Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Election 2020, Environment, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, Global Warming, History, Humor, Immigration, Liberalism, Media Bias, Politics, Progressives, The United States | Tags: Blame., Guilt, Your Fault!
What is it about Liberals? Why do they want us all to feel guilty? We are not supposed to be thankful on Thanksgiving, because we should feel guilty about the Native Americans. We should feel guilty if we call them Indians rather than “Native Americans”.
Some, “Antifa” or something else, have been out rioting and tearing down statues again this weekend, The statues are torn down because we should feel guilty about putting up a statue to someone currently considered unworthy. like George Washington because he once owned a few slaves. Though historically he did not like slavery and had no wish to create a plantation out of Mount Vernon. But that was 244 years ago, and statues of George Washington must be destroyed today to assuage our guilt? Makes no sense whatsoever.
George Washington, father of our country, had a few things more going for him than just the possibility that he owned a very few slaves. Many plantation owners did own slaves at the time, Society, worldwide had not yet decided that owning slaves was wrong. The young people out to riot and break windows and loot and break things seem far more interested in doing that and getting away with it because they were part of a big bunch of people all having fun doing it. Had they been promptly arrested and stuck in cells until someone bailed them out, the whole rationale for rioting might be somewhat different.
Those who choose to feel guilty about celebrating Thanksgiving because we displaced the Indians, might remember that the Native Americans did a lot of massacres as well, of the intruding Englishmen. The history of civilization is full of people being displaced by other warlike tribes, and civilizations have arisen and vanished all over the earth. Supposedly that is why we study history to understand how the world has changed in the past and will undoubtedly change more in the future. But we really don’t need to feel guilty about a past that we had nothing to do with.
If you recall, when Joe Biden decided to run for the office of the presidency, he said that he wanted a black woman as his vice president, and so chose Kamala Harris. So he wanted the credit for choosing a black woman who might become the first black and the first woman to become president rather than choosing someone for their outstanding qualifications and skills.
If you appear in public without wearing a mask, you are supposed to feel guilty. Governors have ordered people to refrain from having Thanksgiving dinners because of Covid. Wags have tacked lifesize representations of those governors to windows where people might be having a Thanksgiving dinner against governors orders. Those governors who issued orders and then had their own celebration were quickly discovered and mocked in the press, and theoretically made to feel properly guilty. Anyone departing from the conventional wisdom of the moment must be guilty, and exposed.
It was hard to choose an image, because there are so many. All the members of the House abjectly kneeling on the floor of Congress. AOC weeping as she clings to a chain-link fence staring out at what turned out to be an empty parking lot that supposedly represented imprisoned illegals at the border, Elizabeth Warren emphasizing her “Indian heritage”, once even with a Native American. All the previous presidents conferring happily with Vladimir Putin, but only Trump being accused of some kind of wrongdoing across a table from him.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2020, Freedom, History, Law, Liberalism, Media Bias, News of the Weird, Politics, Progressives, Progressivism, Socialism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Democrat Control Freaks, My Way or the Highway, Never Mind the Constitution
Clearly the Democrat Party has gone stark raving bonkers. They firmly believe that they are supposed to be in control of the federal government and clearly Donald Trump is an aberration. Not supposed to be that way. They were destined to have the first woman President of the United States, and they still haven’t recovered and are still desperately trying to find a way to get rid of the evil Donald Trump. They keep dragging up the Russians, but the facts simply don’t support their efforts. I’m beginning to think that they were so fixated on electing the First Woman President, that they have simply gone a bit off the rails. Those “Firsts” on the record are very important to Democrats.
Their hatred for President Trump has surpassed all norms. Bob Woodward, longtime journalist, features himself as an investigative journalist, with many left-leaning books to his credit about any scandal he can hype. He, of course, doesn’t like Donald Trump. So this time, he blames President Trump for the Corona-19 virus and every death it caused. If you are going throw accusations around, might as well pick a biggie.
I live currently in a Seattle suburb. The first American exposure and death from Covid-19, came to the next suburb just north of my house. Apparently someone carrying the disease returned to relatives in a nursing home directly from Wuhan, China. Everyone contacted by that person contracted the disease and most died. President Trump slapped a freeze on flights from China immediately. Vast outcry from the Left. Bigot, Racist, etc, etc, etc. Trump gathered up the most informed advisers he could find, Dr.Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in January of 2020, and Dr. Rebecca Birx, and listened closely to their advice. State Governors demanded help, they needed ventilators, Trump pushed American auto makers to shift some production to making ventilators, Governors demanded more hospital beds, Trump sent two US Navy hospital ships, and military hospitals were set up in parks and stadiums where there was room. Masks were needed and produced. The record goes on with the President trying to meet every new need, and shut down that which was not safe. Impossible to control everything that was going on. New York Governor Cuomo directed ailing elders to be treated in senior care homes, and caused vast numbers of deaths of the elderly. Cruise ships that had someone infected on board became death traps. Lots of deadly mistakes were made as we learned about the disease. Mr. Woodward, a small former journalistic star, has betrayed his profession and whatever honored journalistic career he once had, with a partisan attack that is just a partisan lie. Shame on him.
