Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Communism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, History, National Security, Politics, The United States | Tags: Andy McCarthy, David Horowitz, The Errors of the Left
From Andrew C. McCarthy’s book The Grand Jihad:
Neo-communism is leftism liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many newly believed the Soviet demise would be a cautionary tale for the left, warning against the hubris of big- government schemes to perfect man and society. The opposite instead is the case. David Horowitz, today’s most eloquent and incisive observer of the revolutionary left, the movement in which he was raised and which he turned on fiercely, offers a perfect diagnosis.
“Far from instilling humility in progressives…the collapse of socialism has revived their self-righteousness and re-energized their assault on the democratic West. The disappearance of the Soviet bloc has only one consequence of note. It has lifted the burden of having to defend…an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.”
ibid: Today’s hard left is defined by what it is against: the United States, free-market capitalism, and any foreign policy premised on defending American interests or promoting individual liberty. Only this part of the agenda is concrete, leaving neo-communism elastic enough to strike alliances with any movement that shares it. What neo-communists are for, by contrast is a set of abstractions – “social justice”, “equality” , “redistributive rights”, the “rule of law” and of course “our values” the details of those can be worked out later once the more pressing imperatives of undoing the existing order has been realized.
Seemed like a good reminder.
Filed under: Capitalism, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Immigration, Law, Media Bias, News, Politics, Progressives | Tags: Immigration Law, The Southern Border
President Trump is threatening to close the Southern Border entirely, as the “Mother of all Caravans” forms in Honduras. This one is expected to be made up of more than 20,000 people Olga Sánchez Cordero, Mexico’s Federal Interior Secretary said earlier this week.
Sánchez told reporters on Wednesday that “migration and specifically the formation of the huge caravan was a central issue in talks she held yesterday with United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in Miami, Florida.”
According to Sánchez, Nielsen told her that the United States has “returned at least 76,000 migrants to their countries of origin in February and expects to deport more than 90,000 this month and a total of 900,000 by the end of the year.”
President Trump said:
“We have right now two big caravans coming up from Guatemala — massive caravans — walking right through Mexico. Mexico’s tough. They can stop them but they chose not to. Now they’re going to stop them — and if they don’t stop them, we’re closing the border,” he said.
“We will close it for a long time. I am not playing games.”
Sanchez said that criminal groups are transporting migrants from the Southern Mexico border town of Tapachula to the U.S. border in trucks, charging thousands of dollars per person for the service.
The Left likes to promote the idea of “kids in cages,”and “ripped from their mother’s arms” to garner sympathy for illegal aliens, They also want to suggest that any objection to illegal immigrants is “racism” and some kind of objection to “brown people”which is absurd, but apparently effective. Most people welcome legal immigrants who, wanting deeply to become Americans, have a lot to offer the country.
Our immigration laws badly need reform, but the Democrats have no interest in fixing the weak laws that are causing so much trouble.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Foreign Policy, History, Humor, National Security, Politics, Russia, The United States | Tags: Bill Whittle, Mission Accomplished, The Mueller Investigation
I always enjoy Bill Whittle’s take on events. I’m not at all sure that we have completely digested the long, long Mueller investigation. Attorney General Barr says he will probably have the documents delivered to Congress in mid-April. Congress wants “everything,’ but much will be redacted as required by law. (Grand Jury stuff and some intelligence things). Democrats remain positive that Trump is really guilty, and someone’s trying to cheat them out of their deserved victory.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, History, Humor, Immigration, Intelligence, Law, National Security, Politics, The United States | Tags: Former VP Joe Biden, The Apology Tour, Useless Pandering
The government of Spain has refused to apologize for conquering
Mexico five hundred years ago.
The new president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lópes Obrador, announced on Monday that he had sent letters to Spain’s King Felipe VI and Pope Francis urging them to apologize for crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of what today is the nation of Mexico.
“There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples,” Mr López Obrador said in a video message.
He filmed the clip at a Mayan monument near the site of the first battle in which Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés fought indigenous people 500 years ago this month.
Starting from the Tabasco coast and assisted by some indigenous groups who threw in their lot with the invaders, Cortés led a squadron of soldiers eastwards to victory in Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City – two years later in 1521. The Aztec empire was destroyed and the indigenous populations were converted to Catholicism.
This could become a bit of a diplomatic row. The Left-wing Mexican leader is simply following what is becoming the current fashion these days. Apologies are everywhere and expected for everything. Brand new political candidates, old political candidates, are apologizing.
Joe Biden, contemplating another run for the presidency, has been on an extensive apology tour. Mike Bloomberg was asked why he hasn’t thrown his hat into the ring, and noted that in order to do it “you have to go on an apology tour”.
“Joe Biden went out and apologized for being male, over 50, white, and he apologized for the one good piece of legislation that is an anti-crime bill,” Bloomberg said.
