Friday, November 18, 2016

Three common arguments against Trump still being made


Three common arguments against Trump still being made


 
This article prompted me to write this argument against three common charges against Donald Trump. These are dated arguments, but still make the rounds. They are being clung to by Democrats still reeling from the election of Donald J. Trump.

It is not the fault of the COastal Elite, rather the people from the Midwest
"To pin this election on the coastal elite is a cop-out. " Not the elite per se, The Clinton campaign was ignoring the issues and people of the Midwest. Bill Clinton apparently pointed this out but was over ridden. Obama recently said that Hillary did not get to this area enough.

The article repeats the standard false and outdated talking points regarding Donald J. Trump. Here I try to knock them down.
He makes three claims saying that these rubes from the Midwest voted for a man who...
 
CLAIMS
(1) violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to black people. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called
(2) Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and criminals. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called for a
(3) complete ban on Muslim immigration."

RESPONSES
(1) The government sued Trump. Trump sued the government. "Trump vehemently denied the claims, which he called "absolutely ridiculous," according to a 1973 New York Times article. Trump and his company filed a counter-suit the following December, claiming the government made baseless charges and asking for $100 million in damages. The court dismissed the counter-suit."
Trump agreed to stipulations but did not admit guilt. Hardly "violated."
Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/27/hillary-clinton/true-hillary-clinton-says-federal-government-sued-/
1973 was different time and place. This was two years before the TV show The Jeffersons came on the air to explore this issue. The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985 when the show was no longer provocative.(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/) This is very old news.

(2) Liberals always eliminate this crucial sentence/ "And some, I assume, are good people."
Source 6/16/2015: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/16/trump_mexico_not_sending_us_their_best_criminals_drug_dealers_and_rapists_are_crossing_border.html
Current position: Strengthen border security and reform immigration. The people illegally here in our country who are guilty of a crime will be deported or incarcerated. No different than Obama's position.

(3) Liberals ALWAYS stop the quoted sentence BEFORE this "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
Source 12/7/2015: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration
Current position is "Extreme vetting." and probably country based.
We are in a race with the radical Islamic terrorists and cannot lose. It will only take one to destroy a city.

So in conclusion, it does not help to make the same old tired arguments. Let's see how he does and go about our business until there is something NEW to talk about.
"Donald Trump is going to be our president, We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” Hillary Rodham Clinton 11/09/2016

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Is Bannon as bad as they say?


Is Stephen K. Bannon as bad as they say?

I did my own research so you can just click on the links

The links are exposed so, if you want, you can click with some confidence

Since the Election and the character assassination started

Main Stream media at it again saying Bannon is an anti-semite and a racist
Mostly based on a story written on Breitbart by, wait for it, a jew. Article here
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/15/bill-kristol-republican-spoiler-renegade-jew/
Refuted by these posts on Breitbart, with sources

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k-bannon-friend-jewish-people-defender-israel/

and a live interview with the writer, Joel Pollack, on CNN
15:00 - 16:00 Challenge to these guys from Pollack
https://youtu.be/TMViDn_XKOk

And a link to an article mentioned in the interview
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

Wikipedia definition of Alt Right
The alt-right has no formal ideology, with the Associated Press stating that there is "no one way to define its ideology."
Curious that the left has no problem defining the Alt Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/11/14/ben-carsons-former-press-secretary-bannon-allegations-no-patience/

Megan Kelly asking Newt Gingrich about Bannon on Fox News
https://youtu.be/BbQhbG_AFYU

Another CNN interview
1:00 Randy Evans of the RNC "Not surprised that Democrats would be overly critical of the chief strategist that beat them in the election" and neither should you be.
https://youtu.be/OIFPdpggXF0

 Zionist Organization of America defending Steve Bannon
http://zoa.org/2016/11/10342353-zoa-criticizes-adl-for-falsely-alleging-trump-advisor-bannon-is-anti-semitic/

Letter in the Hill by Boteach against the ADL
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/306035-letter-to-anti-defamation-leagues-jonathan



