From Conrad Black:
The two signal facts, or “alternative facts” in the well-chosen parlance of the brilliant and engaging co-counselor and victorious campaign manager of the president, Kellyanne Conway, are that public approval of the national news media now stands at 14%, and the allegations the press are now making against the new administration are of no interest to any serious segment of the public.
After a while, if you lie constantly, no one is going to believe you – even if, for the moment, you are telling the truth.
What happened to the MSM in 2016 was the cumulation of their dishonesty over a many-decade period. This was helped along by the MSM going entirely overboard, even by MSM standards, in their desire to destroy Trump at the behest of their Democrat friends and Trump’s ability to command the center of attention with a willingness to punch back very hard. The MSM is now exposed as a hollow threat – and even mainstream GOP politicians will cease to tremble in fear of offending it. But let’s take a look at how the MSM did this to itself.
G. K. Chesterton – himself a journalist – pointed out very long ago that there was no need of a censorship of the press because we already had a very functional censorship by the press. The press – the MSM as we call it today – takes sides. If they like a person or a particular grouping of people, they will go soft on them. If they don’t like a person or grouping of people, they will be merciless in hounding them. This does have an effect on how some people can be viewed even long after they are dead.
Take, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Roosevelt is lauded in the history books as the strong President who got things done. Taft is derided as a well-meaning man who simply didn’t have the ability of Roosevelt. But, if you dig a bit into the history of things, you’ll find that even on something as signature to Roosevelt as his “trust busting”, Taft actually did far more. Roosevelt did start the Panama Canal, but he did it in a manner which caused grave harm to America’s reputation among Latin American people…Taft actually got the thing properly organized for construction and then kept a close eye on matters until it was nearly done (it was completed about 18 months after he left office…but by then it was all over but the shouting). If you’re liked by the MSM, you’ll have an easy ride – if you’re hated by them, then no level of excellence will be sufficient. When you translate this to the political parties, the MSM likes the Democrats, hates the Republicans – and this goes back quite a long ways: at least to FDR, but a case can be made that the MSM has hated the Republicans ever since Republicans thwarted Wilson, whom they liked, after World War One.
Of course, to take sides means you are simply not going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can’t – because the truth will some times work against your side. Even you don’t flat-out lie for your side, you’re still going to present things in a manner which gives best advantage to your side, and most disadvantage to the other side. And you can speak quite a lot of truth without giving the whole truth; of course, if you don’t give out the whole truth, you’ve carried out the functional equivalent of a lie…but as you can’t be caught out in a factual inaccuracy, you can pretend that you just speak the truth. And that is what the MSM did for many decades. As long as their good friends, the Democrats, generally ran things – and from 1932 until 1980, they generally did, in spite of a few GOPers managing to get into the White House – there was no need to lie; you could just tell that part of the truth which reflected most ill upon Republicans. After the election of Reagan – and, especially, his re-election – that started to change.
I still date the break with truth-telling to be Ted Kennedy’s speech against Robert Bork in 1986. No matter how you want to slice it up, Kennedy got out there and delivered a pack of lies about Robert Bork and then the MSM refused to just call them lies. This, I think, is where old Rush gets his view that, for the MSM, it isn’t the facts of the case but the seriousness of the charge which matters…we are to discuss the charge, not the facts. Kennedy made serious charges – essentially saying that Bork was a Nazi set to destroy freedom in America. Republicans were then asked to prove that he – and they – weren’t in favor of Nazi tyranny. We still weren’t to outright fabrication by the MSM, but we had stepped away from telling even partial truth. Later, especially after the GOP won Congress in 1994, the MSM went to flat out lies in defense of their side.
