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Thursday, September 29, 2016

Obama's illegal Internet giveaway


photo credit: wnd.com

State AGs sue to stop Obama's internet transition

  

Four Republican state Attorneys General [Mike DeWine is not one of them] are suing to stop the Obama administration from transferring oversight of the internet to an international body, arguing the transition would violate the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit — filed Wednesday in a Texas federal court — threatens to throw up a new roadblock to one of the White House’s top tech priorities, just days before the scheduled Oct. 1 transfer of the internet’s address system is set to take place.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general for Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas contend that the transition, lacking congressional approval, amounts to an illegal giveaway of U.S. government property. They also express fear that the proposed new steward of the system, a nonprofit known as ICANN, would be so unchecked that it could “effectively enable or prohibit speech on the Internet.”

The four states further contend that ICANN could revoke the U.S. government’s exclusive use of .gov and .mil, the domains used by states, federal agencies and the U.S. military for their websites. And the four attorneys general argue that ICANN’s “current practices often foster a lack of transparency that, in turn, allows illegal activity to occur.”

“Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement. “The president does not have the authority to simply give away America’s pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish.”

Read the rest here. Ohio AG Mike DeWine’s website is here
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Debate moderator


From one of the Tea Party for Trump sites:


The Trump Pledge
10 hrs · 
What are the odds that the only person in America that has never heard of the Clinton Foundation or the Benghazi scandal is Lester Holt? 
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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Twilight Zone 2016


This one was forwarded from someone who saw it on FB:


"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." 

A new civil rights agenda


photo credit: therightplanet.com

A couple of days ago, I posted a chart demonstrating the radical agenda of Black Lives Matter as it relates to race riots in Charlotte and elsewhere. It’s an important subject in this election season, especially since candidate Donald J. Trump is going where few GOP candidates have gone: into the inner cities to explore a “new civil rights agenda” with black leaders such as Pastor Darrell Scott and Sheriff David Clarke.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and one of my favorite contributors to various blogsites, had an article yesterday at Town Hall entitled ‘Favors’ to Blacks. His comments are particularly on topic as to why a “new civil rights agenda” is in Trump’s platform. Here are some extracts:

Back in the 1960s, as large numbers of black students were entering a certain Ivy League university for the first time, someone asked a chemistry professor -- off the record -- what his response to them was. He said, "I give them all A's and B's. To hell with them."

Since many of those students were admitted with lower academic qualifications than other students, he knew that honest grades in a tough subject like chemistry could lead to lots of failing grades, and that in turn would lead to lots of time-wasting hassles -- not just from the students, but also from the administration.

He was not about to waste time that he wanted to invest in his professional work in chemistry and the advancement of his own career. He also knew that his "favor" to black students in grading was going to do them more harm than good in the long run, because they wouldn't know what they were supposed to know.

Such cynical calculations were seldom expressed in so many words. Nor are similar cynical calculations openly expressed today in politics. But many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks "favors" that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run.

One of these "favors" was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.
In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.

A big "favor" the Obama administration is offering blacks today is exemption from school behavior rules that have led to a rate of disciplining of black male students that is greater than the rate of disciplining of other categories of students.
. . .
But Washington politicians are on the case. It strengthens the political vision that blacks are besieged by racist enemies, from which Democrats are their only protection. They give black youngsters exemptions from behavioral standards, just as the Ivy League chemistry professor gave them exemption from academic standards.

In both cases, the consequence -- unspoken today -- is "to hell with them." Kids from homes where they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police.

This is ultimately not a racial thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental exemption from behavioral standards in Britain have led to remarkably similar results among lower-class whites there.
. . .

If a “new civil rights agenda” honestly confronts such issues and explores real solutions, I am all for it. Some of those real solutions will involve eliminating destructive government interference and shrinking the welfare state. Those are Tea Party values.

Read the entire article here.

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Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Hillary’s track record as Secretary of State

photo credit: businessinsider.com

Betsy McCaughey contributed a post-debate essay today to The American Spectator website. The article, “Failure at Foggy Bottom,” examines Hillary’s track record running the Dept. of State:

Hillary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president. Don’t believe it.

At the end of her taxpayer-funded audition on the world stage, she came home empty-handed, with no meaningful gains for the United States. Voters are too smart to be wowed when she rattles off names of Islamic terrorist splinter factions and third-world capitals.

