-03-18/anti-vaxxers-coronavirus-vaccine-development
I can't pull up the article, but the subject brings up a good question.
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The central planning model, opposite of conservative libertarianism, says we should all move to urban clusters, ride mass transit and go to one health care option.
Facts on the ground suggest otherwise.
I call on mass transit riders to pay their own way and their own share of the road costs they use.
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/20/mass-transit-the-pandemic-petri-dish-the-left-loves/
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The impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the 45th and incumbent president of the United States, began in the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020, and concluded with his acquittal on February 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump
During this time, China admitted the virus was deadly, contagious and out of control, the numbers went up 100-fold, WHO declared an emergency, Trump ordered quarantine and travel ban and Biden called that hysteria and fear mongering.
Now the pandemic is Trump's fault.
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https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/city-hall-didnt-order-covid-19-supplies-for-nyc-until-march-6/amp/
Last minute prepping fails.
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so never let.a bad situation go to waste.
Turn her predicament from a natural plague into a Trump bashathon with all the usual suspects chiming in (including the One who would have single handedly saved the world from this ):
https://ew.com/celebrity/kathy-griffin-coronavirus-slams-trump/
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Before Bernie Sanders fades from the scene, we should take a look at the "braintrust" behind him. To be fair, a whole lot of people think we can just print more money and not pay for what we spend even in good times. But the Left is most brazen about it.
iyi = intellectual yet ignorant
Meet NY Prof. Bernie Sanders adviser Stephanie Kelton. Off the Left edge of Sanders and Krugman is precarious ground, but The New Yorker gives it a serious look.
How do these people get hired and hold their jobs in academia? The answer to that explains much of what is wrong in our country.
--------------------------------------------------
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-economist-who-believes-the-government-should-just-print-more-money
The Economist Who Believes the Government Should Just Print More Money
The Bernie Sanders adviser Stephanie Kelton argues that “How will we pay for it?” shouldn’t be a central question in American politics.
August 20, 2019
...
"Kelton is the foremost evangelist of a fringe economic movement called Modern Monetary Theory, which, in part, argues that the government should pay for programs requiring big spending, such as the Green New Deal, by simply printing more money."
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After Impeaching Trump Over Ukraine, Nancy Pelosi Demands Quid Pro Quo Before Releasing Aid To Americans
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/24/after-impeaching-trump-over-ukraine-nancy-pelosi-demands-quid-pro-quo-before-releasing-aid-to-americans/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=f78b53dec7-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=emai
Hmmm. What don't conservatives get about two sets of rules?
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https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1244016912281059329
But we would be in better hands with Democrats in charge?
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(https://i1.wp.com/freedomandprosperity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Mar-20-20-Greta.jpg?zoom=2)
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haha
the photos of the scowling face made we wonder if she has a smile;
This is what she looks like when she and parents count the bucks rolling in:
https://www.google.com/search?q=greta+thunberg+smiling&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjOpdyKtsLoAhXTmHIEHdaHCZ8QsAR6BAgJEAE&biw=1440&bih=789
-
I don't want to mock her but she did use the world's biggest megaphone to shout "How dare you" to me and to us.
Funny they never want to have the discussion.
-
It just occurred to me
if one says someone is a "colored person "
that someone risks being called a bigot racist etc
but if one says "person of color " that is PC
:-P
-
It just occurred to me
if one says someone is a "colored person "
that someone risks being called a bigot racist etc
but if one says "person of color " that is PC
:-P
Funny, and hard to keep up with. Kamala Harris is not an 'African American'. That heritage came from the Caribbean. If you argue that it goes further back to Africa, maybe we all do.
"Affordable Housing" from a public policy point of view has always meant 'housing that people can't afford', and to address it means make it worse. If words had meanings, affordable housing would be the homes rich people pay cash for, and policies that make more people rich and fixer-uppers legal. "Affordable Care Act" was all about getting more and more people on subsidy, opposite of affording their own care or insurance.
Abortion isn't a "reproductive right". It is anti-reproductive act, if you won't call it the taking of a life of another human being.
Income inequality is a fact with no meaning. If you earn one more dollar, your income is no longer equal to what you made before. Anyyone who goes out and earns a dollar, steals it or just receives it, has committed income inequality. But if you call it an income ban, income freeze, or income brakes, no one will vote for it. The term was resurrected to say that a good economy isn't good, and better isn't better.
Gay once meant happy. The Left stole our language. They stole our colors too. Remember when red states were Democrat? That made more sense.
(https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/KaF0Sb8AFxKpcGshEuH1YZrpn_A=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/red-state-blue-state-election-carter-reagan2-631.jpg)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/
But red looked too much like the communism map, and Democrats resemble that. So they switched over and never switched it back.
Take it back.
-
I have burned over how the Reps allowed the color switch from the beginning.
-
ccp: It is telling how Dems only want to blame Republicans and not themselves
-----------------------------------------------
Pelosi forms House committee to oversee coronavirus response
BY MIKE LILLIS - 04/02/20 11:10 AM EDT
-----------------------------------------------
Where were they during the critical months of November, December 2019, January 2020 when the commie-red-virus was coming in?
They were tying the hands of the President, holding the fake Articles of Impeachment from the real US Senate. Calling the travel ban racist and telling people to come visit Chinatown as late as 2/24/20:
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/02/24/coronavirus-speaker-house-nancy-pelosi-tours-san-franciscos-chinatown/
Come spread your virus if you have one, or pick up one of ours if you don't.
Maybe they should let up on the constant partisanship and do something positive to help, other than not let a good, deadly crisis go to political waste.
-
pelosi schumer nadler and schiff clyburn investigations
and their propaganda outlets with the 24/7 one sided hit pieces
just sickening
"Bipartisan "
sure
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386710.php
-
https://pjmedia.com/election/watch-bernie-sanders-endorses-joe-biden/
if only I was there to put handcuffs on them at the moment in the picture and send them to a gulag in N Dakota
what makes white people like them think the are immune from reparations?
" Biden insisted he would beef up America's social safety net, "make sure that health care is made accessible and affordable to every American," provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and combat "structural racism." He blamed that "structural racism" for "this godawful situation at which African Americans and Latinos suffer most at the hands of the coronavirus."
When you say this how can one do all this without penalizing everyone else?
What about poor white people?
-
BTW, they cleverly did this at the very moment that the Dem-Prog base was getting its daily dose of Gov. Cuomo.
-
how do you explain the death of 42 + in a nursing home in YOUR state on YOUR watch?:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/northam-sneaks-in-raft-of-lefty-bills-on-voting-guns-abortion-climate-lgbt-under-cover-of-easter-weekend/
I am not expecting this question to be raised.
-
woe unto any Dem who does not carry these points:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/15/nancy-pelosi-we-must-acknowledge-truth-trump-worsened-coronavirus-destroyed-economy/
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Speaker Nancy: "inject Lysol into your lungs"
Sen. Amy K: President basically said "chug bleach"
A friend threw this into an email yesterday, the joke of the moment, mocking Trump to rib me:
(https://preview.redd.it/yrcqz5kakyl41.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=e866e90bc3f25cbe5053a5b38a933d9fa1f78117)
Our ccp: "yes I heard what he said and IT WAS NOT that"
--------------------------------------------------
If what he said was reckless and dangerous, someone out there is going to spray lysol into their lungs or drink bleach to save themselves from coronavirus because of what he didn't say, isn't all their mis-repeating of "mis-information" even more dangerous?
-
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/04/29/az-woman-who-blamed-trump-for-chloroquine-ingestion-now-subject-of-homicide-inves-n2567839
I guarantee many or all the calls to poison control were from Dem operatives link directly or indirectly to the MSM.
I wonder if some of them were not jurnolisters themselves
can we trace those calls?
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/
Authors
Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor
Andrew Keane Woods, Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law
Un-bleeping-believable.
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/
Authors
Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor
Andrew Keane Woods, Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law
Un-bleeping-believable.
(https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/ca67cd5cca3281d1.jpeg)
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Can we just merge the Media, the Left and our Fascism threads?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/28/asia/china-coronavirus-model-democracy-intl-hnk/index.html
"The crisis has...highlighted the benefits of a strong government and centralized planning,"
- Really? And the benefits of a lying and jailing the whistleblowers government. What is that benefit, a worldwide pandemic that shut down the global economy and is killing the old, the weak, the poor? How stupid are they, really?
-
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/05/08/arizona-muslim-students-threaten-to-kill-prof-for-suggesting-islam-is-violent-n389324
-
@davidharsanyi
Killing a unborn baby is a decision made solely by a woman and her doctor. Taking hydroxychloroquine is a joint decision between a man, his doctor, every Democrat in congress, and all on-air talent at CNN.
https://twitter.com/davidharsanyi/status/1262555060317364225
-
https://twitter.com/joshlecash/status/1267131322536849414/photo/1
-
https://twitter.com/AmiHorowitz/status/1267908030206816259?s=20
But they aren't on yours.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/06/02/john-legend-natalie-portman-other-celebs-sign-letter-to-defund-police/
-
Speakers and leaders in the war-torn, Democrat-controlled cities urge protesters to make a difference by voting for change.
- I agree.
-
Doug writes,
Speakers and leaders in the war-torn, Democrat-controlled cities urge protesters to make a difference by voting for change.
- I agree.
I know what kind of change YOU mean
but this is not what students are learning in our marxist universities
or from our media
they want ever more handouts freebies and everything paid for by the rich
which means all taxpayers;
until Margaret Thatcher's prediction becomes correct.
I was looking up all the news that came up on my iphone yesterdasy afternoon while getting iced in physical therapy yesterday.
except for one Fox News item EVERTHYING else was pro democrat party and anti Trump
at a dozen other items
This is what the younger ones see all day and night .
Trump is just able to reach out to these people
I don't know who can
W coming out and saying we have failed on race.
Where was he or his father during 12 yrs in office?
Nicky says we need more immigration as well as what for racism, I don't know.
And as for Trump , as Ann Coulter says, he can't even PRETEND to be compassionate.
totally the opposite of Bill Clinton "I feel your pain " which we all knew (on the right) was an act.
I only hope we can hold onto the Senate .... it won't be pretty either way but that would be at lease a salvage
-
(https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/33e990a8274cc5925b9cd28ba319bdfca4e037f8504669ce8e2e03c4cb446528.jpg?w=800&h=499)
See what happens.
-
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/pp%20blm%2020200605%2001.jpg)
-
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/07/10-rules-for-postmodern-rioting/
-
https://www.tmz.com/2020/06/13/atlanta-police-fatally-shoot-black-man-wendys/
I am not sure what else police should do .
It always seems ok to fight the police
and if they are not saints (like of course the people they are arresting)
and passive
then they are no good
-
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/06/15/seattles-liberal-elite-cheer-anti-police-protesters-then-hire-their-own-private-security-n526250
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"Democratic Violent Socialism": That's what they do; let's call it out. A label I just heard from Jason Lewis, Republican candidate for US Senate in Minnesota, Planned Parenthood's Tina Smith seat. Lewis was a local talk show host, formerly a frequent guest host for Rush Limbaugh, former congressman in one of the suburban districts that flipped Dem in 2018. [Give money] https://lewisformn.com/ He leans constitutionalist, libertarian and anti-hawk, maybe of the Rand Paul mold.
Why not lump in the violent tactics with the cause of the Left? They did. Many on the Left excuse the violence as justified in pursuing the cause. Many of the others, well intended, unintentionally give cover to the violence. The policies of so-called defund the police support the rise of violence. Look at the data. Other countries have proven, as documented on the forum, that socialism and "equality" causes require coercion which is at least the threat of force to move outcomes away from their natural, free state.
Ask the persuadable voters in the middle, do you support the violence needed to achieve the Leftist objectives? Most don't. Do you support tyranny of the mob? Most Don't. The Founders and framers truly feared that. Nearly every word of the constitution is written to stop or slow down the impulsive mob rule of the immediate majority, from the electoral college to the structure of the Senate to the enumeration of individual rights (cf. right to own and bear arms, powers not expressly given to the feds go to the states and to the citizens.). These are all under attack from the Left.
Defeat them or be ruled by them. Every race for the Senate and House this year is going to matter, not just the Presidency, and margin of victory or defeat matters too.
-
https://www.co.lincoln.or.us/sites/default/files/fileattachments/health_amp_human_services/page/7581/directive_6-16-2020.pdf
https://nypost.com/2020/06/23/oregon-county-issues-face-mask-order-exempting-non-white-people/
-
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/a-pissed-bubba-wallace-needs-nasca-rs-support-more-than-ever-against-attacks-on-his-character-184514542.html
wait , I thought the FBI was impeccable during Mueller and Comey etc.
now , we are not to believe the FBI conclusions of 15 agents that a rope hanging in a garage was just a rope handing in a garage?
And that Nascar did the bubba wrong even thought they called in Federal Law enforcement over a f'n string and they all rallied around him 100% on national TV .
no privilege here I guess.
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=565819447655664&set=p.565819447655664&type=3&theater
-
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=565819447655664&set=p.565819447655664&type=3&theater
Can you use a difference source rather than FaceHugger?
-
Its all I had for this.
-
The irony of the no-cop CHOP: It showed how much we still need the police after all
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/the-irony-of-the-no-cop-chop-it-showed-how-much-we-still-need-the-police-after-all/
-
(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/06/IMG_2197.jpg?w=428&ssl=1)
-
https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/07/01/wapo-wonders-decades-progressive-leadership-made-minneapolis-create-even-inequality/
-
https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/07/01/wapo-wonders-decades-progressive-leadership-made-minneapolis-create-even-inequality/
Wouldn't you know, failure means, "progressives simply haven’t gone far enough."
-
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/13/nba-bans-custom-jerseys-with-freehongkong-but-allows-burn-jews-and-kill-cops/
-
I am done with basketball same with football
baseball is left for me now - so far
-
https://thediplomad.blogspot.com/2020/07/so-much-prog-fakery.html
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
So Much Prog Fakery . . .
We live in a time of The Great Falsehood, the Edification of the Fake. Everywhere one turns in America and throughout the West, one gets assailed by Fakery.
I "proudly" report that the USA has become the world's greatest manufacturer, consumer, AND exporter of genuine Fakery. A notable achievement. We have set the standard of Fakery for the rest of the world! While much of our Fakery appears meant solely or largely for domestic consumption, such is the global demand for high-quality Fakery that our product heads abroad where it is not only consumed but influences the development of the Fakery produced in foreign lands. Without doubt non-American readers must take a knee in awe to our ability to produce Fakery. We're number one! Bastille Day Fakery be damned!
Almost six years ago, I wrote about living awash in a sea of progressive lies (here). Since then, that sea has continued to rise. For those of us with at least moderate mental abilities, we now do not, despite what the great George Orwell said, have to "struggle to see what's in front of one's nose." The problem today proves much worse: in our "cancel culture," one must struggle to state what one sees in front of one's nose. Accuracy and truth have become the enemies of the "progressive" system. That prog system's array of well-financed supporters do not want islands of truth to emerge from their sea of lies. Speak up about what's in front of your nose, and the woke "cancelers" will cut off your nose; they will get you fired, defamed, bullied, ridiculed, your property trashed, even have you and your family assaulted by a mob of cowards.
Every day we seem to find that today's Fakery makes yesterday's Fakery look minuscule and weak, well, with one huge exception: Global warming, cooling, climate change disruption, whatever. That piece of Fakery, launched decades ago, remains a classic of Fakery, and stands on a podium of its own. The facts, the real science, do not support it, none of its dire predictions comes true, but yet, but yet, there it sits at the center of governmental and international organizations' policies and expenditures, mass movements, and hysterical outbursts throughout the world: the most holy of Fakes. Try, for example, being a university professor who offers research showing that global whatever is Fake . . . . see what happens to your research money, your job, your reputation. The science is settled! Only one opinion allowed! Global whatever remains the Gold Standard of Fakery.
As noted, this humble and inconsequential little blog has over the years featured examples of American-made Fakery. The American prog lies mentioned in the almost six-year-old posting, referenced above, alas, seem laughable compared to what progs produce today. Those "ancient" lies of a just a bit over a lustrum ago would register hardly a blip on a modern Fake-O-Graph. The Great American Emporium of Fakery now proves so well stocked, that we have time to run our eyes only over a few of the products on display. Readers will find many more items than those catalogued here.
We endured years of the Russia collusion hoax, a Fake narrative which caused great damage to real people, and hurt our ability to conduct foreign policy. The proponents of that outrageous Fake never apologized, never admitted they had Faked it all along. They did not reflect on the harm done to people, key institutions, and our nation. No, they just moved on to . . . the Ukrainian hoax and the Fake impeachment! It wasn't Russia in Trump's corner, no, it was Ukraine! Those hoaxes, along with "Trump doesn't pay taxes," "hands up don't shoot," "nooses at NASCAR!," "nooses on campus," the Jussie Smollett "lynching," "the drugs go north, the guns go south," "a video by a Christian caused the Benghazi massacre," "remove the statues," all pale before the latest prog hoaxes: black lives matter and the Covid pandemic shutdown.
The progs prance, dance and screech about how much they care about black people. They Mau-Mau our feckless corporations and Hollywood "elite" into supporting the terrorist/criminal BLM movement, one run largely by white Marxists. The same "woke" multinational corporations, such as Nike, that use quasi-slave labor in China and elsewhere to make their products, fall all over themselves expressing support for Social Justice and BLM. Hollywood and the NBA, both deriving huge sums from China, bow down to the totalitarian brutes running the PRC but loudly proclaim their commitment to Social Justice and BLM--Uighurs, child workers, and Hong Kong be damned!
Let's be clear: the progs don't give a damn about black lives. For the progs, I repeat, black lives do not matter, at all. The progs condemn black kids to horrid, squalid schools run by overpaid, ignorant, and politically woke "teachers" and administrators. Corrupt, violent, prog-run cities slaughter black people by the dozen, nay, the score on a weekly basis, and yet vow to defund the police which provide the only hope for safety of those very black people. Prog-supported Planned Parenthood, founded by a rabid Nazi-like racist scum, runs an anti-black genocide machine in the guise of providing (Fake) "reproductive health services." Prog politicians and their Fake anti-poverty, pro-equality socio-economic policies and programs have devastated the black church, the black community, and the very structure of the black family; their "anti-racism" efforts have destroyed decades of effort to eliminate race as a factor in American life; the woke ones now seek to reintroduce segregation into American schools and life.
The progs have done what neither slavery nor segregation could: they have kept millions of black people as a permanent underclass to be exploited by the prog urban political machines. The progs get to decide who is black and who is a Fake black; they decide what political views black people can and cannot hold; which black "leaders" will emerge and get media time. Behold, the new slavery.
American progs have managed to get goofy foreigners to proclaim the slogans of the BLM. Just yesterday, for example, I was watching a soccer game transmitted from Europe; the head coach of one team, whitest man ever seen, was running about with a "Black Lives Matter" shirt. The idiot former Beatle drummer, Ringo, is holding some sort of a concert with money going to BLM. Jack-assery of the first order. Europe is now again a racial battleground thanks to efforts to "fight" racism. Fakery triumphs!
I have written a great deal about the ChiCom virus. Won't repeat it. Let's just say there is a huge element of Fakery involved. Those of us skeptical from the start about the reaction to the ChiCom virus have proven correct. The "experts" and their models proved Fake. The mortality rate of the virus has continued to decline, as further testing reveals, to a rate equal to or LOWER than past flu epidemics. The media, purveyors of the Fake, cannot allow the truth to emerge. They bury it with inflammatory headlines about "spikes," new outbreaks. They deliberately merge data about "new" cases with old ones newly discovered thanks to ramped-up testing; they won't reveal how many NEW cases are, in fact, old ones from which the "victims" have long recovered, many not even knowing they had the virus.
The morgues are not filled with the dead; the hospitals are not overwhelmed. Fakery at work.
The word has gone out from the epicenters of prog Fakery to keep the ChiCom virus story front and center; to keep us in a state of fear and uncertainty; to keep us from questioning the "necessary" loss of Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights. In other words, just another strategy by the progs to expand their power at the expense of ordinary people; another part of the strategy to throw the November 3 elections, e.g., vote from home because it's too dangerous to go to the polling booth, too dangerous to hold party conventions and debates, mustn't expose the Dems' Fake presidential candidate to any harsh truths . . . but it's perfectly fine to hold BLM rallies.
We see the political power play at work with the current furor over reopening the schools. The all-powerful teacher unions, whose members have continued to receive their salaries during the shut-down, want the schools to remain closed. Too dangerous, they cry.
Have you met the new generation of public school teachers? Marxist morons is too kind of a description for many if not most of them. When I was a kid, teachers, overwhelmingly, were serious people, dedicated to the case of genuine education, and lovers of Western civilization. Now? They are "wokidiots." I wouldn't let them near my kids.
The schools, truth be told, teach largely garbage in the USA and throughout the West; at best, they serve as elaborately funded baby-sitting and prog-indoctrination centers that make it possible for ordinary folk to go to work. Keep the schools closed, and you keep much of the economy shuttered. That's what they want. They want us all to proclaim the importance of the Fake schools. Don't fall into the trap; say what you see in front of your nose. Time to defund public education. Stop paying Fake teachers who won't and don't teach. Give people vouchers, we already have paid for them with our taxes, and let us send our kids to whatever schools we want or make our own.
Speak up. Don't let the progs and their Fakery silence you.
Sorry. This has gotten too long. More later.
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If I was president I would consider sending in the air force to destroy this column
and have a turkey shoot like at the end of Iraq 1 when the US air force destroyed a column of Saddam"s republican guard .
If Biden was President he would send in the. social workers:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/mexican-video-shows-armed-men-cheering-powerful-druglord
Mexico's president maybe doing best he can I don't know really
Oh, I found it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death
Make it loud and clear what any applicants for this job are signing up to.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Ev373c7wSRg&feature=emb_logo
A thin, perhaps non-existent line.
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AWESOME!
-
this overt intent to discriminate was, in campus-speak, called ‘equity,’ which is the opposite of equal opportunity.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/07/harrison-bergeron-university/
-
When does cancel culture finally get to Planned Parenthood, if "black lives matter"?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/margaret-sanger-planned-parenthood-ny-eugenics-racism
-
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/cancel%20culture%2020200722%2001.jpg)
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389311.php
Some animals are more equal than others!
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/never-republicans-want-burn-down-party/
The never trump repubicans just refuse to admit if we lose this election , the WH and both houses
the damage will be great and probably irreparable.
-
Pres. Trump did not go to rep Lewis' service, I am told and told and told. Then they used it as a political rally, as expected.
Will Obama, Biden attend Herman Cain's funeral? Any Democrats other than personal friends of his? Honor a black man who achieved it all in a meritocracy? Ha!
His death is unnoticed and unmentioned in most circles - except to blame Trump for having a rally.
-
"Pres. Trump did not go to rep Lewis' service, I am told and told and told"
in my view he was right not to attend
first Lewis was a fervent militant Democrat always opposed to anything Republican and had TDS trying to impeach Trump from day one
so now Trump should let bygones be bygones and go to honor him at his funeral?
plus of course he would not have been welcomed , if invited at all, criticized for being a hypocrite and had his picture shown all over the media to be butt of the jokes seething anger
and then he would have had to sit through Obama's radical political speech.
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Exactly. They don't recognize him as President and would not have treated his attendance Presidentially.
This turned out to be a political rally of the hard Left. Too bad. Lewis could have been a great uniter. He chose to join in with the dividers and division of the country is what they gathered to celebrate. Odd turn for a bunch of anti-segregationist.
Meanwhile Herman Cain achieved the entire American Dream without the appearance of needing race preference or help from the government. All he ever asked of the government was to be less of a hindrance. Great man? Doesn't matter. He is of no use to them.
He rose the hard, slow way to become head of more than one major corporation, Chairman of a Federal Reserve Bank, was front runner for the Presidency at one point. Against all that discrimination in this racially unfair country.
Which one did more to break ground for blacks that would follow? I don't know. Let's say both did, but one gets the full treatment and one is ignored and forgotten.
Political Narratives Matter.
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Seattle police chief out.
https://mynorthwest.com/2084077/seattle-police-chief-carmen-best-to-announce-resignation/
Milwaukee police chief: Out.
https://patch.com/wisconsin/milwaukee/demoted-milwaukee-police-chief-alfonso-morales-retire
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2018/11/12/morales-town-hall/1946809002/
"Black Lives Matter" is knocking out blacks in power. Hispanics out of power. Left against left. Black against black. What part of this do they think is healthy? Helpful? The end game??
-
Their endgame is us in camps/mass graves while they rule over what is left in their worker's paradise.
Seattle police chief out.
https://mynorthwest.com/2084077/seattle-police-chief-carmen-best-to-announce-resignation/
Milwaukee police chief: Out.
https://patch.com/wisconsin/milwaukee/demoted-milwaukee-police-chief-alfonso-morales-retire
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2018/11/12/morales-town-hall/1946809002/
"Black Lives Matter" is knocking out blacks in power. Hispanics out of power. Left against left. Black against black. What part of this do they think is healthy? Helpful? The end game??
-
https://www.dailywire.com/news/8-times-the-obama-administration-didnt-exactly-go-high-against-their-political-opposition
8 Times The Obama Administration Didn’t Exactly ‘Go High’ Against Their Political Opposition
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and may I add to above list this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-explains-his-remark-about-punishing-enemies/
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389706.php
Stupid really hurts sometimes!
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389706.php
Stupid really hurts sometimes!
"One Key Democrat Group, Black Live Matter Thugs, Now Roaming the Streets Hunting Another Key Democrat Group -- Transgenders -- To Beat and Rob
...
It's a Mostly Peaceful protest, in other words."
Mostly peaceful. Good God. Suddenly I'm pulling for the transgenders. Our next constituency group, once they discover law and order issues, right to self defense, school choice, right of privacy, and so on. How about a right to be left alone?
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" doctor , I can't sleep night , am always tired , getting panic like feeling , can't concentrate at work , find myself yelling at my kids,
with endless worry fear and deep concern for the "threat to our Democracy". over this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senator-angus-king-new-senate-intelligence-report-documents-serious-and-disturbing-link-between-trump-campaign-and-russians-201601446.html
Those dasterdly Russians and that evil tyrannical Orange Man!!!
:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
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" doctor , I can't sleep night , am always tired , getting panic like feeling , can't concentrate at work , find myself yelling at my kids,
with endless worry fear and deep concern for the "threat to our Democracy". over this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senator-angus-king-new-senate-intelligence-report-documents-serious-and-disturbing-link-between-trump-campaign-and-russians-201601446.html
Those dasterdly Russians and that evil tyrannical Orange Man!!!
:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
No news about the other campaign conspiring with Russians (Steele Dossier), the FBI, the CIA, the President and the Vice President to steal the election or bring down the new administration if they win? That report is coming. This looks like a pre-emption to keep the Trump Russia story going.
I take this as persuasive until I hear otherwise: assessment by Sen. Marco Rubio, acting chair of the committee, that a nearly 1,000-page report released by the panel this week found “absolutely no evidence of collusion” among President Trump, his campaign and the Russian government.
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".I take this as persuasive until I hear otherwise: assessment by Sen. Marco Rubio, acting chair of the committee, that a nearly 1,000-page report released by the panel this week found “absolutely no evidence of collusion” among President Trump, his campaign and the Russian government."
Andrew McCarthy on the John Batchelor radio show other night
said there is zero new information in the report
and even said the whole report from both Rs and Ds was a cover their own Senators ass deal
(though not using these words of course)
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Andrew McCarthy is a reliable source.
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atheists
welcome to the Dem Party?
LBGT and A ........
https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/20/dnc-meetings-cut-under-god-out-of-the-pledge-of-allegiance-n817898
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Andrew McCarthy is a reliable source.
Ehhhhhh.....
His stock has seriously dropped with me. Deep state apologist more than anything in recent times.
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I have found Andrew McCarthy to be consistently impressive on the legal issues with the Deep State Coup Attemp in all its permutations.
========================
https://www.foxnews.com/us/lori-lightfoot-defends-ban-protesters-on-her-block-citing-right-to-safety
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love some of the pictures
the one of Pelosi boozing it up is good .........:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teen-instagram-influencer-maga-memes_n_5f43e20bc5b60c7ec4143b96
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https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+photos+in+front+of+military&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=ZilWYa6vvQEi5M%252Cm_NXyULcjfACFM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kRfA4fXO92uG82PUm1jLaLigv5l7w&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiIt9-m97nrAhVEZN8KHevSA5wQ9QEwAHoECAIQBQ
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They changed their minds before I could post, good riddance NBA.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/27/lebron-james-changed-his-mind-on-boycotting-nba-season/
I would love to see these people do regular work for a living.
Shooting armed robbers and rapists fighting the police is offensive but China imprisoning a million Muslims, harvesting live organs from political prisoners and covering up a pandemic while they ship it around the world, no problem.
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"They changed their minds" to return to "playoffs "
I know it is from their hearts
I guess Obama , who tried to egg them on , failed (again):
https://thesportsrush.com/nba-news-we-are-going-to-need-all-our-institutions-barack-obama-tweets-on-course-of-action-following-nba-boycott/
I couldn't think of any "institution"
that represents racism more than the NBA. :roll: :wink: :-P
Lebron for president.
he wouldn't be first black president but he would be tallest.
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https://summit.news/2020/08/26/call-the-police-trends-on-twitter-after-blm-rioters-beg-for-help-from-cops/
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https://m.startribune.com/mpls-business-owners-wanting-to-protect-their-windows-after-riots-face-obstacle/572206032/
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/looting-goes-mainstream-on-npr.php
Power Line
POSTED ON AUGUST 29, 2020 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN RIOTS, THE RESISTANCE, THE SICK LEFT
LOOTING GOES MAINSTREAM ON NPR
With lawlessness and organized looting threatening to take down Joe Biden (which is why I’ve been calling the riots “spontaneous pro-Trump rallies”—have they filed their in-kind contribution reports with the FEC by the way?), we’ve seen leading Democrats like AOC say looting is just desperate people trying to get necessities. Like flat screen TVs and Nike shoes, though I haven’t been able to find the FDA’s nutritional guidance on any of these necessities.
In any case, NPR on Thursday offered an extended interview with Vicky Osterweil, author of a brand new book, In Defense of Looting. Here are some highlights from the interview:
For people who haven’t read your book, how do you define looting?
When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending. . .
Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage—which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.
It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free. . .
Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.
What are some of the most common myths and tropes that you hear about looting?
. . . one is that looters are just acting as consumers: Why are they taking flat screen TVs instead of rice and beans? Like, if they were just surviving, it’d be one thing, but they’re taking liquor. All these tropes come down to claiming that the rioters and the looters don’t know what they’re doing. They’re acting, you know, in a disorganized way, maybe an “animalistic” way. But the history of the movement for liberation in America is full of looters and rioters. They’ve always been a part of our movement.
What would you say to people who are concerned about essential places like grocery stores or pharmacies being attacked in those communities?
When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses. It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.
A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community.
The whole thing is a window into the mental perversion of today’s left. A lot of people are attacking NPR for featuring such an obvious nut job, but I think we should thank NPR for giving such extended exposure to a view that is widespread in the Democratic Party right now.
If ever there was an opportunity for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to have a “Sister Souljah moment,” it would be right now. Anyone making book that they can do it?
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cannot find much on her or him:
https://www.google.com/search?sa=N&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=vicky+osterweil++bio&ved=2ahUKEwjFuc6RqcPrAhUYlnIEHf75CEI4ChCwBHoECAoQAQ&biw=1440&bih=789#imgrc=d4-A14GCmfHuKM
lives in Phila
suppose we organize a group to loot her home which serves many purposes her be damned. - which is her thesis.
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Shim?
cannot find much on her or him:
https://www.google.com/search?sa=N&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=vicky+osterweil++bio&ved=2ahUKEwjFuc6RqcPrAhUYlnIEHf75CEI4ChCwBHoECAoQAQ&biw=1440&bih=789#imgrc=d4-A14GCmfHuKM
lives in Phila
suppose we organize a group to loot her home which serves many purposes her be damned. - which is her thesis.
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Vicky Osterweil
4815 Baltimore Ave Apt 3R
Philadelphia, PA 19143-2038
Shim?
cannot find much on her or him:
https://www.google.com/search?sa=N&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=vicky+osterweil++bio&ved=2ahUKEwjFuc6RqcPrAhUYlnIEHf75CEI4ChCwBHoECAoQAQ&biw=1440&bih=789#imgrc=d4-A14GCmfHuKM
lives in Phila
suppose we organize a group to loot her home which serves many purposes her be damned. - which is her thesis.
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(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Screen-Shot-2020-08-31-at-8.49.55-AM.png)
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Zang!
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someone could (but of course I do not want anyone to do)
put a sign out near her house:
" welcome to those in 'need'"
"help yourselves"
would she be fine with this when it is her/ (or his - not sure) property?
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It would be interesting to sit with the Portland mayor and watch a real lion with prey film.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-lion-king-party-newt-gingrich
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Former U of Chicago Economics Professor John Cochrane poses the question, what if private sector negligence caused the wildfires? Can you imagine the public and political reaction?
Luckily, the government is completely responsible for this avoidable disaster. We'll never know what reaction a private sector culprit would receive.
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/08/what-if-private-sector-were-responsible.html
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Left v. Left. Usually NYT content doesn't come up for me so it's a rare honor to read the great one. (sarc.)
1 or 2 things set me off in this and it raises more questions than it answers.
