Showing posts sorted by date for query extremist. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query extremist. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Monday, January 10, 2022

The Pending November 'Shellacking' for Democrats

At the Los Angeles Times, "Democrats face a tough slog in midterm battle to keep Congress":

Democrats have long known history is not on their side in the 2022 midterm elections. But as they enter this campaign year, the steep climb to keep their majorities in Congress appears even more daunting with the COVID-19 pandemic stubbornly persistent and voters concerned over inflation and crime.

The unsettled national climate — if it holds in November — will likely favor Republicans, who need just five additional seats to take control of the U.S. House and only one more for a majority in the Senate.

The sitting president’s party almost always loses ground in midterm elections — doing so in all but two such contests since the end of World War II. And Democrats hoping to buck precedent have few easy fixes for the problems on voters’ minds or for President Biden’s underwater approval ratings.

“Sometimes you have a messaging problem, and other times you just have a problem. In this situation, [Democrats] just have the latter,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who ran communications for the GOP’s House campaign arm in 2018. “No slogan or single policy achievement can turn around a broader environment. There would have to be a seismic shift.”

Democratic campaign officials reject predictions of a gloomy November, saying they’re confident they’ll have a solid pitch for voters.

“Democrats are going to hold the House because we are delivering for the American people,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He pointed to millions of jobs created in the last year, as well as vaccine distribution and efforts to lower healthcare costs.

“Kevin McCarthy and his band of extremist House Republicans have yet to present a single realistic idea to move this country forward,” he said, referring to the congressman from Bakersfield who leads the GOP in the House.

There are some silver linings for Democrats.

The party probably avoided a worst-case scenario in the redistricting for the House. Though the GOP had an overall advantage in drawing the new congressional maps, so far they’ve mostly tried to shore up existing red districts instead of aggressively creating new ones, experts say.

In the Senate, Democrats are defending seats in battleground states that Biden won last year, albeit by the barest of margins in places like Arizona and Georgia. Senate races can also depend more on individual candidates, making Democrats slightly less vulnerable than their House counterparts if there is a wave election against them.

Still, “it obviously takes unique circumstances to redirect a midterm election,” said Stuart Rothenberg, senior editor of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political newsletter. “I don’t know whether there’s anything that’s going to happen that’s so shocking to people, so stunning that it will give the Democrats the ammunition they need to change the election.”

Privately, Democratic strategists acknowledge the difficulties ahead, particularly after losing the Virginia governor’s race in the fall and barely escaping a similar defeat in deep-blue New Jersey. Those off-year races often have served as early indicators for the direction of the midterms.

The Democrats’ challenge partially lies with the nature of midterms: Supporters of the party in power are often disappointed that the president’s campaign promises have not yet been fulfilled, dampening their enthusiasm, while the opposition is motivated by unhappiness at being out of power.

Republicans, meanwhile, have a more basic task: keeping the focus on the majority party.

“The strategy for Republicans is a pretty simple one: Don’t screw it up,” said Ken Spain, former spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Don’t make yourself the issue and allow the election to be a referendum on Democratic control of Washington.”

Distilling the party’s campaign message, Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, kept the focus tightly on Biden.

“Biden has lost all credibility — he has failed to ‘shut down the virus’ like he promised, pushed Americans out of work with unconstitutional mandates, overseen a rise in crime, presided over skyrocketing prices for everyday goods and promoted trillions more in reckless spending,” she said...

 

Monday, December 13, 2021

For a Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan, and the Rest of the World, a Crisis Looms

A year-end review, at WSJ, "The new Taliban administration is struggling with a devastated economy. The fallout likely will extend well beyond the country’s borders":

Afghanistan is heading into one of its most difficult years.

The new Taliban administration, devoid of international recognition and cut off by the U.S. from the global financial system, is struggling to restart an economy that has shrunk by more than 40% since the American withdrawal in August. The worst drought in decades, combined with the suspension of many foreign-aid projects, means that millions of Afghans could face starvation in coming months.

“We are on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe that is preventable,” says the United Nations representative to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons.

Capitalizing on growing discontent, particularly in eastern and northern Afghanistan, the extremist Islamic State group already is launching nearly daily attacks that target the Taliban and the country’s Shiite minority. That terrorism threat, combined with the Taliban’s so-far unyielding position on issues such as women’s education, means that most Western embassies that escaped the country in August won’t be returning soon.

The only question amid this bleak landscape is to what extent Afghanistan’s crisis can be contained within Afghanistan in 2022. Will the looming famine prompt millions of Afghans to try to reach Europe on foot, the way millions of Syrians did in 2014-2015? Will Islamic State garner enough strength to start launching attacks on Western targets from within Afghanistan? And will the year see a record-breaking outflow of opium and other illicit drugs, now the main livelihood of desperate farmers in many parts of the country?

Past experiences suggest that the fallout will inevitably spread beyond Afghanistan’s immediate neighborhood.

Historical lessons

Historically, Afghanistan has gone through cycles of intense American interest, followed by years of neglect that produced dramatic consequences down the line. In the 1980s, Washington invested great effort and capital into fostering the mujahedeen resistance against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. Then, it turned away when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Backed by regional proxies, victorious mujahedeen engaged in a long and bloody civil war that eventually spurred the Taliban’s rise and led to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Now, after two decades of intense military and diplomatic engagement, the temptation in Washington—and other Western capitals—is to tune out once again. Maintaining the status quo policy of sanctions on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and minimal engagement with Kabul’s new authorities requires little immediate expenditure of political capital, even though it may be the riskiest approach over the long term. “The West wants to punish the Taliban, but the economic chokehold is self-defeating,” says Graeme Smith, co-author of a recent report on Afghanistan by the International Crisis Group conflict-resolution organization. “History shows that ignoring Afghanistan allows problems to fester and grow. Migration, terrorism, drugs: All of these issues could destabilize the region and spill over into Europe.”

The Taliban, of course, are playing up such concerns to win a reprieve from sanctions, and to persuade Washington to unfreeze more than $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets.

“The suffering of a child from malnutrition, the death of a mother from lack of health services, the deprivation of a common Afghan from food, shelter, medicine and other primary needs has no political or logical justification,” the Taliban government’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, wrote in a recent open letter to the U.S. Congress...

Very sad. 

At one photo, "Wazir Nazari was shot in the face, taking both of her eyes, by Taliban fighters going door-to-door in her village in the Malistan district of central Afghanistan’s Ghazni province in early July, her father said."


Friday, October 15, 2021

Afghanistan Mosque Bombing Kills at Least 38 Shiite Worshippers in Kanduhar

The news for Biden is so-bad all-around there's not enough room for above-the-fold headlines in the nation's newspapers. The bad news is packing it, overwhelming everything else. 

I hate to predict elections (because really, you never know until voters actually vote), but if historical precedent is any clue, 2022 is going to be an electoral tsunami like we've never seen. I feel like we're back in the 1970 and Jimmy Carter is whining about the "malaise" he couldn't fix. 

I'll be surprised if Biden doesn't mandate thermostats lowered to 65 degrees this winter and tell regular folks to put on a cardigan sweaters.

At WSJ, "Afghanistan Mosque Bombing Kills at Least 38 Shiite Worshippers":

A complex suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in southern Afghanistan’s main city of Kandahar killed at least 38 worshipers Friday, breaking two months of relative peace in the Taliban’s historic stronghold and highlighting the threat posed by a spreading presence of Islamic State.

While nobody took immediate responsibility, Friday’s attack followed a suicide bombing claimed by Islamic State that killed some 100 people on Oct. 8 at a Shiite mosque in the northern city of Kunduz. The extremist group’s regional affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP, has repeatedly targeted Afghanistan’s Shiite minority in recent months.

Kandahar’s main hospital, Mirwais, said it received 38 fatalities and 72 people who were injured in the blast. Mohammad Qasam, the chief doctor at the hospital, warned that the death toll could rise.

