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POLITICS

Bernie Beats Hillary Activists celebrate the end of moderation in the Democratic field. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-beats-hillary-11579044694?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. But even if he loses again in 2020, his long-term project to pull Democratic candidates in the direction of socialism is already a success.

Today the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness is celebrating the end of moderation among Democrats seeking the White House. The organization gleefully announces:

All four leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have proposed tax and spending plans many times the size of Hillary Clinton’s fiscal plan in 2016, showing how far the debate has shifted in the progressive direction in four years. Like Clinton, they would all raise taxes almost exclusively on the wealthy and corporations to improve public services working families rely on like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

Don’t believe that part about taxes only hitting the rich and corporations. But it’s hard to argue the point that radicalism is the new normal for office-seeking Democrats. According to the lefty outfit:

Clinton proposed upping tax revenue on the wealthy and corporations by $1.4 trillion over 10 years to pay for $1.7 trillion in public investments. Biden and Buttigieg have both offered up plans raising taxes on the rich and corporations by around $3.4 trillion, although both have made statements suggesting their totals could go quite a bit higher. Sanders and Warren are proposing around $10 trillion in high-income and corporate tax hikes, exclusive of the revenue they propose raising for their Medicare for All plans.
Notably, Michael Bennet, another moderate Democrat running for president, has proposed raising $5.2 billion from the wealthy and corporations to fund $6 trillion in new investments. CONTINUE AT SITE

James O’Keefe is back, with a truly chilling look at a Bernie-supporter By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/james_okeefe_is_back_with_a_truly_chilling_look_at_a_bernie_supporter.html

Investigative journalist James O’Keefe sent his undercover agents to check out what’s going on with the Bernie Sanders campaign. On Tuesday, he dropped the first of what promises to be a series of videos focusing on the people working for Bernie.

The video, which is embedded below, is pretty shocking. Kyle Jurek, a Field Organizer for Bernie in Iowa, is a foul-mouthed man with a limited vocabulary. He revels in thoughts of riots, explosions, burnings, beatings, and gulags.

Jurek’s imagination doesn’t limit itself to what will happen in America if Bernie wins. Instead, he predicts the ultimate dystopia should Trump win re-election. For him, the 1968 Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention will serve as a small introduction to what Bernie supporters will unleash should their man lose.

It’s not just conservatives who earn Jurek’s wrath. In true Leftist fashion, he imagines a world in which Bernie’s political rivals on the same side of the Leftist aisle get their comeuppance. He’s no fan of the Clintons, for example, and makes the usual joke about the Clintons and suicides. He then adds, “We don’t gotta kill the Clintons. We’ll make them kill themselves. . . . Reign of Terror.” How very Soviet.

Democrats are getting nervous as they realize their base is tuning them out By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/democrats_are_getting_nervous_as_they_realize_their_base_is_tuning_them_out.html

It’s fascinating to watch some of the smarter Democrats drag themselves out of their own Trump hatred long enough to realize that their party is in trouble at a very fundamental level. Such is the case with Peter Hamby, who wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled, “‘Like, I’ll tune in when there’s two weeks left’: Why Trump has a huge advantage over dems with low-information voters.”

What Hamby is concerned about is the fact that the media are so excessively self-involved that they no longer know how to communicate information and ideas to the voters media types want to reach most: people who are not politically engaged on a day-to-day basis but must turn out to vote on November 3 if the Democrat candidate is to win.

Hamby notes that traveling reporters have nothing but disdain for those who spend their days sitting at their desks reading and reporting on Twitter:

[T]he stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.

Third Republican Senator Endorses War Powers Resolution, Leaving Dems Just Shy of Majority By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/third-republican-senator-endorses-war-powers-resolution-leaving-dems-just-shy-of-majority/

Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.) announced on Tuesday that he would support a resolution to curb President Trump’s power to make war on Iran without Congressional authorization.

Young is the third Republican Senator to support the resolution, which was authored by Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.). Democrats will need four Republicans to vote for the resolution in order to gain the majority required to pass it.

Kaine tweaked the original resolution to make it more palatable for Republicans, eliminating a section that Republicans and some Democrats deemed too critical of President Trump.

“I will be supporting, shall we call it, Kaine 2.0., the newer Kaine language, should I have an opportunity to vote on it,” Young said in comments reported by The Hill.