Historical Posts


Bannon appearing on Bill Mahers Show August 5, 2011 with a great panel including
Anthony Bourdain and Neil deGrasse Tyson
https://youtu.be/2HWGihz0UGg
  • Highlights (for the time constrained) at 1:20
  • 3:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson calls for a Businessman to help the US out of it's troubles. Be careful what you wish for.
  • 5:50 Anthony Bourdain
Bannon in 2011 at the Tea Party Conference in South Carolina January 2016
https://youtu.be/-36PDP-2Fyw

Stephen K. Bannon at The Liberty Restoration Foundation in 2011 - explaining Financial Situation and trade deficit and how to fight and organize
We had then, 200 trillion in liabilities and 50 trillion in assets.
"Barrack Obama is not the problem, he is a symptom of a problem."
9:54 "Guys I respect tremendously, William Crystal, Dr. Krauthammer..."
19:00 Historical perspective
20:00 Listen to Occupy Wall Street
22:00 "We are not nativist, homophobic racists"
 https://youtu.be/0BSrJv0IpH

Bannon Interview on Hannity discussing the Movie he made called Undefeated in 2011
4:20 - Is where he defines the 2016 race
https://youtu.be/o3aa9D1Ar2Q


Bannon and Dinesh D'Souza on Patriot radio
https://youtu.be/EhaZn5sN4is

Quote from Politico on his radio show starting
“We’re particularly interested in Sanders since we think at least some of the issues driving [his surge] are very relevant to our audience,” Bannon said to Politico.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/10/26/siriusxm-announces-daily-breitbart-news-radio/

August 2016 after he was brought into the Trump campaign. He appears with the president of Citizens United.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueRI3T7Pis

October 2016 interview with Mark Cuban before the MSNBC debate
2:50 Steve Bannon is a lot smarter than Donal Trump
https://youtu.be/_FSM7KhlBjc

Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily (11/9/2016) 
https://youtu.be/57n2KFc_350


Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference

Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference

Political correctness functions like a despotic regime. We resent it but we tolerate it.

 
Photo: Getty Images
The current election—regardless of its outcome—reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism sits in American life. As an ideology—and certainly as a political identity—conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for. There is a presumption in the culture that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality—this despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.
In the broader American culture—the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education—conservatism suffers a decided ill repute. Why?
The answer begins in a certain fact of American life. As the late writer William Styron once put it, slavery was “the great transforming circumstance of American history.” Slavery, and also the diminishment of women and all minorities, was especially tragic because America was otherwise the most enlightened nation in the world. Here, in this instance of profound hypocrisy, began the idea of America as a victimizing nation. And then came the inevitable corollary: the nation’s moral indebtedness to its former victims: blacks especially but all other put-upon peoples as well.
This indebtedness became a cultural imperative, what Styron might call a “transforming circumstance.” Today America must honor this indebtedness or lose much of its moral authority and legitimacy as a democracy. America must show itself redeemed of its oppressive past.
How to do this? In a word: deference. Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies. Since then deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one’s innocence of the American past. Deference is, above all else, an apology.
One thing this means is that deference toward victimization has evolved into a means to power. As deference acknowledges America’s indebtedness, it seems to redeem the nation and to validate its exceptional status in the world. This brings real power—the kind of power that puts people into office and that gives a special shine to commercial ventures it attaches to.
Since the ’60s the Democratic Party, and liberalism generally, have thrived on the power of deference. When Hillary Clinton speaks of a “basket of deplorables,“ she follows with a basket of isms and phobias—racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamaphobia. Each ism and phobia is an opportunity for her to show deference toward a victimized group and to cast herself as America’s redeemer. And, by implication, conservatism is bereft of deference. Donald Trump supporters are cast as small grudging people, as haters who blindly love America and long for its exclusionary past. Against this she is the very archetype of American redemption. The term “progressive” is code for redemption from a hate-driven America.
So deference is a power to muscle with. And it works by stigmatization, by threatening to label people as regressive bigots. Mrs. Clinton, Democrats and liberals generally practice combat by stigma. And they have been fairly successful in this so that many conservatives are at least a little embarrassed to “come out” as it were. Conservatism is an insurgent point of view, while liberalism is mainstream. And this is oppressive for conservatives because it puts them in the position of being a bit embarrassed by who they really are and what they really believe.
Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life. We resent it, yet for the most part we at least tolerate its demands. But it means that we live in a society that is ever willing to cast judgment on us, to shame us in the name of a politics we don’t really believe in. It means our decency requires a degree of self-betrayal.
And into all this steps Mr. Trump, a fundamentally limited man but a man with overwhelming charisma, a man impossible to ignore. The moment he entered the presidential contest America’s long simmering culture war rose to full boil. Mr. Trump was a non-deferential candidate. He seemed at odds with every code of decency. He invoked every possible stigma, and screechingly argued against them all. He did much of the dirty work that millions of Americans wanted to do but lacked the platform to do.
Thus Mr. Trump’s extraordinary charisma has been far more about what he represents than what he might actually do as the president. He stands to alter the culture of deference itself. After all, the problem with deference is that it is never more than superficial. We are polite. We don’t offend. But we don’t ever transform people either. Out of deference we refuse to ask those we seek to help to be primarily responsible for their own advancement. Yet only this level of responsibility transforms people, no matter past or even present injustice. Some 3,000 shootings in Chicago this year alone is the result of deference camouflaging a lapse of personal responsibility with empty claims of systemic racism.
As a society we are so captive to our historical shame that we thoughtlessly rush to deference simply to relieve the pressure. And yet every deferential gesture—the war on poverty, affirmative action, ObamaCare, every kind of “diversity” scheme—only weakens those who still suffer the legacy of our shameful history. Deference is now the great enemy of those toward whom it gushes compassion.
Societies, like individuals, have intuitions. Donald Trump is an intuition. At least on the level of symbol, maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference—if not as a liberator then possibly as a reformer. Possibly he could lift the word responsibility out of its somnambulant stigmatization as a judgmental and bigoted request to make of people. This, added to a fundamental respect for the capacity of people to lift themselves up, could go a long way toward a fairer and better America.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

