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2016

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Women Really, Really Dislike Trump: Take Note, Republicans By Abby McCloskey

By on April 18th, 2016

Republicans still haven’t learned. In the autopsy of the 2012 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee concluded that the party needed to “improve its efforts to include female voters” and “represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have.”

But the top two Republican presidential candidates — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — have the lowest favorability ratings in the field among women. If nominated, Cruz would probably perform the same as Romney, whereas Trump would probably lose the women’s vote by the biggest margin in 50 years.

Trump recently tweeted, “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!” This is hard to believe. More than 3 million people have seen the anti-Trump ad in which women repeat real quotes about women from Donald Trump, such as “bimbo” and “fat pig.” Trump described Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her wherever” and mocked Carly Fiorina’s appearance by saying, “Look at that face.” He tweeted a picture of Melania Trump next to Heidi Cruz, as if potential first ladies are contestants in a Miss Universe pageant. And when asked whether women should be punished in the event that abortion became illegal, he suggested that they should be.

Women aren’t amused. Seven out of ten women (67 percent) have an unfavorable view of Trump, and only 26 percent view him favorably, according to a national Quinnipiac survey from late March. Other polls have his unfavorability ratings among women even higher, at 74 percent.

Cruz has capitalized on Trump’s missteps by not making similar misogynist gaffes (admittedly, this is a low bar). He also recently hosted an event — “The Celebration of Strong Women” — in Madison, Wis., featuring his wife, his mother, and none other than former competitor Carly Fiorina. “All issues are women’s issues,” said Cruz, in one of his most humanizing events of the campaign.

This is a very encouraging development, but Cruz too has a steep hill to climb with women voters. Three in ten women surveyed had a favorable view of Cruz (29 percent) and nearly half had an unfavorable view of him (46 percent), according to the same Quinnipiac survey from late March.

Not that the GOP’s leading candidates do particularly well with male voters. The majority of men (54 percent) view Trump negatively, and nearly half (48 percent) view Cruz negatively. But the favorability gap is more pronounced with women, especially for Trump.

Indeed, Trump’s gender gap (measured by the net favorable rating among women minus the net favorable rating among men) is larger than any remaining candidate’s, according to Gallup.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SENATOR MIKE LEE (R-UTAH): U.S. v TEXAS No One Is above the Law Obama broke the law with DAPA. Will the Supreme Court stop him?

By on April 18th, 2016

One of the most fundamental challenges facing the United States today is the deep and growing distrust between the American people and their political system in Washington, D.C. And the inconvenient truth — rarely acknowledged by Washington elites — is that the American people’s distrust of their public institutions is totally justified.

Most moms and dads in America still teach their children to follow the rules even when they’re inconvenient, to respect the authority of the law, and to work hard to earn their success. But when they look to their nation’s capital, they see a very different ethos — one that rewards politicians and bureaucrats who rewrite the rules whenever they please, flout the law with impunity, and rig public policy in their favor.

Today the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in United States v. Texas, which challenges one of the most egregious examples of Washington’s corrupted culture: President Obama’s amnesty program, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Records (DAPA).

For more than six decades, Congress has exercised its power over immigration by establishing a comprehensive scheme of rules and regulations governing admission to the country and the circumstances under which foreign nationals may be eligible for work authorization or government benefits.

President Obama does not like the current immigration code and, to be honest, I have problems with it as well. But neither of us is allowed to change the law on our own, a fact President Obama used to respect.

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Russian Jet Does a Barrel Roll Over U.S. Recon Plane in the Baltic By Rick Moran

By on April 18th, 2016

Some smart-ass Russian pilot decided to channel Tom Cruise in Top Gun and perform a barrel roll over a U.S. reconnaissance plane in international waters. The incident was the second such provocation against the American military in the last few days. On Thursday, Russian jets buzzed the USS Donald Cook destroyer, flying 30 feet above its deck.

CNN:

The incident Thursday occurred when a Russian jet “performed erratic and aggressive maneuvers” as it flew within 50 feet of the U.S. aircraft’s wing tip, Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for U.S. European Command, said in a response to a question from CNN.

The Russian Su-27 began the barrel roll from the left side of the U.S. RC-135 and went over the top of it to end on the right side of the aircraft, European Command said.

The RC-135 aircraft was “intercepted by a Russian SU-27 in an unsafe and unprofessional manner,” Hernandez said, adding that the U.S. plane never entered Russian territory.