Evidence shows she left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. If anything, her record at Foggy Bottom should disqualify her to be president.
. . .
This presidential race is a contest between a builder and a blabberer. The builder, Donald Trump, manages 185 major business ventures around the globe. Until 2009, Clinton had never run anything. Running the State Department was her chance to prove she could do it. She failed miserably.

Read the chapter and verse here.

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Monday, September 26, 2016

Drunk blogging the debate



If you can't bear to watch, or if you don't have a television, you can go to PJ Media's Stephen Green -- Mr Vodkapundit - who is drunk-blogging the debate. Go here
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Black Lives Matter protests



Clarice Feldman is always a good Sunday read (Clarice's Pieces at American Thinker). Yesterday's column on the race riots in Charlotte, George Soros, and Black Lives Matter included the above chart via Zero Hedge:
What is most disturbing is that behind the pent up rage and thuggish violence, dressed up in the socially-acceptable package of "black lives matter" is the reality that white violence is the last thing blacks should be "protesting."
Powerful graphic. (If you have difficulty embiggening the chart, the category to which the arrow points is "Blacks killed by whites.")

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Preview of tonight's debate

By Branco at Legal Insurrection:

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Sunday, September 25, 2016

Yet another continuing funding resolution

art credit: quotesgram.com

The Uniparty is poised to strike again. 


[Sen. Mitch] McConnell urges passage of 'bi-partisan' funding resolution. 

With less than 6 days to go before the government runs out of money, Congress will vote this week on a stop gap measure that would fund the government through December.

What is not in the Continuing Resolution [CR] is far more significant than what it contains. Not included are any controversial policy riders. Funding the battle [against] the Zika virus is included, but at reduced levels.
 . . .
The fact that the CR funds the government at levels agreed upon last year is irrelevant. Those levels are unacceptable because they add tens of billions to the deficit. The military is upset because the reduced funding agreed to will hamper operations and readiness. 

About the only people who are truly happy with this CR are the bureaucrats who will once again be able to expand their power through additional funding.

If this is "bi-partisanship," give me gridlock every day.

Amen to that. Read the rest here, including extracts from Sen. Mitch McConnell’s statement.

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Friday, September 23, 2016

Newt Gingrich, Van Jones to debate at Baldwin Wallace University


photo credit: mrc.org.

You see Van Jones all the time on CNN, but some of us still can't get past his role as President Obama's Green Czar. Jones resigned over the Labor Day weekend in 2009 following criticism and outrage over his radical positions. (Here's the archived report on Politico.)

From cleveland.com today:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Two prominent political commentators will take a quick hiatus from cable TV next week to debate the election at Baldwin Wallace University instead.

Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House Speaker who has emerged as a prominent supporter of Republican nominee Donald Trump, and Van Jones, the former environmental adviser in President Barack Obama's White House who now supports Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, are scheduled to appear at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 29 at BW's Ursprung Gymnasium, 136 E. Bagley Rd. in Berea.

The two, who previously co-hosted "Crossfire" on CNN, will discuss the impact Clinton and Trump's policies could have on Ohio and its economy, according to university officials.

The university booked the two to appear last year as part of the BW School of Business Leadership Lecture Series. It just so happened that both have emerged as prominent voices on this year's election, particularly Gingrich, who was discussed as a possible vice-presidential candidate for Trump.
. . .
The university already has distributed 2,000 tickets — the gymnasium has room for about 1,500 more people. Tickets are free, but are limited to four per person.


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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Excellent reminder of why we stand for the National Anthem

photo credit: sportsleader.org

Well, this was refreshing to read. From Legal Insurrection:

Kneeling during the national anthem has taken the sports by storm since San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick began it during preseason to protest police treatment of black people. Other NFL players have done it along with high school football players.

But Virginia Tech basketball coach Buzz Williams will not have that behavior in his house. Instead, he chose to show his players why we stand for the national anthem. We do it to honor the men and women who sacrificed so much so we can enjoy our freedom at home.

There’s a 4½ minute video of coach Williams on the website. Various versions have been up on YouTube for over a year, but the recent disrespect exhibited by the SF quarterback makes it timely. The video on the LI website shows over 34 million views! It's inspiring.

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If they don’t report, how do you decide?

art credit: bradhoffmann.com

Another black mark for Fox News. In a long line of black marks. 

