If the Democratic Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters and flag burners, that is up to them…The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America safe and salute the American flag.
President Donald Trump
A quality education is the closest thing to magic in America.
U.S. Senator Tim Scott (SC)
Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. When the majority of the people become like sheep, who will tolerate intolerance rather than make a fuss, then there is no limit to how far any group will go.
Thomas Sowell
The rioting has to stop…it’s showing up in the polling, it’s showing up in focus groups
Don Lemon, CNN liberal commentator & Democrat’s cheerleader
Convention Summary: pretty straight forward…and a great contrast.
DNC – “Trump is bad” -Hollywood Elites – Democratic pessimism
vs
RNC – “America is Great” – Hard Working Americans – Republican optimism
Protests vs Riots: “Right to Peaceably Assemble” is granted. “Right to Vandalize, Destroy Public & Private Property, Assault, Injure, Kill, Inflict Fear, Public Nuisance & Hide – These & Other Criminal Behaviors Under the Cover of Angry Mobs” is not.
The problem is innocent people, families and private businesses, who had NOTHING to do with police shootings or excessive force are being targeted and terrorized by arsonists, vandals, looters and rioters.
Obamagate: The weaponization of both domestic and foreign intelligence against a presidential campaign from a sitting administration solely for political purposes to prevent the smooth transition of power and weaken his presidency to limit his legislative successes.
That’s what Obamagate is all about…they spied, they lied and tried to cover it up.
This should NEVER happen to ANY American…there should be bipartisan outrage!!!
-Saul Anuzis
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-he-wants-drug-tests-before-debates-with-biden
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2020/08/26/doj-nursing-home-request-n2575115/
Republican optimism vs. Democratic pessimism
The country the Democrats describe is not the real America.
If you watched last week’s virtual Democratic convention, you heard about an America with which you might not be familiar. Speaker after speaker portrayed America as a failing nation full of misery, poverty and angst that only they can make better.
On his radio program last week, Rush Limbaugh reminded listeners what the fight for the future of America is about. He played an excerpt from Donald Trump’s inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2017:
“The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
Trump brought back those who had been struggling under the slow-growth Obama-Biden administration. Had it not been for the virus, which is being dealt with (more about that in a moment), Trump would be way ahead in the polls thanks to record employment across all demographics.
And still the economy is making a comeback. Check the rising stock market, which has hit record highs. That is good news for retirees with mutual funds and other investment accounts.
Contrast Trump’s address with the gloom and doom projected by Joe Biden and his supporters in his professionally produced speech last Thursday night:
Poll: President Trump and John James Lead in Michigan
A new poll of likely voters in Michigan shows a slight shift in both the presidential and senate race. Conducted by the Trafalgar Group before the inevitable bump in momentum for Republicans following this week’s Republican National Convention (RNC), the poll shows President Trump and John James both with one-point advantages over their Joe Biden and incumbent Sen. Gary Peters.
Michigan is undoubtedly one of the most competitive battleground states in this year’s general election. President Trump carried the state by a slim margin in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. Democrats have an additional hurdle to clear this time around; Sen. Gary Peters is one of more vulnerable Democratic Senators up for re-election this year, and James continues to outraise his incumbent opponent.
The Trap The Democrats Walked Right Into
It finally happened. We have lethal battles in the streets between the two tribes of our polarized politics. This week, a 17-year-old man, Kyle Rittenhouse, brought a rifle to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in order, it appears, to protect the businesses that were being burned down or ransacked by rioters after the police shooting of alleged rapist, Jacob Blake. In a series of skirmishes between Rittenhouse and BLM and Antifa activists on the streets of Kenosha, three men pursuing Rittenhouse were shot and two killed by the vigilante in what appears to be some kind of self-defense.
