Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
The Clown Car - Tuesday - 18 June 2019
Maine House reverses itself again to oppose effort to link Electoral College to popular vote
The Trump Tax Reform Is Generating Good Results
Anti-Trump ‘dossier’ was all about foreign interference in a US election
Joe Biden Says He’s Ready To Handle The World. He Got Iraq Wrong Three Times
Many Democrats Happy to See Bernie Sanders on the Downward Slope
Here’s the truth about sanctuary cities
Single-Payer Health Care Will Increase Fraud, Corruption
Since When Are Liberals against Investigating the CIA and FBI?
Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet
When Normality Became Abnormal
Anti-Trump ‘dossier’ was all about foreign interference in a US election
Joe Biden Says He’s Ready To Handle The World. He Got Iraq Wrong Three Times
Many Democrats Happy to See Bernie Sanders on the Downward Slope
Here’s the truth about sanctuary cities
Single-Payer Health Care Will Increase Fraud, Corruption
Since When Are Liberals against Investigating the CIA and FBI?
Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet
When Normality Became Abnormal
Monday, June 17, 2019
The Clown Car Links - Monday - 17 June 2019
What a guy! Paul LePage has a new job – tending bar in Maine
Justice Department backs Treasury in refusal to hand over Trump's taxes
Election Commissioner: Clinton Can Get Info From Foreigners, But How Dare Trump Think About It
Venezuela: A Humanitarian Crisis The Left Couldn’t Care Less About
Trump Administration Gets Smart On Pre-Existing Conditions
Trump’s Tariffs Did More to Fix Border Crisis in Two Days Than Congress Did in 20 Years
Justice Department backs Treasury in refusal to hand over Trump's taxes
Election Commissioner: Clinton Can Get Info From Foreigners, But How Dare Trump Think About It
Venezuela: A Humanitarian Crisis The Left Couldn’t Care Less About
Trump Administration Gets Smart On Pre-Existing Conditions
Trump’s Tariffs Did More to Fix Border Crisis in Two Days Than Congress Did in 20 Years
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Clown Car Links - Thursday - June 13, 2019
On The Promise Of “Green Jobs” June 12, 2019/ - Francis Menton
HAVE LIBERALS EVER BEEN RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING?
Sanders's Socialist Snake Oil
What’s Wrong with Asking about Citizenship on the Census? - Rich Lowry
And for some humor:
Google Maps Developers Apologize For Bug That Instructs Conservatives To Drive Off Cliff
https://babylonbee.com/news/google-maps-navigation-glitch-instructs-conservatives-to-drive-off-cliff
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
The Clown Car Links - Wednesday - June 12, 2019
Why do we like Trump? Here's why - Phil Grant
https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/opinions/commentary/why-we-like-trump
Justice Ginsburg Angers Dems As She Heaps Praise On Kavanaugh - Carmine Sabia
https://thefederalistpapers.org/opinion/justice-ginsburg-angers-dems-heaps-praise-kavanaugh
Who says Democrats are not civil?
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/marcia-fudge-reads-constituent-letter-calling-trump-voters-racist-and-dumb-on-house-floor/
Another Media-Fueled Collusion Narrative Falls Apart - Julie Kelly
https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/11/another-media-fueled-collusion-narrative-falls-apart/
How Diversity Narrows the Mind - Graham Cunningham
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind/
Why The IG Report On FISA Abuse Will Unleash Barr’s Investigation Of Spygate - Margot Cleveland
https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/07/ig-report-fisa-abuse-will-unleash-barrs-investigation-spygate/#.XPpim5iGxak.twitter
Candidates’ Consciences For Sale - Thomas McArdle
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/07/candidates-consciences-for-sale/
Latest Ramirez cartoon
https://www.creators.com/read/michael-ramirez/06/19/255940
Interesting Link: My Congressional District
https://www.census.gov/mycd/
The Marx Brother
Bernie Sanders clings to socialism, ‘rivals laugh.’
By James Freeman
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2019
Having parted ways with some non-Marxists who managed to infiltrate his 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders will attempt to clarify this afternoon that he is not like other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020. Edward-Isaac Dovere notes in the Atlantic that Mr. Sanders will be speaking in Washington this afternoon on “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.” Mr. Dovere reports that the speech topic is sparking laughter among Democratic rivals as Mr. Sanders “leans into socialism.”
Adds Mr. Dovere:
Aides say the D.C. setting is an attempt to convey his seriousness on the subject. They want this to be a major signpost in his 2020 campaign, an opportunity for Sanders to lay out why he’s running with an argument no one else can or would make as forcefully, and to dare the rest of the field to oppose him. They believe this speech has the potential to re-center the dynamics of the race around him, and that the other candidates will regret any of their laughter and questioning...
Many readers may find it laughable that Mr. Sanders would attempt to position himself even further to the left than he did in 2016. But as a Journal editorial noted in April, there’s nothing funny about the extreme commentary from people who are now members of the Sanders 2020 operation. For example, current Sanders speechwriter David Sirota once wrote an op-ed titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle”. And Mr. Sirota isn’t the only Sandernista who has lauded the Chavistas.