The Costs of Clinton

The Costs of Clinton

Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

 Original Article here

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.

***

Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.
She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.
The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.
But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.
Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.
Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.
Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.
Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.
Lurking behind all this, as we’ve seen these past two weeks, is the familiar pattern of scandal fed by her penchant for secrecy and political paranoia. As journalist Carl Bernstein has noted, she shares Richard Nixon’s “obsession with enemies.” She surrounds herself with henchmen like Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, who feed her instinct to stonewall and attack.
The most astonishing revelation of the 2016 campaign has been that neither she nor her husband learned anything from the ethical traumas of the 1990s. You would have thought they’d want to shed the legacy of the Lippo Group and the Lincoln-Bedroom-for-rent, but instead they built the same pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs. Clinton made the astounding decision to use a private email server for official business so she could duck federal records laws. But when that was discovered, rather than admit the mistake and release everything, she and her retinue continued to resist and deflect and deceive. By her behavior in the past year, Mrs. Clinton has ratified the worst things her critics say about her.
Some of our friends argue that Mrs. Clinton’s corruption is tolerable because it is merely about gaining and maintaining political power. This understates how much the Clinton blending of public office with private gain erodes confidence in honest government. It feeds the leftist narrative that business is merely another arm of the state and thus reduces support for free markets.

***

All of which means that if she does win on Tuesday, the manner of her victory would damage her ability to govern. Rather than win a policy mandate, she has chosen to destroy Mr. Trump personally. She would face a Congress that wants to investigate her from the first day and an electorate that is polarized and doesn’t trust her. Her instinct would be to lean even more on the left for political support, making compromise with Republicans in Congress even more difficult.
We’re as optimistic as anyone about the resilience of American democracy, but four more years of aggressive progressive rule would more deeply entrench the federal Leviathan across ever more of the economy and civic life. The space for private business and nonpolitical mediating social institutions would shrink.
The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Credited to the WSJ

The Gamble of Trump



The Gamble of Trump

The hope of better policies comes with his manifest personal flaws.

Wall Street Journal 11/6/2016 - original link below

The case for Donald Trump is political disruption. A broken Washington needs to be shaken up and refocused on the public good, and who better to do it than an outsider beholden to neither political party? If only that reform possibility didn’t arrive as a flawed personality who has few convictions and knows little about the world.