3 Pulitzer Prizes (TM)? Isn't Pulitzer funded by the NYT? Create your own Pulitzer prize winning column: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/create-your-own-thomas-friedman-op-ed-column
"The sky was yellow and the sun was blue."
All he's got here is an out of context comment from a Trump adviser on the way out and otherwise an entirely left on left disaster. A city where the entire leadership went off the Left cliff making the entire party an open (and dangerous) joke. Now Biden should disregard that his own party supports the violence, come in on a white horse and thread the safety in the streets needle. Keep the police (who could have thought of that, oops everyone except the far Left Democrat leadership) but remove all the imaginary problems we have with them. Joe will say "better training" and voila, the hard Left will retreat, just in time to win the election.
With the leadership change in DC, Freidman imagines George Floyd never would have needed to pass a counterfeit bill, take twice the legal dose of fentanyl, resist arrest at least four times with four officers, or expose them all to covid without a mask. He wouldn't have needed a senior officer called in to apply a hold that allowed a man half Floyd's size to restrain him with a technique taught in the manual written during five decades of Democrat control. Anybody can see this is Trump's fault and we need new old leadership in Washington to get us back to exactly what got us here.
One question for the all knowing Great Carnac from NYC who looks back at his birthplace, why did the entire Jewish community where he was born flee North Minneapolis for the suburbs when the blacks came in and when Leftists took control of the city? Was that Trump's fault too?
https://www.mnopedia.org/event/civil-unrest-plymouth-avenue-minneapolis-1967
"We've been there before."
Residents oppose all this extremism but vote Ilhan Omar for Congress? Good luck reconciling this mess by November. Meanwhile six outstate Democratic mayors just endorsed Trump.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/opinion/biden-trump-police-minneapolis.html
For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis
Not everyone is for defunding the police. Especially those in communities that would be most affected.
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 1, 2020
There’s one thing about the people on the Trump team that I almost admire: When they do blurt out the truth, they really tell you the truth — in a way that’s so raw you’re left asking, “Did they really say that out loud?”
That was certainly my thought when Kellyanne Conway declared last week, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”
The better it is? How could anyone be “better” in America if we have more chaos, anarchy, vandalism and violence? It couldn’t be better — except for one man: Donald Trump.
Alas, it’s true: Every scene of rioting and looting is probably worth 10,000 votes for Trump’s re-election campaign. Just ask Kellyanne.
So, Joe Biden has a real challenge on his hands. To mobilize the majority he needs to credibly assure enough voters that he takes both the violence seriously and its social, policing and economic roots seriously. His “looting is not protesting” speech in Pittsburgh on Monday was a good start.
If you want to understand just what a challenge Biden faces in this election, though, study the struggle in my hometown, Minneapolis, over policing. It’s a face-off between some unlikely foes and, so, it reveals deep truths.
On one side are the super liberals on the Minneapolis City Council. They voted in June, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the local police, to begin a process to remove the requirement of the City Charter to maintain a police department. It would be replaced with “a department of community safety and violence prevention,” with a director who would have “non-law enforcement experience in community safety services, including but not limited to public health and/or restorative justice approaches.” A division of “licensed peace officers” would answer to that director.
Among those opposing this change is a budding coalition of Black and white community leaders from North Minneapolis, the historical home of the Minneapolis Black community. (I was born in the Northside in 1953 when it was also the home of the Jewish community.) They are unnerved by the notion of dismantling the police force for a vague alternative at a time when their neighborhood has experienced a surge in gang shootings, lootings and drug dealing — all exacerbated by the pandemic, spiraling unemployment and demoralized police officers, who, after the Floyd killing, don’t always have the numbers or the will to show up.
On Aug. 18, this coalition — four Black and four white families from North Minneapolis — filed suit against the City Council and the mayor, Jacob Frey, to compel them to maintain the legal minimum of police officers on the Minneapolis force. The families contend that the Council’s actions have driven out too many police officers and curtailed the hiring of replacements, endangering their neighborhood.
Don’t get them wrong, the plaintiffs argue, they want thoughtful and deep police reform. But they want both a better police force and enough police officers to protect their kids and their streets — not either the present unreformed police or a disbanded police department and an uncertain replacement.
The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported on Aug. 1 that since the killing of George Floyd in late May, the city’s police force is down at least 100 officers, more than 10 percent of the force, “straining department resources amid a wave of violence.” The department, the newspaper added, is budgeted for 888 officers this year, but could lose as much as a third of its work force by year’s end — through resignations, firings and medical leave for post-traumatic stress from the violence that followed Floyd’s death.
In an Aug. 24 op-ed in The Star Tribune, Sondra and Don Samuels, two of the Black plaintiffs, explained why they are suing. I know them both, and they are deeply involved in improving their Northside neighborhood. Sondra is the chief executive of the Northside Achievement Zone, and Don, her husband, is a former City Council member, former Minneapolis school board member and chief executive of Microgrants, a local nonprofit.
“We want radical police reform, where all citizens are treated as fully human by all cops, and not just by the ‘good ones’ we all know well,” they wrote. “We support the reform moves of the mayor and chief, which include community alternatives to policing that work hand-in-hand with our police force.”
But, they added: “We will not sacrifice the safety of our community in the pursuit of the City Council’s lofty goals with no plan to back them up. In the months since George Floyd’s murder, we have seen an explosion in crime and homicides. Five of us live just a few houses apart. Four of us have children in our homes. Here’s what we’ve experienced on our block alone over the last two months:
“A mother’s car was shot up with eight bullets, with her infant on board. Another car was shot four times. A bullet went through the front door and a wall of our neighbor’s home. A woman was kicked and stomped within inches of her life in the middle of the street. The drug trade has been revived in two homes, to unprecedented levels, with conflicts resulting in fights and shootouts.”
Their neighbors, they warned, “are leaving their Northside homes to stay with relatives to keep their children safe. Neighbors have put their house up for sale and others are considering it for the first time.”
This is the bottom line: “By charter the Council must maintain a per capita force in the mid-700s of active duty officers. While this is not enough for our needs, we worry that the Council’s naïve intent is to take us well below this number. And we are not having it. If the leadership of the city cannot muster the wisdom to keep us safe, it must muster the compliance to obey the law that is designed to do so.”
Besides big stores, like Saks and Nordstrom, which were vandalized last week in downtown Minneapolis — after rumors spread that the police had shot a Black man, who, it turned out, had actually committed suicide — a slew of Northside businesses owned by people of color were looted or vandalized during the George Floyd protests, and many owners are now afraid to rebuild.
Think about the Northside Achievement Zone that Sondra runs. It’s working with parents, students and local partners in predominantly Black North Minneapolis to end multigenerational poverty through education and fostering family stability. It’s been a real engine for building healthy community and enabling Black Americans to realize their full potential. But it can’t work in chaos.
“We have to be able to say both that Black lives matter and that protests that turn violent cannot be allowed to tear up our city,” Sondra said to me.
But we have to say a third thing, she continued — it’s what Martin Luther King Jr. said in the late 1960s, and it’s as relevant today as it was then.
King decried riots as “self-defeating,” but he also pointed out that “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. … It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”
Economic progress and social justice, King argued, “are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
Which is why Biden, if he frames it right, can be the real “law and order” candidate in this election. Because he’s not for disbanding the police, but for improving them — which is how you build respect for the law from everyone — and because Biden knows that sustainable order can only come from a president who wants to build healthy and just communities, not from a president who thinks it’s “better” for him politically if they’re torn apart.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 2, 2020, Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuFSWcNe8hY
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https://www.ktvu.com/news/nancy-pelosi-confirms-she-got-hair-done-indoors-in-san-francisco
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https://www.ktvu.com/news/nancy-pelosi-confirms-she-got-hair-done-indoors-in-san-francisco
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389960.php
Laws are for the little people!
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"Laws are for little people"
and when the big shot gets caught on camera breaking a law - it is the little people's fault - not hers:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-fights-back-the-salon-owes-me-an-apology-for-setting-me-up
Pelosi: NO ONE is above the law !!!!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/05/nancy-pelosi-full-trump-impeachment-statement
She is thinking she IS the law
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as a cover for what is really assault:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/victoria-taft/2020/09/02/exclusive-case-of-portland-man-who-defended-himself-against-antifa-mob-heads-to-supreme-court-n876896
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/hair-salon-fall-nancy-pelosi-000259729.html
Does not matter, Pelosi knew or should have known the laws .
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/aclu-official-attacks-university-accepting-142340912.html
by this little boy:
ACLU’s Samuel Crankshaw. - ACLU for freedom of speech - except for conservative speech
and by this "diversity professor ":
https://www.transy.edu/academics/faculty/atompkins/
wow I just realized AVery is a guy ! :-o
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https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/09/08/academy-lists-new-diversity-requirements-to-win-oscar-for-best-picture/
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1. Forest Management. Who opposes this? The Left.
2. Naturally occurring? Denial from the Left. It's all global warming. Does anyone on the west coast know that we've been getting steady and frequent rainfall here in the Midwest?
3. Human set fires? Are these liberty loving free market advocates setting fire to forests, or are they the same Leftists that are burning our cities?
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Accusing people of the past of violating today's norms.
Retrospective bigotteering.
Soon we will cancel every building designed by a nonvegetarian architect.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1305412753377693696/photo/1
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VomfB6qY2g0
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vlFI40RvwI&feature=emb_logo
Funny how that works...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vlFI40RvwI&feature=emb_logo
Funny how that works...
Minneapolis North High School Principal:
I think we can assume she was a liberal - before being "mugged".
She is upset with the Democrat Far Left City Council and with the Governor's lock out orders. She can't do this without leaving her job, but it would really be something to see her endorse Trump for President and Jason Lewis for Senate and tell her story of being a former liberal and how that didn't work. The Democrat apple cart has been tipped over. In MN they are called DFL, formerly the coalition of Democrat, Farmer and Labor. They have already lost the farmers. They lost labor. Now they are losing Democrats.
The Principal:
"We are literally in a city right now that is completely and entirely out of control."
"The people in my community need and want good law enforcement."
We can't take it anymore."
"If you don't see this video later it's probably because I said too much."
When is a responsible person telling the truth saying too much?
Minneapolis had a law enforcement mayor, Charles Stenvig, Independent. He left office in 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stenvig
----------------------------
I've tried for a few decades to tell my liberal friends first hand what is happening in the inner city and the say to me, you need to get out of there. They don't get it. I can get out but this IS what's happening in the inner city. Your (liberal) systems are screwing up incentives to get educated and support your family, destroying the family and the community, destroying enterprise, feeding crime, filling prisons and creating a downward spiral of dependency. Every proposal they make is to do more of the same. What was the law of holes again? Stop digging! Treat THESE people like people. If you're able to work, work. If school starts at 8, be there at 8. If the sign says stop, stop. If the officer says keep your hands where I can see them, do that. If you don't pay the rent, you're out. And so on.
But no...
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You ain't Jewish if you don't for for Biden!!!
https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2020/09/24/non-partisan-jewish-group-condemns-msnbcs-donny-deutsch-for-attack-on-pro-trump-jews/
Despite Trump doing more for Israel than any other president in American History
and his own son in law being from an orthodox family.
"come on man , look at the data!"
yes , Deutsch should be fired but at MSLSD he will likely get a promotion
or another NYC marketing deal from some Goldman Sachs liberal.
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Citizen-Police interactions
« Reply #510 on: May 29, 2020, 09:55:42 PM », Crafty_Dog
Neck hold was approved policy
https://www.lawofficer.com/neck-hold-used-by-minneapolis-officer-was-approved-by-department-policy/
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Since May 29, we have known on the forum that the neck hold is a trained and approved [in limited circumstances!] Mpls police technique. Everyone seeing the Floyd video agrees such an extreme measure wasn't needed or appropriate.
A rational response might be to update the manual and training of approved hold techniques:
http://www2.minneapolismn.gov/police/policy/mpdpolicy_5-300_5-300
Left response is burn the whole thing down. Among the results, violence, arson, exodus of police office officers nationwide, and a 40% increase in inner city violent crime.
None of this was necessary, [you morons].
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Citizen-Police interactions
« Reply #510 on: May 29, 2020, 09:55:42 PM », Crafty_Dog
Neck hold was approved policy
https://www.lawofficer.com/neck-hold-used-by-minneapolis-officer-was-approved-by-department-policy/
-------------
Since May 29, we have known on the forum that the neck hold is a trained and approved [in limited circumstances!] Mpls police technique. Everyone seeing the Floyd video agrees such an extreme measure wasn't needed or appropriate.
A rational response might be to update the manual and training of approved hold techniques:
http://www2.minneapolismn.gov/police/policy/mpdpolicy_5-300_5-300
Left response is burn the whole thing down. Among the results, violence, arson, exodus of police office officers nationwide, and a 40% increase in inner city violent crime.
None of this was necessary, [you morons].
It is necessary, for their intended destruction of the United States of America.
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She will take away your health care. Oh good grief! How? By upholding the constitution, as written, to the best of her ability?
Better idea: Design American health care to fall within the constitutional framework of the republic. Or amend the constitution if you don't like it.
When confirmed, she will swear to God to uphold the constitution. You would rather have her do what? Uphold liberal and Marxist dogma against the framework that holds our country together?
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https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/12/dems-plan-to-pack-the-senate-and-the-electoral-college-as-well-as-the-supreme-court/
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https://babylonbee.com/news/liberal-groom-says-he-wont-reveal-position-on-adultery/?utm_content=buffer37dbd&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Democrat Proposing To His Girlfriend Says He Won't Reveal Position On Adultery Until After The Wedding
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Senator Dick Durbin in hearings, felons should not be allowed to own guns, even felons of nonviolent offenses, because they are too likely to commit a violent gun crime.
Democrats in governance, let felons vote!
THAT makes sense to whom?
Nothing but ends justify means for these people, never a stand based on principle.
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I hate to misquote Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer but did he just say, the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation is a big setback for generations of aborted fetuses?
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/coms.jpg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Qanon.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Qanon.jpg)
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-baby-boomers-misinformation-social-media_n_5f998039c5b6a4a2dc813d3d?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/internet-baby-boomers-misinformation-social-media_n_5f998039c5b6a4a2dc813d3d?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
It's nice to see the people screaming "Russia, Russia, Russia" for the last four years are suddenly concerned about baseless conspiracy theories!
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https://twitter.com/PeterWalker59/status/1325703039852875776
Your Biden sign won't protect you.
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hard to believe this guy is some big shot Harvard Constitutional law professor
he sounds like a total idiot:
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/laurence-tribe-donald-trump-2020-election-denial-115940835.html
talk of TDS
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https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/11/24/alyssa-milano-extends-olive-branch-to-trump-supporters-after-years-of-smears-from-klansman-to-misogynist-bigots/
uy!
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https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2020/11/26/antifa-defaces-ulysses-s-grant-high-school-in-portland/
my response :
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-united-nations-abiy-ahmed-ethiopia-war-crimes-b33880834d7cb67b9de3c4f460cb2b9c
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/another_democrat_is_caught_violating_the_rules_she_imposes_on_others.html
Better than you.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/you_just_might_be_a_democrat_if_with_apologies_to_jeff_foxworthy.html
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https://www.newsmax.com/finance/streettalk/tesla-elon-musk-diversity-workforce/2020/12/05/id/1000198/
don't know or care about how many dwarves (or other identity groups they can dream up) they have in their employee base
who would fly in space ship with that is put together by people chosen by a bunch of diversity masters degrees in social justice ?
not me.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/12/05/founding-fathers-of-silicon-valley-give-up-on-california-move-to-texas-n1193826
Mark Levin made the point how so many people are fleeing the totally corrupt government controlled states to those less so
but that the ones who are Democrats are not changing their voting preferences and then vote for the same type of government they just escaped from
turning all out states blue. How stupid
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https://summit.news/2020/12/03/rich-people-journalists-made-exempt-from-having-to-enter-covid-quarantine/
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(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/492/625/original/ec55a181d318f99d.jpg)
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Republicans should vote for Democrat appointees?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-has-the-right-to-name-his-own-cabinet/ar-BB1bGbYF
Hypocrisy and projection lead as the principles of the Left.
Roll back the clock 4 years and see how Democrats voted for or against opposition Presidential appointees.
Cf. All but 5 Democrats voted against Secretary of State Pompeo. Was he unqualified? No. All 5 were Democrat Senators serving in states that Trump won, fighting mostly unsuccessfully for their own survival.
Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Doug Jones of Alabama.
Not one Democrat secure in his or her own position voted for a perfectly qualified Secretary of State.
Resist.
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The web they weave.
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/blm-smartmatic-venezuela/
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(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/593/483/original/3366d9edfe5c8a4c.jpg)
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/733/204/original/cd11019f9d9dc706.jpeg
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/733/204/original/cd11019f9d9dc706.jpeg)
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/kathleen-rice-picked-over-ocasio-034743532.html
Dems need to continue the charade they are not radical and are centrist
but today the entire party is radical
another likely point is the big money keeps AOC down
sounds like big money racism ............
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/12/22/nancy-pelosi-goes-on-cnn-and-has-a-meltdown-too-amazing-to-miss-n1224780
Pelosi and biden can't even answer without blowing their stacks a SINGLE question that questions them.
Compare this to Trump and what he had to endure every single day nonstop
polls who Ga races close ?
or is it the same BULLSHIT game of the pollsters screwing with the numbers
if we lose the Senate
and i have to sit here and watch my country being confiscated
and given away .......
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We don't have an American Republic anymore.
Plan accordingly.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/12/22/nancy-pelosi-goes-on-cnn-and-has-a-meltdown-too-amazing-to-miss-n1224780
Pelosi and biden can't even answer without blowing their stacks a SINGLE question that questions them.
Compare this to Trump and what he had to endure every single day nonstop
polls who Ga races close ?
or is it the same BULLSHIT game of the pollsters screwing with the numbers
if we lose the Senate
and i have to sit here and watch my country being confiscated
and given away .......
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Blitzer: "...it’s about millions of Americans who can’t put food on the table, who can’t pay the rent and are having trouble…
Pelosi: "And we represent them. (Blitzer attempts to respond and Pelosi gets repetitive) And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them and we know them. We know them. We represent them, yes."
- That's worse than repetitive. She is saying it again over every time he tries to speak, trying to prevent any other message from getting out. Opposite of freedom of speech, opposite of having and interview. Nothing unapproved can be asked. Like with any politburo or dictator. Like G M said, it's not a republic anymore. Only thing she doesn't say is off with his head. Cancel culture takes the modern place of that. Off with his show.
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This guy is so amazing
he can write witty insightful articles on a daily basis summing up in a way no other can do:
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/12/24/our-upsidedown-postelection-world-n2582040
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VDH is awesome.
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the left has come up with new phrase now
hollywood tony eluded to this as well saying something like Americans views on self reliance and indivisualism etc are a problem
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950861977/toxic-individualism-pandemic-politics-driving-health-care-workers-from-small-tow
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the left has come up with new phrase now
hollywood tony eluded to this as well saying something like Americans views on self reliance and indivisualism etc are a problem
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950861977/toxic-individualism-pandemic-politics-driving-health-care-workers-from-small-tow
OMG. The war of words IS the war and they are winning. How about the obvious, toxic governmentalism?
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Senate Dems on Barbara Boxer's objection, Jan. 2005
Hillary: "I commend the senator from California for raising the objection"
Ted Kennedy: "I commend and thank our friend for giving us this opportunity"
Harry Reid: "I applaud my friend"
Dick Durbin: "I thank her for doing it"
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1344349659431645185
What could they object to in the 2004 election?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/us/26madison.html
Pizzas!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU5RR3PGz3c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5yT16a_og
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFU7mn9pOhA
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/373/626/original/e48bde265395242a.png
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/373/626/original/e48bde265395242a.png)
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/373/626/original/e48bde265395242a.png
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/373/626/original/e48bde265395242a.png)
https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/380/478/original/c29952755359848d.png
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/380/478/original/c29952755359848d.png)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392025.php
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Hypocrite of the Day
Leominster, Massachusetts school superintendent Paula Deacon recently announced yet another delay in opening schools, which have been closed all year. She then flew to Florida to see Tom Brady and the Bucs game.
https://mailchi.mp/58faeaf93d30/unleash-prosperity-hotline-846638?e=17d44a0477
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Environmental groups are nowhere to be found [on nuclear energy]. Why? Because they hate nuclear power and are financed by the solar and wind industry lobby. They oppose a form of energy that emits NO greenhouse gases. Are there no ends to leftwing hypocrisy?
Committee to Unleash Prosperity
https://mailchi.mp/58faeaf93d30/unleash-prosperity-hotline-846638?e=17d44a0477
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Marking this youtube for future search.
We've never seen protesters storm a capital?
quote author=G M
...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5yT16a_og
...
One difference, no one shot and killed one of the people attempting to enter.
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heros
patriots
fighting for their rights against dastardly evil fascists nazis
who are a threat to democracy
so this is fine
any peep from senile Joe at that time?
how about kamala
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IIRC the takeover of the WI statehouse in 2011 lasted quite a while. Let's get some more of the footage and articles on this.
https://beautifultrouble.org/case/wisconsin-capitol-occupation/
Worth noting:
"The teaching assistants noticed that the senate had failed to set a limit on the number of speakers on a floor debate about Walker’s bill, and so signed up thousands of people to offer testimony. This kept debate open indefinitely, as well as the capitol itself, and eventually turned the occupation into a twenty-four-hour speak-out, with a microphone set up in the middle of the rotunda."
Clearly, this is not what happened after the Trump rally.
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg)
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg)
Correction, thousands of small businesses destroyed.
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https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg
(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/421/199/original/72136a7e5c5cf1d0.jpg)
Correction, thousands of small businesses destroyed.
Good point.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-8.11.00-PM.png?resize=768%2C992&ssl=1
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-8.11.00-PM.png?resize=768%2C992&ssl=1)
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https://cdn.locals.com/images/posts/originals/129306/129306_x8x38n6a7t4cxjt.jpeg
(https://cdn.locals.com/images/posts/originals/129306/129306_x8x38n6a7t4cxjt.jpeg)
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I get the point about hypocrisy, but since when do we model on CK?
-
I get the point about hypocrisy, but since when do we model on CK?
Same rules for everyone, right?
Or are we still in the Mitt Romney mode of going into the fetal position in response to every attack?
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Those aren't the only two options on the table.
Looking like we are just as bad as what we condemned with righteousness while going 0-60 in court and our side killed a policeman (he died of his injuries later) while breaking into the Capitol is a tough sell. Using Colin Kap. as our theoretician is tougher yet.
-
Are we going to VOTE HARDER?
Those aren't the only two options on the table.
Looking like we are just as bad as what we condemned with righteousness while going 0-60 in court and our side killed a policeman (he died of his injuries later) while breaking into the Capitol is a tough sell. Using Colin Kap. as our theoretician is tougher yet.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-8.11.00-PM.png?resize=768%2C992&ssl=1
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-8.11.00-PM.png?resize=768%2C992&ssl=1)
Isn't this amazing?
They take the fun and challenge out of pointing out their bias and hypocrisy when they swim nakedly in it.
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And yet most of them are blissfully unaware...
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https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/01/10/arnold-schwarzenegger-compares-capitol-hill-rioters-to-nazis-wields-sword-from-conan-the-barbarian/
or just TDS?
we are stronger than before ?
28 trill in debt
virtual war with China
we can't even say man or woman anymore
everything is race or identity politics
media silencing the party you once belonged to
mono party take over of the government with big monied backer and virtual control of 90% media
Oh and yes we are a sword being tempered to be "stronger than before"
Does this not meet the definition "muscle head" ( knuckle head) disorder?
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Pussy whipped ever since Maria caught him banging the maid.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/antifa-bullies-powells-books-removing-andy-ngos-book-still-sells-60-versions-mein-kampf-video/
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THOMAS SOWELL: “It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2021/01/12/is-truth-irrelevant-n2582977
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THOMAS SOWELL: “It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2021/01/12/is-truth-irrelevant-n2582977
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/07/kamala-harris-called-riots-a-movement-last-summer-said-they-should-not-stop-n1310640
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/801/024/original/de2df4f98e6a30fb.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/801/024/original/de2df4f98e6a30fb.jpeg)
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If Trump has called off the ruckus for inauguration day, why the security scare. If Trump can incite them and they take their direction from him, can't he call them off as well. If they're saying the supporters would be violent anyway, then he didn't incite them.
BYW, people like a gracious, magnanimous winner. Democrats in Washington aren't that.
-
If Trump has called off the ruckus for inauguration day, why the security scare. If Trump can incite them and they take their direction from him, can't he call them off as well. If they're saying the supporters would be violent anyway, then he didn't incite them.
BYW, people like a gracious, magnanimous winner. Democrats in Washington aren't that.
It appears that they suddenly believe that walls do work, given all those that have gone up recently in DC.
-
https://populist.press/the-left-fears-this-video/
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https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/01/15/hundreds-of-rioters-destroyed-property-set-fires-during-trumps-2017-inauguration-and-all-charges-were-dropped-1016798/
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G M: It appears that they suddenly believe that walls do work, given all those that have gone up recently in D.C.
Yes.
(https://media.breitbart.com/media/2021/01/GettyImages-1230588391-640x480.jpg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392203.php
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Stabbing Hector’s Corpse
Americans hate one thing more than a sore loser, and that is an arrogant, vindictive—and bullying—winner.
By Victor Davis Hanson
January 20, 2021
In Homer’s epic Iliad, the Greek hero Achilles finally kills his hated archenemy, the often trash-talking Trojan warrior, Hector.
After Hector dies, once frightened but now gloating Greek soldiers encircle and cowardly stab his limp corpse.
Achilles even ties the ankles of the dead Hector to his chariot and in fits of mindless rage drags him around the walls of Troy.
Homer then brilliantly shows how Achilles’ vindictive excess ensures sympathy even for the once-braggart Hector. Eventually, the adolescent Achilles relents, grows up, allows Hector to be buried, and accepts the tragic nature of a common humanity.
If Democrats and the Left had wished to reinvigorate the Trump legacy, they could have done no better than unleashing their unhinged and often repulsive hatred of the last two weeks.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson recently boasted, “There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.”
What method does Robinson advocate for the required mind-rinsing of these millions? The Chinese, Soviet, or North-Korean model?
CNN’s Don Lemon claims that those who voted for Trump—nearly half the electorate—are synonymous with the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. Would Lemon include one in three Hispanics or one in five black males?
The Lincoln Project, in good McCarthyite fashion, wants to create lists of former Trump officials to destroy their reputations. Is that the spirit of their namesake, Abe Lincoln, who urged Americans to heal the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all”?
Was it not enough to rush through a slipshod, one-day second impeachment of Trump, the first in our nation’s history?
Or after he leaves office, will Trump also become the first private citizen in history to be the target of a Senate impeachment trial—an act as unnecessary as it is likely unconstitutional.
So far the Left has produced no consistent standard by which the public can judge Trump’s excesses. Indeed, for months, blue-state mayors and governors contextualized nonstop summer rioting, arson, and looting.
Politicians like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Vice President Kamala Harris, and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), have themselves either revved up angry protestors, urged mass street demonstrators to continue indefinitely, or directed followers to hound and harass government officials.
Trump, unlike Iran’s strongman Ayatollah Khamenei who advocates the destruction of Israel, is banned for life from Twitter. So are many of his followers—unlike those of radical Antifa and BLM who used social media to coordinate their often violent protests, looting, and arson.
The small conservative alternative to Silicon Valley’s left-wing social media monopoly, Parler, was crushed by Big Tech in one fell swoop.
Does Joe Biden really believe he can unite the country by smearing two U.S. senators as no different from the genocidal Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels?
Already Biden’s premature promises of mass amnesties and lax border enforcement have sparked caravans of undocumented immigrants to head for the border. Are they going again to crash through without background checks—right in the middle of a spiking COVID-19 pandemic, with already crammed ICUs and long lines for vaccinations?
Joe Biden has promised to cancel pipeline contracts and curtail fossil fuel production.
How popular will that be?
Fracking made the United States a net energy exporter and crashed gas prices. America is no longer dependent on Middle East oil and gas. It has no need to intervene in endless wars out of worry for secure energy supplies.
The transition to clean-burning natural gas allowed the United States to reduce carbon emissions more rapidly than almost any other major industrial nation. And high-paying gas and oil jobs sparked economic booms from Texas to North Dakota.
Lots of departed Republican Trump officials are now loudly trashing their former boss. Few admit that their once-stalled careers were revived only after they successfully lobbied to work for the Trump White House.
Efforts of Republican House members to join House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s push to impeach Trump were widely praised as “bipartisan” in the media and by the Left. But impeachment won the support of less than five percent of Republican House members.
No wonder, since some national polls put Trump’s national popularity unchanged or even above where it was on Election Day. About 85 percent of Republicans still support him.
The irony is that all these frenzied efforts to mutilate the political corpse of Trump are reviving him.
Banning Trump from his often self-destructive Twitter addiction, smearing his supporters as racists, and bulldozing through a far-Left agenda will only ensure Trump a ninth life.
Americans hate one thing more than a sore loser, and that is an arrogant, vindictive—and bullying—winner.
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-19.10.53.png
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-19.10.53.png)
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-19.10.53.png
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-19.10.53.png)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392275.php
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https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2021/01/21/aclu-wants-erase-male-female-sexes-id-documents/
Why, sex is not a "civil liberty" any more than one's height or eye color
listed on and ID
How is this possible people are crazily supporting this?
Why can't Americans have a say
most don't support the LBGT crap
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/062/734/801/original/aeb7b253bae33cf5.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/062/734/801/original/aeb7b253bae33cf5.jpg)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/062/995/123/original/d8de3f125ac098e9.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/062/995/123/original/d8de3f125ac098e9.jpg)
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/buyers-remorse-ute-indian-tribe-lashes-biden-admin-restricting-federal-energy-development-direct-attack-economy-sovereignty/
-
ute indian tribe buyer's remorse
did they vote for him?
what did they think was going to happen?
-
ute indian tribe buyer's remorse
did they vote for him?
what did they think was going to happen?
Moar free Sh*t from Uncle Sugar.
-
is total capitulation
is total appeasement
response to 75 million voters on other side . Ignore the reasons they are pissed and do this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-can-farright-violence-be-stopped-165037092.html
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BURNLOOTMURDER/Protifa are state approved paramilitaries.
is total capitulation
is total appeasement
response to 75 million voters on other side . Ignore the reasons they are pissed and do this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-can-farright-violence-be-stopped-165037092.html
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/063/619/606/original/93e7da82a55a7c35.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/063/619/606/original/93e7da82a55a7c35.png)
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/28/dr-fauci-backs-overseas-abortion-funding-as-positive-for-womens-sexual-and-reproductive-health-n1416432
At first I really liked him
his obvious relish of his celebrity status
has changed my opinion of him
further intensified by his now overt Democrat partisanship
As soon as I see him on the tube I change the station
I can't stomach him anymore
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/pelosis-house-dc-officials-announce-plans-erect-permanent-security-fence-around-us-capitol-week-democrats-ended-construction-border-security-fence/
Not you.
-
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/john-kerry-private-jet-iceland-climate-award
John Kerry took private jet to Iceland for environmental award, called it 'only choice for somebody like me'
President Biden's recently appointed climate czar, John Kerry, took a private jet to Iceland in 2019 to receive the Arctic Circle award for climate leadership.
Kerry defended his high-pollution ride at the time, calling it "the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle". The incident had not been previously reported in the American press.
Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who led the Arctic Circle Roundtable, criticized Kerry for traveling to the event via private jet, Icelandic outlet RUV reported.
Kerry received the award, which took the form of an iceberg sculpture, for being "a consistent voice pressuring the American authorities to commit to tackle environmental matters," the outlet noted.
Icelandic reporter Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson confronted Kerry at the event over his choice of transportation, asking: "I understand that you came here with a private jet. Is that an environmental way to travel?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I want to say, bleeping moron, but it is just the opposite. That's what he thinks we are. WHY IS HE TRAVELING THERE AT ALL, IF THE EARTH'S SURVIVAL RESTS IN THE BALANCE?
Note that that the American press didn't ask the question or even report it.
Besides climate hypocrisy, this reeks of elites' 'rights' versus those of the unwashed masses. Just like how socialist dictator Hugo Chavez' daughter became a billionaire while the little people were left to eat zoo animals.
The work he does is important, anything goes. The work you little people do needs to be stopped, based on the Leftist principle of coercive paternalism.
-
'only choice for somebody like me'
what other choice could a man of such stature do
to be able to travel ~ 2500 miles
to pick up a small statue award
and receive adulation
then fly over on a private jet........
Lurch -> backwards
He even makes Kissinger look handsome in comparison
-
another perfectly timed
leftist assault
on a prominent Republican :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/second-democrat-calls-for-investigation-of-de-santiss-vaccine-distribution-100026167.html
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Bacteria fossil on Mars is a sign of life but a beating heart in a womb is not.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alien-life-bacteria-underground-earth-mars-cyanobacteria-spain-a8563596.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/honduras-abortion-legislation-women-b1791460.html
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-endorses-female-generals-whose-130408215.html
this gets yahoo headlines though it is all conjecture and not more
Trump was not even present with them as choices
-
Interesting point here. "If the United States was starting from scratch, we wouldn’t create a separate state of Delaware. Its existence is a fillip of ancient colonial history, and it houses only one-quarter of 1% of the nation’s population. Its share of land area is even tinier. Some 57% of its residents live in New Castle County, mostly affluent, suburban turf that’s part of the Philadelphia metro area....It was a slave state..."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/what-explains-bidens-chameleon-like-transformation
-------
Rejecting the Founding, if the left had its their way, these little states would not be states, would have no added importance. The Senate would have no unique significance, just be part of a unicameral people's house. There would be no Delaware, no Senate, no Senator Biden and no President Biden. Hmmm.