“The prayer had ended. We were preparing to leave the mosque when we heard gunfire outside. A few seconds later, there was a blast inside. I was close to the entrance and managed to escape quickly,” said the witness. He said two suicide bombers detonated outside the mosque and a third blew himself up inside.

While both the Taliban and Islamic State adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, the two groups have profound ideological differences and consider each other enemies. Though the Taliban persecuted Shiites in the past, they have since softened their position and say that, under their rule, the religious freedom of Afghanistan’s Shiite community will be safeguarded. Islamic State considers all Shiite Muslims infidels who should be killed. The Taliban condemned the attack and directed their security forces “to find the perpetrators as soon as possible and bring them to justice,” according to a statement released by the group’s chief spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid.

The recent series of deadly bombings present a challenge to the Taliban government. Since the Taliban toppled the U.S.-backed Afghan republic on Aug. 15 and proclaimed a restored Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, improved security has been a key source of legitimacy for Afghanistan’s new rulers. Yet ISKP—the only significant militant group currently operating in Afghanistan—has struck many high-profile targets since then, including a bombing outside Kabul airport that killed 200 Afghans waiting to be evacuated and 13 U.S. service members.

Friday’s blast shows that the Taliban are struggling to guarantee security even in Kandahar, their historical stronghold.

“The Taliban have been dismissive of the Islamic State’s threat—and it is showing how wrong they are,” said Asfandyar Mir, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace. “Carrying out this attack in the Taliban’s heartland is a clear signal that the Islamic State wants to take the fight to the Taliban, bleed their legitimacy and sovereignty over Afghanistan.”

The mosque bombing interrupted a period of unusual peace in southern Afghanistan, home to some of the deadliest battlegrounds of the 20-year war waged by the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies.

“When the Taliban took over the country, I thought we would be rid of war but now I think the situation may get even worse in the future,” said Navid, a resident of Kandahar city who didn’t want his surname to be used. “The harsh truth, which we all have to accept, is that there is no peace in Afghanistan. We will never be able to live peacefully, neither under the previous government nor the current Islamic Emirate,” he added.

Afghanistan has largely avoided the kind of sectarian strife that plagues much of the Muslim world. ISKP, which was formed by spinoff factions of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in 2014, was the first group to systematically target Shiite Muslims, who make up around a fifth of Afghanistan’s population...

 

Friday, August 27, 2021

Dumping the Browser Tabs

Hey dear readers!

I honestly haven't been able to blog.

Right now I'm doing heavy prep work. My college starts its fall semester on Monday and I'm teaching six classes. I'm excited, but the prep is exhaustive, as my school is once again mostly online for fall, and the Canvas (online learning) system takes time to revise from semester to semester.

By the end of this term (second week of December), I'll have taught almost two full years since the start of the lockdown in March of last year. More specifically, the spring term starts up in early February next year, so altogether, at that time, it'll be about 23 months since I've taught on campus.

Not only that, of course I've been glued to the TV in my remaining time this last few days, and of course I was completely glued to the set after the bombings yesterday at the airport. Things are so bad: It's astonishing what's happening, and events are moving so fast you shouldn't trust anyone claiming they know what's going to happen --- this weekend or years from now. 

So, I've have read a few articles I've been meaning to share. The old veteran blogger Jimmie Bise used to have a saying, something along the lines like "dumping the browser tab," as in my title to this post. Sometimes you read so many articles before you know it you've got a dozen tabs open, and that's too much to blog! You've gotta dump 'em! (And I see that Jimmie's doing very well, has published a recent book, and is interviewed at this podcast). Good for him!

At any rate, a few of my tabs:

At YouGov, "Americans who think the withdrawal from Afghanistan went poorly blame Biden." 

If his numbers are crashing now, it's going to be like a rockslide down Mt. Whitney before too long. Again, you can't predict the future. The best I can say is it's going to be a rough few years ahead, and I'd be surprised if the Democrats can hold on to their congressional majorities in next year's midterm elections (and if G.O.P. candidates are prepping new attack ads following the news out of Afghanistan --- these dolts need to get new campaign managers. *Sheesh.*

Also, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K)." 

This is a very good piece, and it's interesting because the New York Times is out with this today, "What Is the Islamic State Khorasan, a.k.a. ISIS-K?"

If you're not up on it, "IS-K" is definitely the preferable term. Note that "ISIS" stands for the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," but the group dominated that part of the world way back in 2014 --- almost eight years ago --- and since then they were completed routed by the Trump administration --- and if it weren't for the debacle in Afghanistan they'd still be long forgotten. (Not by me, but almost all of the American public, of whom most are more concerned with domestic affairs --- like the economy --- than U.S. incursions in hotspots around the world. It's been that way a while, and political science research going back decades has established this point as fact. (But note this 2014 piece on the topic at the Washington Post . More, a 2015 Gallup Poll found that just 21 percent indicated that foreign policy was a top concern. See here and here, too, for more examples.)

In any case, top analysts for a while have preferred simply the "Islamic State." The goal of this organization, perhaps the most violent, merciless, and indiscriminate terrorist group in the world, is a global caliphate. That is, the group's interpretation of Islam is totalitarian, in more ways than one, but especially in that its ideology calls for Muslim domination of the entire world. All non-believers would be placed under the yoke of extremist Islamic rule, and no one would be safe --- frankly, I hesitate to say it, but if such a thing were to ever to come about, it's not out of the realm of the possible that Islamic jihad could murder more innocent people than the Nazis during WWII.

Finally, read this great piece from Henry Kissinger, who at 98 years remains one of the most important international relations scholars ever. See, "The future of American powerHenry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan."

That's all for now. Thanks for reading and check back soon for further updates. 




Sunday, July 25, 2021

Judge Jeanine Slams Extremist Left's Attack on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (VIDEO)

I used to post Judge Jeanine's opening monologues quite often.

She's a real treasure (and doesn't take any crap). 

At Fox News:



Monday, July 12, 2021

Biden Administration to Begin Monthly Family Subsidy Payments This Week

Hey, three-hundred a month to families with kids under 6, and $250 who are older. 

That's no chump change. In fact, the one-year cost for the first year is $105,000,000 ---- and extremist Dems want to add the program as a permanent feature of the U.S. social welfare safety-net. 

At NYT, "Monthly Payments to Families With Children to Begin":

The Biden administration will send up to $300 per child a month to most American families thanks to a temporary increase in the child tax credit that advocates hope to extend.

WASHINGTON — If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.

With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent.

But the program, created as part of the stimulus bill that Democrats passed over unified Republican opposition in March, expires in a year, and the rollout could help or hinder President Biden’s pledge to extend it.

Immediate challenges loom. The government is uncertain how to get the payments to millions of hard-to-reach families, a problem that could undermine its poverty-fighting goals. Opponents of the effort will be watching for delivery glitches, examples of waste or signs that the money erodes the desire of some parents to work.

While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.

“It’s the most transformative policy coming out of Washington since the days of F.D.R.,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. “America is dramatically behind its industrial peers in investing in our children. We have some of the highest child poverty rates, but even families that are not poor are struggling, as the cost of raising children goes higher and higher.”

Among America’s 74 million children, nearly nine in 10 will qualify for the new monthly payments — up to $250 a child, or $300 for those under six — which are scheduled to start on Thursday. Those payments, most of which will be sent to bank accounts through direct deposit, will total half of the year’s subsidy, with the rest to come as a tax refund next year.

Mr. Biden has proposed a four-year extension in a broader package he hopes to pass this fall, and congressional Democrats have vowed to make the program permanent. Like much of Mr. Biden’s agenda, the program’s fate may depend on whether Democrats can unite around the bigger package and advance it through the evenly divided Senate.

The unconditional payments — what critics call “welfare” — break with a quarter century of policy. Since President Bill Clinton signed a 1996 bill to “end welfare,” aid has gone almost entirely to parents who work. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, recently wrote that the new payments, with “no work required,” would resurrect a “failed welfare system,” and provide “free money” for criminals and addicts.

But compared to past aid debates, opposition has so far been muted. A few conservatives support children’s subsidies, which might boost falling birthrates and allow more parents to raise children full-time. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a larger child benefit, though he would finance it by cutting other programs.

