While everyone argued about Trump’s crowd size and a zillion Hillary supporters engaged in bizarre demonstrations over the weekend, a few real things happened:
Jerusalem mayor says he’s talking with with Trump Administration about moving our embassy to Jerusalem.
Bergdahl’s lawyers are now trying to claim he can’t get a fair trial under President Trump.
On his way out the door, Obama gave us one more lie.
Democrats are just not getting it: Caroline Kennedy being talked up as a possible Senate and Presidential candidate. You see, she doesn’t have Clinton’s “baggage”, so that will make us all want to elect a member of a worn out, has-been political dynasty…
Some law professors are suing President Trump over the Emoluments clause. Said clause:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State
So, even if a foreign leader staying at a Trump hotel is considered an “emolument”, all Trump would need is a waiver from a GOP controlled Congress to get past the difficulty. But, I don’t buy the argument that such is an emolument – the definition being, “a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office”. Donald Trump is neither an employee nor an officer of his various private concerns at the moment. You can argue that because it is still “all in the family”, as it were, he’s getting paid but that stretches it to near impossible lengths. Suppose, Progressives, your favorite Progressive movie star became President…would a foreign leader renting one of their movies work out to an emolument? No – this is just an attempt to work up nothing into something.
Seems that while some of the senior leadership at CIA dislikes Trump, perhaps the rank and file are more pleased with him.
Don Surber reminds us that the same CNN which is after Trump is the CNN which hid Saddam’s crimes in order to retain “access”.
Plenty of speculation on who will be Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
Progressives want to get Trump out via impeachment. The plan works like this:
1. Hold loud, nasty protests on a regular basis.
2. ????
3. Win 218 House seats and 67 Senate seats in the 2018 mid-terms.
No one mention to them that even if Democrats held on to all their Senate seats up for election in 2018 and won every GOP seat up (this would include winning Senate seats in such areas as Tennessee and Utah, by the way), Democrats would only get up to 56 Senators… As I said, don’t bring this up too often…let them dream their little, dreamy dreams. Keeps them busy while Trump and the GOP Congress get things done.
Blogs For Victory 
Caroline has stated that she wants to follow In the footsteps of assassinated and therefore hero Uncle Bobby Kennedy, rather than in those of alcoholic sexual predator-who-left-a-woman-to-drown-to-try-to-protect-his-political-reputation Uncle Teddy Kennedy. While she seems to be trying to avoid references to her father, the precursor to the Clinton use of the White House as Whorehouse, in an effort to distance herself from Hillary Clinton’s “baggage” she does have something else in common with Hillary. That is, a pretty casual attitude about security of official communications.
WASHINGTON — Caroline Kennedy used a personal e-mail account for official business as US ambassador to Japan, a State Department audit revealed Tuesday.
The agency’s inspector general reviewed operations at the embassy between January and March — just as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state was coming to light — and raised questions about its own e-mail practices.
Inspector General Steve Linick said his office “confirmed that senior embassy staff,” including Kennedy, “used personal e-mail accounts to send and receive messages containing official business.” Such conduct can lead to “data loss, hacking, phishing and spoofing of e-mail accounts, as well as inadequate protections for personally identifiable information,” according to the report.
In addition, ….. the report highlights deficiencies in Kennedy’s management of a $94 million operation with 727 employees.
http://nypost.com/2015/08/26/caroline-kennedy-used-private-email-for-government-business/
Of course, were she to bring along her staff (which has already come under fire from that same State Department audit for mismanaging the embassy in Japan) at least they look like a fun bunch. Now that we’ve seen how she wants the United States represented in Japan, how can we NOT look forward to presenting ourselves that way to the world?
(My reaction to the video was to wonder if shared family traits might include Uncle Teddy’s drinking problem).
http://nypost.com/2016/12/21/caroline-kennedy-koi-dance-video-goes-viral-rightfully/
While everyone argued about Trump’s crowd size
During the campaign when Trump was filling large venues, and Hillary was having trouble filling high school gymnasiums, crowd size wasn’t important. What’s changed? Oh, wait — never mind.