-
it is still a slave state (D) -> taxpayers
that said I get the point
founders did not foresee urban centers controlling the entire country
-
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/03/22/childrens-book-celebrates-how-dr-fauci-became-americas-doctor/#
not clear why he is not disgraced for being a beneficiary of white privilege here
or why we here he is a boy
and not cisgender or whatever the acceptable term is.
Actually Fauci has been very impressive over his career
I don't like the label "Americas doctor" though
he ain't mine . I prefer Ben Carson .
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393337.php
Where my unarmed social workers at?
-
hearing more and more leftist speaking quite openly about trying to wipe the republican party by 2024
it is obvious their intent
but now they openly come out and say it
rinos who still deny this are just as stupid as Obama Biden and everyone since GH Bush about China
BTW what happened to the civil war thread ?
-
“Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use,”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/biden-white-house-sandbags-staffers-sidelines-dozens-for-pot-use
https://fee.org/articles/why-the-biden-administration-fired-staffers-over-smoking-pot-but-let-kamala-harris-get-away-with-it/
Even when smoked in states where it's legal.
[Must be true; it's in the Daily Beast!]
Yet President Bozo's first real hire Kamala cackled about her pot use, "Yes I have", "And I inhaled", Hahaha. "Half my family's Jamaican!" Hahahahaha!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKMwua-_jlQ
But that was a long time ago [when it was ILLEGAL]
Where's her suspension
Buttigieg too. But not too high to raise taxes.
But only "a handful of times, and he has quite small hands.
https://apnews.com/article/17fb64590766491091db107d7891e023
Lesson from the power Left: You little people have different rules. Get used to it.
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-ten-radical-new-rules-that-are-changing-america/
The Ten Radical New Rules That Are Changing America
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
April 1, 2021
Many American privately reject the new diktats of wokism. But publicly, not so much.
There are ten new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.
1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.
Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe that permanent zero-interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or that the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.
Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted, or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring, and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.
3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or it’s a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.
4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school, and obey all the laws.
Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe that illegal entrants more closely resemble the “Founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.
5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.
Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning.
6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate-change activists fly on private jets. Social-justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism, and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. What matters is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live.
7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate, and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill, and create sufficient public shelter areas.
8.) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.
Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social-media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.
9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project requires any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.
10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican; and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels.
Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.
The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.
-
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/04/who-is-the-phoniest-of-them-all.php
John Hinderaker picks Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary who staged his ride to work on a bicycle by traveling most of the distance in a Chevy Suburban. The video shows him hidden in the trees unloading the bike, mounting it with his suit, his helmet, his mask, his little blinking tail light and a great big Chevy Suburban with a staff of drivers and assistants. It looks like a grown up rides next to him, a bodyguard twice his size peddling a fat tire bike. Then the Suburban drives behind them. Green!
-
He said the study said it would grow jobs by 19 million and it really said it would grow jobs by 2 million, also untrue.
How can you be more of something of which you are none? He lied. He wasn't partly accurate nd should have been more. What he should have done is tell the truth.
But he didn't. The why of that should concern us. The same lie was told by all of them. In other words, it was coordinated, ordered from above. He didn't make a mistake in speaking or analysis. He made the mistake of joining an administration that requires lying to justify their actions and proposals. He made the mistake of getting caught. He made the mistake of going on a show that just might call him out on it now that he's not busy shouting down Trump.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/buttigieg-admits-to-overstating-infrastructure-plan-job-creation-number-by-16-million-i-should-have-been-more-precise_3771964.html
-
lie more
and louder and in unison
of course when have they ever been truthful?
they can't win on logic common sense and the truth
so make up their own "truths" and go out and lie about them
-
we are not to state he or she
just person
on the other hand we are all supposed to way woopty doo when a person with a vagina vaults to the top Army spot :
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-nominates-christine-wormuth-first-224417329.html
continued twisting logic on its head
the Democrat Party way
-
https://www.dailywire.com/news/ny-to-give-illegal-immigrants-covid-checks-of-up-to-15600-republicans-hit-back-in-new-york-it-pays-to-break-the-law
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/trevor-noah-calls-police-us-rotten-tree-conveniently-forgets-homicide-rate-home-country-6-times-us/
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1382732456151879683?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1382732456151879683%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2Frevealed_before_becoming_woke4tv_trevor_noah_supported_using_tear_gas_and_real_bullets_against..._striking_minorsmore
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/071/681/710/original/06ce4f0804176bed.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/071/681/710/original/06ce4f0804176bed.jpg)
-
https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/nba-players-selling-clothing-made-by-uyghur-slave-labor-communist-china/
-
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/scottmorefield/2021/04/17/bill-maher-praises-desantis-rips-media-panic-porn-on-covid-how-did-your-audience-wind-up-believing-such-a-bunch-of-crap-n2588096
time for Fauci to retire
-
Defund them, they're racist, take away their guns, oh by the way I will need an armed police escort to protect me during my visit aimed at ramping up the violence in your northern confederate city.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/19/rep-maxine-waters-police-escort-rioters/
Rep. Maxine Waters Asked For Police Escort As She Encouraged Protestors To ‘To Get More Confrontational’
Waters flew into Minnesota-St. Paul International Airport on April 17, just days ahead of a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial. The congresswoman requested a police escort that night when she called for people to stay out on the streets if Chauvin is not found guilty and they don’t get “justice,” according to Townhall.
Waters said she also felt the need to attend the protests to show the family of Daunte Wright, who was shot by police during a traffic stop on April 11, that someone was listening to them. (RELATED: Two National Guard Members Injured During Drive-By Shooting In Minneapolis)
“We’ve got to stay on the street, and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational,” Waters said, “We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
----------------------------------------------------------
Where is my police escort? Who says her work is more important?
-
https://thepostmillennial.com/walls-erected-outside-academy-awards-to-protect-the-hollywood-elite
-
https://thepostmillennial.com/walls-erected-outside-academy-awards-to-protect-the-hollywood-elite
https://biznewspost.com/news/oscars-hollywood-erects-walls-to-keep-celebrities-safe-during-academy-awards/
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/27/nolte-usa-today-edits-stacey-abrams-op-ed-suggesting-she-supported-mlb-boycott/
-
Not ok to mention attacker is "African American"
or simply black
but ok to note she is wearing black
how nuts:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/asian-woman-walking-manhattan-bashed-155100002.html
part of the new rules (for morons , I mean radicals)
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sikh-community-demands-hammer-attack-192923136.html
HATE on the Rise, domestic terror
in our racist white privileged society
suggests the headlines
where is FBI DOJ ? I am sure they are NO where to found here
how about you Crump ?
-
offers to resign -> good
resignation refused -> bad
with the obligatory " I'm sorry charade"
https://www.dailywire.com/news/texas-dem-party-leader-calls-tim-scott-racial-slur-then-resigns-texas-dems-wont-accept-his-resignation
-
determined not to be hate crime. :wink::
https://www.yahoo.com/news/asian-american-father-walking-1-225240689.html
-
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/10/trouble_in_river_city_the_lefts_ugly_con_game_145727.html
-
Pelosi supports diplomatic boycott of Olympics in China. What the hell is a diplomatic boycott. Boycott is not hyphenated. You send a team or you boycott.
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394009.php
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-reportedly-crashing-memorial-services-132345361.html
of course no comment on the great snake running the show
covertly
-
Better for the Citizen Trump thread
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bidens-approval-takes-a-hit-driven-by-sagging-hopes-among-democrats/ar-AAL7t9e?li=BBnb7Kz
"Back in April, when Mr. Biden was making big legislative strides, 83 percent of Democrats said they thought the country was moving in the right direction, according to a Monmouth survey at the time. But in Wednesday’s poll, just 59 percent of Democrats said that."
Source: NYT
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what a joke
Federal employees who already have every benefit in the book
are now going to get another holiday
which was already enshrined with MLK day
more give aways
more spending with nothing in return
and more debt :-(
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2021/06/most-feds-off-friday-as-biden-set-to-make-juneteenth-a-federal-holiday/
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"what a joke"
June 19 will be celebrated on June 18 this year - so that people who already get Saturday and Sunday off get an extras day off. Hey Doc, Do hospitals get weekends off? )
In my business, the more state and federal holidays the better. I wonder if the Minneapolis Department of Regulatory Services is closed today. Who will protect the public?
-
and even more of a joke
is the fact that VP Harris
gave us a lecture about this before jBiden got on stage to slumber through a speech like written by far left historian Jim Meacham
and the only reason this mostly unqualified and totally unpopular person is the VP is precisely because she is black. yet she would lecture us on how much work needs to be done
and we are still racist
we don't need to have these historical events shoved up our buttocks from 150 yrs from now for phony 2021 racism
they can't even get their story straight
The emancipation proclamation was in 1863.
Joe Johnston did not surrender (after lee did ) till I think 5 /65
so I did not know the specific date of June 19 - so what .
:-(
I learned as far back as I can remember about slavery and the rest...
-
"precisely because she is black."
- She is part 'black' but she identifies Black.
The emancipation proclamation was in 1863.
- The Republican emancipation proclamation. Not the entire country was behind it.
Now that they've rejected the core of "I have a Dream", do we lose a January holiday?
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/collapsed-miami-condo-sinking-earth-181026431.html
I knew it
I said yesterday that somehow the Left will blame the Miami building collapse on global warming
or climate change
this article does not specify that yet - but we will hear about this soon
-
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/new_york_times_defund_the_police_06-24-2021.jpg)
Homicides Have Skyrocketed in These 6 Democratic Cities. Black People Are Disproportionately the Victims, Data Shows. June 24, 2021
Who could have seen this coming?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/24/homicides-have-skyrocketed-in-these-6-democratic-cities-black-people-are-disproportionately-the-victims-data-shows
https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/bidens-anti-crime-plan-ignored-dems-role-in-creating-crime-rise/
If not rational, at least they are consistent (mostly).
Cities: Lawless, no enforcement. Let the gangs rule. We don't care.
Borders: Lawless, no enforcement. Let the gangs rule. We don't care.
Elections: Lawless, no enforcement. We don't care.
China: No rules or limits on barbaric totalitarian rule. We don't care.
Exceptions:
Rudy Giuliani, he supported Trump, OMG, pull his law license. Guilty until proven innocent.
Mueller investigation: 675 days, employed 19 lawyers, assisted by a team of 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and other professional staff. 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants. 230 orders for communication records, 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers to monitor electronic communications, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence. 500 witnesses. No budget. No limit. Cost $25.2 million. No crime.
We only care about (Republican) crime where none occurs.
-
https://news.yahoo.com/ill-fated-miami-building-showed-224735523.html
"Professor Shimon Wdowinski and co-author Simone Fiaschi were examining increases in flooding frequency, and found that in addition to rising sea levels, flooding was “significantly higher” in areas along the southeastern coast that had been sinking into the earth due to urban development and compacted sediment on what was (at least in part) reclaimed marshland."
Somehow climate change is ALWAYS cited in some way
-
Either that or "whiteness".
https://news.yahoo.com/ill-fated-miami-building-showed-224735523.html
"Professor Shimon Wdowinski and co-author Simone Fiaschi were examining increases in flooding frequency, and found that in addition to rising sea levels, flooding was “significantly higher” in areas along the southeastern coast that had been sinking into the earth due to urban development and compacted sediment on what was (at least in part) reclaimed marshland."
Somehow climate change is ALWAYS cited in some way
-
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/29/politics/breyer-retirement-plans/index.html
He's a hundred times sharper than Slow Joe, and similar age.
-
Not the crime itself. Murder rate doubled in Mpls, worse in Portland. Ho hum. But liberals lose elections in NYC, now we care.
NYT: the success of Adams, coupled with polls showing the “disconnect” between the views of Blacks and the Democratic left on matters of crime and policing, “threatens to undermine a central tenet of [Democratic] political thought for decades.”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/panic-at-the-new-york-times.php
Same goes for all real issues. They fear the politics or 'optics' of the border. They don't fear a porous gang controlled border. The politics of unemployment, not people losing jobs. The politics of inflation, not the dollar worth nothing. The politics of China overtaking us, they don't fear the country becoming a second rate country or worse under their watch.
-
"Not the crime itself"
" Same goes for all real issues. They fear the politics or 'optics' of the border. "
right
keep the carrot and the stick on minority voters
stick - > everything is racist. due to white man
carrot - > vote for us and we will get you cash (reparations). (ya'll!)
keep the border open as long and as much as possible to flood the country with democrat voters (illegal makes no difference and work on getting them Ids so they can vote)
and somehow bullshit us about needing immigration reform while the corrupt media covers for it all
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394483.php
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394514.php
Rudy can't practice law, but Clinesmith can.
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/new_york_times_defund_the_police_06-24-2021.jpg)
Homicides Have Skyrocketed in These 6 Democratic Cities. Black People Are Disproportionately the Victims, Data Shows. June 24, 2021
Who could have seen this coming?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/24/homicides-have-skyrocketed-in-these-6-democratic-cities-black-people-are-disproportionately-the-victims-data-shows
https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/bidens-anti-crime-plan-ignored-dems-role-in-creating-crime-rise/
If not rational, at least they are consistent (mostly).
Cities: Lawless, no enforcement. Let the gangs rule. We don't care.
Borders: Lawless, no enforcement. Let the gangs rule. We don't care.
Elections: Lawless, no enforcement. We don't care.
China: No rules or limits on barbaric totalitarian rule. We don't care.
Exceptions:
Rudy Giuliani, he supported Trump, OMG, pull his law license. Guilty until proven innocent.
Mueller investigation: 675 days, employed 19 lawyers, assisted by a team of 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and other professional staff. 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants. 230 orders for communication records, 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers to monitor electronic communications, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence. 500 witnesses. No budget. No limit. Cost $25.2 million. No crime.
We only care about (Republican) crime where none occurs.
-
now the libs go after the credit market
lets see mortgage education health care energy indoctrinate the military
open the borders real estate
(just not big tech monopolies )
https://www.yahoo.com/money/house-democrats-propose-government-run-credit-reporting-system-194943545.html
-
now the libs go after the credit market
lets see mortgage education health care energy indoctrinate the military
open the borders real estate
(just not big tech monopolies )
https://www.yahoo.com/money/house-democrats-propose-government-run-credit-reporting-system-194943545.html
USA = PRC?
GOVERNMENT RUN CREDIT REPORTING SYSTEM:
THIS IS A HORRIBLE IDEA.
-
To the top, Hat Tip: G M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df5yT16a_og
Watch and see if this looks remarkably like the so-called Jan.6 insurrection.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are Democrats and students upset with Scott Walker (or just along for the experience) storming the Wisconsin Capitol building in Madison, home of the University of Wisc. 2011
We visited Madison on a college tour later that same year. This could have been my daughter or yours that got shot if we believe it is okay to shoot Ashli Babbitt Jan.6, 2021 for unarmed, following the crowd in, trespassing.
How many hundreds of these people were hauled off to jail? How many still in jail? How many shot by Capitol Police? Where is the investigation
[/quote]
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394546.php
They deserve it, good and hard!
-
https://www.newswars.com/doctoral-candidate-who-sought-to-prove-justice-system-was-racist-against-blacks-stabbed-to-death-by-black-male-in-chicago/
-
https://www.newswars.com/doctoral-candidate-who-sought-to-prove-justice-system-was-racist-against-blacks-stabbed-to-death-by-black-male-in-chicago/
Memorials to the Equal Justice Initiative. I hope the assailant receives equal justice.
-
"https://www.newswars.com/doctoral-candidate-who-sought-to-prove-justice-system-was-racist-against-blacks-stabbed-to-death-by-black-male-in-chicago/"
In honor to the dead man's memory
the killer should be let out with no bail
and provided a social worker
and unemployment benefits
the victims family can thus be so proud
the "good" mench is this honored
-
It is amazing how uneducated our educated class is. Very sad that the longer you stay in school the less you know about certain parts of life, human nature, economics and how the world works.
It's amazing how close a 'bad area' can be to the financial district and the government buildings. Everyone (almost everyone) seems to know and no one seems to care or do anything about it. cf. Mayor Lightbrain.
This young lady knew no better. She was saying things, studying things and writing things that pleased her peers and the department and institution where she wished to get an advanced degree. That seems admirable - even if it was all wrong. Going there was perhaps an attempt to learn and get the story right. I'll bet she never read an opposing view, not one article by Heather MacDonald for example taking down the race based false claims of the Left with hard facts.
This young woman studied crime from the point of view of us being too hard on the offenders. But simple math tells you that when the shootings and the murder rates go up 80% in a year, we aren't being too hard on perps; we are making life awful for victims, who also mostly black, though color shouldn't matter.
I was hit by a car and left to die along the side of the road in my youth. Ouch, but the first part of it was accidental, and I lived. Stitched up in a hospital after a knife-based attempted mugging on another occasion. Dying from the intentional knife stabbing through your neck must really suck. I wish she were here to tell others in "criminology' how bad that is and how hard we should try to stop it.
-
turned into a "people of color" and LBTQetc. issue?
It is a child abuse / rape issue period.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/how-experience-childhood-sexual-abuse-inspired-woman-help-others-heal-185539916.html
the LEFT just has to soak ever angle to their agenda
out of everything.................
-
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/07/06/msnbcs-watts-americas-neo-fascism-right-like-40s-germany-pushing-race-war/#
-
https://m.facebook.com/brad.smith.96387189/posts/10100910393481509
Hat tip Instapundit.
Democratic legislators fled the state of Texas to prevent the large legislative majority from enacting a voting reform bill. They flew to Washington, D.C., where they rallied for ending the filibuster so that Democrats’ slim majority can pass a voting ‘reform’ bill.
----------------------
Last night the BBC was saying both those things at once, with no consciousness of any contradiction.”
----------------------
Doug: Take note of what we are up against as we design our own strategy going forward.
-
https://cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/texas-sen-cruz-dems-who-fled-state-over-voter-verification-bill-had-show-id
-
https://neociceroniantimes.wordpress.com/2021/07/07/the-myth-of-progressivisms-shiny-future/
-
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jane-fonda-covid-gods-gift/
COVID is God’s gift to the Left. [Laughs]... ripped the bandaid off who he is and what he stands for... we have a chance to harness that anger and make a difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuCvO7gNzfY&t=5134s (1:27:00)
This is The Left. Know your enemy.
-
https://babylonbee.com/news/scientists-warn-that-in-the-next-decade-well-run-out-of-things-to-call-racist
Scientists Warn That Within 6 Months Humanity Will Run Out Of Things To Call Racist
-
AOC Struggles to Explain How Cashing in on Her 'Tax the Rich' Merchandise Isn't Capitalism or Something
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/07/20/aoc-struggles-to-explain-how-cashing-in-on-her-tax-the-rich-merch-isnt-capitalism-or-something-n1463200
It's not capitalism because we aren't evil - or something.
-
"To be a lefty is to believe that the Constitution is a living document that changes with the times, but a poem on a statue binds immigration policy forever.” - Glenn Reynolds
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/271762/
Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
That's binding, forever. All poor, all tired, all masses, no matter the numbers, the issues, the problems, even the pandemic. Are you nuts?
Article Five of the Constitution:
"two thirds of both houses ...ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states..."
That's not binding. Just change any meaning to fit your desired outcome.
"...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." 'Shall not' actually means 'shall' if you are Left in our time. No amendment is needed because, um, well because it wouldn't pass 2/3 House, 2/3 Senate or in 38 states.
The right to kill unborn, anytime, for no reason or any reason, try passing THAT in 38 states, yet the Left thinks it's a constitutional right.
-
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/larry-david-couldn-t-curb-003041733.html
reminds me of a nasty disgusting call my sister got about my nephew who works with Josh Hawley
from a "friend" from her previous home town
who just had to open his big mouth about how Hawley "has blood on his hands" after 1/6/21
I said I bet anything this person was jewish - she said yes.
The Jewish democrats are some of the most nasty hypocritical narcissistic virtue signalers
Thank you all for listening
now that I got this off my chest......
To clarify I am not anti jewish but anti the democrat party religion of my fellow jews
hat tip to Doug
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I know my friend ccp is Jewish, but please be careful to clarify, this forum is anti-Left, not anti-Jewish.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/whats-happening-afghanistan-is-horrible-how-else-was-us-involvement-going-end/
all he thinks about is CRT and reparations
all else be damned - democrat agenda full speed ahead.
can anyone imagine if Trump was president how much this guy would be hollering ?
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"This is not an apologia for the tragic and chaotic scenes that have been unfolding in Kabul. Rather, it is a reality check. If there is a graceful, orderly way to abandon involvement in a brutal, unresolved civil war on the other side of the world, please cite historical precedents. I can’t find them."
The Soviets left in an orderly way, and the government lasted four years after they left, if I recall correctly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/whats-happening-afghanistan-is-horrible-how-else-was-us-involvement-going-end/
all he thinks about is CRT and reparations
all else be damned - democrat agenda full speed ahead.
can anyone imagine if Trump was president how much this guy would be hollering ?
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395442.php
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395442.php
https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/joe-bidens-call-to-afghan-president-is-impeachable-devine/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/questions-grow-over-long-beach-004028125.html
when "security officer " shoots young "MOM"
but when blacks shoot/kill each other at dozens every day - not a peep
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There SHOULD be public attention when a badge shoots a citizen.
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I don't think it warrants front page international news
whenever it happens
and my point about black on black crime being ignored
in contrast to show the media bias is relevant.
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Sorry to nitpick, but it was not "international news". It was front page news of a shooting under color of law in LA County in LA County's largest newspaper.
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no prob
your correct ;
its just that it gets on yahoo huffpost
and every leftist news site
stirring up the race card
not that I like a young mother being shot for any reason
soon sharpton and what's his face attorney will be there turning this into a race crime
we'll see
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"black on black crime being ignored"
Race matters when it fits the narrative and fuels the agenda. In LA maybe it's Mexican gangs
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2007/latino-gang-members-southern-california-are-terrorizing-and-killing-blacks
Also MS-13: https://nypost.com/2021/08/26/members-of-ms-13-subset-charged-in-brutal-los-angeles-murders/
Here is an LAT attempt to acknowledge homicide victims, never called black on black or gang on gang crime:
https://homicide.latimes.com/
This is public data from police reports. Not one reporter was assigned to hundreds and thousands of crimes. Who was killed, why, over what, how did the investigation go? Was anyone charged, anyone convicted? A deplorable lack of curiosity.
In gang related murders, the victim is also often a murderer or criminal too but no one sorts that out.
It's getting worse:
https://www.dailynews.com/2021/01/07/2020-was-a-deadly-one-for-l-a-with-most-killings-in-years/
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TAX THE RICH!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvgxe/were-going-to-make-the-rich-pay-joe-manchin-tells-protesters-from-his-yacht
of course there will be trillion dollar bill
any is too much
So how high will Joe go because we know there will be a giant spending bill
like my sister advised me some yrs ago
it is always the same mantra
when Dems
many who pay zero income tax
are asked how do we pay for these gigantic bills
"tax the rich " is ALWAYS the (me dumb ass response)
I am thinking since printing endless money is no problem
why tax anyone ?
just print more money.
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Ok, one more illustration:
(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/10/download-4-copy-2.jpg?resize=768%2C652&ssl=1)
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/harrassing_sinema_in_bathroom_meme_10-04-2021.jpg
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/harrassing_sinema_in_bathroom_meme_10-04-2021.jpg)
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/harrassing_sinema_in_bathroom_meme_10-04-2021.jpg
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/harrassing_sinema_in_bathroom_meme_10-04-2021.jpg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395862.php
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following a US Senator into the bathroom AND FILMING IT.
why is this not just bad as a touch on the fanny?
Why are these people not arrested
where is the me too outrage
anyone see proud boys following women into the restroom to harass them and film then in a BR stall?
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following a US Senator into the bathroom AND FILMING IT.
why is this not just bad as a touch on the fanny?
Why are these people not arrested
where is the me too outrage
anyone see proud boys following women into the restroom to harass them and film then in a BR stall?
If anyone tried this with leftist dems, they'd be shot in the neck by Capitol Police or incarcerated without trial for years.
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https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-biden-says-his-plan-costs-nothing-why-he-s-n1280158
Biden says his plan costs nothing.
MSNBC writes, "why he's right".
Doug: Speechless.
If this needs explaining, we already lost you.
If you added a $1 cost to a gallon of gasoline, and you paid that additional cost, was the net cost zero. Nothing. Nada?
Yes, according to Leftist lying anti-math.
Is a loss of millions of jobs zero net cost?
https://www.westernjournal.com/experts-many-jobs-bidens-agenda-will-kill/
I can't find it but radio had a montage of Dems saying zero cost.
When have they gone too far with the lie, cheat, steal approach to governing?
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=395977
You aren’t voting your way out of this.
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"You aren’t voting your way out of this."
For now that is our only chance . Unless.......
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"You aren’t voting your way out of this."
For now that is our only chance . Unless.......
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/087/514/900/original/94f0046cdc986e60.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/087/514/900/original/94f0046cdc986e60.jpeg)
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=395977
You aren’t voting your way out of this.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10083783/Loudoun-County-father-arrested-school-meeting-says-daughter-raped-boy-girls-bathroom.html
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Of course gets honored
by sleazy Joe and the rest of the Dem gang:
https://populist.press/chris-dodd-accused-of-assaulting-waitress-praised-by-biden-for-how-he-treats-wait-staff/
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/10/18/media-blackout-the-latest-mass-shooting-in-minnesota-that-no-one-heard-about/#more-251187
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Hey, is St Paul part of Murderapolis?
I heard a mention of that incident but no follow-up. Black on black crime is swept under the table. Why is it not racist to kill a black victim - no matter who you are? I thought, "black.lives.matter". Black lives sometimes matter??
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Hey, is St Paul part of Murderapolis?
I heard a mention of that incident but no follow-up. Black on black crime is swept under the table. Why is it not racist to kill a black victim - no matter who you are? I thought, "black.lives.matter". Black lives sometimes matter??
Twin Cities, right? Known for their mostly peaceful protests and extreme flammability...
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https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2021/10/19/ken-blackwell-colin-powell-life-was-a-quintessential-american-story-that-collapses-critical-race-theory/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10122323/DHS-spent-half-MILLION-dollars-building-security-fencing-Bidens-Delaware-beach-home.html
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Walls don't work
for the left the problem is a Southern Border wall would work
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Walls don't work
for the left the problem is a Southern Border wall would work
Exactly.
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Why are liberal writers, liberal producers and liberal directors with liberal actors incorporating guns into their work product?
To show how bad they are - by mis-using them?
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https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/10/22/breaking-alec-baldwins-gun-loaded-with-one-live-round-in-place-of-a-blank-n1526063
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https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/10/22/breaking-alec-baldwins-gun-loaded-with-one-live-round-in-place-of-a-blank-n1526063
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1452303617617235989
Seems like the person you want handling guns.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/26/the-left-is-everything-they-hate/
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that's who was in charge of the gun?
:-o :-o
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that's who was in charge of the gun?
:-o :-o
It's my understanding her dad was big in the movie industry in the area of firearms.
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https://www.jewishworldreview.com/1021/hanson102821.php
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https://news.yahoo.com/vote-to-abolish-minneapolis-police-department-divides-community-this-wouldnt-have-saved-george-floyds-life-145607488.html
and replace with department of public safety - WHATEVER THAT MEANS
of course the Somalian immigrant which has been one of the most violent places on Earth comes here and tried to do the same to us is one of those leading the charge
I don't live there so I don't give a darn if they want to let criminals run loose terrorizing honest citizens but my friend Doug does.
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making its way around the jornlisters:
- our messaging was wrong ( not the policies)
- people were mad that we have not passed the socialism bill ( they are still waiting for their
bribes (not that those who stuck with bills for it all are pissed)
- and behind closed doors we know they are saying we have the wrong front man ( as though it
would matter - perhaps they need another "Great Snake")
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/big-donors-financed-bidens-2020-180134276.html
so much in this article is sickening on so many levels and perspectives
love this one: " a number of major Democratic donors, in particular in Silicon Valley, have been pressing Biden to move more forcefully on passing voting rights legislation, seeing state-level Republican restrictions on voting as an existential crisis for democracy."
yeah right :wink:
:roll: :roll: :roll:
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https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/oprah-lockdown-fire-vaccine-monitor-spending-illegals-get-money-no-vax-required.jpg?w=482&ssl=1
(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/oprah-lockdown-fire-vaccine-monitor-spending-illegals-get-money-no-vax-required.jpg?w=482&ssl=1)
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10117689/Moscow-State-University-confirms-DESTROYED-Biden-pick-Saule-Omarovas-dissertation-Marxism.html
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is just mind boggling
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/11/20/dem-rep-moore-when-i-saw-judge-tossed-lesser-charges-against-rittenhouse-that-took-the-pathway-to-conviction-on-larger-charges/
she is losing sleep that the verdict will spur white supremacists
to run around to BLM "protests" playing vigilante ( notice she seems oblivious to the fact we even need vigilantes to start with )
bottom line RACISM !
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1. It would be "undemocratic" if the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade leaving it to the people to decide the contentious issue through their representatives in the 50 states.
Honestly, are we the only ones that see how wrong, upside down and moronic that is?
2. Striking down Roe v Wade would have a "disparate impact on blacks and minorities" - because fewer live and healthy black and minority unborn young would be killed? Really??!!
3. Pictures tell the stories:
Jessie v, Kyle
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/image-5-copy.jpg?resize=768%2C764&ssl=1\)
4. Healthcare denied.
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/image009-copy-2.png?w=518&ssl=1)
5. Joe Biden's accomplishments
(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/list-of-joe-biden-accomplishments-blank-notepad.jpg?w=500&ssl=1)
6. Joe Biden Presidency: Maybe it still IS your grandfather's Democratic Party:
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-01-at-9.38.11-PM.png?resize=768%2C651&ssl=1)
7. Which one triggers the Left?
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/image001-9.png?w=453&ssl=1)
8 . Liberals fight crime:
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-7.31.06-AM.png?w=1000&ssl=1)
Pictures Source: Powerline Week in Photos
9. How do you leave the topic of cognitive dissonance without pointing out the yawn that is the Left reaction to Left hero Alec Baldwin, with the gun, on the set, shooting her dead? Imagine if that was someone on the right, say Dick Cheney.
OUTRAGED when Trump said he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and his followers would stay with him. It could have been self defense. This wasn't any excuse and they stay with him, could have happened to anyone, honest mistake?
The Left wants Officer Kim Potter, Brooklyn Center MN, to fry for shooting a gun when she should have shot a taser, at a very bad guy, when she is required to carry both, loaded, and use in emergencies with no notice. Baldwin had no reason to have a gun, hold a gun, aim a gun, or pull a trigger, and he did all that, killed a woman, says he didn't pull the trigger, and faces no charges?
The Left is not outraged by the actions of Baldwin and the failure to charge him because:
a. The gun might have loaded, aimed and shot the innocent woman all by itself, or because
b. Alec Baldwin is a good liberal and it the Left didn't have double standards they would have no standards at all.
10. I can't find a stopping point: Stacey Abrams says she did not challenge the result of her 2018 election:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/stacey-abrams-tells-rachel-maddow-she-did-not-challenge-the-outcome-of-2018-election/ar-AARpvdv?ocid=uxbndlbing
WHO STILL TAKES THESE PEOPLE SERIOUSLY?
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https://babylonbee.com/news/mirror-brought-into-courtroom-so-jussie-smollett-can-face-his-attackers
Mirror Brought Into Courtroom So Jussie Smollett Can Face His Attackers
----------------------------------------------
Don't tell me this wasn't political. The fake attackers were staged to be Trump supporters.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/328/743/original/a1ccfc2d08e564e8.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/328/743/original/a1ccfc2d08e564e8.jpg)
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/california-reparations-slavery-african-americans
:-(
why us?
I don't want to pay up
anymore then I do
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/california-reparations-slavery-african-americans
:-(
why us?
I don't want to pay up
anymore then I do
No reparations without repatriation.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-charges-york-man-threatening-160536037.html
yet attorney Deirdre von Dornum claims
"Mr. Welnicki intended no harm to anyone,"
:roll:
have not found image of this guy - yet
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".No reparations without repatriation."
My take :
1) total repatriation
2) NO reparations under any circumstance
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...who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old, 50-state union?
Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?
The Constitution also clearly states that "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside." Who slammed through the impeachment of former president Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?
Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?
The Left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel's report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?
New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration potentially lifesaving new COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of "equity."
The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny "equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof." Who is behind the new racial discrimination?
In summer 2020, many local and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity — if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.
Currently, the Biden Administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.
The Biden Administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border — in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.
The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.
Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 "sanctuary city" jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.
At various times in our nation's history — 1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63 — America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.
In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about "Russian collusion." Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander-in-chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.
Some of the nation's top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.
All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.
The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.
We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish one-day rioters on January 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property — all under the banner of revolutionary justice.
Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America's institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.
https://jewishworldreview.com/0122/hanson010622.php
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The greed of Big Food is what is driving food inflation. - Morons at the White House
Biden administration to give billions to food producers to 'bring down the cost of food':
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/biden-invest-1-billion-producers-after-blaming-inflation-greedy-meat-mongers
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/politics/biden-meat-processing-industry/index.html
Can't.make.this.stuff.up.