With Congress requiring payments to start just four months after the bill’s passage, the administration has scrambled to spread the word and assemble payment rosters.

Families that filed recent tax returns or received stimulus checks should get paid automatically. (Single parents with incomes up to $112,500 and married couples with incomes up to $150,000 are eligible for the full benefit.) But analysts say four to eight million low-income children may be missing from the lists, and drives are underway to get their parents to register online.

“Wherever you run into people — perfect strangers — just go on up and introduce yourself and tell them about the Child Tax Credit,” Vice President Kamala Harris said last month on what the White House called “Child Tax Credit Awareness Day.”

Among the needy, the program is eliciting a mixture of excitement, confusion and disbelief...

More at that top link.


 

Friday, April 2, 2021

Suspect Identified in City of Orange 'Mass' Shooting as 44-Year Old Fullerton Resident Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez (VIDEO)

Following-up from yesterday, "Four Killed, Including Child, in Latest 'Mass Shooting, in Orange, California (VIDEO)."

Well, first off, the suspect, Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, is obviously not a "white supremacist domestic terrorist," and thus the lying "mainstream" media --- at all the major leftist cable and network news outlets --- can't run with their continuous and despicable lying memes of this so-called epidemic of "right-wing extremist violence," which these ghouls must be hatin' to their everlasting regret. 

Lots of facts are still unknown, including the motives of the suspect Gonzalez; but it is known that the killings were completely premeditated, and the suspect knew the victims, and that he had secured bike-locks to the front and back gates to the business building complex there, and it appears, as O.C. District Attorney Todd Spitzer indicates at the video below, that the man is definitely eligible for the death penalty. 

And one thing about Spitzer --- who I don't really like, and who I never vote for --- is that while he's actually a craven career politician, he's a freakin' hardcore "tough on crime" mofo, and he will push it to the max to make sure this Gonzalez guy gets the full "justice" that's coming to him, and if it's not lethal injection, that f*cker will be going behind bars for a very long time, perhaps even for life in prison.

In any case, at the Los Angeles Times (and with the KABC Eyewitness News 7 segment on yesterday's press conference here), "Orange shooting gunman knew his victims and how to trap them":



The gunman knew his victims. He knew the office park — and how to trap them.

He locked the gates to the complex with bike cables before he slipped inside a manufactured homes business called Unified Homes, backpack slung over his shoulder, gun in hand.

That’s how police Thursday described the start of a shooting in Orange the night before that left four people, including a 9-year-old boy, dead.

Officers arrived at the scene about 5:30 p.m., minutes after receiving reports of shooting. They encountered gunfire and shot through the locked gates, wounding the gunman, said Orange Police Lt. Jennifer Amat. They used bolt cutters to enter the complex.

Officers found two victims in the courtyard — the boy and a woman who was alive and taken to a hospital, where she remains in stable yet critical condition. Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said it appeared that the boy died in the arms of a woman who “was trying to save him.”

The boy is believed to be the son of one of the victims who worked at Unified Homes. It is not clear if the mother is the woman hospitalized.

Police found three more bodies: a woman on an upstairs outdoor landing, a man in an office and a woman in a separate office.

The victims’ names have not been released because their next of kin have not all been notified, Amat said. The suspect is Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, a 44-year-old man last known to be living in Anaheim who police said had a “business and personal relationship” with the victims.

“It is a horrible, horrible tragedy,” Spitzer said, “that Mr. Gonzalez made a decision to use deadly force to deal with issues he was dealing with in his life. So he will suffer and face the consequences.”

Police recovered a semiautomatic handgun and a backpack with pepper spray, handcuffs and ammunition, “which we believe belonged to the suspect,” Amat said Thursday.

The suspect had been living in a motel room in Anaheim, and arrived at the business in a rental car, police said. A photo released by authorities showed a man entering the business dressed in black and gray with sunglasses, a baseball hat and a black bandanna covering his face. He had a backpack on his left shoulder and a gun in his right hand.

Two police officers discharged their weapons, said Kimberly Edds, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney’s office, which investigates officer-involved shootings. Both were wearing body cameras.

The incident — the third mass shooting in the United States in two weeks — stunned the quiet north Orange neighborhood.

Tim Smith was sitting in his living room watching TV news about a commercial fire in Compton when he heard the crack of gunfire.

Seconds later, three more shots. His wife, Kim, joined him. The couple has lived in their home on Dunton Avenue since 1992, and said the most disruption they deal with on a typical day is the sound of neighbors mowing their lawns.

They looked at each other as four more gunshots sounded.

They got low in the house to shield themselves. After a moment, Smith went to the back door and cracked it open to listen.

Smith’s backyard — lined with tall cypress trees — is feet away from the office building’s back parking lot. Smith heard a male officer’s booming voice barking a command: “Don’t move or I will shoot you.”

He watched from his shed as the SWAT team moved into the building, silently, and in strategic formation. Smith says he was heartened that police arrived so fast.

Still more at that top link.



Saturday, February 6, 2021

"Everybody today is talking about this Time magazine story by Molly Ball, which looks an awful lot like a secret plan to rig the election, but you're not allowed to say 'rigged' or 'stolen,' because if you do, you’re an 'extremist' and potentially a terrorist..."

 At great piece, at the Other McCain, "You Can’t Say ‘Rigged’":


One of the things you learn, if you spend as many years in the news business as I have, is that the news is not random. That is to say, the question of what stories will appear on the front page of the New York Times is not merely matter of what happened the day before, because all kinds of things happen every day, and there is only so much space on the front page of a paper. Actual choices have to be made, by human beings called “editors,” to determine what’s front-page news, what gets stuck back on Page A14, and what never gets reported at all.

The process of deciding what is “news” is not random, as I say, even though some events are of such unquestioned importance that they must be at the top of the front page. If you picked up any American newspaper on Sept. 12, 2001, this was rather obvious, but such historic events are rare, and on most days the question of what goes on A1 leaves a fair amount of leeway to the editors to make their own choices. There may be one or two stories of such unquestioned importance that they must be on the front page, but when it comes to the rest — Story 3, Story 4, Story 5, etc. — the editor’s have more room to exercise discretion.

Trust me, there is often a lot internal disagreement over such things. When I was at The Washington Times, some reporters would get very angry if a story they had pitched for A1 didn’t make the cut. It was generally the policy that A1 would have at least one Metro story, and on most days also there would be something from Sports or Features on the front page, so that out of a total of seven or eight front-page stories, the National desk would only get five or six. Well, if Bill Gertz had a story about the Chinese military that he felt deserved to be on A1, he’d get rather peeved — and understandably so — if his story was bumped back to Page A3 so that we could have, say, a feature about Georgetown University basketball on the front page. It happens.

Human beings make decisions about what counts as front-page news, and there is a certain amount of selectivity involved. You know who figured this out? Matt Drudge. The story is that when he was working as the overnight clerk at a 7-Eleven in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., he would read all the newspapers to pass the time in the wee hours when there were no customers. Reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Times, the New York Post, USA Today, etc., back-to-back every day for weeks on end, Drudge began to notice the different choices reflected in the content of the papers. From that insight sprang his subsequent approach to aggregating news at the Drudge Report (which, alas, he seems to have turned over to a gang of liberal dimwits in the past couple of years). Thanks to the Internet, all of us now have more access to different sources than was possible for most people back when Drudge was reading all those newspapers at 7-Eleven, so there is more widespread understanding of how media bias operates.

“Why is this story national news?”

That’s the question you have to ask, whenever a crime story makes it to CNN or to the network evening news broadcasts. Because America is a very large country, with more than 325 million people, the vast majority of crime in the United States is strictly “local news.” There were more than 16,000 murders in America in 2019, which works out to about 45 murder per day. How many of those murders even get mentioned on CNN? Not many. So when something like the Trayvon Martin shooting or the death of George Floyd becomes national news — hourly updates 24/7 on CNN — this means that a decision was made by someone. These stories didn’t just coincidentally become national news. On the day that George Floyd died, about 40 other Americans were shot to death, but none of those other deaths were deemed newsworthy by CNN...