It’s too bad Reince Priebus didn’t have the presence of mind yesterday on Fox News Sunday to ask Chris Wallace for the time stamp on the photo showing lots of white space in the inauguration crowd last Friday. I think he could have caught Wallace in an embarrassing misrepresentation on national television.
As I said in the previous thread, brace yourselves for a non-stop offensive by the media to diminish the Trump presidency in any and every way they can. They have apparently not yet learned that Trump’s response is patterned after Israeli military responses to Palestinian terrorist attacks — harsh and disproportionate. They continue to attack him at their own peril.
The thing about crowd size is that the left always exaggerates their own size…I remember the Million Man March…some Progressives were claiming nearly two million showed up; from what I can tell, it was maybe a couple hundred thousand. People don’t seem to realize just how few people can go into making what looks like a lot of people. No matter how you slice it, a lot of people showed up for Trump’s inaugural…and as the area in which it was is populated almost entirely by people who voted against him, the people who showed made a large effort to get there; for Obama’s inauguration, it was vastly just people who live in the area and voted for him. As for the women’s march – from what I’ve read, they just re-cast the proposed Hillary crowd for the Trump protest (which makes sense – who can just drop everything and go like that? Well, perhaps people who already booked their flights in anticipation of a Hillary victory…).
What Trump should do is show up for the March for Life. Couple years ago, 650,000 people showed up for that – to zero MSM coverage, of course. But if Trump shows up for it, the MSM will have to cover it. At that moment, crowd size won’t be brought up again.
As for the women’s march – from what I’ve read, they just re-cast the proposed Hillary crowd for the Trump protest
I don’t think I buy that. It sounds like an effort to dilute criticism of the marches and riots by making it sound like they were kind of spontaneous—-“hey, we’re already here, we might as well march or something”. It is an effort to distract from the fact that the entire scenarios were carefully plotted and financed and choreographed from the get-go. I really doubt that many of these females bought tickets more than two months in advance, or that if they did they then decided it was cheaper to go ahead and go and pay for hotels and meals, etc. than to take the hit for the cancellation fee.
There were a lot of professional-looking signs out there. Who created them, ordered them, paid for them, distributed them? How about those Hello “Kitty” hats? From looking at these hags, I doubt that many can knit. Someone designed them, found a manufacturer, had them made, sold them. This is all organized.
No, the Left has a special radar for finding the kinds of people easily led into violence, hysteria and conflict, and then validates these personality disorders, casting them as noble and “strong”. And then it rounds them up into mobs and leads them into conflicts.
Perhaps if the rioters who have been charged with some pretty serious crimes ever show up for trial, after being set free without bail (because who could be more reliably counted upon to respect the law than a professional agitator and/or a rioter?) we can find out who paid for their transportation, hotels, food, etc. Or their signs or weapons.
OT but…… I guess some Republican had to edit his Facebook page after he posted that in one day Trump got more fat women out marching than Michelle Obama had in eight years. Now THAT was funny!
Color me SHOCKED!
Matt Walsh has his usual take no prisoners take on the Women’s March.
Now that Thomas Sowell has retired, I have a new favorite columnist—Matt Walsh.
My two favorites lines, of so many, from his article:
Selfishness, brutality, vulgarity, dishonesty — these are not feminine qualities. Women can certainly possess those qualities just like men, but they do so at the expense of their femininity.
And, about modern “feminism”— It rejects all that is inherently kind, giving, compassionate, sacrificial, and loving in womanhood, encouraging women to live only for themselves instead — even if blood must be shed in the process.