***

The best hope for a Trump Presidency is that he has aligned himself with enough sound policy impulses that he could liberate the U.S. economy to grow faster again. He would stop the crush of new regulation, restore a freer market for health insurance, unleash U.S. energy production, and reform the tax code. His default priority would be growth, which the U.S. desperately needs after a decade of progressive focus on income redistribution and the worst economic recovery in 70 years.
Assuming Republicans hold Congress, the House GOP has already put many of these reforms in legislative language. Mr. Trump could adopt them as his own reform agenda and get a fast start on governing. With a GOP Senate he could fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court with someone from the fine list of candidates he has publicly released. For many voters, the future of the Court is by itself enough reason to support Mr. Trump.
Yet while this could be a 1980-like moment of economic renewal, Mr. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. The Gipper came to office with a coherent and firmly held world view formed by decades of reading and experience as a Governor. It isn’t obvious that Mr. Trump reads anything at all. He absorbs what he knows through conversation and watching TV, and he has no consistent philosophy.
This makes it hard to predict how he would respond to the shocks and surprises that buffet any President. His firmest policy conviction seems to be that trade is a zero-sum game and that America is losing from global commerce. But if he follows through on his vow to withdraw from trade pacts, impose tariffs on imports and punish U.S. companies that invest abroad, he could cause a recession. The main economic battle in a Trump Administration would be between his pro-growth domestic reforms and his anti-growth trade policy.

***

The strongest argument against Mr. Trump, as Hillary Clinton has recognized, concerns his temperament and political character. His politics is almost entirely personal, not ideological. He overreacts to criticism and luxuriates in personal feuds.
President Obama’s greatest failure has been to govern in a deliberately polarizing fashion, and Mr. Trump’s response has been to campaign the same way. If the businessman loses a race that Republicans should win this year, one reason will be that his often harsh rhetoric has repelled women, minorities and younger voters. He ignores or twists inconvenient facts, and even when he has a good point his exaggerations make it harder to persuade the public. Yet a President needs the power to persuade.
The least convincing Never Trump argument is that he would rampage through government as an authoritarian. That ignores the checks and balances in Washington that constrain GOP Presidents in particular. If Mr. Trump wins, the media would awaken from their Obama-era slumbers and dog his Administration with a vengeance. The permanent bureaucracy would resist his political appointees, working with the media to build public opposition.
The more realistic concern, especially for conservatives, is that Mr. Trump would be as haphazard in office as he has been as a candidate and thus fail to change Washington as he has promised. Mr. Trump would start out with more than half the country disliking him, and most of his advisers lack government experience. Too many blunders or an early recession could cause voters to sweep out the GOP Congress in 2018, setting up a return to an all-progressive government in 2020.
Another risk comes from the negative impulses on the political right that Mr. Trump’s meanest rhetoric has awakened. Populism has its uses, and the media stereotypes of Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t capture their variety and general goodwill. But populism becomes dangerous when it is rooted too much in ethnicity or class.
Mr. Trump’s Breitbart posse has a vendetta against Republicans on Capitol Hill and is motivated by brooding resentments that too often veer into white-identity politics. If Mr. Trump indulged these sentiments as President, he would further polarize the country and alienate non-whites for a generation.
Then there is the biggest Trump gamble of all—foreign and security policy. The good news is that Mr. Trump wants to rebuild U.S. defenses that have eroded on Mr. Obama’s watch. He would be more candid about, and more aggressive against, the Islamist terror threat.
Yet the irony is that Mr. Trump shares Mr. Obama’s desire to have America retreat from world leadership. Beyond “bombing the hell out of ISIS” and “taking the oil,” it isn’t clear the Republican has any idea what to do in the Middle East. As a rookie in world affairs, he would be unusually dependent on his advisers—if he listened to them.
His seeming bromance with Vladimir Putin is especially troubling given the Russian’s aggression in the Middle East, Europe and cyberspace. Presidents Bush and Obama also underestimated Mr. Putin’s revanchism, but Mr. Trump has been all too nonchalant as Russia presses ahead. His instincts to retreat to a Fortress America could invite more aggression from Russia, China and Iran.

***

The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn’t endorse Ronald Reagan we aren’t about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Yet one of them will be the next President. The choice comes down to the very high if relatively predictable costs of four more years of brute progressive government under Hillary Clinton versus a gamble on the political unknown of Donald Trump.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Accredited to the WSJ

Friday, August 5, 2016

Is the New York Time Biased?

