I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2017
⚡️ “Hundreds protest in #Anaheim after officer-teen confrontation” #TheOC https://t.co/ymp5kX8upm
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 23, 2017
The altercation on the tidy, suburban street in Anaheim apparently began with a complaint common in many neighborhoods: a group of teenagers walking through a neighbor’s yard on their way home from school.More.
But this seemingly mundane dispute spun out of control on West Palais Road on Tuesday when authorities say an off-duty Los Angeles police officer confronted the group. Other teenagers pulled out their cameras, filming the officer as he held a 13-year-old boy by the collar of his sweatshirt, trying to detain him.
The situation quickly escalated from there. At one point, another teen rushed the officer, sending him tumbling over a line of bushes. The officer then reached into his jeans and drew a gun, firing a single shot.
No one was hurt by the gunfire, which Anaheim police said was aimed at the ground. But footage of the encounter stirred uproar across the country, prompting criticism of the off-duty cop’s actions and questions over why investigators arrested two teenagers — but not the officer — at the scene.
As the video went viral Wednesday, more than 300 protesters took to the streets to protest the shooting. Police broke up the demonstration and arrested 23 people, but not before some vandalized the officer’s home.
The tension in Orange County’s largest city comes after several incidents in recent years in which Latino activists have protested police shootings that they felt unfairly targeted the city’s large Latino community. Many of the teens involved in Tuesday’s incident appeared to be Latino, and the officer appears to be white.
On Thursday, officials from both Anaheim and Los Angeles scrambled to calm the public’s concern.
“Like many, I am deeply disturbed and frankly angered by what it shows,” Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait said about the footage of the incident. “The video shows an adult wrestling with a 13-year-old kid and ultimately firing a gun. … It should never have happened.”
Anaheim police are investigating the altercation itself while the Los Angeles Police Department and Inspector General are conducting internal investigations into the officer’s actions.
The Los Angeles Police Commission will ultimately decide whether the officer violated any LAPD rules during the encounter.
“I am very interested in knowing the facts of the incident based on the investigation by the department and the Office of Inspector General that is underway,” said commissioner Cynthia McClain-Hill. “Some of the actions — brief as that exchange caught on video may be — do not properly represent what I believe should be expected and reflected by a member of the Los Angeles Police Department when engaging members of the public, be it on-duty or off-duty.”
The officer, whose name has not been released by authorities, was removed from the field, which is standard protocol after shootings by LAPD officers.
An attorney representing the officer, Larry Hanna, declined to discuss the encounter in detail, citing the ongoing investigations. He also declined to name his client or describe his work with the LAPD, saying he was concerned for his safety.
“All of this will come out,” he said. “I just think that people should let the investigators do their job.”
The union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers came out strongly against those who criticized the officer’s action...
1/20/2017 "We the People" pic.twitter.com/CDOrl8Cs2P— 🌸TrumpGirl® (@Girl4Trump_) January 20, 2017
#DNCFuture looks disastrous!. See what this African American man has to say about what has become of the Democratic Party. #CPAC2017 💯 👏🏾 pic.twitter.com/A5y8ccUfy9
— Deplorable Melissa (@sweetatertot2) February 24, 2017
Conservatives love Trump now b/c 'he has all the right enemies.' But how long this honeymoon? https://t.co/CQ5DoTAYbI @Noahbierman
— Marc Duvoisin (@MarcDuvoisin) February 24, 2017
A year ago, Donald Trump skipped the nation’s preeminent conference of conservatives, underscoring the friction between the populist candidate and many of the warring factions in his party during a heated presidential primary season.Keep reading.
Friday, Trump returned to the Conservative Political Action Conference with the blunt force of a conqueror, planting his brand of nationalist, anti-globalist populism like a flag.
His speech, with rhetoric that even Trump said would have been too controversial at the event even a year ago, marked his takeover of the conservative movement, one of several signs of his dominance throughout the conference, which also featured a rare and well-received speech from his chief intellectual influence and advisor, Stephen K. Bannon.
"There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency or a global flag," Trump said to great applause from thousands of conservatives. "I'm not representing the globe. I'm representing your country."
He echoed ideas he has espoused in the past — denouncing trade deals as the antithesis of "economic freedom," warning that Paris and other great cities of Europe have been ruined by mass immigration, criticizing Democratic and Republican presidents for their interventions in the Middle East.