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https://news.yahoo.com/under-gov-ron-desantis-florida-110232663.html
well
he did not call him "hitler" or "fascist" or "king" blah blah blah
(notice they never say Marxist or Communist - those adjectives apparently are good; Hitler bad Mao and Stalin good )
so anyone who stands up to the LEFT is the authoritarian one......
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An Authoritarian that has a state with more freedom than most.
https://news.yahoo.com/under-gov-ron-desantis-florida-110232663.html
well
he did not call him "hitler" or "fascist" or "king" blah blah blah
(notice they never say Marxist or Communist - those adjectives apparently are good; Hitler bad Mao and Stalin good )
so anyone who stands up to the LEFT is the authoritarian one......
-
An Authoritarian that has a state with more freedom than most.
https://news.yahoo.com/under-gov-ron-desantis-florida-110232663.html
well
he did not call him "hitler" or "fascist" or "king" blah blah blah
(notice they never say Marxist or Communist - those adjectives apparently are good; Hitler bad Mao and Stalin good )
so anyone who stands up to the LEFT is the authoritarian one......
Their ability to project and our ability to just sit there and take it is beyond scary. VDH is great at calling this out but I don't know anyone to the left of us who reads him.
Hypocrite is when you do yourself what you accuse the other of doing.
Project in this case is when you do it yourself and they aren't doing it and you accuse them anyway, over and over an over again repeating the Big Lie in the echo repeat chamber until one can't help but believe what they say must be true.
Even "The Big Lie" is their term for what we never did. Just wanted every legal vote counted, once, and accurately tabulated. But 40 million votes were harvested with no traceable chain of custody and now they want them all that way.
Makes you want to stand up and scream however that isn't the most effective way to reach out and inform and persuade people.
Good news is that DeSantis does not ever seem blindsided by this and knows how to respond - with all the savvy of Trump and none of the crudeness.
That he is now their target is a sign of success.
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“That he is now their target is a sign of success.“
They fear DeSantis more than Trump.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/607/367/original/fcf9c055399a6a39.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/607/367/original/fcf9c055399a6a39.png)
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/maxine-waters-attacks-manchin-sinema-over-voting-bill-says-they-dont-care-about-black-people
Right but backwards.
They should switch parties.
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https://bigleaguepolitics.com/rabbi-at-congregation-beth-israel-promoted-far-left-dogma-banned-guns-at-synagogue-before-islamic-hostage-situation/
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MLK was a Republican by every measure today. The Civil Rights Act was passed by majority R. Republican Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. MLK was pro-life. Most crucially, Democrats are color of your skin and Republicans are content of your character.
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https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1073705516/co-owner-of-the-nbas-warriors-lambasted-after-saying-nobody-cares-about-the-uygh
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https://freebeacon.com/democrats/squad-ally-calls-sinema-manchin-white-nationalists/
Both should leave the Dem party.
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https://choiceclips.whatfinger.com/2022/01/26/wtf-msnbc-guest-calls-on-audience-to-take-up-weapons-in-war-against-republicans-insane/
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https://matzav.com/out-of-touch-adl-blasts-tuckers-dangerous-anti-semitic-dog-whistle-on-george-soros/
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"The spokesperson added that “casting a Jewish individual as some sort of puppet master”—for which the ADL has called out Fox in the past—has the “effect of mainstreaming antisemitic tropes and giving support to bona fide antisemites.”
if there ever was / is. stereotype rich Jewish person who wields unusual influence behind the scenes
and usually while he profits from same
it is George Soros
he is the epitome of this wretched stereotype
while it is hard to begrudge him as 14 yr old for giving up fellow Jews to survive ( I am first to admit - I am sad to say I am not sure I would have given up my young life to do otherwise)
what has persistently astounded me is I have never read he has any remorse, guilt and even called that experience the most "exciting of his life"
As for Tucker - he IS NOT an anti semite
he speaks the truth
I doubt the ADL would come out and defend a Jewish Republican
they are crats first after all
like the ACLU
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397635.php
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397635.php
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397651.php
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can we exile this guy to China or Russia or Cuba
and take away his citizenship please :
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/robert-reich-great-resignation-general-strike-health-care-childcare.html?recirc=taboolainternal
reich:
dartmouth yale scranton
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A Democrat till he dies :
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/02/04/ron-perlman-calls-for-secession-you-dont-wanna-live-in-my-world-and-i-certainly-dont-want-to-live-in-yours/
most evil:
Republicans
Conservatives
American Patriots
least evil:
Mao/ Xi
Stalin/ Putin
Nazis
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PS
very righteous
for the poor
for the downtrodden
love peace
https://readspost.com/2021/10/08/ron-pearlman-net-worth-biography-career-spouse-and-more/
https://www.google.com/search?q=Ron+Perlman&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&vet=1&fir=ppfZPWM4BtUbRM%252Cz4W4mf7vohYq5M%252C_%253B0Vh2EpZ6_0TPdM%252CWhXoOQs0vpkGgM%252C_%253Br3M5ZoIgNxAiJM%252CcUfwJepaErB4iM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQb3ioZEaiA2gnsB09KVOMcqMu0HA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiq4JGwwOv1AhUalIkEHbP8DrMQ_h16BAgWEAE&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2#imgrc=r3M5ZoIgNxAiJM
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397635.php
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397651.php
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/986/139/original/be92ac2bc9f7f85c.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/986/139/original/be92ac2bc9f7f85c.png)
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/democrats-gas-tax-gimmick-shows-theyre-really-scared-about-november
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does anyone have an opinion
or Rove and he supposedly mishandled redistricting
gerrymandering?
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Rich, liberal elite, NFL, Super Bowl attendees, players, coaches, mayors, celebs... Not so much.
https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2022/02/13/heres-a-reminder-that-kids-in-los-angeles-will-have-to-wear-masks-when-they-go-to-school-tomorrow-at-all-times/
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[Doug] I didn't know our brains had skin color.
PjMedia Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/02/17/wapo-describes-justice-thomas-the-black-justice-whose-rulings-often-resemble-the-thinking-of-white-conservatives/
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WHAT RACISM LOOKS LIKE: WaPo Describes Justice Thomas: “the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.”
The Washington Post wrote the emphasized portion. You know, Justice Thomas, the black justice who thinks like a white person. The Washington Post called Justice Thomas an Oreo. And that statement isn’t even accurate! The Court’s white conservatives issue rulings that often resemble those of Justice Thomas. Thomas is the intellectual leader of the Court’s conservative wing. And he has been for decades. Gorsuch, Alito, and the rest are just trying to keep up with CT. But once again, we get the racist trope that Thomas is Scalia’s clone. Just the opposite. Scalia often remarked that Thomas pushed him to the right. What lazy writing from the Post.
------------------------------
This article brings to mind an exchange between Justice Thomas and then-Senator Biden more than three decades ago.
Say, it would be interesting to see Thomas and Biden debate the constitution today, wouldn’t it? - Glenn Reynolds
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Justice Thomas:
"And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. -- U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree."
Just think of this statement.
He basically says if you do not vote Democrat you are "uppity".
Same as Biden saying if you are a Democrat you are not Black.
Is this insulting or what to Blacks?
The Democrat Party is the Black plantation where in they are to be controlled,
told how and what to think , and that they must think as themselves as victims who are owed and to hate whites. This is their MO.
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" I support Uncle Joe but his thirty-six years in the Senate did not serve him well and hobnobbing in hallways and giving speeches to an empty chamber are not edifying activities. It would've been good for him or any other senator to take a two-year sabbatical and teach tenth-grade history."
- Garrison Keillor
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"." I support Uncle Joe but his thirty-six years in the Senate did not serve him well and hobnobbing in hallways and giving speeches to an empty chamber are not edifying activities. It would've been good for him or any other senator to take a two-year sabbatical and teach tenth-grade history."
- Garrison Keillor
Remember my Bob Dole Cspan post
when he was asked which Senators were worth listening to
he answered most of them , when they would get up to speak, was a signal it was a good time to go the mens room ( when they were not transrooms). to take a leak
I do this when Biden gives a speech...
Interesting the only one he named by name as being a great orator was the klansman from WV
Senator Byrd.
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You'd think we could win elections by putting peace and prosperity up against the party of plague, war and famine, but everybody has different preferences.
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Doug wrote:
"You'd think we could win elections by putting peace and prosperity up against the party of plague, war and famine, but everybody has different preferences."
The problem with that is plague, war , and famine are free shit :wink:
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Barack Obama 2012 to Mitt Romney:
"When you were asked, 'What's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,' you said 'Russia.' Not al Qaeda; you said Russia. And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."
Obama's third term: Largest land war in Europe since WWII. Russia vs. [Nobody fighting back]
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/100/762/225/original/0f0bbc880cd6bdec.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/100/762/225/original/0f0bbc880cd6bdec.png)
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https://bongino.com/poll-68-of-republicans-say-theyd-fight-if-u-s-were-invaded-while-majority-of-democrats-say-theyd-flee/
but they have no problem telling others to fight in other countries......
I wonder if the poll asked would you fight conservatives if they took over ?
the Dem answer 100 % would fight......
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https://bongino.com/poll-68-of-republicans-say-theyd-fight-if-u-s-were-invaded-while-majority-of-democrats-say-theyd-flee/
but they have no problem telling others to fight in other countries......
I wonder if the poll asked would you fight conservatives if they took over ?
the Dem answer 100 % would fight......
No surprise here.
It's coming (CW2).
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/100/762/225/original/0f0bbc880cd6bdec.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/100/762/225/original/0f0bbc880cd6bdec.png)
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-4393c911-9aa2-4c9a-94e3-4d5838ee5a99_544x680.jpeg)
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Headline at RCP (MSNBC) : "The GOP is Lying to you about Gas Prices"
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/record-high-gas-prices-are-not-joe-biden-s-fault-n1291238
Sorry but how do you lie about gas prices? Like dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, it's all around you and in this case you can see it. Maybe you could lie to someone in a nursing home or prison about the outside world - if they don't have a TV or get a newspaper.
Gas prices started going up at the exact moment Joe Biden and the Left cabal were declared winner in the Nov 2020 elections - for reasons obvious to anyone awake and alive. He promised to do everything that makes gas prices go up. It's a futures market and expectations proved accurate. In his first minute in office he started canceling pipelines, leases, drilling, fracking, canceled energy independence, emboldened enemies, caused war and chaos and brought us THIS. Now he's canceling imports, emboldening more enemies, cf Iran, Venezuela, and refusing to expand domestic production - in the name of climate change!
I'm guessing from the headline, this article will explain the talking points of how this is not Biden's fault or the fault of his policies. Good luck with that!
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Remember how McDonald's and Coke and Big Tech cut off China for Covid, lying about it and their many, many well documented human rights abuses?
No?
Remember how the dems sprung into action to punish China economically?
No?
Memo to Putin:
Be sure to buy off Big Tech and funnel money to the relatives of US politicians before your next war.
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https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/BIDENGASPRICES-438x600.jpg
(https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/BIDENGASPRICES-438x600.jpg)
Headline at RCP (MSNBC) : "The GOP is Lying to you about Gas Prices"
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/record-high-gas-prices-are-not-joe-biden-s-fault-n1291238
Sorry but how do you lie about gas prices? Like dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, it's all around you and in this case you can see it. Maybe you could lie to someone in a nursing home or prison about the outside world - if they don't have a TV or get a newspaper.
Gas prices started going up at the exact moment Joe Biden and the Left cabal were declared winner in the Nov 2020 elections - for reasons obvious to anyone awake and alive. He promised to do everything that makes gas prices go up. It's a futures market and expectations proved accurate. In his first minute in office he started canceling pipelines, leases, drilling, fracking, canceled energy independence, emboldened enemies, caused war and chaos and brought us THIS. Now he's canceling imports, emboldening more enemies, cf Iran, Venezuela, and refusing to expand domestic production - in the name of climate change!
I'm guessing from the headline, this article will explain the talking points of how this is not Biden's fault or the fault of his policies. Good luck with that!
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"Headline at RCP (MSNBC) : "The GOP is Lying to you about Gas Prices"
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/record-high-gas-prices-are-not-joe-biden-s-fault-n1291238 "
I recall speaking to a couple of Russian born doctor colleagues who came to US for better economic opportunity
and when I would ask about propaganda and corruption in Russia
they would kind of shy away from talking about it due to their way of thinking :
we have just as much corruption and lying here.
no different really.
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"Headline at RCP (MSNBC) : "The GOP is Lying to you about Gas Prices"
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/record-high-gas-prices-are-not-joe-biden-s-fault-n1291238 "
I recall speaking to a couple of Russian born doctor colleagues who came to US for better economic opportunity
and when I would ask about propaganda and corruption in Russia
they would kind of shy away from talking about it due to their way of thinking :
we have just as much corruption and lying here.
no different really.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/169/040/original/4766d36d97afb460.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/101/169/040/original/4766d36d97afb460.png)
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"Headline at RCP (MSNBC) : "The GOP is Lying to you about Gas Prices"
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/record-high-gas-prices-are-not-joe-biden-s-fault-n1291238 "
I recall speaking to a couple of Russian born doctor colleagues who came to US for better economic opportunity
and when I would ask about propaganda and corruption in Russia
they would kind of shy away from talking about it due to their way of thinking :
we have just as much corruption and lying here.
no different really.
One Russian American observed it's worse here. Russia had only lying network' and everyone knew not to believe them. Here you can go up and down the dial and hear the same lie on a dozen different networks, far more tempting to believe but just as wrong.
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pretty sad that whenever a Federal Government employee
my automatic tendency is to assume they are lying right off the bat
:x
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pretty sad that whenever a Federal Government employee
my automatic tendency is to assume they are lying right off the bat
:x
The USG telling the truth would be like finding a Unicorn wearing a necklace made of 4 leaf clovers being ridden by an honest used car dealer.
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https://www.arkhaven.com/comics/comedy/stonetoss/drone-warfare
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Think I will go to the doctor. Agree with George Soros here. No other symptoms.
Putin and Xi have to go.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putin-ukraine-world-war-3-risk-by-george-soros-2022-03
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Doug,
listen to Newt's interview with Soros author Matt Palumbo:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/video-newt-gingrich-matt-palumbo-discuss-secret-frontpagemagcom/
I believe it will invigorate your disgust for this selfish Kapos who is the living reality of the selfish evil Jew Manipulating governments and law and order for his own profit .
It certainly did with me.!
I will say again ->
George Soros is the poster boy for all the antisemitic conspiracy and scapegoat theories of Jews.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-democrats-are-building-themselves-a-suicide-machine/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-03-18&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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[Asked by Dems recently]
Who or what is Lowenbrau? A classmate? A secret party place? Is it related to the ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ or a type of ‘boofing’?
I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors, or committed any physical or verbal harassment or assault of a sexual nature?
Have you ever passed out from drinking?
What do you consider to be too many beers?
Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before?
Do you believe Anita Hill?
Do you agree that it is possible for men to both be friends with some women, and treat other women badly?
Do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?”
“I would be afraid to ask her about the presence of gravity on Earth. She may decline to answer because it might come up in a case, you know, it could come before a court someday,” Sen. Dick Durban said during Barrett’s confirmation.
Until Democrats on the Judiciary Committee ask all these questions of the current nominee, including her view on the presence of gravity on Earth, how could they possibly countenance confirming Ketanji Brown Jackson to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/22/how-is-boofed-pronounced-and-other-vital-questions-ketanji-brown-jackson-must-answer/
Or is there some cognitive dissonance here?
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Dems play to win, no matter what. Most republicans don’t want anyone mad at them.
“Gosh darn it, we tried”.
Endless failure theater.
[Asked by Dems recently]
Who or what is Lowenbrau? A classmate? A secret party place? Is it related to the ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ or a type of ‘boofing’?
I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors, or committed any physical or verbal harassment or assault of a sexual nature?
Have you ever passed out from drinking?
What do you consider to be too many beers?
Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before?
Do you believe Anita Hill?
Do you agree that it is possible for men to both be friends with some women, and treat other women badly?
Do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?”
“I would be afraid to ask her about the presence of gravity on Earth. She may decline to answer because it might come up in a case, you know, it could come before a court someday,” Sen. Dick Durban said during Barrett’s confirmation.
Until Democrats on the Judiciary Committee ask all these questions of the current nominee, including her view on the presence of gravity on Earth, how could they possibly countenance confirming Ketanji Brown Jackson to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/22/how-is-boofed-pronounced-and-other-vital-questions-ketanji-brown-jackson-must-answer/
Or is there some cognitive dissonance here?
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https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2022/03/24/the-real-reset-is-coming-n2604976
what Biden
really meant when he blurted out a "New Global Order" .
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For years, Democrats played Putin’s music
It’s no wonder why he thinks he has the upper hand
By Rowan Scarborough
How did Russian dictator Vladimir Putin come to believe he could do just about anything he wanted with Obama/Biden-Biden/Harris in power?
Because they telegraphed weakness, a fungible asset for a psychopath like Mr. Putin. Capitalize on weak adversaries to conquer land, subjugate people, harass the West — facing little blowback.
Like Josef Stalin, Mr. Putin puts great importance on destabilizing adversaries. He secretly funds environmental groups whose anti-fossil fuel demands force Europe to buy more of his oil and natural gas. He spews disinformation. In 2020, for example, he blamed neighboring Poland for the start of World War II. He relentlessly hacks foreign computer networks, particularly of former Soviet puppet states he wants Russia to reabsorb. The Soviet Union’s end was a tragedy, he says.
Former President Barack Obama always had sympathy for regimes who hold a grudge against America. He watched baseball in Cuba with dictator Raul Castro. Mr. Obama initiated a sweetheart deal with Iran. Airborne palettes of cash arrived, giving the mullahs more resources to kill people in Iraq, Syria, Yemen.
Mr. Obama pretty much left China alone as the Communist Party repressed at home and hacked Americans, smashing and grabbing anything of value.
Mr. Putin went beyond hacking in August 2008. His troops invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He had made the decision before his presidential term ended that May, relinquishing leadership to his crony, Dmitry Medvedev, who promptly appointed him prime minister.
The response from former President George W. Bush lacked military action, but things remained frosty until the Obama-Biden team arrived.
Two months after inauguration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Geneva. She laughed it up with dour Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. She pulled out a prop, a red “reset button” to signal a fresh start.
What it really signaled was weakness. We’re so sorry George W. was mean to you. The whole photo op was bungled. The button’s Russian word for “reset” was actually “overcharged.” Tellingly, then-Vice President Joe Biden had announced the new cave to Moscow earlier, unveiling the “reset” theme in Munich.
Mr. Obama’s meekest message to Mr. Putin came on a hot mic, without which we would never have known just how committed the president was to placating the former KGB henchman.
There is usually a waiting period for history books to catch up with summit details. But the active mic in 2012 allowed the public to hear Mr. Obama make a vow to show “more flexibility” toward the incoming Putin presidency in May once the American president won reelection.
“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” then-Russian President Medvedev whispered back.
Later that year, Mr. Obama was a man of his word, vis-a-vis Mr. Putin. When Republican candidate Mitt Romney warned at a nationally televised debate that Russia presented our nation’s No. 1 strategic threat, Mr. Obama royally mocked him, and American foreign policy, all at once. “The ’80s called. They want their foreign policy back,” he said.
Putin music.
Mr. Putin executed his second grand military offensive in February 2014, slicing off a piece of land from Ukraine — the strategically important peninsula named Crimea on the Black Sea. Mr. Obama did little, except for sending new military clothing and box lunches. He said he did not want to trigger Mr. Putin.
That same month a Moscow oligarch wired $3.5 million to Mr.
Biden’s son Hunter for consulting fees. No Russian oligarch would send such a sum to the vice president’s son without Mr. Putin knowing, and probably orchestrating, the influence-buying.
Donald Trump became president in January 2017. Here’s what Mr. Trump did to check Mr. Putin while awkwardly praising him at times: Choked off Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to the West; provided to Ukraine the U.S. Army’s top anti-tank weapon, the Javelin, our first lethal aid; refused to extend the START treaty for fear Moscow was gaining an advantage in nuke weapons; withdrew from intermediaterange nuclear forces and Open Skies treaties because Mr. Putin was cheating; stopped the ineffective Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, a Russian client whose vicious militia fight with Russians in Syria; sanctioned several bigshot Russians. The music stopped for Mr. Putin, who complained relations with Washington had never been worse. With President Biden’s arrival, the Putin music was back in the jukebox. Let’s make a weakness list:
• A double-win for Mr.
Putin. Mr. Biden signed several executive orders to throttle our energy production, then begged Mr. Putin to pump more oil.
• Lifted Trump sanctions on Nord Stream 2 pipeline while canceling our new oil line, an unconditional surrender.
• In a show of military incompetence, the president hastily withdrew American forces from Afghanistan in a humiliating retreat after Mr. Biden pledged to Americans it would be in an “orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops.”
• Thirteen Marines were murdered by an ISIS bomber at a jammed chaotic Kabul airport. As retribution, the Pentagon bombed an innocent Afghan family by mistake. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged the U.S. embassy would stay open for years to come, then closed it days later.
• Extended START treaty, no questions asked.
• Restarted talks with Iran’s murderous mullahs to revive the Obama nuke deal, with Russia negotiating for us. It will mean billions of dollars more to Iran, who will share with Mr. Putin.
• Removed Trump terrorist designation for Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
• When Russians hacked U.S. gasoline and meat production, Mr. Biden met with Mr. Putin and handed over a list of 16 infrastructure targets he mustn’t hack — got that? Sixteen.
• On Ukraine, as Putin massed nearly 200,000 troops, Mr. Biden refused to deliver requested lethal aid, blocked Senate vote to sanction Russia, and seemed to approve a “minor incursion.”
The weakness list only involves his first year, a record that followed his campaign allegation that Mr. Trump was “coddling” dictators.
Overall, Mr. Putin’s greatest success was the anti-Trump, Kremlin-sourced dossier.
Democrat operatives ordered it, paid for it, circulated it and vouched for it. Mr. Putin gave Democrats the single most debilitating weapon to keep Mr.Trump distracted and under siege. And the whole 35-pages were a critical mass of disinformation. The CIA termed it “internet rumor.”
U.S. intelligence believes some of the most outrageous claims, such as Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly traveling to Prague, came directly from the Kremlin infiltrating ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier sourcing network.
Democrats were more than willing to collude with Mr. Putin’s propaganda machine when it meant more power for them regardless of what it did to the president or the country.
https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=b21fd36889a2e2fda6e487de547d02c6_623dc2ec_6d25b5f&selDate=20220325
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Trump or DeSantis should name VDH to the VP spot. He knows how to tie things together.
The Sheer Madness of Today’s Left
When ideologues demand power but cannot achieve it politically because they are cruel ideologues, expect more of their insanity to follow.
By Victor Davis Hanson
March 27, 2022
... So it is now. When the rock of green and woke ideology hits the hard place of reality, sheer madness always results.
The world prices of oil and natural gas are skyrocketing. At the time of a major war in Ukraine, the Western democracies have framed the conflict as existential, with a Russia/Mordor on the attack against a declining West/Gondor.
A subtext of the struggle is that the world’s illiberal regimes—fossil-fuel exporting Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and the various Middle Eastern autocracies—are getting richer by the day while destroying Mother Earth, as noble gas and oil importing green Western nations can scarcely afford to drive or heat their homes.
Normally, the mad Left would not object terribly to the ensuing fuel price hikes. Remember, Joe Biden bragged on the campaign trail that he would end fossil fuels during his tenure.
Obama’s soon-to-be Energy Secretary Steven Chu said during the 2008 campaign he wished to see American gas prices match those in Europe (i.e. $9-10 a gallon). And then President Obama himself did not disagree. He meekly added that such increases should be “gradual.” He had also warned that his cap-and-trade initiatives would necessarily “skyrocket” electricity prices—without suggesting that his off-guard brag was even a gaffe of unexpectedly telling the truth.
So green orthodoxy dictates that the highest possible fossil fuel prices are good. Unaffordability will hasten the end of gas and oil, ensuring currently subsidized but uneconomical green energy as the only remaining alternative.
But like most leftist top-down agendas, the details and consequences are usually hidden. After all, green wokeism usually exempts the lifestyles of its elite advocates. The Obamas currently are building a most un-green luxury Hawaiian beach mansion (their third such estate). And Al “Earth in the Balance” Gore got rich selling his failed cable outlet to a carbon-fueled Al Jazeera.
Nonetheless exorbitant gas and heating prices are toxic politically to the middle class. Worse yet for the Left, we are currently in a Biden-created inflationary spiral, in the middle of a savage Ukrainian war, and facing a catastrophic Democratic wipeout in the upcoming November midterms.
The result of green theory meeting cruel reality is sheer madness. As a good green, Joe Biden in one of his first acts sought to cancel the critical EastMed pipeline that is planned to feed over 10 billion cubic meters per year of natural gas into southern Europe. That clean burning fuel would enhance the suppliers, our allies Greece, Cyprus, and Israel.
Yet Biden also dropped all sanctions against the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline, enriching Vladimir Putin with profits from global exports. Biden talked a good game, Corn Pop-style, to Putin—but acted in ways throughout 2021 that would appease Russia until it subsequently invaded Ukraine.
What other than sheer madness is the logic of helping enemies like Putin and hurting our Mediterranean allies?
When Biden entered office, the United States was the largest gas and oil producer in the world. Yet he immediately began jawboning the oil and gas industry about their fated doom on the horizon, pressuring lending agencies not to aid the American frackers, canceling pipelines, ending ANWR, and stopping all new federal gas and oil leases.
So Biden achieved his goal of higher prices and less U.S. production. But now politics wars with green dogmatism. And madness once again ensues. As a result, Biden has variously in the past months begged, but been rebuffed by Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela to help out the Democratic cause by pumping their filthy, smelly, hot gas and oil, all of which we too have in abundance, but are too clean and too noble to tap. Finally, after trying to destroy the U.S. natural gas industry, he is on his knees begging it to export American supplies to fuel-starved green Europe—that has also mostly outlawed fracking.
Here in California, Governor Gavin Newsom has gone mad. He reigns over the most expensive gas and diesel prices in the history of the United States, at over $6 and $7 a gallon respectively in most parts of the state.
Californians suffer under the highest gas taxes in the nation and are shutting down nuclear plants. They seek reductions in clean burning natural gas generators at a time of drought when hydroelectric production is constrained.
So what does Newsom do? To fuel his state, and keep a shrinking middle class sustainable, does he tap California’s huge gas and oil reserves? They are the seventh largest of the 50 states and might bring down prices in a state that consumes more fossil fuels than any state but Texas.
No, that would be green heresy. So instead Newsom has proposed spending $11 billion in subsidies to drivers—at $400 per registered vehicle—so that the state’s drivers can buy more smelly, dirty gasoline and diesel fuel that they otherwise would not at the prohibitive, but secretly desirable, $6-7 a gallon price.
Post-reset Democratic orthodoxy now says Putin and the Russians are evil. That narrative fueled the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa-Bank hoax, and the Hunter Biden Russian disinformation hoax.
But what if sealing a new “Iran Deal” is critical before the midterms to show something—anything—of substance after a string of Biden foreign policy disasters? In other words, which agenda reveals the greatest clout: Biden’s demonization of Putin as a “killer,” “bully,” “war-criminal,” and “butcher” or positioning Putin as the suddenly needed Iranian Deal 2.0 fixer?
That is a tough call between Joe’s foreign policy “accomplishments” and Putin slaughtering Ukrainians. But in the end, nonetheless, we have asked the Russians to adjudicate a new Iran deal that almost certainly will pave the way to an Iranian-fossil-fueled nuke.
Remember that Obama in 2012 invited the Russians into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus. Biden will trump that disaster by ensuring Putin becomes the nuclear protector of the old Obama vision of a Persian-Iran-Shiite-Syrian-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Axis from Tehran to the Mediterranean—likely to be protected by nuclear Russia as an apparent counterweight to U.S. allies in the Gulf and Israel.
Enraging Contradictions
The southern border since late January 2021, for all intents and purposes, has ceased to exist. That is unless we are talking about Cuban and Russian refugees who seem to the Left to be too politically independent to embrace as victim constituents needing left-wing permanent government patronage.
Yet the midterms loom. One of the most unpopular of Joe Biden’s initiatives is his welcoming of nearly 2 million impoverished, unvaccinated, unaudited, and untested illegal immigrants to cross the southern border. By any fair measure, Biden deliberately violated his oath of office by failing to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Political agendas outweighed his own promises to uphold the sanctity of federal law.
Yet he fears polls. Of all the Biden failures, the southern border and illegal immigration seem to infuriate Americans of all persuasions the most.
So what to do? Spring is here. Warmer weather ushers in a huge new influx. Over 140,000 illegal immigrants entered in a cold February alone—at an annualized rate of nearly 1.7 million that will likely soar even higher over the summer.
The collapsing world economy and stagflation will send record numbers northward. They will simply walk illegally into U.S. sovereign territory anywhere the detested Trump wall remains (intentionally) unfinished.
Homeland “Security” Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has shackled the border patrol and destroyed its morale, turning a once effective border deterrence force into agents of their own humiliation as they watch thousands simply walk past them.
Adding insult to injury, Biden—in the fashion of his rush-to-judgment support of the faker Jussie Smollett—was quick to condemn his own federal employees as mounted criminals who “whipped” illegal aliens from their horses.
There was clear evidence that the agents were trying to block entry, did not whip any illegal alien, and were using long reins to maneuver panicking horses. No matter: Biden shot off the cuff with, “I promise you, those people will pay. There will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”
Mayorkas then piled on against “those people” as weaponizing their horses.
So how is that circle squared? On the one hand, Biden must encourage more illegal aliens from the south, but he also must alter the optics of such a summertime flood of illegal immigrants on the eve of the midterms.
Or in starker terms, how does one galvanize a border patrol that the president had promised will pay for their purported sins when he temporarily needs such good team players to pose as orderly accommodators of the new influx for a few months?
Answer? Mayorkas is calling for an emergency “DHS Volunteer Force” that will provide the appearance of “order” to an otherwise riotous mob-like scene at the border.
Stranger still, the Left is demanding an end to a “Title 42” provision—the public health order during the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed for a quicker deportation of illegal aliens right at the border.
Yet, at the same time, federal health officials and many in the administration are warning that COVID-19 is not over. With his accustomed gloom and doom, Dr. Anthony Fauci warns that the new variants of the Omicron wave may threaten to send us into yet another cycle of pandemic social distancing, masking, and quarantining.
Who wins this left-wing agenda war—the Faucites who want permanent COVID-19 emergency powers, or the coalition of the La Raza-istas, the hard Left, and labor-hungry employers who want millions more of illegal aliens—when their shared open border agendas spell catastrophe in seven months at the polls?
These contradictions that lead to insanity enrage Americans. They believe the fiascos of 2021-2022 were almost a case study how to destroy a great nation economically, materially, culturally, socially, politically, and militarily in just 14 months.
Yet madness is predictable when the unchecked left-wing’s demand for limitless and endless power collides with a hated, but unremorseful ideological agenda utterly divorced from reality. Put simply, when ideologues demand power but cannot maintain it politically because they are cruel ideologues that destroy what they touch, expect more of their insanity to follow.
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1914398/big-question-russia-cut-oil-gas-to-europe
-
https://goodwordnews.com/white-house-celebrates-maoist-yuri-kochiyama-who-applauded-bin-laden-communist-massacre-in-peru/
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-signs-bill-making-lynching-a-federal-crime-ending-centurylong-effort-210032180.html
except last time I looked the last lynching was around 35 to 40 yrs ago.
plus I did not know it was legal to lynch anyone till this is passed
and of course photo opps of the signing with the race hustler looking over this shoulder probably cackling
:roll:
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Feminists call on Justice Thomas to rein in the political activities of his wife.
I think that was a Babylon Bee headline by Amy Klobuchar among others fell right into it:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amy-klobuchar-clarence-ginni-thomas-texts_n_6240b467e4b097d36e440cf7/amp
I can't remember which article or amendment puts the coequal legislative branch above the judicial branch.
Our friend ) Andy McCarthy:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-smearing-of-clarence-thomas/
-
gaining the notoriety he deserves.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/31/klaus-schwab-tells-global-leaders-to-collaborate-for-world-governance/
Americas enemy # 2 behind Xi
Putin 3rd
imo
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10665091/amp/AOC-says-Democrats-Biden-need-LEFT-stand-chance-midterms.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i-was-right-about-joe-manchin.html
-----
Helpful advice to AOC types: Better to sit quietly and thought a fool than to open her mouth and remove all doubt.
The even further Left agenda didn't pass because a. It would destroy our country, and b. Doesn't have enough support to pass.
That is not Joe Manchin's fault any more than it is Ted Cruz's fault. Neither supports it and neither's constituents support it.
She is right to panic, all the momentum is now in the opposite direction.
The House has something like a hundred far-Lefters. After the midterm she will still have all those but virtually no centrist Dems who will all lose because of her big mouth and extreme views.
Leftists like Obama, as recent as 2008, knew a gaffe for far-Lefters is to say aloud what you really think and will do. On that score, the young Left has no subtlety.
AOC could not win a single vote in WV, probably couldn't find it on a map, but knows for certain that the moderate Dem Senator should follow her lead off the precipice ... because of her off-the-charts, self-rated, wisdom and charm?
Instead her big mouth and open support of communism is the best thing to happen to conservative momentum in a very long time.