Last year, Megyn Kelly disgraced herself at the first GOP primary debate, with assists from Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. Gretchen Carlson sued Fox for sexual harassment and won. Roger Ailes resigned under a cloud. Then Greta Van Susteren resigned abruptly. Last month, Andrea Tantaros sued Fox for sexual harassment. Some critics are fed up with Sean Hannity for his blatant bias and support of Donald Trump.

So yesterday evening, the 10pm Hannity show was scheduled to broadcast the town hall taped earlier in the day in Cleveland Heights. Donald Trump was speaking as the guest of Pastor Darrell Scott, who is a Trump surrogate; Scott is especially eloquent on minorities, inner cities, the media, and related issues. (This blog has posted some of Scott's interview via YouTubes here and here.)

Fox News bumped the Hannity town hall last night. Instead, they went wall-to-wall with “Fox News Alert” coverage of Charlotte, North Carolina, with shots of earlier rioting interspersed with current shots of not much going on (the Governor declared a state of emergency at 12:30 am and the violence continued into the night; I don't know if Fox was still bumping regularly scheduled programming). 

Is Fox planning to run the Hannity town hall with Trump tonight or over the weekend? The Fox website states only that “The Hannity town hall event, originally scheduled for Wednesday, did not air due to breaking news coverage of the protests in Charlotte.” No announcement of re-scheduling. 

Sundance recently predicted that as Election Day approaches, and since Hillary’s campaign seems to be cratering, that we will see the media and the Uniparty political class fan the flames of race warfare like we’ve never seen. Maybe Fox’s decision to bump the Trump town hall and spend the entire hour with footage of Charlotte streets, evidently anticipating more rioting, is a beginning of the final ugly phase of the presidential campaign season. I don't know, but I can say that I don't see much difference these days between Fox, other cable news, or the networks.

The Washington Post, no fan of Mr. Trump, published an annotated transcript of the Hannity/Trump town hall here

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Election issues 101

art credit: blog.press.princeton.edu

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite columnists, not the least because of his ability to explain economics in ways that anyone can understand. He writes in plain English, marshals his facts, and it’s all but impossible to find a logic lapse in any of his arguments. While I may disagree with him on this or that, I admire him and respect his opinion. Always. So I am extracting his column from a recent Front Page column on “Essential Reads For The 2016 Election:  Books every American should be familiar with before voting this November”:

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple. It was not written this year and is not even about the United States, much less our current presidential or other candidates.
What makes "Life at the Bottom" especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States.
Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behavior cannot be explained away by "a legacy of slavery" or "institutional racism," or other such evasions of facts in the United States.
As Dr. Dalrymple says: "It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course." That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behavior it promotes and subsidizes.
Another and very different example of the welfare state's actual consequences is "The New Trail of Tears" by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It is a painful but eye-opening account of life on American Indian reservations.
People on those reservations have been taken care of by the federal government for more than a hundred years. They have lived in a welfare state longer than any other minority in America. What have been the consequences?
One consequence is that they have lower incomes than any other minority — including other American Indians, who do not live on reservations, and who are doing far better on their own.
The economic plight of people on the reservations is by no means the worst of it. The social problems are heart-breaking. As just one example, the leading cause of death, among American Indian boys from 10 to 14 years of age, is suicide.
As regards black Americans, there is much talk about the role of police. If you want a book that cuts through the rhetoric and confusion, and deals with hard facts, then "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald does precisely that.
On racial issues in general, the best economic survey is "Race and Economics" by Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University. Just the table on page 35, showing unemployment rates among black and white teenagers, going all the way back to 1948, should demolish all the rhetoric and spin that tries to conceal the deadly effects of minimum wage laws on unemployment among black teenagers.
The rest of Sowell's column is here. The authors cited by Sowell are also regular contributors to print and online sources. So if book-length discussions are too time-consuming for a busy schedule, you can access columns by Dalrymple on welfare and poverty here, Williams on the consequences of minimum wages here, and McDonald on the war on cops here. And here’s a review of McDonald’s book on cops. 

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Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Hillary: fashion icon? Who knew?