Keep reading.

And at the American Spectator, "Why Is Identity Politics Destroying America?"

Biden Under Pressure to Delay U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan (VIDEO)

Well, this is the administration that claims to want to "use diplomacy" and "rebuild" alliances in order to "restore America's standing in the world." 

Well, what's to restore? 

The Trump administration had, no doubt, perhaps its greatest successes in foreign policy. At the video below, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gives a somber, reasoned defense of his leadership, at both the CIA and the State Department, while serving on President Trump's foreign policy team. Pompeo notes that no American diplomats or CIA operatives were killed or bombed under his watch. He also defended the Trump administration's record at maintaining and building alliances, particularly in the Middle East, where the U.S. entered into historic agreements that have literally shifted the balance of power away from enemies such as Iran, in favor of our longtime friends and allies, especially Israel. 

Under the Trump administration, high-value and dangerous enemies intent to take out American troops and other U.S. government officials (and regular American citizens) were liquidated with very carefully-targeted actions that left minimal collateral damage (for example the pinpoint drone strike against Iran's Qassim Suleimani, the Commander of Iranian Forces, who had in the past been the Iran's leading strategist on Iran's attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere, and U.S. intelligence reports indicated that more attacks were in the works under Suleimani's leadership). To say, as Joe Biden does a the video linked above, that "America's back" is bluster and hubris from the new Democrat administration filled with idiotic war-hawks. 

Now while I'm no isolationist, at all, I prefer to fight back when America is threatened and attacked, and screw lame "diplomacy" when U.S. vital interests are at stake. But restraining U.S. power, especially when the use of credible threats remain always in the background, is preferable to the all-out bluster approach under the new administration's foreign policy team. I mean, Pompeo notes that no new wars were hatched under President Trump, that troop withdrawals were taking place, and that in fact, it was the previous Democrat administration of Barack Obama who "lost Crimea" to Russian aggression in that southern zone of Ukrainian sovereignty, and it was the Obama administration that stood aside as Russia's "Little Green Men" launched a clandestine incursion into Ukrainian territory proper, to destabilize the legitimate government there in Kiev. 

So now we're going to KEEP troops in Afghanistan. We've been there for almost 20 years, and saying this as a big supporter of our goals in Afghanistan from the start, enough is enough. If the Taliban don't want peace, and they don't appear to be heading in that direction, abandon those losers, work with real hard diplomacy, and wield the stick of our military forces to send the big message to those backtracking on previous agreements with the U.S. government under the Trump administration that they will bear heavy costs. Maybe a few well-placed Predators drones targeting the renascent al-Qaeda ready to come out from the hillsides and safe-zones in the mountainous regions in Pakistan, will get the message that the U.S. means business, and that's without any boots on the ground. 

Everybody with a cool and calm demeanor, and personal self-honestly knows this. It's the new "globalists" in this new Biden administration who will misread the tea leaves and end up botching the current peace, and Biden himself will go down as a freakin' authoritarian and warmongering nincompoop.

In any case, at LAT, "Will Biden follow through on Trump’s plan to pull remaining troops from Afghanistan?":


WASHINGTON — President Biden is under pressure to delay the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a decision that has forced a vexing early debate within his national security team about whether ending America’s longest war will plunge the violence-plagued country deeper into chaos.

It’s a decision that Biden inherited from former President Trump, who negotiated a withdrawal timetable with the Taliban but left the final and most difficult step of actually ending the war to his successor.

Though Biden has long favored shrinking the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, current and former national security officials warn the president that even after nearly two decades in Afghanistan, the departure of U.S. forces there could lead to a resurgence of Al Qaeda, the militant group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Biden’s national security team is looking for ways to pressure the Taliban to reduce attacks, break with Al Qaeda and return to peace talks before the final 2,500 troops are scheduled to depart in four months, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

But senior military and intelligence officials are skeptical about prospects for an Afghanistan peace deal, contending that Taliban militants have shown little willingness to reduce violence or enter into a power-sharing agreement with the Afghan government, the officials said.

“We believe that a U.S. withdrawal will provide the terrorists an opportunity to reconstitute, and that reconstitution will take place within about 18 to 36 months,” said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. Dunford offered that assessment Wednesday, during the unveiling of a congressionally mandated study on policy options in Afghanistan.

But Biden faces at least as powerful political pressure not to put off withdrawal indefinitely — from liberals in his party as well as many other Americans who favor bringing troops home — even with the risk that terrorist groups will grow stronger.

“This is unacceptable,” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) after hearing the study group recommendation to delay withdrawal. “Those who had any part in getting us into this 20 year war should not be opining about keeping us mired in it.”

At the height of the war a decade ago, U.S. forces numbered more than 100,000. By Trump’s last year in office, however, that figure had dropped from 14,000 to only 2,500 — the lowest number since the invasion in 2001.

At the same time, Taliban attacks on Afghan government troops have surged, along with assassinations of government officials and activists. Peace talks between the government and the Taliban that began last fall have stalled, and many Afghans have grown fearful that a U.S. withdrawal will cause the fighting to worsen.

If the U.S. pulls out on schedule, but without progress on a peace settlement, the Taliban is likely to step up its attacks on Afghan troops and suicide bombings in urban areas, officials say.

But an order by Biden to halt the withdrawal is likely to reignite the U.S. shooting war with the Taliban, extending American involvement in the two-decade-old conflict.

Another option is for Biden to announce a delay in the U.S. withdrawal, in hopes of convincing Taliban officials that their only option is to negotiate with the Afghan government.

“It’s going to be a tough call,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who agreed to discuss deliberations under the condition of anonymity. “If we stay after the deadline, the Taliban is likely to take that as a sign that we are not leaving and start attacking us.”

The Afghanistan Study Group, a congressionally mandated panel of former military officers, diplomats and lawmakers charged with recommending a future path, called Wednesday for the Biden administration to extend the May withdrawal deadline “in order to give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result.”

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, is conducting an administration review of the withdrawal agreement signed by the Trump administration and the Taliban last February and is expected to recommend options to Biden within weeks, officials said.

Biden has kept Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump official who negotiated the deal and has led efforts to push the peace talks along, in his post, a possible sign that Biden hopes to salvage at least some of the Trump exit strategy.

The Trump-Taliban agreement set the May deadline for U.S. forces to leave, along with more than 10,000 Pentagon contractors who play an important role in assisting Afghan troops fighting the Taliban. In return for a hard deadline on withdrawal, the Taliban agreed to halt attacks on U.S. troops, a commitment it has honored.

But Biden administration officials say the Taliban has not complied with other parts of the deal, including a commitment to seek a cease-fire and to prevent Afghan territory it controls from being used by Al Qaeda members. Taliban officials have accused the U.S. of violating the deal in carrying out airstrikes to help Afghan troops — a charge the U.S. denies.

One likely outcome of Sullivan’s review is a renewed U.S. push for a cease-fire, or at least a temporary reduction in violence, between the Taliban and the Afghan government. That would keep alive the prospect that U.S. troops could leave on schedule or close to it, several U.S. officials said.

The Biden administration “is committed to a political settlement in Afghanistan, one that includes the Afghan government,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters Tuesday. He added that any decision to reduce U.S. troops below 2,500 would be “conditions-based,” a Pentagon term meaning not tied to a fixed timetable.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III sounded out the views of Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the top commander in the Middle East, in a telephone call Monday, according to a Defense official.

McKenzie and Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, oversaw the steep drawdown of U.S. forces last year, but are said by associates to have deep reservations about a full withdrawal.

There are also about 8,000 troops from other countries under NATO command in Afghanistan, who would also depart if the U.S. left.

During the presidential campaign, Biden promised to “bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan” and to “focus our mission on Al Qaeda” and Islamic State, extremist groups with small but entrenched followings in Afghanistan.