-
Do you see the left acting like they are going to lose?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10665091/amp/AOC-says-Democrats-Biden-need-LEFT-stand-chance-midterms.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i-was-right-about-joe-manchin.html
-----
Helpful advice to AOC types: Better to sit quietly and thought a fool than to open her mouth and remove all doubt.
The even further Left agenda didn't pass because a. It would destroy our country, and b. Doesn't have enough support to pass.
That is not Joe Manchin's fault any more than it is Ted Cruz's fault. Neither supports it and neither's constituents support it.
She is right to panic, all the momentum is now in the opposite direction.
The House has something like a hundred far-Lefters. After the midterm she will still have all those but virtually no centrist Dems who will all lose because of her big mouth and extreme views.
Leftists like Obama, as recent as 2008, knew a gaffe for far-Lefters is to say aloud what you really think and will do. On that score, the young Left has no subtlety.
AOC could not win a single vote in WV, probably couldn't find it on a map, but knows for certain that the moderate Dem Senator should follow her lead off the precipice ... because of her off-the-charts, self-rated, wisdom and charm?
Instead her big mouth and open support of communism is the best thing to happen to conservative momentum in a very long time.
-
"Do you see the left acting like they are going to lose?"
no . no con artist dolt this time getting up with a straight face telling us "the era of big gov is over!"
not yet anyway
-
https://instapundit.com/516077/
The left is smart! Just ask them!
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/jan-6-revelations-blow-roof-140144294.html
"BLOW ROOF OFF HOUSE"
tells us the congessional lister & lawyer lister
Raskin
to blasted on all the MSM airways by the journolisters , ad nauseam
till they see no one cares ...........
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Larry Elder:
"Of all the names the left have called me, from "the black face of white supremacy" to "Uncle Tom" , the one they never call me is ... 'wrong'.
See Larry on Epoch Times TV.
-
“My body, my choice”. Not after forcing the ClotShot at government gunpoint.
“Women’s healthcare” Woman? Are you a biologist?
-
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=398965
-
https://twitter.com/AllanRuhl/status/1521366024439795714
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Aren't the people who want to blow up our constitutional system INSURRECTIONISTS?
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/04/sen-ed-markey-is-a-dangerous-insurrectionist-who-must-be-canceled-for-his-attack-on-the-supreme-court/
Left want a new Supreme Court to be a rubber stamp of the legislative branch.
Oddly, Roe denied, not upheld, the rights of citizens to decide the issue democratically.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse?s=r
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/105/792/753/original/d0c90b467fc912a2.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/105/792/753/original/d0c90b467fc912a2.png)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/278/181/original/929d304a3eb1e2a4.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/278/181/original/929d304a3eb1e2a4.png)
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I'm so old, I remember when the left pretended to be anti-war.
They aren't anti-war, just on the other side.
Greg Price:
When Biden signs the $40 billion Ukraine money laundering bill into law, America will have spent more money in 6 months on a proxy war in Ukraine than we did in the first two years of the war in Afghanistan that involved actual U.S. troops on the ground.
Greg Price Retweeted Michael Tracey:
Bernie Sanders just voted YES on funding the US proxy war in Ukraine to the tune of $40 billion. So now it's officially on the record that every national politician associated with the activist "Left" is completely on board with escalating the war. That's what the "Left" is now.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/107/479/779/original/a344f71b79c9750d.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/107/479/779/original/a344f71b79c9750d.png)
"Fences don't work!"
-
https://dnyuz.com/2022/06/11/should-biden-run-in-2024-democratic-whispers-of-no-start-to-rise/
not because DNC policies are terrible
but because he did not get "bid ticket" Dem agenda passed
more free shit
tax the rich
more spending
more woke nonsense
etc etc
:roll:fd
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he has to atone for becoming a right wing talking point when he told us (what we all knew anyway)
that inflation was going to happen and Fed etc not doing enough
so now , like a good Jewish millionaire Democrat he blames it on Republicans:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/12/larry-summers-blames-banana-republicans-january-6-for-inflation/
The total insanity of my fellow Jews who are Democrat still amazed me though does not shock
me
We Republicans are worse than Nazis
yes Larry you are now invited the next Purim meal
:wink:
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"1/6 is why we have hyperinflation" is the new talking point.
he has to atone for becoming a right wing talking point when he told us (what we all knew anyway)
that inflation was going to happen and Fed etc not doing enough
so now , like a good Jewish millionaire Democrat he blames it on Republicans:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/12/larry-summers-blames-banana-republicans-january-6-for-inflation/
The total insanity of my fellow Jews who are Democrat still amazed me though does not shock
me
We Republicans are worse than Nazis
yes Larry you are now invited the next Purim meal
:wink:
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" "1/6 is why we have hyperinflation" is the new talking point."
Yes. Their talking points used to have punch, now they are just noise in the room.
Jan 6 is an attempt to take down Trump. Inflation is the policy of Biden and the Dems: More money. Fewer goods.
-
https://www.istockphoto.com/video/banging-head-against-wall-gm472667369-10975493
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/king-hypocrite-obama-install-massive-2500-gallons-commercial-propane-tank-seaside-home-marthas-vineyard/
-
https://lawliberty.org/the-oikophobic-will-to-power/?fbclid=IwAR23vpMNGeOvEhUV6AL5cE8LEHBRZHxQH2GIQ9rI-ml0yeGiFCxIgNol7Tg
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Janet Yellen on ABC This Week today:
"We don't think policies are to blame for the high energy prices."
Begs the question, who is "we".
Quick follow-up, if something, anything economically had gone right instead, would Biden policies be to credit for it?
-
Of course. Lying to our faces no longer requires plausibility.
Pissing on our leg while explaining that it's raining in just the default setting for gov officials as MSM-DNC scribes nod furiously in agreement.
Janet Yellen on ABC This Week today:
"We don't think policies are to blame for the high energy prices."
Begs the question, who is "we".
Quick follow-up, if something, anything economically had gone right instead, would Biden policies be to credit for it?
-
https://populistpress.com/jamal-khashoggis-ties-to-extremists-under-scrutiny-after-d-c-renames-street-after-him/
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/674/411/original/19519593777bf5ae.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/674/411/original/19519593777bf5ae.png)
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Ezra Levant :
Justin Trudeau has invited American women who want an abortion to come to Canada.
Bodily autonomy, he says.
But they are not allowed to come unless they get vaccinated first.
-
Did I mention he is "Nobel Peace Prize winning Economist", Professor at Princeton, Paul Krugman?
Nothing makes the point for conservatism or supply side economics as persuasively as watching the Left get EVERYTHING wrong.
Here's one:
New York Times, November 19, 2020
"Making the Most of the Coming Economic Boom"
"The economic outlook is probably brighter than you think."
by Paul Krugman, Opinion Columnist."
-------------------------------------------------
The economic disaster has caused Biden's approval to drop below poison ivy - but Paul Krugman still leads the economic thinking that the entire MSM follows.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/994/808/original/4c1120955fd19315.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/994/808/original/4c1120955fd19315.jpeg)
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robert reich is one of the most pre eminent communists in the USA
he is a joke
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/110/084/141/original/27f2a51c32ece8ec.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/110/084/141/original/27f2a51c32ece8ec.jpg)
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/994/808/original/4c1120955fd19315.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/994/808/original/4c1120955fd19315.jpeg)
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https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2022/07/gavin-newsom-montana/
Do as I say...
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399928.php
Why doesn't the DNC-MSM cover this?
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/retired-three-star-general-suspended-122943671.html
I don't recall outrage when retired generals spoke out at Trump et al
even the active duty ones were heroes for their outspokeness
remember Milley apologizing for being seen with Trump in front of the church?
-
hunter had some kind adjectives for his step mother
when he was withdrawing from opioids:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/09/hunter-biden-jill-biden-is-selfish-silly-entitled-cnt/
does he speak the truth?
-
Hunter may be the most honest member of the Biden Crime Family.
hunter had some kind adjectives for his step mother
when he was withdrawing from opioids:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/09/hunter-biden-jill-biden-is-selfish-silly-entitled-cnt/
does he speak the truth?
-
House of Representatives: Democrat-run
US Senate: Democrat-run
White House: Democrat
All cabinet agencies therefore: Democrat-run
Policies of the country: Democrat
Economy: somewhere between disarray and crisis
Americans who think country is on the right track: 13% per NYT today
-
13% per NYT today
what I really want to know how much of these people are really repudiating crat policies
or simply bitching they have not gotten more leftist agenda done
free this, free that
reparations
rob the rich
etc
-
quote author=ccp
13% per NYT today
what I really want to know how much of these people are really repudiating crat policies
--------------
Right. It is second level thinking to connect dismal results with the policies that go with Democrat rhetoric. To connect "we're only raising taxes on the rich" with "my real wages are falling".
Nobody noticed when solar and wind subsidies and mandates caused electricity prices to double, but $100 to fill your tank or you can't go to work or drive your kids, while you hear them declare war on the producers?
Now they've hit a nerve.
We saw empty shelves in pictures in the Soviet Union and Venezuela. Never connected it to 'liberal' rhetoric and policies at home.
"It can't happen here."
Then it happens.
Saying "we warned you" doesn't help. Just celebrate each person seeing just a little light.
-
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-jan-6/
-
Strange how the really smart policies of the left always fail because of bad leadership.
I wonder why the list of dem leaders omits the first minority female Vice President in US History. Why so racist and misogynist, Nation Magazine?
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-jan-6/
-
Guy Benson sums it up.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2022/07/27/will-democrats-desperate-spin-backfire-by-actively-insulting-voters-n2610878
-
Guy Benson sums it up.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2022/07/27/will-democrats-desperate-spin-backfire-by-actively-insulting-voters-n2610878
The dems know their base.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhDONWaF_8M
-
this is just so astonishing
yet ask them the buzz dem stuff -
do you want free abortions
free college
should we tax the rich
are you against discrimination of non white hetero people
should we allow all illegals here who are working or have family members born here stay
should everyone be allowed to vote
and most would give immediate yes to all the above without really even knowing what they are talking about.
-
https://notthebee.com/article/the-cleveland-indians-bowed-to-the-woke-mob-and-renamed-themselves-the-guardians-and-now-nobody-wants-to-go-to-their-games-anymore-
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/world_economic_forum_attacks_idea_of_private_property_natural_rights.html
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/world_economic_forum_attacks_idea_of_private_property_natural_rights.html
This is why they are planning to kill most of us off.
-
https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/jeremy_redfern_scott_weiner_monkeypox_8-4-22.jpg
(https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/jeremy_redfern_scott_weiner_monkeypox_8-4-22.jpg)
Some diseases are more equal than others.
-
Minneapolis Mayor versus Minneapolis Congresswoman:
Update: Adding this video, Mayor Frey calls out Omar - after she won her primary:
https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-primary-election-results-congressional-district-5
Scroll down to 3rd news video on the page.
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/08/Omars-response.png?w=992&ssl=1)
If the inept Mpls mayor is better or worse for the city than Rep Ilhan (not-)Omar, I hadn't noticed.
Minneapolis is actually run by a 13 person elected politburo Katie Pavlich calls the City Clowncil. The current mix is 13-0 Leftists, including Keith Ellison's son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Ellison
representative of my North Mpls district.
-
It's the fault of COVID and Trump!!!
Minneapolis Mayor versus Minneapolis Congresswoman:
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/08/Omars-response.png?w=992&ssl=1)
If the inept Mpls mayor is better or worse for the city than Rep Ilhan (not-)Omar, I hadn't noticed.
Minneapolis is actually run by a 13 person elected politburo Katie Pavlich calls the City Clowncil. The current mix is 13-0 Leftists, including Keith Ellison's son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Ellison
representative of my North Mpls district.
-
The evil of justifies all means to stop him.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/21/the-lefts-mask-slips-on-brazen-trump-bias/
-
The evil of justifies all means to stop him.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/21/the-lefts-mask-slips-on-brazen-trump-bias/
As always.
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/IMG_1424.JPG
(https://ace.mu.nu/archives/IMG_1424.JPG)
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watched the end of it last night on cable
he had obnoxious Meathead and Koblacher on as guests
he did stick it to them at times
when he kept asking them to at least appreciate the pro life people concerns
about abortion being MURDER! and that is how they use
then the two libs of course start bring up straw man answers to evade the truth . TRUE obnoxious never wrong closed minded Democrat Libs.
The Maher defines "straw man " and brings out a straw man to show them the stupidity of their answers
Of course the both ended the show pushing the Dem partisan line .
I do give some credit to Maher that at least he is a lib who will LiSTEN to the other side and even agree sometimes - such as he does by calling LBGT and he/he/ other a bunch of craziness -
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/08/26/maher-media-engaged-in-conspiracy-against-trump-on-hunter-biden-story/
-
Yes. That's all you can ask from a liberal or anyone else, to consider both sides of each issue honestly.
I am so sick of hearing regurgitated dishonest liberal straw man talking points repeated ad nauseum. Once both sides of it are honestly considered, I can accept and respect someone having a different viewpoint.
-
here is another from an obvious lib ->
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2022/8/bpvpwg0d8fqx5ywj0oma7dqpevn8np
"‘My Son Hunter’: Hunter Biden Movie is as Deranged as it Sounds"
Maybe not a good movie
but it is NOT THE MOVIE THAT IS AS DERANGED AS IT SOUNDS , IT IS HUNTER AND FATER AND BIDEN FAMILY THAT ARE DERANGED AS THEY SOUND.
Again change the subject from the subject of the movie to the direction production of the movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTFnj-9EY4M
-
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/28/the-strangest-thing-about-semi-fascist-trump/
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/942/176/original/4069a905efbb5f83.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/942/176/original/4069a905efbb5f83.jpg)
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right.
50 people to MV = "political stunt" , "inhumane", "abusing human beings for political gain"
and front and center news from the MSM!
5,000,000 over the Southern border = perfectly legal because they are told to say "I am seeking asylum". This "humane" : "we are a nation of immigrants" ; "great for the economy"
"not politically motivated "; "border is secure"; " we have processes in place " and virtually ignored by MSM!
:roll: :x :wink: :x
-
https://twitter.com/DoctorTurtleboy/status/1570571488956395521
-
I'm getting great mileage from that one spreading it all over every thread on the subject on FB that I see.
-
https://notthebee.com/article/marthas-vineyard-has-already-begun-the-deportation-process-according-to-cbs-reporter-but-don
-
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/massachusetts-governor-activates-national-guard-as-marthas-vineyard-migrants-removed-from-island/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=29074937
-
some of the rich and famous and glorious kings and queens of MV:
https://www.businessinsider.com/marthas-vineyard-obama-ceos-millionaires-celebs-homes-vacations-2019-12
Celebrities like Bill Murray, Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon, Mike Wallace, and even Princess Diana have all regularly visited. A number of them, such as Michael J Fox, have called the Vineyard their home. The low-key vibe is just one of the reasons the rich and famous make Martha’s Vineyard part of their summer circuit.
-
Assuming 'migrants' keep coming, DeSantis and Abbott can just keep doing this, drip, drip, drip, until the election and longer. Transporting people across state lines, with their full consent and cooperation, is legal!
Might as well move the worst ones to the front of the line.
Trump says, they're emptying their prisons on us. If so, find them and send them.
They can stay in Obama's guest rooms and even sray in the MBR when they're not home. What's the matter? Don't ya trust 'em?
Of course not, they're all unscreened.
Why does the Left invite people onto our streets that they wouldn't have in their homes?
The issue is perfectly framed and back in the news.
-
Doug wrote:
"Might as well move the worst ones to the front of the line."
agreed
would any cartel members please line up to go to the richest communities in NE and Hollywood?
calling all professional thieves and crooks......
we can get you to where the mullah moolah is .......
:evil:
-
CD wrote:
"I'm getting great mileage from that one spreading it all over every thread on the subject on FB that I see."
is now the hottest "influencer"
-
https://twitter.com/DoctorTurtleboy/status/1570571488956395521
Amazing how quickly rich leftists can get illegals removed from their community.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400975.php#400975
-
"Amazing how quickly rich leftists can get illegals removed from their community."
sound pretty damn racist if you ask me. :wink:
-
https://twitter.com/DoctorTurtleboy/status/1570571488956395521
Amazing how quickly rich leftists can get illegals removed from their community.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400975.php#400975
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/989/671/original/4b579626b4c3f201.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/989/671/original/4b579626b4c3f201.jpeg)
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https://twitter.com/DoctorTurtleboy/status/1570571488956395521
Amazing how quickly rich leftists can get illegals removed from their community.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400975.php#400975
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/989/671/original/4b579626b4c3f201.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/989/671/original/4b579626b4c3f201.jpeg)
https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/no-human-illegal-science-real-marthas-vineyard-no-trespassing.jpg?w=509&ssl=1
(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/no-human-illegal-science-real-marthas-vineyard-no-trespassing.jpg?w=509&ssl=1)
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https://www.revolver.news/2022/09/new-marthas-vineyard-in-this-house-we-believe-sign-just-dropped/
-
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0100960
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https://nypost.com/2022/09/16/marthas-vineyard-migrants-sent-to-cape-cod-mass-calls-national-guard/
he should hold stat press conference
to criticize this and proclaim:
THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE !!!!!!! :wink:
-
He won't, because this is exactly who they are.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/16/marthas-vineyard-migrants-sent-to-cape-cod-mass-calls-national-guard/
he should hold stat press conference
to criticize this and proclaim:
THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE !!!!!!! :wink:
-
Jeh Johnson:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/18/jeh-johnson-abbott-desantis-bussing-migrants-political-stunt-treating-people-like-livestock/
-
Never thought I would click on his opinion much less post it. Wow has he grown and has guts to criticize what I assume still is his own side.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/09/18/bill_maher_liberals_want_to_abuse_history_to_control_the_present.html
------
Something I'm proud of here, we rip our own when they're wrong. Seldom do we see it on the Left. When it happens it's a breath of fresh air.
-
Yes
very rare on the LEFT
it certainly drives his ratings up
I actually look forward to watching him now
since he does at least give credence and legitimacy to our side
his lib guests NEVER DO
they nervously laugh grimace or show facial signs of silent outrage....
was this the show the lib historian Jon Meacham was on?
he has convinced Biden how he will go down in history with the pantheon of great presidents
if he rams the lib ideology down our throats
make us suffer now but 30 yrs from now you Joe will be far more consequential then Barack Obama - you helped us go green - you fought back the magas - and saved Democracy
And Joe the lifelong dupe falls for it ........
Meacham is a sinister little prick imo
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401000.php
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marthas-vineyard-newspaper-lists-50-job-ads-despite-claims-no-work-island
-
Know your opponent. I spotted this new slogan on a Minneapolis liberal bumper sticker:
"Build the Swamp!"
----------
One former President said, how can they be against making America great again? Now we find, in an honest moment, they are pro-swamp!
-
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/09/21/letter-surfaces-of-obama-foundation-admitting-in-2018-they-keep-classified-documents-in-unsecured-storage-at-furniture-warehouse/
-
The difference is the legal standard of Orange Man Bad!
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/09/21/letter-surfaces-of-obama-foundation-admitting-in-2018-they-keep-classified-documents-in-unsecured-storage-at-furniture-warehouse/
-
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/22/mystal-white-maga-bigoted-southerners-like-herschel-walker-because-hes-stupidallah-show/
:roll:
-
Wish I remember what it said or where I read it, but I saw an article listing an evergrowing list of serious fibs by HW about himself.
-
Why Haven't Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib Even Mentioned Iran's Hijab Protests?
by Phyllis Chesler
IPT News
September 26, 2022
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9263/why-havent-linda-sarsour-ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib
-
Why Haven't Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib Even Mentioned Iran's Hijab Protests?
by Phyllis Chesler
IPT News
September 26, 2022
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9263/why-havent-linda-sarsour-ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib
The same reason Obama hasn’t. They are on the side of the mullahs.
-
https://summit.news/2022/09/28/climate-activists-rank-hypocrisy-exposed-in-hilarious-radio-interview/
-
https://twitter.com/eclipsethis2003/status/1574480235822727169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1574480235822727169%7Ctwgr%5E8213be398e357c961075dc05b2e355e42811461a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F
-
When we look for persuadable voters, the people who habitually vote Dem who might change sides, she is not likely one of them, but I like that she's mad about gas prices.
The hardest of the hard left need to be defeated, not converted.
-
Like Bill O'Reilly said
many who vote Democrat automatically are just plain *dumb*
My only surprise is she didn't mention TRUMP!!!! in her rant
I would have hated to be the gas pump attendant at Costco. :-o
-
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/30/rick-wilson-donald-trump-is-the-worst-narcissist-on-planet-earth-in-the-history-of-mankind/
I always get these two bald scowling "I LIVE TO HATE TRUMP"
assholes mixed up :
1)
https://www.google.com/search?q=rick+wilson&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_pf6zl7_6AhWXEFkFHXjNAjEQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2
2)
https://www.google.com/search?q=John+Heilemann&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwidxcm6l7_6AhVSF1kFHf_tB2YQ_AUoAnoECAMQBA&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2
Yes their cousins , they walk alike , talk alike , look alike
and are the same in every way , yes their cousins la-di-da
they even suffer from the same mental disease .
:wink:
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/974/996/original/fd8574236a613091.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/974/996/original/fd8574236a613091.jpg)
-
Ginni Thomas is a "Filthy Liar" for saying she doesn't discuss hr political activism with her husband,
but no problem with Joe doesn't talk to Hunter about their business on 17 hour flights, and lunches, dinners photos opps with the customers.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/30/abcs-hostin-ginni-thomas-is-a-little-bit-of-a-filthy-liar/
One generation before us, a married woman was often formally called Mrs. [husbands first and last name]. Does anyone remember that? How [not] far we have come.
-
Ginni Thomas is a "Filthy Liar" for saying she doesn't discuss hr political activism with her husband,
but no problem with Joe doesn't talk to Hunter about their business on 17 hour flights, and lunches, dinners photos opps with the customers.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/30/abcs-hostin-ginni-thomas-is-a-little-bit-of-a-filthy-liar/
One generation before us, a married woman was often formally called Mrs. [husbands first and last name]. Does anyone remember that? How [not] far we have come.
Anyone remember when American cities weren't dangerous shitholes?
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/226/889/original/5dfb0fc44e963259.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/117/226/889/original/5dfb0fc44e963259.jpeg)
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Z1x8Ou8VU&t=4s
-
Ron Klain: Seniors are getting a big raise.
source: twitter
-
Ron Klain: Seniors are getting a big raise.
source: twitter
No Dollar Store dogfood under Biden!
They can buy the name brands!
-
"So I'm at Tesco buying a bag of Purina dog food for my dog. While in the check-out line, a woman behind me asked if I had a dog. Why else would I be buying dog food, RIGHT??? So on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again, and that I probably shouldn't because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in intensive care with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms. I told her that it was essentially a Perfect Diet and all you do is load your pockets with Purina Nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.) Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stepped off a curb to sniff a poodle's butt and a car hit me. I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard."
-
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
·
Follow
One of the most amazing things I've seen is the complete disappearance of this war from US left-liberal discourse.
Other than a Chomsky video here and a rogue Jacobin writer there, this war basically doesn't exist in mainstream left US discourse. They have *nothing* to say.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/24/over-50-shot-during-weekend-in-mayor-lori-lightfoots-chicago/
where is DOJ labelling gangs terrorists. which is what they are?
this is NUTS!!!
even more dangerous then proud boys ( :wink:)
even more dangerous then parents at school board meetings ( :wink:)
or the single person that may have a single pistol at Capital on 1/6 ( :wink:)
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I love botched analogies and mixed metaphors, and real ones. This is just too good.
----------------------
White suburban women voting for GOP is 'like roaches voting for Raid,' The View host says
Co-host of ABC's "The View," Sunny Hostin, said during Thursday's episode that a recent Wall Street Journal poll indicating suburban white women had shifted their support significantly to Republicans was "almost like roaches voting for Raid."
https://cbs12.com/news/nation-world/sunny-hostin-white-suburban-women-voting-for-gop-is-like-roaches-voting-for-raid
---------------------
GOP winning strategy, let liberals speak. And let them govern.
-
Clyburn
who singlehandedly had more influence then anyone else to stick us with the very worst President in US history ,
uses , get this , the NAZI card:
https://nypost.com/2022/11/04/no-3-dem-sen-clyburn-plays-nazi-card-ahead-of-midterms/
worse probably then John Tyler , Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan , Jimmy Carter , or even Barack Obama
-
Keep your doctor, keep your plan?
Why do Democrats keep referring to The Big Lie. Do they have not shame?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamas-keep-your-plan-promise-labeled-lie-of-the-year/
-
will be the fall guy for the blowout:
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2022/11/06/cnn-fact-checks-joe-biden-on-several-false-misleading-claims-hes-made-while-campaigning/
as thought the rest of the DNC had nothing to do with it.
Just bad messaging I guess.
what is unusual is he still has 2 yrs to go.
will he triangulate - does not seem so with this crew .
hence Hills sees daylight to rush into.....
not sure she will also not get brutally tackled.
-
Colleges (and leftists) can make the most
most simplex things complex, and sometimes turn them upside down.
Vox, a liberal site, lists the questions the midterms will answer. This one is telling.
"4) How potent is abortion as a political motivator?
Though the economy remains the predominant issue, abortion rights still rank highly on the minds of voters — especially among Democrats, liberals, women, and college-educated voters."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/11/7/23441115/midterm-election-questions-answers-results
------------
Isn't that funny, "college educated voters" favor abortion more than those 'less educated'. The longer you remain in indoctrination, um, college, the harder it is for you to see the most simple truth of abortion. Every 'successful abortion' is the intentional taking of the most innocent of human life.
The issue of abortion to a liberal is the taking of the "right' to take that life.
The earlier in life you leave our educational system, the more clearly you see that very few other facts or circumstances (cf. rape, incest, life of the mother) justify the taking of an unborn life.
Begs the question, especially in politics, are the college educated really more educated?
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/teens-eulogy-racist-misogynistic-xenophobic-230620770.html
-
https://nypost.com/2022/11/21/grant-wahl-barred-from-world-cup-stadium-over-lgbtq-shirt/
and not make political statements about their sexual preferences
-
https://nypost.com/2022/11/21/grant-wahl-barred-from-world-cup-stadium-over-lgbtq-shirt/
and not make political statements about their sexual preferences
Yes. Can't they just play soccer. Or don't schedule your event in their country. Or don't go. Or change your shirt.
When did gay go from a private matter to a political cause?
Why don't we refuse to sign an Iran deal until they accept homosexuality? Instead we send them planeloads of money and tell them everyone is welcome.
In our country, the gays and the gay denying Muslims are in the same political party. How do you advance either cause that way? And they all hate Republicans who want liberty for both.
No wonder most of our threads start with 'cognitive dissonance'.
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-claims-minorities-thrived-during-his-presidency-advocates-disagree-201423533.html
yeah right !
https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/asian-man-who-was-attacked-on-nyc-subway-platform-was-vigilante-justice-witness/
the lying LEFT
:x
-
https://babylonbee.com/news/kamala-harris-urges-nation-not-to-forget-january-6th-on-this-pearl-harbor-remembrance-day
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I think that was from a speech she gave 1//6/22
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/us-elections-government/ny-vp-harris-jan-6-insurrection-anniversary-remarks-20220106-ntekptxdljanxi4ms4z3oukjke-story.html
but no
1/6/21 was not Pear Harbor or 9/11
but that does not stop Dems from cheap insulting stupid proclamations
they know will echo through the valley of the msm echo chamber
-
https://conservativebrief.com/trump-tax-69470/
Dem House releasing Citizen Trump tax returns to the public.
-
Lavrentiy Beria
of course his famous:
"Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime"
and others are fitting:
"The enemies of the Soviet state calculate that the heavy loss we have borne will lead to disorder and confusion in our ranks. But their expectations are in vain: bitter disillusionment awaits them"
""Let us call to strict account all who try to degrade the organisational and ideological principles of Leninism" [progressivism]
"Scream or not, it doesn't matter"
"Let us once and for all root out the seeds of individual ambition. Let us smash any manifestation of anti-party groupism, put an end to efforts to destroy party discipline, in whatever form these efforts manifest themselves"
-
He wants to ban this car, and this smile.
Top down no doubt already violates new safety standards. MPG is already illegal. Plus it looks like he is emitting CO2 for fun, not necessary transportation.
https://www.fuelly.com/car/chevrolet/corvette/1967
Look how proud he is of his 8 cylinders, more engine and acceleration than he would ever need - or can legally use. Scroll right.
(https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/01/1862/1046/biden-corvette.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/01/1862/1046/biden-corvette.jpg?ve=1&tl=1
-
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/21/joe-biden-gets-rare-permission-to-drive-his-67-corvette-proceeds-to-burns-rubber.html
gas mileage of 1967 average is 13.8 mpg:
https://www.fuelly.com/car/chevrolet/corvette/1967#:~:text=Based%20on%20data%20from%201,1.86%20MPG%20margin%20of%20error.
the later corvettes get 19/27 city/highway
-
David Gergen (I never understood why in the world he gets to bloviate on CNN since I have yet , in decades, ever heard him say anything that was not common sense that anyone could conclude without his worthless opinions )
I love how he totes the LEFT's argument that Biden's problem is not a "legal" problem, but only a "political" problem.
And how the Biden's team for playing "by the book" and doing an admirable job of doing the right thing (yrs after the fact and only due to leaks or fear of Republicans finding this out).
Already the LEFT is "taking criminal action " "off the table "
in advance => fix is already taking shape.
I can hear it now. Even though technically a crime , no responsible prosecutor will bring criminal charges for this .
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/former-clinton-adviser-david-gergen-says-biden-risks-being-creamed-by-docs-case-very-very-big-deal/
-
https://newschannel20.com/news/local/chicago-mayor-tells-residents-to-stop-using-cash-if-they-dont-want-to-keep-getting-mugged-lori-lightfoot-digital-payment
-
admits it was very wrong inaccurate and outright political lying:
[after it takes the check from Soros]
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/02/06/harvard-quietly-shutters-misinformation-program-that-cast-doubt-on-hunter-biden-laptop-story/
just kidding
no apology
no admission of guilt
no retraction
just quietly disappears the d
"department"
probably folded it into some other area without making any fanfare
typical of leftist media machines
probably now under wing of lib Larry
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403171.php
-
yet Republicans put fentanyl # 1 and obesity #2
crats, of course # 1 is guns ! and obesity #2 .
amazing how politics gets in the way of the health situations
what the hell does guns have to do with health anyway?
GM :wink: puts covid vaccines as # 1 health threats - I am still waiting for Americas to start dropping like flies
from this .
-
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00159-6/fulltext
however I don't really know how anyone can make any kind of accurate estimate
since obesity is so mixed in with everything else
this data could be totally flawed admittedly
but if one includes other health concerns such as sleep apne
heartburn joint wear and tear
back pain
cancers
who really knows other then it has to be huge (no pun intended)
I do recall having a 90 yo lady in the hospital circa 1987 who weighed 350, but that has got to be so rare
-
yet Republicans put fentanyl # 1 and obesity #2
crats, of course # 1 is guns ! and obesity #2 .
amazing how politics gets in the way of the health situations
what the hell does guns have to do with health anyway?
GM :wink: puts covid vaccines as # 1 health threats - I am still waiting for Americas to start dropping like flies
from this .
#diedsuddenly
Pay no attention to all the young, healthy people who die suddenly.
BTW, a new and disturbing trend I am seeing is the mainstreaming of non-disabled people using mobility scooters.
Sad!
-
"Pay no attention to all the young, healthy people who die suddenly."
well no , I don't think I said this
certainly we must try to figure out the true extant of vaccine injury
if possible, though very difficult
Indeed, sorting it out from vaccine or actual corona infection or other causes very difficult and in some cases likely impossible.
What do you feel about Pfizer being the one to look at this ?
This is how a I feel about that:
:x :roll:
I would also be for Pfizer Moderna AZ J&J setting up a fund for those who can be proven injured
The problem with that is it then leads to massive fraud with everyone who has medical illness claiming it is vaccine related
and then unscrupulous doctors and lawyers diving head first into the bonanza
for example fen-Phen
when paid off cardiologists were claiming every abnormal echo and reading them all as abnormal so those who took the meds could claim. injury
and the look the other way lawyers claiming they were just going by the doctor's "expertise"
like doctors who make up bills
like lawyers who pad their bills
Another example is 911. So every human being that has any illness may or may not be linked to exposure to the twin towers can be claimed due to that.
When not really able to "prove " a negative then this is what we see.
-
"I would also be for Pfizer Moderna AZ J&J setting up a fund for those who can be proven injured"
I have not followed the issue with precision, but my understanding is that a big part of all of this is that the government (IIRC beginning with President Trump (and Congress?) gave Big Pharma legal immunity in order to encourage super rapid development of the vaxxes. My understanding is that the moves by the bureaucracies (CDC, NIH? etc) to expand requiring the vaxxes to children all while Pharma is immune from legal responsibility angered us here and properly so.
Working from memory from first year Torts (so we are going back over 40 years!) is that the cost certain categories of risk should be spread out over the entire class instead of being born just by the few unlucky ones.
-
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/moderna-stock-moderna-earnings-q4-2022/
-
"Working from memory from first year Torts (so we are going back over 40 years!) is that the cost certain categories of risk should be spread out over the entire class instead of being born just by the few unlucky ones."
