Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

A Fearful White Leftist’s Black Nationalism Chris Hayes goes all in on Black Nationalism with “A Colony in a Nation.” Daniel Greenfield

Black Nationalism is hot.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which publishing’s answer to Kanye West contended that the white firefighters of 9/11 were “not human”, won a National Book Award. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, which indicted a post-racial society as racist, won the next one.

But the dirty little secret is that the target audience for these Black Nationalist tracts is as lily white as the MSNBC lineup.

So it’s no wonder that a brother from the MSNBC hood and The Nation barrio decided to get on board with the revolution. Chris Hayes, who is the same shade as Shaun King, takes his own Rachel Dolezal shot at monetizing Ferguson and writing a Black Nationalist tract with A Colony in a Nation.

A Colony in a Nation boasts an appropriate black and white color scheme. If you’re not very bright and want to understand Hayes’ thesis, “Colony” has a black background and “Nation” has a white one.

America is a nation for white people and a colony for black people. We’re an Apartheid state.

Except it’s not Hayes’ thesis. It’s just another case of white lefties stealing ideas from black people and then marketing them. Chris Hayes just dived into his closet, reached into a moldy pile of back issues and dug out Internal Colonialism. Now Hayes is presenting that old moldy idea as a provocative new thesis.

But that’s the Black Nationalist revival in a nutshell. Black Lives Matter’s totem is seventies terrorist Assata Shakur. Ibram X. Kendi’s model in Stamped is Angela Davis. The Black Nationalist revival is a laughably Black-ish effort by the Kanye Wests of a rising African-American middle class to compensate for their privileged lives with the radical tantrums of Black-ish Nationalism by privileged racists.

Black-ish Nationalism by college students is both racist and silly. But Coates still makes a much more convincing racial revolutionary than MSNBC’s less masculine version of Rachel Maddow.

Chris Hayes writes about black people without knowing anything about them. He approaches the black people he talks to with the awed enthusiasm of an anthropologist discovering a lost tribe in the Borneo. Worse still he’s clearly writing for an audience to whom black lives are equally exotic and obscure.

It’s awkward, racist and ignorant. He insists that in the white “Nation” the ”citizens call the police to protect them” but in the black “Colony, subjects flee the police, who offer the opposite of protection.”

That silly pompous rant would embarrass any decently ignorant Bard College sophomore.

How, one wonders, does Hayes think that police respond to calls in black communities at all? Is Detroit’s tiny white minority responsible for all the 911 calls? What does he think that black people do when someone is breaking into their house? Turn on MSNBC? Throw a copy of A Colony in a Nation at them?

US Citizenship test requires understanding of only 64 words By Ed Straker (Appalling!!! rsk)

The US citizenship or naturalization test consists of two components, the civics test and the language test. The government has a preparatory website which has a list of vocabulary words needed for the language test. There are only 64 words or phrases needed to be learned to become an American.

With many of the words being proper names like “George Washington” and “Flag Day” and still more of the words being prepositions like “of” and “in” and “on”, it is very easy for someone to study for this test, pass easily, and yet lack the vocabulary to even understand “See Spot Run.”

There’s even a helpful guide to phrases the government interviewer may say that are not on the 64 word list:

Come! Sit!

Even doggies don’t need this helpful guide.

But immigrants who only learn the 64 words needed to pass the exam will be clueless when an inteviewer waves to them with their hand and asks them to come with them, unless they have this guide, or a well trained cocker spaniel to interpret hand gestures for them.

To pass the test, all you have to do is to correctly read aloud one out of three sentences, and write one out of three sentences correctly. That’s right, if you read or write two out of three easy sentences incorrectly, you can still become a citizen!

It’s no wonder the test has an over 90% pass rate.

But if that’s still too difficult, don’t worry, there are some exceptions for people over the age of 50 and people who can claim they are mentally challenged. They may not have to take the test at all!

I always wondered why ballots have to be in Spanish and other languages. If a person becomes a citizen, shouldn’t the citizen be able to read the ballot in English? Now I know why. Unless the ballot says things like “Where George Washington on Independence Day?” or “Abraham Lincoln has many senators”, immigrants may not understand it.

What key words in English do you think immigrants should understand?

Who Is Obama? By David Solway

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people. His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage. As Obama himself confessed (or boasted) in The Audacity of Hope, this layering of anonymities enabled him to “serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama’s enigmatic personae and antecedents are an issue most people are reluctant to pursue, whether out of mere indifference, partisan allegiance or fear of ridicule. Even though he represents one of the most pivotal moments in American history, which saw a polarizing cipher with a neo-Marxist blueprint reduce the country to a social, political and economic shambles, Obama doesn’t get much traction in the news these days. Few wish to investigate his shadowy heritage, to confront the ongoing implications of the debacle he was instrumental in causing or to pursue its resolution. The unwillingness to grapple with what Obama signifies — in fact, personifies — is a sign of the failure of political will, a tendency to allow a crucial feature of national existence to subside beneath the welter of current events. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the consensus, “time to move on.”