Time out for a little humor. Doug Powers (on Michelle Malkin's website) reports the following:


The Post put a question mark after “style icon” because they didn’t want to be total sycophantic sellouts.
Maybe they’re on to something, because I was dressed like this earlier when fixing an electrical problem (it’s the only jacket with pockets that can hold all my tools, and the wearable black tape really comes in handy for wire wrapping):

This outfit –and Doug Powers’s editorial comments above – crack me up. But have you taken note of the stunning matching pants? Meow.

REMINDER: Tune in to Fox News tonight at 10pm for Hannity's Town Hall "Trump Talks Minority Outreach." It was recorded this morning in Cleveland Hts. at Pastor Darrell Scott's church.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Short notice: tomorrow with Trump


Announcement below via Cuyahoga Valley Republicans - with apologies for the short notice:

You're invited!
10:30 AM
TOMORROW
Wednesday, September 21st 
when
Mr. Donald Trump 
will appear with 
Dr. Darrell Scott
for a Special Town Hall Meeting
with
Sean Hannity
at
The New Spirit Revival Center
3130 Mayfield Road
Cleveland Hts., Ohio 44118

PLEASE NOTE:
THIS EVENT IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
The 9:00 AM Pastors Leadership Conference  is by invitation only.
Admission is Free.
The Town Hall will start at 10:30 AM
We suggest arriving by 9:00 AM.

Let's Rock the House!

Monday, September 19, 2016

See No Jihad

art credit: 123rf.com

IMHO, Andrew McCarthy is one of the go-to columnists on matters jihad. Back in January, when McCarthy wrote his short piece for the Conservatives Against Trump issue of National Review online, I shook my head in disappointment. Here’s a short quote:
A president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda] effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this,  careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue. 
However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:
In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.
In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.
. . .
Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.
The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.
Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.
If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Read the rest here. (And Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is meeting with both presidential candidates during his visit to New York and the United Nations this week.)
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Saturday, September 17, 2016

Presidential debate on Sept. 26: Johnson and Stein not invited

art credit: wiltondems.org.

Assuming Hillary doesn’t have another collapse or some other health issue, there will be two candidates at the first Presidential debate on Sept. 26: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. From The Hill:

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced on Friday that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their running mates are the only candidates who will participate in the upcoming debates.

This means Trump (R) and Clinton (D) will take part in the Sept. 26 debate at Hofstra University in New York and that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein have not been invited. 

The Oct. 4 vice presidential debate will just include Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence

Some of the crystal balls got this one wrong. Politico ran a story on the possibility of third party candidate participation. Treehouse captured text of the recent full-page ad in The New York Times that gave every appearance of greasing the polling wheels to get Johnson onto the debate stage. Evidently, it didn’t work.
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American education standards and today's electorate


art credit: giphy.com

Anyone who can stand to watch Fox’s Watter’s World on-the-street interviews with low-information voters, or those who remember similar candid camera interviews on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, are probably aghast at the dumbing down of the American culture, media, and education. We're talking about young adults who do not recognize an image of George Washington and cannot name the sitting Vice President. Who are the young voters who are part of the electorate?

This past week, I came across two opinion pieces that examined the educational decline in our country. The first was by Bruce Deitrick Price (K-12: Parent X Takes On Principal Zero) at the American Thinker blog, about a parent who had attempted on numerous occasions to register concerns with the principal of her daughter’s school:

My complaints were elevated to the new principal.  I met with him at least seven times; several times I was accompanied by a member of the school board.

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

He was emphatic that neither I nor the school board member could change anything.

This parent decided to home-school her daughter. But the principal’s attitude and his unashamed statement that academic excellence is a thing of the past is more than a little alarming. The rest of that short report is here.

A longer analysis of the collapse of America’s educational standards is by a Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway:

What we see today, then, universities as centers of leftist indoctrination, the shutting down of intellectual debate (cf. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind), a generation of “snowflake” students who are preoccupied with frivolities like trigger warnings, microaggresssons, transgender bathrooms, and “safe spaces” where they will never be exposed to an unfamiliar or conflicting idea, and the sniveling infantilization of the entire academic cohort—flows directly from [John] Dewey and his followers. 

These pedagogical dissidents prepared the ground for the subversive agenda of the Frankfurters by engaging in an act of cerebral softening, that is, promoting the student over the teacher, the child over the man (or woman), and feeling over thought—hence the continuing prominence of the “self-esteem” movement that slashed-and-burned its way through the educational landscape.

