Remembrance Day

President Trump's Proclamation commemorating the 78th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor is here.

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Corruption in the GOPe

Michael Ramirez cartoon via International Liberty

Some readers will have watched Tucker Carlson’s segment last night on Paul Singer, someone I had never heard of before. The segment interviewed residents of Sidney, Nebraska about the destruction of their town as a result of Singer’s predatory actions.

Today, the blog Ace of Spades has much more, pulling back more of the masks of the Uniparty:

Tucker Carlson Obliterates Free Beacon Funder & 

Possible FusionGPS Paymaster Paul Singer, 

as Well As His Owned-and-Operated Pet Senator Ben Sasse

This is an important story. Both video and a transcript at the link.

Definitely watch until the very end, where Tucker Carlson lays into Ben Sasse, one of Paul Singer's wholly-owned subsidiaries, for refusing to make any comment whatsoever -- or even respond to inquiries from Carlson -- about his views about Paul Singer's destruction of a town in the state Sasse allegedly represents.

Here's a Fox news print story about the topic.

People like Paul Singer control the GOP and are effectively in a conspiracy against actual GOP voters. When Singer's kid announced he was gay, Paul Singer basically mandated that the GOP become pro-gay marriage, and the GOP complied.

Another billionaire funder, Stanley Hubbard, told, in 2016, his own pet candidate Scott Walker that he must not question the Corporate Class Consensus on birthright citizenship and high levels of tolerated, supposedly illegal immigration.

Hubbard issued his rebuke, and Walker changed his tune to sing the Corporate Class anthem within a day.

. . .

Paul Singer calls the shots in the GOP. If you ever wonder why the GOP supports so many unpopular positions with incredible zeal and passion (such as vulture capitalism), and why the GOP runs away from some popular issues like border enforcement, and why the GOP takes the Democrat side on issues which are 50/50 (gay stuff, abortion), it's because very rich liberals like Paul Singer, who have no interest in the GOP or conservatism except to pervert it into a tool to help put more money into their pockets, have willed it so . . .

The full report by Ace of Spades is here.  There will always be vultures like Singer, whether in a free market or in a government-controlled economy, but it is particularly scary to see yet more corruption in the political class, including most of the GOP.   

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Dilbert and Trump

You and Scott Adams probably have had similar experiences. The Wired blog has an article/interview with him on to promote his latest book, and it starts off:

After expressing support for Donald Trump in 2016, Dilbert creator Scott Adams estimates that he lost about 30 percent of his income and 75 percent of his friends. He says that that level of political polarization has created a climate of genuine fear.

“People will come up, and they’ll usually whisper—or they’ll lower their voice, because they don’t want to be heard—and they’ll say, ‘I really like what you’re doing on your Periscope, and the stuff you’re saying about Trump,'” Adams says in Episode 389 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “They’re actually afraid to say it out loud. They literally whisper it to me in public places.”

Adams blames the current climate on social media and a clickbait business model that rewards sensationalism over fact-based reporting. Since the technology is here to stay, he says we’re going to need new societal norms to help foster a calmer, more constructive political discourse.

Yes, but this gets us into another major issue contributing to the political polarization, i.e., emotions on one side vs critical thinking on the other.  Adams expands on that point in an earlier book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, pictured above.  More of the Wired Scott Adams interview is here.

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The Plot Against the President

Some readers will not have the time to read book-length investigations into Deep State and media-fueled hoaxes. So here’s an excerpt from Scott Johnson’s review of Lee Smith’s book, The Plot Against the President, posted at Power Line:

All The President’s Men, Take 2

Lee Smith is the author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in US History. The book is an invaluable companion to Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency; it adds to and amplifies the case McCarthy makes. I wrote about McCarthy’s book in “All the president’s men, Obama style.” Smith’s book elaborates on the theme to which I alluded in the heading of that post. I urge all readers with an interest in this incredible scandal to read both books.

Lee Smith is a great journalist. This bears on one of the book’s principal themes: the complicity of the press in peddling the hoax alleging the collusion of the Trump campaign with organs of the Russian government. In peddling the hoax, the most prominent organs of the mainstream media were the accomplices of the perpetrators. The book cites the relevant stories and relentlessly names names demonstrating the “collusion” of the press with the Clinton campaign and the government — the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice — in peddling the Russian hoax as news.