Senators Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) have both previously expressed support for the War Powers resolution. Paul and Lee confirmed their support after a classified briefing on the U.S. airstrike that killed senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

“A Look Back to the Past Decade” Sydney Willams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In his 1961 work, A Study of History (a study of the rise and fall of twenty-three civilizations), Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder, brought on by a decline in the moral fiber of society. When a New York Times reporter compared the killing of Qassim Soleimani to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Left never blinked, despite the implied insult to the Reverend King, his family and followers. When the West fails to defend the genocide of Christians in Africa, but are supplicant to Muslims who murder them, does that reflect a moral stance or a fear of retaliation? “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage,” spoke Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard commencement in 1978. The decline in moral courage has worsened over the past forty-two years. We in the West are more prosperous than ever before, yet we are filled with discontent: If we are black, we are victims; if we are white, we are supremacists; if we are Jews, we are subject to anti-Semitism; if we are Asian, we suffer from reverse discrimination. Unemployment, including minority unemployment, is the lowest in fifty years, and 2019 year-over-year wage growth was the highest for low-wage earners. Yet few of us seem happy with who we are. Perhaps because family has been subordinated to the village and the state?

There were, during the past decade, trends that might be a cause of this despair. While none began in the Twenty-teens, they accelerated over the past ten years. All stem from a desire for power, a sense of political correctness and identity politics coated in hypocrisy, and a belief we should apologize for the success we have had, individually and collectively. We were told we didn’t build the business we built. We tear down statues that represent our history. Hashtags rule and victimization reigns. In colleges and universities, the humanities have been attacked as representing only dead white males who promoted exclusivity. We are told to be inclusive, but not when it comes to political opinions. Where, for example, is the diversity of ideas promoted by a racially and sexually diverse slate of Democrat candidates for President?

Four trends come to mind: The increasing estrangement between bureaucratic global institutions like the United Nations and the European Union and the nation states that compose them; the aging of populations, especially in Western nations and Japan; the decline of participation in organized religion, and the curtailment of free speech. The consequence has been disillusionment and partisanship, fueled by supercilious entertainers and journalists whose readership and viewership are in decline.

WILLARD “MEDEA” ROMNEY

‘Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate.” ”
“How I wish I might see him and his bride in utter ruin” MEDEA- By William Shakespeare

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/13/trump-impeachment-trial-senate-independence-romney-collins-column/4443789002/

hell hath no fury like a candidate scorned by William Congreve
First written as “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” in the 1697 play The Mourning Bride (Act III Scene 2) by Congreve, falesly attribute to William Shakespear

►Mitt Romney of Utah. The former Republican presidential nominee called Trump’s pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “wrong and appalling.” This reaction was predictable from Romney, who spoke out against Trump in 2016 and has continued to be critical. In an October interview with USA TODAY, Romney, 72, described himself as free to do “entirely what I believe is absolutely right. … And I hope that my kids down the road will say, ‘Yeah, you know our dad, our grandfather, our great-grandfather was a person of integrity and honored his oath of office.’ ” That sounds like a man who is ready to draw a sharp contrast with Trump.

Black Conservatives in America Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/13/black-conservatives-in-america/
Here are links to more black conservatives, showing how to find them:
Justin Wilson, Antonia Okafor, Candace Owens, Dr. Carol Swain, Chandler Crump, CJ Pearson, Anthony Brian Logan, David J Harris Jr., Lynnett Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson (Diamond and Silk), Jesse Lee Peterson, KingFace, Larry Elder, Mike Nificent, Allen West, Pastor Mark Burns, Patricia Dickson, Horace Cooper (Project 21), Shekinah Geist, Stacy Dash, Star Parker, Terrence K Williams, Taleed Brown, Keith Hodge and Kevin Hodge, Brandon Tatum, Will Johnson, Wayne Dupree, Jon Miller, Jamarcus Dove-Simmons, Derrick Blackman, Joy Villa, Mind of Jamal, Jermain Botsio, Jay McCaney.

Ideology is color blind. Patriotism is color blind. Faith is color blind. As Benjamin Franklin once said, we must hang together, or surely we shall hang separately.

Mainstream liberal Democrats and their allies in the media have made clear that “demographics is destiny,” and that destiny favors Democrats. It’s easy enough to see why they believe this: nonwhites constituted 15 percent of the population in 1960, by 2050 that will have risen to 53 percent, and nonwhites vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

The answer most mainstream conservatives have to this challenge is to try harder. Convince nonwhites to vote for conservative candidates, even if that means giving up all the entitlements that Democrats have used for decades to purchase votes and create dependency. It’s a tough sell.