Scary stuff. This is a much longer read and very thought-provoking, but it may be of interest to conservative voters who have an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election with family and friends. Be forewarned: the essay is rather depressing, but it does a good job of tracing the history of how we got to where we are and why it's an uphill battle. If you are interested, it’s here.

The key for me when attempting discussions on politics with liberals is that the facts and logic don’t seem to matter – at least most of the time. It’s all about feel-good emotions. If you find Mr. Solway’s observations perceptive, you might also want to take a look at Diana West’s book-length treatment, The Death of the Grown-Up. It’s available on Kindle and discounted hardcovers (as low as 1¢). It’s a good read and goes fast.


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Friday, September 16, 2016

Hillary's' basket of Deplorables' : another exploding cigar

Hillary's "basket of Deplorables": the gift that keeps on giving... this image is from today's Trump rally in Miami (via Sundance):

image by Keln

Look familiar? We posted it last week here
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Restatement on The Flight 93 Election

photo credit: cnn.com

A few days ago I posted a link to a think piece entitled The Flight 93 Election, along with a few extracts. The essay, originally published on The Claremont Review of Books website here, generated a significant amount of interest in the blogosphere. It also generated a boatload of responses, much of it critical, to which the author, writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, responded on Sept-13 here.

Like everyone else, I am trying to navigate my way through the run-up to the November election, and I highly recommend both the original think-piece and the follow-up that responds to specific criticisms. Here are a few extracts from the Restatement on Flight 93:

Some also complained about the aptness of the analogy: the plane crashed! Well, yes, and this one might too. Then again, it might not. It depends in part on what action the electorate chooses to take. The passengers of Flight 93 roused themselves. They succeeded insofar as that plane did not hit its intended target.

The temptation not to rouse oneself in a time of great peril is always strong. In another respect, the analogy is even more apt. All of the passengers on Flight 93—and all of the victims at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—died owing in part to a disastrously broken immigration system that didn’t then and still doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. Which also happens to be the core issue at stake in this election.
. . .
[another reason that some conservatives oppose Trump is that] Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left.

The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.
. . .
[T]he current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question [my emphasis]. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. 
. . .
If Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. Things will mostly look the same, just as—outwardly—Rome changed little on the ascension of Augustus. It will not be tyranny or Caesarism—not yet. But it will represent, in my view, an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Consider that no president has been denied reelection since 1992. If we can’t beat the Democrats now, what makes anyone think we could in 2020, when they will have all the advantages of incumbency plus four more years of demographic change in their favor? And if we can’t win in 2016 or 2020, what reason is there to hope for 2024? Will the electorate be more Republican? More conservative? Will constitutional norms be stronger?

The country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a blue state on a national scale. 


The entire article is here. Should be a Must Read.
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Thursday, September 15, 2016

It's contagious (unlike Hillary's pneumonia)


‘Make Britain Great Again’ 

photo credit: all50flags.com
The Breitbart London report is here.
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Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Land of Hope and Glory: Maybe there is hope for us


The annual series of Prom concerts at Royal Albert Hall in London have traditionally closed with the audience waving flags and singing along to “Land of Hope and Glory” – lyrics set to the Edward Elgar march that Americans recognize as “Pomp and Circumstance.” That is the march often played as the processional at high school graduations (or at least it used to be in the ancient days of my youth.) This year the YouTube of the September 10, 2016 Last Night of the Proms “Land of Hope and Glory” is particularly heartening as well as entertaining.

Conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (9 minutes)

Yes, there were flags of the EU (spoilsports) and if you go through the comments section, you’ll see the pro-Brexit and anti- Brexit sentiments. But mostly you see Union Jacks galore inside Royal Albert Hall and at the sing-alongs broadcast from London’s Hyde Park and from Belfast. It was a celebration of British culture, heritage, and tradition. The Brits were out in force enthusiastically waving their flag.
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Monday, September 12, 2016

Deplorable week for Hillary

I am assuming that Tea Party people are already up to date on Hillary’s collapse yesterday in New York, the belated diagnosis of “pneumonia” -- which now seems to be afflicting her staff and Chuck Schumer as well, the possibility of a DNC fallback plan (see also here), etc. The Power Line blog has a photo essay up on Hillary’s really bad week, and here are two images:




The rest of the images/captions are here.
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