They felt they had to. The reason Reagan won – and Gingrich’s GOP won – was that the system created by the Democrats was starting to fall apart. The Welfare State wasn’t working. The military system and alliances created by the Democrats wasn’t working. The economic system of the Democrats wasn’t working. To tell the truth about anything pretty much meant you were going to have to say something bad about Democrats. The MSM could still tell bits of truth about the GOP which were bad for the GOP – so, of course, whenever a GOPer was caught in genuine scandal, it was played up for all it was worth – but that wasn’t enough, because the GOP was proposing alternatives to failed policies and even if the alternatives were untested, it was clear that we couldn’t just go on and on with policies which were failing right in front of everyone’s eyes. It became necessary to just cook up things to say which would either help Democrats, or harm Republicans. And that is where things started to go wrong for the MSM – took a while, but as I noted, when you lie enough, eventually people just stop believing you.
And it did take a while. It took ten thousand accusations of GOP racism, sexism and homophobia. Ten thousand accusations that GOPers want to starve kids and shove granny off a cliff. It took ten thousand stories about how swell Democrat things are while people could see for themselves that they were getting worse. It took, finally, eight years of servile MSM devotion to Obama winding up in lunatic MSM opposition to Trump to finish the job.
I’ve seen some articles by MSMers wondering how they can get their mojo back – in none of them do I see, “we’ll report the truth, no matter what it is”. They still can’t go there for the same reason they could never go there: they still like the Democrats (actually, of course, they are Democrats), and still hate Republicans. How things will work out for the next four to eight years remains to be seen. But we do actually need an MSM which will just tell the truth. The alternative media is great – and played a role in breaking through the MSM lies – but it is also contains many people just as willing to lie for their own side as the MSM has been. As soon as someone figures out that what will really sell is an MSM outfit which will just tell the truth – the verified, honest truth – no matter whom it hurts, that will be the MSM outfit which comes to dominate all others…and leads to a restoration of a genuine free press in the United States.
Blogs For Victory 
Who has the money? We do. I’m not talking about billionaires, I’m talking about small business owners and other people who work for a living, or people who planned ahead for retirement instead of counting on Uncle Sam to buy their bread and milk for them.
Who has the numbers? We do, or at least enough of them to make a difference.
Who has the brains? I think the past year has answered that question for us.
So why don’t we just pull in and let the other side wither on the vine? All we need is a conservative billionaire, or consortium of conservative billionaires, to buy one of the usually-faltering alphabet networks and run it like a true news organization, and the lies and liars will topple of their own weight. But even without that, we now have a president and administration not afraid to take the battle to the Complicit Agenda Media and call them out. Liars don’t get press passes. Now, was that so hard? Post it on the door. Play the game. Don’t reward suck-ups but do reward truth-tellers.
I like Spicer’s passion but we don’t need an angry man, we need a Tony Snow type who can smile a rueful smile and say “Well, there you go again….” with a Reaganesque shrug, and then point out the crap.
Stop going to bad movies. Stop watching award shows. Stop worrying about what some celebrity lightweight is emoting about. Ashley Judd just killed her career. Killed it flat dead, then backed up and ran over it again. Not for political reasons, but because no one will ever be able to look at her again without seeing that vile, vicious, spewing of hate and utter stupidity she insisted on showing off for us. Streep may find her latest movie a non-starter—–I see it is already on Cinemax—–and I’ll bet the next one is even worse. Baldwin is doing game shows.
Sort of OT, but interesting nonetheless. This was sent to me by one of the guys in my local Oath Keepers group:
Jack Wheeler is a brilliant man who was the author of Reagan’s strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness. For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informative.
He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc. He is in semi-retirement now. He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything.
He is also a somewhat well-known mountain climber and adventurer.
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler:
The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.
He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.
What he isn’t, not a genetic drop of, is ‘African-American,’ the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn’t a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.
It’s something Hillary doesn’t understand – how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white.
Thus Obama has become the white liberals’ Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him:
Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd.
Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior.
He is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.
And yet he got elected, not once but twice. Thanks to those that did not think it was important to vote for freedom and those that were willing to give up their freedoms for entitlements.
Remember you don’t have to be on a southern plantation to be a slave, if you are dependent on government entitlements you just have a different slave owner.
Good article. I had not realized that Obama has so little African blood. This is brilliant:
Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white.
Thus Obama has become the white liberals’ Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White.
I also did not know he is a descendant of slave traders.
