Justplainbill's Weblog

July 30, 2015

The Truth About Western “Colonialism”, by Bruce S. Thornton [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, Econonics, Education, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Islam, Media Check, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 5:58 pm

The Truth About Western “Colonialism”
July 29, 2015 10:35 am / 12 Comments / victorhanson
How the misuse of a term legitimizes the jihadist myth of Western guilt.

by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas
Photo via Front Page Magazine

Photo via Front Page Magazine

Language is the first casualty of wars over foreign policy. To paraphrase Thucydides, during ideological conflict, words have to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which is now given them.

One word that has been central to our foreign policy for over a century is “colonialism.” Rather than describing a historical phenomenon––with all the complexity, mixture of good and evil, and conflicting motives found on every page of history––“colonialism” is now an ideological artifact that functions as a crude epithet. As a result, our foreign policy decisions are deformed by self-loathing and guilt eagerly exploited by our adversaries.

The great scholar of Soviet terror, Robert Conquest, noted this linguistic corruption decades ago. Historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism,” Conquest wrote, now refer to “a malign force with no program but the subjugation and exploitation of innocent people.” As such, these terms are verbal “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,” which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.” Particularly in the Middle East, “colonialism” has been used to obscure the factual history that accounts for that region’s chronic dysfunctions, and has legitimized policies doomed to fail because they are founded on distortions of that history.

The simplistic discrediting of colonialism and its evil twin imperialism became prominent in the early twentieth century. In 1902 J.A. Hobson’s influential Imperialism: A Study reduced colonialism to a malign economic phenomenon, the instrument of capitalism’s “economic parasites,” as Hobson called them, who sought resources, markets, and profits abroad. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin, faced with the failure of classical Marxism’s historical predictions of the proletarian revolution, in 1917 built on Hobson’s ideas in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Now the indigenous colonized peoples would perform the historical role of destroying capitalism that the European proletariat had failed to fulfill.

These ideas influenced the anti-colonial movements after World War II. John-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Franz Fanon’s anti-colonial screed The Wretched of the Earth, wrote, “Natives of the underdeveloped countries unite!” substituting the Third World for classic Marxism’s “workers of the world.” This leftist idealization of the colonial Third World and its demonization of the capitalist West have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Marxism, and have become received wisdom both in academe and popular culture. It has underwritten the reflexive guilt of the West, the idea that “every Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent,” as French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, for the West contains an “essential evil that must be atoned for,” colonialism and imperialism.

This leftist interpretation of words like colonialism and imperialism transforms them into ideologically loaded terms that ultimately distort the tragic truths of history. They imply that Europe’s explorations and conquests constituted a new order of evil. In reality, the movements of peoples in search of resources, as well as the destruction of those already in possession of them, is the perennial dynamic of history.

Whether it was the Romans in Gaul, the Arabs throughout the Mediterranean and Southern Asia, the Huns in Eastern Europe, the Mongols in China, the Turks in the Middle East and the Balkans, the Bantu in southern Africa, the Khmer in East Asia, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Iroquois in the Northeast, or the Sioux throughout the Great Plains, human history has been stained by man’s continual use of brutal violence to acquire land and resources and destroy or replace those possessing them. Scholars may find subtle nuances of evil in the European version of this ubiquitous aggression, but for the victims such fine discriminations are irrelevant.

Yet this ideologically loaded and historically challenged use of words like “colonial” and “colonialist” remains rife in analyses of the century-long disorder in the Middle East. Both Islamists and Arab nationalists, with sympathy from the Western left, have blamed the European “colonialists” for the lack of development, political thuggery, and endemic violence whose roots lie mainly in tribal culture, illiberal shari’a law, and sectarian conflicts.

Moreover, it is blatant hypocrisy for Arab Muslims to complain about imperialism and colonialism. As Middle East historian Efraim Karsh documents in Islamic Imperialism, “The Arab conquerors acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.” Indeed, if one wants to find a culture defined by imperialist ambitions, Islam fits the bill much better than do Europeans and Americans, latecomers to the great game of imperial domination that Muslims successfully played for a thousand years.

“From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire,” Karsh writes, “the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams.”

A recent example of this confusion caused by careless language can be found in commentary about the on-going dissolution of Iraq caused by sectarian and ethnic conflicts. There is a growing consensus that the creation of new nations in the region after World War I sowed the seeds of the current disorder. Ignoring those ethnic and sectarian differences, the British fashioned the nation of Iraq out of three Ottoman provinces that had roughly concentrated Kurds, Sunni, and Shi’a in individual provinces.

There is much of value to be learned from this history, but even intelligent commentators obscure that value with misleading words like “colonial.” Wall Street Journal writer Jaroslav Trofimov, for example, recently writing about the creation of the Middle Eastern nations, described France and England as “colonial powers.” Similarly, columnist Charles Krauthammer on the same topic used the phrase “colonial borders.” In both instances, the adjectives are historically misleading.

France and England, of course, were “colonial powers,” but their colonies were not in the Middle East. The region had for centuries been under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Thus Western “colonialism” was not responsible for the region’s dysfunctions. Rather, it was the incompetent policies and imperialist fantasies of the Ottoman leadership during the century before World War I, which culminated in the disastrous decision to enter the war on the side of Germany, that bear much of the responsibility for the chaos that followed the defeat of the Central Powers.

Another important factor was the questionable desire of the British to create an Arab national homeland in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and to gratify the imperial pretensions of their ally the Hashemite clan, who shrewdly convinced the British that their self-serving and marginal actions during the war had been important in fighting the Turks.

Obviously, the European powers wanted to influence these new nations in order to protect their geopolitical and economic interests, but they had no desire to colonize them. Idealists may decry that interference, or see it as unjust, but it is not “colonialism” rightly understood.

No more accurate is Krauthammer’s use of “colonial borders” to describe the region’s nations. Like all combatants in a great struggle, in anticipation of the defeat of the Central Powers, the British and French began planning the settlement of the region in 1916 in a meeting that produced the Sykes-Picot agreement later that year. But there is nothing unexceptional or untoward in this. In February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Yalta to negotiate their spheres of influence in Germany and Eastern Europe after the war. It would be strange if the Entente powers had notlaid out their plans for the territories of the defeated enemy.

Thus as part of the peace treaties and conferences after World War I, the French and British were given, under the authority of negotiated treaties and the supervision of the League of Nations, the “mandates” over the former Ottoman territories lying between Egypt and Turkey. In 1924 the goal of the mandates was spelled out in Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant: “Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”

Thus the nations created in the old Ottoman territory were sanctioned by international law as the legitimate prerogative of the victorious Entente powers. There was nothing “colonial” about the borders of the new nations.

One can legitimately challenge the true motives of the mandatory powers, doubt their sincerity in protesting their concern for the region’s peoples, or criticize their borders for serving European interests rather than those of the peoples living there. But whatever their designs, colonizing was not one of them. Indeed, by 1924 colonialism had long been coming into question for many in the West, and at the time of the post-war settlement the reigning ideal was not colonialism, but ethnic self-determination as embodied in the nation-state, as Woodrow Wilson had called for in February 1918: “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” The Anglo-French Declaration issued a few days before the war ended on November 11, 1918 agreed, stating that their aims in the former Ottoman territories were “the establishment of National Governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.”

Again, one can question the wisdom of trying to create Western nation-states and political orders in a region still intensely tribal, with a religion in which the secular nation is an alien import. That incompatibility continues to be an ongoing problem nearly a century later, as we watch the failure of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the hopes of the Arab Spring dashed in the violence and disorder of the Arab Winter.

But whatever the sins of the Europeans in the Middle East, colonialism is not one of them. The misuse of the term may sound trivial, but it legitimizes the jihadist narrative of Western guilt and justified Muslim payback through terrorist violence, now perfumed as “anticolonial resistance.” It reinforces what Middle East scholar J.B. Kelly called the “preemptive cringe,” the willingness of the West to blame itself for the region’s problems, as President Obama did in his 2009 Cairo speech when he condemned the “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.”

This apologetic stance has characterized our foreign policy and emboldened our enemies for half a century. Today the region is in more danger of collapse into widespread violence and more of a threat to our national interests than at any time in the last fifty years. Perhaps we should start crafting our foreign policy on the foundations of historical truth and precise language.

July 16, 2015

Martial Law in the U.S., by Robert Richardson [nc]

Filed under: crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, gun control, handguns, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Islam, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Military, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, self-defense, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:46 pm

Martial Law in the United States: How Likely is it, and What will happen under Martial law?
Filed under Man-made Disasters, Preparedness, Threats
Posted by: Robert Richardson

The march towards martial law is something that is often ignored by the general public, often labeled as Quackery or something belonging on conspiracy websites. But what’s happening in this country is exactly what our founders warned us about, and martial law is something they took very, very seriously.
What is martial law?

If you’re looking for a definition, then Martial Law basically means using state or national military force to enforce the will of the government on the people.

Under a declaration of martial law, Constitutional freedoms and liberties are suspended, and civilians are no longer entitled to their civil rights. It basically allows the government, or a tyrannical politician, to shred the Constitution and impose its will through military force.
History of Martial Law in the United States of America

“Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.”
Winston Churchill

In one way or another there have always been tyrants who have used the power of government to suppress and control the public. But if we are looking for specific examples of Martial Law being used inside the United States, we don’t have to look very hard or far to find them.

Using the strictest definition of the term, we can see the roots of martial law in America take hold during the lead up to the Revolutionary war. Although there were many reasons for the war, including resistance to taxes imposed by the British parliament, the main catalyst was England’s decision to use military troops to enforce everyday law throughout the colonies.
The beginning of the end? The Civil War Ushers in a Strong Central Government through Martial Law Enforcement

Civil War Soldiers

Flash forward a hundred years, and many of the most egregious examples of martial law can be found throughout the civil war. While today’s history books largely ignore the real reasons for the war, or the many atrocities committed by President Lincoln, the facts of what really happened cannot be disputed.

The reason we have lost so many of our liberties can be tied directly to the civil war.

On September 15, 1863, President Lincoln imposed Congressionally-authorized martial law. While history contends the war was fought to end slavery, the truth is, Lincoln by his own admission never really cared about freeing slaves. In fact, Lincoln never intended to abolish slavery, his main interest was centralizing government power and using the federal government to exert complete control over all citizens. The abolishment of slavery was only a byproduct of the war; it actually took the 13th amendment to end slavery, since Lincoln actually only freed Southern slaves, not slaves in states loyal to the Union.

During the Civil War, Lincoln continually violated the Constitution, in some cases suspending the entire Constitution that he swore to uphold.

He suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus without the consent of congress.
He shutdown newspapers whose writers displayed any dissent to Union policy or spoke out against him.
He raised troops without the consent of Congress.
He closed courts by force.
He even imprisoned citizens, newspaper owners and elected officials without cause and without a trail.

Our founders were very wary of using the military to enforce public policy, and concerns about this type of abuse date back to, and largely influenced, the creation of the Constitution. The founders continually warned about using military force to uphold law and order; unfortunately, most Americans are rather ignorant of history and are even more ignorant to what our actual founders intended when they created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
What will happen under Martial law?

Military Style SWAT Team Raid

The actual words martial law will probably never be used.

The first thing you will likely see is a declaration of a “State of Emergency”. This may be done nationally, in cases of war or a large-scale terrorist attacks; or it may happen locally, as witnessed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In August of 2005, New Orleans was declared a disaster area and a state of emergency was declared by the governor. This allowed state officials to order evacuations and forcefully remove residents from their homes, suspend certain laws, confiscate firearms, and suspend the sale of items like liquor, firearms and ammunition.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police, the U.S. Marshalls office, and the Louisiana National Guard forcibly confiscated over 1,000 legal firearms from law-abiding citizens.

Depending on the reasons behind the declaration you may also see:

The suspension of the Constitution, probably starting with the first and second amendment.
Confiscation of firearms; it has happened and it will happen again.
Suspension of Habeas corpus: Imprisonment without due process and without a trail.
Travel Restrictions, including road closures and possibly even quarantine zones.
Mandatory Curfews and Mandatory Identification.
Automatic search and seizures without warrant.

When can Martial Law be enacted?

Military Force

When Martial Law can be enacted is a pretty touchy subject, largely because our founders never intended the federal government or a standing army be permitted to take such actions. Unfortunately, most people accept these unconstitutional activities, and are more than willing to give up their essential liberties in exchange for peace of mind and not having to think for themselves.

This is something Benjamin Franklin warned about when he famously wrote,
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

How likely is martial law in the United States?

Let’s face it, this country is a ticking time bomb. From widespread social unrest, crime and violence to a growing national debt which includes an entire subset of our population that depends on government assistance to exist, the writing is on the wall: Trouble is Coming.