Great article from the WSJ

'This Is Kind of Old News’

Hillary Clinton’s editorial judgment.

Does the New York Times have a liberal bias? Most readers of this column would answer the question with a rhetorical one about ursine digestive functions or the religious affiliation of the pope. But the Times’s “public editors”—hired for fixed terms to report and comment on the Times, independent of its usual editorial processes—have grappled with the question with varying results.
The first public editor, Dan Okrent, ended his tenure in 2004 with an affirmatively forthright answer: “Of course it is.” Clark Hoyt, who had the job some five years later, raised the question frequently, and always (as we recall) reached a conclusion like this one: “I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it.”
Liz Spayd, the newest public editor, raised the question without answering it in her first column last month:
Why is it that conservatives, and even many moderates, see in The Times a blue-state worldview? Let’s set aside for now the core of their criticism—that the coverage is in fact biased. I’ll be turning to that as I settle into the job.
Turn to it she did on Tuesday, in a blog post titled “The Clinton Story You Didn’t Read Here.”
That would be Hillary Clinton’s interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, in which, as Spayd gently puts it, the Democratic presidential nominee’s “contentions”—most notably her claim that FBI director James Comey had vouched for her honesty—“were misleading, bordering on false.” You did read it here, in Monday’s column. Spayd:
If you’re getting all your political news from The New York Times, this may be the first time you’re hearing this. [Mrs.] Clinton’s remarks were covered by several major news organizations, several of which pointedly challenged the Democratic nominee’s candor. But nothing on the interview ever appeared in The Times, either online or in print.
Spayd doesn’t take a clear position on whether the paper erred in ignoring the story, about which she writes both that “it was clearly news” and that it “may have felt like more of the same, especially coming as it did on the same day [Donald] Trump made a flip remark about a Muslim couple who lost their son in Iraq and appeared at the Democratic convention.”
We tend to agree with the former observation. As for the latter, surely a news organization with the Times’s resources could cover both stories, as this columnist did; we weighed in on the Trump-Khizr Khan kerfuffle on Tuesday.
Which brings us to The Wall Street Journal’s report, in yesterday’s paper, by Jay Solomon and Carol Lee:
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
On Twitter, Jonathan Weisman, the Times’s deputy Washington editor, scoffed: “New York Times’ @SangerNYT in January vs. @WSJ ‘scoop’ today. Hmmm. Is that really a secret ransom payment?” He provided this excerpt from that Times report, on which David Sanger shared a byline with Rick Gladstone and Thomas Erdbrink:
[President] Obama also announced the resolution of another argument between Tehran and Washington that dates to the Iranian revolution, this one over $400 million in payments for military equipment that the United States sold to the shah of Iran and never delivered when he was overthrown. The Iranians got their money back, with $1.3 billion in interest that had accumulated over 37 years.
It’s true, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin notes, that the fact of the payment “wasn’t exactly a secret up until now.” But he adds:
The Journal story not only connects the dots to prove that Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim the U.S. didn’t pay ransom was a lie; it also illustrates how President Obama’s eagerness for a deal at any price prolonged the captivity of the hostages and wound up facilitating the West’s commitment to subsidizing the regime Kerry’s own State Department has certified as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
The image of piles of money being delivered to Tehran on wooden pallets also made the story a lot more vivid than the abstraction of a nine- or 10-figure money transfer.
The Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier, a contributor to this column, notes that in September 2015 an anonymous “senior administration official,” in a State Department background briefing, “pooh-poohed” what the official called the “common misperception” about the administration’s deal with Iran “that on implementation day a big suitcase full of cash shows up in Tehran and all of a sudden they have all this money.”
All of that denial turned out to be false, except for the bit about the suitcase. That would have been one hell of an oversize bag.
There’s more. The Journal’s Devlin Barrett reports in today’s paper:
Senior Justice Department officials objected to sending a plane loaded with cash to Tehran at the same time that Iran released four imprisoned Americans, but their objections were overruled by the State Department, according to people familiar with the discussions. . . .
The timing and manner of the payment raised alarms at the Justice Department, according to those familiar with the discussions. “People knew what it was going to look like, and there was concern the Iranians probably did consider it a ransom payment,’’ said one of the people.
Even Vox describes the cash delivery as “a debt payment dressed up as a ransom.”
The Times treated the story as a political one, reporting on page A5 of today’s paper that the payment “became part of the presidential campaign on Wednesday, as Donald J. Trump seized on the money transfer as a sign of what he called the administration’s failed foreign policy—prompting a forceful White House rejection”:
The existence of the payment was disclosed in January, and [White House press secretary Josh] Earnest dismissed a Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday about the details of the cash payment as a “six-month-old news story” that is being pushed by opponents of the president’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The Washington Examiner reports that Mrs. Clinton took a similar tack in an interview with Denver’s KUSA-TV:
“The White House has addressed this,” she said. . . . “This is kind of old news.”
“So far as I know, it had nothing to do with any kind of hostage swap or any other tit-for-tat. It was something that was intended to—as I am told—pay back Iran for contracts that were cancelled when the shah fell,” she added.
So Mrs. Clinton’s news judgment is in line with the Times’s. Some readers will take that as an indication of bias.
See his regular column by subscribing to the Wall Street Journal

Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
“Republicans are freaking out about Donald Trump, but the candidate himself is insisting his campaign has never been in better shape.”—Dana Bash and Stephen Collinson, CNN.com, Aug. 4

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Democrats, Slavery and Racism since the civil war

I saw this and thought it worth reformatting for this blog.
The article steps through the Democrat parties positions over the years. Most is historical
The link to the original article is here



American Minute  
Politics of Race:
Democrat-slavery & discrimination; Republican-abolition & civil rights   

In 1857, the Supreme Court, with 7 of the 9 Justices being Democrat, decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen, but property.



Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by Democrat President Andrew Jackson, referenced in his decision that slaves were "so far inferior...that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit."



After the Civil War, Republicans pushed through the 13TH AMENDMENT, adopted December 6, 1865, officially abolishing slavery in America.

Once Southern Democrats were forced to free their slaves, they attempted to effectively re-enslave them by passing Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws which required former slaves to be "apprenticed" to "employers" and punished those who left.



On November 22, 1865, Republicans denounced Mississippi's Democrat legislature for enacting Black Codes as they institutionalized discrimination, such as an 1865 Mississippi Black Code which stated:

"No freedman, Negro, or mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition."


On February 5, 1866, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens introduced legislation to give former slaves "40 acres and a mule," but Democrats opposed it, led by President Andrew Johnson.




On April 9, 1866, Republicans in Congress overrode President Johnson's veto and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, conferring rights of citizenship on freed slaves.



To force Southern States to extend State citizenship rights to former slaves, Republicans in the U.S. House passed the 14TH AMENDMENT, May 10, 1866, as did the Senate, June 8, 1866.

One hundred percent of Democrats voted against it.



The 14TH AMENDMENT was adopted by the States on JULY 28, 1868.

Republican Congressman John Farnsworth of Illinois stated, March 31, 1871:

"The reason for the adoption (of the 14TH AMENDMENT)...was because of...discriminating... legislation of those States... by which they were punishing one class of men under different laws from another class."



Along with Jim Crow laws, Southern Democrats attempted to keep former slaves from voting.

On January 8, 1867, Republicans granted voting rights to former slaves in the District of Columbia by overriding President Andrew Johnson's veto.



On July 19, 1867, Republicans passed more legislation protecting voting rights of all freed slaves after overriding again President Andrew Johnson's veto.

On March 30, 1868, Republicans began impeachment proceedings of President Andrew Johnson.




On September 12, 1868, Democrats in Georgia's Senate expelled civil rights activist Tunis Campbell and 24 other Republican African-Americans, who would later be reinstated by a Republican Congress.



On October 22, 1868, while campaigning for re-election, Republican Congressman James Hinds was assassinated by Democrats who had organized vigilante groups.



The 15TH AMENDMENT, granting the right to vote to all men regardless of race was passed February 3, 1870, overcoming 97 percent Democrat opposition.



Once Southern Democrats could no longer keep former slaves from voting, they attempted to intimidate them through KKK-type vigilante activities and lynchings.




Republican President U.S. Grant signed the Enforcement Act, May 31, 1870, which imposed stiff penalties for depriving any American of their civil rights.



The Republican Congress, June 22, 1870, created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard civil rights against Democrats in the South.