He has long argued that if Al Qaeda ever reemerges in Afghanistan — where it mounted devastating terrorist attacks against the United States 20 years ago — the militants could be dealt with by small special operations teams and with airstrikes, instead of large numbers of ground troops...


 

Monday, February 1, 2021

An Emboldened Extremist Wing Flexes Its Power in a Leaderless G.O.P.

Pfft.

It's the Old Gray Lady, back up to her stupid, hypocritical tricks.

Because, you know, there is no "extremist wing" in the Democrat Party; oh no, A.OC. and "the Squad" don't count, because they're on NYT's side. Ditto for the Bernie Sanders "wing" in the upper chamber of Congress, most of whom are to the left of the Castro regime in Cuba.

But FWIW, which admittedly, isn't much, except that the newspaper's "screeds" do give us a glimpse into how privileged and stunningly un-self-aware are the "journalists" who write up all this agitprop for the country-club-socialists who live and die by every word published in that rag, and the same folks can't wait to get their marriage announcements into the paper's society pages (hello Jessica Valenti!). 

I read this crap so you don't have to: Have a look and judge for yourself, because that's exactly what the stupid, hypocritical "editors" at the paper DON'T expect you to do, but would rather have just tune out and burn out by avoiding their "mainstream news" and instead "radicalize yourself" on Fox News (which contrary to the most feverish of progressive dreams, is the only cable outlet right now actually reporting real news; and don't get me going about the "balanced" coverage we see daily at the corporate-big-tech-controlled CNN).

Here:

As more far-right Republicans take office and exercise power, party officials are promoting unity and neutrality rather than confronting dangerous messages and disinformation.

WASHINGTON — Knute Buehler, who led Oregon’s Republican ticket as the candidate for governor in 2018, watched with growing alarm in recent weeks as Republicans around the nation challenged the reliability of the presidential election results.

Then he watched the Jan. 6 siege at the United States Capitol in horror. And then, to his astonishment, Republican Party officials in his own state embraced the conspiracy theory that the attack was actually a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Trump supporters.

The night after his party’s leadership passed a formal resolution promoting the false flag theory, Mr. Buehler cracked open a local microbrew and filed to change his registration from Republican to independent. “It was very painful,” he said.

His unhappy exit highlighted one facet of the upheaval now underway in the G.O.P.: It has become a leaderless party, with veterans like Mr. Buehler stepping away, luminaries like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio retiring, far-right extremists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia building a brand on a web of dangerous conspiracy theories, and pro-Trump Republicans at war with other conservatives who want to look beyond the former president to the future.

With no dominant leader other than the deplatformed one-term president, a radical right movement that became emboldened under Mr. Trump has been maneuvering for more power, and ascending in different states and congressional districts. More moderate Republicans feel increasingly under attack, but so far have made little progress in galvanizing voters, donors or new recruits for office to push back against extremism.

Instead, in Arizona, the state Republican Party has brazenly punished dissent, formally censuring three of its own: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the widow of former Senator John McCain. The party cited their criticisms of Mr. Trump and their defenses of the state’s election process.

In Wyoming, Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, headlined a rally on Thursday to denounce Representative Liz Cheney for her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. Joining Mr. Gaetz by phone hookup was Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, who has been working to unseat Ms. Cheney and replace her with someone he believes better represents the views of her constituents — in other words, fealty to his father.

In Kentucky, grass-roots Republicans tried to push the state party to pass a resolution urging Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, to fully support Mr. Trump in next month’s impeachment trial. The effort failed.

And in Michigan, Meshawn Maddock, a Trump supporter who pushed false claims about voter fraud and organized buses of Republicans from the state to attend the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, is running unopposed to become the new co-chairman of the state party. While marching from the Ellipse to the Capitol on Jan. 6, Ms. Maddock praised the “most incredible crowd and sea of people I’ve ever worked with.”

Nothing is defining and dividing the G.O.P. more than loyalty to Mr. Trump and his false claims about the election.

“You’ve got 41 percent of the country, including a lot of independents, who think the election was stolen,” said Scott Reed, the former political director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a veteran Republican consultant. “That’s an amazing number. It takes months for a party that loses a national election to re-gel.”

There are still Republican officials who are responsible for the party’s political interests — but these people are under their own kinds of pressure, preaching unity to factions that have no desire to unite.

Perhaps the most prominent party official right now is Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s. In an interview on Friday, she condemned the “false flag” resolution passed by Oregon Republicans and sounded exasperated at the public brawling in her party.

“If you have a family dispute, don’t go on ‘Jerry Springer,’” Ms. McDaniel said. “Do it behind closed doors. It’s my role to call them and explain that if we don’t keep our party united and focused on 2022, we will lose. If we are attacking fellow Republicans and cancel culture within our own party, it is not helpful to winning majorities.”

At the same time, Ms. McDaniel made clear that she was not going to impose top-down decision making on the party, noting that the role of the R.N.C. was to stay neutral in primaries. She said she planned to do so in the 2022 midterm elections, barring more extreme behavior emerging...

Still more at that top link, if you stomach can it, sheesh.

 

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Everything is 'White Supremacist'

 Big eyerolls here, but it's absolutely true.

And it's the most stupid thing. I feel bad for white people, especially meekly progressive whites who are too afraid of being labeled "racist" (and having their lives destroyed) to stand up to the bullying. 

At NYT, "'White Supremacy' Once Meant David Duke and the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More":

"As July 4 and its barbecues arrived this year, the activist and former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared, “We reject your celebration of white supremacy.”

The movie star Mark Ruffalo said in February that Hollywood had been swimming for a century in “a homogeneous culture of white supremacy.”

The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of New York City’s most prestigious museums, acknowledged this summer that his institution was grounded in white supremacy, while four blocks uptown, the curatorial staff of the Guggenheim decried a work culture suffused in it.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board issued an apology two weeks ago describing itself as “deeply rooted in white supremacy” for at least its first 80 years. In England, the British National Library’s Decolonising Working Group cautioned employees that a belief in “color blindness” or the view that “mankind is one human family” are examples of “covert white supremacy.”

In a time of plague and protest, two words — “white supremacy” — have poured into the rhetorical bloodstream with force and power. With President Trump’s overt use of racist rhetoric, a spate of police killings of Black people, and the rise of far-right extremist groups, many see the phrase as a more accurate way to describe today’s racial realities, with older descriptions like “bigotry” or “prejudice” considered too tame for such a raw moment.

News aggregators show a vast increase in the use of the term “white supremacy” (or “white supremacist”) compared with 10 years ago. The New York Times itself used the term fewer than 75 times in 2010, but nearly 700 times since the first of this year alone. Type the term into Twitter’s search engine and it pops up six, eight or 10 times each minute.

The meaning of the words has expanded, too. Ten years ago, white supremacy frequently described the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, the neo-Nazi politician from Louisiana. Now it cuts a swath through the culture, describing an array of subjects: the mortgage lending policies of banks; a university’s reliance on SAT scores as a factor for admissions decisions; programs that teach poor people better nutrition; and a police department’s enforcement policies.

Yet the phrase is deeply contentious. Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, have embraced it, seeing in white supremacy an explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery. To examine many aspects of American life once broadly seen as race neutral — such as mortgage lending or college faculty hiring — is to find a bedrock of white supremacy.

“It is not hyperbole to say that white supremacy is resting at the heart of American politics,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton, a socialist activist and professor of African-American studies, said in a speech in 2017.

But some Black scholars, businessmen and activists — on the right and the left — balk at the phrase. They hear in those words a sledgehammer that shocks and accuses, rather than explains. When so much is described as white supremacy, when the Ku Klux Klan and a museum art collection take the same descriptor, they say, the power of the phrase is lost.

Prof. Orlando Patterson, a sociologist at Harvard University who has written magisterial works on the nature of slavery and freedom, including about his native Jamaica, said it was too reminiscent of the phrases used to describe apartheid and Nazi Germany.

“It comes from anger and hopelessness and alienates rather than converts,” he said.

The label also discourages white and Black people from finding commonalities of experience that could move society forward,

Professor Patterson and others said. “It racializes a lot of problems that a lot of people face, even when race is not the answer,” Professor Patterson said.