Riots in the Streets of America

In my opinion, we are already under a form of martial law. The founders never intended standing armies policing the citizens of the United States; sadly that is exactly what we have.

Drones, armored vehicles with high power weapons, tanks, and battlefield helicopters are no longer something that you see on some foreign battlefield; it’s now standard operating procedure at police stations throughout the country. Our federal government has poured billions of dollars into militarizing and taking over our country’s local police forces, in what can only be described as a domestic military force or standing army meant to enforce federal law.

President Bush Expands Martial Law Authority

George Bush Signing Bill

On September 29, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122). The law expanded the President’s authority to declare Martial Law under revisions to the Insurrection Act, and actually allowed the President to take charge of National Guard troops without state governor authorization.

While certain aspects of the bill were rolled back in 2008, President Obama used the 2012 NDAA to further strengthen the Executive offices ability to declare Martial Law, and added provisions that would allow military troops to detain U.S. citizens without a trial.

President Obama Forms National Police Task Force; Uses Social unrest as Justification.

Obama Signing Bill

In March of 2015, the Obama administration put together a task force that outlined rules for our nation’s police.

In his Task Force on 21st century policing report, he outlined the formation of a National Policing Practices and Accountability Division within the federal government. The report went on to describe how the Department of Homeland Security could be used to “ensure that community policing tactics in state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies are incorporated into their role in homeland security.”

Increasing number of Joint Police/Military Drills are using American Citizens as Theoretical Threats.

Military Style Police Force

From the Jade Helm Military drills that classified Texas and Utah as hostile zones, to National Guard troops in California using crisis actors to portray “right-wing” U.S. citizens in their training exercises, there is a growing number of military style drills that are portraying American citizens as the perceived threat.

Back in 2012, an army report about the future use of the military as a police force within the United States looked at theoretical situations where the U.S. Army could be used against Tea Party “insurrectionists” who take over U.S. cities. During that same time period, the Department of Homeland Security released a report titled, “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States,” where they outlined who the federal government sees as the largest terrorist threat in the country – that threat was U.S. citizens with extreme “right-wing” views.

The United Stated of America that our Founders created is gone; it’s been replaced by a system that has grown so powerful that most people don’t even realize they’ve become enslaved by that very system.

So how likely is Martial Law in the United States? Well, it’s already here; unfortunately, most people will choose to ignore the reality of the situation.

June 24, 2015

America: One Nation, Indivisible, by Victor Hanson [c]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, crime control, Historical context, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 2:19 pm

America: One Nation, Indivisible
June 24, 2015 1:57 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
The Confederate battle flag is far from the only worrisome symbol in America today.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Protesting the Confederate flag in Columbia, S.C. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty)
Everyone is weighing in on the horrific murders in Charleston and blaming the mindset of the mass murderer on wider social pathologies. After the airing of the racist crackpot ideas of the unhinged Dylann Roof, calls have gone out to ban the public flying of the battle flag of the Old Confederacy, which has also been incorporated in various forms in four state flags. Perhaps we should step back and eschew symbolism that separates us by race rather than unites us as fellow citizens.
Aside from the specious argument that the flag, along with media like Fox News and talk radio, fuels homicidal maniacs like Roof, there is quite another question: whether implicit state endorsement of Confederate symbolism offers sanction for the old idea of an apartheid nation, and thus sends entirely the wrong message of American separatism rather than unity. While many Southerners object that the flag simply proclaims the battlefield honor of those who were defending their homeland, the Confederacy was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today, can evoke racial polarization. For all the Southern patriots who understandably see in the Confederate battle flag the historical resonance of Pickett’s Charge or the resistance to Sherman’s March to the Sea, there are probably just as many who equally understandably consider it a nostalgic icon of white supremacy. In a racially diverse society, it makes sense to phase out state sanction for the battle flag — as South Carolina governor Nikki Haley advocated yesterday, in calling on the state legislature to vote for the removal of the battle flag that has been flying over the grounds of the state capitol.

But perhaps we should not stop there, given increasing ethnic tensions and widening racial fault lines. There are plenty of other overt racialist symbols that separate Americans. One is the prominent use of La Raza, “The Race” — seen most prominently in the National Council of La Raza, an ethnic lobbying organization that has been and is currently a recipient of federal funds. The National Council of La Raza should be free to use any title it wishes, but it should not expect the federal government to subsidize its separatist nomenclature.
The pedigree of the term La Raza is just as incendiary as that of the Confederate battle flag. The Spanish noun raza (cf. Latin radix: “root” or “race”) is akin to the now-discarded German use of Volk, which in the early 20th century came to denote a common German racial identity that transcended linguistic and cultural affinities: To be a real member of the Volk one had to “appear” German, in addition to speaking German and possessing German citizenship.
La Raza is just such a racialist term. It goes beyond a common language and country of origin, and thus transcends the more neutral puebla(“people”: Latin populus) or gente (“people”: Latin gens). Raza was deliberately reintroduced in the 1960s to promote a racially superior identity of indigenous peoples and mestizos born in the Spanish-speaking countries of the New World. That is why the National Council of La Raza once had a close affinity with MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), the infamous racialist U.S. student group (its ironic motto is “Unity creates strength”), some of whose various past slogans (cf. the Castroite derivative “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada”) finally became sources of national embarrassment.
La Raza is now a calcified separatist slogan, one full of implications that are unworthy of taxpayer support.
The use of the phrase La Raza reflects its illiberal modern origins. It came into popular currency during the 1930s in Spain, when the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco wished to promote a new Iberian identity that went well beyond the commonality of Spanish citizenship and fluency in the Spanish language. Franco expropriated La Raza to promote the racist idea that the Spanish were a superior people by birth. He penned a crackpot novel, Raza, embodying Fascist and racist themes of Spanish genetic and cultural superiority. La Raza appeared on the big screen in the form of a hokey 1942 Spanish-language movie, full of racist themes, anti-Americanism, and fashionable Fascist politics.
But Franco was only channeling another, more famous contemporary Fascist, Benito Mussolini, who had his own Italian version of the term, la Razza. In 1938 Mussolini published his Manifesto della Razza (“The Racial Manifesto”), which defined Italians as a superior Aryan race and excluded Italian Jews, Africans, and other supposedly less pure groups from various positions in the Italian government.
In sum, the word “Raza” has a disturbing recent history, and that is why Spaniards and Italians today have dropped its common usage. Yet that well-known association with racial chauvinism was precisely why the founders of the National Council of La Raza, by their own admission, reawakened the word in the 1960s to focus on what they saw as a particular racial category of Spanish speakers. But La Raza is now a calcified separatist slogan, one full of implications that are unworthy of taxpayer support.

One wonders why in 2015 there is still nomenclature such as “the Congressional Black Caucus,” over half a century after the civil-rights movement sought to promote integration and the idea that Americans should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.. The Caucus ostensibly seeks to ensure the end of exclusion by race from full participation in American society by creating a lobbying group focused entirely on one particular race. The postmodern rationale is either that groups that have suffered past disfranchisement and discrimination should not be subject to current anti-discriminatory protocols, or that they should at least enjoy a compensatory period of exclusion from color-blind values to offset centuries of oppression.
The premise seems to be that African-American House members seek to promote a common “black” agenda that transcends their local, county, or state interests.
Thus the group’s membership is entirely race-based. The Caucus is not open to those members of the House of Representatives who are not African-American, but who might share the Caucus’s racial or political agenda — as the Jewish-American Representative Steven Cohen learned when he was elected to Congress in 2006. The Lebanese-American Ralph Nader was once attacked at a Caucus meeting in clearly racial terms on the understanding that the group was exempt from charges of racism. How far is the racial concept transferable — “the Asian Caucus”? “the Latino Caucus?” “the White Caucus?” “the European-American Caucus”? The premise seems to be that African-American House members seek to promote a common “black” agenda that transcends their local, county, or state interests. If an Asian, white, or Latino voter’s congressional representative is a member of the “Black Caucus,” does that mean that the voter will receive less attention than a black voter — as de facto white caucuses in the Old South most certainly did ignore the interests of their non-white constituents? Is that why conservative African-American legislators who see all their constituents in terms that transcend race tend to avoid joining the Caucus? Could not the “Black Caucus” rebrand itself as the “Civil Rights Caucus” or the “Progressive Caucus”?

Reexamination of the battle flag offers us a teachable moment. Critics made a good point that any state sanction of the secessionist flag inevitably sends the wrong message to millions of Americans, who in their private lives are free to display any symbol they wish. But the current racialist reaction to past racism has become equally indefensible in an increasingly fragile multiracial state. The state should not support any racially separatist symbols, titles, or groups.
We should pause to appreciate that the American democratic experiment in ethnic and racial diversity is nearly unique. Indeed, the very idea of racial diversity and nationhood does not have much of a record of success in history. Few countries have been able to transcend their ethnic origins and sustain a racially pluralistic society. Rome was an exception and pulled it off for nearly 500 years, as the Roman Empire grew to encompass non-Italian peoples from the Euphrates to Scotland before unwinding into tribal chaos. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires worked for long periods, though they relied on the use of autocratic force and imperial coercion to suppress minorities, in ways antithetical to modern notions of governance.
In more recent times, religious and racial diversity — in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, or contemporary Nigeria — has resulted in chaos and, occasionally, genocide. True, some nations have been able to incorporate different tribes, as in the United Kingdom’s unification of the various peoples of the British Isles, but usually after hundreds of years of fighting and only when there were underlying racial and cultural affinities that could trump tribal differences.
In other words, the United States is history’s exception, not its rule. America is a great, evolving experiment of a constitutional republic in which peoples of all different races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds are equal under the law and see themselves as Americans first and members of tribes second — appearance and religion being incidental rather than essential to the American body politic.
In an America that was originally founded by mostly Northern European immigrants, a Juan Lopez from Oaxaca is freely accepted as a U.S. citizen in a way that a white Bob Jones would never fully be embraced as a citizen of Mexico, a country whose constitution still expressly sets out racially chauvinistic guidelines that govern immigration law. Someone who appears African or European would have a hard time fully integrating as a citizen in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese society, in a way not true of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in America. The world assumes that in America a president, attorney general, secretary of state, or Supreme Court justice can be black; but it would be as surprised to find whites as high public officials in Zimbabwe as to find a black as prime minister or foreign minister in Sweden or Germany.
In the last half-century, Americans have increasingly tended to emphasize race and tribe in promoting “diversity,” rather than seeking to strengthen the more tenuous notion of unity with their fellow citizens. We have forgotten that human nature is fond of division and must work at setting aside superficial tribal affinities to unite on the basis of core values and ideas.
Symbols, flags, organizations, and phrases that emphasize racial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as expected.
That would be a great tragedy, but a catastrophe entirely predictable if citizens seek symbolic solidarity with their tribe rather than in the common idea of just being American.

[And, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, The Italian anti-Defamation League, &c.

Personally, when advertising agencies aim at one ethnic group rather than the entire market segment, in the interest of diversity, and polling companies don’t include ‘American’ as a demographic group, the racism becomes more and more ingrained in the culture to the detriment of ALL!.]

June 17, 2015

Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies, by Bruce. S. Thornton, [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Iran, Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, Uncategorized, Valerie Jarrett, Yemen — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 5:21 pm

The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies
June 17, 2015 3:06 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

middle-east-scholarshipsIn theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.

Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern Studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand [3], most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––“a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written [4], “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”­­––Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.

Yet Said’s baleful influence has not been limited to Middle East Studies programs, one of which has been created at my campus of the California State University, replete with theproblems [5] Kramer catalogues. It has insidiously corrupted much of the humanities and social sciences, operating under the innocuous rubric of “postcolonial” studies, which to the unwary suggests a historical rather than an ideological category. Through General Education courses that serve students across the university, and in departments like English that train primary and secondary school teachers, Saidian postcolonial ideology has been shaping the attitudes and presumed knowledge of Islam and the Middle East far beyond the reach of Middle East Studies programs.

Said’s dubious argument in Orientalism is that the work of Western scholars on the Middle East embodied “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” thus creating the intellectual infrastructure for justifying colonialism and imperialism. As such, every European scholar perforce was “a racist, an imperialist, and totally ethnocentric.” For social science and humanities departments committed totally to the multiculturalist melodrama of white racism and oppression of the dark-skinned “other,” Said’s work seemingly provides scholarly bona fides to ideas that are in fact expressive of illiberal grievance politics.

English departments have been particularly vulnerable to Said’s work, for he overlaid his bad history with watered down Foucauldian ideas about the relationship of power to discourse. Thus English professors seduced by the poststructuralist theory ascendant in 1978 when Orientalism was published found in that book a seemingly sophisticated theoretical paradigm that shared both poststructuralism’s disdain for objectivity and truth, and its “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the notion that the apparent meaning of a discourse is a mask for the sinister machinations of power at the expense of the excluded “other.”