I’m doing my best to convey the gist of what happened — and there’s an excellent, detailed report of the incident from the NYT — without justifying any of it. No excuse for vigilantism; no excuse for looting, rioting and arson. The truth is: even a few minutes of chaos and violence can contain a universe of confusing events, motives and dynamics that are extremely hard to parse immediately. And yet it is the imperative of our current culture that we defend one side as blameless and the other as the source of all evil.
Our Elected Leaders Must Oppose the Growing Lawlessness in the Country
Pernicious consequences arise from mob rule.
A clear and metastasizing disdain for law, order, and reason is growing unchecked in parts of our country. We are seeing what happens to a society without order or trust. Mob rule, lawlessness, and distrust are taking root. Burrowing surreptitiously, at first, into the national conversations over race, radicals have revealed themselves as interested not in racial justice but in revolution. They seek changes that are as revolutionary as they are dangerous.
As Wisconsin seems to be the epicenter of so much these days, its experiences are telling and alarming. The recent riots in Kenosha have been frightening. In response to the police shooting of a black man, rioters set 34 fires, destroyed 30 businesses, burned American flags, and wreaked havoc with the police. Early reports suggest that vigilantes have opposed them with force. At a recent protest in Madison, an organizer declared: “This is not a peaceful protest, so if you came out here for a peaceful protest, you missed it.” Police reports immediately after the first round of riots in Madison indicate that over 75 stores were damaged or looted. One store saw looters steal 90 percent of its inventory. In response to events in Kenosha, rioters in Madison smashed windows at the state capitol, the courthouse, and (once again) businesses up and down the street.
Looting and rioting have stained many of our great cities. Seattle even endured a so-called autonomous zone for nearly a month in which rioters, unchecked by any legitimate government authority, invaded, annexed, and controlled portions of the city. They even hung a banner on the police station that read: “THIS SPACE IS NOW PROPERTY OF THE SEATTLE PEOPLE” (as though it had previously belonged to some other people).
Shamefully, too many of our elected leaders have refused to oppose or even strongly criticize this lawlessness. Seattle’s mayor called the Antifa riots a “block party” instead of what they truly are — an armed rebellion. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler was a pathetic prop for radical rioters until they (ironically) deemed him a fascist and heaped trash at him. When he could be bothered to discuss it, Wisconsin’s attorney general simply remarked last May that looting is “destructive of property, of businesses that people have spent years building, and of public safety,” before he bemoaned that the looters “have, unfortunately, diverted some of the public discourse away from where it belongs.”
When You Say Yes to Hate: Dispatch From Portland
C. and I arrive at Justice Center in downtown Portland on Saturday a little after 11 a.m. Unlike the night demonstrations, in which protesters pelt police headquarters with fireworks and flaming trash, the few dozen people this morning are waving American flags and shouting, “Blue lives matter!”
Which is not popular with the crew across the street, who shout back “ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS!” and that all cops must die.
Even the good ones?
“There are no good ones,” an Ojibwe boy wearing a medicine pouch tells me.
He cannot name an instance where a police officer has done good for someone?
“You need to step six feet away from him,” a kid at the curb tells me—and, regarding my question about the police, “I am going to totally KICK YOUR ASS!”
So good morning from Day 87 of the protests in Portland, Oregon. This one is a little different: It’s organized by Back the Blue, a group showing its support for police, support that includes a caravan of Trump-supporting motorcyclists who roar up and form a barrier between the opposing sides.
The RNC Rebranded the Republican Party, and America
The great success of the Republican National Convention (RNC) is that it rebranded the Republican Party.
Over four nights, we saw speaker after speaker telling the stories of African Americans, of immigrants, of women — and of how President Trump had fought for them all.
The convention explained conservative policies, but did so through personal testimonials — the grief of Ann Dorn and Kayla Mueller’s parents; the warnings of Maximo Alvarez; a young Madison Cawthorn rising to his feet.
There has been much hand-wringing in the media about how Trump has changed the GOP. For four days, Republicans celebrated civil rights leaders, suffragettes, and redeemed prisoners. If this is Trump’s “new” GOP, it is long overdue.