Although many of the words were familiar, the venue and the passion made Friday's speech remarkable.
Trump spoke directly of his ambition to turn the GOP into "the party of the American worker."
"I'm here today to tell you what this movement means for the future of the Republican Party and for the future of America," Trump said. "The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that [must] put and will put its own citizens first."
While Trump tried to unite conservatives, the speech made little effort to bridge the country's larger political divide. For example, Trump dismissed people who have shown up at town halls around the country to protest reversal of Obamacare.
"They're not you. They're largely — many of them are the side that lost," he said.
The visuals around the waterfront conference outside Washington were just as striking: the red “Make America Great Again” caps, the throngs of college Republicans surrounding Trump’s aides and allies, the giant Trump-decorated pickup truck at the convention center entrance.
As he has repeatedly done in the last couple of weeks, Trump attacked the media for what he sees as unfair coverage. He also showed how much he remembers the details of how his campaign was described in the press, at one point praising The Times for its election tracking poll that consistently showed him leading.
“I must say Los Angeles Times did a great job — shocking,” he said. “A couple polls got it right.”
In reality, the USC Dornsife/L.A. Times “Daybreak” tracking poll overstated Trump’s support, although it did correctly pick up the backing he was getting from disaffected white voters, many of whom had sat out the 2012 election.
Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an outlet that has presented itself as a voice of the white nationalist alt-right movement, joked a day earlier as he sat down for a marquee event about how far he had come.
He used to hold a competing event called “Uninvited” for conservatives whose philosophies were considered too radical for the conference, Bannon said at a panel featuring him and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
Bannon reveled in his newfound influence as the conference organizer interviewed him in front of thousands of people.
He praised Priebus, the former GOP chairman, another indication of how the mainstream of the party has come into Trump’s fold. But both men made clear that Bannon was the dominant force in shaping Trump’s vision.
Bannon spoke about defending his notion of American culture and lashed out against the “corporatist, globalist media” standing in the way of Trump’s “economic nationalist agenda.”
“If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight," he said. "You are sadly mistaken.”
“We're at the top of the first inning of this,” Bannon said near the end of his remarks. “We want you to have our back.”
Conference organizers seemed to have gotten the message.
Breitbart News owns the first booth by the entrance of the convention hall, hawking “Border Wall Construction Company” T-shirts...
The New Nationalism in America: How conservatism is changing in the Trump era https://t.co/ytTqhBYbTx via @continetti pic.twitter.com/GtJZRFZkCi— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 24, 2017
Dear Senators and the People:
I and the children of the former South Vietnam soldiers will never forget the support of former Senator Tom Hayden for the Communist government of Vietnam and the oppression by the Communist Government of Vietnam for the people of Vietnam.
After 40 years, the efforts by people like him have hurt the people of Vietnam and have worked to stop the Vietnamese refugees from coming to the United States, a free country. We will always continue to fight for freedom and human rights for the people of Vietnam.
Members, I recognize today in memory of the million of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy. I recognize that on Tuesday you had an opportunity to honor Senator Tom Hayden. With all due respect, I would like to offer another historical perspective.
On Tuesday, instead of participating, I chose to step out of the chamber out of respect to his family, his friends and to you. In contrast to your comments on Tuesday, I want to share what Senator Hayden meant to me and to the over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans who call California their home, as well as to the over 1 million Vietnamese Americans across the United States.
As you may be aware, Tom Hayden chose to work directly with the Communist North Vietnamese Government to oppose the efforts of United States forces in South Vietnam.
Mr. Hayden sided with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family. Mr. Hayden’s actions are viewed by many as harmful to democratic values and hateful towards those who sought the very freedoms on which this nation is founded.
Were it not for the efforts of the thousands of men and women who served bravely in the United States military and the South Vietnamese military, as well as the efforts of millions of Vietnamese citizens who resisted the communists, I would not be standing here on this Senate floor humbly representing the residents of the 34th District.
In addition to the sacrifices made during war, the efforts of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s allowed many Vietnamese like me to seek refuge in the United States.
In contrast to the great many people who fought to defend freedom and democracy, Mr. Hayden supported a Communist agenda and traveled to North Vietnam during the war.
He believed that those who protested the human-rights violations of the Communists were tools of the CIA. It is known that he believed that the war was a conflict between Imperialism, led by the United States and the “free” people of North Vietnam. Former Senator Hayden was profoundly wrong in his support of the Communists.