More important, postcolonialism is a politically activist theory, bound up as it is in the politics of the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now English professors could avoid the legitimate charge that poststructuralism, despite its patina of leftist ideology, was in fact an evasion of politics, a “symbolic politics,” as historian Russell Jacoby put it, “a replacement for, and a diversion from, the gritty politics of the community and the street.” On the contrary, the purveyors of postcolonialism were on the barricades, struggling to liberate Palestinians and other Muslims oppressed by a neo-imperialist America and its puppet Israel. Rather than pampered elitists guaranteed jobs for life, now the professors could fancy themselves freedom fighters and champions of the ex-colonial brown peoples still exploited and oppressed by the capitalist, racist West.

Finally, the dogma of multicultural “diversity” now firmly enshrined in American universities likewise has found Saidian postcolonialism a useful tool for interpreting and teaching literature, one that exposes the Western literary canon’s hidden racism and oppression. Moreover, in a university like Fresno State, half of whose students are minorities, a postcolonial perspective can establish a rapport with minority students who are encouraged to interpret their own experiences through the same lens of unjust exclusion and hurtful distortions of their culture and identity. At the same time white students are schooled in their privilege and guilt, minorities can be comforted by a narrative that privileges them as victims of historical oppression, one masked by the unearned prestige of the classics written by “dead white males.” Now minority students learn that Shakespeare’s Caliban is the true hero the Tempest with whom they should identify, the displaced victim of rapacious colonialists and slavers like Prospero who unjustly define the indigenous peoples as savages and cannibals in order to justify the brutal appropriation of their lands and labor.

Over the thirty years I have taught in the California State University, I have seen this transformation of the English department. Reading lists dominated by contemporary ethnic writers are increasingly displacing the classics of English literature, and even when traditional works are on the list, the books are often taught from the postcolonial perspective. New hires more and more comprise those Ph.D.’s whose specialties lie in ethnic or “world” literature, replacing the Shakespeare scholars and others trained to teach the traditional English and American literary canon. The traditional content of a liberal education––“the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold wrote––is disappearing, replaced by multicultural melodramas of Western crime and guilt.

More important for the culture at large, many of these students will go on to earn teaching credentials and staff public schools. They will carry the postcolonial ideology into their own classrooms, influencing yet another generation and reinforcing a received wisdom that will shape their students’ understanding of the important threats to our national security and interests emanating from the Middle East, especially jihadism. And it will encourage ordinary citizens to assent to the demonization of our most valuable regional ally, Israel, currently battling the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement that can more easily gain traction among those who from grade school to university have been exposed to the postcolonial ideology.

The damage done to our foreign policy by Middle East Studies is obvious. The influence of the godfather of such programs, Edward Said, on the social sciences and humanities departments like English is more insidious and subtle. But it is no less dangerous.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/the-postcolonial-rot-spreads-beyond-middle-east-studies/

URLs in this post:

[2] Middle East Forum: http://www.meforum.org/

[3] Ivory Towers on Sand: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/IvoryTowers.pdf

[4] written: http://www.amazon.com/Lust-Knowing-Orientalists-Their-Enemies/dp/0140289232/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1434065002&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+irwin+for+lust+of+knowing

[5] problems: http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/70

Copyright © 2015 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.

May 20, 2015

The Unconstitutional TPA Bill, by Capt John USN [It’s worse than NAFTA!]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, China, Econonics, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Politicians, PRC, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 2:41 pm

Joseph R. John
To jrjassoc@earthlink.net
May 19 at 3:04 PM

The Republicans in the House and Senate have resurrected Fast Track Authority to give Obama the ability to bypass the checks and balances of congress. In order to pass it, they are trying to say that President Ronald Reagan would approve the UNCONSTITUTIONAL TPA Bill. They are “lying outright” to their fellow Congressmen–please read the below listed article that details what President Ronald Reagan did and based upon what we know of his conservative philosophy, what he would do today.—President Reagan cared about protecting American jobs for hard working men and women.

This TPA Bill will destroy the US Borders forever, and will open the flood gates to millions of Illegal Aliens from Mexico, from 11 Asian countries, and eventually will allow millions more Illegal Aliens to enter the United States thru the UN Resettlement Program (which is preventing Christian refugees from entering the US). Those refugees have been stealthily resettled by Obama in 195 cities across the nation for the last 6 years. To allow the flood gate to open to let foreign alien workers to enter the US, a time when 104 million Americans are unemployed is a crime against middle and low income Americans seeking employment.

I encourage you to take action to prevent the Republican leaders in the House and Senate from working with Pelosi and Reed to pass this Unconstitutional TPA Bill that will allow Obama to force the United States to abide by all UN Treaties. Rhinos go to the other side of the aisle to get votes to p[ass measures, and frustrate the will of their rank and file members. That is what Boehner has done in the past to fund and support Obama’s unconstitutional violation of Federal Immigration Laws—and he is doing it again to ram the Unconstitutional TPA Bill thru Congress.

The TPA Bill will eliminate the Constitutional requirement that 2/3rd of the US Senate must vote to approve and pass any international treaty with a foreign country. Obama is already violating the US Constitution and bypassing the US Senate, while he and Kerry negotiate a treaty with Iran, that was initiated by then Secretary of State Clinton. That Nuclear Weapons Treaty will allow Iran to develop and deploy nuclear weapons on their Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Those nuclear tipped missiles will become a threat and a dagger thrust poised to strike the heart of the United States’ homeland.

The TPA Bill will give up the US’ Sovereignty to the Marxists, Socialist, and Communists in control of the UN who have been working with Obama to eliminate the 2nd Amendment rights of all Americans by forcing the Congress to abide by the UN Small Arms Treaty, a treaty that the US Senate has already voted down because it violates the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution, to the disappointment of Obama, Clinton, and Kerry.

Obama is still determined to force the US to abide by the anti 2nd Amendment UN Small Arms Treaty with the support of the block of 70 elected Socialist, Marxists, and Communist members of Congress.

The below listed E-mail will tell you how to easily contact your Senator and Congressmen and demand that they not listen to the outright lies the leaders of the House and Senate are promulgating about what President Reagan would do in regard to the Unconstitutional TPA Bill—please read the below listed article by Charles Benninghoff, Esq..

I first worked for Governor Reagan in his first presidential race against President Gerald Ford that we lost at the Republican Convention in Kansas City, then worked for President Reagan on and off for the next 10 years (a total of 14 remarkable years), and I believe he would never let this Unconstitutional TPA Bill pass under any circumstance. For the Republican leaders in the Senate and House to take President Reagan’s good name in vain, to get Republican members of Congress to pass the Unconstitutional TPA Bill, is further proof that the Republican leaders in control of the House and Senate are once again discrediting themselves in the eyes of hundreds of millions Patriotic Americans who knew and supported President Reagan.

I encourage you to help us protect and defend the US Constitution and the 2nd Amendment that millions of Americans servicemen fought and died to protect. I encourage you to demand that your Congressional representatives vote against the “SECRET” TPA Bill that is thousands of pages long, that no member of Congress has sat down and read in its entirety, and is another thousand page bill that is being jammed down the collective throats of hard working Americans by the Republican and Democrat leaders in Congress.

The TPA Bill will have much worse consequences for our freedom and independence, than the Obamacare Law that Obama and Pelosi jammed down the collective throats of all Americans. If the TPA Bill passes, it will further continue to transform The Free Enterprise System, that over the past 238 years, created the most effective economic engine in the history of mankind, and we will be “CHANGED” into a Socialist/Welfare State.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI/Reagan Administration Alumnus

Fax: (619) 220-0109

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

-Isaiah 6:8

From: jury.activehosted.com@s130.acemserv.com [mailto:jury.activehosted.com@s130.acemserv.com] On Behalf Of Pray For US
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 7:57 AM
To: jrjassoc@earthlink.net
Subject: Reagan vs. Obama

Desperate RINOs Claim Reagan Was Just Like Obama

05/19/2015

Dear Fellow Patriot,

Liberal Republicans (RINOs) in Congress are trying to claim that Ronald Reagan used Trade Promotion Authority, also known as fast-track trade powers, and therefore they must now renew Trade Promotion Authority for Obama immediately.

Liberals Republicans just love to invoke Ronald Reagan’s name while hoping that you will not pay any attention to the historical record.

This argument being pushed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and House Speaker John Boehner shows just how DESPERATE the RINOs are to pass fast-track powers for Obama.

The RINOs may have the votes to pass fast-track for Obama in the House, if they win this argument, and that is why they are promoting it right now.

Send FaxGrams to keep the pressure on House Republicans right now to deny fast-track powers from Obama!

Did Ronald Reagan use Trade Promotion Authority or fast-track powers?

ANSWER: Yes.

Did America lose millions of jobs under crippling trade deficits because of Ronald Reagan’s trade deals as we have seen under the Bushes, Clinton and Obama?

ANSWER: No.

Ronald Reagan was hated by the so-called “free-traders” because he always protected American jobs FIRST in trade agreements — which we know Obama will not do.

As an example, Japan tried to flood the American market with cheap cars in the 1980s. Reagan immediately stepped in and imposed import controls on Japan and he is credited with single-handedly saving the American auto industry.

Without Reagan’s actions, Ford and Chrysler would have gone belly-up at the time and hundreds of thousands of Americans would have lost good-paying jobs.

President Reagan protected American workers through dozens of trade agreements and at the end of his time in office, the free-traders at the Cato Institute wrote, “From the standpoint of free trade, we have seen only a few bright days in the last eight years.”

America has been losing jobs through trade agreements ever since Reagan left office:

The Bush-Clinton North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cost America 700,000 jobs.
The Obama Korea-US trade Agreement (KORUS) passed in 2012 cost America 65,000 jobs.
Opening communist China up to trade with the US cost America 2.1 million manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2011. The jobs of American workers are now being done by communist workers who are paid about $2,500 per year!

Ronald Reagan did not tolerate Americans losing their jobs because of trade agreements and that is the true conservative position! It is absolutely hypocritical of the RINOs to invoke Ronald Reagan’s name in their efforts to grant Obama fast-track trade powers.

Tell the Republicans in Congress to deny fast-track powers to Obama! Tell the House to vote NO on fast-track for Obama!

We are opposed to Obama’s trade deals and fast-track powers because these deals deliver the exact opposite of what they promise.

Deuteronomy 15:6 states, “For the Lord your God blesses you, as He promised you; and you shall lend unto many nations, but you shall not borrow; and you shall reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over you.”

Obama’s trade deals will put America further into debt to foreign countries and will allow those countries to reign over us by suspending congressional oversight.

Stop Obama from gaining fast-track powers! Tell Congress that Obama is NOT Ronald Reagan!

In 1892, Republican Senator William McKinley who would one day become President said, “Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations.”

This was the conservative position on trade until Ronald Reagan left office. Reagan protected our currency, our manufacturing jobs and our markets, something that no president has done since and certainly not Obama!

What has changed since Reagan left office? Multinational corporations are now permitted to give American congressional members untold billions of dollars each year, in essence bribing these elected officials to see things their way. And, “their way” does NOT include any concern about what happens to American workers, only what will realize for these international corporate giants the greatest profits!

Send your FaxGrams to deny Obama fast-track powers today!

Then, please tell others about this campaign by sending them this link:

https://PrayFor.US/150518_35264_p4us_pp_Stop_TPA_in_House/

Finally, call your Representative in the House at 202-224-3121 and let them know that you are opposed to Trade Promotion Authority for Obama.

Sincerely,

Charles Benninghoff Signature Image for Email

Charles Benninghoff, Founder
Pray For US
2360 Corporate Circle, Suite 400
Henderson, Nevada 89074-7722
Personal Cell: 949-510-1100

Saints’ Corner
Matt 5:15 Men should not
light a candle and put
it under a bowl, but
on a table, giving
light to all

It is more important that you pass
this message on to your
family, friends &
acquaintances
than give.

Copyright 2015 by Pray For US | All Rights Reserved
This may not be copied or reproduced in any way
without permission from Pray For US.
Email forwarding for personal use excepted.

Please forward this powerful call to action
to all of your family members, friends and acquaintances.