I am not sure what you mean here . I meant all the vaccine makers
do we add Trump and the medical (such as Fauci) and other bureaucrats to the list of drug companies to be held responsible
-
Sorry, a poll that says Oz really won, Walker really won, Lake really won?
Assuming yes on cheat, how much? The problem is 99% failure to persuade.
-
Sorry, a poll that says Oz really won, Walker really won, Lake really won?
Assuming yes on cheat, how much? The problem is 99% failure to persuade.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/midterms-2022-polls-today-kari-lake-big-lead.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/midterm-elections-2022/voting-machine-malfunctions-maricopa-county-b2220746.html?amp
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/kari-lake-slams-katie-hobbs-recusal-refusal-close-arizona-governor-race
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/richard-baris-maricopa-county-kept-gop-heat-map-expected-voters-hanging-wall-voting-centers-heavy-gop-areas-just-happened-election-day/
Pure coincidence!
-
Sorry, an (exit) poll that says Oz really won, Walker really won, Lake really won?
Unresponsive because ...
-
Sorry, an (exit) poll that says Oz really won, Walker really won, Lake really won?
Unresponsive because ...
What is the proper way to poll people who aren’t allowed to vote because the machines don’t work?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/watch-least-517-voters-left-long-lines-maricopa-county-polls-closed-election-day-nearly-double-margin-victory-abe-hamadehs-race-estimated-8327-not-cast-ballots-due/
-
well we can move to a cabin somewhere in the woods
and hope a. few military personnel,
who are patriots can hijack an Abrams and one an F22 with some ammo for both
and make a run to Gettysburg. :-o
OR
we fight election fraud
the best we can
and vote harder and play the vote harvesting game
-
Sorry, an (exit) poll that says Oz really won, Walker really won, Lake really won?
Unresponsive because ...
Suburban voters in 6 states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, you think they all voted for red wave but got cheated out of it?
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3870203-these-6-states-will-determine-the-2024-presidential-election/
I get that election rules and shenanigans were against us. But I'm not seeing where swing voters broke our way. They didn't.
If it's all cheat, nothing about the voters not buying our product, why did Kemp win and Walker lose? Same machines. Why did Ron Johnson win and Oz lose? One connected with voters and one didn't. That's what the data shows.
There is no evidence swing voters broke right in the key elections we lost.
-
"Working from memory from first year Torts (so we are going back over 40 years!) is that the cost certain categories of risk should be spread out over the entire class instead of being born just by the few unlucky ones."
"I am not sure what you mean here . I meant all the vaccine makers"
===================
Assume one million people use a product of redeeming social value. Those harmed by the product through no fault of their own or fault of the maker of the product are very few in number and so we allow the product.
Question presented: Who bears the burden for their harm? The few, or do we spread it out over the one million who benefitted?
-
well we can move to a cabin somewhere in the woods
and hope a. few military personnel,
who are patriots can hijack an Abrams and one an F22 with some ammo for both
and make a run to Gettysburg. :-o
OR
we fight election fraud
the best we can
and vote harder and play the vote harvesting game
How many tanks did the Afghans have? Fighter planes?
That's not how 5th gen warfare, or old school guerilla warfare works.
A rural area where actual food is produced and a good working relationship with the locals is essential to surviving what is coming. Medical skills will be especially appreciated. Brush up on medicine in austere environments.
-
"Medical skills will be especially appreciated. Brush up on medicine in austere environments."
18 Delta Frankie McRae has been hammering this point with us.
-
"Medical skills will be especially appreciated. Brush up on medicine in austere environments."
18 Delta Frankie McRae has been hammering this point with us.
He knows better than most what is coming.
-
I asked him the other day for his assessment of Ukraine.
"We lose."
He is of the mind the best strategy right now is to get ready to hunker down and that for many people it is already too late to get ready.
-
I asked him the other day for his assessment of Ukraine.
"We lose."
He is of the mind the best strategy right now is to get ready to hunker down and that for many people it is already too late to get ready.
He is correct.
-
or putin croaks
and maybe just maybe a peace deal can be reached
and zelensky either must agree to it or simply loose the bank account with us.
hope is eternal
-
Or the Russian soldiers being tossed into the meat grinder say "NO!"
-
or putin croaks
and maybe just maybe a peace deal can be reached
and zelensky either must agree to it or simply loose the bank account with us.
hope is eternal
Hope is not a plan. The guy that takes over for Putin will make Putin look tame in comparison.
They tried a peace plan last year, we and the UK scuttled it. 100,000 dead Ukes later...
-
Or the Russian soldiers being tossed into the meat grinder say "NO!"
Not happening.
-
"The guy that takes over for Putin will make Putin look tame in comparison."
This possibility seems to go uncontemplated here.
-
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/a8fbfc656d5e18ec.png)
-
here is a clue:
Jimmy Carter is ranked #24 :roll:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/presidents-ranked-worst-best/28/
[just behind Ronald Reagan :roll: :roll:]
[Brock of course is up there too : anyone who disagrees is racist]
-
here is a clue:
Jimmy Carter is ranked #24 :roll:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/presidents-ranked-worst-best/28/
[just behind Ronald Reagan :roll: :roll:]
[Brock of course is up there too : anyone who disagrees is racist]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11807897/Ex-Secret-Service-agents-reveal-Jimmy-Carter-actually-rude-time.html
-
Your weekly reminder that the left supported Russia for 100 years exactly (1917 to 2017) and took its side in every dispute, arguing against every military system designed to deter them or shoot down missiles, arguing endlessly that we should concede the entire world to the Soviet Union, even laughing in a 2012 presidential debate at the notion that Russia was a "global foe."
But then in 2016 Russia spent $150,000 on FaceBook ads to stir up political trouble which a failed alcoholic lesbian claimed was "stealing the election."
At that point, the left became the absolute most unhinged of Dr. Strangelove level Russia hawks, and began attacking anyone who didn't now want to start a nuclear exchange with Russia a "RUSSIAN AGENT."
Just forget about those previous 90 years, eh, comrade? Like when the Democrat party was made up of front groups directly funded by the KGB?
Leftists have no patriotism, except to leftism itself. They championed Russia when it was invading the world and funding terrorist groups to attack Europe, Israel, and the US. They finally decided that Russia might be a Bad Guy when they ran $150,000 in ads on FaceBook that Hillary Clinton said "stole" the election from her.
-
That actually has quite a bit of punch to it.
URL?
There are some people I'd like to provoke with it.
-
"Your weekly reminder that the left supported Russia for 100 years exactly (1917 to 2017) and took its side in every dispute, arguing against every military system designed to deter them or shoot down missiles, arguing endlessly that we should concede the entire world to the Soviet Union"
mostly true with the notable exceptions as Truman and Kennedy / Johnson were crats who started both Korean and Vietnam wars.
And Eisenhower and Nixon both Republicans ended them .
-
That actually has quite a bit of punch to it.
URL?
There are some people I'd like to provoke with it.
It’s a sidebar at ace.mu.nu
-
TY.
-
and one of the World's richest man claims he has no clue:
https://www.dailyfetched.com/george-soros-responds-to-claims-hes-funding-manhattan-da-bragg-as-right-wing-conspiracy-theories/
:wink:
-
and one of the World's richest man claims he has no clue:
https://www.dailyfetched.com/george-soros-responds-to-claims-hes-funding-manhattan-da-bragg-as-right-wing-conspiracy-theories/
:wink:
You just did a hate crime! Anti-semite! :-D
-
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/1/left-wing-antisemitism-and-randi-weingartens-jewis/
truth be damned
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/ilhan-omar-embarks-path-no-121223872.html
:roll: ->
https://www.google.com/search?q=getting+to+know+you+song&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=b-oyZOSjPOGh5NoPgL-pgAw&ved=0ahUKEwikl-3Nnp3-AhXhEFkFHYBfCsAQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=getting+to+know+you+song&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIICC4QgAQQ6gQyBQgAEIAEMgUILhCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQguEIAEMgUIABCABDIICAAQigUQhgM6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6CAguEIAEENQCOggILhDUAhCABDoHCAAQigUQQzoGCAAQFhAeOgcIABANEIAEOgYIABAeEA06CAgAEAgQHhANSgQIQRgAUO8DWOweYMIgaAhwAXgAgAFdiAHMB5IBAjEzmAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:79170b17,vid:Vlx6gQWfjp0
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ilhan-omar-embarks-path-no-121223872.html
:roll: ->
https://www.google.com/search?q=getting+to+know+you+song&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=b-oyZOSjPOGh5NoPgL-pgAw&ved=0ahUKEwikl-3Nnp3-AhXhEFkFHYBfCsAQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=getting+to+know+you+song&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIICC4QgAQQ6gQyBQgAEIAEMgUILhCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQguEIAEMgUIABCABDIICAAQigUQhgM6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6CAguEIAEENQCOggILhDUAhCABDoHCAAQigUQQzoGCAAQFhAeOgcIABANEIAEOgYIABAeEA06CAgAEAgQHhANSgQIQRgAUO8DWOweYMIgaAhwAXgAgAFdiAHMB5IBAjEzmAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:79170b17,vid:Vlx6gQWfjp0
I am so glad to see that Jewish Dems can overlook the Islamic hatred for them so they can work together to destroy America!
-
“I don’t need any of you to defend me against antisemitism,” said Rep. Jan Shakowsky, D-Ill. “My friend Ilhan Omar and I have worked together toward the values that I treasure as an American Jew and that she treasures as an American Islamic woman, the only one on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
advancing Muslim/Jewish relations
I mean democrat socialism......a cross over religion
-
https://nypost.com/2023/04/08/dems-play-same-old-hand-the-trump-card/
add to making it about "trump"
race / white supremacy
DEI
CRT
reparations
abortion on demand
gender -> LBTQ
Climate "catastrophe"
funny how disparities between rich and poor seem to be taken off front page - now that the rich are buying the Dem's affection....(for now)
-
The LEFT comes to the defense of Jewish profiteering financier puppeteer George Soros
with the strategy of telling us none of what we see hear experience is really true
it is all in our heads , the blind following the blind magas , racist antisemitic .
most rich dem donating libs are not Jewish but
this guy does happen to be Jewish - sorry but true
I don't dislike him because he is Jewish but because he is a globalist who donates to causes that damage my country. and I am sad that so many of my fellow jews believe the same stuff.
like it or not he does fit into the centuries old stereotype.
he survived the Holocaust - true - how did he do that?
no criticism by me on this - I was never there - lucky for me but worth a mention of something he did during a time he states was the most exhilarating in his life.
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/arrest-in-bob-lee-killing-silences-critics-who-blasted-san-francisco-conditions/ar-AA19Pyyu
SEE SF is not that bad as the right headlined ! :wink:
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/842/155/original/afdcaca79d81c262.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/842/155/original/afdcaca79d81c262.jpeg)
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what a great idea new and novel ->
send some people other people's money :
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/stimulus-proposal-could-americans-monthly-163115730.html
this is what Dems do when they let inflation soar .
it makes for a great talking point for campaigns :wink:
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what a great idea new and novel ->
send some people other people's money :
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/stimulus-proposal-could-americans-monthly-163115730.html
this is what Dems do when they let inflation soar .
it makes for a great talking point for campaigns :wink:
Why not 12,000 a month?
-
"Why not 12,000 a month?"
why not!
and while we are at it - lets add the DACA's and then squeeze in the illegals (hey they have to pay sales tax so it only seems the right thing to do )
-
"Why not 12,000 a month?"
why not!
and while we are at it - lets add the DACA's and then squeeze in the illegals (hey they have to pay sales tax so it only seems the right thing to do )
We joke now...
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/962/228/original/9a59d746e3e84d3f.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/962/228/original/9a59d746e3e84d3f.png)
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/22/dangerous-trend-medical-schools-are-ditching-standardized-tests-in-the-name-of-diversity/
Because it overly impacts blacks and hispanics!
Don't get sick!
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https://students-residents.aamc.org/taking-mcat-exam/taking-mcat-exam
MCAT
new admissions test consists of simpler questions:
Are you :
male female or other
black, white, asian, hispanic, asian, pacific asian, native american
straight gay or any of the LBGTQ etc
no need to submit grades
as long as you passed
and graduated
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https://students-residents.aamc.org/taking-mcat-exam/taking-mcat-exam
MCAT
new admissions test consists of simpler questions:
Are you :
male female or other
black, white, asian, hispanic, asian, pacific asian, native american
straight gay or any of the LBGTQ etc
no need to submit grades
as long as you passed
and graduated
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=14975
https://www.newsweek.com/georgetown-fires-professor-agonizing-over-black-students-grades-opinion-1576636
https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discrimination-on-admissions/
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https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=14975
https://www.newsweek.com/georgetown-fires-professor-agonizing-over-black-students-grades-opinion-1576636
"But Georgetown Law School has not only denied its faculty and students the right to discuss the subject; it has also denied them the right to remain silent while such a discussion is occurring."
The totalitarianism here is terrifying. Tucker is right-- we must speak Truth.
-
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=14975
https://www.newsweek.com/georgetown-fires-professor-agonizing-over-black-students-grades-opinion-1576636
"But Georgetown Law School has not only denied its faculty and students the right to discuss the subject; it has also denied them the right to remain silent while such a discussion is occurring."
The totalitarianism here is terrifying. Tucker is right-- we must speak Truth.
Isn't interesting that the modern leftist pseudo-religion treats blacks with the same reverence and prohibitions against even the mildest criticism as muslims do Mohammed?
-
not chopping heads off yet----
but they are certainly thinking it .
-
not chopping heads off yet----
but they are certainly thinking it .
Right, they'll just burn down your city and destroy your life.
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/171/430/original/94e3f427f5f146f1.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/171/430/original/94e3f427f5f146f1.png)
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Playing that forward
-
In case anyone missed
https://www.fox.com/watch/c4500556a9155dcf895614bfd808050f/
he and Dershowitz finally had a meeting of the minds
and 'While Time Remains' author Yeonmi Park
on the shocking ideology being pushed at Columbia University
worse then I ever thought .......
-
freely associates during post Cannes movie premier
from character in movie William Hale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hale_(cattleman)]
---->
Trump
----->
Magas
------>
Nazis
this is how they think -. they [we] are all nazis
-
There is no compromise possible.
There is no living with them.
freely associates during post Cannes movie premier
from character in movie William Hale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hale_(cattleman)]
---->
Trump
----->
Magas
------>
Nazis
this is how they think -. they [we] are all nazis
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/paul-craig-roberts-united-states-has-been-destroyed-its-ruling-elites
There is no compromise possible.
There is no living with them.
freely associates during post Cannes movie premier
from character in movie William Hale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hale_(cattleman)]
---->
Trump
----->
Magas
------>
Nazis
this is how they think -. they [we] are all nazis
-
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1136,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/778/964/original/8f1206534ca904f7.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1136,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/778/964/original/8f1206534ca904f7.png)
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It should not take too much effort to find a whole bunch of hard assed Israelis who are alive because they kill people who fukk with them.
If memory serves, we here have used the wall they built and the success resulting therefrom in support of President Trump's wall.
-
nudging
is out
FORCE is in and if you don't like it be doxxed ,
humiliated , demoted , pay cut , or plain fired ! - GET IT !
Sunstein
is out
Larry Fink , another one, will tell us all what to do now:
https://townhall.com/videos/2023/06/05/woke-blackrock-ceo-wants-to-force-behaviors-on-employees-n8330
-
George Alex Soros
visited WH 14 times
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12182829/George-Soros-hands-reins-son-Alex-promises-push-funding-liberal-causes.html
where are the complaints from I feel the burn Sanders, or Pochahantas about this.?
Alex - adds abortion and voting rights too.
[lets rig it more for Crats]
that said who doesn't think George wasn't already doing that through endless DNC "causes"
was it true that Rockefeller bought the 1896 election for McKinley and promoted TR for VP thinking that would get him out of the way only to get screwed when McKinley got murdered and TR then became Pres and from there went on a trust busting rampage
money corrupts all the time.........
-
https://nypost.com/2023/07/24/our-societys-top-brains-have-gone-mad-and-dysfunctional-politics-is-the-result/
-
Ford is set to lose 4.5 Billion on EVs this year. Not counting that the feds subsidized each sale with thousands!
I don't know if Ford or if they were just convinced this is the direction the market is turning. Some reports say, EVs are not selling unless the brand name is tesla.
Didn't Ford make a fortune with the F-150? Does anyone see the F-150 buyer as someone looking to buy an EV?
Reminds me that I took my money out of the market, mutual funds that were probably holding Ford.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/07/31/green-cars-red-ink-ford-set-to-lose-4-5-billion-on-electric-vehicles-this-year/
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When I bought my Ford Maverick the base model was a hybrid. I spend a few thousand more so that I could get the all gasoline model.
I remember the story of Lindbergh choosing to fly a single engine aircraft for the first flight across the Atlantic being a double engined plane would have twice the chance of something going wrong and it would not fly on one alone.
Besides, I remembered my wife's Toyota hybrid braking system being sensitive to my , , , natural ways and the battery being sensitive to running down when playing the radio when sitting with the engine off.
-
Right. I like the hybrids, regenerative braking makes sense, but you are exactly right about what can and will go wrong with increased complexity. You can't let the car sit for example; must be driven. (How does that save gas?). The small SUV (Ford Escape hybrid) I like for winter sat too long and wouldn't start. I suspected the big battery needed a charge but there's no easy way for the user to do that. I took it to the Ford dealer. They said the charging mechanism is in the transmission, needs replacing, $20k, 5 times what I paid for the used vehicle originally. We hauled it home, learned a little online, bought a $40 charger, removed the 150 lb battery (with help), charged it overnight and it has worked ever since, so far....
To the thread title, increased complexity should be a choice not a mandate. These people have no idea or care for what your need or use will be.
-
"To the thread title, increased complexity should be a choice not a mandate. These people have no idea or care for what your need or use will be."
but then how can the auto makers justify jacking up the prices ? :wink:
I lease. yes, may cost a bit more but then the cars are so new I never need to worry about repairs.
I have been getting good deals since I am repeat customer.
No EV for me (yet) but then I don't drive much .
Guessing my whole yr of driving uses less carbon then one John Kerry flight to Europe to find further ways to destroy our sovereignty
Is Tesla worth the money ?
-
ccp:
Is Tesla worth the money ?
(Doug). The car or the stock?
Both depend on the tax credit which is public money foolishness. The cars themselves are great, smooth, quiet, very disruptive to the other luxury car makers. (Is any new luxury car worth the money?)
The idea this solves energy and environmental issues is crazy. The grid runs on carbon (natural gas, also coal) more than any other source, is already overloaded and we aren't adding new nuclear, night sunshine, magical batteries or any other new sources at this time.
On the crazy valuations of hot, newer companies like Tesla, I don't know. My guess is these other manufacturers, BMW EVs etc pay Tesla technology licensing royalties. I know Ford has to pay Toyota for Prius technology to build and sell hybrids. Tesla moving into China is interesting. How will he protect his parents there? Doesn't that add economic risk, war, trade wars, etc.?
My instinct on any investment in these screwed up times is go run and hide (unless you know what you're doing).
-
I'm not a fan of David Brooks, but this column is strangely interesting. He makes a point I have (inarticulately) tried to make to liberals, if you don't want a Trump phenomenon to win half or more of the country, don't act and govern in such extreme ways.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/02/what-if-were-the-bad-guys-here/
He only gives a few examples, but this applies to almost every topic on the forum. Don't leave the border open and let a quarter of a million people a month flood in if you don't want support for a leader like Trump to emerge promising to build a wall. Don't have the highest corporate business tax rates in the developed world, where companies and headquarters are leaving, if you don't want the political pendulum to swing back the other way. Don't build a tax system no one can read or comply with if you don't want reformers to gain popularity. Don't spend trillions more we don't have or blatantly pay billions to cronies and alter election rules in order to win. Don't have men in women's swimsuits, women's swim races, on women's champion podiums, or naked with their male genitalia showing in women's locker rooms if you don't want the center of the country to rise up and say stop it. Most of all, don't let the deep state take over everything and prosecute free speech and political speech if you don't want the heartland to rise up in angry resistance.
(I'm so old I remember when) Bill Clinton had to run as a "new democrat" because everybody knew at that time that these far left policies were unelectable nationwide. Then he governed his first two years as an old Democrat and lost Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Republicans didn't repeal Obamacare, but did win the House of Representatives over it, then the Senate from their once 60 vote majority, and then the White House in response to Leftism gone too far.
Brooks senses this happening again. He is warning NYT readers that they could hold power longer if the leftist overreach wasn't so sudden, so constant and so extreme. That's pretty good advice IMHO.
He makes ONE BIG MISTAKE. He refers to the conservatives in the heartland as "less educated", perpetuating the elitist mentality of his publication and his readers. A more humble approach for a column of humility would be to acknowledge these people are receiving a different education, not less education.
If you had two identical twins finishing college and one went on to grad school for most of his / her 20s and earned a Masters and then a PhD in the social sciences, or any field, and the other started, grew and ran a small business during that time, with all the challenges that go with that, is one of them less educated or could we admit the two of them are differently educated? He might want to consider that in his contrition.
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3675154/Left-wing-German-politician-raped-migrants-admits-LIED-police-attackers-nationality-did-not-want-encourage-racism.html
This is the Left in their own words, think about their priorities. No interest in finding the attackers or preventing the next woman from being raped. Not compared to the need to protect the innocent image of the "migrants".
In their mind, you can't handle the truth.
-
Pre-emptive dhimmitude!
-
they cannot see why we hate them so much?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-wouldnt-people-see-politics-in-trump-indictments
they are so sure of their convictions that anyone who does not agree
is either insane or a fool who follows Trump
and PS ,
what is this scumbucket Kearns actually suggesting with "organization"
sounds like a call to fix the election if you ask me.
-
A response to David Brooks. Must read, start to finish IMHO.
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/yes-david-brooks-you-are-the-bad#details
-
Trump is already ineligible to serve, without a conviction.
That's what the left is reading this morning, by "highly credentialed academics".
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/donald-trump-constitutionally-prohibited-presidency/675048/?utm_source=msn
-
Two problems with this CNN story, it is the liberals turning people against their madness, and since when are they entitled to creating a new language.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/20/politics/conservatives-verbal-combat-blake-cec/index.html
"Mention almost any touchstone phrase adopted by the left in recent years — “critical race theory,” “diversity,” “global warming,” even the word “liberal” itself — and it has been redefined or tarnished by conservatives."
-
"Almost every touchstone phrase adopted by liberals in recent years — “critical race theory,” “diversity,” “global warming,” even the word “liberal” itself—has been redefined or tarnished by conservatives. How did they do it? It’s called “verbal jiujutsu.”
well lets break this down
CRT - > reverse racism
Diversity - >. reverse racism preference of non whites over whites
global warming -> every single weather event and everything else on the planet is due to man made climate change - absurd and leading to chaos in the economy
unneeded panic and stupid policies
liberalism - > force everyone into their own ideology by financial employment shaming means
LBGTQ rights - > they already have but force everyone to celebrate it and influence children to increase their numbers
Yet if we point this out it is verbal Ju Jitsu - > not true the verbal ju jitsu comes from the LEFT
example : A Biden spending bill named the inflation reduction act he admits has nothing to do with inflation
I could go on.
-
https://nypost.com/2023/08/21/jeff-bezos-should-have-given-100-million-to-the-poor-not-van-jones/
-
From another thread:
The Left
It’s not exactly news the political divide in our country is… pretty deep. And pretty acrimonious and growing more extreme. If you doubt that, try and imagine yourself only five years ago and ask yourself what you’d have thought if someone had told you one side would be fighting passionately for the right of parents to surgically mutilate their children – or worse, the power to take children away from one parent and give them to the other who wanted to mutilate them.
To some it seems like a dispute between two models of governance, and that’s at least partly correct. But though the left model is pretty well articulated: soul engineering, central control, top-down my-way-or-the-highway, the opposition on the right is not nearly as well defined.
Purely in terms of the oppositional dynamics what we have is a situation where the federal government has become so powerful to the point it has occurred to some that they must never let power change hands again, the danger the Founders feared.
And given no one is immune to the corrupting effects of power the question of which side is most dangerous. The answer is, the side which has been ascendant the longest of course. And today, that’s the Left. So…
What is the left?
- That part of the political spectrum historically concerned with obtaining the support of the bottom half of society, ranging from the moderate left to full-on communism. (Note I said, “the side concerned with obtaining the support of” not “benefitting.”)
- But like all social movements, the leadership is at the top end of society the aristocracy, either by birth or adoption. During revolutionary times it is comprised of ambitious middle classes, the so-called noveau riche and disaffected members of the upper class. (Stick a pin in that.)
- The very bottom of society comprises: low-wage earners and the disabled, but also the unemployable, the insane, and low-end criminals. Both victims of misfortune and those who’ve fallen to the bottom due to poor life choices. Leftists at the top of society cannot or will not recognize the difference.
- The line that defines “bottom half” also runs through the middle class and high-wage working class. Whether the middle identify as left or right may be determined by whether they see government as either, 1) the guarantor they do not fall downwards, or 2) as an obstacle to working their way further upwards.
- Today the left has lost the working class and now base themselves in a coalition of minorities – which they automatically characterize as part of the bottom half and lacking in “privilege” no matter how wealthy and influential they may be. Thus billionaires like Oprah can count themselves as unprivileged minorities with a straight face.
- While rightists can generally describe the left accurately, leftists cannot describe the right and when attempting to describe right-wing views create a grotesque caricature at best. This has been confirmed by research, most notably in Moral Foundations theory.
- While there is both a moderate left and a hard left as in every movement, the hard left is at present in control of the movement.
- Note that EVERY movement has a tendency to become controlled by its most extreme elements. Because they are the ones ready to devote themselves heart and soul to the movement. The rest of us have lives. Passion is power.
- Despite their professed concern for the poor and powerless they are elitist to the core and believe in rule by an enlightened ruling class rather than the rule of impartial laws.
- They implicitly believe in the inferiority of minorities and the poor, believing them incapable of rising by their own efforts no matter what opportunities they are given.
- The moderate left may be just as horrified by the crimes of communism as the right, but the difference is of degree, not basic principle. They are totalitarian by nature, by the very definition of the man who invented the term. “Tutto all'interno dello stato. Niente fuori dallo stato. Niente contro lo Stato” “Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini.
- Though the Hard Left calls themselves “Progressives” they are anything but progressive, they revert to the oldest model of politics in history, the rule of the strong and (allegedly) wise.
- They despise liberty, but feel compelled to pay lip service to it – for now.
The Leftist approach to what they call “social justice” is: hierarchical, top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway. When they see a problem their first instinct is not to approach it with private, voluntary means, but to pass laws and create new government offices.
- Any suggestion that resources available to address social problems are finite and must be allocated intelligently is met with moral outrage.
- Their default assumption is that ordinary people are helpless to support and take care of themselves without preferential legislation and massive subsidies. In time this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Leftist model of governance is failing catastrophically, due among other things to:
- The increased complexity of government resulting from regulatory burdens that hamper production and growth.
- The enlargement of government resulting in the withdrawal of more and more educated people from productive work in the private sector.
- The diversion of wealth into patronage for supporters.
- The chaos and waste of resources caused by attempts to “soul engineer” i.e. make people good according to their vision of the good via manipulation of language and censorship.
- Attempts to increase upward social-economic mobility for some, which result in destroying the already established institutions that historically provided the means for the poor to rise. (See the history of City College of New York, “The Harvard of the Proletariat.”)
- Ignoring human nature. Note defunding the police and the subsequent rise of crime in poorer neighborhoods.
They react to the failure of their model by doubling down on everything that causes it to fail and finding scapegoats to blame for the failure.
The left is utopian rather than pragmatic.
- A lot of the injustice they see is just life.
- The idea that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and the corollary rule-of-thumb “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are anathema to them. They favor change for the sake of change, confident it will always tend towards perfection - as long as they direct it.
- They are impatient with established rules and procedures and see them as institutionalized barriers to achieving The Good.
- For them the end justifies the means. If the end is perfection, what wouldn’t be justified to achieve it?
- For many years in many countries leftists have seen criminals as "primitive rebels" (as in the title of the book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum) engaged in "social banditry."
- Part of the utopian view is to see planning and purpose everywhere. So failure to achieve it is never due to bad decisions or even just bad luck, but of active villainy on someone’s part.
- They are ferociously hostile towards religion. They seek to establish heaven on earth right now rather than in an afterlife or in the indefinite future.
- Their ethics are strictly situational. They reject the notion of an action that is bad in and of itself rather than whether it serves their cause or not.
- They maintain double standards for themselves and their opponents. Another word for which is “privilege,” the right to do that which is forbidden to others. And this is not hypocrisy! They see themselves as a separate and superior caste who must be judged by different standards than us peasants.
- There is no end-point to their demands. They have no appreciation of diminishing marginal utility.
They do not argue for their position and against yours – they write the script for both sides of the argument, i.e. not against your position but what they say your position is. (Strawman.)
- They do not appear to know what an argument is. (A set of propositions, one of which, the conclusion, is claimed to necessarily follow from the others.)
- They rely on fallacies “the counterfeit of argument” to support their proposals, most often: Appeal to Pity and Ad Hominem.
- They do not value free speech and the free play of ideas. Their reaction to any coherent contrary argument is to silence the arguer.
While claiming to be the “party of science” and to represent “the knowledge class” they believe and profess things directly contrary to what we know to be immutable scientific fact, such as their claim men can become women, get pregnant, etc.
They have to have enemies to excuse the failure of their model and rally their supporters with the strong social glue of grievance. Grievance which is fed by envy, “The only one of the seven deadly sins which brings the sinner no pleasure at all.”
- The target of that grievance, the Enemy – is you. Anyone who doesn’t think like them. And we have arrived at a point at which why they think of you as the enemy is of no importance compared with the fact that they do.
- They are not producing enough children to stay viable over generations, so they need yours to replenish their numbers via indoctrination. They have no respect for parental rights at all.
- Moderate Democrats are in what amounts to an abusive relationship with the hard left. They will not let themselves see that the things that pass for normal on the hard left are nothing like normal, and are in fact quite insane.
The dilemma of the right, or the "non-left" in general.
- They hate you, make no mistake about that. The level and kind of insult should make that plain to you. When they call you “Nazis” they are expressing a willingness to see you killed.
- There is nothing you can say or do that will make them stop hating you. They need an enemy to hate to preserve the cohesion of their movement.
- They say libertarian conservatives are racists, fascists, and Nazis. We know we are not.
- They say conservatives are homophobes and this is more nuanced. There are those who don’t have anything against gays per se, but just don’t like them setting the agenda in education and entertainment. It feels too much like grooming.
- They say conservatives want to return Black people to their status under (historically Democrat) Jim Crow. We know we want no such thing.
- They say conservatives are transphobes. They’re more solid ground here, anyone who’ll volunteer to be castrated and surgically mutilated is pretty scary. And anyone who can talk kids into it is REALLY scary.
What all of this amounts to is othering conservatives, classical liberals, and moderate Democrats to the point they feel justified in assault, vandalism, and repression by means of organized rioting and politicized government agencies such as the DOJ and IRS.
It’s not going to get better in the foreseeable future.
Bottom line. To recapitulate they hate you. They can’t be persuaded not to hate you because they need someone to hate to give their movement cohesion.
If you belong to any of the groups they see as their client minorities, in essence their property, they hate you most of all and you are in the most danger from them.
You say, “Well I’ve got lots of friends who are leftists and I don’t feel they are dangerous to me.”
So do I, and I feel that way too about them. But – to quote Heinlein from his novel Methuselah’s Children. “I am not in danger from my neighbors and you are not in danger from yours, but I am in danger from your neighbors and you are in danger from mine.”
You need to make your plans and preparations accordingly.
Questions:
Q: What percentage of the Left is really Hard Left?
A: Don’t know for sure but some estimates have it that “Progressives” are around 14-16% of the voting age population.
Q: How dangerous are they really?
A: Every totalitarian movement coming to power needs a thug corps. We saw the summer of riots a few years ago which produced relatively few casualties but billions of dollars of property damage. We also saw their tactics evolving. We saw training maneuvers designed among other things to sort out the “tooth to tail ratio.” To find out who among their ranks can be street fighters, who can stand incarceration, etc.
Q: But aren’t they a decentralized movement with no central command structure?
A: In a word, bullshit. We saw a sophisticated logistical support and supply system involving busing rioters from outside. The fact we cannot identify their command hierarchy with certainty should worry you.
Q: How bad is it going to get?
A: No clue. The left power base is confined to major cities with dense populations. It might stay there and make the cities progressively more unlivable. It might become something like the Troubles in Ireland, or worse La Violencia in Columbia. (Look it up.) Or it could burn itself out in a hurry and leave a minor footnote in history. (Well it might!) It’s a big country and the bulk of it will possibly not even notice much. I’ve heard that from expats living in rural Chile during the late troubles.
Q: You talk about plans and preparations, what kind of plans and preparations do you mean?
A: Up to you and your own individual threat assessment. I myself plan to live out in the sticks where violence is unlikely to penetrate with adequate preparation for supply train interruptions while I watch the world burn – or smoke and fizzle as the case may be.
Q: Do you think it could become a civil war?
A: We’re already in what amounts to a cold civil war. Will it become hot and if so how hot? Dunno, and where would it be fought? It’s not like everybody is going to dress up in their cammies and tacticool gear and head out to the national parks to duke it out. (Although the idea of holmgang has some merit to it..) Although as unlikely as that sounds to anyone living amid the broad treeless fields of the Midwest farm belt, one might remember General Grivas and the Cypriot insurgency.