The feeling of a typical Republican voter, watching all of this, was one of pride — pride in the party, pride in the president, pride in the country.
Democrats worry about voter backlash in suburbs
Democratic strategists are worried scenes of violence in Kenosha, Wis., and the “defund the police” debate could give Republicans and President Trump a boost with suburban voters.
The issue has come back to the forefront amid new incidents of violence, property destruction and protests this week after another unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back by a police officer.
Some Democrats worry the continuing unrest could give Trump an opening with swing voters in Wisconsin and other key states that voted for Trump in 2016.
“Republicans are very wisely pouncing on this moment and using that language [of defund the police] that emphasizes everything wrong with what progressives do,” said a Senate Democratic aide, who argued that Democrats have failed to make clear that defunding the police is about getting around obstacles that unions pose to sensible reform and not shuttering police departments.
“I would imagine it’s a potential problem,” the aide added. “The riots in the streets and the destruction are not the only part of these protests. If you were to follow what Republicans have said about this protest movement and these moments, you would think that every single moment of these protests has been defined by violence, and they haven’t been.”
Biden, Dems rethink riots response as law-and-order message lifts Trump
Top Democrats scrambled to adopt a tougher approach this week to riots that have broken out in cities across the country, casting a worried eye at President Trump’s rising poll numbers, which experts said were driven at least partly by his law-and-order message.
Americans tell pollsters they are tiring of the clashes that have broken out on a nearly nightly basis in Portland for the last three months, and the riots that have seen a resurgence in the Midwest this week.
“They say, ‘I’m not for that,’” said Robert C. Cahaly, chief pollster at the Trafalgar Group, a political and corporate market research firm. “The narrative that we cannot let this chaos reign, there is a lot of people that agree with that.”
FACT CHECK: Democrats did indeed omit ‘under God’ from Pledge of Allegiance
As the Democratic National Convention played out across locked-down America over the past week, conservative observers were keen to note that Democrats had omitted “under God” from when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
President Trump took offense to their actions and tweeted: “The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention. At first I thought they made a mistake, but it wasn’t. It was done on purpose. Remember Evangelical Christians, and ALL, this is where they are coming from-it’s done. Vote Nov 3!”
The Pledge, for those whose memories were too rusty (or too seditious, let’s be frank, to remember) goes like this:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Who Is Helmut Norpoth and Why Does He Say Trump Will Win Big?
Political scientist predicts Trump will win a 362-176 Electoral College landslide in November.
Most political prognosticators delay their final predictions for a presidential race until the morning of Election Day. In 2016, for example, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of the New York Times released their final projections during the wee hours of November 8. One forecaster, however, routinely publishes his predictions six months in advance. Professor Helmut Norpoth of Stony Brook University in New York issued his last word on the Trump–Clinton contest 246 days before the voters went to the polls. In March 2016, Norpoth confidently predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president. He not only contradicted Silver, Cohn, and countless other experts, he had the effrontery to be right.
Professor Norpoth just as confidently predicts that Trump will trounce Joe Biden in November. Specifically, he gives the president a 91 percent chance of winning the election with an unambiguous 362-176 Electoral College margin. If this seems implausible, considering the avalanche of polls that portend Trump’s imminent political demise, it will seem less so when Norpoth’s track record is taken into account. The 2016 election was by no means his first foray into political projections. His model has correctly predicted five of the last six presidential elections, and projected the correct result in all but two of the last 27 contests when pre-election data were fed into his “Primary model.”
This model ignores the polls, which Norpoth believes are no longer representative of the electorate, and does not attempt to calculate the political effect of transient events like economic fluctuations or natural disasters. Instead, it is designed around long-term electoral cycles and early primary results of particular contests under scrutiny. There is a remarkably large amount of historical data for Norpoth to draw from in building and refining his model. Reliable information regarding electoral cycles is available as far back as 1828, and reliable data on primary performances by individual presidential candidates goes back to 1912. As Professor Norpoth explained to Stony Brook University News:
How to be right
Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement.