The media was most interested in Biden’s apologies for Anita Hill, apparently an apology for allowing Clarence Thomas to be confirmed as a conservative justice on the Supreme Court. If you search for “Joe Biden apology” you will find page after page of his apologies about Anita Hill, but I didn’t see an apology to Anita Hill. He apologized for racially profiling blacks. He apologized for saying that Mike Pence is “a decent guy.”(really)
If all that is not off-putting enough, former Vice President Joe Biden went to the NATO Munich Security Conference last month and declared America “an embarrassment” before our European allies.
Violating a decades-old tradition of leaving politics at home when addressing foreign nationals, the potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate spent much of his speech suggesting America had violated its commitment to “human decency” and other cornerstones of democracy. Biden has said that he wishes to restore “civility” and “respect” to American politics.
The America I see values basic human decency, not snatching children from their parents or turning our back on refugees at our border. Americans know that’s not right.
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke apologized for his jokes about his wife, for the writings he posted online when he was teenager, for his writings in Columbia University’s student newspaper 30 years ago among other apologies.
Cory Booker apologized in general for eating meat and cheese and vowed to keep fighting against Big Food corporate interests, suggesting that the planet can’t sustain billion of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture. He says he is a vegan.
I’m not going to continue through the long list of candidates who are all out apologizing for something or other. It’s just the latest fad, and nobody cares. Whatever bad thing you apologize for does not mean you won’t do it again. Things that happened in the past are history. We need history to know where we have been. If we don’t like some part of our history, learn why we did, and why we should do it differently today if that is the case, but your apologies are meaningless pandering. Knock it off.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Communism, Economy, Russia, The United States, Venezuela
Last Saturday, two Russian air force planes arrived in Venezuela, outside Caracas, believed to be carrying nearly 100 Russian special forces and cybersecurity personnel. That appears to have escalated the political crisis in the country.
Russia and China have backed President Nicolas Maduro, along with Cuba. Communists stick together.
President Donald Trump called on Russia to pull its troops from Venezuela and said that “all options” were open to make that happen. Other Western countries support newly elected opposition leader Juan Guaido. In January, Guido invoked the Venezuelan constitution to assume Venezuela’s interim presidency, as according to the constitution, Maduro’s 2018 election was illegitimate.
“Russia has to get out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he met with Guaido’s wife, Fabiana Rosales.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Immigration, Law, National Security, Politics, Progressives, Taxes, The United States
Here’s a headline to startle you a bit, by Andrew R. Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies, today:
Will the Last Person in Central America
Please Turn Out the Lights?Just when I was convinced that the immigration emergency at the border could not get any worse, Texas Monthly makes clear that it has. Bottom line: In just the last five months, 0.47 percent of the population of Guatemala and 0.645 percent of the population of Honduras has been arrested along the Southwest border, stretching U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) resources to the point that Border Patrol highway checkpoints are being shuttered and CBP officers are being pulled from the ports of entry in order to handle the flow.
The Border Patrol’s El Paso sector — which includes El Paso and Hudspeth counties in Texas and all of New Mexico — and the Rio Grande Valley sector have borne the brunt of the record surge of asylum-seeking families, mostly from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. From October through February, El Paso sector Border Patrol agents processed 41,670 members of family units and unaccompanied children who crossed the border illegally, most of whom sought out and surrendered to agents. In the Rio Grande Valley, that number reached 69,623 in the first five months of the fiscal year. Crossings in March are on pace to well exceed the record numbers of February, Border Patrol officials have said.
El Paso Border Patrol officials have said they’ve been taking custody of almost 600 migrants a day … the past month, most walking across the Rio Grande in the city limits of El Paso, then walking toward the border fence that lies several hundred feet north of the international boundary, and waiting for Border Patrol agents to take them into custody. Because border detention facilities are past capacity and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has limited ability to hold families in detention, the migrants are processed, given a notice to appear in immigration court, then released to the nonprofit Annunciation House in El Paso while they make travel arrangements to join other family members in the interior of the United States.
I should remind you that Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke insists that there is no border problem in his home town of El Paso, and we should just eliminate the border fence entirely.
The whole article and a map are here. It’s worth your time. Democrats range from complete denial of any possibility of any kind of crisis at our southern border (and of course, any possible need for a wall). It’s hard to tell if it is just an attempt to deny Trump anything whatsoever, the idea that illegals will be democrat voters and keep them in power, or simply that they think they can portray America as a nation of immigrants as a winning campaign issue. Interestingly, citizens with Hispanic surnames are not at all enthusiastic about the flood of illegals. The denials of what is really happening are bizarre, and there is little straight talk anywhere, particularly in the Capitol.
Another headline, this one from Breitbart: “U.S. PROJECTED TO ADD 1.5 MILLION ILLEGAL ALIENS TO POPULATION THIS YEAR.
How many does it take to make a crisis? See cis.org
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Free Speech, History, Humor, Intelligence, Media Bias, News, News of the Weird, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics | Tags: Has Some Explaining to Do, Our Sacred Media, Propaganda Techniques
You may have already seen this video, but I find that it deserves multiple viewings. It’s funny! I have always assumed that Democrats all say the same thing at the same time because they receive “talking points” of carefully selected words generated by their propaganda workshop, but perhaps it is some kind of unconscious mind-meld, or they listen intently to what their compatriots say, so they will know what to say themselves.