Not-so-mainstream conservatives are as likely to give up as to try harder. Consider this comment made in rebuttal to a recent article “Race and Realignment in the Anglosphere,” which had made the case for trying harder:

More pandering, compromise and continual hope that the invaders, who are relentlessly beating us politically, will suddenly draw back and change orientations is foolish. It is just more of the same old “conservative” born-to-lose mentality, no matter how nicely presented. We already know the result of the experiment you suggest, we lose everything, America becomes Brazil, and the multi-generational white majority, “Americans” as we think of ourselves, we will become a minority, in our only nation. And a targeted and hated one, at that . . . Let’s start seriously talking about the separation.

The problem with this comment, however well argued, is that it argues for something even more impossible. There will be no CalExit, there will be no sovereign American Redoubt, there will be no independent Atzlan. Because other than via a cataclysmic collapse that nobody should wish for, the United States is not going to split up. And even if separation is Plan B, shouldn’t Plan A—a massive nationalist political realignment—first be given a fighting chance?

Why Is the Gay Presidential Candidate Silent about Iran Hanging Gays? By Daniel John Sobieski

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/why_is_the_gay_presidential_candidate_silent_about_iran_hanging_gays.html

Mayor Pete, as he likes to be called, who has led the cry that Iran’s shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner using a Russian missile is somehow the fault of an American president, Donald J. Trump, is among those who say it was “collateral damage” resulting from Trump trashing the flawed and unworkable Iran nuclear deal and his zapping of terrorist Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Knowing that Democrats obey Rahm Emanuel’s famous observation that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, Mayor Pete wasted no time attaching his name to the slander that the 176 innocents aboard the Ukrainian plane would be alive today were it not for Donald Trump’s insistence that Iran not get a nuclear weapon with which to annihilate the Jewish state of Israel:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg suggested Thursday that the United States bears some of the blame for the Iranian military shooting down a commercial airliner while it was at the same time firing ballistic missiles at an Iraqi military base that houses American troops.

“Innocent civilians are now dead because they were caught in the middle of an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat,” Buttigieg tweeted.

‘Moderate’ Michael Bloomberg Is an Authoritarian Nightmare By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/moderate-michael-bloomberg-is-an-authoritarian-nightmare/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Throughout his career, he has repeatedly shown blatant disrespect for individual rights and civil liberties.

While discussing the Texas church shooting last week, Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said that we “just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”

“It may be true — I wasn’t there; I don’t know the facts — that somebody in the congregation had their own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people, but it’s the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot,” Bloomberg said in Montgomery, Ala., on December 30, as reported by Conservative Review. “You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”

Bloomberg is, of course, correct. Although the shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement tragically took two lives, it could have been much worse had an armed, trained volunteer security guard not been there to shoot the gunman dead before he could do even greater damage.

This incident was about as clear an example as you could get for how maintaining our Second Amendment rights can save lives — and, therefore, it might seem like a pretty odd thing to reference when you’re arguing against gun rights. The Second Amendment, after all, worked in this case; people are alive because of it, and Bloomberg is going to say that he wished the situation had been different?

What A “Moderate” Democratic Candidate Looks Like: Mike Bloomberg? January 12, 2020/ Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-12-what-a-moderate-democratic-

A new (January 10) Des Moines Register poll shows Bernie Sanders starting to pull away from the field at 20%, with Elizabeth Warren second (17%), and Pete Buttagieg suddenly down 9 points to 16%. Is the Democratic nomination battle really going to come down to just crazy versus crazier?

But, you say, there’s Joe Biden. He’s stuck at 15% in the Register poll, although perhaps will do better in subsequent states like South Carolina. But is he really a moderate? Among other things, Biden has endorsed the total socialist restructuring of the U.S. economy known as the Green New Deal; the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs for the green dream; and the jailing of fossil fuel executives. Not a lot of moderation there.

So today, let’s take a look at Mike Bloomberg. He’s not running in Iowa, but is putting big money into the race in California that follows a few weeks later. He was a fairly decent Mayor of New York for twelve years, despite some totalitarian urges like cracking down on sodas and salt. But then, in the Mayor job he didn’t have access to the seemingly infinite pile of federal loot that somehow causes politicians to let loose with their most destructive instincts. What is he proposing now?

Here’s my favorite of Mike’s crop of proposals: A War on Poverty! I’m not making this up. Bloomberg gave his first California speech in Stockton on December 11. The AP’s account of his talk contained this nugget:

“As president, my job will be to move all Americans ahead, and that includes committing our country to new and innovative ways to combat poverty. There has to be a war on poverty,” the New York billionaire said while campaigning in Stockton.