If this message was forwarded to you and you would like to sign up:
SUBSCRIBE

150518_35264_P4US_PP

1646

May 12, 2015

Authority to approve treaties UNCONSTITUTIONAL [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, China, Econonics, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Islam, Japan, Media Check, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Politicians, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:31 pm

Joseph R. John
To
jrjassoc@earthlink.net
May 11 at 4:37 PM
FYI
From: Joseph R. John [mailto:jrjassoc@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 2:29 PM
To: ‘Cdr William Ise’62, USN (Ret) (JAGC)
Subject: Republicans Congressional Leaders Giving Obama “Unconstitutional” Authority to By-Pass Congress in Approving Treaties

Bill,
In light of your comments with regard to the subject issue, you should review the below listed legal argument submitted by Dr Dennis Jackson. He states that there is no legal authority to delegate this type of authority because Congress does not have the right or authority to delegate this to a third party and surly not to the executive branch.
Specific mention is made of the Hamilton’s Paper 84 in his sophisticated argument, and he refers to the argument Madison made in Federalist Paper 45. You should share this with attorneys you communicate with and seek their support to ask their Senators not to pass the TPA Bill, because among many other destructive provisions, it eliminates all borders of the United States. We as a nation are in extremis because of the stupidity of the Republican leadership in Congress—this secret bill with thousands of pages no one has even seen is more destructive than Obamacare.

Respectfully,
Joe

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108

Fax: (619) 220-0109
Cell: (310) 989-8778

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8
From: Dennis Jackson Monday, May 11, 2015 8:11 AM
To: Joseph R. John
Subject: RE: Republicans Congressional Leaders Giving Obama “Unconstitutional” Authority to By-Pass Congress in Approving Treaties

Federalist Paper 45, Madison stated that the “powers.. delegated are few and defined”…

First we need to know what delegated means. Someone with authority allowed a subordinate to exercise the authority that is specifically defined. There is no authority to delegate this authority because congress does not have the right or authority to delegate this to a third party and surly not to the executive. Specific mention to Hamilton’s Paper 84 should be made here. Please see the paper, if you do not have a copy you can find a PDF on line so you can search it.

The Federalist has been used 291 times by the Supreme Court for guidance, it is Prima Facie intent of the Framers in developing the Constitution. The Federalist has also been used over 1500 times by lesser authorities in treatise, legal article and law reviews, it is a far gone conclusion.

The Debates also known as Elliot’s Debates are the foundation for the Federalist and are the notes from Madison who was the Secretary of the Convention. It is Gospel in the legal world. It is also available in PDF form. Until we as free men understand the system as it was intended we will forever be tilting windmills. The illusion created by decades of Marxist Methodology and socialist ideology is rampant. It may be past the breaking point. At the end of the day we are accountable for not informing ourselves. Relying on the officials who populate the halls of congress is about a smart as putting the wolf in the sheep pen to stand guard. We are the sheep dogs, those who know a lie when we hear it. We, as Samuel was commanded, are the watchmen on the wall and the protectors of the Republic.

It is sort of like navigation. The first things you do is fix your position. Without that you don’t know where you have come from or where you are going. It is that simple. The founding documents are the very least of the navigational tools. This is basic seamanship on the waters of history. It is our responsibility to know and be able to fix our position with whom ever we connect with. I have done this and even commented on a Socialist site. The response I got was many positive comments. The lady wrote me and commended my approach even though I identified myself as an NRA Life Patron Member, as Firearms Instructor and a Strict Construction Constitutionalist. There were other things as well but I am trying to be brief.

I have had other encounters and each time I quote Book and Verse of the Constitution , it original intent and the purpose for which it was written I get no takers fro an otherwise ravenous pack. The core issue her is, and there is always a core issue around which all the orbiting sub arguments are anchored to, none of the Socialists really understand the Document. They have been spoon fed the swill they regurgitate. When they get the truth in correct logical form they have no where to go. The truth is a powerful tool when you are able to articulate it. If you get caught in the rhetoric and succumb to the reaction to choke the shit out of some ass hole who desperately deserves it you loose. If you stay the course and don’t succumb and respond with truth and correct logic, as in Aristotelian Logic, they clam right up because that are not trained to combat logic. Its like a shoot out with a bunch of guys wielding clubs, slaughter.

So if you will look at this document that I am sending it will fix a position for you. Not only will it fix the position for the subject that I intended it for, immigration, it will fix the position for the instant cause in your communication. I think that I perhaps have sent this along but I wanted to refresh your memory and illustrate how simple a thing is if we simply educate ourselves. In other terms Jesus fought with the Pharisees for the same reason. They perverted the law with the “traditions of men”. This is the same way our Law, the Constitution, is being cut to pieces. We are fighting the same type of corruption with these critters who have sold their soul to Lucifer. Don’t believe me??? Get a copy of Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals”. He actually dedicated his book to Lucifer. The Biblical prophesies are exactly true and no one is in touch enough to see it. Remember the Jews were in denial right up to and into the gas chambers.
My gratitude to you sir. You are an honorable man and I am glad to see such in this day. I hope you take my words in the spirit in which they were intended. I may be a bit terse but I think candy coating is about as smart as shooting yourself in the foot. A word on how to treat these rascals and old Hindu Proverb:

“If you feed a serpent milk you only increase its venom.”

God Bless and Thank You for Your Service,
Dennis Jackson
________________________________________
From: jrjassoc@earthlink.net
To: jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Subject: Republicans Congressional Leaders Giving Obama “Unconstitutional” Authority to By-Pass Congress in Approving Treaties
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 00:34:40 -0700
On Tuesday the Republican leadership will encourage the House and Senate to vote to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Initiative; the bill is known as “Trade Promotion Authority” or TPA—no one has even seen thousands of pages of Obama’s Secret Trade Bill —now the Republican leadership is saying “we will have to pass it to see what is in it”. The Republican leaders are planning to give Obama “Carte Blanche” to enter into “Fast-Track Trade Treaties” in “total secrecy” eventually with future countries such as Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, etc., because Obama will be able to add other countries to this agreement, which is UNCONSTITUTIONAL; it “short circuits the legislative process” which requires a two thirds majority vote of the US Senate to approve Treaties. Republican leaders are planning to give Obama unprecedented power to curtail Congressional checks and balances on Treaties, even while they have been watching him for 6 ½ years, violate Federal Immigration Laws, the US Constitution, and Freedom of Religion for members of the US Armed Forces.

The TPA Bill has many damaging provisions, among them, it will allow millions of foreign workers to be given visas to enter the US at a time when 104 million Americans are unemployed, the TPA will open the way to import dangerous foods products that will negatively affect the health of unsuspecting Americans, according to Congressman Alan Grayson (R-FL-9) it will ship millions of American jobs overseas, it will “force the US” to abide by UN & EPA business destructive unproven climate change regulations, will “force the US” to abide by the UN’s Small Arms Trade Treaty(ATT) which was voted down by the US Senate & violates the 2nd Amendment’s provision that allows American citizens to purchase and sell their small arms, and it will force the US Congress to abide by every UN Treaty, undermining the sovereignty of the United States.

The TPA initially embraces 12 nations including the US, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Brunei, Darussalam, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore; however there is a provision in the agreement that allows Obama to add other countries in the future, like Cuba, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, etc.. The TPA is a secret Obama Law, like the secret Obamacare Law, that will allow the free flow of Mexican, South American, and Asian workers to enter the US (not only will the southern border remain wide open, but the US will no longer have any borders “at all”, or any barriers to entry), the millions of new entering foreign workers will willingly work for exceptionally lower wages under substandard conditions. Details in thousands of unread pages of this law have not been read or worked out, yet the Republican leadership is giving Obama “Fast-Track” authority to make any and all decisions in all and every treaty with the initial 12 countries and as many additional countries Obama decides on in the future, without Senate ratification (all future trade treaties will no longer be subject to the Constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority of the US Senate for ratification). Republican leaders are enhancing Obama’s control of foreign policy, while making the Congress irrelevant.

In order to deal with the millions of Americans who will be losing their jobs because of the TPA Bill, under the radar, the Republican leadership of the House and Senate is crafting a bill to go along with TPA, known as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Bill to be passed on the same day the TPA Bill is passed—-it should more appropriately be entitled the “Put all American Workers on Welfare Bill Because of the TPA Bill”. That new Trade Adjustment Assistance Bill specifically targets workers and farmers who lose their livelihood, because of this “Stupid TPA Bill” being promoted by the Republican leadership in Congress, which will result in millions of Americans losing their jobs because of what Obama will authorize in secret “Trade Treaties” with foreign countries, that will be devastating to the labor movement and jobs in the United States.

Once Obama uses his “Fast-Track” authority to agree with UN Regulations, Congress would not be able to modify or amend those TPP provision entered into solely by Obama himself, without Congressional involvement at all, and Obama’s individual decision would have the force of the “law of the land” under the US Constitution. This proposed “living agreement” by Republican leaders in Congress will seriously undercut the re-employment of 104 million unemployed Americans, because as a “living agreement”, it would leave the southern border of the US to be even more porous than it is today, and will allow Obama to change immigration policy “at will” without Congressional approval—those proposed provisions of the TPA are absolutely UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Republican leaders are approving the massive immigration of millions of Illegal Aliens from Mexico and from 12 other countries.

The Republican leadership will surrender its authority to write Federal Immigration Laws by passing TPA, thus enabling Obama to use his pen to simply authorize the importation of millions of non-Christian Asian, Japanese, Malaysian, Brunei, Darussalam, Singapore, and eventually Chinese and Iranian workers. According to the Greek Catholic Relief Agency, for over 6 ½ years, Obama has refused to allow any of the 300,000 Syrian and Assyrian Christian refugees in the Middle East to enter the US, while Canada has been resettling those Syrian and Assyrian Christians. Obama’s has only been allowing the entry of Muslim refugees thru the UN Muslim Refugees Resettlement Program, and has been intentionally excluded Christians. Now the Republican leadership is giving Obama the right to bring in millions of Asian immigrant workers who are also not of the Christian faith.

Obama has been resettling hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees in 195 cities across the nation without elected state and city officials being provided with specific details on who is being resettled in their cities, and without informing them who is going to pay for the health care, resettlement costs, transportation costs, education of refugee children, the welfare costs of refugee families, food stamps, and housing costs for hundreds of thousands of those Muslim refugees being brought into their communities.

Supporters of this aggressive secret Obama initiative include Democratic Progressives in Congress, Democratic Congressman Danny K. Davis who received an award from the Communist Party in 2012, David Cortright who is Obama’s close Chicago associate on the Committee for a Sane Nuclear policy (SANE), Communist Tom Hayden who is a member of “Progressives for Obama”, Democratic Congressmen in the “Hanoi Lobby” who are aggressively supporting normalization of relations with Cuba, Cora Weiss who is a strong supporter of Communism & a member of the Anti-War Movement, Adam Hersh from the liberal Center for American Progress, the left of center liberal media establishment, and the Democratic Progressive Caucus. Those Leftists, Marxists, Progressives, and Communists, have been getting the very aggressive support of the Republican leadership in the House and Senate, who have been working with the Democratic Progressive Caucus in Congress to pass the TPA (the 70 member Caucus includes Socialists, Progressives, Marxists, and Communists members of Congress),
.
The AFL-CIO Unions are on solid footing in their opposition to this “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority”. Responsible and clear thinking Democrats in Congress are against giving Obama “Fast-Track” authority with this labor damaging bill’ it will allow millions of new workers to enter the US, will force the Congress to abide by environmental protection standards that will restrict business development & job growth in the US, will allow currency manipulation, and will allow millions of new Mexican Illegal Alien workers to legally enter & work in the United States. The Republican leaders in Congress should use some degree of “Common Sense” and wait for 19 months, before they give the occupant in the Oval Office any trade promotion authority, and only if that trade authority is very limited. Hopefully the new occupant of the Oval Office, unlike Obama, will be a pro-American president who supports and abides by the provisions of the US Constitution.

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions has alerted the American people about the dangers of the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) speeding through Congress and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that TPA would help push. Senator S essions said, “The president has circumvented Congress on immigration with serial regularity. But the TPA would yield new power to the executive to alter admissions while subtracting Congressional checks against those actions,” he said in a “critical alert” dispatched by Senator Session’s office. Senator Sessions and several outside groups said Obama could change immigration policies between trading partners “at will” without any Congressional oversight. “The plain language of TPA provides avenues for Obama and trading partners to facilitate the expanded movement of foreign workers into the U.S. — including issuing visitor visas that are used as worker visas,” said Senator Sessions. The bases of that charge is a phrase in TPA calling it a “living agreement.” Sessions said that means that they can be changed after Congress approves them, and also that countries can be added in the future, including China. “It leaves it open for a president to change it without Congressional approval,” warned Jessica M. Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies. “Congress should not surrender its authority to write immigration laws to either the executive branch, to trade negotiators, and definitely not to international trade tribunals,” she added.