Glenn C. Loury, a conservative-leaning economics professor at Brown University, hears in the term an attempt to spin a mythic narrative about a fallen America.

“So we declare structures of our country are implacably racist,” Professor Loury said. “On the other hand, we make appeals to have a conversation with that country which is mired in white supremacy? The logic escapes me.”

Then there are those whose cultural signposts are found outside the Black-white divide. The essayist Wesley Yang, the son of Korean immigrants and the author of “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” often examines racial identity and has found himself watching the debate over these words as if through a side window. Did this thing called white supremacy really so neatly define the lives of Black people and Latinos and Asians?

“The phrase is destructive of discourse,” he said. “Once you define it as something that has a ghostly essence, it’s nowhere and everywhere”..."

Saturday, December 28, 2019

White Voters See Doom Without Trump

People keep talking about "civil war" but I don't see that happening.

Conservatives will continue to flee the progressive urban enclaves and coastal states, and leftists will continue to cluster into "high-density" shithole municipalities (think San Francisco), drinking their Veuve Clicquot in million dollar townhomes, while moaning about "inequality."

That said, I love the "civil war" metaphor and, frankly, I won't mind if it becomes more than a metaphor (calling Kurt Schlichter).

At NYT, "‘Nothing Less Than a Civil War’: These White Voters on the Far Right See Doom Without Trump":

GOLDEN VALLEY, Ariz. — Great American Pizza & Subs, on a highway about 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas, was busier and Trumpier than usual. On any given day it serves “M.A.G.A. Subs” and “Liberty Bell Lasagna.” The “Second Amendment” pizza comes “loaded” with pepperoni and sausage. The dining room is covered in regalia praising President Trump.

But this October morning was “Trumpstock,” a small festival celebrating the president. The speakers included the local Republican congressman, Paul Gosar, and lesser-known conservative personalities. There was a fringe 2020 Senate candidate in Arizona who ran a website that published sexually explicit photos of women without their consent; a pro-Trump rapper whose lyrics include a racist slur aimed at Barack Obama; and a North Carolina activist who once said of Muslims, “I will kill every one of them before they get to me.”

All were welcome, except liberals.

“They label us white nationalists, or white supremacists,” volunteered Guy Taiho Decker, who drove from California to attend the event. A right-wing protester, he has previously been arrested on charges of making terrorist threats.

“There’s no such thing as a white supremacist, just like there’s no such thing as a unicorn,” Mr. Decker said. “We’re patriots.”

As Mr. Trump’s bid for re-election shifts into higher gear, his campaign hopes to recapture voters who drifted away from the party in 2018 and 2019: independents who embraced moderate Democratic candidates, suburban women tired of Mr. Trump’s personal conduct and working-class voters who haven’t benefited from his economic policies.

But if any group remains singularly loyal to Mr. Trump, it is the small but impassioned number of white voters on the far right, often in rural communities like Golden Valley, who extol him as a cultural champion reclaiming the country from undeserving outsiders.

These voters don’t passively tolerate Mr. Trump’s “build a wall” message or his ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries — they’re what motivates them. They see themselves in his fear-based identity politics, bolstered by conspiratorial rhetoric about caravans of immigrants and Democratic “coups.”

But events like it, as well as speaking engagements featuring far-right supporters of the president, have become part of the political landscape during the Trump era. Islamophobic taunts can be heard at his rallies. Hate speech and conspiracy theories are staples of some far-right websites. If Trumpstock was modest in size, it stood out as a sign of extremist public support for a sitting president.

And these supporters have electoral muscle in key areas: Mr. Trump outperformed Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, in rural parts of Arizona like Mohave County, where Golden Valley is located. Mr. Trump won 58,282 votes in the county, compared to 47,901 for Mr. Romney, though Mr. Romney carried the state by a much bigger vote margin.

Arizona will be a key battleground state in 2020: Democrats already flipped a Senate seat and a Tucson-based congressional district from red to blue in 2018. For Mr. Trump, big turnout from white voters in areas like Mohave County — and in rural parts of other battlegrounds like Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia — could be a lifeline in a tight election.

“We like to call this the ‘Red Wall of Arizona,’” said Laurence Schiff, a psychiatrist and Republican campaign official in Mohave County who organizes in support of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Winning the state starts here, with us.”

Grass-roots gatherings play a critical role in the modern culture of political organizing, firing up ardent supporters and cementing new ones. Small circles of Trump-supporting conservatives, often organized online and outside the traditional Republican Party apparatus, engage in more decentralized — and explicit — versions of the chest-beating that happens at Mr. Trump’s closely watched political rallies...
More.

Friday, June 28, 2019

Democrats Move Left --- Frankly, It's Just All Out in the Open Now

It's not like the Dems haven't been a far-left extremist party. It's now that they're not afraid to come out as the crypto-Marxists they truly are.

At LAT, "This is not your father’s Democratic Party: Debate shows how leftward it has moved":

The Democratic Party opened its 2020 presidential debates with a remarkably policy-focused exchange that illustrated how consistently to the left they have moved. For the night, at least, this was Elizabeth Warren’s party.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who entered the debate with momentum behind her campaign, set the tone and dominated the early part of the debate, which focused on economic policy.

“When you've got a government, when you've got an economy that does great for those with money and isn't doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple,” she said. “We need to make structural change in our government, in our economy and in our country.”

Even those of her rivals who don’t fully share that assessment declined chances to put themselves at odds with Warren. Instead, they sang from the same hymnal of left-wing economic populism declaring the need for broad reforms of the political and economic system.

“It is time we have an economy that works for everybody,” said Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, after minimizing his differences with Warren’s plan to break up big tech companies.

The shift in the party goes beyond economics. As the debate made clear, it includes gun control, abortion, climate change and immigration, among other issues. On each of those, candidates took positions to the left of those embraced by either of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who was barely mentioned by any of the candidates.

Rather than Clinton’s call for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare,” for example, the debate featured candidates stressing that the universal healthcare plans they backed would include public funds to pay for abortions for poor women.

On healthcare, only two candidates — Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio — raised their hands when asked who would favor fully abolishing private health insurance plans in favor of instituting “Medicare for all.” But even those who favored a more moderate approach, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, for example, said they preferred a new government health insurance option for all — an idea that was considered too radical to pass when Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act less than a decade ago.

On immigration, former Obama Cabinet official Julián Castro pressed for decriminalizing illegal border crossings, making that a civil rather than a criminal offense. While Castro was correct in saying that the Trump administration had used the criminal law in a far more aggressive way than its predecessors, the law that makes unauthorized border crossings a criminal offense has been on the books for decades. Eliminating it is a move popular with some activists.

At least three of the candidates — Warren, Booker and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio — share Castro’s view. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke disagreed, and the clash between the two Texans over decriminalizing the border made for one of the night’s most intense moments, but it was notable that the disagreement came on a proposal that went far beyond anything that the Obama administration, in which Castro served, ever talked about.

And there was broad party consensus on gun control, an issue that Democrats for years shied from. Booker’s proposal to require gun licensing goes significantly further than what gun-safety advocates have dreamed of proposing.

The leftward tilt of the party did give some candidates pause.

“We have a perception problem with the Democratic Party that we are not connecting to the working class,” said Ryan, who represents the Youngstown, Ohio, area. “We have to change the center of gravity from being coastal elites and Ivy League.”

Klobuchar took a veiled swipe at Warren’s promises to enact broad changes in the political and economic system.

“I don’t make all the promises others up here make,” Klobuchar said. “I’m going to govern.”

But others argued for going further left, notably De Blasio, struggling for a breakout moment and calling the primary a “battle for the heart and soul of our party.”

“This Democratic Party has to be strong and bold and progressive,” he said.

Monday, June 24, 2019

Feminist Extremist Sophie Lewis Defends Murdering Unborn Children (VIDEO)

Actually, while she appears extreme, she's just outwardly stating what any pro-abort Democrat believes and advocates: the wanton murder of the unborn.

