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POLITICS

The Virginia train wreck has set the stage for 2020 By M. Catharine Evans

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_virginia_train_wreck_has_set_the_stage_for_2020.html

Virginia’s Del. Kathy Tran’s and Governor Ralph Northam’s open and public admission that their bill, H.B. 2491, allowed for the murder of a baby up until the time of birth and afterward was never supposed to happen.

Tran’s and Northam’s partial-birth abortion-funders, Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, have always encouraged their candidates in Southern states to stay mum on abortion until they get into office.

For example, in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, in blue state Virginia, where there are still plenty of conservative voters and where congressional races were tight, Democratic candidates focused on health care, fair wages, and security issues. Abortion, if mentioned at all, was couched in the more moderate-sounding “reproductive rights.”

Consequently, Tran’s and Northam’s startling and unpredictable honesty about H.B. 2491 had the Democratic Party and its pro-abortion benefactors trying to stifle any reporting suggesting that Democrats are the party of infanticide.

The Indecent Inquisitors By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/10/the

The first contest of the 2020 primary season is one year away and the Democratic Party’s agenda now is coming into sharp focus: An income tax rate upwards of 70 percent, a Green New Deal that would send America back to the Stone Age, postpartum baby-killing, and the elimination of federal control over our southern border are just a few of the lowlights.

Sprinkle that message with a heavy dose of anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-male rhetoric and voila!—Democratic presidential contenders are ready to swarm Iowa and New Hampshire.

But another destructive sideshow now animates the Democrats ahead of next year’s elections: The multi-pronged, unprecedented and possibly unconstitutional investigation into President Trump.

To satisfy the bloodlust of the party’s rank-and-file, still bitter about losing the 2016 presidential election and gobsmacked that Trump somehow remains in office, congressional leaders are seeking vengeance in the hearing rooms of Capitol Hill. Since taking the helm of powerful House committees last month, Democratic chairmen are wasting no time in probing every crevice of Trump World; no one, including the president’s family members, will be spared.

Hundreds of New Investigations
The government’s formal investigation into Donald Trump began in July 2016, when Barack Obama’s FBI launched a counterintelligence probe into four Trump campaign aides, allegedly suspected of conspiring with Russians to influence the election. In May 2017, Trump’s own FBI—led temporarily by the disgraced Andrew McCabe after James Comey was fired—opened both a counterintelligence and a criminal case into the president. Days later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as a special counsel to further investigate any supposed ties between the Kremlin and Donald Trump.

The Democrats’ Identity Meltdown The furies they unleashed are consuming their own. Where’s Barack?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-identity-meltdown-11549836657

Democrats need an identity-politics intervention. Having unleashed race, gender, sexual orientation and class as the defining issues of American politics, these furies are now consuming their authors. Where’s Barack Obama when Democrats need him?

Every national Democrat of note is demanding that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam resign for appearing in blackface in 1984 and for offering different explanations for an offensive photo on his medical college yearbook page. But Mr. Northam is refusing to go.

A second woman has now accused Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax of rape, this time at Duke University in 2000. Another woman has accused Mr. Fairfax of raping her at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Mr. Fairfax denies both allegations and is demanding an FBI investigation, but many Democrats are also calling on him to resign.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Mark Herring, next in line for Governor if both Messrs. Northam and Fairfax resign, also appeared in blackface in the 1980s. Democrats are more forgiving of Mr. Herring, perhaps because next in line for Governor would be the Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates.

Imagine the cognitive Democratic dissonance if Mr. Fairfax, who is black, is forced to resign because of unproved accusations of sexual assault that he denies, while the two white men survive despite racial offenses that they admit.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Falsely Claims to be Native American Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272808/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-falsely-claims-be-daniel-greenfield

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed to be a girl from the Bronx, when she was actually an architect’s daughter from Westchester. Then she decided to claim Jewish ancestry and now, joins Senator Elizabeth Warren in claiming to be Indian.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that America needs to allow illegal immigrants, who are Latino, to stay in the country because they are descendants of Native Americans, and the United States is on native lands. She made the remarks during a press conference in which she called for the abolishment of ICE on Thursday.

“We have to have respect for children, respect for families, respect for human rights, and respect for the right of human mobility because it is a right,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is a right because we are standing on native land, and Latino people are descendants of native people, and we can not be told and criminalized simply for our identity or our status, period.”

You’re a descendant of European colonists. You share a last name with Cortes, one of the most infamous Spanish colonist leaders.

Cortes’ ancestry is Puerto Rican.

