Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

America Is In A Cultural Civil War : By Ben Domenech

www.henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com

 

This is the week America woke up to a moment of clarity: we are in the midst of a great cultural civil war.

The country was largely unified when we all saw the terrible video of George Floyd’s tragic death – unified in anger and frustration, in wanting justice and punishment for a cop who, whatever his motivation, went too far and murdered a citizen for the crime of passing a counterfeit bill. Ever since then, we’ve been coming apart.

The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling. Consider that as much as the protests can largely be described as peaceful, they have now led to more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and theft. Consider the image of Senator Tim Kaine, the former Vice Presidential nominee of his party, kneeling on the ground like he’s a hostage, as if only the penitent white man will pass. Consider the footage from the Minneapolis mayor being shouted down for refusing to defund the police.

It sets up a clash for the fall between the politics of revolutionary racial radicalism and defunding the police on the one hand, and law and order on the other. As Charles Murray noted yesterday, “The ‘abolish the police’ movement is the final piece needed to replicate the mentality of the New Left in the late 1960s–positions so crazy that only people completely out of touch with reality can advocate them with a straight face.” But farcical Maoism is still Maoist, and the struggle session doesn’t become less so just because it’s conducted by lunatics.

Horror and humiliation in Minneapolis Where black churches nourished the civil rights movement, identity politics has built a culture of rage and rejection David Goldman *****

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

Why did the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody arouse a national wave of revulsion? There are two vectors to this wave: The humiliation of American blacks and the horror of white liberals.

If police are restrained, or even de-funded, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) demands, the crime rate will rise sharply, and blacks are far more likely to be crime victims than whites.

Why black Americans should want to undermine the police forces that protect them is a sensitive question that has a simple answer: The price of such police protection is humiliation.

The sort of policing that keeps criminals off the streets through filters such as stopping and frisking large numbers of people and stopping cars with broken tail lights also subjects large numbers of innocent people to humiliating examination and occasional mistreatment.

Most people would rather be dead than humiliated, and black Americans are no exception. 

A black American is a thousand times more likely to be killed by another black American than by a police officer, as the estimable Heather MacDonald explained last week in The Wall Street Journal.

To be precise, American police (white or black) killed exactly nine unarmed black Americans in 2019. Whether these shootings were justified is a different issue. That is about one one-thousandth of the 7,407 blacks murdered in 2018 (last year for which data are available), about 90% of whom were killed by other black Americans. 

US Manufacturing Exodus From China Gets Underway By Emel Akan

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-manufacturing-exodus-from-china-gets-underway

Move is mainly to Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, per supplier inspection data.

WASHINGTON—The CCP virus pandemic has put global supply risks into the limelight, and recent data compiled by a Hong Kong-based supply chain inspection company shows that U.S. firms have already started moving their sourcing away from China.

A manufacturing exodus was already underway due to the uncertainties created by the U.S.–China trade war in 2019. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, has accelerated that trend and encouraged more companies to reduce their excessive dependence on China as a single supplier.

Much of the manufacturing is moving to Southeast Asia and South Asia, according to a report by Qima, a Hong Kong-based quality control and supply chain inspection company. The Qima report is based on data collected from tens of thousands of supply chain inspections conducted globally for consumer goods brands and retailers. Companies use these inspection reports to make decisions about whether to migrate to a new supplier.

In the first two months of the year, demand for inspections and audits from North American buyers increased by 45 percent year-on-year in Southeast Asia, with Vietnam, Burma (also known as Myanmar), and the Philippines reaping the benefits, the report stated.

Rod Rosenstein’s devastating admissions If the worst allegations are proven, they will reveal one of the most far-reaching political scandals in American history Charles Lipson

https://spectator.us/rod-rosenstein-devastating-admissions/

Rod Rosenstein’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was quiet, calm, almost bemused. But the tale he told was devastating — to the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Mueller investigation. It destroyed three years of media narrative about ‘Trump-Russia’ collusion. It’s obvious now why Senate Democrats want to kill all future hearings on the topic. They lack the votes to do it, but it’s the thought that counts.

Testifying under oath, Rosenstein laid out a series of fundamental problems plaguing the entire collusion investigation. Actually, he did even more. When questioned by Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Rosenstein agreed that when he appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel in summer 2017, there was no basis for the appointment and that the FBI already knew it. In retrospect, he says, he appointed a Special Counsel because the FBI hid crucial fact facts from him. They vigorously deny it.

This back-and-forth signals a fight, sure to intensify, over who is to blame for multiple investigations gone badly wrong. Will primary responsibility fall on the FBI or Department of Justice? The intelligence agencies? Or the Obama White House and its National Security team?

The Morality of Insurrection By Tom McCaffrey

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-morality-of-insurrection
This is a struggle between good and evil, and that there no longer exists a middle ground on which the two sides can meet. We are long past that.

Among the more disturbing images to come out of the recent street violence following the killing of George Floyd are those of police officers and white civilians kneeling “in solidarity” with the protesters. 

If any of those Americans, black or white, who are protesting the killing of George Floyd are acting in good faith and not in the furtherance of a Leftist agenda, then they are either uninformed or they are being manipulated. Contrary to the narrative being promoted by the Left, the media, and former president Barack Obama, once the respective rates of violent crimes committed by blacks and whites are taken into account, it is clear that police throughout America simply are not killing disproportionately more black men than white men. In other words, the only reason to take to the streets over the Floyd killing is to exploit it to promote Leftist ends.  

Before the 1960s, Marxists divided people into capital and labor and posited an unbridgeable gap between the interests of the one and the other. Since then they have divided people into the oppressed (blacks, women, gays, and a host of others) and the oppressors (primarily whites and men), and they have posited the same unbridgeable gap. The viability of the Democratic Party depends on maintaining, and widening, this gap.