At the Illinois Family Institute, "Torturing Language to Kill Humans."




Also at Life Site, "Feminist author: Abortion ‘is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend’."

Friday, March 15, 2019

New Zealand Christchurch Mosque Massacre (VIDEO)

I'm numb to this stuff by now.

This massacre of course is the perfect example of our polarized times, and especially so since the perp is a white nationalist. (And it must be said, but there'd be no focus on exterminationist ideologies had this been another mass jihad terrorist attack; see Robert Spencer's entry this morning, for example.)

In any case, I fully endorse the condemnations and sympathy that have been flooding out following the massacre. I'm especially heartened by the genuine good will shown by conservatives, especially since it's gonna be people on the American right who'll be demonized as fundamentally guilty for the acts of this lone extremist.

More on this throughout the day, but see the New Zealand Herald, "Christchurch mosque massacre: 49 confirmed dead in shootings; four arrested - three men, one woman."

And at Memeorandum, via Bellingcat, "Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre."

Here's the obligatory leftist take blaming the alleged "right-wing media" for enabling "right-wing terrorism," which is somehow the world's "number one terrorist threat" (not). At Sydney Morning Herald, "Broken white men and the racist media that fuels their terrorism."

And at CNN:



Sunday, October 14, 2018

How #Democrats Created Insane 'Social Justice' Mobs

From the inimitable Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "The TrigglyPuff Party: How Democrats Created Insane ‘Social Justice’ Mobs":


Commenting on the irrational female rage unleashed by the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, Stephen Green remarks: “The Democrats have worked hard to lock down the Trigglypuff vote, but at what cost of even slightly more moderate voters?” But do such voters really exist?

We are more than 25 years into a cycle of increasing polarization that arguably began with Bill Clinton’s election as president. Clinton’s radicalism — remember the so-called “assault weapons” ban? — sparked a backlash that cost Democrats the control of the House that they’d held for 40 years. Everything thereafter increased the partisan divide: The budget standoff that led to the government shutdown, the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis, the Florida recount in 2000, the Iraq War, the recapture of Congress by Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement, on and on.

It is not the case that America’s politics have become more divisive because the Republican Party has moved further right. Liberal pundits, commenting from within their ideological cocoons, habitually apply labels — “far right,” “extremist,” “white nationalist,” etc. — to depict the GOP as beholden to a dangerous fringe, but this is just paranoid propaganda. The typical Republican voter in 2018 is actually no more “extreme” than his father was in 1988. Nor is the policy agenda of the GOP now any more “far right” than it was in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The cause of the increased partisan divide is not that the Republicans have moved right, but that Democrats have moved left.

What happened, when did it happen and why did it happen?
What happened?

A whole helluva lot, lol, but keep reading.


Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Kavanaugh Coverage at the Other McCain

From Robert Stacy McCain, "Rhetorical Escalation":

After President Trump announced Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to the Supreme Court on Monday, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) spent all day Tuesday engaged in a competition to demonize Kavanaugh. If you believe what Democrats tell you, Kavanaugh is the most extreme extremist in the history of extremism. How extreme is he? Extremely extreme! He’s not just a right-winger, he’s “far-right.” How far? Extremely far! He’s so extremely far right as to “threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades,” to quote Clinton crony and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. (Hat-tip: Hogewash.)

The reader who isn’t tuned into the CNN/MSNBC/Democrat hysteria may wonder, how does a federal judge threaten millions of lives? On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Chuck Schumer said: “I will oppose this nomination with everything I’ve got. . . . This man should not be on the bench. . . . I believe he is far, far right on so many issues.” Schumer repeatedly asserted that the Kavanaugh nomination is somehow a threat to ObamaCare. Exactly how the Supreme Court affects healthcare legislation, Schumer didn’t specify, but he said that coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” which he described as “very popular” with the Democrat Party’s base, would be jeopardized if Kavanaugh is confirmed.

Because I don’t pay much attention to the paranoid fears of Democrats, it’s possible that Schumer is actually right about this. For all I know, there are cases pending in lower courts challenging elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which Democrats rammed through Congress on a party-line vote just a few months before they lost their majority in the 2010 midterm elections. The ACA’s mandate of coverage for “pre-existing conditions” was one of the worst job-killers in the bill. Requiring employers to provide insurance that covered whatever health problems the employee might have had before being hired meant that a lot of people simply couldn’t get hired, and this measure also sent health insurance rates skyrocketing, as insurers sought to compensate for the (often very expensive) treatments they were now required to cover.

One reason the economy started booming — and unemployment started declining — as soon as Trump was elected was that he promised to repeal ObamaCare and, by executive action, was able to limit the job-killing impact of this badly constructed legislation. If somehow the Supreme Court could render the entirety of ObamaCare null and void, good, although as I say, I’m not aware that this is likely, or even possible...
More.

Also at the Other McCain, "Democrats Use Kavanaugh Nomination in Congressional Fundraising Efforts."

Don't know about you, but I don't expect Kavanaugh to have a tough confirmation. Pro-choice Republicans (I know, oxymoron) Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have signaled their support for the nominee, and most of those red-state Democrats facing reelection this year are likely to fall in line (see the interesting Survey Monkey poll at Axios, "Democrats' Senate dream slips away.")

Kavanaugh will be borked, of course. But he's a decent family man and Democrat opposition to him is going to put the party on the wrong side of the American people, which is where the Democrats are most of the time anyway nowadays (*eye-roll*).

Saturday, June 30, 2018

'I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live...' (VIDEO)

This is apparently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's canned line on what it means to be a democratic socialist. At WaPo, "'No person in America should be too poor to live': Ocasio-Cortez explains democratic socialism to Colbert."

She came up with the same line on the View, when asked by Meghan McCain. See Free Beacon, "Self-Described Democratic Socialist Ocasio-Cortez Struggles to Differentiate Between Socialism, Democratic Socialism."



She's just trying to make her socialism palatable, even for the so-called working class voters in her district, many of whom probably do wake up every morning saying they're "capitalists."

Here's the page for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) at Discover the Networks:
At the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War era, the Socialist Party USA of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas split in two over the issue of whether or not to criticize the Soviet Union, its allies, and Communism: One faction rejected and denounced the USSR and its allies—including Castro's Cuba, the Sandinistas, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong—and supported Poland's Solidarity Movement, etc.  This anti-Communist faction took the name Social Democrats USA. (Many of its leaders—including Carl Gershman, who became Jeane Kirkpatrick's counselor of embassy at the United Nations—eventually grew more conservative and became Reagan Democrats.) The other faction, however, refused to reject Marxism, refused to criticize or denounce the USSR and its allies, and continued to support Soviet-backed policies—including the nuclear-freeze program that sought to consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe. This faction, whose leading figure was Michael Harrington, in 1973 took the name Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC); its membership included many former Students for a Democratic Society activists.

DSOC operated not as a separate political party but as an explicitly socialist force within the Democratic Party and the labor movement. As such, it attracted many young activists who sought to push the Democratic Party further leftward politically. Among the notables who joined DSOC were Machinists' Union leader William Winpisinger, feminist Gloria Steinem, gay rights activist Harry Britt, actor Ed Asner, and California Congressman (and avowed socialist) Ron Dellums.