He also made up a great deal of his biography – his dad, the Great Revolutionary Opponent of British Imperialism wasn’t all that big a deal. Of course, no one who fought against British Imperialism in the 50’s and 60’s really was…the Brits were voluntarily on their way out and were just waiting until the locals could figure out who was going to be in charge when they left. The only prolonged fight the Brits had was in Malaya, but that was because the Malays needed their assist and wanted it against a ruthless, Chinese-backed communist insurrection. Once the Brits and the Malays got on top of the rebels, the Brits left. The whole thing about European imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa is that it only happened for prestige reasons and the Europeans were only going to keep it up as long as it wasn’t expensive…only in South Africa was it a bit different because there was a very large settler population. As soon as it took more than minimal force and expenditures to keep the African Empires, no one was interested in having them any longer. Additionally, far from exploiting Africa, the Europeans routinely spent more there than they got back…
But, it looked good in the bio to have a father who fought Imperialism, so in it went…like a lot of other myths.
Stephen Crowder and friend, posing as transgendered males, asked women at the Women’s March in Austin what rights they thought were in danger. Emphasis mine:
”…..in terms of understanding why they were marching, no one had a really solid idea. Upon being asked which rights were in danger, no one could give a complete answer that wasn’t stumbled through with some difficulty.
Not even former Texas senator, and abortion advocate Wendy Davis, who spoke in nebulous terms about how nobody has rights if even one person or group doesn’t.
What Davis did have was an economic plan that required women be paid more than they currently are, because of the negative stereotype that women spend more frivolously than men, and this will boost our economy.
Translation: Texas dodged a bullet, though evidently Davis was never much of a threat when she ran for governor there. I did spend a minute or so trying to figure out what she meant by her economic plan—-if you pay women more they will spend more and this will boost the economy? But it is just a negative stereotype that women spend more frivolously than men, so that can’t be it, so…… and then I realized it was no more comprehensible than the reasons for marching
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/24/no-one-at-the-womensmarch-seemed-to-know-what-rights-are-in-peril-not-even-wendy-davis/
He is a proud American but even a prouder Mexican, according to his own bio, yet he feels compelled to lecture Americans on our immigration policies. Better yet, he blames America’s illegal immigration problems on our foreign policies, so evidently a lot of people in El Salvador felt compelled to illegally cross our border because of our excursion in Iraq or something like that. Here’s the bottom line – progressives are just dangerously stupid people without an ounce of common sense and a tenuous grasp of reality (see: Ashley Judd) and thank God conservatives finally found the backbone to stand up and call them out. Here’s Tucker exposing another brainless progressive:
So Trump is “an embarrassment to the whole world?” Has the Left decided to drop the “Russia Wanted Trump” meme in favor of Russian being embarrassed by who is president of the United States?
Has anyone here ever seen a Leftist point of view presented in a way that sounds even halfway intelligent? I haven’t. Even if I sift out the lies (which can take a while) they just sound stupid. Toxic, and stupid.
Tip for the Left: If you are speaking under a banner or headline that says you are speaking about a cause, try to spend at least a little time speaking about that cause before going into a rant about Donald Trump.
Here’s another fine example of a brainless progressive who was voicing her support for refugees on Facebook. Her first contention was that the refugees had NO CHOICE but to flee their homes and seek refuge in another country. Really? If my state or country was under siege from a hostile invader, I would fight. Period. The thought of running and relying on others to protect me wouldn’t even register with me and I think many “self respecting” people would feel the same. Her next contention was that most refugees find work in America within 6 months of arriving and pay taxes. Wow, that’s impressive considering that 95 million Americans are out of the work force and unable to find a job so the question is, is that a manufactured statistic (yes), but more importantly shouldn’t Americans have the first opportunity for those jobs?
Her mindset is what has governed this country for the last 10 years and why we find ourselves in such a mess. We can never let up and allow this type of thinking to ascend to power again.
I’m not as tough on the concept of being a refugee as you are, Cluster, but I do take issue with the way the Left defines the term.