President Trump was among the first to get it, in his own intuitive, messy way. The ambitious Missouri senator Josh Hawley is likewise woke. So are Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But too many credentialed conservatives don’t get it.
What’s the it conservatives need to get? It is simply this: that the political left neither loves you nor shares many loves with you, certainly not the love of neutral norms and procedures that have long been the stock-in-trade of the center-right establishment.
Clinesmith’s Guilty Plea: The Perfect Snapshot of Crossfire Hurricane Duplicity
Carter Page was a CIA asset, not a Russian spy, and the FBI knew it early on but plowed ahead with its fantasy anyway.
To answer the question posed in last Tuesday’s column, Yes, Kevin Clinesmith did plead guilty Wednesday. Sort of.
Well, maybe it was a smidge better than “sort of.” After all, it did happen in a federal-district-court proceeding (via videoconference) on Wednesday. And Judge James Boasberg did accept the plea after eliciting it in accordance with settled criminal-law rules. Sentencing is scheduled for December 10. So it’s official.
But I’m sticking with “sort of.” If Clinesmith’s guilty plea is legally adequate, it is barely so. And neither a judge nor a prosecutor is required to accept an allocution sliced so fine. In “admitting” guilt, Clinesmith ended up taking the position that I hoped the judge, and especially the Justice Department, would not abide, in essence: Okay, maybe I committed the crime of making a false statement, but to be clear, I thought the statement was true when I made it, and I certainly never intended to deceive anyone.
Huh?
I don’t mean to make you dizzy, but in my view, Clinesmith is lying about lying. His strategy is worth close study because it encapsulates the mendaciousness and malevolence of both “Crossfire Hurricane” (the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation) and the “collusion” never-enders who continue to defend it. A defendant’s lying about lying does not necessarily make a false-statement guilty plea infirm as a matter of law. The bar is not high. Still, his story is ridiculous, in a way that is easy to grasp once it’s placed in context.
So let’s place it in context.
Voters Favor Crackdown on Violent Protests; Most Democrats Disagree
Voters are ready for the police to put an end to the continuing violent protests nationwide. Most also say the protests will be important to their vote in the upcoming elections.
When asked which is closer to their own thinking, 50% of Likely U.S. Voters say the police should crack down on the protests to bring them to an end. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 38% disagree and believe the protests should be allowed to continue until the protesters decide to end them. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
There’s sharp partisan disagreement on this question, though. While 75% of Republicans and a plurality (47%) of unaffiliated voters think the police should crack down on the protests, just 31% of Democrats agree. Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats say the protests should be permitted to continue until the protesters want to end them.
Civil Unrest, Elections Pushing Women to Guns
Women cite recent civil unrest and the upcoming presidential election as motivating factors behind recent gun purchases, according to an August survey conducted by A Girl and A Gun Shooting League.
According to the survey which polled 6,000 AG & AG members, 14 percent of women cited riots, mobs, and civil unrest as the reason for their first gun purchase. Meanwhile, 12 percent of respondents said the presidential election slated for November pushed them towards gun ownership. The Coronavirus pandemic nabbed the fourth spot on the list, with 7-percent concerned about the virus and its impact.
Concerns over gun control often arise in election years causing more Americans to stock up on guns and ammo. This year’s election has already proven important for gun rights due to presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s support of a rebooted ban on semi-automatic firearms. Taking to social media in early August, Biden made it clear that so-called “assault weapons” have no place under his presidency, should he be elected come November.
“Weapons of war have no place in our communities,” Biden’s social media accounts said. “When I was a senator, I took on the NRA and secured a 10-year ban on assault weapons — and as president, I’ll ban these weapons again.”