Assessing the current Sanders team, the Journal observed:
Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.
Mr. Dovere writes today in the Atlantic:
Sanders’s inner circle is now committed to democratic socialism in a way that some senior members of his 2016 campaign team were not, though he did deliver a speech about the topic back then as well. This new speech, aides tell me, will go much deeper. Sanders and his aides see this as a moment to reach for the revolution that he’s been dreaming of since he was an angry, underemployed writer in the 1970s, paying his bills through essay writing while being an activist.
Given the long history of Mr. Sanders’ friendly relations with communist thugs, one must be optimistic to assume his brand of socialism would remain “democratic.” How many Americans want to live through a revolution dreamed up by an angry, underemployed writer anyway? Fortunately, as Mr. Dovere notes, the citizens of our democracy don’t necessarily want exposure to the full Bernie:
Not everyone believes the message will penetrate. “There is zero electoral evidence that voters support hard socialism or care about the fights the left relitigates every day on Twitter,” one frustrated former 2016 Sanders aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely criticize the current campaign, told me.
Who knew we’d be looking back with admiration at the relative moderation of the Sanders 2016 staff?
As for the members of the current Sanders staff, one would hope they would look back in horror at their admiring commentary on the Venezuelan regime, but today’s speech suggests not. Attendees at today’s Sanders event can expect him once again to urge U.S. adoption of the same health care guarantee that’s been made for years by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The results have been appalling. Last month Vivian Sequera of Reuters reported on the “Venezuela healthcare collapse” and focused on 11-year-old Erick Altuve, who died “from respiratory problems while being treated for stomach cancer at the Jose Manuel de los Rios public hospital.” According to the Reuters report:
For the past six months, Altuve had not received his medication, his mother, Jennifer Guerrero, said, because of widespread shortages of drugs and medical equipment that have devastated Venezuela’s health system...
Children have paid an especially heavy price from the collapse in Venezuela’s healthcare system as the economy has shrunk by over a half during six years of recession.
The most recent figures from Venezuela’s Health Ministry show that infant mortality, covering children age 1 and below, rose 30% to 11,466 cases in 2016 from the year before. There is no official data on children’s’ deaths from cancer.
More broadly, the mortality rate for children under 5 years has risen by 40% since 2000, the humanitarian group Save the Children said in its 2019 report.
Democratic voters have an opportunity to save U.S. patients of all ages from the plans of Mr. Sanders and his staff.
By James Freeman
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2019
Having parted ways with some non-Marxists who managed to infiltrate his 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders will attempt to clarify this afternoon that he is not like other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020. Edward-Isaac Dovere notes in the Atlantic that Mr. Sanders will be speaking in Washington this afternoon on “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.” Mr. Dovere reports that the speech topic is sparking laughter among Democratic rivals as Mr. Sanders “leans into socialism.”
Adds Mr. Dovere:
Aides say the D.C. setting is an attempt to convey his seriousness on the subject. They want this to be a major signpost in his 2020 campaign, an opportunity for Sanders to lay out why he’s running with an argument no one else can or would make as forcefully, and to dare the rest of the field to oppose him. They believe this speech has the potential to re-center the dynamics of the race around him, and that the other candidates will regret any of their laughter and questioning...
Many readers may find it laughable that Mr. Sanders would attempt to position himself even further to the left than he did in 2016. But as a Journal editorial noted in April, there’s nothing funny about the extreme commentary from people who are now members of the Sanders 2020 operation. For example, current Sanders speechwriter David Sirota once wrote an op-ed titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle”. And Mr. Sirota isn’t the only Sandernista who has lauded the Chavistas.
Assessing the current Sanders team, the Journal observed:
Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.
Mr. Dovere writes today in the Atlantic:
Sanders’s inner circle is now committed to democratic socialism in a way that some senior members of his 2016 campaign team were not, though he did deliver a speech about the topic back then as well. This new speech, aides tell me, will go much deeper. Sanders and his aides see this as a moment to reach for the revolution that he’s been dreaming of since he was an angry, underemployed writer in the 1970s, paying his bills through essay writing while being an activist.
Given the long history of Mr. Sanders’ friendly relations with communist thugs, one must be optimistic to assume his brand of socialism would remain “democratic.” How many Americans want to live through a revolution dreamed up by an angry, underemployed writer anyway? Fortunately, as Mr. Dovere notes, the citizens of our democracy don’t necessarily want exposure to the full Bernie:
Not everyone believes the message will penetrate. “There is zero electoral evidence that voters support hard socialism or care about the fights the left relitigates every day on Twitter,” one frustrated former 2016 Sanders aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely criticize the current campaign, told me.
Who knew we’d be looking back with admiration at the relative moderation of the Sanders 2016 staff?