I was a true feminist, before the term became so corrupted. That is, I wanted to be treated with respect, while understanding that I had to deserve it, I wanted the freedom to choose my own way without being confined by what were considered traditional “women’s roles” and I wanted to be treated as an equal, in marriage, in the workplace, and in my paycheck. Of course, I grew up on a farm, where women and girls always drove trucks and tractors, worked cattle, stacked hay and so on, so I never saw a reason why, when I moved to the city, I should be told I was limited in what I could do. I didn’t get snotty, hysterical, vulgar, profane, rude or hostile about it—-I just did it.
I was reading some comments on some articles and kept seeing comments from females who said they were soooo impressed by the sight of so many “strong women”. Strong? A strong woman accepts responsibility for her actions—-it takes a female not only weak but corrupted to avoid responsibility by slaughtering an innocent life that would not exist except for her pursuit of her own pleasure.
“Strong”, as illustrated by dressing like a freak and screeching obscenities at strangers? “Strong” as in proudly ignorant of the foundational document of this land and how our system works? “Strong” as in throwing vulgar wall-kicking squalling temper tantrums when things don’t go their way? This is now the definition of “strong”?
Whatever it was meant to be, Feminism sure isn’t that. I see it as almost a complete death cult these days – it isn’t even about women doing men’s work on a level of equality, but of merely tearing down western civilization and, especially, arguing forcefully against childbirth. Which, now that you think of it, means they are witches – most people don’t know that the primary charge directed in ancient days against witches is that they prevented the birth of children (the other rather common charge is that they ruined the crops). As a man, of course, I don’t have much I can say about having children in the physical sense…but it seems to me that there is probably a reason women have this physical capability and to try and short circuit it is, long term, not the best for anyone…and especially the women involved. I’ll let any woman beat me about the head and shoulders on this if I’ve over-stepped the bounds and gone into mansplaining here, but it is how I see it.
I just happen to think that we are supposed to be just regular, old, human folks first and foremost…and whatever one wishes to believe regarding the bounds of sexual activity, the clear-cut and obvious fact is that most of us are supposed to engage in regular (as it were) activity and this is supposed to produce children, in the by and by. And it fascinates me that our organic, vegan, locally-sourced, health-nut Progressives seem to be determined to insert the greatest artificiality in this particular area.
Mark, I was taught by my mother that women were strong because of the extra burdens we would have to carry, including those of bearing and rearing children. I was taught to be proud to be a woman and entrusted with these vital and nearly sacred responsibilities. It is what set us apart and made us special. Now “women” are dedicated to eroding and even destroying that, to lowering us to the level of mere animals who copulate only for pleasure and are willing to engage in human sacrifice—OF OUR OWN BABIES—-to ensure that we do not have to take responsibility for our own actions. What is presented as empowering women only diminishes us and demeans us.
I can’t think of another species, other than reptiles, that does not fight to protect its young. Tiny birds will fight off large predators like hawks and eagles to protect their fledglings. You have never known fear till you have come between a mother horse or cow and her baby, and the worst bear attacks have happened when people inadvertently went between a mother bear and her cub. I once picked up a tiny baby bunny, and when it squealed its mother came running, ready to take me on, and small rabbits would fight much larger prairie dogs that were trying to invade their burrows.
But many women, the females of what is supposed to be the most advanced species, are determined to lower themselves to the lowest of the low, to become an aberration in the circle of life, to not just be indifferent to the survival of their offspring but to actively take part in their killing. It defies understanding. For all of civilization, a mother who kills her child has been seen as a freak of nature, and now we are being told that this is really a sign of advanced civilization.
And then, as if that is not enough of a disconnect from reality, they posture as morally superior and engage in lavish street theater to lecture others on their specialness, sneering at those of us who are not as “evolved” and who still think of babies as being as deserving of life as any other human being. These are the same people whose shrill squeals of outrage at anything they see as a “conflict of interest” will make your ears bleed have no problem saying that the person who will benefit the most by the death of a child should be the only arbiter on whether that child deserves to live. It simply doesn’t make sense.