Members, to this day, the government of Vietnam continues to violate the basic human rights of its citizens. They systematically continue to oppress freedoms of expression, religion and assembly and incarcerate those who speak out for freedom and democracy.
Thank you for allowing me to make my comments. I proudly stand before you as a Vietnamese-American who appreciates the freedoms that so many around the world do not enjoy.
Trump, Putin, and the new Cold War: https://t.co/f6B9fbTLXC pic.twitter.com/lEBySWGTpK
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 24, 2017
Trump administration rescinds guidelines on protections for transgender students https://t.co/v6IGLFsmgx pic.twitter.com/Yb4JNTVmh1— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) February 23, 2017
Emily Ratajkowski’s iCloud is ‘targeted again as personal nude images of the model appear online’ https://t.co/RMOm4PLS2r pic.twitter.com/m58VmleUeJ— The Scottish Sun (@ScottishSun) February 19, 2017
#LePen is Mightier than the Sword -New #BenGarrison #cartoon #frenchelection #Brexit #Islam #Veil #ImWithHer https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/ZxdVsj2YA8
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) February 22, 2017
A 1964 book claiming that communists had infiltrated all levels of government was that era's version of fake news https://t.co/V1K2wG4uCp— NYT Metro Desk (@NYTMetro) January 11, 2017
Killing of a young woman grips Iceland https://t.co/zDW0ZJE5w1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 24, 2017
Trumps’ critics, left and right, aim to bring about the cataclysm they predicted.It's sickening.
A 1964 political melodrama, Seven Days in May, envisioned a futuristic (1970s) failed military cabal that sought to sideline the president of the United States over his proposed nuclear-disarmament treaty with the Soviets.
Something far less dramatic but perhaps as disturbing as Hollywood fiction played out this February.
The Teeth-Gnashing of Deep Government
Currently, the political and media opponents of Donald Trump are seeking to subvert his presidency in a manner unprecedented in the recent history of American politics. The so-called resistance among EPA federal employees is trying to disrupt Trump administration reform; immigration activists promise to flood the judiciary to render executive orders inoperative.
Intelligence agencies had earlier leaked fake news briefings about the purported escapades of President-elect Trump in Moscow — stories that were quickly exposed as politically driven concoctions. Nearly one-third of House Democrats boycotted the Inauguration. Celebrities such as Ashley Judd and Madonna shouted obscenities to crowds of protesters; Madonna voiced her dreams of Trump’s death by saying she’d been thinking a lot about blowing up the White House.
But all that pushback was merely the clownish preliminary to the full-fledged assault in mid February.
Career intelligence officers leaked their own transcripts of a phone call that National Security Advisor–designate Michael Flynn had made to a Russian official.The media charge against Flynn was that he had nefariously talked to higher-ups in Russia before he took office. Obama-administration officials did much the same, before Inauguration Day 2009, and spoke with Syrian, Iranian, and Russian counterparts. But they faced no interference from the outgoing Bush administration.
No doubt the designated security officials of most incoming administrations do not wait until being sworn in to sound out foreign officials. Most plan to reset the policies of their predecessors. The question, then, arises: Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate (and Trump himself?) and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press? For what purpose?
Indeed, Trump’s own proposed outreach to Russia so far is not quite of the magnitude of Obama’s in 2009, when the State Department staged the red-reset-button event to appease Putin; at the time, Russia was getting set to swallow the Crimea and all but absorb Eastern Ukraine. Trump certainly did not approve the sale of some 20 percent of North American uranium holdings to Russian interests, in the quid pro quo fashion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did, apparently in concert with Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation — and to general indifference of both the press and the intelligence community.
In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that career intelligence officers have decided to withhold information from the president, on the apparent premise that he is unfit, in their view, to receive it. If true, that disclosure would mean that elements of the federal government are now actively opposing the duly elected president of the United States. That chilling assessment gains credence from the likelihood that the president’s private calls to Mexican and Australian heads of state were likewise recorded, and selected segments were leaked to suggest that Trump was either trigger-happy or a buffoon.
Oddly, in early January, Senator Charles Schumer had essentially warned Trump that he would pay for his criticism of career intelligence officials. In an astounding shot across his bow, which was followed up by an onslaught in February, Schumer said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. . . . So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
Schumer was evidently not disturbed about rogue intelligence agencies conspiring to destroy a shared political enemy — the president of the United States. What surprised him was how naïve Trump was in not assessing the anti-constitutional forces arrayed against him.