“The unsafe and unprofessional actions of a single pilot have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries,” said Hernandez, who added the United States is protesting with the Russian government.

But Russia’s Defense Ministry said that reports on Thursday’s incident were “not consistent with reality” and that the Russian aircraft’s maneuvers had been “performed strictly in accordance with the international regulations on the use of airspace.”

Ministry spokesman Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the Su-27 had been dispatched after Russian air defense facilities spotted an unknown target over the Baltic Sea, approaching the Russian border at high speed.

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Sleeping Dogs Are Waking By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 18th, 2016

College.

The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.

Colleges overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class, and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students will mysteriously soar.

In response, the university freely imposes speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts) to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for the moment partially escaped the ruin.

Online colleges are far cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?

It runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what is becoming their Frankenstein monster.

Tribe.

A multiracial, single-cultural U.S. was an historical fluke. No other society has ever quite pulled that feat off—not Austria-Hungary, not Rwanda, not Iraq, not Yugoslavia. To ensure multiracial harmony, cultural unity (or what is now dismissively written off as the “melting pot”) was essential.

Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

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False Moral Equivalence as a Tool to Demonize Israel by Manfred Gerstenfeld and Jamie Berk

By on April 18th, 2016

False moral equivalence is one of a series of major fallacies. False moral equivalence comparing Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis was used by several prominent social-democratic politicians, including French President François Mitterrand, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou.

Another example of false moral equivalence is calling Israel an Apartheid State. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter made this comparison in his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid — which incorporates the false moral equivalence in its title.

The false comparison between Zionism and racism has been repeated countless times through United Nations and UN-sponsored declarations and conferences.

Another category of moral equivalence pretends that the intended murder of innocent civilians is equal to the accidental deaths of civilians in targeted assassinations. For instance U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry compared the three civilians murdered in the 2013 Boston Marathon to the nine activists who had planned violence and were killed by Israeli soldiers they attacked on the Mavi Marmara ship in 2013.

Among the many tools mobilized for the demonization of Israel, one frequently used is a mode of argument known as false moral equivalence. The term “moral equivalence,” originates from a 1906 address by American philosopher William James.[1] It is the claim that there is no difference between two actions of greatly varying character. It is frequently used to emphasize similarities between two otherwise dissimilar acts. False moral equivalence undermines norms and values in a society, blurring the lines between good and evil also right and wrong.

False moral equivalence comparing Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis was used by several prominent social-democratic politicians, including French President François Mitterrand,[2] Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme[3] and Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. [4]

When two dissimilar realities are linked such as Israel and Nazism, use of one side of the equivalence will eventually automatically bring to mind the other – however distorted the comparison may be. Subsequent repetition results in an acceptance, where the false moral equivalence is no longer countered or questioned.

False moral equivalence should not be confused with moral relativism. The latter lends itself to the justification of behavior by claiming that they are acceptable in a certain culture’s values or were common practice during certain periods of history.[5]

Moral equivalence embodies comparisons, defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as: “The act or process of comparing: as the representing of one thing or person as similar or like another, or the modification of an adjective or adverb to denote different levels of quality, quantity, or relation.”[6] Comparisons innately lend themselves to frequent abuse.
CATEGORIES OF MORAL EQUIVALENCE

False moral equivalence used against Israel may be categorized into nine main groups, shown below. These groups are:

The false moral equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany;
Israel and South African apartheid;
Zionism and racism and its sub-categories Zionism and colonialism/imperialism, as well as Zionism and fascism, the Holocaust and the Nakba (Arabic for “The Catastrophe,” of 1948.)
False moral comparisons of murder and accidental death, comparisons of targeted killings of terrorists with intentional murder of civilians;
Equivalencies drawn between kidnapping of soldiers and imprisoning terrorists;
Presenting moral equivalence between Israel’s actions as a legitimate sovereign state and the illegitimate actions of terrorists.
A ninth category, “others,” includes demonization of Israel in ways which do not fit into the above categories, such as the moral equivalence drawn between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and the perceived parallels between Nazi brutality and the actions of their Allied opponents.

CATEGORY 1: ISRAEL AS A NAZI STATE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey Builds Mega-Mosque in U.S., Blocks Churches in Turkey by Uzay Bulut

By on April 18th, 2016

As yet another enormous mosque has opened in the U.S. (funded by the Turkish government), Christians in Turkey are waiting for the day when Turkish state authorities will allow them freely to build or use their churches and safely pray inside them.