It is just so very strange – Robert Stacy McCain on his blog dissects the problem at length…it is a routine of these women that they are from broken homes and that they did a lot of things as young ladies that one shouldn’t…and so built up anger, resentment and guilt until mommy and daddy forked over 50 grand a year to send them to an elite school where they majored in some variation of gender studies. Presto! They got their answer – it wasn’t their miserable home life and their foolish moral choices which made them miserable…it was society, run by men for the specific detriment of women, that did it. RSM also documents the other routine – booze and drug use and being continually under psychiatric care (or, at least, on prescription medication for their depression). I hate to be all hetero-patriarichal about it, but if these ladies would just go confess their sins to a priest and gain absolution, they’d be on their way back to joy.
Well, you can’t just yell “Shazaam!” and have these people discover faith. And accompanying faith is discipline, which make it a double negative for the narcissistic and entitled.
The thing is, if any woman resents being a woman, she can easily step out of that role. The range of “womanhood” is so vast these days, no longer demanding a mommy stuck in the kitchen all day, that there is no reason to whine about restrictions on women. Women can celebrate their femininity while at the same time being CEOs or engineers or fighter pilots, women can redefine their femininity by being partnered with other women, women can deny their femininity and live as men. I’m talking “transgender” here, merely that women can live lifestyles associated with men—short haircuts, tattoos, big bikes, whatever. There are literally no restrictions on the kinds of lives women in this country, at this time, can choose.
And I’m not buying into the “poor sad abused childhood” excuse, either. I have an example in my own family. A cousin, one of nine children in a loving Catholic family, is the only one who found it awful. She resented rules and she resented the feeling that the adults treated the children like children. Basically, she resented. She was a sulker. And she is the poster child Lib I have mentioned. She is pro-“choice” because she doesn’t like the idea of anyone telling women they can, or can’t, do anything. I have a feeling that most of the women out there have a lot in common with my cousin—an infantile conviction that no one should ever have to do anything she doesn’t feel like doing. People like this are very vulnerable to the emotional manipulation of the Left, which zeroes in on pathologies like this, validates them, reinforces them, and creates robotic little mouthpieces which spew Leftist cant.
Who knew Soros was behind this? Only people who can think, is all.
Who realized that none of these
protestsriots were “spontaneous”? Only people who realize there is a well organized and well funded International Left, that pays people to travel around the world and recruit mindless thugs (and a few mindless ideologues) to engage in violence, looting, assaults and general mayhem.Who funds them? (See “Soros”, above.) emphasis mine
The link to the Soros connection says this: Much like post-election protests, which included a sign, “Kill Trump,” were not “spontaneous,” as reported by some media outlets, the “Women’s March” is an extension of strategic identity politics that has so fractured America today, from campuses to communities. The key word here is “strategic”.
BUT….you can’t be sucked into these things, which are always run in the same way, without being predisposed to act this way, to feel justified in acting this way. Compare the dignity of the Civil Rights marchers in the 60s with the screeching harridans and weapon-wielding rioters for a telling comparison of legitimate, serious protests and this Leftist effort to undermine our government and our nation by corrupting our people.
BUT….you can’t be sucked into these things, which are always run in the same way, without being predisposed to act this way, to feel justified in acting this way
I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I emailed the link to the NYT article posted above to several friends, one of which is a exceptionally devout Christian couple who are among the leaders of our local Tea Party group. The husband’s response was interesting and more than a little frightening.
He’s referring to the march in Fort Wayne which attracted hundreds on the Court House square.
I stand corrected, though I do wonder if these otherwise well-intentioned women were also screeching, using profanity and generally acting like female thugs, or if they were just along because they had been led to believe it was a moral imperative.