The only “native people” there were Taino Indians. There were never very many and they vanished early in the 16th century. Puerto Rican nationalists love claiming Taino ancestry even though by 1520, there were only 1148 Taíno remaining. Whatever Taino genes are in the Puerto Rican population came by way of Spanish colonists taking women from the conquered population.

Green New Deal-The Same Old Deal By The Editors

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/green-new-deal-left-has-only-one-idea-control/

Speaking of bovine flatulence . . .

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was supposed to be the Democratic party’s fresh new face — so why is the honorable lady from the Bronx trafficking in ideas from the 1930s?

The Left really has only one idea: control. At the end of the Cold War, when socialism stood discredited and the memory of its atrocities and repression were fresh in the minds of people who had just watched the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and much of what it stood for, the partisans of central planning found themselves in need of a new host, and what they found was the environmental movement — another vehicle for supplanting liberalism and free markets with five-year plans and political discipline. Hence the joke about “watermelons,” the new lefty activists who were green on the outside but red on the inside. The metaphor may occasion some eye-rolling and is prone to abuse, but it speaks to an undeniable truth: Environmentalism has been since the fall of the Soviet Union the world’s most important vessel for anti-liberal and anti-market forces.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s brief public career offers testimony to a mind that never has been at risk of being violated by a coherent thought, much less an original one, and so she has settled upon the “Green New Deal,” a concept and a marketing campaign that already was hackneyed and shopworn back when Barack Obama was pushing it years ago, and when Thomas Friedman was pushing it before him, and when the Communist Party USA was pushing it before him. Van Jones, quondam Maoist adviser to President Obama, wrote a book on the subject, The Green Collar Economy, in which he made the case for conjoining “our two biggest problems.” The program he spelled out will be familiar to any student of the history of socialism.

Was Stacey Abrams really the best the Dems could do? By Russ Vaughn

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/was_stacey_abrams_really_the_best_the_dems_could_do.html

EXCERPT

“……After but a preliminary search, I was wondering why on Earth the Georgia Democratic Party powers that be had selected a former tax attorney, who doesn’t pay her taxes timely, to be the chief executive officer of the state, expected by voters to govern responsibly. Why would they advance a person to head their state, whose major obligation to the citizenry is managing the financial affairs of their state, who obviously cannot responsibly manage her own financial affairs? According to articles out there on the web, candidate Abrams owed some serious money to the IRS, more than $50,000. She had student loan debt in excess of $90,000. And what’s even more damning was her personal credit card debt, pushing $80,000. It’s doubtful that Ms. Abrams has completely balanced her books since that was reported less than a year ago, although, as a favored Democratic Party figure, the possibility can’t be dismissed.

So Abrams appears to have issues when it comes to managing her personal finances, and Georgia Democrat fat cats wanted her to head their ticket, to entrust her with the financial well-being of their state — with a budget approaching $50 billion. Did they seriously want voters to believe they could not find, in the entire state of Georgia, a better qualified black female who could check off their requisite identity politics boxes, one, perhaps, who pays her taxes and her credit card bills? Worse is that even though Georgia voters rejected this irresponsible woman and elected a man with a business background to manage their state finances, national Democratic Party leaders still saw fit to select a tax-evader as the face of the party to deliver the SOTU rebuttal, which she did rather poorly — and poorly is being charitable.

This politically correct farce illustrates the madness that permeates the Democratic Party, wherein qualifications to manage the affairs of our states and our nation take a dismissive back seat to race, sex, and sexual preferences when it comes to candidate selection. For an even better demonstration of this leftist irrationality, one needs only to view the video of that sullen, surly, white-clad gaggle of Democrat women in the House chamber for Trump’s address and observe their immature behavior. You’d be hard pressed to find any examples of thoughtful, responsible leadership in that crowd of churlish girls. Yep, I said “girls,” because that is exactly the description their adolescent comportment begs for. With their spoiled, snotty, self-serving behavior, they clearly demonstrated to America what the Democratic Party has become: a refuge for know-nothing know-it-alls, who, with the absolute certainty of adolescents, think they can do a better job of managing family affairs than the grown-ups. And these are the women to whom the Democrats expect the voters to entrust the future of this nation?

If the Democrat leadership believes that Stacey Abrams represents the very best of this lame-brained bunch of petulant, pussy-hatted politicos, wouldn’t you just love to see the financial statements on the rest of these new Democrat “leaders” who will control the trillion-dollar budgets and deficit spending of your nation?

Sleep on that thought, America…

The PMS Caucus By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/07

In a gracious move at his State of the Union address, President Trump gave a shout-out to the historic number of women serving in Congress this year. “Exactly one century after Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we now have more women serving in Congress than at any time before,” the president said, pointing to a claque of congresswomen seated in front of him.