As for the members of the current Sanders staff, one would hope they would look back in horror at their admiring commentary on the Venezuelan regime, but today’s speech suggests not. Attendees at today’s Sanders event can expect him once again to urge U.S. adoption of the same health care guarantee that’s been made for years by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The results have been appalling. Last month Vivian Sequera of Reuters reported on the “Venezuela healthcare collapse” and focused on 11-year-old Erick Altuve, who died “from respiratory problems while being treated for stomach cancer at the Jose Manuel de los Rios public hospital.” According to the Reuters report:
For the past six months, Altuve had not received his medication, his mother, Jennifer Guerrero, said, because of widespread shortages of drugs and medical equipment that have devastated Venezuela’s health system...
Children have paid an especially heavy price from the collapse in Venezuela’s healthcare system as the economy has shrunk by over a half during six years of recession.
The most recent figures from Venezuela’s Health Ministry show that infant mortality, covering children age 1 and below, rose 30% to 11,466 cases in 2016 from the year before. There is no official data on children’s’ deaths from cancer.
More broadly, the mortality rate for children under 5 years has risen by 40% since 2000, the humanitarian group Save the Children said in its 2019 report.
Democratic voters have an opportunity to save U.S. patients of all ages from the plans of Mr. Sanders and his staff.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
All Bernie’s Socialists
The candidate’s advisers want America to be more like Venezuela.
By The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
April 8, 2019
Socialism is cool again, and Bernie Sanders wants to reassure voters that there’s nothing to worry about. “I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism—democratic socialism,” Mr. Sanders said last month. He has also said that conservatives portray his brand of socialism “as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.”
We wish that were true. But we’ve been reading the work of Bernie’s senior political advisers, and their words deserve more attention. Take speechwriter David Sirota, who joined the Sanders campaign in March, though he had been attacking the Vermont Senator’s Democratic opponents on Twitter for months.
Mr. Sirota wrote an op-ed for Salon in 2013 titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle.” Mr. Sirota conceded, Chávez “was no saint” and “amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms.” Those pesky disclaimers aside, Mr. Sirota suggested that there’s plenty to learn from Chávez.
“For example, the United States has adamantly rejected the concept of nationalization and instead pursued a bailout/subsidy strategy when it comes to rapacious banks and oil companies—and those firms have often gone on to wreak economic havoc. Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?” Mr. Sirota wrote. “And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chávez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?”
He wrote this in 2013, nearly 15 years after Chávez took power. Mr. Sirota has also opposed nearly all U.S. military actions abroad, and he blames the U.S. for inciting terrorism. Days after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, Mr. Sirota wrote that “with America having killed thousands of civilians in its wars, we should be appalled by acts of terrorism—but we shouldn’t be surprised by them.” His disclaimer: “Noting this is not to argue that such attacks are justified or that we deserve them.”
Mr. Sanders’ political director, Analilia Mejia, spent part of her childhood in Venezuela and told the Atlantic in 2016 that “it was better to live on poverty-level wages in a shantytown in Venezuela than on a garment-worker’s salary in Elizabeth, New Jersey.”
Mr. Sanders’ senior policy adviser Heather Gautney visited Caracas in 2006 to attend the World Social Forum. The event featured a two-hour speech by Chávez lauding Karl Marx and Fidel Castro and pledging to “bury the U.S. empire.” Ms. Gautney admitted the event had “a militarized feel” but wrote about how Chávez had “implemented a serious [sic] of programs to redistribute the wealth of the country and bolster social welfare.”
She defended Chávez’s nationalization of private industry and efforts to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution on grounds that Chávez’s “proposals advocated for a system in which the presidency would be decided via popular vote.” She also wrote that “today’s neoliberal capitalist system has become utterly incompatible with the requisites of democratic freedom.” And she says that “as it stands, US representative political and economic institutions are not structured as representative bodies in any real sort of way.”
As a sociology professor at Fordham, Ms. Gautney has written admiringly that the U.S. Occupy movement was “based on the belief that some places, institutions, forms of property, and rights, should be collectively owned and enjoyed.” So “if neoliberal forces of privatization and deregulation have indeed dispossessed people of these forms of social wealth, then occupation should be understood as an act of repossession in which persons or groups take back what was once common.”
Redistribution of wealth and property is a major theme among the Bernie brigades. In a column for the Intercept this year, Mr. Sanders’ national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, wrote: “There will be no racial equality under capitalism. . . . voters should be clear that ‘recognizing’ disparities and doing something about them through aggressive, redistributive policies are not the same thing.”
Claire Sandberg, national organization director for the Sanders campaign, praised U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for going “beyond even what Bernie called for in saying that we need to have a robust public sector, that we need to in the UK bring the railways back under public control, and to really fight back against the privatization. That’s something that we’re not even talking about here: How do we undo all of the privatization that’s occurred over the last 30 years?”
Mr. Sanders isn’t a gadfly on the fringes of the Democratic Party. He’s a leading candidate for its presidential nomination, and these are the people who would staff his White House. Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.
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