In Turkey, some churches have been converted to stables or used as storehouses. Others have been completely destroyed. Sales of churches on the internet are a common practice.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan said during the opening ceremony of the Maryland mosque that the center was important at a time of an “unfortunate rise in intolerance towards Muslims in the United States and the world.”

How would Muslims feel if mosques in Mecca were put up for sale on the internet, turned into stables, or razed to the ground? How would they feel if a Muslim child were beaten in the classroom by his teacher for not saying “Jesus is my Lord and Savior?” How would they feel if they continually received violent threats or insults for just attempting peacefully to worship in their mosques?

Before Muslim political or religious leaders lecture the world about the non-existent threat of “Islamophobia” or “intolerance against Muslims” in the West, they should take moral responsibility and address the real abuses against Christians in their home countries, and the actual Christian genocide taking place across the Muslim world.

On April 2, a gigantic Ottoman style of mosque was opened in Lanham, Maryland by the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The mosque, according to Turkish officials, is “one of the largest Turkish mosques built outside Turkey.”

Funds to build it, as reported by the Turkish pro-government newspaper, Sabah, came from Turkey’s state-run Presidency of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, as well as Turkish-American non-profit organizations.

The mosque is actually part of a larger complex, commonly referred to as “Maryland kulliye.” A kulliye, as such Islamic compounds were called in Ottoman times, is a complex of buildings, centered on a mosque and composed of various facilities including a madrassa (Islamic religious school).

Erdogan recited verses from the Quran inside the mosque after the mosque was opened.

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Multiculti education guru denounces showing up on time, hard work, and clear language as part of white oppression By Thomas Lifson

By on April 18th, 2016

Heather Hackman of the Hackman Consulting Group apparently is a big deal in educational circles concerned with denouncing “white privilege.” School districts all over the country spend big bucks sending teachers and administrators for indoctrination into White Privilege Theory. The St. Paul public schools, for instance, have spent millions of dollars on this mission.

Blake Neff of the Daily Caller News Foundation has been attending the 17th Annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia, where Hackman enunciated a set of ideas that sound suspiciously close to white supremacy, and which made explicit the notion that teachers in government schools are now expected to be political indoctrinators more than teachers of any useful knowledge and skills.

A professional education consultant and teacher trainer argued at the White Privilege Conference (WPC) in Philadelphia that great teachers must also be liberal activists, and described in detail her goal for destroying the “white supremacist” nature of modern education. (snip)

On Friday, Hackman was given a platform at WPC to deliver a workshop with the lengthy title “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.” The long title masked a simple thesis on Hackman’s part: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers in college to be activists as well as pedagogues.

In fact, Hackman argued teachers shouldn’t even bother teaching if they aren’t committed to promoting social justice in school.

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The Perilous Politicization of the Military By Jonathan F. Keiler

By on April 18th, 2016

We are looking at a permanent structural change in the American armed forces that will not only weaken the nation’s ability to defend itself, but endanger constitutional principles. A year ago in an article titled “Obama’s Generals,” I described an American military increasingly politicized under the current administration. The evidence at the time was already abundant: the military’s refusal to identify the Fort Hood shootings as terrorism, the coddling of Bowe Bergdahl, the relief or prosecution of politically unreliable generals, and unrealistically rosy appreciations of the campaign against ISIS being the major points. If anything, things have worsened since, most especially with the purely political decision to remove all restriction on women in combat, and as noted in a recent AT posts the mostly symbolic but still significant decisions by the Navy to issue “gender neutral” uniforms and to ignore regulations regarding naming ships to honor Democrat politicians and leftwing social activists. Add to this, ongoing and increasingly aggressive recruiting policies that mandate “diversity” and the situation becomes scary.

Arguably there has been some good news here and there, but even that must be taken with a large grain of salt. Last year Congress passed legislation allowing for the soldiers wounded at Fort Hood to receive Purple Hearts, and the Army belatedly acknowledged former Major Nidal Hassan’s terrorist ties, though has yet (to my knowledge) formally remove the “workplace violence” moniker it attached to the shooting, despite the fact that Obama late last year reluctantly acknowledged the Fort Hood shooting as a terror attack.