What do you think? I don’t think I have ever used the words “beginning of the end” or “the walls are closing in”. I don’t think they are in my normal vocabulary or what I would say in such a situation. How about you?
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Immigration, Law, National Security, Regulation, Taxes, The United States | Tags: Doing a Hard Job, Love and Hate, The Problems With Pedestals
The news, again today, is all about the Mueller Report. The media, in general, are trying desperately to figure out what to say. They have managed to prove the suggestions by the President that they are committing “fake news,” and indeed they have been. Congressional Democrats are trying to impune the reputation of Attorney General Barr as if he must have misrepresented the actual Mueller Report in his letter to Congress. It is not possible, you see, that President Trump did not collude, because they have so much invested in the idea that he did. Adam Schiff is embarrassing.
There is lots more to come – eventually. There is an Inspector General’s report on the Justice Department to come, and all the usual suspects want to keep investigating until they do find something. Congress wants to see the Mueller Report with their own eyes, assuming they can find something really really bad that Mr. Mueller didn’t notice. Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal has done an excellent job with this mess, and concludes that a major investigation into the FBI is needed. Andy McCarthy, as an experienced prosecutor, has been an invaluable source of sanity, and Victor Davis Hanson’s column today is not to be missed.
I want to add something that seems to me to be pertinent. I think way too many people tend to put a president on a pedestal, and that is a mistake. A president is someone we elect for four years to manage the country. If he or she does a good job, we might give him or her another four years to try to fix things. But the candidates from whom we select our president are only ordinary human beings with all the flaws and foibles and quirks that come with being human.
Republicans are as bad as Democrats at the pedestal part. Many Republicans made a pilgrimage to the Reagan Library for just that reason. Some presidents are loved more than others. Reagan applied some pure capitalism to a troubled economy and created a boom, and always had a self-effacing quip or joke to help the medicine go down. So many remember him more fondly. We just need to remember the ordinary human being part. We ask a lot of them, and don’t always treat them well. Pedestals just create extra problems.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, History, Junk Science, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Science/Technology | Tags: CO2 Famine, Mass Hysteria, Physicist William Happer
William Happer is one of our most renowned and esteemed physicists, a professor emeritus from Princeton University. He decidedly does not agree with the current panic about the horrors of “climate change.”He says, and explains why CO², carbon dioxide, doesn’t have much of anything to do with warming, and we really need more of it — not less. CO² is food for plants. The slight increase we have had is greening the earth. You can see it from space.
This conversation with Dr. Happer is completely fascinating and worth your time. Share it with your kids and friends and family.
You have surely heard the current crop of Democrat candidates hoping to run for the presidency against Donald Trump, speaking out on the notion that they will work to save us from the horrors of climate change and only disagreeing on how long we have left before it is all over. Green New Deal, they all signed right on.
Yes, I know that Nancy Pelosi wants sixteen year-olds to vote, but one would expect better from grownups who think they should be president. Yes, in the heat of a campaign and trying to raise money, they should have some responsibility for saying stupid things.
For those who are sure that 400 ppm represents the upper limits of what we can tolerate in the atmosphere, greenhouses pump in extra CO² to reach about 1,000 ppm to help their seedlings grow. The floors of greenhouses are not littered with the corpses of nurserymen.
We are in a CO² famine. We don’t have enough.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Environment, Global Warming, Immigration, Junk Science, Media Bias, Politics, Science/Technology | Tags: Constitutionl Ignoramuses, Fear of Climate Change, We're all Going to Die
And they simply cannot manage it. I am quite sure that none of this bunch have ever read anything about climate change, nor questioned what they have apparently been told. There is Democrat approved knowledge, and there are the “deniers”– which is the rest of us. Because we have been labelled “deniers”, nothing we say can be believed, so they refuse to consider the very odd chance that they might be wrong. Look at them today. The Mueller Report has been turned over to Secretary Barr with the notice that there are no further indictments, and that is simply unacceptable. Of course Trump is guilty, they just didn’t find the right evidence. Congress will investigate, and find him guilty. (Congress has no authority to investigate anything, their job is oversight and legislation – that’s all.)
Climate Change is the greatest threat to the world ever, but they have no interest in the fact that in the last 40 years the earth has warmed only about 2.2º F. Probably they have never heard that fact, or if so, dismissed it immediately as obviously untrue. Or they regard posing as the ones who will save us from catastrophe as the perfect campaign message. I think they believe it.
But they seem to believe that getting rid of the Electoral College is a good idea, without the slightest understanding of why we have such a Constitutional requirement. It would be fine if our elections were always decided by New York, New Jersey and California because those other states don’t matter anyway. Reforming the Constitution so 16 year olds can vote? Fine! I raised 3 kids who were all once 16, and I’d be more inclined to raise the voting age.
They want open borders, more Democrat voters, O’Rourke wants to tear down the existing border wall in El Paso. They also want to impeach Brett Kavanaugh for being a conservative justice appointed by Trump, I guess.
All they have to do is not be crazy, and they simply cannot manage it.
American Elephants 