This is the kind of thing that calls for leadership, which in this case would probably start by asking women what it was they hoped to accomplish. As I said, the litany of crazy I read from a female intent on dispelling the claim that these people were only there to demand more abortions was just plain goofy, as it was just claims of invented fears. She was horrified, she was terrified, she was in fear, blah blah blah, and it was all nonsense.
My message to well-intentioned women is that they can’t hope to be taken seriously when they participate in silly street theater like this, and they can’t expect to be thought of as intelligent if they can’t even do their homework first.
Your friend said it best: For one thing, why would any Christian woman want to associate herself with others wearing ‘pussy hats’. I bet every one of these women has lectured her children that you are judged by the company you keep. How are we supposed to look at a crowd of squalling harridans screaming profanity, invective and lies and pick out the ones who are just well meaning and naive?
Your friend said :For one thing, why would any Christian woman want to associate herself with others wearing ‘pussy hats’…?” You could just as easily say “For one thing, why would any
Christianintelligent or self-respecting woman want to associate herself with others wearing ‘pussy hats’..”The comment did illustrate what I have been saying for a long time—that a lot of well meaning good-hearted people get sucked into the belief that what they are doing (marching with a bunch of abortion-crazed lunatics, voting for a Democrat…) is a good and moral thing to do, without the slightest awareness of what lies behind the thin (and to us, transparent) facade of the Moral High Ground.
The battle for DNC chair continues and from the looks of it, the GOP will be in power for a long long time. This is unbelievable. What in the hell happened to the Democrat Party? Here are a few of the insights offered by some of the DNC chair candidates:
Democrats must provide “training” that focuses in part on teaching Americans “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white,” urged the executive director of Idaho’s Democratic Party, Sally Boynton Brown, who is white.
“This is life and death” she emphasized. “I am a human being trying to do good work and I can’t do it without y’all. So please, please, please, get ahold of me. Sally at we-the-dnc.org. I need schooling so I can go school the other white people.”
https://news.grabien.com/story-dnc-chair-candidates-bash-white-people-racially-charged-foru
As I noted, there is a large portion of the Democrats who believe that even more ID politics is key to future victory – their theory is that ID politics is what gets people out to vote. They are thinking, especially, of the Democrat vote in 2008…but what they are forgetting is that in 2008 Obama was all about the post-partisan healer. Hillary did less well with just about everyone than Obama, but she still got most of his core constituency to show up…but a crucial part of it, especially in the Mid-west, flipped to Trump…partially in direct rejection of ID politics.
We’ll all know soon enough who is right about this – my view is that an increasing concentration on ID politics will alienate even more people from the Democrats. 2018 will tell the tale, if they go that route.
It’s obviously not enough to get black people to hate white people. Or to get brown people to hate white people. Now they have to get white people to hate white people.
Pretty soon, if these people get their way, if you even have a drop of white blood you must be discriminated against. Sound familiar? It’s a typical PROGRESSION of civilization according to PROGRESSIVE dogma. That is, regression to the worst of any civilization.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/23/the-womensmarch-gets-expertly-trolled-by-a-trending-hashtag-for-the-second-time/
The Women’s march was as discombobulated, unfocused, and ineffective as the current Democrat party is, so in that vein it was a wild success.
To me this photo makes a powerful statement about the class of women involved:
I wouldn’t begin to pretend to know what it’s like to be a woman in 21st century America, but as Doc Thompson noted yesterday, “women live longer, work fewer hours, work less dangerous jobs, and get hurt less at work.” So just exactly what “rights” are they fighting for?
I think the underlying motivation of many of these women is an effort to get some kind of social validation for their killing of their babies—to get a verdict that they should not suffer guilt or shame for what they have done. It is not enough to just have the legal ability to kill one’s child, now they want to be told this was not a shameful act. I think subconsciously there is a belief that if enough people support enough freedom to kill unborn children then that will, somehow, make it right to do so.
And, of course, some are just freakin’ nuts, seething with unfocused rage and eager to spew it out, especially in front of cameras.