But there is more to see than meets the eye. The question that may exercise future historians is how a man so obviously unfit for the presidency and so patently inimical to the well-being of the nation could have been elected—twice. Was the race card in itself sufficiently instrumental to persuade a nation to embrace eight years of mayhem? Could a voting majority have been swept up in an access of reparation euphoria? Did John Dewey’s “progressivist” education gradually work to dumb down a significant portion of the electorate, rendering it ultimately susceptible to socialist manipulation? Was the influence of the Frankfurt School and its leftist agenda powerful enough to subvert the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and the culture at large, and thus to transform a free democratic society into a nascent authoritarian state? All these elements were certainly in play, but likely could not have borne their tainted fruit had Obama not appeared on the scene, like a diabolus ex machina. He acted as both catalyst and embodiment of a looming catastrophe.

The fact that there was little in the way of reliable biographical and formative data — vital records were (and are) either disputed or inaccessible — was not the liability one might have imagined. Rather, it may have been the critical factor in determining Obama’s electoral triumphs and the malign consequences that inevitably followed.

Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts By Roger Kimball

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bill Maher Says College Anti-Free Speech Warriors Are the Liberals’ Version of Book Burning VIDEO

https://pjmedia.com/video/bill-maher-says-college-anti-free-speech-warriors-are-the-liberals-version-of-book-burning/

Bill Maher is a liberal, but even he doesn’t like the fact that liberals have silenced conservative speakers on college campuses. The latest victim of the social justice warriors’ attack on our civil rights is Ann Coulter, who was set to give a speech at UC Berkeley. Maher said that the anti-debate and anti-education nonsense at our college campuses is the liberals’ version of book burning. Let’s put aside the fact that most of the historic book burnings have been perpetrated by liberals, and focus on the one liberal, Bill Maher, actually standing up for our civil liberties.

Why can’t the Clintons just go away? By Maureen Callahan

Since losing the most winnable presidential election in modern American history, Hillary Clinton has, among other things: given a series of high-profile speeches, joined Gov. Cuomo at his public unveiling of tuition-free college, refused to rule out a run for mayor of New York and issued an online video message exhorting fellow Democrats to fight on in her name.

“The challenges we face,” she said, “as a country and a party, are real.”

Clearly, Hillary still sees herself as the leader of the Democratic Party. And why shouldn’t she? Democrats have been locked in an abusive relationship with the Clintons for decades, enabling, explaining, convincing themselves that next time will be different. Party faithful hew to Hillary’s excuses for losing to Donald Trump: It’s James Comey’s fault, plus the Russians, white supremacists, misogynists, the deplorables and immobilized millennials, among other things.

Her losses in 2008 and 2016 have been framed as things that happened to Hillary — not one, but two Black Swan events that stymied her historic destiny.

How is it that Democrats have fealty here, let alone sympathy? How is it that Hillary routinely walks into standing ovations at Broadway theaters? Where is the realization that Hillary is to blame or the rational rejection of a two-time loser?

Any debate about what happened last November ends with Tuesday’s publication of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes spent the past two years talking to Hillary’s most trusted advisers, and what emerges is damning.

Every mistake made in her 2008 run was compounded in 2016: the paranoia, the staff infighting, the underestimation of the intra-party wild card, the self-righteousness, the failure to connect with average voters, the belief that because it was her turn the presidency would be hers. It’s “Groundhog Day” with global consequences.

Clinton’s Towering Fiasco

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of “data analytics” now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

Politico swooned that computer algorithms “underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” Computer guru Elan Kriegel had crunched the numbers for campaign manager Robby Mook, allowing Team Clinton to precisely target her potential voters and thus not waste one dime on appealing to the deplorables.

“Clintonites saw it as their secret weapon in building an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders,” Politico reported. And come the general election the Clintonistas were downright giddy about the edge Big Data was giving them. With the hopelessly old-school Trump team “investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage.” Ah, hubris.

We were reminded of that Politico article in reading the first of what promises to be a sizable library of books autopsying the Clinton campaign, Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The consensus among the Clintonites interviewed is that Mook and Kriegel and all their overhyped whizbang hooey are to blame. Fair enough: That’s what they get for taking their victory lap too soon.