I am in favor of taking in refugees. I think most of those who fled Cuba (aside from those sent by Castro, from mental institutions and prisons) have worked out well. The poor addled Left just can’t make up its mind on refugees, though. When they had to deal with Elian Gonzales, there wasn’t any concern about taking in refugees because they were more concerned about making Castro happy, so they backed Clinton’s violation of the refugee rules put in place by Reagan after the United States returned a Russian refugee (a sailor who jumped off a Russian ship) several times.
Now they want to consider anyone from a war-torn country a refugee. We have seen what has happened when Leftist Europe has opened its arms to hordes of Middle Eastern “refugees” , mostly young men. Go back a few weeks and read the link to the CPAC panel discussion in which a Brit explains that the entire culture of Britain will be gone in 15-20 years, and that for all intents and purposes the national identity of Sweden is already gone.
There is nothing wrong with a compassionate effort to help people who are desperate, but they have to be willing to become part of this country to live here. Period. We have to be able to vet them, to separate (as much as possible) those with a genuine desire to make a new life in a country they admire, with respect for its laws and customs, from those who merely want to infiltrate the United States to provide a disruptive element from within the country.
Right now that is hard because we have not yet taken the step of demanding the development of a Reform Islam which rejects the violent and political aspects of Islam, so we can treat the two elements of Islam differently and reject those who adhere to the violent, political, and inherently anti-American version.
Demanding that we admit people who refuse to submit to our laws is simply insane. Demanding that we admit people who hate our culture and have no intention of ever assimilating into it is simply insane.
This gal was speaking to the middle east refugee crisis and my comments were primarily directed at that as well. I don’t disagree that political refugees from Cuba is one exception to the rule, but I also think that we should probably consider temporarily suspending all refugee and immigration intake for a while. We can not even take care of the people who are already here, let alone even identifying many of them and continued influx will only compound that problem.
I can imagine the possibility of a young man trapped in a radical Islamic world where he doesn’t feel he belongs, who yearns to be in a nation that is free, where he can work and be a father. I can imagine that such a young man exists, and if he does, I would like to be part of a nation that offers him sanctuary and a chance.
However, when I see the videos of the young Middle Eastern men rampaging down the streets, hear their comments, read about the carnage they are inflicting on the neighborhoods where they have been warehoused, and come to understand that they arrive in their host nations determined to never assimilate, never respect those nations or their peoples, and are motivated by hatred and resolution to destroy those nations, I agree that we can’t let them in.
Sadly, so many of the women are equally hate-driven and militant it is dangerous to accept them, as well, and I can just imagine the howls of outrage if we were to only accept children too young to have been poisoned by the virulent hatred that is Islam in the Middle East.
That’s pretty much my view – and I rarely see anyone pointing out the obvious: the United States, as a nation, simply cannot accept within it’s border every person who either wants or needs to come here. The number of people affected by grinding poverty, oppression and war is probably in the neighborhood of two billion…if we say we must accept everyone who shows up suffering from the above listed condition, we’ve instantly got 1/3 of the human population within our border. As all who want/need to come here can’t, we must set criteria on who can/will come here. Children and their parents would obviously get a bit of a priority – single, military-aged males right at the back of the line. But even in those very broad categories, we have to carefully look over who wants to come. One thing I pointed out with Sweden’s refugee policy is that even if you ignore the Islamist problem, the bottom line is that Sweden is a highly advanced technological nation and the refugees, often, are only a step up from subsistence farmers…not exactly people Sweden can find employment for (not even in farming, as Swedish farmers are also highly advanced). Also, it isn’t good when centuries-old communities are destroyed and dispersed around the world – the primary aim of our actions should be the restoration of peace in the home country and the development of prosperity…and if this means we send an expedition to grab a couple hundred square miles of Syria to provide a protected refugee area, then that is ok.
This isn’t exactly about immigrants, though peripherally it kind of is. It is spurred by Mark’s comment on unskilled labor.
We used to have offices near a halfway house, and the men who were there were required to look for work. We would have six to a dozen men in our office every week, saying they were looking for a job. Maybe some were, but most just wanted a signature on their little paper saying they had been in and asked.