Similarly, in the Bergdahl case, also after incredibly long delays, the Army decided to try the soldier at a General Courts Martial. This is seen by some as the “old Army” reasserting itself in a case that reeks of liberal political influence. Perhaps this is so. However, the decision to try Bergdahl only came after he badly embarrassed the Army by going public with his account of his desertion and capture on NPR, practically forcing the hand of convening officer, General Robert B. Abrams. Moreover, though the decision to try Bergdahl was made last December (four days after the first NPR appearance), the trial will not take place until August, scarcely demonstrating a hard charging prosecution in a relatively simple case. Even assuming Bergdahl is convicted, his attorneys will argue that Bergdahl has successfully served on active duty for over two years since his release by the Taliban in May 2014, and thus deserving of leniency, undermining the contention he is a bad soldier. This might sound ridiculous to some, but the jury will have to consider it, and it is part of the reason why military prosecutions are usually expeditious, though the Army has not demonstrated any sense of urgency in the case.

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Peter Smith The Dismal Science of Perpetual Jealousy

By on April 18th, 2016

Those who harp about “inequality” will talk themselves hoarse over the election season to come, insisting that the gaming of our economic system is the only explanation why some grow very rich and many do not. Just like the poor, class envy will be with us always
According to “Labor’s agenda for tackling inequality,” the Growing Together report, “inequality is at a 75-year high.” Nonsense is immortal in the hands of the left. A fundamental law of capitalism which, heretofore, has received little recognition or exposure is the antidote.

I flirted with calling it Smith’s Law but if it were any good no doubt a somewhat better-know Smith, Adam, would be mis-assigned the credit. Mind you, Smith is such a commonplace name that pseudonymity would probably be suspected. Some years’ ago I got into a heated wrangle on the Liverpool FC website about the worth of the then-coach and was accused by one of my antagonists of hiding behind the obvious pen name of Peter Smith. He clearly regarded my name as akin to Joseph Blow or Donald Duck. So modest sensibly prevails and I will just call it ‘the fundamental or inbuilt law’.

There is a heap of talk these days about rising inequality. It will no doubt be a central issue in the US elections and would be the only issue of note for socialist Bernie Sanders in the highly unlikely event he were to win the Democratic nomination. Jeremy Corbyn is on board the Bernie bandwagon as, without a shadow of doubt, is Labor’s Andrew Leigh (Battlers and Billionaires).

Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, gave the issue (as specious as it is) a literary boost. My review, “The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty” in the June, 2014, issue of Quadrant, did a fair job (British understatement) of exposing the flaws in his arguments.

Recall that the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011; inspired, in part, by the focus that Piketty and a colleague, Emmanuel Saez, had earlier given to the wealth and income of the so-called “one per cent”. Piketty and Saez were by no means alone. For example, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (“Of the 1%, by the1%, for the 1%”) is one among a number of prominent ‘socialist economists’ (in itself, by the way, a contradiction in terms) who gave the issue a kick-along.

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‘I Am President. I Am Not King’ The Supreme Court turns to Obama’s lawless immigration order.

By on April 18th, 2016

One reason American politics is so polarized is that President Obama has been so cavalier about his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws he dislikes. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of his worst abuses, his 2014 order that rewrites U.S. immigration law.

In United States v. Texas, 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s executive diktat that awards legal status, work permits and other government benefits to some 4.3 million illegal immigrants, with no consent from Congress. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping this ukase last year, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Those were narrow rulings, but the Justices enlarged the case to reach constitutional questions and will hear an unusual 90 minutes of oral argument.

We support humane and economically rational immigration reform, but Texas isn’t about the policy merits. The case implicates the Constitution’s separation of powers and the basic precepts of self-government. The Anglo-American legal tradition began as the English rebelled in the late 1600s against the Stuart kings who claimed the power to suspend or dispense with laws passed by Parliament. The first two grievances against the Crown in America’s Declaration of Independence concerned such “Abuses and Usurpations.”

The Framers wrote Article II’s Take Care clause to prevent the President from claiming the same lawmaking powers. The executive shall—not “may”—execute Congress’s laws faithfully, in one of the Constitution’s most specific instructions.

Congress has debated a more generous immigration policy during the Obama years, and all the while Mr. Obama insisted he couldn’t act alone. “I am President. I am not king,” he told Univision in 2014. “I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen.”

But reform failed, and two weeks after the 2014 midterm election Mr. Obama decided he could act like a legislature: “I take executive action only when we have a serious problem, a serious issue, and Congress chooses to do nothing.” He has no such authority. CONTINUE AT SITE

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