Now we have the battle of the Supreme Court. Democrats are outraged that with Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death, President Trump will, as the Constitution requires, name a new justice for the Senate to approve. Democrats are threatening to impeach Trump once again, for any reason they can think up, anything to keep him from naming a new candidate to replace the late Justice Ginsberg. He has no right to do this when there’s an election coming up in two months, and Biden might win, and then he would appoint a left-leaning candidate.
The Constitution is just fine, until it doesn’t support what you want to do. Naming a potentially conservative justice to the Supreme Court just means the Democrats will have to pack the court and expand the number of justices so they can be in control. They are Democrats and entitled not to be troubled by some hillbilly backwoods bunch of Conservatives, who just don’t understand the way it was meant to be.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economy, History, Immigration, Law, Liberalism, Media Bias, Mexico, National Security, News, Politics, Progressives, The United States | Tags: Americans Need to Learn, The Reality, The Rule of Law, The Southern Border
Naturally, I like to write my own sterling opinions, which I assume are entirely correct, but I have the feeling that you would rather hear it direct from the horse’s mouth, as the saying goes. This is a conversation between Jessica Vaughn for the Center for Immigration Studies and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan. He is well chosen to occupy this post with his long experience in the field.
The talking points and misinformation that we normally hear have little to do with the actuality in the field. The flow of people who want to get in to the United States is huge, composed of people from all over the world. But it’s not a simple thing to understand. We hear lots about compassion and concern, and a lot less about the Cartels and their activity which includes not just the Wall, which is being built, but drugs coming across the border. 68,000 Americans died this past year from drugs smuggled in across the Southern Border. Sixty-eight thousand!
There’s lots of human smuggling, sex trafficking, and drugs, the Cartels haul in billions from their take in supporting all this evil. Democrats, interested in compassion, and their own designation as “good people”, are apt to believe that we should care deeply about these poor people who just want to participate in the good life that America promises. It is way more complicated than that.
The estimate is 150,000 people who make it across unchecked, and unaccounted for, not those who are caught and tallied. They assume that the actuality is much larger. Mr. Morgan points out that not all of them are bad people, but a heck of a lot are. The Wall is not an invention of President Trump’s. It is the results of the request of the Border Patrol for a badly needed wall.
Do watch the whole thing. We need more people who understand what the real situation is, and what the Border Patrol faces. We have a lot of Politicians who come up with a lot of false information. It’s a complicated and complex situation, and we need more informed and concerned Americans.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Education, Environment, Free Markets, Freedom, Health Care, Humor, Immigration, Liberalism, Media Bias, National Security, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Progressives, Progressivism, Statism, The United States | Tags: Changing Opinions, Changing Reality, Ideological Extremism
Fascinating article today at The Federalist: “25 Reasons Today’s Left Has Become A Bunch of Ideological Extremists” with the subhead “Anyone who denies the existence of an influential, mainstream, radical left in America today doesn’t have any idea what the word ‘radical’ means.”
They went from, “Ask not what your country can do for you” to demanding a universal basic income provided by your neighbor.
They went from, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” to “speech is violence.”
They went from talking about a crisis at the border to saying anyone who believes there is a border crisis is a racist.
It’s 25 reasons, and interesting and unfortunately true. How about “They went from working to get drugs out of schools to working to get drag queens and Planned Parenthood into schools. Do read the whole thing. It’s an eye-opener to see how they are changing our understanding of the way things work. Nobody seems to really care about what is true any more. There is a radical left, and what they do in the guise of being ‘nice: and ‘kind and generous’ isn’t exactly what we had in mind.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Economics, Election 2020, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, Liberalism, Media Bias, Middle East, Politics, Progressives, Syria, The United States | Tags: Microsoft Updates!, The Democrat Debate
Sorry about that! Microsoft decided to add a formal update, and it did not go well. Needed things disappeared, unneeded things were added, nothing worked, and it took a full day to just become functional again. Beyond my level of expertise. Didn’t miss much.