So I am talking about a LOT of men. And almost none of them had a job skill. Of any kind. A few had CDLs, though after being sentenced to a halfway house for drug and/or alcohol addiction the chances were pretty slim that they were going to keep them. A very few said they could operate heavy equipment, but they turned out to not even know what heavy equipment is. After all, how much of a difference could it be operating a forklift or a D-9 Caterpillar?
We have more than enough unskilled labor in this country. We don’t need to import more.
Worth reading. Not exactly OT, as I can imagine the savagery with which the media will attack this movie.
http://dailysignal.com/2017/01/23/how-gosnells-house-of-horrors-made-me-pro-life
Time will come for those who have committed such atrocities or even advocated for them, to answer to God. I have little doubt, should we still be in existence a few hundred years from now, this era will be seen as one of the most disturbing examples of human’s capacity for evil.
I think, if we survive at least enough to HAVE history books, this will be a defining moment in the very existence of our country. And, as the United States has always been the place people could count on as a refuge from tyranny, oppression and brutality, that means the world will have been taken over.
We are at a crossroads. Many of us have been saying we have been approaching a crossroads, and now the International Left and its domestic stooges have accelerated that approach. We are here.
We have to stop weasel-wording our way through life, trying to be “fair” and just appeasing evil. It is time to define life, and commit to defending it. It is time to define free speech and also to define treason and subversive activities, and act on those definitions. It is time to define religion and define a political system thinly disguised as a religion and which has as a basic tenet the destruction of our country and its people, and protect the religious while fighting the political system. It is time to educate our children, not just indoctrinate them into a toxic political and belief system. It is time to apply the law equally to all, without concern for age, gender, race or ethnicity, and certainly without regard for how a religion may view the law.
Well, well well
“We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/24/study-claims-up-to-2-8-million-non-citizens-voted-in-2008/#ixzz4WnMKkvVk
At least in one DMV in Colorado, anyone who got a driver’s license, even if it was restricted to only the period of time shown on a work visa and with identity proved by a foreign passport, was asked if he or she then wanted to register to vote. I saw it myself, and I challenged the DMV workers when I saw it happen, and they always said it was the law—they were required to offer voter registration to every single person issued a driver’s license.
I don’t know if this was the law or just the interpretation of the regional manager. I don’t know if it happened all across the country. But I do know that a LOT of people from other nations, here on temporary visas, were registered to vote in this one county. Since we don’t purge registration rolls, these people may have been back in their home countries for years, but their names are still on the rolls and anyone who knows about this practice can find them and vote in those names.
I keep asking if some computer whiz could cross-reference visas with voter registrations, to see how many foreigners have been registered to vote. It seems like a pretty good idea to me.
That should be a TOP priority of the Paul Ryan led House
President Barack Obama’s Justice Department ignored Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter” law. This provision requires local governments to maintain and keep voter rolls current.
And just how would these local governments do this? Is there a mechanism in place to routinely purge registration rolls of names of people who have moved? I can see there might be a way to cross reference local death notices with registration rolls, though I doubt that is ever done, but how would you know if someone has moved?
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group at the New York University School of Law, insisted voter fraud is a myth and opposed an investigation.
………………….
There is a great deal of evidence that our voting system locks out far too many eligible citizens from voting.
Really? I wonder what kind of evidence he says he knows about. Of course, his rhetoric depends on his own definitions—he is, after all, a Liberal—so he might decide if he knows of two registered voters who were not able to vote, that could be “far too many” and then phrase this as being “locked out”. I wonder if he means the people in nursing homes and hospitals whose ballots are filled out by Liberal staff or activists, without their knowledge or input. I kinda think that is not what he is talking about. It’s time to make these people put up or shut up.
http://dailysignal.com/2017/01/25/trump-doj-likely-to-find-many-offenses-in-voter-fraud-probe-experts-say
On a lighter note, this is pretty funny.
I loved Dave Burge’s take on it:
Brandon Smith has written a number of really good articles over the last few years about Global economics and geo-politics. This is one of his best.
