Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.
The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.
A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.
But it gets worse.
There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.
I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.
But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”
The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.
You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”
Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama's first black tax assessor, who said, "The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law."
Then under "Association with White Nationalist and Hate Groups," the letter, which seems to thrive on parading its own stupidity around, proves that Sessions must be a bigot because he had received awards from the "David Horowitz Freedom Center and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."
Sessions was honored by the Center for Security Policy at the Smithsonian Postal Museum with its Keeper of the Flame award, which recognizes “those individuals who devote their public careers to the propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world.”
Past recipients have included Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Garry Kasparov and Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps the Conference could specify which white nationalist hate group Lieberman and Kasparov belonged to.
Senator Sessions received the Annie Taylor Award from the Freedom Center in 2014. The next year’s recipient would go on to be African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.
It’s unknown which white nationalist hate group Clarke belongs to. Perhaps the Conference could ask the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose inept smear of Sessions it appears to have relied on, to tell them.
The Annie Taylor Award has gone to Iranian dissident Amir Fakhravar, journalist Oriana Fallaci, Baroness Caroline Cox and Democratic Senator Zell Miller. But perhaps the most notorious white supremacist to receive the award was Ward Connerly, the African-American chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.
As smear campaigns go, the Conference’s letter is laughably terrible.
“Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity,” it claims. That’s quite a claim and it isn’t backed up. If Sessions had spent the last 30 years going around shouting racial slurs, you would think that there would be more evidence of that to present in the left’s poison pen letters.
The Conference insists that the Attorney General has to be approved of by “every member of the public”. If that were the case, we couldn’t get a single Attorney General approved.
It states that Sessions supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder raises questions about his fitness. Is the Conference really demanding an Attorney General who won’t uphold Supreme Court decisions?
The Conference’s letter is short on facts and heavy on innuendo. It’s clueless about its own charges. And mostly it opposes Sessions because he doesn’t agree with its radical policy agenda. The letter accuses him of opposing illegal alien amnesty and being skeptical about Global Warming which, according to the letter, “disproportionately affect low-income families and communities of color.”
World ends. Minorities hardest hit.
Further evidence of Sessions’ unfitness is found in that he voted to defund Planned Parenthood, opposed a push for Green Energy and Obama’s pardons for drug dealers. In short, he’s guilty of being a conservative Republican, not a radical leftist.
That’s really why the Leadership Conference opposes him, but it can’t come out and say so. The failed effort to smear Sessions as a racist isn’t about his record; it’s about blocking anyone on the right while cynically abusing a serious accusation for partisan political gain. No one who knows Sessions, including one of the accusers who serves as the basis for many of these smears, believes that he is a racist.
Furthermore the accusations are coming from actual racists like La Raza and the ADC. The ADC honored Helen Thomas after she called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. It was where Ralph Nader insisted that, “Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” The Leadership Conference shows no signs of having a problem with any of this.
Senator Sessions isn’t a racist. His accusers are.
Trump? You kids don’t know what real worry is like – when I was in school, our final exams were taken in the shadow of atomic war, nuclear winter, disco, and Fred Silverman’s NBC programming. Not to mention what was on the other channels...
Donald Trump expressed fondness during the presidential campaign for some of the big federal programs that serve the country’s most vulnerable, but whatever warmth he may feel does not seem to be shared by the people he is choosing to run them.
Monday’s selection of Ben Carson, the former pediatric neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development was the latest move to fit the pattern of stocking the Cabinet with social conservatives deeply skeptical of the government agencies they will be asked to oversee.
Trump chose Carson despite the physician’s protest last month that he lacked the credentials needed to run a federal agency. As a child, Carson lived in what he has described as a housing project in Detroit. Since becoming a doctor, however, he has had little other direct experience with urban policy or housing issues.
He would assume a post overseeing an agency that was elevated to the Cabinet level as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society effort to combat poverty — something that Carson has declared an epic failure.
The job would test Carson’s management ability. The department, with an annual budget of $48 billion, oversees big development contracts and the distribution of lucrative grants to communities, and it has been historically susceptible to corruption in times of weak oversight.
During Ronald Reagan’s tenure, HUD money was regularly misappropriated to contractors with political ties, leading to multiple felony convictions. The agency’s standing in that administration seemed to be crystallized by Reagan’s failure to recognize his HUD secretary, Samuel Pierce, during an encounter at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1981. Reagan addressed Pierce as “Mr. Mayor.”