Trump-Removal Chic
The elite efforts to emasculate the president have sometimes taken on an eerie turn. The publisher-editor of the German weekly magazine Zeit raised the topic on German television of killing Trump to end the “Trump catastrophe.” So did British Sunday Times columnist India Knight, who tweeted, “The assassination is taking such a long time.” A former Obama Pentagon official, Rosa Brooks, recently mused about theoretical ways to remove Trump, including a military coup, should other avenues such as impeachment or medically forced removal fail: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”
The Atlantic now darkly warns that Trump is trying to create an autocracy. Former Weekly Standard editor in chief Bill Kristol suggested in a tweet that if he faced a choice (and under what surreal circumstances would that happen?) between the constitutionally, democratically elected president and career government officials’ efforts to thwart or remove him, he would come down on the side of the revolutionary, anti-democratic “deep state”: “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it [emphasis added], prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” No doubt some readers interpreted that as a call to side with anti-constitutional forces against an elected U.S. president.
Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep equate the president with brownshirts and assorted fascists. A CNN reporter announced that Trump was Hitlerian; another mused about his plane’s crashing. Prominent conservative legal scholar Richard Epstein recently called for Trump to resign after less than a month in office, largely on grounds that Trump’s rhetoric is unbridled and indiscreet — although Epstein cited no indictable or impeachable offenses that would justify the dispatch of a constitutionally elected president. Earlier, Republican columnists David Frum and Jennifer Rubin had theorized that the 25th Amendment might provide a way to remove Trump from office as unfit to serve. The New Republic published an unfounded theory, based on no empirical evidence, alleging that Trump suffers from neurosyphilis and thus is mentally not up to his office.
Former president Barack Obama — quite unlike prior presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, who all refrained from attacking their successors — is now reportedly ready to join the efforts of a well-funded political action committee to undermine the Trump presidency...
The most politically dangerous book you’ve never heard of https://t.co/urHQbA9z61 via @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/k6hCeijH2A
— POLITICO (@politico) December 12, 2016
Armour of a cuirasse du carabinier holed by a cannonball at the battle of Waterloo pic.twitter.com/TBJ7rGPIVf— History In Pictures (@historyepics) January 15, 2017
This is a French cuirass, a breastplate worn as body armour by French cavalry. The hole is from a British cannonball that smashed through the unlucky soldier’s chest. The Waterloo campaign was the first occasion that British troops found themselves face to face with Napoleon’s armoured cavalry, whose cuirasses and metal helmets made them a daunting foe.More.
Yet as the British would discover, even these armoured troopers were by no means invincible as this breastplate brings home with shocking force.
“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot.” https://t.co/w5mG5rsj0A— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 27, 2017
“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.
Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.
“What, mom? I’m taking the laundry down,” human Alexa shouted back. “What do you need?”
“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot,” says Alexa Sussman, a recent New York University graduate who works in marketing.
The artificial-intelligence invasion is upon us, in the form of disembodied personal assistants we can give orders to, query and, in some cases, try to converse with. In hopes of getting us used to our new artificially intelligent family members, the technology companies behind them have given the machines mostly female names to go with their soothing voices.
Apple Inc. picked “Siri.” Microsoft Corp. chose “Cortana.” ( Alphabet Inc.’s Google opted to keep its software nonhuman, calling it “Assistant.”) Amazon.com Inc.’s choice, as it happens, was the 39th most popular girl’s name in the U.S. in 2006. That means in some homes the plan has backfired: The effort to make a gadget more humanlike has earned it human enemies.
In the Sussmans’ household in Levittown, N.Y., the confusion cuts both ways. Last week, when human Alexa’s father, Dean, asked her to grab some water from the kitchen, Amazon’s Alexa wanted to help, too. “Amazon’s choice for water is Fiji Natural Artesian Water, pack of 24. It’s $27.27, including tax. Would you like to buy it?”
When he told his daughter to move the living-room chair, Amazon’s Alexa yelped, “Ready to pair!” Robo-Alexa had a command for Mr. Sussman himself: “Go to the Bluetooth devices on your mobile device.”
The microphones in the $180 Amazon Echo and the smaller $50 Echo Dot are always listening for “Alexa,” which is their default “wake word,” the phrase causing it to start paying attention to commands. Amazon lets users change the wake word to “Echo,” “Amazon,” or, starting this week, “computer.”