A truly brilliant and important article. It should be the foundation of a grass-roots movement.
I know a lot of people who already do some of the things he talks about. I, for one, see Facebook as a superficially benign cancer infecting the entire nation. People who were initially drawn to the idea of it being a way to maintain a community even among friends and family who are not geographically close are now psychologically dependent on it. I have had people I barely know comment on something I have done, and learned that it was posted on Facebook by someone I do know—-without my knowledge, without my permission, and now part of some permanent internet archive. At first I thought Facebook sounded intriguing, but as I now see people (mostly women) literally addicted to it, I have started to see it as a more malignant force.
I was talking about this the other day with a relative and his girlfriend, and he said he had had to tell his mother, who is addicted to Facebook, to stop putting ANYTHING about him in her entries, for the same reason I mentioned above. His girlfriend mentioned that she can go on Facebook at any time and know exactly where another family member is—–at the gym, shopping, etc. I am always being told “I only use it to share recipes and sometimes a photo”—-the woman who posts several times a day about where she is and what she is doing told me this, as a matter of fact.
The Women’s March, and probably most of the rioting and demonstrations in DC, could not have been organized without Facebook and with the help of Twitter. It is a recruiting and rallying tool as well as a way to keep track of people. I think it is an insidious tool. Tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—-of people would feel bereft and unmoored if Facebook were to simply disappear one day, they are so dependent on it.
I just bought a new iPod and set it up without many of the options, such as location tracking, and within an hour got an email that my iPod account had been sent to the Cloud. I buy a lot of audio books from Audible, which only downloads to Apple (the only reason to buy anything by Apple) and noticed that it now has an app for Androids. Cool, says I, that might be handy, to have an Audible book on my phone—but to set it up I had to authorize access to everything in my phone, including my contacts list and my call log. No thank you.
I’m not a Luddite, and I depend a lot on the internet. If I have any question, from weather to how to make paella to the closest electrical contractor, I go to the net. I post here. I email. But the gradual incursion of the internet and what is so benignly referred to as “social media” (isn’t that a warm fuzzy term?) is creepy, and I think ominous. Is the world a better place, are we better people, when we can blurt out every brain fart within seconds on Twitter and can’t go an hour without checking our Facebook page? Not to mention the fact that these toys place us in a certain place at a certain time.
I am more and more inclined to agree with Brandon Smith.
Boy, if this doesn’t make a statement on where we’re at as a society, I don’t know what does:
https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15965510_1241573762563453_2080463893278327821_n.jpg?oh=ba99c1f688da2c63a19778f42d72cc5a&oe=594AD727
Isn’t that the truth. I think a big problem in today’s society is an overinflated sense of self. Our local Chamber awards banquet was held the other day and meaningless “participation” trophies were a big part of the night and the applause, adulation and Facebook postings for those folks who won was over the top. Get over yourself people, you’re not that great.
They should just put trophies on the tables, next to the water glasses, because after all, you DID show up.
Great article about Betsy DeVos:
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444260/betsy-devos-school-choice
And one indisputable fact:
Competitive markets were known to improve products, prevent corruption, encourage adequate supply, and keep prices moderate. And competition happens only when consumers have a meaningful choice between different products or services.
It looks like Betsy is going to have the hardest time getting approval as a cabinet member. In the same vein as “follow the money” this calls for us to follow the motivation, As your article points out, there are more teachers in the US than in the military and working for WalMart, combined. Betsy DeVos poses a threat to this demographic.
But looking deeper than that, her agenda poses a greater threat to one of the main weapons in the Leftist arsenal—-control over what our children are taught. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, and Left know this and has focused a large amount of its effort and influence on bending our twigs as far to the Left as possible. To do this, the twiglets have been taught things that are simply lies, as well as having everything they encounter in school slanted toward Leftist ideas and away from fact, American allegiance and respect. Let a cabinet member like DeVos in, especially this early in a 4-year term, and there will be time for parents to experience the difference school choice and true education can mean.
Pretty scary to the Dems. I think we need to pay attention to the coordinated effort to discredit DeVos and block her nomination, because this will show us what matters to the Left.