But don’t put all the blame on the geek squad: The reason Hillary Clinton lost, first and foremost, is that Hillary Clinton was the dismalest, dreadfulest of candidates. That said, the emphasis on data analytics was of a piece with Hillary’s overall awfulness. Understanding the data approach, Politicowrote before the election, “is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign—precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational.” The reporter was more right than he knew.

Still, the Clinton team’s overconfidence in data analytics was a typical error made with new technologies. It isn’t just overconfidence in what the technology can achieve, it is that the people using the technologies are ever tempted to push out to the edge of what the technologies can do as a way of proving not only the power of the new machines and methods and materials, but the prowess of the technologists themselves.

Little Creep Against Chelsea Clinton By Kevin D. Williamson

Hasn’t Bill Clinton been fellated thoroughly enough?

Nina Burleigh spoke for a certain variety of 1990s-style feminist when she famously said that “American women should be lining up” — on their knees — in order to express their gratitude to Bill Clinton for “keeping theocracy off our backs.”

You all remember how close we were to theocracy back in the 1990s: California banned smoking in all bars, Chris Farley died of a cocaine-and-opiates overdose, Barry Switzer got canned . . . and . . . nothing like a theocracy was anywhere to be seen, heard of, or smelt. As much as the Democrats tried to cast Ken Starr as a modern-day Roger Chillingworth (if not a Torquemada), Bill Clinton wasn’t in trouble for making the White House interns strap on their presidential kneepads: He was in trouble for perjury, an offense for which he was later obliged to surrender his law license. Clinton was guilty of everything he was accused of, and more.

But he beat two Republicans when Democrats thought they were never going to win the presidency again, and he brought the Reagan era to an end. He did not actually do a hell of a lot as president — he just surfed the long wave of prosperity that had kicked off in the early 1980s — and much of what he did do was to enact Republican priorities: NAFTA (Republicans used to believe in free enterprise — look it up, kids!) and, grudgingly, welfare reform. He bitterly complained in private that he had come into office hoping to be Jack Kennedy but had been obliged to become Dwight Eisenhower.

But politics is not about policy. Clinton won, Clinton was slick, and Clinton made fools out of Republicans and high-profile right-wing critics. He provided American progressives with all they really want out of a politician: emotional validation. (Hey, Trump voters!) And so Democrats loved him — deeply, madly, and, in many cases, to the point of abasing themselves.

Miss Burleigh’s suggestion was not enough. Not nearly. Rather than send Bill Clinton into his dotage with a generous allowance of Viagra and interns, they gave his wife — his batty, corrupt, inept, corrupt, feckless, corrupt, preening, unbearable, corrupt, condescending, and corrupt wife — the Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the last good Democrat. She was elected to represent the state of New York in the Senate when she did not even live there, leading Moynihan to wryly praise her “Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm.”

She did not do very much in the Senate, though she did manage to acquire a nice real-estate portfolio, including a Chappaqua house with a pool big enough to dock Marco Rubio’s boat. The Senate is a perfectly nice place to be. They don’t expect much of you there — ask Patty Murray. You can make little speeches, and shunt great roaring streams of federal money into the service of your hobbies and the pockets of your friends.

There ain’t no cure for love, and Democrats just can’t quit the Big Creep.

Trump welcomes Syrian illegal aliens Australia doesn’t want By Ed Straker

It’s bad enough that President Trump violated his own campaign promise and continues the illegal, unconstitutional “DREAMer” amnesty created by President Obama. But now Trump is going out of his way to take the most dangerous illegal aliens that other countries don’t want!

The United States will honor an Obama-era agreement with Australia to help resettle Syrian refugees, despite the Trump administration not favoring the arrangement, Vice President Mike Pence announced Saturday.

“President Trump has made it clear that we’ll honor the agreement — that doesn’t mean we admire the agreement,” Pence said during a joint news conference….

He’s honoring it but not admiring it? That’s the kind of doubletalk we expect from politicians. Well, I honor President Trump but don’t admire him either.

Up to 1,250 refugees housed in Australian detention camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea would come to the U.S. under the agreement made with President Barack Obama.

Within the first 10 days as president, Trump had a tense phone call with Turnbull about the agreement. He followed up the phone call with a tweet several days later where he called the deal “dumb.”

Trump was right. But you see that was the view of the January 2017 Donald Trump, whose views are different from the February 2017 Donald Trump and the March and April version as well. This is what you get when you have a president unmoored by a coherent belief system.

Obama made this bad deal, but Trump was not obligated to comply with it. And these are not just any refugees, these are refugees (probably mostly Muslim) from war-torn Syria. There is absolutely no way to vet these refugees, because there is no central, reliable government we trust to get this information from.