Within the profession there has been no reckoning for the misconduct that the book makes out. On the contrary, at the profession’s upper reaches, we have seen only the renewed commitment to carry on the campaign to remove Trump from office. 

This book may be the closest we ever get to the day of reckoning that is due the press.

Read the full column here.

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The first Thanksgiving

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org

Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:

What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 

Here’s Bowyer's “How A Failed Commune Gave Us What is Now Thanksgiving.”

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Who do you know who still trusts the media?

image credit: woodylewis.com

I am always on the lookout for reports to share with liberal friends and relatives – on why they should be skeptical of what they read in the New York Times or cleveland.com -- or what they watch on TV.  Today, Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart dissects the lazy, not to say dishonest reporting on the impeachment “inquiry” – and it’s worth printing out and taking to your Thanksgiving dinner for another attempt to change minds. A brief sample:

The Media Neither Read the Transcripts 

Nor Watched the Hearings

The media seem not to have watched the impeachment hearings: they stopped paying attention the moment the witnesses’ prepared statements were leaked and the Democrats’ talking points were posted.

Nor did many journalists bother to read the transcripts of the witnesses’ depositions in the earlier, closed-door hearings.

Partly that was because Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) rushed the public hearings before some of the most important transcripts were ready. Partly that was because the sheer length of the transcripts — hundreds of pages each — was daunting for journalists working on deadline.

But partly it was because some journalists are simply lazy, and others share the Democrats’ goal of bringing down President Donald Trump by any means necessary.

That’s why the media reports of the hearings were so inaccurate. 

. . .

On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the media center outside the Democrat debate in Atlanta, Georgia, co-hosted by MSNBC and the Washington Post. In the hours prior to the debate, MSNBC’s live coverage of the impeachment inquiry was showing on all the screens. Many journalists in the hall seemed not to be watching at all. They were mailing about, chatting to colleagues, or enjoying refreshments.

Some of them were top correspondents for leading media outlets — the ones who pose questions to candidates, and shape public opinion on their panel discussions and Sunday shows. Yet they were ignoring the hearings.

. . .

And what kind of journalist decides what the verdict should be before the other side has even had a chance to make its case?

Schiff and the Democrats broke from tradition and refused to let the president be represented by legal counsel, or to give Republicans near-equal control over the witness list. They held the hearings in the Intelligence Committee so they could use a secret room. Not one media company in the House press gallery bothered to sue for access — the way they sue the Trump administration for any small inconvenience, like the suspension of Jim Acosta’s press pass.

The media did not report what actually happened in the impeachment hearings, but what they want to have happened. They have enlisted themselves in a distortion of due process that threatens the constitutional rights of all Americans. If the president himself is not safe from abuse, none of us can be.

Read the whole thing here – and print it out!!!

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Election Fraud on a National Scale?

art credit: Center of the American Experiment

Some of us continue to be concerned about voter fraud in the 2020 election.  Eric Georgatos at American Thinker published a sobering report this past week:

Dallas patriots Kevin Freeman, host of the Economic War Room on BlazeTV and Russ Ramsland, a voter fraud and election expert, have released detailed findings from a cyber/forensic investigation into election fraud utilizing compromised voting machines in 2018 (and quite probably, in the governor’s race in 2019 in Kentucky). 

In summary terms, Freeman’s “Episode #70” reveals that (1) security protections in voting machines were disabled, (2) penetration and manipulation of actual vote tabulations was and is possible, and (3) evidence already exists that votes were surreptitiously, electronically manipulated to change election results. 

This is the 21st century version of Stalin’s ruthless observation, “it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”  Only today’s Stalins can do it all by online penetration of unsecure ‘voting machines’ to count and alter votes, and leave almost no IT fingerprints. 

. . .

If the fraud is as widespread and systemic as Episode #70 suggests, there isn’t going to be a technical fix in time for the 2020 elections. 

There may in fact be only one solution:  An American grassroots effort on a scale never before seen to demand that the 2020 election be by paper ballot, counted manually, in all 50 states.

Read the full report here. Judicial Watch recently distributed a pamphlet about what concerned citizens can do in the coming months to prevent or reduce voter fraud in their precincts; I plan to post some highlights later this month.

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