But many users aren’t aware. The Sussmans found out about the setting a year after buying the device. They have decided to keep “Alexa” because they say they find it funny.
Amazon has sold more than 11 million Echos and Dots since 2015, Morgan Stanley estimates, and it is working with partners to put Alexa into other products, including Ford Motor Co. cars and General Electric Co. lamps.
Some human Alexas want nothing to do with her.
“Oh, your name is Alexa, like the Amazon thing?” Alexa Duncan, 33, says she hears all too often these days. She refuses to buy the Echo.
Amazon says it named its Alexa after the ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria. The company hasn’t offered any formal apologies to the human Alexas.
Roughly half of Millennials have positive feelings about socialism, twice the rate of the previous generation https://t.co/ofqRdNCJpD
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 19, 2017
Increasingly American politics are driven by generational change. The election of Donald Trump was not just a triumph of whiter, heartland America. It also confirmed the still considerable voting power of the older generation. Yet over time, as those of us who have lived long enough well know, generations decline, and die off, and new ones ascend.Hey, bring it on, lol.
In this past election, those over 45 strongly favored Trump, while those younger than that cast their ballots for Clinton. Trump’s improbable victory, and the more significant GOP sweep across the country, demonstrated that the much-ballyhooed millennials simply are not yet sufficiently numerous or united enough to overcome the votes of the older generations.
Yet over time, the millennials—arguably the most progressive generation since the ’30s—could drive our politics not only leftward, but towards an increasingly socialist reality, overturning many of the very things that long have defined American life. This could presage a war of generations over everything from social mores to economics and could well define our politics for the next decade...
Milo says he does not support pedophilia. https://t.co/8g2Q5klGw9
— Heat Street (@heatstreet) February 20, 2017
Simon & Schuster Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos's Book. Our full story. https://t.co/eDwpnx3qEf
— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) February 20, 2017
— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) February 20, 2017
Look out! It’s another fake Islamophobia crisis.Still more.
“Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report,” wails NBC News. “Watchdog: Number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015,” FOX News bleats. ABC News vomits up this word salad. “Trump cited in report finding increase in US hate groups for 2nd year in a row.”
The SPLC stands for the Southern Poverty Law Center: an organization with slightly less credibility than Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and without the academic degree in greasepaint.
And you won’t believe the shameless way the SPLC faked its latest Islamophobia crisis.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate group” sightings claims that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016.”
That’s a lot of folds.
And there is both bad news and good news from its “Year in Hate and Extremism.”
First the good news.
Casa D’Ice Signs, the sign outside a bar in K-Mart Plaza in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is no longer listed as a hate group. The sign outside the bar had been listed as a hate group by the SPLC for years. The owner of Casa D’Ice had been known for putting politically incorrect signs outside his bar. So the SPLC listed the “signs” as a hate group. (Even though there was only one sign.) Not the bar. That would have made too much sense.
Since then Casa D’Ice was sold and the SPLC has celebrated the defeat of another hate group. Even if the hate group was just a plastic sign outside a bar.
But the bad news, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is that anti-Muslim hate groups shot up from only 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016.
What could possibly account for that growth? Statistical fakery so fake that a Vegas bookie would weep.
President Trump is on the cover of the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report: a misnomer of a title from an organization whose intelligence gathering led it to list a bar sign as a hate group.
But there’s actually another phenomenon responsible for this startling rise reported by the SPLC.
The SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America as separate groups.
How do you get a sudden rise from 34 to 101 hate groups? It helps to suddenly add 45 chapters of one group. Act for America isn’t a hate group. It’s also just as obviously not 45 groups.
And it didn’t come into existence last year.
Act for America was only listed as one group in the 2015 list. It shot up to 45 now.
The SPLC this year listed the Los Angeles chapter of Act for America as a separate group. But the chapter has been around for quite a few years.
Furthermore Act for America boasts not 45, but 1,000 chapters across the country. Why list just 45 of them? Look at it from the SPLC’s perspective. Next year, it can add 200 chapters and claim that anti-Muslim hate groups once again tripled. And then it can do the same thing again the year after that.
That way the Southern Poverty Law Center can keep manufacturing an imaginary Islamophobia crisis.
Also added to the list is Altra Firearms: a gun store that ran an ad declaring that it wouldn’t sell firearms to Clinton supporters or Muslims. Like Casa D’Ice, this is another case of the SPLC demonstrating that it has no idea what distinguishes a store whose owner says politically incorrect things from a “group”.