The Republican Congress passed another Enforcement Act, February 28, 1871, which provided federal protection for Black voters.



The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, April 20, 1871, outlawing Democrat-affiliated groups which oppressed African-Americans.

On October 10, 1871, African-American Republican civil rights leader Octavius Catto was murdered by a Democratic Party operative, after repeated threats by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting.



Republican President Ulysses S. Grant deployed U.S. troops on October 18, 1871, to combat violence against African Americans.




Republican President Theodore Roosevelt stated December 3, 1906:

"White men are lynched, but the crime is peculiarly frequent in respect to black men...

Governor Candler, of Georgia, stated... 'I can say of a verity that I have, within the last month, saved the lives of half a dozen innocent Negroes who were pursued by the mob, and brought them to trial in a court of law in which they were acquitted.'

As Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, has finely said: 'The mob lynches a Negro charged with rape will in a little while lynch a white man suspected of crime. Every Christian patriot in America needs to lift up his voice in loud and eternal protest against the mob spirit that is threatening the integrity of this Republic...'"



Republican President Theodore Roosevelt continued:

"There is but one safe rule...that is, to treat each man, whatever his color, his creed, or his social position, with even-handed justice...

Reward or punish the individual on his merits as an individual. Evil will surely come in the end to both races if we substitute for this...

Every lynching represents...a loosening of the bands of civilization... No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered.

Every lynching means just so much moral deterioration in all the children who have any knowledge of it, and therefore just so much additional trouble for the next generation of Americans."



Democrat President Woodrow Wilson segregated the U.S. Navy.



 

During World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower overcame racism and made the decision to arm African American soldiers with weapons.

 

In 1952 and 1956, a majority of African Americans voted for Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.



Republican President Eisenhower ordered the desegregation of Washington, D.C. public schools after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.





When Southern Democrat Governors resisted desegregation, Republican Eisenhower sent in Federal troops.




Eisenhower forced integration by having Federal soldiers escort Black students.






In 1953, Republican Vice President Richard Nixon chaired a committee which sought to eliminate discrimination on the basis of race or color in the employment practices of government contractors.



In 1957 and 1959, Republican President Eisenhower proposed civil rights bills to enforce the 15th Amendment, strengthening the rights of African American to vote.



Senate Democrats filibustered the bills and watered them down.



In 1959, when Southern Democrats demanded that any who violated the new civil rights bill should be tried before all-white Southern juries, Republican Vice-President Richard Nixon gave the deciding Senate vote to kill the Southern amendment.



Southern Democrats who opposed desegregation included former KKK klansman Senator Robert Byrd and Governor George Wallace.



After the Birmingham Children's Crusade Protest where police dogs and fire hoses were used against African Americans, President John F. Kennedy called for a bill emulating the Republican Civil Rights Act of 1875.



Southern Democrats fervently opposed it, as Democrat Senator Richard Russell in 1964:

"We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."



Democrat Senator Robert Byrd filibustered the Civil Rights Bill for 14 hours and 13 minutes on June 10, 1964.



Democrat Senator Strom Thurmond stated in 1964:

"This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress."



The phrase "the bribe or the bullet" refers to positive or negative human motivations, as generations of parents had motivated children with a piece candy for obedience or a swat on the rear for disobedience..

From the Civil War to Lyndon Johnson, Southern Democrats were accused of engaging in negative intimidation tactics to keep African Americas from voting.

As television and media coverage of these tactics grew, it resulted in bad press for the Democrat Party. Political strategists proposed a switch from "the bullet" to "the bribe"; from "intimidation" to "entitlement."



In other words, if the African American vote could no longer be suppressed, then maybe it could be manipulated and controlled through dependency on entitlement programs.

Would anyone vote to stop receiving free money?


Even though Democrat Senators filibustered the Civil Rights legislation nonstop for 71 days, from March 30 to June 10, President Lyndon Johnson persuaded the leaders of his Party to support of watered-down compromise bill, which he signed July 2, 1964.





According to Ronald Kessler's book, Inside The White House (1996), Lyndon Johnson explained his abrupt change in strategy to two Democrat governors aboard Air Force One, saying: "I'll have those n****rs voting Democratic for the next 200 years."



Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Welfare State proceeded to enroll large numbers of minorities into entitlement programs, leading to a dependency and a strong inclination to vote for the Party promising a continuance of those entitlements.



Lyndon Johnson, with the help of Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy, also changed immigration quotas to bring in large numbers of immigrants from poorer countries who would enroll in entitlement programs and thus be more likely to vote for Democrat candidates who promised to continue entitlements.



The Welfare State provided more money to a household if a father was not present in the home.

This adversely affected the strong church-centered African American families and neighborhoods.



As lower income voters grew in their dependency on government programs it proportionally increased the Democrat Party's voting constituency.

Prior to LBJ's "War on Poverty," less than 2 percent of the Federal Budget was on welfare spending. 50 years later spending has mushroomed to 27 percent of the Federal Budget, costing $22 trillion a year, three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the Revolution, yet the percentage of people in poverty has not improved.

Before LBJ's "War on Poverty," less than 5 percent of children were born to unmarried parents. 50 year later it has skyrocketed to 40 percent.

Before LBJ's "War on Poverty," less than 10 percent of U.S. children lived in single parent households. 50 years later that number has exploded to 33 percent, with the poverty rate of single female parent households growing to 37.1 percent.


African American Republican Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr., stated February 5, 1997:

"For the past 30 years our nation's spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that we didn't get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it.

We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a welfare system that penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children, and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that's not right."



Internationally renown Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson stated:

"My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn't want to be on welfare.

She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that...

But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like."


Dr. Carson added:

"The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures.

We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn't provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to.

That's why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are."



Get the book George Washington Carver-His Life and Faith in His Own Words

Beginning in the 1960s, educational emphasis transitioned from strictly academic achievement to behavior modification.


Voters who were less educated tended to be more easily manipulated, as foreshadowed in the pre-Civil War South where it was a crime to teach slaves to read.

An effort began to redefined "racism" to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs.

In a tragic irony, growing dependency on government hand outs appeared reminiscent of the dependency which existed on Southern Democrat plantations where slaves waited for hand outs from their masters.


Star Parker, founder of CURE (Center for Urban Renewal) wrote Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It.


Rev. C.L.Bryant produced a documentary Runaway Slave Movie, stating: "I am a 'Runaway Slave' from the Democrats' plantation."


C. Mason Weaver wrote It's OK to Leave the Plantation: The New Underground Railroad.


Wayne Perryman wrote Unfounded Loyalty: An In-Depth Look Into The Love Affair Between Blacks and Democrats.


Increasingly, media, music and entertainment began to be employed to stir prejudices and passions for political purposes, as President William Henry Harrison warned in his Inaugural, 1841:

"The understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices."



Political organizers used race-baiting tactics to incite racial tensions for political purposes.

Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals:

"The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems...

"The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community...

"The organizer...polarizes the issue...and helps to lead his forces into conflict...

"An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent...

"Fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression.

"He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them... for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act."


Booker T. Washington - American Hero

Earlier in the century, Republican Booker T. Washington had written in My Larger Education-Being Chapters from My Experience (1911, ch. V: The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob, p. 118):

"There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.

Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.

Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs..."

Booker T. Washington stated:

"There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."



Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr., stated February 5, 1997:

"Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide....

Republicans and Democrats - red, yellow, black and white - have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility....

It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator.

And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what's immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance..."

J.C. Watts continued:

"We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within.

And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does...."



J.C. Watts concluded:

"I've often told the story of a boy and his father.

The father was trying to get some work done, and the boy wanted the daddy's attention, but the father was busy at his desk with so much to do.

To occupy the boy, this father....remembered that he had seen a picture of the world in this magazine.

In what he thought was a stroke of genius, the father tore out the picture and tore it into 20 different pieces, and he said, 'Here son. Go put the world back together.'

And you know what happened? Five minutes later the little Michelangelo was back, saying, 'Daddy, look what I've done.'

The father looked, and he said, 'Son, how did you do it so quickly? How did you put the world back together so quickly?'

And the little boy answered, 'Dad, it was easy. There was a picture of a man on the back of the map, on the back of the world. And once I put the man back together, the world fell into place.'

And friends, this is our agenda: to put our men and women back together, and, in that way, get our country back together."

END OF ARTICLE
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