By 1979 DSOC had made major inroads into the Democratic Party and claimed a national membership of some 3,000 people. In 1983 DSOC, under Michael Harrington's leadership, merged with the New American Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Harrington’s strategy was to force a “realignment” of the two major political parties by pulling the Democrats emphatically to the left and polarizing the parties along class lines. He expected that this would drive business interests away from the Democrats and into the Republican Party, but that those losses would be more than offset by an influx of newly energized minority and union voters to the Democratic Party, and that over time the Democrats would embrace socialism as their preferred ideology.[1] Thus Harrington sought to establish DSA as a force that worked within, and not outside of, the existing American political system. Following Harrington's lead, most DSAers were committed to electoral politics within the Democratic Party.[2] They feared that if they were to openly move too far and too quickly to the left, they would run the risk of alienating moderate Democrats and thereby ensuring Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984.[3]

Early in DSA's history, political organizer Harry Boyte, convinced that even Michael Harrington’s non-revolutionary form of socialism would be rejected by most Americans, formed a “communitarian caucus” within DSA. As author Stanley Kurtz explains:

“The communitarians wanted to use the language and ethos of traditional American communities—including religious language—to promote a 'populist' version of socialism. Portraying heartless corporations as enemies of traditional communities, thought Boyte, was the only way to build a quasi-socialist mass movement in the United States. Socialists could quietly help direct such a movement, Boyte believed, but openly highlighting socialist ideology would only drive converts away. In effect, Boyte was calling on DSA to drop its public professions of socialism and start referring to itself as 'communitarian' instead.”[4]
But DSA rejected this approach, worried that if it failed to publicly articulate its socialist ideals, genuine socialism itself would eventually wither and die. Boyte’s opponents stated: “We can call ourselves ‘communitarians,’ but the word will get out. Better to be out of the closet; humble, yet proud.”[5]

DSA helped establish the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) in 1991 and continues to work closely with the latter to this day. Virtually every CPC member also belongs to DSA.

In 1998, WorldNetDaily (WND) published a two-part series of articles titled “Congress’ Red Army Caucus” (here and here), which exposed the close association between DSA and CPC. At that time, DSA hosted the CPC website. Shortly after the WND revelations, CPC established its own website under the auspices of Congress. Meanwhile, DSA scrubbed its own website to remove evidence of its ties to CPC. Among the items removed from the site were the lyrics to such songs as the following:
* “The Internationale,” the worldwide anthem of Communism and socialism

* “Red Revolution,” sung to the tune of “Red Robin” (This song includes such lyrics as: “When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along, there’ll be no more lootin’ when we start shootin’ that Wall Street throng.…”)

* “Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie?” (The lyrics of this song include: “Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie. And when the revolution comes, We’ll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie.”)
In 2000, DSA endorsed Pay Equity Now!—a petition jointly issued in 2000 by the National Organization for Women, the Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Together these organizations charged that “the U.S. government opposes pay equity—equal pay for work of equal value—in national policy and international agreements”; that “women are often segregated in caring and service work for low pay, much like the housework they are expected to do for no pay at home”; and that “underpaying women is a massive subsidy to employers that is both sexist and racist.”

In 2001, DSA characterized the 9/11 terror attacks as acts of retaliation for transgressions and injustices that America had previously perpetrated across the globe. “We live in a world,” said DSA, “organized so that the greatest benefits go to a small fraction of the world’s population while the vast majority experiences injustice, poverty, and often hopelessness. Only by eliminating the political, social, and economic conditions that lead people to these small extremist groups can we be truly secure.”

Strongly opposed to the U.S. war on terror and America's post-9/11 military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, DSA is a member organization of the United For Peace and Justice anti-war coalition.

DSA was a Co-sponsoring Organization of the April 25, 2004 “March for Women’s Lives” held in Washington, D.C., a rally that drew more than a million demonstrators advocating for the right to unrestricted, taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.

In 2007, DSA National Political Committee member David Green expressed support for the Employee Free Choice Act as a measure that could “limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace”; “minimize the degree of exploitation of workers by capitalists”; and “provid[e] an excellent organizing tool (i.e., tactic) through which we can pursue our socialist strategy while simultaneously engaging the broader electorate on an issue of economic populism.”

In 2008, most DSA members actively supported Barack Obama for U.S. President. Saidthe organization: “DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda.”

In October 2009, the Socialist Party of America announced that at least 70 Congressional Democrats were members of its Caucus at that time—i.e., members of DSA. Most of those individuals belonged to the Congressional Progressive Caucus and/or the Congressional Black Caucus. To view a list of their names, click here.

In the fall of 2011, DSA was a strong backer of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Said DSA:
"The Occupy Wall Street protests have invigorated the American Left in a way not seen in decades … So we have urged our members to take an active, supportive role in their local occupations, something many DSAers had already begun doing as individuals, because they believe that everyday people, the 99%, shouldn’t be made to pay for a crisis set off by an out-of-control financial sector and the ethically compromised politicians who have failed to rein it in."
On October 8, 2011, DSA co-sponsored a Midwest Regional March for Peace and Justice, a protest demonstration commemorating the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
 Click here for a list of additional co-sponsors.

DSA members today seek to build “progressive movements for social change while establishing an openly socialist presence in American communities and politics.” “We are socialists," reads the organization's boilerplate, "because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.” "To achieve a more just society," adds DSA, “many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed.” A major hallmark of such transformation would be an “equitable distribution of resources.”

DSA summarizes its philosophy as follows: "Today … [r]esources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them. Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives."

True to its roots, DSA seeks to increase its political influence not by establishing its own political party but rather by working closely with the Democratic Party to promote leftist agendas. "Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party," says DSA. "We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.... Maybe sometime in the future ... an alternative national party will be viable. For now, we will continue to support progressives who have a real chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing Democrats."

In a document titled “Where We Stand,” DSA outlines in detail its political perspectives. Key excerpts from this document include the following:
“Nearly three decades after the 'War on Poverty' was declared and then quickly abandoned, one-fifth of our society subsists in poverty, living in substandard housing, attending underfunded, overcrowded schools, and receiving inadequate health care.”

“In the global capitalist economy, these injustices are magnified a thousand fold. The poorest third of humanity earns two percent of the world's income, while the richest fifth receives two-thirds of global income.”

“We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.”

“We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.”

“A democratic socialist politics for the 21st century must promote an international solidarity dedicated to raising living standards across the globe, rather than 'leveling down' in the name of maximizing profits and economic efficiency.”

“Equality, solidarity, and democracy can only be achieved through international political and social cooperation aimed at ensuring that economic institutions benefit all people.”

“Democratic socialists are dedicated to building truly international social movements—of unionists, environmentalists, feminists, and people of color—that together can elevate global justice over brutalizing global competition.”

“To be genuinely multiracial, a socialist movement must respect the particular goals of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other communities of color. It must place a high priority on economic justice to eradicate the sources of inequality; on affirmative action and other compensatory programs to overcome ongoing discrimination and the legacy of inequality; and on social justice to change the behavior, attitudes, and ideas that foster racism.”

“Free markets or private charity cannot provide adequate public goods and services.”

“The capitalist market economy not only suppresses global living standards, but also means chronic underfunding of socially necessary public goods,from research and development to preventive health care and job training.”

“U.S. dominance of the global economy is buttressed by its political power and military might. Indeed, the United States is engaged in a long-term policy of imperial overreach in a period in which global instability will probably increase.”

“Fifty years of world leadership have taken their toll on the U.S. The links among heavy military spending, fiscal imbalance, and a weakening economy are too clear to ignore. Domestically, the United States faces social and structural economic problems of a magnitude unknown to other advanced capitalist states. The resources needed to sustain U.S. dominance are a drain on the national economy, particularly the most neglected and underdeveloped sectors. Nowhere is a struggle against militarism more pressing than in the United States, where the military budget bleeds the public sector of much needed funds for social programs.”

“As inequalities of wealth and income increase and the wages and living standards of most are either stagnant or falling, social needs expand. Only a revitalized public sector can universally and democratically meet those needs.”

“Social redistribution—the shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society—will require: massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector, in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs, income maintenance and infrastructure rehabilitation, and a massive shift of public resources from the military (the main user of existing discretionary funds) to civilian uses.”

“Over time, income redistribution and social programs will be critical not only to the poor but to the great majority of working people. The defense and expansion of government programs that promote social justice, equal education for all children, universal health care, environmental protection and guaranteed minimum income and social well-being is critical for the next Left.”

“The fundamental task of democratic socialists is to build anti-corporate social movements capable of winning reforms that empower people. Since such social movements seek to influence state policy, they will intervene in electoral politics, whether through Democratic primaries, non-partisan local elections, or third party efforts.”

“Electoral tactics are only a means for democratic socialists; the building of a powerful anti-corporate coalition is the end.”