You got it – both money and power are at stake here for the left and they won’t go down without a fight.
To succeed, the Left has to eliminate all challengers to its complete authority. The biggest competitors for authority of the government are families and religion, which is why both have been under attack for decades now. In a perfect Leftist world, the only religion is the State and the State is the family.
The fastest way to erode and undermine the authority of religion and the family is to control education. In the schools, children can be taught that if they have a problem (such as pregnancy) they should not go to parents (who at that time are identified not as loving caretakers but as enemies to be feared) but to the school, which will help the child terminate the pregnancy without even letting the parents know what has been going on. They are taught that parents have no right to discipline them, and to report parents—–now for disciplining them, later for speaking out against the State, as has happened in every country where Leftist governance has taken deep root. Schools can, and often do, work to separate children from their families by establishing Us/Them paradigms. In school they learn that family structure is not a father and mother and children, it is any combination of any genders. What could do more to erode the basic structure of the family than to eliminate the concept of gender?
And, of course, they learn that they should not love their country, that our country is vile, corrupt, founded in hatred and oppression by hateful and vile men, that it is responsible for any and all problems around the world. They can be taught that our Constitution is meaningless, except possibly as a general but nonbinding suggestion for how things might be done, if it is convenient.
We have not yet, quite, gone past the tipping point. There are still parents, and teachers, who have not been corrupted by this political system and philosophy, and they can and will, if given the opportunity, choose education that does none of these things.
We are no longer being Chicken Littles when we see our time as a cusp, a turning point in our history. I am energized and hopeful to see the growing pushback to the Leftist agendas, and I see their hysterical opposition to DeVos as a sign that the Left knows this as well.
What a brilliant observation.
I read this article too this morning and what a great observation. What we are witnessing right now is the slow suicide of the Democrat party. They have spent decades dividing people for political gain, and now all those special interest factions are warring with each other. We may need more popcorn.
And as the MSM’s (or as Amazona refers to it, the complicit agenda media) influence continues to swirl the drain, the effect is only going to accelerate. The really hilarious aspect of the current political climate is that, instead of the Left saying, “OK, time out, let’s sit down and talk and see if we can find common ground because we are all Americans,” they’re doubling down on nastiness and uglyness and name calling, and inevitably on violence. They just can’t help themselves; it’s who they are. Well, all I can say is, bring it on.
Except that as Orwell put it, if the Party says that two plus two equals five, then it does. A lot of Progressive people are starting to recoil from the absurdity of it all…but most won’t. They’ll just tell Christian men to shut about abortion and then turn around a second later and say that a man who “feels” like a woman is female…
Expect non-stop attacks like this on Trump and his family for as long as he’s President.
(Looks like the video is no longer up. It was a clip from the Today Show on NBC that claimed they did research that showed Tiffany Trump registered to vote in 2 states, PA and NY. She moved from PA to NY before the election and re-registered in NY.)
Interestingly, here’s what updater.com says about updating your voter registration:
The thing is, if any Trump family members are registered in multiple places, it is just an illustration of the sloppiness of our voting system. It’s not like the Trump’s were out on a campaign to commit voter fraud. David Burge noted last year that he’s probably still registered to vote in Chicago…and that he probably voted for Hillary.
I might very well still be registered in Wyoming—-I never thought about it till this came up. And I am very sure all those foreign workers who got registered through that Colorado DMV still have intact registrations, even though they haven’t even been in the United States for a decade—-and weren’t citizens when the DMV registered them. I don’t remember the DMV asking if I was registered anywhere else when I got my Colorado license, though they had my old Wyoming info. But seriously, folks, are we expecting the DMV to be this efficient?
A similar note: Why do we have translators at voting booths? One of those foreign workers told me her parents were becoming citizens, and to be naturalized they had to pass English competency exams. She pointed out that if you are born here, you speak English, and if you are naturalized you have to learn to speak English, so translators must be for people who are not citizens.
Yet the Left squeals that lack of translators at voting precincts is voter suppression.