The Republican Leadership of the House and Senate are planning to give Obama free rein with “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority”, with full the knowledge of Obama’s very dangerous anti-American track record, and his pro-Marxist/Communist initiatives. Even the most casual observer of Obama’s dangerous foreign policy initiatives can’t help but understand that, in the past 6 ½ years, Obama foreign policy decisions have consistently favored the enemies of the Republic like Radical Islamic Terrorists in Libya, Communist China, Communist North Vietnam, Radical Islamic Terrorists in Iran, Radical Islamic Terrorist in the Muslim Brotherhood, Chavez’s Socialist Venezuela, Castro’s Communist Cuba, and Putin’s anti-American Russia—they have all collectively and repeatedly expressed their intent to destroy the Republic as it was created by the Founding Fathers.

A newly elected pro-American Patriotic US President would judiciously apply trade promotion authority negotiations by entering into separate Trade Treaties with 12 Asian and South American countries, while abiding by the provision of the US Constitution that requires a two thirds majority vote of the US Senate to approve each treaty. The American people need to rise up and oppose Obama’s secret TPA Bill by calling their Senate representatives at (202) 224-3121 and by sending FaxGrams to their Senate and Congressional representatives telling them to reject Obama’s “Fast-Track” authority which will permit Obama to enter into and force the Congress to abide by all UN Treaties, and will also permit Obama to enter into future secret treaties with countries such as Cuba, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, etc. This most recent initiative by Republican leadership in the House and Senate, follows their inept funding of Obamacare, illegal Immigration, and Obama’s wide open southern border policy thru September 2015, is approaching insanity and would be akin to allowing the fox into the chicken coop.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108

Fax: (619) 220-0109

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

To:
The Honorable Citizens of the United States, the House of Representatives, the Senate and Justices

Dear Souls:

I am delivering this message to inform you of a dire situation within our country. We, the People of the United States have been besieged by those who think so little of us as to consider us their prey. We are scorned, made light of and our system of election has even been accosted by those who would steal by fraud and deceit our very birthright. I cannot say that every person so situated is part of the faction that seeks to unilaterally place themselves above the law, without authority and to the detriment of the People as a whole. As human beings who are lawful citizens of these United States we are entitled to be fairly treated and our elected officials be in obedience to the Law they swore to uphold.

It both saddens and infuriates me to witness the destruction of our country by those who would make themselves our masters. We are not their servants, their slaves or surfs. We not only have the right to be free, we have the duty to demand and to exercise the mechanisms with which to free ourselves and the responsibility to ourselves and our posterity to make it so. But we cannot exercise that right and duty in the darkness of ignorance, we must be informed. We must understand the foundation of our system. To do this we must consult not those who pervert the Great Charter of our system of government but those who conceived and put this government to order. Those who bled and died lost their fortunes and families are the authority; the ones whose souls could not condone servitude are the voices that we must rediscover, not those who pretend and usurp.

I am sorry to say we have criminals in office, not by my word or act but their own. If it be their ignorance then they have this opportunity to correct it, if not they expose themselves for the traitors to the People they are.

CRIMINALS IN OFFICE

The legislature and others in government service or office have erected for themselves an elite status not authorized by the Constitution. As such it cannot be authorized by any law made in pursuance to the Constitution. Harry Reid says it’s the Law of the Land get over it, we say ok the Law of the Land. O’l Harry is quick to use the Law against the mere citizen but not on himself. Let’s examine the Law of the Land and just how these elites have made themselves lords over us.

We now live in a country where the people who make the law do not obey it. There is no authority to treat everyone differently or put one class of people over another. There is no grant of privilege by the Law of the Land to allow those who hold office any more right that the rest. A brief look into the basic law, the Constitution, and its history and intent will show any such notion to be completely without substance either inferred or expressly stated. Neither wealthy politicians of the right or the socialist exhibit any difference in this one idea.

The wealthy claim their elite status is due to their superior acumen in financial and economic affairs, while the socialists claim their elite status is due to their support of the down trodden and disadvantaged. But the common theme of them both is that they should be entitled to a status which is above their fellow. They grant themselves exemption from the same rules they enforce on others because they occupy a public office. The problem is that there is no such grant of authority and the status is one that is created for their sole benefit. In fact the overwhelming evidence is that there is to be no such distinction.
The delegates while debating the Constitution, the Framers, consistently put forth the effort to make sure no aristocratic class was set up or developed through service in government or holding office. In other words, no elite ruling class was intended. In fact the arrangement of and separation of powers and division of delegated authority was intended to prevent the formation of an aristocracy. This they were so intent upon it surfaced in the debates time and again. From Elliott’s Debates, the Notes of Madison during the Convention:
“We should remember that the people never act from reason alone. The rich will take
the advantage of their passions, and make these the instruments for oppressing them.
The result of the contest will be a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.
The schemes of the rich will be favored by the extent of the country. The people in
such distant parts cannot communicate and act in concert. They will be the dupes of
those who have more knowledge and intercourse. The only security against
encroachments will be a select and sagacious body of men, instituted to watch against them on all sides.”

Mr. MASON. “……Should the latter have the power of giving away the people’s money, they might soon forget the source from whence they received it. We might soon have an aristocracy.”

“Mr. BUTLER. There is no right of which the people are more jealous than that of
suffrage. Abridgments of it tend to the same revolution as in Holland, where they
have at length thrown all power into the hands of the senates, who fill up vacancies
themselves, and form a rank aristocracy.”

“Col. MASON ……. His idea of an aristocracy was, that it was the government of the few over the many. An aristocratic body, like the screw in mechanics, working its way by slow degrees, and holding fast whatever it gains, should ever be suspected of an encroaching tendency. The purse-strings should never be put into its hands.”

Madison gives us several methods of creating this aristocracy. The chief of these methods is for the legislature to control the electors or the candidates. This brings us to mind of targeting the conservative groups, like the Tea Party, by the IRS. When we see the lax enforcement of the laws and congress’ lack of energy in pursuing and punishing the offenders we begin to wonder why. Certainly the power of the two major political parties and the apparent cooperation of the main stream republicans to defeat outsiders we are left with at least a question in our minds. But the example represents mischief’s want to exclude those who are not of like mind and further consolidate the power in the hands of the few, the elite.

Mr. MADISON was opposed to the section, as vesting an improper and dangerous
power in the legislature. The qualifications of electors and elected were fundamental
articles in a republican government, and ought to be fixed by the Constitution. If the
legislature could regulate those of either, it can by degrees subvert the Constitution. A
republic may be converted into an aristocracy or oligarchy, as well by limiting the
number capable of being elected as the number authorized to elect. In all cases where
the representatives of the people will have a personal interest distinct from that of
their constituents, there was the same reason for being jealous of them as there was
for relying on them with full confidence, when they had a common interest. This was
one of the former cases. It was as improper as to allow them to fix their own wages, or
their own privileges. It was a power, also, which might be made subservient to the
views of one faction against another. Qualifications founded on artificial distinctions
may be devised by the stronger in order to keep out partizans of a weaker faction.

Madison’s Notes on the Debates

The continued persistence of the IRS in targeting conservative groups and the proposed new “rule change” further exhibit both the use of the bureaucracy to harass a political group. The IRS’ informal attack against conservative groups that are attempting to exert a lawful right, to freely associate on political subjects has been directly challenged by a bureaucratic agency. How convenient for the politicians. They have no control over the creature they have created. It is allowed to run amok, exactly as Madison gave example to, and harass a weaker faction. Never mind that free speech was exactly political speech during the Colonial period. Without any meaningful act of oversight by the legislature we have evidence again of the mindset of this “elite” class to preserve itself and position. If you add the support of the Chamber of Commerce and their explicit stated goal of spending tens of millions on candidates who support immigration reform, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the other “business friendly” agenda of the Chamber, we see a continuation of the same. The votes of the people become less and less meaningful and the “elite” secure their position by any means available, legal or otherwise. Don’t forget there are Democrats who want this Trans Pacific Partnership, just like Democrat legislators Waters and Pelosi voting to bail out the banks on the backs of the American People because they or family members had interests in the banks. Of course they are the “elite” they deserve it…..

The real question is, do the “elite” have some special privilege, secured by the Law of the Land?? Do they have the right, the authority to manipulate the system of elections, the economy and the government in order secure to themselves and their friends privilege that the People as a whole do not??? Of course we must consult the Law of the Land, remember what Harry said, in order to find out. We have seen the intention of the Framers when they were in debate discussing the Constitution. They were of a mind, so the records show, that no “aristocracy” was to be condoned and that they were initiating specific steps to block the formation of an “elite”.

The Framer’s line of reasoning continues into the Federalist Papers. The propensity of the “elite” to grant themselves special exemptions from the laws they wrote was addressed specifically. The writings of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison have been use over 1500 times to interpret the Constitution by the legislature and the courts. Madison states it best in Federalist 57. Madison places a great amount of emphasis on favoritism in the making and executing laws and makes it perfectly clear that it is the citizen’s duty through his vigilant manly spirit which is the guardian and intolerant force against such abuses of the legislature as well as the proper function of a Republican system:
“I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny. “
The Federalist, Paper 57, James Madison
Madison continues on to denounce the practice of elitist abuses in regard to the law and pronounces it the path to tyranny. He states plain language that the true and intended operation of the system “the nature of just and constitutional laws” was the safeguard but availing that it would be the American Spirit and strength as men and women.
“If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America — a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.
If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty.”
Federalist 57
So Madison states the “whole system” was intended to be a bar against favoring any person or group or people, especially an elite legislature of government/ruling class. A debased spirit that tolerates the legislature making laws for others it does not obey. Madison’s explanation is very enlightening. How far have we come to allow this to happen??? Shall we not be ashamed and unworthy of the liberty so hard won by blood, fortune and sorrow that we may be defeated as a debased spirit. Are we so debased of our own right of being that we gladly shackle ourselves to the yoke of oppression???

Nowhere in the Constitution is there any authority granted by the People to the officers, officials and employees of the government to violate any law by virtue of their office. The legislature does not get to pass judgment on itself for the violations of laws, only violations of virtue and ethical infractions. Article I Section 3 Clause 7 granting authority for impeachment only involves the removal from office. The offenders are still liable for criminal acts:

“Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office,
and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

Article I Section 3 Clause 7

The Constitution specifically states that the legislators are immune from arrest from and to sessions and are not liable for things said on the floor of their respective assemblies. But that is all the privilege they get. Treason, felonies and Breach of the Peace are expressly stated as charges they are liable for without reservation. Remember the term felonies….

Here is the exact text of the Constitution:
“They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
Article I Section 6 Clause 2, United States Constitution
The Constitution also states that there are to be:
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States….”,
Article I Section 9 Clause 8.
The concept has come through a clear line of reasoning form the Debates of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and finally in express terms in the body of the Constitution itself. This is the limit of authorization for the legislature and their very specific and limited immunity. We find no enlargement of privilege that even remotely allows the elected officials the right to violate the laws, either those in existence or even those they create. Such a law is immediately unconstitutional and without authority to make from the outset. It is an overreach of authority, one they do not have even in the plain language of the document itself. Where no authority is given and it is expressly forbidden any attempt to enact of even solicit such a mere piece of legislation is a violation of the Constitution and the oaths they all took.
Now look at the law that the politicians are violating every day the law they would change to dis- enfranchise you with by creating, with a stoke of a pen, a voting block so large that the People, the rightful citizens, would be overwhelmed and their very right to a meaningful vote be stolen:

Federal Immigration and Nationality Act
8 USC Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(iii)
“Any person who . . . encourages or induces an alien to . . . reside . . .
knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such . . . residence is . . .
in violation of law, shall be punished as provided . . . for each alien in
respect to whom such a violation occurs . . . fined under title 18 . . .
imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.”