Q: Aren’t you just being alarmist? We’ve been through bad stuff before as a country and always got through it.
A: Yes we have, but I urge you to remember this irrefutable historical truth. All predictions of social collapse come true – eventually.
I will leave you with Steve's Four Rules of Power, distilled from observations of totalitarian movements contemporary and historical. Listen, remember, and see if this doesn’t explain a lot of otherwise crazy stuff.
Demonstrate your power over others by:
1) Making them constantly afraid of giving offense unintentionally.
2) Making them give up cherished customs, symbols, pastimes, relationships.
3) Making them pay lip service to ideas of breathtaking absurdity.
4) Making them do things that disgust and repel them.
-
The Left
It’s not exactly news the political divide in our country is… pretty deep. And pretty acrimonious and growing more extreme. If you doubt that, try and imagine yourself only five years ago and ask yourself what you’d have thought if someone had told you one side would be fighting passionately for the right of parents to surgically mutilate their children – or worse, the power to take children away from one parent and give them to the other who wanted to mutilate them.
To some it seems like a dispute between two models of governance, and that’s at least partly correct. But though the left model is pretty well articulated: soul engineering, central control, top-down my-way-or-the-highway, the opposition on the right is not nearly as well defined.
Purely in terms of the oppositional dynamics what we have is a situation where the federal government has become so powerful to the point it has occurred to some that they must never let power change hands again, the danger the Founders feared.
And given no one is immune to the corrupting effects of power the question of which side is most dangerous. The answer is, the side which has been ascendant the longest of course. And today, that’s the Left. So…
What is the left?
- That part of the political spectrum historically concerned with obtaining the support of the bottom half of society, ranging from the moderate left to full-on communism. (Note I said, “the side concerned with obtaining the support of” not “benefitting.”)
- But like all social movements, the leadership is at the top end of society the aristocracy, either by birth or adoption. During revolutionary times it is comprised of ambitious middle classes, the so-called noveau riche and disaffected members of the upper class. (Stick a pin in that.)
- The very bottom of society comprises: low-wage earners and the disabled, but also the unemployable, the insane, and low-end criminals. Both victims of misfortune and those who’ve fallen to the bottom due to poor life choices. Leftists at the top of society cannot or will not recognize the difference.
- The line that defines “bottom half” also runs through the middle class and high-wage working class. Whether the middle identify as left or right may be determined by whether they see government as either, 1) the guarantor they do not fall downwards, or 2) as an obstacle to working their way further upwards.
- Today the left has lost the working class and now base themselves in a coalition of minorities – which they automatically characterize as part of the bottom half and lacking in “privilege” no matter how wealthy and influential they may be. Thus billionaires like Oprah can count themselves as unprivileged minorities with a straight face.
- While rightists can generally describe the left accurately, leftists cannot describe the right and when attempting to describe right-wing views create a grotesque caricature at best. This has been confirmed by research, most notably in Moral Foundations theory.
- While there is both a moderate left and a hard left as in every movement, the hard left is at present in control of the movement.
- Note that EVERY movement has a tendency to become controlled by its most extreme elements. Because they are the ones ready to devote themselves heart and soul to the movement. The rest of us have lives. Passion is power.
- Despite their professed concern for the poor and powerless they are elitist to the core and believe in rule by an enlightened ruling class rather than the rule of impartial laws.
- They implicitly believe in the inferiority of minorities and the poor, believing them incapable of rising by their own efforts no matter what opportunities they are given.
- The moderate left may be just as horrified by the crimes of communism as the right, but the difference is of degree, not basic principle. They are totalitarian by nature, by the very definition of the man who invented the term. “Tutto all'interno dello stato. Niente fuori dallo stato. Niente contro lo Stato” “Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini.
- Though the Hard Left calls themselves “Progressives” they are anything but progressive, they revert to the oldest model of politics in history, the rule of the strong and (allegedly) wise.
- They despise liberty, but feel compelled to pay lip service to it – for now.
The Leftist approach to what they call “social justice” is: hierarchical, top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway. When they see a problem their first instinct is not to approach it with private, voluntary means, but to pass laws and create new government offices.
- Any suggestion that resources available to address social problems are finite and must be allocated intelligently is met with moral outrage.
- Their default assumption is that ordinary people are helpless to support and take care of themselves without preferential legislation and massive subsidies. In time this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Leftist model of governance is failing catastrophically, due among other things to:
- The increased complexity of government resulting from regulatory burdens that hamper production and growth.
- The enlargement of government resulting in the withdrawal of more and more educated people from productive work in the private sector.
- The diversion of wealth into patronage for supporters.
- The chaos and waste of resources caused by attempts to “soul engineer” i.e. make people good according to their vision of the good via manipulation of language and censorship.
- Attempts to increase upward social-economic mobility for some, which result in destroying the already established institutions that historically provided the means for the poor to rise. (See the history of City College of New York, “The Harvard of the Proletariat.”)
- Ignoring human nature. Note defunding the police and the subsequent rise of crime in poorer neighborhoods.
They react to the failure of their model by doubling down on everything that causes it to fail and finding scapegoats to blame for the failure.
The left is utopian rather than pragmatic.
- A lot of the injustice they see is just life.
- The idea that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and the corollary rule-of-thumb “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are anathema to them. They favor change for the sake of change, confident it will always tend towards perfection - as long as they direct it.
- They are impatient with established rules and procedures and see them as institutionalized barriers to achieving The Good.
- For them the end justifies the means. If the end is perfection, what wouldn’t be justified to achieve it?
- For many years in many countries leftists have seen criminals as "primitive rebels" (as in the title of the book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum) engaged in "social banditry."
- Part of the utopian view is to see planning and purpose everywhere. So failure to achieve it is never due to bad decisions or even just bad luck, but of active villainy on someone’s part.
- They are ferociously hostile towards religion. They seek to establish heaven on earth right now rather than in an afterlife or in the indefinite future.
- Their ethics are strictly situational. They reject the notion of an action that is bad in and of itself rather than whether it serves their cause or not.
- They maintain double standards for themselves and their opponents. Another word for which is “privilege,” the right to do that which is forbidden to others. And this is not hypocrisy! They see themselves as a separate and superior caste who must be judged by different standards than us peasants.
- There is no end-point to their demands. They have no appreciation of diminishing marginal utility.
They do not argue for their position and against yours – they write the script for both sides of the argument, i.e. not against your position but what they say your position is. (Strawman.)
- They do not appear to know what an argument is. (A set of propositions, one of which, the conclusion, is claimed to necessarily follow from the others.)
- They rely on fallacies “the counterfeit of argument” to support their proposals, most often: Appeal to Pity and Ad Hominem.
- They do not value free speech and the free play of ideas. Their reaction to any coherent contrary argument is to silence the arguer.
While claiming to be the “party of science” and to represent “the knowledge class” they believe and profess things directly contrary to what we know to be immutable scientific fact, such as their claim men can become women, get pregnant, etc.
They have to have enemies to excuse the failure of their model and rally their supporters with the strong social glue of grievance. Grievance which is fed by envy, “The only one of the seven deadly sins which brings the sinner no pleasure at all.”
- The target of that grievance, the Enemy – is you. Anyone who doesn’t think like them. And we have arrived at a point at which why they think of you as the enemy is of no importance compared with the fact that they do.
- They are not producing enough children to stay viable over generations, so they need yours to replenish their numbers via indoctrination. They have no respect for parental rights at all.
- Moderate Democrats are in what amounts to an abusive relationship with the hard left. They will not let themselves see that the things that pass for normal on the hard left are nothing like normal, and are in fact quite insane.
The dilemma of the right, or the "non-left" in general.
- They hate you, make no mistake about that. The level and kind of insult should make that plain to you. When they call you “Nazis” they are expressing a willingness to see you killed.
- There is nothing you can say or do that will make them stop hating you. They need an enemy to hate to preserve the cohesion of their movement.
- They say libertarian conservatives are racists, fascists, and Nazis. We know we are not.
- They say conservatives are homophobes and this is more nuanced. There are those who don’t have anything against gays per se, but just don’t like them setting the agenda in education and entertainment. It feels too much like grooming.
- They say conservatives want to return Black people to their status under (historically Democrat) Jim Crow. We know we want no such thing.
- They say conservatives are transphobes. They’re more solid ground here, anyone who’ll volunteer to be castrated and surgically mutilated is pretty scary. And anyone who can talk kids into it is REALLY scary.
What all of this amounts to is othering conservatives, classical liberals, and moderate Democrats to the point they feel justified in assault, vandalism, and repression by means of organized rioting and politicized government agencies such as the DOJ and IRS.
It’s not going to get better in the foreseeable future.
Bottom line. To recapitulate they hate you. They can’t be persuaded not to hate you because they need someone to hate to give their movement cohesion.
If you belong to any of the groups they see as their client minorities, in essence their property, they hate you most of all and you are in the most danger from them.
You say, “Well I’ve got lots of friends who are leftists and I don’t feel they are dangerous to me.”
So do I, and I feel that way too about them. But – to quote Heinlein from his novel Methuselah’s Children. “I am not in danger from my neighbors and you are not in danger from yours, but I am in danger from your neighbors and you are in danger from mine.”
You need to make your plans and preparations accordingly.
Questions:
Q: What percentage of the Left is really Hard Left?
A: Don’t know for sure but some estimates have it that “Progressives” are around 14-16% of the voting age population.
Q: How dangerous are they really?
A: Every totalitarian movement coming to power needs a thug corps. We saw the summer of riots a few years ago which produced relatively few casualties but billions of dollars of property damage. We also saw their tactics evolving. We saw training maneuvers designed among other things to sort out the “tooth to tail ratio.” To find out who among their ranks can be street fighters, who can stand incarceration, etc.
Q: But aren’t they a decentralized movement with no central command structure?
A: In a word, bullshit. We saw a sophisticated logistical support and supply system involving busing rioters from outside. The fact we cannot identify their command hierarchy with certainty should worry you.
Q: How bad is it going to get?
A: No clue. The left power base is confined to major cities with dense populations. It might stay there and make the cities progressively more unlivable. It might become something like the Troubles in Ireland, or worse La Violencia in Columbia. (Look it up.) Or it could burn itself out in a hurry and leave a minor footnote in history. (Well it might!) It’s a big country and the bulk of it will possibly not even notice much. I’ve heard that from expats living in rural Chile during the late troubles.
Q: You talk about plans and preparations, what kind of plans and preparations do you mean?
A: Up to you and your own individual threat assessment. I myself plan to live out in the sticks where violence is unlikely to penetrate with adequate preparation for supply train interruptions while I watch the world burn – or smoke and fizzle as the case may be.
Q: Do you think it could become a civil war?
A: We’re already in what amounts to a cold civil war. Will it become hot and if so how hot? Dunno, and where would it be fought? It’s not like everybody is going to dress up in their cammies and tacticool gear and head out to the national parks to duke it out. (Although the idea of holmgang has some merit to it..) Although as unlikely as that sounds to anyone living amid the broad treeless fields of the Midwest farm belt, one might remember General Grivas and the Cypriot insurgency.
Q: Aren’t you just being alarmist? We’ve been through bad stuff before as a country and always got through it.
A: Yes we have, but I urge you to remember this irrefutable historical truth. All predictions of social collapse come true – eventually.
I will leave you with Steve's Four Rules of Power, distilled from observations of totalitarian movements contemporary and historical. Listen, remember, and see if this doesn’t explain a lot of otherwise crazy stuff.
Demonstrate your power over others by:
1) Making them constantly afraid of giving offense unintentionally.
2) Making them give up cherished customs, symbols, pastimes, relationships.
3) Making them pay lip service to ideas of breathtaking absurdity.
4) Making them do things that disgust and repel them.
-
Last time Democrats took a mugshot of their political opponents
https://twitter.com/barnes_law/status/1694850823225012436
Spoiler, it's a mugshot of Martin Luther King.
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That is awesome. Playing it forward!
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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/joe-plumber-maga/
I post it just as a window into convoluted Left thinking.
Plumber's assistant is not plumbing. Being anti-union doesn't count as working class. With nothing whatsoever to do with race, they see Republicans chasing the "white working class" vote. Do they really think R's don't want the votes of black working people (are they really a "class") or does the Left think there aren't any. To them the flip side demographic of white working class is black welfare class? So racist! They close by ripping the recently deceased for starting a business other than plumbing. How dare he.
All the while, contending Republicans are the party of the rich even though everyone knows the Uber rich and the rich men north of Richmond are all Democrats, and the people Joe the Plumber symbolized have flipped to Republican.
In my state MN, the Dem party is still called DFL from the 1940s(?) merger of Democrats with the farmer-labor party, yet the farmers (and laborers) have flipped to solid R. What would they call their coalition if the name was honestly upgraded to suit current times?
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This article apparently by the Left has some truth (the real world isn't that simple) and some of its own cognitive dissonance in it.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2023/09/04/democrats-need-to-apologize-to-oliver-anthony/
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I had a chance to see the (new) 'View'.
Is it 'media' or is it 'The Left'? A distinction without a difference.
Whoopi gone, and I thought they had one conservative. No sign of that.
That Behar, God she's ugly, and that's just her attitude.
They related to their stuck home with nothing to do audience by each describing their extended, exotic summer vacations, Greece, Spain, cruises etc cause that's what regular people do.
They RAILED on Trump for his weight. I thought they already covered that in previous episodes. I thought weight shaming was so anti-woke these days, but no. Not if it's Trump. Any chance any in their audience have also been a bit over served? Including at least one on the stage.
They note Trump has 4 criminal cases going right now. No mention that he had a clean record until he announced he was running a third time.
They RAILED on Trump for his deficits. Odd timing on that:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/03/us-debt-deficit-rises-interest-rate/
We can argue that no one watches, but still, this is the nonstop message that is out there, whether NPR in a softer voice, or BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LAT, late night, comedy, opunion or network news.
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"We can argue that no one watches, but still, this is the nonstop message that is out there, whether NPR in a softer voice, or BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LAT, late night, comedy, opunion or network news"
may I add to never forget PBS - another propaganda outfit funded by libs.
I can't stand Amanpour - a cranky perfect definition of an elistist/globalist if there ever was one.
The so called conservative Margaret Hoover spends 95% of her time bashing Trump and related policies
and she is the best of them :roll:
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This is the vice chair of the democratic party we are talking about:
This is not your father's or your mother's Democratic party of the 1960s we are talking about.
In June of 2020, Sathanandan wrote in a post on Facebook: "We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department."
Oops.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/dfl-second-vice-chairwoman-injured-after-alleged-carjacking-in-minneapolis/
Brutally beaten and carjacked in front of her kids.
This is not funny but I point out liberals lack the empathy they claim a monopoly on. This type of crime was skyrocketing BEFORE it happened to her, and the increase in general is BECAUSE OF her policies. There is no consequence for the perps.
There was NO SPIKE in crime last time a Republican mayor ran the City, Charlie Stenvig 1978, 45 years ago.
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https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
--------------
To be clear, I'm against both.
But look how they define wage theft, when anyone other than government (or unions) takes from your earnings.
Easy solution , stop all withholding, and have people pay in their taxes, they way, umm, people do.
Quite a scary article but still, 99.999% of paycheck wage theft is by government.
Want to see the largest theft, how much of your pay, your purchasing power is stolen by inflation?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/workers-lose-ground-to-inflation-despite-big-wage-gains-11673649460
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Agreed. Every time the Left's foolishness and incompetence is displayed for all to see the subject is changed and deflected.
"shoplifting theft" is minor but corporate wage theft is the real issue :roll:
No mention of government confiscation and spend of course.
Ironic how the big money players are paying off scrutiny of them by their PACS supporting Democrat causes agendas.
TNR =>
The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win_McCormack
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https://babylonbee.com/news/audience-cheers-as-apple-unveils-first-carbon-neutral-uyghur-slave-camp
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https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tax-cuts-election-2024-rcna105185
I was teased by a headline that might tell me what Trump's latest economic plan might be. It's MSNBC so I know I'm going to see an opposing view, but do they really win an argument by lying about the opposing side of it?
From the article:
"Not all of Trump’s advisers are on board with that plan, though, according to the Post. At least not Arthur Laffer, who, as an economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, championed “supply-side economics,” the idea that lower classes benefit when the wealthy get wealthier. He also lent his name to the Laffer Curve, which proposes that cutting taxes leads to the government’s collecting more revenue. Neither idea has ever proved to be correct in the slightest. Income inequality between the wealthiest 1% and everybody else really took off under Reagan, and it’s now a yawning chasm."
Picking that apart,
"the idea that lower classes benefit when the wealthy get wealthier."
No, that is ass backwards. Lower classes NEVER advance under (their) policies aimed at preventing people from accumulating wealth. And they measure gaing only by someone else losing. Zero sum fallacy easily proven false.
"He also lent his name to the Laffer Curve, which proposes that cutting taxes leads to the government’s collecting more revenue."
Complete obfuscation. The Laffer Curve merely states an empirical fact graphically. When tax rates are either 0% or 100% the government will collect zero revenues. At some rate in between revenues are maximized, optimized. As you move up or down from the optimal rate, revenues decrease. When rates are so high they significantly discourage work and investment, lowering them may increase revenues. Also an empirical fact.
"Neither idea has ever proved to be correct in the slightest."
Let's see about that. Revenues increased when they cut rates in the 1920s. Revenues increased when they cut rates in the 1960s. Revenues increased when they cut rates in the 1980s. Revenues increased when they cut capital gains rates in the 1990s. Revenues increased when they cut rates in the 2000s. Revenues increased when they cut rates in 2018. Two of those were under Democrats.
Deficits in the 1980s and every other time we're all about excess spending, not undertaxation. And the House of Representatives, where all spending ordinates, was under complete Democrat control the entire decade of the 1980s, also Biden's first two years when all this current spending was passed.
"Income inequality between the wealthiest 1% and everybody else really took off under Reagan"
Logic fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc, as old as the Roman empire. This preceded that therefore this caused that.
Income inequality is widest today in the blue run states of California and New York. Is that because tax rates there are too low?
When you have to lie about the opposing argument to win, are you really winning an argument?
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/09/18/come-as-you-are-schumer-gives-thumbs-up-to-end-of-senate-dress-code/
what a disgrace.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/09/18/come-as-you-are-schumer-gives-thumbs-up-to-end-of-senate-dress-code/
what a disgrace.
Everybody knows they changed the rule for Fetterman. Why did he apply for a job he won't dress for?
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The Left analyzing what the Left is doing wrong, what could go wrong.
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/23873568/biden-polling-black-latino-voters-2024-election-trump
3 'reasons'
It's early.
Voters 'of color' aren't monolithic,
Blacks and Latinos have been neglected by the Dem party.
(Doug) First, note that LatinX has been dropped. That came from elite Ed, not from the neighborhoods.
It's early? No. They've seen 2.5 years of Biden, 8 years of Obama Biden, and can contrast it with 3 pre-covid years of Trump when their incomes grew the fastest and gas prices were reasonable.
Voters of color aren't monolithic? Yes they were. Dems used to win 95-98% of black vote, only to repeatedly disappoint.
Neglected? Yes but not in the way they mean. Most blacks and Latinos work for a living (who knew?) and most not at the University President level. That means they buy gas and have taxes withheld, etc. Under Trump and Republicans they learned the Dem demagoguery was bullshit. Down deep, most of them want America to be great again. Again, who knew?
Mentioned in previous cycles, within these 'voting groups' type analyses, Republicans and conservatism doesn't need to win over all of them at once or ever. We merely need to make significant inroads in all the the demographic groups.
Reason two of the article gives it away. The stigma for going R is gone; they are now free to think for themselves.
Reason four they won't tell you is that Dem and far Left policies are bad for the people they are purported to help.
The merger of the far Left academic elite with the welfare and underpaid crowd is a failure. So-called liberal policies drive all costs up and real incomes down.
Carbon neutrality, boys in girls sports, pronoun flexibility, these aren't the top priorities of people struggling to make ends meet.
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https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/25/is-the-left-happy-that-they-got-their-wish/
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What is a conspiracy theorist?
Someone who lives in Orwellian times and makes obvious observations aloud.
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Besides the stupidity and shortsightedness of the handful of not really Republicans who voted to vacate the Speakership of the House, someone explain to me why Democrats all went along. This will not come back to bite them?? They don't want Speakership to go to the leader of the majority party? They don't have a rogue wing of their own party to deal with? Good luck with that.
THEY voted unanimously to have the business of the House shut down, without a plan. Only a handful of so called Republicans did this. Do they think this gets them a better Speaker? No. They just want the disarray.
Why is all the blame on 4% of one party for what 100% of the other party supported? Are they now the extreme ultra maga they despise? That's who they sided with. Democrats, you own this, now live with the consequences.
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Let's use the Congress thread for this please.
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Did they really say, defund the police?
From the memory hole, this is the Minneapolis city council president speaking during covid and George Floyd. Being able to call the police for a break-in comes from a point of privilege.
https://youtu.be/2inoNzJjR1M?si=w3PxtoqM_1Jc68Pp
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From one who knows:
https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/i-was-a-dei-director-dei-drives-campus-antisemitism/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR3bE0HZzQUGl3c9miQidV8H8TVHL5r1HkPkn9-UbPeZQz7Z7w4ELIse-X4
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2nd post.
An interview exploring how quickly Woke folk abandoned Jews, particularly those embracing Progressive orthodoxies:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong
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https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong
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https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=liberal-jews-thought-progressives-were-an-ally-they-thought-wrong
With all the talk about divisions in the R party, over nothing, this gets glossed over. Representatives like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are on the other side of this war. And it's not just a few high profile officials, but the energy on the campuses that make up the base of the party, all on the side of the terrorists destroying Israel. On liberal TV I hear it is a Democrat split between young and old. You are an old Democrat if your instinct and experience puts you on the side of Israel. cf Joe Biden.
Until he spoke we did not know which side of the conflict Joe Biden would come down on. He "clarified", but is already calling for Israel to use "restraint. (Which is it?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ea1lEELr2U
Good luck threading the needle between support for peaceful existence of Israel and support for the 'Palestinian cause' (which includes the destruction of Israel).
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/in-a-shift-democrats-are-focusing-their-jewish-campaign-on-israel-policy/ar-AA1j5IJ8?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=e2cc0ee059184d59844f37fa70d38ad7&ei=12
Democrats solidly behind Israel we are told
but then:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rep-jayapal-warns-president-biden-says-he-needs-to-be-careful-about-support-for-israel/ar-AA1j66Go
I don't see any anti Israel or anti-semitism coming from Republicans.
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In my youth it was listening to apologists on the left minimize the wholesale murder embraced by various communist regimes. In my dotage it is listening to apologists on the left minimize the atrocities committed by Hamas as they implicitly and explicitly call for the genocide of all Israelis (yo apologists, you may want to look a wee bit more closely at the Hamas extermination menu; there are more than Jews on that list, with many of you likely candidates for defenestration, stoning, et al). Never could grasp that willing blindness; this piece seeks to explain it:
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/10/30/far-left-support-for-hamas-is-not-an-aberration/
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2nd post.
Yeah, this leaves a mark:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/the-woke-code-of-morality-was-all-nonsense/
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This is not your grandfather's Democrat party.
CNN was once the greatest news network in the world and AOC seems to be the senior Statesman of the Democrat Party. They discuss the greatest issue of the day. Why call for a ceasefire after one side has attacked and the other side has not had time to respond? AOC reaches deep into her little brain to explain the unexplainable.
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1714254898122903772
How can anyone ever be against a ceasefire, and then there is the questioner. These violent attackers, "some even call them terrorists".
Aren't they?
There is killing them. What are the other ways of stopping terrorists?
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Bill O Reilly
has book 'Killing the Killers' ( I have not read )
next one could read 'Killing the Jews'
one chapter to white, one to blacks
and the rest to radical Muslims.
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… in advance of APEC, at least:
https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/news/san-francisco-clears-drug-addicts-and-homeless-out-of-downtown-ahead-of-biden-and-xi-jinping-summit/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR0VYITw-M7NIiZjcVj6kaq5QZ4fuTyeAYksFChjTM9npk94VmbkMb00PqM
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How bend-the-knee-third-world groveling of Newsom.
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don't clear them for US citizens but do for the mortal enemy of the country Xi
yes a Chinese child is smart enough to take down Newsom and laugh at (not with) him
and by association the entire US.
In San Fransisco's China town they must be either shaking their heads in astonishment at how stupid our leaders are
or laughing in bemusement over what fools they are,
or probably both
enough bitching by me today (I don't want to wear out my welcome!)
good night.
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… in advance of APEC, at least:
https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/news/san-francisco-clears-drug-addicts-and-homeless-out-of-downtown-ahead-of-biden-and-xi-jinping-summit/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR0VYITw-M7NIiZjcVj6kaq5QZ4fuTyeAYksFChjTM9npk94VmbkMb00PqM
Hide what's happening in SF from Xi? How could he ever find out? Let's see, there's the internet, he had a spy in Diane Feinstein's inner circle for 20 years, he owns tic toc and this might not help but through 23 & me he has all our DNA.
They're trying to hide the Calif human disaster from the media, not from Xi.
Interesting that they've known how to pack 'em up and move' em out all along.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/10/thiessen-sen-dianne-feinstein-had-a-chinese-spy-on-her-staff-for-20-years/
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Well said.
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"They're trying to hide the Calif human disaster from the media, not from Xi."
Actually I had it backwards, the government is helping the media cover (up) the story.
'Journalism is
covering the biggest stories of the day
with a pillow
until they stop breathing.'
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'Journalism is covering the biggest stories of the day with a pillow until they stop breathing.'
Yup.
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Like Dana Bash telling Vivek everytime he brings up Hunter "there is NO evidence!" (about joe)
Finally Vivek said there is circumstanctial evidence and once again Bash yells "there is NO evidence!!!!!"
I am not a lawyer but since when is circumstantial evidence "NO" evidence?
Many a defendant have been convicted of circumstantial evidence in the past.
https://blog.ipleaders.in/circumstantial-evidence-sole-basis-conviction-not/
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Trust fund commie’s hobby is scaring Jews:
https://freebeacon.com/israel/hes-a-communist-trust-fund-baby-who-inherited-millions-now-hes-using-daddys-money-to-harass-jews/
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I’ve been seeing a lot of this brand of twisted logic lately:
David Bernstein
@ProfDBernstein
Me: Israel needs to crush Hamas.
Them: We need a cease-fire and diplomatic solution.
Hamas: We will never give up our fight against the Zionist oppressor, we will give them 100 more 7th of Octobers.
Them: See, Hamas is interested in a cease-fire and diplomatic solution.
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VDH makes a point that only the far left can't grasp:
https://victorhanson.com/when-has-war-even-been-proportional/?fbclid=IwAR2EYRXdHn3QDdhlA35fikVutLdd8pg_uYe-A9AREr3p3EyRuD6qJHqtkSM
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2nd post.
NGO outgoing editor indicts Human Rights Watch’s pro-Hamas bias:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/outgoing-human-rights-watch-senior-editor-blasts-groups-infected-work-on-israel/?fbclid=IwAR1Re1rGYsaS8ToGpF0NiiYMKRRBw2jjIQubqri8qjjsAWrPTEk88ZF5vMs
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insinuation that if Biden was 50 instead of 81 he would be crushing it:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/axelrod-says-biden-has-a-50-50-shot-in-2024-he-thinks-he-can-cheat-nature/ar-AA1kez3h?ocid=msedgntphdr&cvid=609a016b3307443ff8a74500eb3c6451&ei=19
psst : comrad, it ain't his age for the reason he is disliked by nearly everyone.
:roll:
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"psst : comrad, it ain't his age for the reason he is disliked by nearly everyone."
ccp nails it. It's the policies stupid.
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" ccp nails it. It's the policies stupid"
yes. As an OBamian this will never be mentioned
if not age then it must be "messaging"
how do we convince people inflation is good for them!
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https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/metro/mayor-eric-adams-rips-vile-show-of-antisemitism-at-nyc-school/
"“The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated in any of our schools, let alone anywhere else in our city,” Adams tweeted Saturday night as he shared The Post’s story on the incident.
“We are better than this,” Hizzoner added.
Here we go again. He copies Obamster's line "we are"
What is with the use of *WE*?
Don't include everyone because you are too cowardly to say who is to blame
Same twisting of words like Obama
when putting blame on Hamas attack on "all of us"
All of us , or we are NOT to blame here.
it is some of the people who vote for you .
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"(Trump) a man whom former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill recently described as “more dangerous” than Hitler. The problem with this reasoning, such as it is, is that the dictator in question would never have allowed a political opponent to denounce him in such terms in any public venue. And, during Trump’s previous four years as President, he never got around to executing any of his critics."
https://spectator.org/bidenomics-the-high-price-of-gaslighting/
(Doug). Which side has the fascists?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-america-abandoned-the-greatest-economy-in-history/ar-AA1kvsm3
Everything was great until Reagan screwed it al up.
Umm, we had a quarter of a century boom starting with Reagan and ending with the election of those promising to end it.
Amazing how upside down the facts can be twisted.
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Advocates for Social Security and Medicare say an upcoming budget hearing will lead to the creation of a "death panel" to gut the social programs.
The House Budget Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday morning to examine the need for a fiscal commission to address the nation's debt.
of course the libs will pick this up and go posting all over the same label
on every social medias MSM Dem Pols etc
before it evens has a chance to start
so the country and its programs simply go broke
so depressing
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https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/cup-foods-sues-minneapolis-jacob-frey-george-floyd-square/#:~:text=The%20lawsuit%20accuses%20the%20city,counterfeit%20%2420%2C%20sparking%20worldwide%20protests.
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the problem is not enough government handouts:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-racism-in-this-blue-state-can-be-illustrated-with-one-infuriating-statistic/ar-AA1kSRlx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=39cdc4bc74d24292b154380f562ac4d3&ei=8
[and not the real problem which leaves hispanics to have to need foster care to begin with]
more free s..t is NOT the answer to family pathology that is increasing due to failed policies, overwhelming failed immigration enforcement etc.
:wink:
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Slow Joe, Pres. Biden:
“Let me be clear to any corporation that hasn’t brought their prices back down even as inflation has come down: It’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden tweeted . “Give American consumers a break.”
Washington Examiner says he flunks Economics. True but I say he flunks math.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/biden-flunks-econ-101-with-incoherent-inflation-tweet
Inflation is the rate of change . A guy with a second grade understanding is telling us that the rate of change of the rate of change has come down.
Let me put the reality in simpler terms:
"You spent too much dumbshit."
Now what's left for the rest of us is worth less and less until we replace you with people who understand this, and even then the pain you caused will haunt us for decades or longer.
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And think of what it would have been had the $5T "Build Back Better" passed!!!
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News item:
Man becomes more conservative as he regains brain function.
(Fetterman)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/the-week-in-pictures-context-edition.php
'Rather than attack your enemy, surprise him by retreating and leaving all your equipment behind.'
- General Milley (?)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gen-mark-milley-back-us-withdrawal-afghanistan/story?id=103164460
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" Man becomes more conservative as he regains brain function.
(Fetterman)" :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/senator-fetterman-s-switch-from-the-right-s-punchline-to-the-left-s-punching-bag/ar-AA1lhrmB?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=f66335c6b0a2459695c7b4e48c632507&ei=58
if he would switch to the Rs I agree he is fit for the Senate :-D
8-)
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Thanks ccp, the Fetterman joke needed a link to his recent statements.
From the story, 33 Pittsburgh have come in under Biden. I heard 4 Nebraska, and I can't remember how many Ireland's. Everybody needs some reference point they can visualize, and most of these numbers are understated. That said. I want to ask all voters of the Left, when did you find this out and why don't you give a damn about the consequences?
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Dem voter polling shows they disbelieve Trump indictments:
https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2023/12/11/lawsuits-against-trump-are-so-transparently-political-that-even-democrats-are-catching-on-n4924657
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I wish we could get a GOOD republican spokesperson on CNN to counter their BS
most of the Rs they do have are lacky's
I guess they are worried if they fight back with the truth too hard they are out of a gig
Vivek was good at talking back to Phillips though I wish it not over the entrapment theory of 1/6 which is marginal at best.
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Well this wasn’t a very good idea:
https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/15/staffer-caught-filming-sex-tape-senate-hearing-room/
Caution: a gent’s booty gets shaken. And stirred.
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Jordan Petersen lays out the “logic.”
The way the new world functions
Natalie Solent (Essex) · Culture Wars · Middle East & Islamic · Totalitarianism · UK affairs
In a Telegraph article ostensibly about the pro-Hamas protests, Jordan Peterson describes the emerging new system:
If you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimiser. If you are not, you are a victim.
A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are, as well, only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on “philosophical” grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimiser, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.
If you are a victimiser, after all, you have no moral standing whatsoever. No punishment is therefore undeserved, or sufficiently severe. This is true even if you are “only” a member of a victimising group, and have done nothing wrong other than that, because “individual” is a category that within the postmodern philosophy no longer exists.
If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable – even morally required – even if you are merely a self-aggrandising, vindictive and hypocritical “ally” of some marginalised group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door to the worst possible actions by the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern Left – most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the their most resentful fantasies.
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Ah, the pithiness of Jordan Peterson!
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/harvard-president-claudine-gay-corrects-two-scholarly-articles-following-allegations-of-plagiarism/ar-AA1lzOYL?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=3d2e8311106241d1a8f81a520012a289&ei=32
message from Harvard board: ok, all fixed ===> MOVE ON, assholes!
