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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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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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!

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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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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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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