Carson’s first test at managing a complex, multi-state operation came in the presidential campaign. He proved gifted at raising money, building a small-donor network that was surpassed only by that of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But Carson’s campaign and the network of allied super PACs that supported him also stood out for how little money they spent on campaigning and how much was plowed back into payments to contractors.
His lack of experience drew attacks from many prominent Democrats.
“I have serious concerns about Dr. Carson’s lack of expertise,” said incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York. “Someone who is as anti-government as him is a strange fit for Housing secretary, to say the least.”
Schumer vowed Carson would be pushed during confirmation proceedings to prove he “is well versed in housing policy and has a vision for federal housing programs that meets the needs of Americans across the country.”
In Los Angeles, which works closely with the federal housing agency as it carries out a $23-million anti-homelessness initiative, one of the country’s largest such programs, Mayor Eric Garcetti was more cautious.
"Los Angeles stands at the forefront of the very challenges that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was created to tackle,” Garcetti said in an email. “I am hopeful that as a physician, Mr. Carson will create the much-needed connection between public health and community development in neighborhoods everywhere.”
In 2014, the last year for which full figures are available, 492,000 Californians received HUD-funded vouchers to help with rent. The city of Los Angeles received $52 million in community development grants from HUD that year.
In the Cabinet, Carson would join a list of social conservatives that includes Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Georgia Rep.Tom Price, and Betsy DeVos, who has been tapped to head the Education Department.
Price is a budget hawk and crusader for cutting Medicaid and Medicare, the latter of which Trump, in the campaign, said he opposed cutting. DeVos, the wealthy former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, is a strong backer of voucher programs, which provide tax money to families to spend on private schools...
I bought this book when it came out, but I'm now engrossed in it.
Steele offers perhaps the best explanation yet of our current (crushing) era of political polarization; it's an merciless indictment of radical left-wing identity politics.
I noticed that Hillbilly Elegy was at the top of the non-fiction bestsellers at the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, and I felt a hint of pride in having read it.
But turns out the New York Times refused to cite the J.D. Vance autobiography in its list of top books of 2016.
The biggest surprise from the finale was Ford’s secret desire to free his creations, which made him seem less like the evil lunatic this series has threaded since the pilot. Of course, he’s still a murdering psychopath who built a sexual assault theme park— despite knowing that his creations had, or could achieve, consciousness— but the last episode tried to right a few of his wrongs by exposing his plans for a robot revolt.
But if Ford engineered the escape plan, how much of this is about true sentience? We know for certain that the hosts have memories from past iterations of their characters; this was the entire purpose of Arnold’s maze. That being said, if Ford was the one who programmed Maeve’s exit from the park, does that rob her of her own organic desire to be free? Was the purpose of Maeve’s violent exit merely to distract from the bloodbath of Delos’ board executions?
And also, doesn’t unleashing an army of murderous robots still kind of make him an evil lunatic?
The bigger questions remain: Are Maeve’s thoughts entirely her own? Is her mission just beginning? And what’s next? Will she jump from park to park looking for her lost host child? Or will she take part in the new narrative that Ford built, the uprising at Westworld?
It was a little violent for me altogether, but I like the twists. I'm already looking forward to Season 2.
YouTube banned this video from the site this morning, only to reinstate the clip after realizing it's an anti-hate video, not a hate video, which would be violate the service's terms.
Burning to death has gotta be one of the worst ways to go. Perhaps the black smoke overtook some of the victims first, and they passed out before being consumed in flames.
Either way, I'd rather be shot.
Don't mean to be morbid about it, but it's just so horrible.
The death toll in the devastating fire at a converted Oakland warehouse climbed to 36 Monday, and as emergency crews picked through the dangerously unstable rubble they said they found what they suspect is the area where the blaze started.
The number of victims recovered from the gutted building grew by three overnight, but work on retrieving more bodies was stopped around midnight because of a “wobbly” wall that made the situation dangerous for firefighters and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies, said Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton of the Oakland Fire Department. The wall was stabilized and work resumed at 9 a.m.
A few hours later, another wrinkle arose when the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. cut power to the area so potentially live power lines wouldn’t endanger workers as they brought in a crane to move the rubble. The outage was expected to affect between 50 and 500 customers in the Fruitvale area for as many as 12 hours, said Officer Johnna Watson, spokeswoman for the Oakland Police Department.
So far, a total of 11 victims have been identified and their families notified.