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we better do this before the election =>
https://dnyuz.com/2023/12/19/new-york-to-consider-reparations-for-descendants-of-enslaved-people/
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An infuriating piece about the horrific treatment of women by Hamas Oct. 7 and thereafter. How the left excuses their silence here is beyond me:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-the-sexual-atrocities-hamas-committed?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=363080&post_id=140162669&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=9bg2k&utm_medium=email
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/16/opinion/trump-nears-the-gop-nomination-and-elitist-media-coverage-proves-its-2016-again/
Me :
Wait wasn't it around 3 to 6 months David Brooks of the NYT dared ask maybe it is about us? meaning the darn LEFT itself that half the country is voting against not necessarily voting for Trump.
Of course that was dismissed and stuffed into a drain in the basement.
And now they pretend they are flummoxed as to Trump's 'strange' appeal.
How could this be they ask? :roll:
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/16/opinion/trump-nears-the-gop-nomination-and-elitist-media-coverage-proves-its-2016-again/
Me :
Wait wasn't it around 3 to 6 months David Brooks of the NYT dared ask maybe it is about us? meaning the darn LEFT itself that half the country is voting against not necessarily voting for Trump.
Of course that was dismissed and stuffed into a drain in the basement.
And now they pretend they are flummoxed as to Trump's 'strange' appeal.
How could this be they ask? :roll:
Yes they don't seem to understand the actions of the Left cause the equal opposite reaction.
Newton's 3rd law.
Example. Open border. Close the border.
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" Newton's 3rd law."
I love it. Simple physics :-D
-
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/19/alex-soros-says-davos-wrong-to-think-trump-win-is-a-done-deal.html
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Walgreens unit with unsustainable shoplifting among other crimes issues in Boston cajoled by Usual Suspects to remain open despite being unsafe and unprofitable:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/woketivists-protest-to-try-and-force-walgreens-into-keeping-stores-in-high-crime-parts-of-boston-open/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=woketivists-protest-to-try-and-force-walgreens-into-keeping-stores-in-high-crime-parts-of-boston-open
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I never liked him
I don't care that he shed tears for 9/11 survivors he still a lib shit:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/can-jon-stewart-live-up-to-his-daily-show-legacy/ar-BB1hg6Lk?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c3b6fc0420b1486b85b1c79a8c729542&ei=11
That's it: bring some TV comedy act back on to cash in during the election year all the while bashing the guy (Trump) he hates.
low class.
Just what we don't need : another smart ass Colbert.
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I never liked him
I don't care that he shed tears for 9/11 survivors he still a lib shit:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/can-jon-stewart-live-up-to-his-daily-show-legacy/ar-BB1hg6Lk?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c3b6fc0420b1486b85b1c79a8c729542&ei=11
That's it: bring some TV comedy act back on to cash in during the election year all the while bashing the guy (Trump) he hates.
low class.
Just what we don't need : another smart ass Colbert.
Hmm, I may have figured out a way to solve several problems at once: popularize a drinking game where, whenever someone gushes on about that smirking tool Jon Stewart, every one of his fans within earshot has to do a shot. Cirrhosis will quickly prevent a broad swath of nitwits from making it to the polls and, as his fanbase croaks, Stewart will have to find another aren't-we-all-just-too-clever-for-being-in-on-the-same-joke brand of "Progressive" public intellectual masturbation audience to vend his "humor" to.
Wanna speed the process up? Substitute a snort of street fentanyl for booze....
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Couldn’t find a UN Thread this would fit in, same w/ Biden-based topics, so here it lives.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/state-dept-pauses-unrwa-funding-amid-allegations-employees-participated-in-oct-7-massacre/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=state-dept-pauses-unrwa-funding-amid-allegations-employees-participated-in-oct-7-massacre
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Hiding here in plain sight :-D
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1790.msg24728#msg24728
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Hiding here in plain sight :-D
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1790.msg24728#msg24728
Didn’t strike me this piece had much to do with international relations or US law, but was instead more of a “cognitive dissonance of the UN,” or “UN funds terror” sort of thing, or perhaps “Biden’s flip flops the MSM ignores” topic. Perhaps I took “international relations” too literally, thinking it meant sovereign nations instead of terror orgs and the NGOs funding ‘em.
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Stop what you are doing and read this. It lays out why we are at where we are at: ruthless efforts to limit options for the American voting public. This really isn’t the place for this piece, but I can’t find a better one and hence am tempted to start an “American Oligarchy” thread.
https://www.racket.news/p/the-anti-democratic-movement-targeted?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2x9941xaT_8AhmtjiGoICHv_fkbsHBqUONy2NNQGURC3UiyN1LbYaOcRg
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Let's continue using this thread for that:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1709.msg21472#msg21472
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Chicaga’s (as it’s pronounced there) new mayor ashcans the sweetness & light he’d previously committed to:
https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/01/28/this-is-the-reason-chicago-is-puling-up-the-welcome-mat-for-illegal-aliens-n4925907
ETA: the city’s denizens are also objecting:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/black-chicago-residents-want-city-officials-to-remove-sanctuary-city-status/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=black-chicago-residents-want-city-officials-to-remove-sanctuary-city-status
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Maher says he is emailed by libs that yell at him for having anyone on his show that is contra lib.
But what good is this if he won't name the scumbuckets?
Carl Reiner?
Conway?
Nicole Wallace or Madcow?
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https://victorhanson.com/do-leftists-now-believe-leftism-doesnt-work/?fbclid=IwAR2barl621y35ch09203m4kUIqvb5ZBjOMEwNnobVT9BPsHHbTHJLBmhGao
-
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/hubert-humphreynow-more-than-ever
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… is called out top to bottom here. No prisoners taken in the vid:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/mustsee_video_one_amazing_black_woman_gets_it_about_democrats_all_of_it.html?fbclid=IwAR2LPCi9YlduxlKsB8rBJ2BXRit2KZseoxFKWAm74LAST0USs77SGtkWcbQ
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Democrats own 95% of media yet Clyburn is trying to tell us Biden's dismal poll ratings are due to poor messaging and the spread of misinformation:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/05/clyburn-misinformation-seems-to-be-overtaking-the-whole-political-process-thats-why-bidens-struggling/
:roll:
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/lawyers-who-voided-elon-musks-excessive-tesla-pay-package-want-6-billion-fee
Lawyers who voided Elon Musk's 'excessive' Tesla pay package want $6 billion fee
-
It is massive lawfare/media warfare/DNC lawfare against Musk since he took over Twitter.
I think lawyers are worth hundreds of thousands per hour don't you.
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… is dependent upon party affiliation?
https://joefriedcpa.substack.com/p/fani-and-the-politics-of-the-ping?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR2XNH6XoupA0Z0fgibJjzJUly3VqyHxANOluQJCwQjIP72-lxgZ4P99-_Q&triedRedirect=true
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Various reactions to th SOTU:
Republican Security Council
·
This photo sums up the response of many to President Biden's State of the Union address. 12 reactions from the right and left.
1) The Atlantic "This State of the Union was the most unusual in living memory."
2) Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report is a Democrat who says "The speech felt like something you would hear at the Democratic National Convention rather than a State of the Union address. He mentioned his 'predecessor' in negative terms at least 11 times."
3) Republican Security Council "At the beginning, Biden made some important observations about the combined major threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but at the same time he is proposing a defense budget below the level of inflation."
4) AEI "Biden moved quickly from important fundamental points at the beginning to partisan policy points undermining the tone and potential bipartisan agreement he was building on. His speech writers are idiots."
5) Pollster Frank Luntz "It was the loudest State of the Union speech. Let’s see whether undecided voters like being yelled at."
6) Politico "Biden clearly choose a hammer over an olive branch."
7) Marc Thiessen, Washington Post "Biden focused on his predecessor instead of pitching himself to American voters."
8 ) Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer "If Trump gave a blatantly partisan State of the Union address like this, MSNBC and CNN would have quickly cut away from the live coverage. This was at a level never seen before."
9) PolitiFact "Biden said 'There are 1000 billionaires in America... the average federal taxes for those billionaires… 8.2%.
”That’s False. The wealthiest Americans currently pay an effective tax rate of more than 20% of their income, not 8%. . . The president's son is under federal indictment for not paying his taxes or taking care of his family."
10) Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is not happy because Biden said Laken Riley was "killed by an illegal." National Review "This will actually help Biden if he can stand the pressure from the left."
11) The New York Times "What's astonishing is how interactive it was. Biden was actually engaging with his hecklers, challenging and gently razzing them."
12) Noah Pollak, Free Beacon "The Gaza pier optics were particularly bizarre. Biden is helpless to stop millions of illegal aliens but instead of a border wall he's building piers in terrorist-held territory 7,000 miles away. What?"
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pete-buttigieg-jumps-to-defend-biden-on-cnn-after-being-asked-if-he-s-comfortable-with-term-illegal/ar-BB1jyAQv?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=d20702b8b3d340c0bd4eb3ab7c625976&ei=20
and Leftist Peggy Noonan thought it was great:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-of-the-union-shows-there-s-life-in-the-old-boy-yet-e1319b97
Does she not realize she epitomizes the perjorative labels = "elistist " and "swamp creature"?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pete-buttigieg-jumps-to-defend-biden-on-cnn-after-being-asked-if-he-s-comfortable-with-term-illegal/ar-BB1jyAQv?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=d20702b8b3d340c0bd4eb3ab7c625976&ei=20
and Leftist Peggy Noonan thought it was great:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-of-the-union-shows-there-s-life-in-the-old-boy-yet-e1319b97
Does she not realize she epitomizes the perjorative labels = "elistist " and "swamp creature"?
NPR does not really deny it was an angry, divisive, partisan political speech.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1236782758/state-of-the-union-address-biden-trump
Looks like he's ready to do rallies. We'll see how many sign up to attend when the attendance isn't compulsory.
No I didn't watch it. Was out doing more fun things: https://youtu.be/Lt-1F8SKVfQ?si=dfrSoY2gcmROza_a
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" No I didn't watch it "
you missed nothing.
It was more of the same LEFTIST/OBAMA crap shoved down our throats
"fair share"
bash the "rich"
shoutout to teachers unions - teachers should be paid more
shoutout to the unions - build back better with green jobs
shout out to Climate activists
shout out to Palestinians
shout out to minorities
shout out to "illegals"
shout out to abortionists
shout out to endless Ukraine war
do not touch Social Security - he will guard it with his life etc
more government programs
F/U to Trump
F/u to anyone who opposes him
and of course the female all dressed in white in the audience to stand for "abortion"
their only majority supported issue
here is what he said about China :
https://time.com/6253778/chinese-balloon-biden-state-of-the-union-2023/
while most likely his speech was delivered on TikTok to reach the younger crowd - one of his team's
assortment of ragtag voters.
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unless I missed it while brushing teeth or letting my dog outside during the 100 % partisan rant:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-all-due-respect-biden-scolds-supreme-court-justices-to-their-faces-over-dobbs-decision/ar-BB1jwNC4?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=465e4cfb0b18489abfe47fc364f1e8b2&ei=15
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Ok I'm listening now. Three comments and maybe I'll have to come back to clean up the language, angry man, fucking liar and economic ignoramus.
If you combine lying with deceptions, it's almost every sentence.
He says "more affordable" at every turn but nearly every proposal will make things less affordable.
No mention of spending 40% more than we take in, but he did cut the deficit by billions or was it trillions? Raise your hands, fiscal hawk independents, if you think President Biden is the balanced budget candidate. "It's no joke."
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/03/the-sotu-from-hell.php
What is he mad about? He made this mess and he had control of Congress for 2/3 of his time so far.
Last mention before closing, he's going to cure cancer. BINGO! Whoops, I thought that was a first term promise. He also promised to be a transitional president, serve a term and step aside. But when the lips move, the lies and deception come out. Half his audience loves that.
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To the Dems, isn't chanting "four more years!" at an official government proceeding just as rude as the other side heckling or shouting him down? (The gold star dad heckler was arrested.)
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And then there was RFK jr, (releasing a 10-minute campaign film), now I've seen them all.
https://youtu.be/A0yvc2Qhn5E?si=plSGGHfdoopPKrUg
1. He lacks the charisma of his father and uncle, even of Ross perot.
2.His message starts with linking liberty with prosperity, good for him!
3. His main point through the meat of the speech is that the state of the union is sh*tty. A slam on both parties but more specific would be a slam on the incumbent and the trifecta of power that he wasted the first two years.
4. Like Ross Perot, brilliant at describing what's wrong; vacuous at detailing a solution. We are a great country we can come together... blah blah. Recreate what we had BEFORE JFK, the 1950s, good luck with that.
From the point of linking freedom and prosperity, you would think that he would draw mostly from Trump votes. But look back to the candidacy of Ross Perot. Two candidates stood up on stage beating up on the status quo. But if voters want to disrupt the status quo, get more individual liberty and prosperity, the electable answer is Trump, like it or not.
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President Biden: "I told him, Bibi, and don't repeat this, but you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting."
“I’m on a hot mic here. Good. That’s good.” pic.twitter.com/KCgpbx4awf
(Doug). What is a "come to Jesus" meeting with a Jewish leader anyway?
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as always wearing his shyster mobster color -> black
I suppose he assumes this is akin to a Judge's black robe.....
twisting and turning tying and untying rotating folding the arguments to fit his DNC narrative :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/tribe-scotus-did-a-favor-for-oath-breaking-insurrectionists/ar-BB1jz7oq?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a0b28c3b97c643958693bc773870361d&ei=11
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Palestinian protest held at the World Trade Center. Not sure how they expect the optics and associations to help their cause, so I guess this was more of an in-your-face effort:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/mob-of-anti-israel-protesters-swarms-the-world-trade-center-in-nyc/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mob-of-anti-israel-protesters-swarms-the-world-trade-center-in-nyc
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https://nypost.com/2024/03/12/us-news/powerful-white-house-official-anthony-bernal-jill-bidens-work-husband-is-a-metoo-nightmare-with-claims-of-bullying-sexual-harassment/
I am thinking this guy must be gay .
What hetero would be obsessed with penis size ?
What a sick person . Who talks like this at work?
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https://twitter.com/UK_DA_USA/status/1763636167293956283
bizarre
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https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-9/clause-8/
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Any irony here? The people promoting Biden at 82 are afraid that Sonia Sotomayor is too old at 69.
https://headlineusa.com/panicked-dems-want-sotomayor-69-to-retire-before-trump-77-wins-presidency/
Besides losing the presidency as the polls stand today, Democrats see that they may never control the Senate again.
As they radicalize the polarization, half the country is extreme maga, whatever that is, Red States may not elect democratic senators anymore. Cf West Virginia, Montana, Ohio.
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Hi Doug,
Sotomayor has juvenile diabetes since age 7
far more likely then not she has complications
eye problems
kidney problems
nerve problems
heart problems
for example
she could get into medical trouble at any time far more than the average 69 yo.
that is why dems wring their hands over her longevity.
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Thanks ccp. (I didn't know that.)
Biden has some health concerns as well.
https://www.moodyneuro.org/joe-biden-is-a-survivor/
It would be nice if the person pushing Sotomayor out for health reasons was - her, and not political hacks. Former Justice Breyer looks like the character from Monte Python, look I'm still alive...
Who will they pick for the Female Hispanic Identity Seat? Maybe someone just finishing liberal law school to get the maximum number of years out of her. Needless to say, white, conservative, constitutionalist males need not apply.
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A bunch of juicy ironies shown here, with some great graphs as well:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/03/misinformation-experts-are-almost-all-left-wing-and-they-want-to-censor-you/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=misinformation-experts-are-almost-all-left-wing-and-they-want-to-censor-you
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/28/obama-fears-trump-win-in-2024-making-frequent-calls-to-bidens-chief-of-staff/
Umm, isn't it Obama's staff anyway, wasn't he calling the shots, that is until Joe refused to step down late last year.
Name three things Clinton, Obama and Biden have in common.
Lost the House, lost the Senate, lost the race for the successor.
One more thing, they could lie to your face without hesitation. I didn't have sexual relations with that woman Monica Lewinski. You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. I had nothing to do with my son's business dealings.
How would these advice sessions from Obama to Joe go?
'Uh Joe, uh, tell 'em your gonna tax the rich.' 'Barack, I already did.' 'Uh Joe, leave the border open'. 'Barack, it's open.' ' Uh Joe, tell 'em your gonna transform America.' 'Into what?'
Nothing funny here, point is Clinton and Obama got by on personal political skills, not by having magical ideas or governing well.
Clinton was saved by Newt Gingrich. He was on a one term path before Republicans took Congress.
Obama was saved by Mitt Romney and Candy Crowley. If Mitt had done his homework and stood up to Candy with facts, Barack was also headed to the ash heap of one term Presidents history - and there would be no Trump.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/central-asian-migrants-face-xenophobic-backlash-in-russia-after-moscow-terror-attack/ar-BB1kMvOe?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=DCTS&cvid=bd35466fc3824c279a4e58e4899b4b4c&ei=73
4 Mooslim Tajikastanis terroize innocents at a theater
and then the normal backlash against them is labelled ->XENOPHOBIA
how stupid and annoying is this.
what are Russians supposed to do invite every know Tajikastani to dinner for a love fest?
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Democrat party's Schutzstaffel:
https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2013/04/shays-longue-rebellion.html
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Valuation of the business is the worst crime imaginable, brought to you by the people who think donors buying Hunter painting for millions is fine.
https://babylonbee.com/news/4d-chess-trump-makes-mar-a-lago-worth-500-million-by-hanging-up-3-hunter-biden-paintings
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… arrested for carrying a concealed firearm. Chicago/Illinois citizens tax dollars in action:
CHICAGO: Another Day, Another ‘Ceasefire’ ‘Anti-Violence’ Worker Busted on Gun Charges
By John Boch - April 1, 202446
The do-gooders in Illinois believe that if you hire enough felons to “interrupt” violence, somehow you’ll make the streets safer. Given that Murder City USA has kept that title for 12 years in a row now, one would think that smarter heads would prevail and the state legislature would vote to stop paying millions of taxpayer dollars to these foolish endeavors.
Yet each year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs off on scores of millions paid to these organizations like “CeaseFire” who employ ex-cons who will supposedly stop gang violence. ($110M in 2022 alone!) Ironically, CeaseFire lost one of its recent leaders thanks to an arrest for beating his wife domestic battery.
And while shoveling the money at these groups never stops, neither do the arrests of these paid “anti-violence” workers, often times for gun charges. Take Davon Turner, aged 35 – or in common parlance, “old enough to know better.”
See Davon, a frequent felon in the Land O’ Lincoln’s criminal justice system (or what masquerades as such), walked out of the house that day packing a GLOCK Fo-Tay. He came to the attention of Five-Oh because he and a bunch of his buddies acted like fools while smoking the Devil’s lettuce in a building where not everyone appreciated the smell of skunk.
One thing led to another and cops cuffed him after finding (Surprise!) that GLOCK .40. Of course, when he showed up at the Cook County Jail, he proudly mentioned that he had gainful employment. Indeed, he worked for CeaseFire/FLIP anti-violence programs. Paid for by Illinois taxpayers.
Why if Illinois’ leaders only treated the law-abiding people as kindly as they treated the criminal class (to include illegal aliens) as well. From CWB Chicago:
CHICAGO — An anti-violence worker is facing a Class X felony gun charge after Chicago police said they found him carrying a gun on the Near West Side.
Cops were called to the 2300 block of West Van Buren on Saturday evening by someone who said a group of men were smoking pot and refusing to leave the building, according to the arrest report for Davon Turner, 35.
The first officers to arrive found a firearm magazine at the scene and radioed descriptions of a group of men who were leaving the area, including at least one who was holding their waistband, said the report.
CPD officers stopped a group matching the description nearby. Turner, who was clutching his waistband near an “L-shaped object,” was one of them, the report stated. Prosecutors say the cops recovered a 40-caliber handgun from Turner.
The arrest report lists Ceasefire/FLIP, two Chicago anti-violence programs, as his employer.
He’s charged with Class X armed habitual criminal and being a felon in possession of a firearm. His previous felony convictions include being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2014 and narcotics cases in 2018, 2013, 2008, and 2007.
Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that not a single syllable was mentioned about how Gov. and Presidential-hopeful J.B. Pritzker’s so-called “Protect Illinois Communities Act” failed to protect Illinois communities from ne’er-do-wells like Davon Turner.
Maybe the PICA gun and magazine ban really just disarms the law-abiding, not the criminal class.
Who would have thunk it?
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/chicago-another-day-another-ceasefire-anti-violence-worker-busted-on-gun-charges/
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... but don't you dare say so out loud. If you need any further proof that "Progressive" politics and cognitive dissonance march hand in non-gender specific hand, I provide you this it's-homophobic-to-point-out-Hamas-is-homophobic gem. The upside? Defenestration is much more difficult in Gaza these days given all the Hamas enclaves Israel has leveled:
Unhinged Rutgers prof says it’s ‘homophobic’ to note that Hamas brutalizes LGBT people
Criticizing people who point out Hamas's harsh treatment of LGBT-identifying people, a Rutgers teacher said: 'We have to start naming this as homophobic. You cannot rehearse violence to queer people,’ the professor asserted.
The other professor involved in the event had previously dismissed Israel’s tolerance to LGBT-identifying people as ‘pinkwashing’ done for propaganda purposes.
BY PATRICK MCDONALD '26
Michael Duke | New York Correspondent
April 3, 2024, 9:07 am ET
A Rutgers University professor said it is “homophobic” to point out that LGBT-identifying people face persecution in the Gaza Strip.
At Rutgers University in New Jersey on March 20, Maya Mikdashi, an associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers joined University of Illinois professor Nadine Naber for a discussion titled “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle,” according to the Daily Mail.
[RELATED: Columbia taps pro-Hamas, ‘anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar’ to teach intersectional history]
During the event, Mikdashi commented: “So I’ve been at protests where I’m then told ‘don’t you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine’. . . . We have to start naming this as homophobic. You cannot rehearse violence to queer people. It’s violent,” wrote the Daily Mail.
Naber claimed: “We’re going to need our organizing to center queer and trans people not only because they are especially vulnerable to colonial violence and the racism and the doxxing, but they also embody exceptionally nuanced wisdom about Zionism because they are living it in all its complexity,” the Daily Mail continued.
Naber also claimed Israelis have been guilty of raping Palestinian women since the founding of the Jewish State: “ndeed the practices of rape and sexual assault that have been well-documented during the founding of Israel and continued today are not an exception or a secondary impact of colonial violence. . . [They] are part of the settler, colonial white supremacist logics and practices of Israel that conflate colonized women with the land and nature and assume that therefore to dominate the land necessitates dominating Palestinian women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities from 1948 until today,” reported the Daily Mail.
Naber has previously argued that Israel “pinkwashes” itself to improve its image, claiming in a 2021 Truthout op-ed: “Pinkwashing is a . . . strategy that Israel deploys to distract attention away from its oppression of Palestinians in the face of a growing international Palestinian solidarity movement. AlQaws activists, centering the experiences of queer Palestinians, describe pinkwashing as an international propaganda effort that aims to rebrand Israel as a liberated ‘modern’ and therefore ‘gay-friendly’ state compared with what it portrays as hyper-homophobic ‘Palestinian-Arab-Muslim culture.’”
[RELATED: Unhinged student group at Massachusetts college promotes violence as ‘the only way to liberate Palestine’]
The Daily Mail related that “Queers for Palestine” protests have risen in frequency in the U.S. since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, and that some critics have pointed out the apparent inconsistency in LGBT support for a Palestinian government that is not seen as friendly to LGBT issues.
LGBT-identifying people face great hardship and discrimination in Palestinian-controlled territories, and a great number of LGBT-identifying Palestinians go to Israel to find safety from persecution by other Palestinians, Reason Magazine reported.
Campus Reform has reached out to Rutgers University, Maya Mikdashi, and Nadine Naber for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
https://www.campusreform.org/article/unhinged-rutgers-prof-says-its-homophobic-note-hamas-brutalizes-lgbt-people-/25127
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https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/msnbc-cuts-off-democratic-congressman-174138973.html
asked a question that begins with people "feel" like they are being gaslighted and then he proceeds to gaslight us and as usual tells us it is a messaging problem
then gets cut off the air with the honest news... that tells everyone he is full of shit.
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This could live more than one place but given the abject asshattery documented in this piece I’ll drop it here:
“Crime Guns” -- D.C.’s MPD Under an ATF Cloud
MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2024 “Crime Guns” -- D.C.’s MPD Under an ATF Cloud
Some reckonings are a long time coming. The District of Columbia’s irrational hostility to all things gun-related and to legitimate, licensed retail gun dealers in particular, has reportedly culminated with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) scrutinizing the D.C. police department under a program aimed at suspected “bad apple” gun dealers.
When the District’s one and only Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) who processed gun transfers lost his lease in 2011, D.C.’s restrictive zoning laws forced him to temporarily close his business because he was unable to get approval for an alternative location. District law forbids firearm transfers between unlicensed individuals, which meant residents were left without a legal means of acquiring or transferring handguns. It was only after a lawsuit was filed that local politicians agreed to lease him space in the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) headquarters, allowing the FFL to resume operations. Even so, the location was not zoning-compliant and required emergency legislation to sanction it.
In March 2020, the FFL “abruptly” shut down his business, and the MPD itself stepped in as the District’s FFL. Mayor Muriel Bowser justified the move as necessary to avoid more litigation, “so that we wouldn’t run into any constitutional issues or open ourselves up to meddling in our gun laws from outside groups… once there is a viable commercial alternative licensed to operate in D.C., MPD will no longer need to serve this role.”
As one source pointed out, not only did the MPD-as-FFL continue to charge $125 per firearm for each transfer –“$100 more than the average cost in the USA to process a firearm transfer for an eligible citizen” – there were questions as to whether the MPD qualified for an FFL and whether the ATF “gave the MPD special treatment” in granting the license. There was also the conflict between the D.C. government, a federal enclave, acting as an FFL and keeping the mandatory records required by that role at its “business premises,” which premises also happened to be “a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof,” contrary to the prohibition in 18 U.S.C. § 926(a)(3).
A report from NBC’s News4 I-Team now claims to have “federal documents proving a concerning number of guns the Metropolitan Police Department helped bring into the District ended up at crime scenes. So many guns recovered at crime scenes, in such a brief period, that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives placed D.C. police into a program designed to give extra scrutiny to dealers with higher levels of so-called crime guns.”
The report alleges that the ATF issued the MPD a “Demand 2 Program” letter in May 2022. The Demand 2 Program requires FFLs with 25 or more firearm traces in a calendar year, with a short “time to crime” of three years or less, to submit an annual report of firearms transactions to the ATF, followed by quarterly reports of used firearms acquired by the FFL. The reporting requirement applies until the FFL is instructed to stop by the ATF. The letter, of course, concerns just the eight or so months that the MPD acted as the District’s exclusive FFL, when it limited itself to processing transfers, including conducting background checks and enforcing the District’s gun registration and other requirements.
Based on the NBC report, “at least 25 of the guns MPD helped sell to D.C. residents in 2020 and 2021 were recovered at crime scenes in 2021 alone,” and that “[f]or the dozens of guns recovered at crime scenes that D.C. police helped sell, the time-to-crime was at most 20 months – less than two years.”
The initial reporting period under the Demand 2 Program is as identified in the ATF letter or no less than the 12 months prior to the date of the letter; follow-up reporting periods are quarterly, going forward from the date of the ATF letter. The ATF’s stepped-up reporting requirements are likely meaningless in the case of the MPD, given that the department ceased its short-lived tenure as an FFL effective January 4, 2021.
Anti-gun politicians and their gun control allies have argued for years that high crime rates in gun control strongholds are fueled by so-called “bad apple” gun dealers and less stringent laws in adjacent jurisdictions. The Brady Campaign, for instance, claimed that Chicago’s strict gun control was undermined by neighboring states’ laws and certain suburban dealers that “simply flood the streets of Chicago with thousands of guns.” The Giffords Law Center asserts that Washington, D.C. “has some of the strongest” gun control in the nation and “(b)ecause of this, firearms purchased in DC are rarely used in crimes… nearly every gun recovered at a crime scene in DC was originally purchased in another state.” This statement conveniently overlooks D.C.’s rising crime rates and that guns could only be purchased elsewhere, given that the District lacks a single retail gun store.
The NBC report refers to a letter in a similar vein that Mayor Bowser wrote to Virginia lawmakers on January 8, 2020. It named Virginia (a Giffords B plus-rated state) as the main source of “crime guns” used in the District, and asked for measures to address gun trafficking through stronger licensing and increased inspections for gun dealers (“ATF data show that criminal or negligent gun dealers are responsible for ‘nearly half’ of the total number of trafficked firearms uncovered in ATF investigations”).
A few months later, on April 20, Bowser signed Mayor’s Order 2020-064, authorizing the MPD to obtain a federal firearms license on behalf of the District. Not only did the MPD allegedly advise the NBC news team that “it started dealing guns more than two weeks before Mayor Muriel Bowser’s order allowing them to do so,” but it facilitated bringing guns into D.C. that ended up being used in crimes. The NBC News4 I-Team reportedly contacted the Mayor’s office about the letter and MPD’s role as a gun dealer, and while the office “acknowledged the questions” it “never answered them.”
By now, having “facilitated the legal transfer” of approximately 8,000 firearms for an estimated revenue stream of over a million dollars, the MPD and the District’s political leaders face questions as to how these facilitated sales impacted public safety.
Ironically, given the mayor’s concerns over “open[ing] ourselves up to meddling in our gun laws from outside groups,” at least two of the outside groups asking questions are the gun control group Brady and the ATF. According to a Brady spokesperson quoted in the NBC report, “MPD is ultimately responsible for the public safety of the residents … Everything that they do should have an eye towards protecting the public safety. If Washington [MPD] is engaged in selling firearms to the public, they have an obligation to the residents of D.C. to make sure that they are doing so safely and responsibly.”
The greater irony, by far, is that many of D.C.’s politicians pushed a bill last year to crack down on “firearm industry members” (any entity “engaged in the manufacture, distribution, importation, marketing, wholesale, or retail sale of firearm-related products”). If passed, one of the responsibilities of regulated entities would be to prevent “the unlawful … use of a firearm-related product,” with the District’s Attorney General, private citizens and others being authorized to bring civil actions with respect to alleged violations. A specific section reads, “An intervening act by a third party, including, but not limited to, criminal misuse of a firearm-related product, shall not preclude a firearm industry member from liability under [this] title.” At the time, the bill’s sponsor described the bill as “a meaningful step towards measured responsibility for the ongoing trauma gun violence inflicts on District residents.”
If nothing else, this latest development may persuade D.C. lawmakers to reconsider the flaw in blaming industries and institutions, rather than individual perpetrators, for crime and violence, especially as one of the institutions involved is the District itself.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20240408/crime-guns-dc-s-mpd-under-an-atf-cloud
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"President Joe Biden made a nostalgic return to the house where he grew up in working-class Scranton on Tuesday, kicking off three days of campaigning across Pennsylvania by calling for higher taxes on the rich and casting Donald Trump as an out-of-touch elitist"
I (me) would vote for such legislation in a second with one stipulation:
The rich must be rich Democrats , you know those who are intellectual, vote for the party of the poor, call themselves for the people, upholding Democracy, decent, know it all types like this well known beautiful person who is so wise, caring, and much more astute then most of the rest of us who just don't get it, for instance:
https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=2209&q=katie+couric+net+worth&cvid=c6b75f6c79564089ac9483178cd4767f&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQABhAMgYIAhAAGEAyBggDEAAYQDIGCAQQABhAMgYIBRAAGEAyBggGEAAYQDIGCAcQABhAMgYICBAAGEDSAQg0Mjg1ajBqMagCCLACAQ&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=DCTS
If only I would tune out Trump I would be able to see the light they see......I could be reborn as a crat.
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... but it can't deal with it. I'd argue, moreover, that when "Progressives" go after someone their general offense has more to do with failing to kowtow before far left sensibilities (if they can be called that) than any sort of concrete offense moral or criminal ... like giving aid and comfort to terrorists that embrace abject anitsemitism and advocate for the utter destruction of Israel.
Someone find me a tiny violin I can play for these whiners and their WaPo handmaidens:
https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/04/17/the-washington-post-tries-to-turn-supporters-of-terrorism-into-victims-n4928266
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https://about.me/marisakabas
and naturally MSNBC did :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i-m-jewish-american-silencing-a-muslim-valedictorian-s-speech-doesn-t-make-me-feel-safer/ar-AA1ngifO?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=02c462ee396242dea02cd823afbf35fa&ei=50
:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:
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Yahoos from my ol’ stomping grounds partake of circlejerks plotting to make the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago as memorable as the ‘68 convention was in that “toddling town,” as Sinatra calls it.
Fat chance, say I, as convention planners have become adept at stringing cyclone fence, establish “free speech zones” far from media convenances, and indeed have the model of the Jan. 6 “riots” to call upon to threaten people with, not that “Progressive” protestors are held to the same standard.
The angst is fun to watch, though:
https://www.thefp.com/p/activists-plotting-to-disrupt-dnc?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2zMee6g7knwW4oMqzTzyQGPtAK-7nMUzzzvPTKioqF_4KeAyxeR5rAwv0_aem_AZfYTe0pT97zi3IcOiCxrfpAPJVbHXHonm4E5GmX-INOyvhy8YcRjH7SFw744fEEweOQuL1zAZ9xyi1H_elC-lgV