I view the entirety of Progressive ideology as an attempt to justify not doing the right thing – we talked this up recently; what has happened over the past 10 days or so just confirms it.
That’s exactly it.
They say “We want to do something that mankind has always forbidden and considered degenerate” and we finally say “OK, you can do it”.
Then they say “Now we want you to admire us for doing it” and they freak out and have big marches when we say “Nah, ain’t going that far. Do what you want, but don’t expect praise for it and don’t expect us to say there is nothing wrong with it.”
I wouldn’t begin to pretend to know what it’s like to be a woman in 21st century America,…..
It is an era of absolute freedom for women—the only restrictions are those of biology. And those seem to be the restrictions that enrage these women and drive them into frenzies of frantic resentment.
These restrictions can now, with the help of science, be pretty much eliminated. If a woman hates being governed by monthly cycles, she can have surgery to remove her ovaries and this “problem” is solved. Menses can be stopped with hormones. If she doesn’t want to get pregnant, there are myriad choices available to avoid pregnancy, ranging from abstinence to closing off her Fallopian tubes.
There is now no social stigma against having a child out of marriage, so giving birth and choosing adoption of the child is not going to have a negative impact on how a woman is seen by others.
However, if one does not make any of these choices, and prefers to roll the dice and have unprotected sex, she now wants the one remaining biological restriction—-being pregnant—-also removed.
What I am seeing is raging against nature, raging against biology, raging against the concept that they are not absolutely completely 100% free, and the feeling that any restriction, even that of biology, is really just “oppression”. Yet look at what the freedom to kill their children has brought them. Does Chelsea Handler strike you as a happy person? If abortion makes these women happy, and they have the legal ability to get abortions, why are they so miserable?
I think it is because no one, no matter how callous, no matter how self-deceiving, can ever truly escape from the knowledge, and the guilt, that she killed her own tiny helpless baby—and did it because she just didn’t want to be bothered. What these people are trying to achieve is freedom from that sense of guilt and failure, but those are the things that make them still human.
This article will no doubt create a whole new class of “science deniers” as it cites studies which show that embryos continue to divide cells and grow even outside a uterine environment—that is, they are autonomous in identity even if dependent for protection and nutrition, or, to put it differently, they are human beings.
……as Robert George and Patrick Lee point out, we value instances of the oak species because of their instrumental value, and thus we value an oak tree more than an oak acorn, even though they are the same entity. But we value instances of the human species because of their intrinsic value, and thus we value all human beings at all stages of development equally. Human beings don’t acquire personhood at some developmental milestone.
Now that the Shahbazi study has demonstrated, as George and Tollefsen reasoned, that the early embryo has all the capacities to develop its organism autonomously, it would be interesting to know whether this would be sufficient evidence for Saletan to rethink his stance on personhood. The question for all of us now is whether we will start acknowledging that the biological autonomy of embryos should translate into ethical and legal personhood.
So let’s stop deflecting. It’s time to own up to the truth. Science has already affirmed what we have long since suspected: we can call them fertilized eggs, zygotes, morulas, blastocysts, products of conception, embryos, or fetuses, but that doesn’t change reality. And that reality is this: they are autonomous humans from the very beginning.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/17222/
I was discussing this with my daughter just the other day. The article states: “And that reality is this: they are autonomous humans from the very beginning.”
I’ve had people argue, simply making that statement doesn’t make it so. My response is usually along the lines of this. For those of us who have a moral compass, we must first determine at what point a unique individual human life comes into being. Until we can conclusively define that, any attempts to eliminate that life will always carry with it the potential consequences of murder. While I may not be able to define conclusively (within scientific terms that meet your acceptances) that life of a new human begins at conception, no one else can say conclusively that it does not. And until such determination can be made (to satisfy others beside people of faith and moral conviction), we have the moral obligation to protect such life. The fact that such life temporarily resides inside another human is of no consequence to the determination of new life’s existence.