Section 274 felonies under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, INA
274A(a)(1)(A):
A person (including a group of persons, business, organization, or local
government) commits a federal felony when she or he:

* assists an alien s/he should reasonably know is illegally in the U.S. or who
lacks employment authorization, by transporting, sheltering, or assisting him
or her to obtain employment, or

* encourages that alien to remain in the U.S. by referring him or her to an
employer or by acting as employer or agent for an employer in any way, or

* knowingly assists illegal aliens due to personal convictions.
Just how many politicians have spoken at pro “immigration” rallies, how many town and city councils have created “sanctuary cities” or even states, all felons. Now remember representatives and senators may be arrested for felonies without regard to the limited immunity, even while in session.
Not only have these criminals committed felonies for encouraging illegal aliens (Yes they are illegal aliens not illegal immigrants, the crooks use immigrant or immigration to make is seem less lawless.) People who invade our borders are aliens and they are illegal. They have never entered the immigration process. They never intended to enter the path to be lawful citizens. They have intentionally broken the law of the federal government, the state governments and something called the Law of Nations. Calling a lemon and apple does not make it an apple……
The example the whole “immigration” thing is an example of the song and dance these varmints go through to pull the wool over your eyes. They will not be above board and be forthright, they are afraid of what would happen if you Citizens knew the truth. Most are attorneys so ignorance of the law should never be a defense, it isn’t to us. There is no privilege to ignorance to the Constitution. If they took the oath they should know what they are signing on for.
Did I mention that you as a citizen, having knowledge of a Felony being or has been committed you can arrest the perpetrator????? Yep all legal like and in some states you may use force…. Remember there is no immunity for felonies for the legislators. So don’t be shy, they will not when they impose their hypocritical garbage on you. You can get more details at Google on citizen’s arrest. Do it right if you decide to. Don’t forget tell your friends, make it a party. So here is notice to them and to you. Tell the Criminals we don’t want any more criminals in office.
God Bless and Good Hunting,
Publius

April 15, 2015

Some Jefferson Quotes

Filed under: Business, crime control, Foreign Affairs, gun control, Political Commentary, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 8:32 pm

“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe .”
— Thomas Jefferson

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
— Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property – until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

On Abraham Lincoln and the Inversion of American History, by Boyd D. Cathey, [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 7:24 pm

On Abraham Lincoln and the Inversion of American History
By Boyd D. Cathey • April 15, 2015 • 1,700 Words • 15 Comments
• Reply
shutterstock_115238551

Back in 1990 in Richmond, Virginia, as part of the Museum of the Confederacy’s lecture series, the late Professor Ludwell Johnson, author and professor of history at William and Mary College, presented a fascinating lecture titled, “The Lincoln Puzzle: Searching for the Real Honest Abe.” Commenting on the assassination of Lincoln now 150 years ago, here is a portion of Dr. Johnson’s prepared remarks:

[After his death] for many, Lincoln became a symbolic Christ, for some, perhaps, more than symbolic. They could scarcely help themselves, the parallels were so striking. He was the savior of the Union, God’s chosen instrument for bringing the millenium to suffering humanity, born in a log cabin (close enough to a stable), son of a carpenter. . . . He was a railsplitter (close enough to carpentry), a humble man with the human touch, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, called by his followers to supreme greatness, struck down by Satan’s minions on Good Friday.

Said one minister in his Black Friday sermon: ‘It is no blasphemy against the Son of God and the Savior of Men that we declare the fitness of the slaying of the second Father of our Republic on the anniversary of the day on which he was slain. Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country’. . . . Another spoke of his ‘mighty sacrifice . . . for the sins of his people.’ Yet another proposed that not April 15, but Good Friday be considered the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. ‘We should make it a movable fast and ever keep it beside the cross and grave of our blessed Lord, in whose service for whose gospel he became a victim and a martyr.’

For years after the war the rumor persisted that Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield was empty. Lincoln was also frequently compared to Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land that he was not allowed to enter, and, like Moses after viewing Canaan, was taken by death.

It is right and fitting, then, given the legacy now increasingly laid at Lincoln’s feet, the resultant and seemingly unstoppable growth of the “Behemoth” managerial state that has occurred since his presidency, and the anniversary of his death, to examine again his actual meaning in the context of our history.

Probably too much has been written about Abraham Lincoln. Most school age children know almost nothing about him, except that “he freed the slaves,” which, of course, is patently untrue: he freed not one slave. Yet, his looming presence as a pre-eminent national lodestar, his role as a kind of holy icon after death, and the radical task he accomplished in completely restructuring the original American nation that the Founders created, remain constantly with us. In a real and palpable sense, as the text excerpted from Professor Johnson shows, Lincoln immediately became the founder and canonized “saint” of a “new” nation, in which the ideas of “democracy” and “equality” were enshrined as bedrock principles.

As the late Professor Mel Bradford illustrates abundantly in his signal volume, Original Intentions, with Lincoln and his successors, concepts rejected outright by most of the Founders and eschewed by the Authors of the Constitution, replaced the original understanding of what this nation was supposed to be and represent. The Gettsyburg Address makes clear that Lincoln based the American founding on the Declaration of the Independence (“Four score and seven years ago….”) and on his shaky reading of that war time document.

As such, today the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that are the most heinous, the most grave, in our benighted land are “crimes” against “equality,” whether committed against racial minorities, or against “women,” or against homosexuals who want to force the rest of us to fully accept their lifestyle…and “crimes” against “full democracy,” including voter IDs, and preventing illegals from full participation in all the goodies that the Federal government can dole

This is not to say that there is an unbroken, direct line connecting the “Lincolnian Revolution” of the 1860s with the public and private defecated culture and corrupt and managerial political system that engulf us today. Indeed, the history of the USA since 1865 is filled with vicissitudes and “curves and variations.” It would be unfair perhaps to blame Lincoln directly for these present happenings. Indeed, more than likely, as a 19th century liberal, he would be offended and shocked by much of what besets us today culturally and socially. But Lincoln, like other leaders of 19th century Liberalism, opened the door to future, much more radical change. So, while it is assuredly not correct to hold him responsible for, example, same sex marriage, there is a torturous genealogy that can be traced without injury to the historical narrative.

Of those radical changes that came as a result of the Lincolnian Revolution and that directly affect us today, the cataclysmic effects of the (illegally passed) 14th Amendment must be highlighted. Indeed, one could suggest that it is under the rubric of the 14th Amendment that most all of our present decay and distress has occurred. If there had been no 14th Amendment, would most of the horrendous court decisions we’ve seen have been rendered? Yet, the 14th Amendment grows directly out of the consequences of Southern defeat in 1865, in a War begun by Abraham Lincoln.

Certainly, there are those who would argue that the “Reagan years” or even the 1920s represented respites in this ongoing revolution. Nevertheless, the general and overwhelming propulsive movement, the historical dynamic, has been in just one direction. In sum, the triumph of the Lincolnian Revolution in the American nation was, in fact, the real triumph of the 19th century “Idea of Progress” and the belief in the inevitable and continuing liberation and enhancement materially and intellectually, of human kind.

It is interesting, I think, to focus the great Iliad of the Confederacy in the context of the brutal and vicious universal war between the forces of 19th liberalism and the forces of tradition and counter-revolution. The Confederacy, the old South, played a not unimportant role in that conflict, and, even if most Southerners did not recognize that context at the time, many European traditionalists, Legitimist royalists, and Catholics most certainly did.

In my research over the years, specifically while I studied in Spain and Switzerland, and then taught in Argentina, I was struck by the fact that almost without exception, all 19 th century traditional conservatives, Legitimists, and Catholics not only favored the Confederacy in its crusade against the North, but they did so enthusiastically, to the point that thousands of European traditionalists found their way to cities like New Orleans to volunteer to fight for the Confederate cause. As many as 1,800 former soldiers of the old Bourbon Kingdom of Naples (Two Sicilies) arrived in Louisiana in early 1861 to offer their services to the South after their defeat by the arms of the liberal Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy. Volunteers from the Carlist Catholic traditionalists in Spain came by way, mostly, of Mexico. According to Catalan historian, David Odalric de Caixal, as many as many as 4,000 Carlists enlisted in Confederate ranks, many in the Louisiana Tigers (see M. Estella, “Un historiador investiga la presencia de carlistas en la Guerra de Secesion,” El Diario de Navarra [Pamplona], December 9, 2011). French Legitimists (the “ultra-royalists” who opposed the “democracy” of the Citizen-King Louis Philippe) also volunteered, mostly notably the Prince Camille Armand de Polignac, a hero of the battle of Mansfield.

The Italian Duchy of Modena, under its duke Francesco V (called by modern writer and historian Sir Harold Acton, “the most reactionary ruler in all of Europe”), actually recognized the Confederacy. And Pope Pius IX offered de facto recognition to the Confederate cause, and his sympathies were quite open, as were the Confederate proclivities of the official publication of the Vatican, “La Civilta Catolica.” The Crown of Thorns that Pius IX wove with his own hands for President Jefferson Davis while Davis was a post-war prisoner in Fortress Monroe remains in a museum in New Orleans, a memorable relic of papal sympathy for the Confederacy.

And who can forget the favor given by and collaboration of the Habsburg emperor of Mexico, Maximilian? It was to his empire that many Confederate soldiers fled after Appomattox and Palmito Ranch. (Recall the John Wayne classic, “The Undefeated,” and other cinematic representations of that relationship?)

The traditionalist press in Europe openly believed that the Confederacy was part of a much greater conflict—a conflict, a universalized war, to halt the advance of the effects of the French Revolution, and to–if possible–reverse the worst aspects that resulted from the opening of that Pandora’s Box. And in particular, they visualized the Confederacy as a co-belligerent in the effort to stop the growth of “democratism” and “egalitarianism.”

Certainly, one can debate if this vision by European traditionalist conservatives was completely valid, or mere fancy. But the reasons supporting it, given our subsequent history, are strong in an ex post facto way.

What we are talking about is, then, the triumph in the 19 th century of a radical transformation in the way our society and our citizens look at history and change. Indeed, the result was the enthronement of the “Idea of Progress” as the norm, such that movement in history always is “progressive” or, better described, “a la Sinistra”–to the Left. And, given this template, does not the ongoing Leftward—”progressive”—movement of both Democrats AND Republicans in the US, as well as both Socialist and establishment “conservative” political groupings in Europe, make sense?

Until this narrative–this sanctified and blessed “progressivist” idealization–is overturned and reversed, we shall continue to be at the mercy of faux-conservatives who continue to lead us into more Revolution, even if by a slightly different route from the hardcore revolutionaries.

Thus, Professor Johnson’s account of the apotheosis of Lincoln and the enshrining of the “Lincoln Myth” go hand-in-hand with the mythologization of Garibaldi in Italy, or of Louis Blanc in France, as symbolic of what happened to an older, pre-Revolutionary civilization…and to the “exceptional” American nation along the way.

In the USA it really began in earnest, as Ludwell Johnson recounts, almost immediately after Lincoln’s death, and it continues full force today.

April 4, 2015

thereligionofpeace.com [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Islam, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, US Constitution, Valerie Jarrett, Yemen — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 2:51 pm

TheReligionofPeace.com
Guide to Understanding Islam

What does the
Religion of Peace
Teach About…

Violence

Question:

Does the Quran really contain dozens of verses promoting violence?

Summary Answer:

The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.

Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.

The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today’s Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book’s call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.

Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad’s own martial legacy – and that of his companions – along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Quran have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.

The Quran:

Quran (2:191-193) – “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing…

but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)” (Translation is from the Noble Quran) The historical context of this passage is not defensive warfare, since Muhammad and his Muslims had just relocated to Medina and were not under attack by their Meccan adversaries. In fact, the verses urge offensive warfare, in that Muslims are to drive Meccans out of their own city (which they later did). The use of the word “persecution” by some Muslim translators is thus disingenuous (the actual Muslim words for persecution – “idtihad” – and oppression – a variation of “z-l-m” – do not appear in the verse). The actual Arabic comes from “fitna” which can mean disbelief, or the disorder that results from unbelief or temptation. Taken as a whole, the context makes clear that violence is being authorized until “religion is for Allah” – ie. unbelievers desist in their unbelief.

Quran (2:244) – “Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah Heareth and knoweth all things.”

Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.” Not only does this verse establish that violence can be virtuous, but it also contradicts the myth that fighting is intended only in self-defense, since the audience was obviously not under attack at the time. From the Hadith, we know that this verse was narrated at a time that Muhammad was actually trying to motivate his people into raiding merchant caravans for loot.

Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”. This speaks directly of polytheists, yet it also includes Christians, since they believe in the Trinity (ie. what Muhammad incorrectly believed to be ‘joining companions to Allah’).

Quran (4:74) – “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” The martyrs of Islam are unlike the early Christians, who were led meekly to the slaughter. These Muslims are killed in battle as they attempt to inflict death and destruction for the cause of Allah. This is the theological basis for today’s suicide bombers.

Quran (4:76) – “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah…”

Quran (4:89) – “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.”

Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those of the believers who sit (at home), except those who are disabled (by injury or are blind or lame, etc.), and those who strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives. Allah has preferred in grades those who strive hard and fight with their wealth and their lives above those who sit (at home). Unto each, Allah has promised good (Paradise), but Allah has preferred those who strive hard and fight, above those who sit (at home) by a huge reward ” This passage criticizes “peaceful” Muslims who do not join in the violence, letting them know that they are less worthy in Allah’s eyes. It also demolishes the modern myth that “Jihad” doesn’t mean holy war in the Quran, but rather a spiritual struggle. Not only is this Arabic word used in this passage, but it is clearly not referring to anything spiritual, since the physically disabled are given exemption. (The Hadith reveals the context of the passage to be in response to a blind man’s protest that he is unable to engage in Jihad and this is reflected in other translations of the verse). Allah will allow the disabled into Paradise, but will provide a larger reward to those who are able to kill in his cause.

