Rainbow over Cleveland

5:50 pm ~ photo by Cleveland Tea Party’s roving photographer, Pat J Dooley

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Socialism on the rise

image credit:thedebtweowe.com

The disconcerting headline (disconcerting to Tea Party people!) in Rick Moran’s piece in American Thinker:

"Socialism is going mainstream, and Millennials are the cause"

From the article:

A headline in The Hill captures a significant moment in American history: "Four socialist-backed candidates win Pennsylvania legislative primaries."

The Democratic Socialists of America supported all four candidates, who will almost certainly win in November, given their lack of GOP opponents.

The DSA itself thinks socialism's time has come:

The DSA hailed the legislative victories as a huge moment for the socialist movement. 

Arielle Cohen, co-chair of the Pittsburgh DSA chapter, told HuffPost that she feels a "monumental shift" after the victories, noting DSA's growing membership since President Trump's election.

"We won on popular demands that were deemed impossible.  We won on health care for all, we won on free education," she said.

"We're turning the state the right shade of red tonight," she added.

The "right shade of red" is due to a growing acceptance for socialism, especially among Millennials, and outright hostility and opposition to capitalism. 

. . .

How did this happen? The short answer is that the American people are ignorant of the dangers to human liberty posed by socialism and have been propagandized by our educational system, our culture, and our media to hate capitalism.  If you are told capitalism is evil for your entire life by teachers, movies, TV, and news media, you are going to believe that capitalism is evil. 

The rest of the article is here. If you go to the link, you will see more than the usual number of reader comments - over 400 when I posted. 

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Book Note: Why Trump Is a President Like No Other

Historian Victor Davis Hanson reviews historian Conrad Black’s new book Why Trump Is a President Like No Other at American Greatness. Here are a few paragraphs from the review:

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus [the middle of things into which one jumps] accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

. . .

Black’s final third of the book is magisterial, as he recites nascent Trump achievements—tax reform, deregulation, the end of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate, superb judicial appointments, curbs on illegal immigration, expanded oil and gas production, a restoration of deterrence aboard—against a backdrop of nonstop venom and vituperation from the so-called “Resistance.” He is certainly unsparing of the Left’s desperate resort to discard the Electoral College, sue under the emoluments clause, invoke the 25th Amendment, introduce articles of impeachment, and embrace a sick assassination chic of threats to Trump’s person and family. Some element of such hysteria is due to Trump’s ostensible Republican credentials (the Left had devoured even their once beloved John McCain, as well as the gentlemanly and judicious Mitt Romney), but more is due to Trump’s far more conservative agenda and his take-no-prisoners style.

Trump’s friends and critics assure us that his incessant twittering and carnival rally-barking are suicidal. Black is too insightful to settle for such a one-dimensional critique (while often lamenting that Trump’s bluster and rhetorical excess are hurting full appreciation of his otherwise solid accomplishments). Instead, Black sees much of Trump’s targeting as comeuppance and long overdue—given a sanctimonious, corrupt media, and a gatekeeping political class that weakened the country over the last two decades of fiscal, social, cultural, and military irresponsibility.

. . .

The rest of Hanson’s review is here. It’s pretty much a rave.

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Amnesty Threat. Again. Alert!

image credit: www,cafepresscom

Late yesterday, NumbersUSA sent out an Action Alert. Below is a lightly edited copy of the Alert:

RED ALERT!
AMNESTY THREAT!

Republican faction working with Democrats to force vote on Amnesty-only bills, need only 7 more GOP signatures

Majority Whip Scalise pushes Goodlatte bill instead.

… some renegade House Republicans are … trying to force votes on an Amnesty-only bill, using a "discharge petition." If they can get one half of all Representatives to sign -- all Democrats plus just twenty-five Republicans -- they can pass an Amnesty-only bill, despite Speaker Paul Ryan's objections.

Already 18 House Republicans have signed the discharge petition that will force a vote on several Amnesty bills. They have only 7 Republican signatures to go!! We have to intervene right now!!

Make your calls [phone numbers appended below]. Send your messages. This fight could be over in just a few days.  

If these renegade House Republicans get their intended outcome, there will be no end to chain migration. Annual migration will continue at one million per year. 