Manhattan DA Won’t Prosecute Curfew Violators, Urges More Protests By Rick Moran

New York City authorities have hit upon a brilliant strategy, one that Neville Chamberlain would certainly approve of. Give the rioters and protesters everything they want while looking the other way as they trash the city. Appeasing mobs and dictators doesn’t work out very well for the appeasers. But those who are being appeased make out like bandits — literally.

“The prosecution of protestors charged with these low-level offenses undermines critical bonds between law enforcement and the communities we serve. Days after the killing of George Floyd, our nation and our city are at a crossroads in our continuing endeavor to confront racism and systemic injustice wherever it exists. Our office has a moral imperative to enact public policies which assure all New Yorkers that in our justice system and our society, black lives matter and police violence is a crime. We commend the thousands of our fellow New Yorkers who have peacefully assembled to demand these achievable aims, and our door is open to any New Yorker who wishes to be heard.”

Black Americans Speak Out on George Floyd and the Riots By Elise Cooper

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/black_americans_speak_out_on_george_floyd_and_the_riots.html

George Floyd was killed by excessive force by a police officer in Minneapolis.  Across the board, Americans were outraged.  Peaceful protests arose, but with the protests came forces that initiated violence by killing innocents and police, burning buildings, destroying property, and stealing.  American Thinker interviewed black Americans for their feelings of what is happening in this country today. The black Americans are all in agreement that they are horrified by what happened to George Floyd, but they are equally horrified by the violence and lack of law and order.

These black Americans feel dismayed by what happened.  They recognize that there is legitimate anger over the tactics used by the Minneapolis police.

Stacy Washington is the co-chairperson of Project 21, founded after the 1992 Los Angeles riots to highlight black Americans’ political diversity.  She differentiates between a protester, someone who exercises his right under the 1st Amendment, and rioters who break the law.  Kathy Barnette, who is running in the general election for Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District, saw “the heart of a nation rise up in defense of George Floyd.  No one tried to defend the indefensible acts of these officers.  I was even more excited to see President Trump immediately have the Justice Department investigate and not sweep what happened under the rug.”

All interviewed want to emphasize that it is inexcusable for many of the cities to have abdicated the rule of law.  There are those who claim that the riots and destruction of property are understandable and excusable since it is not a life being destroyed.  Stacy responds, “Property is a life.  I agree buildings are not alive, but what happens inside of buildings enables people to live.  It is their livelihood.  Studies show there is a direct link between increases with poverty and suicide/homicide.  People turn to crime when they are not able to be employed.  In Ferguson, Missouri, after the riots, M1 Bank literally created investment vehicles.  The neighborhood became integrated, and young couples, both black and white, could afford a house.  Now things are getting burned down again.  I am not sure the neighborhoods will be rebuilt.”

Chris Arps, a Project 21 member, agrees with this Martin Luther King quote: “I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating.  A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved.  You can, through violence, burn down a building, but you can’t establish justice.  You can murder a murderer, but you can’t murder through violence.  You can murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate.”

Hillary Clinton asks appeals court to help her dodge Judicial Watch deposition on emails and Benghazi Jerry Dunleavy

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hillary-clinton-asks-appeals-court-to-help-her-dodge-judicial-watch-deposition-on-emails-and-benghazi

A three-judge appeals court panel heard arguments this week from Hillary Clinton’s lawyer and Judicial Watch as the former secretary of state seeks to avoid a deposition about her private email server and the Benghazi attack talking points.

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, argued Tuesday that the depositions of Clinton and Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered by a D.C. district court judge was necessary to understand whether Clinton attempted to avoid the Freedom of Information Act when she improperly used a private server to conduct her State Department business and whether the agency adequately searched for all her emails.

“It is certainly within the authority of the district court to hear from the agency head herself about whether there was intent,” said Judicial Watch attorney Ramona Cotca.

Clinton wanted to “short-circuit this process by using the most potent weapon in the judicial arsenal to prevent the district court from ever being able to reach a determination of whether there was ever an adequate search,” Cotca said.

Failing in their three-year coup, the left riots Glenn Beaton

https://theaspenbeat.com/2020/06/05/failing-in-their-three-year-coup-the-left-riots/

We all know the story. In the first chapter, they transformed the laugh line “I demand a recount” into actual demands for recounts. But the recounts didn’t materially change the vote totals.

Then they asked the Electoral College to defy the will of the people they represented. That, too, didn’t work.

The next chapter was the smear that Trump had colluded with the Russians. But the only collusion they could find in their two-year investigation was the Dems’ own payment of millions of dollars for a fake Russian “dossier” fantasizing that the president – a noted germophobe – engaged in pee-pee sex.

Meanwhile, the outgoing Dem administration used this dossier they knew was fake to get warrants to spy on the incoming Republican administration.

Trump’s approval ratings held steady.

Looting American Culture- Fiamma Nierenstein

https://www.jns.org/opinion/looting-american-culture/

The young people destroying shops, stealing goods, shooting and beating have been shaped by a culture that bows to suffering and elevates victimhood.

 If George Floyd, the African-American strangled to death by the knee of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, had been white, his death would have elicited the same horrified reaction on my part.

A violent killing by a member of the police department is unfathomable and inexcusable.  But so is the behavior of the angry “Black Lives Matter” mob.  Martin Luther King Jr. surely would have agreed. He would have considered the current violence and looting to devalue the cause and decay the role of blacks.

King outlined his dream—as the best-selling author Douglas Murray recalled in his 2019 book, The Madness of the Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity—at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

Describing how black Americans first were slaves and then second-class citizens, he denounced the laws of racial segregation (that still existed in certain state at the time), and said that he dreamed his children should “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”