Candidate Trump had said that not only would he not admit any more refugees from Syria, he would send the ones here home. President Trump, meanwhile, has been admitting refugees from Syria at a faster rate than Obama, and now is taking in problematic refugees who weren’t even trying to come to America.

How many “Trump refugees” will turn around and kill Americans? How many “Trump refugees” will walk around wearing burkas and demand special accommodations? How many “Trump refugees” will build mosques which blare the call to prayer, five times a day, over loudspeakers starting at 6 a.m.?

What’s next? Will we start accepting Muslim refugees bound for Germany and France? Is this what Trump supporters voted for?

Remembering Earth Day Founding Father and Girlfriend-Composter Ira Einhorn By Jack Cashill

With Earth Day come and gone, I could no evidence of public recognition for one of the holiday’s founding fathers, the only slightly atypical Ira Einhorn, the soi-disant “Unicorn.”

In the way of background, the first formal Earth Day did not take place on the vernal equinox, as originator John McConnell had hoped. Rather, it took place on April 22, 1970, a Wednesday. How this seemingly arbitrary date was picked has been lost to history. No one has taken public credit for choosing it. Still, one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that the choice of date might have had something to do with the fact that April 22, 1970 was Vladimir Lenin’s one hundredth birthday.

Whoever chose the date chose wisely. The springtime pageantry gave students a pleasant reprieve from their strenuous anti-war activities and proved to be a huge success. It also gave Einhorn the chance to mark publicly the shift in his activism from antiwar to environmentalism.

Einhorn attributed his change in direction to the “the accelerating destruction of the planetary interconnecting web.” Not everyone was as tuned in as Einhorn – only the “few of us activists who took the trouble to read the then available ecological literature.” Or so Einhorn explained in his book Prelude to Intimacy.

“We intuitively sensed the need to open a new front in the ‘movement’ battle,” he continued, “for Chicago ’68 was already pointing towards Kent State and the violence of frustration that lead to the Weathermen and other similarly doomed and fragmented groups.”

Although Senator Gaylord Nelson usually gets the credit for organizing that first Earth Day in 1970, it was people like Einhorn who were putting the pieces together on the ground.

Einhorn’s terrain was Philadelphia. By his lights, environmental protection required a fundamental transformation of society or, as he phrased it, “a conscious restructuring of all we do.” To pull off so ambitious a program, Einhorn claimed to have enlisted a happy cabal of business, academic, and governmental factions. Together, they formed a broad popular front to deal with this unraveling of the planetary web, much as the Soviets organized popular fronts ostensibly to deal with the threat of fascism in the 1930s. And recall, this was back when “global cooling” was the reigning anxiety.

Whether or not Einhorn did as he claimed, there is no denying how well he had insinuated himself into the upper reaches of Philadelphia’s good deed-doer set. Ira had a “brilliant network,” a local oil executive would later tell Time magazine. “He knew enough corporate people to get our projects funded simply by strolling into people’s offices and asking for the money.”

These connections would come in handy just nine years after that first Earth Day, when police found the battered and “composted” body of Einhorn’s girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in a steamer trunk in Einhorn’s apartment. She had been stashed there for eighteen months.

At his bail hearing, one after another of the city’s liberal elite took the stand to sing the accused murderer’s praises. These included a minister, an economist, a corporate lawyer, a playwright, and many more – what Time called “an unlikely battalion of bluebloods, millionaires and corporate executives.”

Representing Einhorn was none other than future Democrat and Republican U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. The combined clout of these worthies swayed the judge to set bail at $40,000, only $4,000 of which was required to put Einhorn back on the streets.

Fronting the money was Barbara Bronfman, a Montreal socialite who had married into the conspicuously liberal Bronfman family, they of Seagram’s fame. After Einhorn jumped bail, Bronfman continued to funnel money to Einhorn for some seven years.

French police did not catch up with the self-dubbed “Unicorn” until 1997, sixteen years into his subsidized European exile. In protesting extradition, Einhorn claimed to have been persecuted because he had given his life to “the cause of nonviolent social change.” That boast did not overly impress the French, but in their eagerness to spite the United States on the human rights front, they kept Einhorn in country for another five years.

Justice finally felled the Unicorn twenty-five years after he killed would-be flower child Maddux. Einhorn’s best line of defense at his 2002 trial in Philadelphia was that somebody – the CIA, most likely – stuffed Maddux’s body into the trunk and secreted the trunk in his closet to frame him. Einhorn might have tried the “some other dude did it” defense, but cop-killer and fellow Philadelphian Mumia had already played that one out.