New Thinking on Covid Lockdowns: They’re Overly Blunt and Costly
Blanket business shutdowns—which the U.S. never tried before this pandemic—led to a deep recession. Economists and health experts say there may be a better way.
In response to the novel and deadly coronavirus, many governments deployed draconian tactics never used in modern times: severe and broad restrictions on daily activity that helped send the world into its deepest peacetime slump since the Great Depression.
The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone. Global output is on track to fall 5% this year, far worse than during the financial crisis, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Despite this steep price, few policy makers felt they had a choice, seeing the economic crisis as a side effect of the health crisis. They ordered nonessential businesses closed and told people to stay home, all without the extensive analysis of benefits and risks that usually precedes a new medical treatment.
There wasn’t time to gather that sort of evidence: Faced with a poorly understood and rapidly spreading pathogen, they prioritized saving lives.
‘Black people in America are the FREEST and MOST PROSPEROUS black people in the world’: African Christian University Dean
Dr. Voddie Baucham, Dean of Theology at African Christian University and former pastor from California, recently made waves when his sermon titled “Ethnic Gnosticism” resurfaced online. He joined Glenn Beck on the radio program Thursday to share why he believes today’s social justice, anti-racism movements are “poisonous” ideology steeped in Marxist critical theory, which aim to “redistribute” justice to certain societal groups with no consideration for the individual.
Dr. Baucham argued that left’s narrative that black Americans are the most oppressed black people in the world is far from true.
“I’ve been trying to talk about this from the perspective of the big picture. Unfortunately, when you talk about it from the big picture, people tend to think, you just don’t have empathy, you just don’t have compassion, you just don’t understand how bad it is. Me, who grew up in drug-infested, gang-infested, South Central L.A., born in 1969, grew up during the crack era … [and] raised by a single, teenage Buddhist mother,” Baucham said.
“I’m also an American who, as an expat in a foreign country, I’ve been to dozens of countries in the world. And there are two things I know: One, black people in America are the freest and most prosperous black people in the world. Period. Bar none,” he asserted. “And the second thing is this: people outside of America just think that we are the most oppressed people in the world. People actually think that things like George Floyd are happening every day. That they’re not an anomaly. But that they’re commonplace … it sickens me. It saddens me … the reputation that black people have, that somehow we are weak and impotent, and that we can’t do or be anything unless white people do it for us. Which, by the way, is kind of racist.”
Dr. Baucham emphasized that black Americans are “some of the strongest people in the history of the world.”
Why Russia Is Getting Ready to Invade Belarus
It is not clear that Lukashenko’s security forces are able or willing to do what is necessary to restore order to the country. Would Putin decide to step in?
Belarus continues to amaze. After twenty-six years of seemingly stable leadership, Alexander Lukashenko’s regime may be on the rocks. Public demonstrations have rattled the country ever since Lukashenko tried to steal Belarus’s presidential elections on August 9. A major crackdown—the arrest of thousands, the widespread use of torture—has thus far failed. It is not clear that Lukashenko’s security forces are able or willing to do what is necessary to restore order to the country. This has prompted Lukashenko to appeal to Vladimir Putin.
According to the Belarusian strongman, he reached an agreement with Putin that will allow Russia to intervene in Belarus to end the unrest. Moscow has confirmed that the agreement exists. Lukashenko is hoping that this threat will improve the morale of his security forces and persuade protesters to stand down. He is renewing his efforts to steel his forces and end the protests. But it is unclear how this will turn out.
This poses a major problem for the Kremlin. Lukashenko’s Belarus has long been a key member of the Eurasian Economic Union—a major priority for Putin, and a reliable defense partner in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which borders NATO and is not far from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. While Putin and Lukashenko have maintained an uneasy relationship, Putin considers it anathema that a public uprising would remove an “elected” leader. Thus, Russia will ensure that the regime in Belarus remains in power. At the moment, Lukashenko is in the difficult position of having launched a violent crackdown that has not succeeded. His legitimacy is shot and he still does not have control.