The female Democratic representatives, many dressed in white to honor the suffrage movement’s 100th anniversary, erupted with self-congratulatory glee. The same gals who were seen scowling, seething, and fake-crying just moments before suddenly were giddy, clapping wildly and high-fiving each other.

Say hello to the PMS Caucus.

Rather than demonstrate that women politicians on a combative national stage can govern in a sober and diplomatic way, female Democrats in Congress—don’t call them ladies—unfortunately are playing into the very stereotypes that they claim to want to disprove. They are moody, petulant, and impulsive. When confronted about their bad ideas or egregious remarks, these Cycle Sisters rage about sexism and racism rather than respond in good faith. They have profanity-laced temper tantrums and emotional breakdowns in public.

Their collective mood is so foul and unpredictable that one feels almost compelled to give them a box of chocolate donuts, a dose of Midol, and send them to bed with a heating pad.

The PMS Caucus showed their true colors on Tuesday night—and one of them wasn’t white. They were red and blue, and not in an American way. Their de facto leader, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) glowered throughout the president’s speech. The youngest person ever to serve in the people’s house didn’t applaud when the president heralded a federal agent who rescued hundreds of women and girls from sex traffickers. She also refused to stand when First Lady Melania Trump was introduced; at the introduction of American war veterans; for record low unemployment among minorities; and for plans to eliminate the scourge of AIDS.

Ocasio-Cortez: ICE Doesn’t ‘Deserve a Dime’ of Funding By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-ice-doesnt-deserve-a-dime-of-funding/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said Thursday that she would work to deprive the Department of Homeland Security of funding until the agency adopts more permissive immigration-enforcement policies.

“This is one of the most urgent moral issues and crises that we have in America right now,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a rally outside the Capitol building. “This is not a political issue. Children dying in detention centers should not be a partisan concern. It should be a universal concern for every American in the United States.

“We’re here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime,” she added.

Invoking Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen’s claim that the agency does not have a policy of separating migrant children from their parents, Ocasio-Cortez argued that Nielsen is ignorant of the enforcement policies pursued by her subordinates.

“I will not give one dollar to a secretary who does not care about her life and does not care to investigate a child’s death,” she said to applause. “I will not give one dollar to black-box detention facilities that think that some people in this country are deserving of constitutional protections and others are not.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: A one-woman EMP By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/alexandria_ocasiocortez_a_onewoman_emp.html

The ubiquitous Miss O-C made her big splash yesterday and introduced her Green New Deal, and an amusing prescription it is. If even a fraction of her plans were ever implemented, the U.S. would be transported back to before the Industrial Revolution. No fossil fuels, no airplanes, no cars, no heat, no air conditioning, no meat, no dairy. Every home and building in the country would have to be retrofitted to comply with her ridiculous demands. There would be “charging stations” everywhere; she does not say where the power to those charging stations would come from. She apparently thinks wind (now provides 1.9%) and solar (now provides 0.5%) can fill the bill. She must think the trucking industry that above all others makes our country work can run on wind or solar; it cannot. When asked how to pay for all this, she suggests printing more money! Has this woman ever considered how groceries and all other merchandise in stores get there? Obviously not.

The first time I ever heard the phrase “as dumb as a rock” was years ago. It was a caller to Larry Elder’s radio program; the caller was talking about Sean Penn, whom the caller knew. It is an apt phrase, and never more than to describe Miss O-C. Boston U, from where she received a degree in economics, should immediately be de-certified and shuttered. No public person has ever displayed more ignorance, not just on economics, but on practically every topic relevant to the public realm. The fact that the media have made her a celebrity far beyond her ability to speak coherently will most likely be her undoing. They will at some point realize their catastrophic mistake and take her down. If they don’t, as the face of the Democratic Party, she will take them down.

The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal The Green New Deal isn’t just un-America, it’s also completely bonkers. David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/07/ten-most-insane-requirements-green-new-deal/

Note: Ocasio-Cortez’s office has taken down their page describing the Green New Deal.

A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls — including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters — have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.

While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan’s authors assure that this “massive transformation of our society” needs some “clear goals and a timeline.” The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:

Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas — one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.
Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable “clean” energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy production so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.
Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension.” You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified “massive” taxation. On the bright side, when you’re foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.
Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.
A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide “healthy food” to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).
A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, “safe, affordable, adequate housing” for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.
Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work. Just to reiterate: if you’re unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.
Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can’t get zero emissions in 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.