Quran (4:104) – “And be not weak hearted in pursuit of the enemy; if you suffer pain, then surely they (too) suffer pain as you suffer pain…” Is pursuing an injured and retreating enemy really an act of self-defense?

Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”

Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them” No reasonable person would interpret this to mean a spiritual struggle.

Quran (8:15) – “O ye who believe! When ye meet those who disbelieve in battle, turn not your backs to them. (16)Whoso on that day turneth his back to them, unless maneuvering for battle or intent to join a company, he truly hath incurred wrath from Allah, and his habitation will be hell, a hapless journey’s end.”

Quran (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah” Some translations interpret “fitna” as “persecution”, but the traditional understanding of this word is not supported by the historical context (See notes for 2:193). The Meccans were simply refusing Muhammad access to their city during Haj. Other Muslims were allowed to travel there – just not as an armed group, since Muhammad had declared war on Mecca prior to his eviction. The Meccans were also acting in defense of their religion, since it was Muhammad’s intention to destroy their idols and establish Islam by force (which he later did). Hence the critical part of this verse is to fight until “religion is only for Allah”, meaning that the true justification of violence was the unbelief of the opposition. According to the Sira (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 324) Muhammad further explains that “Allah must have no rivals.”

Quran (8:57) – “If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember.”

Quran (8:67) – “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land…”

Quran (8:59-60) – “And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip (Allah’s Purpose). Lo! they cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of (armed) force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

Quran (8:65) – “O Prophet, exhort the believers to fight…”

Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.” According to this verse, the best way of staying safe from Muslim violence is to convert to Islam (prayer (salat) and the poor tax (zakat) are among the religion’s Five Pillars). This popular claim that the Quran only inspires violence within the context of self-defense is seriously challenged by this passage as well, since the Muslims to whom it was written were obviously not under attack. Had they been, then there would have been no waiting period (earlier verses make it a duty for Muslims to fight in self-defense, even during the sacred months). The historical context is Mecca after the idolaters were subjugated by Muhammad and posed no threat. Once the Muslims had power, they violently evicted those unbelievers who would not convert.

Quran (9:14) – “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.” Humiliating and hurting non-believers not only has the blessing of Allah, but it is ordered as a means of carrying out his punishment and even “healing” the hearts of Muslims.

Quran (9:20) – “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.” The Arabic word interpreted as “striving” in this verse is the same root as “Jihad”. The context is obviously holy war.

Quran (9:29) – “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” “People of the Book” refers to Christians and Jews. According to this verse, they are to be violently subjugated, with the sole justification being their religious status. Verse 9:33 tells Muslims that Allah has charted them to make Islam “superior over all religions.” This chapter was one of the final “revelations” from Allah and it set in motion the tenacious military expansion, in which Muhammad’s companions managed to conquer two-thirds of the Christian world in the next 100 years. Islam is intended to dominate all other people and faiths.

Quran (9:30) – “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!”

Quran (9:38-39) – “O ye who believe! what is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling heavily to the earth? Do ye prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place.” This is a warning to those who refuse to fight, that they will be punished with Hell.

Quran (9:41) – “Go forth, light-armed and heavy-armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah! That is best for you if ye but knew.” See also the verse that follows (9:42) – “If there had been immediate gain (in sight), and the journey easy, they would (all) without doubt have followed thee, but the distance was long, (and weighed) on them” This contradicts the myth that Muslims are to fight only in self-defense, since the wording implies that battle will be waged a long distance from home (in another country and on Christian soil, in this case, according to the historians).

Quran (9:73) – “O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.” Dehumanizing those who reject Islam, by reminding Muslims that unbelievers are merely firewood for Hell, makes it easier to justify slaughter. It also explains why today’s devout Muslims have little regard for those outside the faith.

Quran (9:88) – “But the Messenger, and those who believe with him, strive and fight with their wealth and their persons: for them are (all) good things: and it is they who will prosper.”

Quran (9:111) – “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Quran: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? then rejoice in the bargain which ye have concluded: that is the achievement supreme.” How does the Quran define a true believer?

Quran (9:123) – “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”

Quran (17:16) – “And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.” Note that the crime is moral transgression, and the punishment is “utter destruction.” (Before ordering the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden first issued Americans an invitation to Islam).

Quran (18:65-81) – This parable lays the theological groundwork for honor killings, in which a family member is murdered because they brought shame to the family, either through apostasy or perceived moral indiscretion. The story (which is not found in any Jewish or Christian source) tells of Moses encountering a man with “special knowledge” who does things which don’t seem to make sense on the surface, but are then justified according to later explanation. One such action is to murder a youth for no apparent reason (74). However, the wise man later explains that it was feared that the boy would “grieve” his parents by “disobedience and ingratitude.” He was killed so that Allah could provide them a ‘better’ son. (Note: This is one reason why honor killing is sanctioned by Sharia. Reliance of the Traveler (Umdat al-Saliq) says that punishment for murder is not applicable when a parent or grandparent kills their offspring (o.1.1-2).)

Quran (21:44) – “We gave the good things of this life to these men and their fathers until the period grew long for them; See they not that We gradually reduce the land (in their control) from its outlying borders? Is it then they who will win?”

Quran (25:52) – “Therefore listen not to the Unbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost strenuousness…” “Strive against” is Jihad – obviously not in the personal context. It’s also significant to point out that this is a Meccan verse.

Quran (33:60-62) – “If the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and the alarmists in the city do not cease, We verily shall urge thee on against them, then they will be your neighbors in it but a little while. Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.” This passage sanctions the slaughter (rendered “merciless” and “horrible murder” in other translations) against three groups: Hypocrites (Muslims who refuse to “fight in the way of Allah” (3:167) and hence don’t act as Muslims should), those with “diseased hearts” (which include Jews and Christians 5:51-52), and “alarmists” or “agitators who include those who merely speak out against Islam, according to Muhammad’s biographers. It is worth noting that the victims are to be sought out by Muslims, which is what today’s terrorists do. If this passage is meant merely to apply to the city of Medina, then it is unclear why it is included in Allah’s eternal word to Muslim generations.

Quran (47:3-4) – “Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord… So, when you meet (in fight Jihad in Allah’s Cause), those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)… If it had been Allah’s Will, He Himself could certainly have punished them (without you). But (He lets you fight), in order to test you, some with others. But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” Those who reject Allah are to be killed in Jihad. The wounded are to be held captive for ransom. The only reason Allah doesn’t do the dirty work himself is to to test the faithfulness of Muslims. Those who kill pass the test.

Quran (47:35) – “Be not weary and faint-hearted, crying for peace, when ye should be uppermost (Shakir: “have the upper hand”) for Allah is with you,”

Quran (48:17) – “There is no blame for the blind, nor is there blame for the lame, nor is there blame for the sick (that they go not forth to war). And whoso obeyeth Allah and His messenger, He will make him enter Gardens underneath which rivers flow; and whoso turneth back, him will He punish with a painful doom.” Contemporary apologists sometimes claim that Jihad means ‘spiritual struggle.’ Is so, then why are the blind, lame and sick exempted? This verse also says that those who do not fight will suffer torment in hell.

Quran (48:29) – “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard (ruthless) against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves” Islam is not about treating everyone equally. There are two very distinct standards that are applied based on religious status. Also the word used for ‘hard’ or ‘ruthless’ in this verse shares the same root as the word translated as ‘painful’ or severe’ in verse 16.

Quran (61:4) – “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way” Religion of Peace, indeed! The verse explicitly refers to “battle array” meaning that it is speaking of physical conflict. This is followed by (61:9): “He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.” (See next verse, below). Infidels who resist Islamic rule are to be fought.

Quran (61:10-12) – “O You who believe! Shall I guide you to a commerce that will save you from a painful torment. That you believe in Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad ), and that you strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives, that will be better for you, if you but know! (If you do so) He will forgive you your sins, and admit you into Gardens under which rivers flow, and pleasant dwelling in Gardens of ‘Adn – Eternity [‘Adn (Edn) Paradise], that is indeed the great success.” This verse refers to physical battle in order to make Islam victorious over other religions (see above). It uses the Arabic word, Jihad.

Quran (66:9) – “O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be stern with them. Hell will be their home, a hapless journey’s end.” The root word of “Jihad” is used again here. The context is clearly holy war, and the scope of violence is broadened to include “hypocrites” – those who call themselves Muslims but do not act as such.

Other verses calling Muslims to Jihad can be found here at AnsweringIslam.org

From the Hadith:

Bukhari (52:177) – Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Bukhari (52:256) – The Prophet… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).” In this command, Muhammad establishes that it is permissible to kill non-combatants in the process of killing a perceived enemy. This provides justification for the many Islamic terror bombings.

Bukhari (52:65) – The Prophet said, ‘He who fights that Allah’s Word, Islam, should be superior, fights in Allah’s Cause. Muhammad’s words are the basis for offensive Jihad – spreading Islam by force. This is how it was understood by his companions, and by the terrorists of today.

Bukhari (52:220) – Allah’s Apostle said… ‘I have been made victorious with terror’

Abu Dawud (14:2526) – The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: Three things are the roots of faith: to refrain from (killing) a person who utters, “There is no god but Allah” and not to declare him unbeliever whatever sin he commits, and not to excommunicate him from Islam for his any action; and jihad will be performed continuously since the day Allah sent me as a prophet until the day the last member of my community will fight with the Dajjal (Antichrist)

Abu Dawud (14:2527) – The Prophet said: Striving in the path of Allah (jihad) is incumbent on you along with every ruler, whether he is pious or impious

Muslim (1:33) – the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah

Bukhari (8:387) – Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’. And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally.”

Muslim (1:30) – “The Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah.”

Bukhari (52:73) – “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords’.”

Bukhari (11:626) – [Muhammad said:] “I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.”

Muslim (1:149) – “Abu Dharr reported: I said: Messenger of Allah, which of the deeds is the best? He (the Holy Prophet) replied: Belief in Allah and Jihad in His cause…”

Muslim (20:4645) – “…He (the Messenger of Allah) did that and said: There is another act which elevates the position of a man in Paradise to a grade one hundred (higher), and the elevation between one grade and the other is equal to the height of the heaven from the earth. He (Abu Sa’id) said: What is that act? He replied: Jihad in the way of Allah! Jihad in the way of Allah!”

Muslim (20:4696) – “the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: ‘One who died but did not fight in the way of Allah nor did he express any desire (or determination) for Jihad died the death of a hypocrite.'”

Muslim (19:4321-4323) – Three separate hadith in which Muhammad shrugs over the news that innocent children were killed in a raid by his men against unbelievers. His response: “They are of them (meaning the enemy).”

Muslim (19:4294) – “When the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him… He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war… When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

Bukhari 1:35 “The person who participates in (Holy Battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him do so except belief in Allah and His Apostle, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty ( if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise ( if he is killed).”

Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared, “Kill any Jew who falls under your power.” Ashraf was a poet, killed by Muhammad’s men because he insulted Islam. Here, Muhammad widens the scope of his orders to kill. An innocent Jewish businessman was then slain by his Muslim partner, merely for being non-Muslim.

Tabari 9:69 “Killing Unbelievers is a small matter to us” The words of Muhammad, prophet of Islam.

Tabari 17:187 “‘By God, our religion (din) from which we have departed is better and more correct than that which these people follow. Their religion does not stop them from shedding blood, terrifying the roads, and seizing properties.’ And they returned to their former religion.” The words of a group of Christians who had converted to Islam, but realized their error after being shocked by the violence and looting committed in the name of Allah. The price of their decision to return to a religion of peace was that the men were beheaded and the woman and children enslaved by the caliph Ali.

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 484: – “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’”

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 990: – Lest anyone think that cutting off someone’s head while screaming ‘Allah Akbar!’ is a modern creation, here is an account of that very practice under Muhammad, who seems to approve.

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 992: – “Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.” Muhammad’s instructions to his men prior to a military raid.

Saifur Rahman, The Sealed Nectar p.227-228 – “Embrace Islam… If you two accept Islam, you will remain in command of your country; but if your refuse my Call, you’ve got to remember that all of your possessions are perishable. My horsemen will appropriate your land, and my Prophethood will assume preponderance over your kingship.” One of several letters from Muhammad to rulers of other countries. The significance is that the recipients were not making war or threatening Muslims. Their subsequent defeat and subjugation by Muhammad’s armies was justified merely on the basis of their unbelief.

Additional Notes:

Other than the fact that Muslims haven’t killed every non-Muslim under their domain, there is very little else that they can point to as proof that theirs is a peaceful, tolerant religion. Where Islam is dominant (as in the Middle East and Pakistan) religious minorities suffer brutal persecution with little resistance. Where Islam is in the minority (as in Thailand, the Philippines and Europe) there is the threat of violence if Muslim demands are not met. Either situation seems to provide a justification for religious terrorism, which is persistent and endemic to Islamic fundamentalism.