The list has added Bosch Fawstin: an artist who was the target of the first ISIS terror attack in America during the assault on the Draw Mohammed cartoon contest. The SPLC announced that it was adding the Eisner nominated artist to its list of hate groups after he survived the attack.
The SPLC’s actions were obscene.
After the attack, Heidi Beirich, in charge of adding targets to the SPLC’s hate map, announced that she would be adding Bosch to the list because the Center now knows his location.
Indeed the SPLC makes a point of highlighting the locations of likely terrorist targets. And the Southern Poverty Law Center’s map of hate has been used by terrorists before.
Floyd Lee Corkins opened fire at the headquarters of the Family Research Council. The conservative Christian organization had been targeted by Corkins because of its appearance on the SPLC’s list.
"Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online,” Corkins later confessed to the FBI.
When Leo Johnson, the building’s African-American manager, attempted to stop Corkins, the SPLC shooter told Johnson that he didn’t like his politics and opened fire. The SPLC gunman had planned to kill everyone in the office, but Johnson’s heroic actions saved their lives. The African-American building manager was forced to undergo painful surgeries because of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate list.
Despite its role in the terror attack, the SPLC continues to target the Family Research Council.
None of the so-called “Anti-Muslim hate groups” listed by the SPLC have shot anyone. The SPLC has...
Excerpt from Big Agenda in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: https://t.co/ROAQl98P0V— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) February 19, 2017
Ironically, it was a billionaire businessman who broke the mold in the 2016 presidential campaign and brought a new voice into Republican politics. Donald Trump took up the cause of the forgotten working class, promising to restore America's industrial prowess and bring back the jobs that a corrupt elite with a globalist outlook had negotiated away in reckless trade deals that sent Americans to the back of the bus and squandered the prosperity they had created over generations.Most excellent.
Equally groundbreaking was Trump's bluntness in confronting the corruption of both parties for participating in a rigged system that left their constituencies out in the cold. The failure to secure the borders was a national disgrace in which both parties were complicit. In focusing on the criminal aliens who had not been blocked at the borders and were not deported, he broke the silence imposed by the politically correct party line. In calling Clinton a "crook," a "liar," and the enabler of a sexual predator, he took her off the pedestal on which her gender and the Democrats' fantasy of a Republican "war on women" had placed her. By speaking out against the Democrats' rape of the inner cities and their treatment of their black constituents as second-class citizens, Trump burst a bubble that had protected Democrats from the consequences of their actions and opened the ranks of the Republican Party to "people of color."
Trump's readiness to go for the Democrats' jugular rallied Republican voters frustrated by their leaders' long-running deference to Democratic outrages and their willingness to keep their party on the defensive. It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a "movement." It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats' collectivism and in defense of individual liberty. Perhaps Trump's most significant innovation as a Republican candidate was the moral language he used to indict his Democratic opponent. Previously, Republicans would have been too polite to call their opponents liars and crooks - even when the evidence clearly showed that they were. If their opponent was a woman, they would never have dreamed of using such language, so deferential were they to the stringent rules of political correctness. Trump broke free of this constraint. But Republicans need to take this a step further and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance with which they can characterize their opponents and level the political playing field.
That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom. Compulsory public schools are not a service to minorities and the poor but are infringements on their freedom to choose an education that will allow them to pursue the American dream. Obamacare is objectionable not only because its mandates drive up the costs and diminish the quality of health care, as Republicans have argued. Far more important is that government-controlled health care takes away the freedom of individuals to manage their own health and secure their life chances. Onerous taxes and massive government debt are not accounting problems; they are a war on the ability of individuals to work for themselves instead of the government and are therefore an attack on individual freedom. This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda...
Who Rules the United States?: How bureaucrats are fighting the voters for control of our country https://t.co/FKo760mAiu pic.twitter.com/QxtRlb7Txd— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 18, 2017
Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation's capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. "What truly matters," he said in his Inaugural Address, "is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."More.
Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.
There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.
Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.
But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?
Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year's election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.
How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. "I can't think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this," a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.
Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women's March.
But here's the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?
The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.
The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief...
How half this country feels about @realDonaldTrump.
— Steph (@steph93065) February 19, 2017
Pure love and gratitude ❤🇺🇸💙#LoveTrumpsHate pic.twitter.com/efeqXEtQV8