Businesses will be able to hire illegal workers. The Trump administration will be forced to continue catch-and-release, while migrants play games with our asylum system. The visa lottery will continue. And enforcement of our immigration laws will likely continue to be handicapped by open-borders activist judges.

Remember, people who want amnesties are ever watchful. If we nod off for five minutes, they're on us.

You may be asking yourself, "How could something this awful come up so quickly?" A little background:

For a couple of weeks, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA) has said he would try to force a vote on Amnesty bills. Why? He may lose his re-election race this fall, and he and other immigration-expansionist Republicans are anxious to burnish their Amnesty-loving credentials. Just about every House Democrat appears ready to support this move, if there are enough Republican votes.

[NumbersuSA’s] Rosemary Jenks denounced the discharge petition in the press: "There is a small group of so-called Republicans in the House who are willing to destroy the Republican Party in a delusional attempt to safeguard their own seats. It is lunacy, absolute lunacy," she said.

She continued, "How is assisting a big fat amnesty with zero enforcement -- while we are in the middle of a border crisis! -- [going to] help them get reelected? They are delusional. It is a slap in the face to [GOP] leadership, assuming that leadership does not want to pass a big fat amnesty and that is not a very safe assumption."

The discharge petition would force a resolution to the floor that would allow votes on several proposed DREAM-style Amnesties. Even if a good compromise bill were to get a majority, the bill with the most votes would be sent to the Senate.

The good news is that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is pushing back against the insurrection. "We have a regular process that we've been working through and Goodlatte-McCaul, I still think, is the right answer to the problem -- I'm a co-sponsor of the bill," he said.

As reported in Politico earlier today, Speaker Ryan urged fellow Republicans to draft a bill in line with the White House's immigration priorities: "We actually want to solve this problem, so that's why we want to come up with a solution that the president will support."

<snip>

Here are the numbers for GOP House Leadership team:

House Speaker Paul Ryan -- (202) 225-0600

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy -- (202) 225-4000

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise -- (202) 225-0197

House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers -- (202) 225-5107

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The Connecticut Compromise

image credit: www.forbes.com

Coming soon to a state near you?

From Tara Ross at The Daily Signal:

Opponents of the Electoral College achieved an important victory last weekend when Connecticut’s legislature passed the so-called National Popular Vote compact. Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is expected to sign the measure.

Most Americans have never heard of the National Popular Vote compact, but it is shockingly close to causing a major political and legal firestorm. It is a clever scheme to change how we elect the president without the bother of having to pass a constitutional amendment.

States that approve this legislation enter a simple compact with one another. Each participating state agrees to allocate its electors to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of how its own citizens voted. The compact goes into effect when states holding 270 electoral votes (enough to win the presidency) have agreed to the plan.

With Connecticut’s vote, 11 states and the District of Columbia have now approved the measure, giving the compact a total of 172 electors. It needs only 98 more to reach the 270 mark.

The Constitution State has drifted far from its roots. What would Founders such as Roger Sherman think? That Connecticut statesman was an influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Great Compromise—sometimes called the Connecticut Compromise— which gave Congress its bicameral structure, might never have been brokered without him.

Moreover, Sherman was one of many delegates from small states who refused to go along with the idea of a direct popular vote for the presidency. He knew that little Connecticut would be outvoted time and time again. The people at large, Sherman told the Convention, “will generally vote for some man in their own state, and the largest state will have the best chance for the appointment.”

His words reflected the sentiments of other small state delegates.

. . .

Now imagine what Clinton—or any candidate—could do without the restraints inherent in the Electoral College system.

If Clinton reaped a reward from those landslide victories in Los Angeles and New York City, wouldn’t she have worked even harder to run up her tallies there? Why would she make extra visits to Rust Belt states if she could make up the votes with massive voter drives in the big cities?

With the Electoral College, the Democratic Party received a firm reminder not to take those states for granted. Without the Electoral College, such states — which make up vast swaths of the electorate — could simply be ignored.

Read the rest of the article (“Connecticut Subverts the Electoral College, Rejecting Its Own History”) here.

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Election results

image credit: theexaminer.com

ICYMI, Cleveland.com has the Ohio (state and local) election results here. 

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It’s Primary Election Day

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