Democrats remain certifiably crazy in their search for something with which to impeach the bad orange man. They were quite sure that anything and everything he did would be extremely bad, but the economy seems to be booming, wages are up significantly. Unemployment is at record lows. They were sure they really had him when when he took the troops out of Syria, and left the Kurds unprotected, but the President reminded Turkey’s dictator Erdogan that Turkey was being left alone without a single ally in the Middle East, and the Middle East is not a calm settled area of peace and tranquility, and Turkey may have gotten the message. We’ll see.
I remain deeply unimpressed with the lineup of Democrat candidates yearning to be president. Bernie Sanders had the burden of advanced age right off the bat, wondering when advanced age becomes too advanced, but adding a heart attack probably eliminates him. Elizabeth Warren has moved into the lead, but she misses a central fact about Americans. The freedom we celebrate makes it possible for anyone with a great idea to become rich. And Americans are doing so all the time. Elizabeth Warren seems to believe that no one should be allowed to become rich, and she will promptly take away their money to give to those who need it more. Can’t come up with a more un-American idea than that. Democrats want to buy your vote. Conservatives want to preserve the ability to become rich – because you have a good idea.
Democrats aren’t impressed with their own array of candidates. They keep pushing some other choice — Michelle Obama, Hillary again. Even Chelsea. Hillary may yet jump in. She remains obsessed with being the first woman president.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Liberalism, Literature, Media Bias, National Security, News, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Progressivism, The United States | Tags: Essential Reading, Political Correctness, The American Conversation
The conversation out there has become quite impossible. Rude, insulting, partisan, phony, uncivil. How did we get here? Everyone seems to be playing the old “can you top this” game. Can insults become offensive enough? Some were suggesting that it was a matter of attention. People just weren’t paying enough attention, and they didn’t understand what was really going on. I’m not convinced. But it started me off on a slightly different track.
I have been noticing that people don’t seem to read anything much – in depth. Snippets here and there. A few lines, and decide it’s not interesting enough. A headline here, a picture caption there and on to something else. Reading is complicated, much of the writing is lightweight. The internet world flashes words. A serious passage is interrupted with ads and pictures, The worst is a ad with a picture that is moving right in the middle of something that promised to be rewarding. Your concentration is always broken. Words and voices are competing constantly for your attention. While you are trying to read a short paragraph, a message appears about your incoming mail, and are you listening to the radio while you read? As you surf the web, are you actually learning anything at all? What do you do with longer pieces that promise to offer something worthwhile? Do you read it immediately to see if it is worth saving or just save it, and forget to read it later?
Think back to earlier days when new information was not so easily obtained. When there were town criers, when the telegraph finally crossed the continent. When books were scarce, and information only arrived occasionally. Now we are drowning in it, and view it with mild interest and often contempt. We suffer from a glut. The fact that it is no longer valued is exemplified by the proliferation of “fact-checking sites,” Back when information was slow and scarce, we probably believed it all because there was no competition. Do you know the history of our country? Do your kids know the history of our country? Or only Howard Zinn’s phony version?
Let’s say you are interested in China, because you have heard of the Hong Kong riots, and “Trump’s trade war”— how do you satisfy the urge to know more? Do you start with a Google search? Turn to Fox News or the Huffington Post or Drudge? You surely search for a source you trust, but why has that site earned your trust? And are they informed enough to have good information, and how much information do you need to find to satisfy the need to know?
I was an English major a hundred or so years ago, and I learned to read and read a lot. I know I read a lot more than my kids do, because I have more available time. Do you squeeze the news into your work day? Or does that wait till you get home? I suspect that in the “Information Age”, we may be dumber and more poorly informed than ever before. I think there are many who have never learned to read the hard stuff. What has Twitter done to our use of words and our understanding? Are our kids learning too much from computer screens instead of the printed page? Newspapers and magazines are clearly slowly dying. Do people subscribe to newspapers and magazines any more? Does anyone subscribe to a movie magazine or a People type magazine except for Doctors offices and hairdressers? Are any of your children real readers who get lost in a book? And how did they get that way? I think there is a big change here underlying our present world, and I’m not at all sure it is a good one.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Heartwarming, History, Liberalism, Politics, Progressives, The United States | Tags: Illusions about Race, The Case for Marxism?, White Supremacy
It’s Sunday, so perhaps you have more time to watch a little longer intellectual discussion of capitalism and freedom from Thomas Sowell, brilliant as usual. A splendid commentary on the general conversation out there today.
Sowell discusses his early life as a high school dropout and his first full-time job as a Western Union messenger delivering telegrams. He admits to flirting with Marxism in his early twenties as he first tried to grapple with the housing inequality he saw across the neighborhoods of New York City. Marxism, he says, was the only explanation he could find at the time. He went on to serve in the Marine Corps before continuing his education in economics at Harvard and earning a master’s at Columbia and a PhD at the University of Chicago.
Sowell’s first job after his receiving his PhD in economics was working for the Department of Labor, and he says it was there that he realized Marxism was not the answer. He argues that the government has its own institutional interests in inequality that cannot be explained through Marxism. He began to be discouraged by Marxism and the government in general and began searching for better economic ideas and solutions (the free market).
Robinson and Sowell discuss Sowell’s written works, his ideas of racial and economic inequality, the state of the United States today, and much more.
Filed under: Capitalism, Cool Site of the Day, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Free Speech, Freedom, Heartwarming, Liberalism, Media Bias, Politics, Pop Culture, Progressives, Progressivism, The United States | Tags: Advertising Lessons, The Kids from Covington, The Stupidity of Gillette
This has been a day of extraordinarily bad behavior by the Left, provoked, as Joy Behar admitted, by Catholic kids wearing MAGA hats because the women on The View hate Trump and want him gone. A wee bit of Honesty.
It’s hard to remember that only a couple of days ago, the controversy was all about Gillette Razors and their attack on men and “toxic masculinity.” Turned out that the art director was a radical feminist well known for her hatred of men. The puzzle was why on earth a famous razor company would approve such a commercial, but it seems that many businesses in our current climate have never learned the lessons of time and experience and do not have the sense to recognize that a wise business dealing with the American people does not choose to do politics instead of business, nor chooses to alienate half the country and all of their customers.
A competitor recognized the opportunity presented. And good for Barbasol.
And even a watch company saw a chance to speak out at Gillette idiocy!
Companies invest a lot of money in their advertising, hoping to please potential customers. Consider this a lesson in how it is done.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2016, Freedom, Immigration, Law, Liberalism, Media Bias, National Security, Politics, STEM Graduates, The United States, Unemployment | Tags: Cost American Jobs, Obama's Illegal Amnesty, Three "Caravans"
Jessica Vaughn from the Center for Immigration Studies (cis.org) discusses the “caravan” on the Neil Cavuto Show, and tries to get across some of the immense problems involved.
CIS identifies themselves as being pro-legal immigrants, and anti-illegals. It’s a good site for learning about what’s going on with immigration and what the problems we face are. Careful research by authorities.
President Obama spiked legal and illegal immigration to a record level of 1.75 million in 2017—by accepting one migrant for every two young Americans who entered the workforce in 2017. That huge inflow matched the record set by Bill Clinton in 1999. Obama’s wave of legal immigrants, illegal migrants and visa workers rose from 1.1 million in 2009 to 1.75 million in 2017.
That same year roughly four million Americans turned 18 and entered the workforce. That four million included the children of immigrants as well as the children of illegal migrants. Many of Obama’s migrants went home when their work visas ended or when they were deported, but the total inflow added more than 5.2 million migrants to the US population from 2010 to 2017, according to federal data prepared by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The inflow included 1.1 million Asians, 1.1 million Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, 680,000 people from the Caribbean, and 480,000 people from South America. From 2010 to 2017 Obama also imported 680,000 people from Muslim-majority nations, even though Islamic theology urges believers to attack Americans. That inflow enlarged the Islamic population of the United States by 31 percent, CIS says.
The inflow includes many temporary workers. This keeps roughly 1.5 million white-collar, multi-year, visa-workers in U.S. jobs formerly held by graduates of American universities. President Donald Trump has blocked business pressure for expansion of the H-2B visa-worker program and directed the H4 EAD visa-worker program be ended.
Obama’s inflow also helped elect Donald Trump.
The 2014 border crisis was triggered by Obama’s encouragement of Central American illegal migration. The crisis wrecked bipartisan plans to push an amnesty through Congress.
Obama’s pro-migration policies helped stagnate Americans’ wages in a depressed economy while providing windfall gains to the real-estate owners, retails, and investors who gained from the extra workers and consumers.
President Trump’s pro-American stance has resulted in employers hiring more Americans at higher wages, with the highest wage-gains going to those Americans hit hardest by Obama’s surge. Newly released data show 2016 tied with 1999 as the highest single year of immigration in U.S. history with the arrival of 1.75 million new immigrants, both legal and illegal.We are seeing what is happening to Europe with the massive flow of illegal migrants and the crime brought by them.
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American Elephants 