The reasons are obvious and begin with the Quran. Few verses of Islam’s most sacred text can be construed to fit the contemporary virtues of religious tolerance and universal brotherhood. Those that do are earlier “Meccan” verses which are obviously abrogated by later ones. The example of Muhammad is that Islam is a religion of peace when Muslims do not have the power and numbers on their side. Once they do, then things change.

Many Muslims are peaceful and do not want to believe what the Quran plainly says. They reach subjectively for textual context across different suras to try and mitigate the harsher passages. Even though the Quran itself claims to be clear and complete, Muslim apologists speak of the “risks” of trying to interpret the verses without their “assistance.” Like many religious people, they want the text to fit their pre-established moral framework.

Far from being mere history or theological construct, the violent verses of the Quran have played a key role in very real massacre and genocide. This includes the brutal slaughter of tens of millions of Hindus for five centuries beginning around 1000 AD with Mahmud of Ghazni’s bloody conquest. Both he and the later Tamerlane (Islam’s Genghis Khan) slaughtered an untold number merely for defending their temples from destruction. Buddhism was very nearly wiped off the Indian subcontinent. Judaism and Christianity met the same fate (albeit more slowly) in areas conquered by Muslim armies, including the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe, including today’s Turkey. Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of a proud Persian people is despised by Muslims and barely survives in modern Iran.

So ingrained is violence in the religion that Islam has never really stopped being at war, either with other religions or with itself.

Muhammad was a military leader, laying siege to towns, massacring the men, raping their women, enslaving their children, and taking the property of others as his own. On several occasions he rejected offers of surrender from the besieged inhabitants and even butchered captives. He actually inspired his followers to battle when they did not feel it was right to fight, promising them slaves and booty if they did and threatening them with Hell if they did not. Muhammad allowed his men to rape traumatized women captured in battle, usually on the very day their husbands and family members were slaughtered.

It is important to emphasize that, for the most part, Muslim armies waged aggressive campaigns, and the religion’s most dramatic military conquests were made by the actual companions of Muhammad in the decades following his death. The early Islamic principle of warfare was that the civilian population of a town was to be destroyed (ie. men executed, women and children taken as slaves) if they defended themselves. Although modern apologists often claim that Muslims are only supposed to attack in self-defense, this is an oxymoron that is flatly contradicted by the accounts of Islamic historians and others that go back to the time of Muhammad.

Consider the example of the Qurayza Jews, who were completely obliterated only five years after Muhammad arrived in Medina. Their leader opted to stay neutral when their town was besieged by a Meccan army that was sent to take revenge for Muhammad’s deadly caravan raids. The tribe killed no one from either side and even surrendered peacefully to Muhammad after the Meccans had been turned back. Yet the prophet of Islam had every male member of the Qurayza beheaded, and every woman and child enslaved, even raping one of the captives himself (what Muslim apologists might refer to as “same day marriage”).

One of Islam’s most revered modern scholars, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, openly sanctions offensive Jihad: “In the Jihad which you are seeking, you look for the enemy and invade him. This type of Jihad takes place only when the Islamic state is invading other [countries] in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove obstacles standing in its way.” Elsewhere, he notes: “Islam has the right to take the initiative…this is God’s religion and it is for the whole world. It has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions … it attacks institutions and traditions to release human beings from their poisonous influences, which distort human nature and curtail human freedom. Those who say that Islamic Jihad was merely for the defense of the ‘homeland of Islam’ diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”

The widely respected Dictionary of Islam defines Jihad as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims…[Quoting from the Hanafi school, Hedaya, 2:140, 141.], “The destruction of the sword is incurred by infidels, although they be not the first aggressors, as appears from various passages in the traditions which are generally received to this effect.”

Dr. Salah al-Sawy, the chief member of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, stated in 2009 that “the Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time,” tacitly affirming the legitimacy of violence for the cause of Islamic rule – bound only by the capacity for success. (source)

Muhammad’s failure to leave a clear line of succession resulted in perpetual internal war following his death. Those who knew him best first fought to keep remote tribes from leaving Islam and reverting to their preferred religion (the Ridda or ‘Apostasy wars’). Then, within the closer community, early Meccan converts battled later ones. Hostility developed between those immigrants who had traveled with Muhammad to Mecca and the Ansar at Medina who had helped them settle in. Finally there was a violent struggle within Muhammad’s own family between his favorite wife and favorite daughter – a jagged schism that has left Shias and Sunnis at each others’ throats to this day.

The strangest and most untrue thing that can be said about Islam is that it is a Religion of Peace. If every standard by which the West is judged and condemned (slavery, imperialism, intolerance, misogyny, sexual repression, warfare…) were applied equally to Islam, the verdict would be devastating. Islam never gives up what it conquers, be it religion, culture, language or life. Neither does it make apologies or any real effort at moral progress. It is the least open to dialogue and the most self-absorbed. It is convinced of its own perfection, yet brutally shuns self-examination and represses criticism.

This is what makes the Quran’s verses of violence so dangerous. They are given the weight of divine command. While Muslim terrorists take them as literally as anything else in their holy book, and understand that Islam is incomplete without Jihad, moderates offer little to contradict them – outside of opinion. Indeed, what do they have? Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, but when every twelfth verse of Islam’s holiest book either speaks to Allah’s hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forced conversion, or subjugation, it’s little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community – even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.

Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam’s most respected philosophers, understood that “the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force”, many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran’s near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity – preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance – because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to learn that the evidence of the Quran and the bloody history of Islam are very much in contradiction to this.

Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the “culture”, claiming that the father was merely following “the religion” and saying that the couple had to “discipline their daughter or lose respect.” (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious “holy pilgrimage” to Mecca by the Saudi king – without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.

For their part, Western liberals would do well not to sacrifice critical thinking to the god of political correctness, or look for reasons to bring other religion down to the level of Islam merely to avoid the existential truth that this it is both different and dangerous.

There are just too many Muslims who take the Quran literally… and too many others who couldn’t care less about the violence done in the name of Islam.

TheReligionofPeace.com Home Page

© 2006-2016 TheReligionofPeace.com. All rights reserved.

February 3, 2015

Global Warming Hysteria Doesn’t Fit the Facts, Thomas Sowell PhD [c]

Filed under: Climatology, Econonics, Energy Talk, Global Intel, Historical context, Media Check, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:01 pm

Global Warming Hysteria Has Problem: It Doesn’t Fit With Facts
412 Comments

BY THOMAS SOWELL
02/02/2015 06:46 PM ET

Print
Comment
inShare

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell

It was refreshing to see meteorologists apologize for their dire — and wrong — predictions of an unprecedented snowstorm that they had said would devastate the northeast.

It was a big storm, but the Northeast has seen lots of big snowstorms before and will probably see lots of big snowstorms again. That’s called winter.

Unfortunately, we’re not likely to hear similar apologies from those who’ve promoted “global warming” hysteria for years, in defiance of data that fail to fit their climate models.

What is at issue is not whether there is “climate change” — which nobody has ever denied — but whether the specific predictions of the “global warming” crowd as to the direction and magnitude of worldwide temperature changes are holding up over the years.

The ultimate test of any theoretical model is not how loudly it is proclaimed but how well it fits the facts. Climate models that have an unimpressive record of fitting the facts of the past or the present are hardly a reason for us to rely on them for the future.

Putting together a successful model — of anything — is a lot more complicated than identifying which factors affect which outcomes. When many factors are involved, which is common, the challenge is to determine precisely how those factors interact with each other. That is a lot easier said than done when it comes to climate.

Everyone can agree, for example, that the heat of the sunlight is greater in the tropics than in the temperate zones or near the poles. But, the highest temperatures ever recorded in Asia, Africa, North America or South America were all recorded outside — repeat, OUTSIDE — the tropics.

No part of Europe is in the tropics, but record temperatures in European cities like Athens and Seville have been higher than the highest temperatures ever recorded in cities virtually right on the equator, such as Singapore in Asia or Nairobi in Africa.

None of this disproves the scientific fact that sunlight is hotter in the tropics. But it does indicate that there are other factors which go into temperatures on Earth.

It is not only the heat of the sunlight but its duration that determines how much heat builds up. The sun shines on the equator about 12 hours a day all year long. But in the temperate zones, the sun shines more hours during the summer — almost 15 hours a day at the latitude of Seville or Athens.

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/020215-737517-climate-change-models-dont-fit-reality.htm#ixzz3Qh5ZOfRN
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook

[For a set of the scientific fact, go to the first post on this blog “The Polar Ice Cap is Shrinking”, which, btw, NASA satellite photos show that the Polar Ice Cap is in fact getting LARGER at an alarming degree, when one considers the fishing grounds that it is endangering. Reference works are in the 2008 post, the first on this blog.]

January 12, 2015

The Progressive Racial Narrative and Its Beneficiaries, by Bruce Thornton [nc]

Filed under: Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 5:04 pm

The Progressive Racial Narrative and Its Beneficiaries
January 11, 2015 7:41 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
Debunking the lies about race in America.

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

al_sharpton_speaking_reuters-450x337A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reveals that nearly 6 in 10 people believe race relations are bad, with 23% saying they are “very bad.” The causes of these perceptions are many, including nationally publicized police killings of two black men, disorderly and violent demonstrators ignoring the facts of the cases to brand the police “racist,” a lazy media neglecting to dig up and then publicize those facts, and a president, Attorney General, and mayor of New York willing to exploit and widen racial division and consort with hustlers like Al Sharpton.

What we see at work in these events is the long established racial narrative in which endemic white racism accounts for all the ills that afflict black people. Not just individual whites harbor this original sin, but our educational, political, social, justice, and economic institutions are racist as well, favoring white people and hence conferring on them “white skin privilege.” The wide scope of racism means that no matter how well meaning towards blacks, or how socially and economically disadvantaged, individual whites cannot purge themselves of racism. Only radical transformation of all our institutions can redeem America from racism.

This fairytale regularly ignores numerous facts. The decline in black poverty, for example, calls into question the notion that there is “institutional racism” warping the economy. Thanks to postwar economic growth, the black poverty rate decreased from 87% in 1940 to 28% today. Similar improvement can be seen in the growth of the black middle class and increases in black home ownership. And the claim that blacks are shut out of the job market is hard to square with the fact that millions of illegal aliens are working in this country, and immigrant entrepreneurs are creating small businesses.

Similarly, the idea that the police are an “occupying army” targeting blacks, a cliché we heard repeatedly during the recent demonstrations over the police shootings in Ferguson and Brooklyn, is exploded by simple statistics that show about 200 blacks a year––most shot while possessing a gun or knife––are killed by police officers, while almost 6,000 a year are killed by other blacks. It’s a strange “army” that endangers itself in order to protect and save the lives of those it’s allegedly “occupying.”

Then there’s the “voter suppression” charge, the assertion that attempts by states to ensure only legal voters cast ballots really are designed to discourage black voters. The increasing numbers of black people registering and turning out to vote belie this claim, as does the much greater number of blacks holding elected office. Indeed, in 2012 the proportion of black voters turning out in the national election was greater than that of white.

The fact is, by global standards the largest number of politically free and well off blacks is in the United States. As for those blacks still mired in dysfunctional communities filled with crime, violence, unemployment, drugs, and fatherless children, those evils do not reflect white racism or a “legacy of slavery.” Rather, they can be traced to what Michael Gerson called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the culture of dependence and the erosion of self-reliance and self-responsibility created by government handouts and the liberal narrative of endemic white racism that demeans blacks as helpless victims incapable of improving their lives or being accountable for their actions, since through no fault of their own they are imprisoned by “institutional racism.” And don’t forget progressive government policies that inhibit economic growth, historically the great engine for improving black lives, and the culture-wide degradation of sexual mores and the collapse of traditional marriage.

So cui bono, as the lawyers say, who benefits from this narrative? The federal and state entitlement industry, of course, whose agencies and bureaucrats profit from having a permanent underclass of clients. So too the Democratic Party, which buys black votes with promises to keep the transfers and set-asides flowing. So too the racial grievance industry, that gang of activists, academics, ethnic studies professors, “diversity” consultants, and shakedown artists like Al Sharpton who use black misery as leverage for more power and pelf. So too the leftover leftists, who find in racial discord a weapon for attacking the country that kicked their cherished collectivist ideology into the dustbin of history.

Most black Americans aren’t invested in this narrative. They’re too busy working and raising their families. But let’s not forget the role this narrative plays in camouflaging the privilege of those millions of blacks who live better and have more social clout than millions of white people. By ignoring their economic advantages and brandishing their scars from alleged racist wounds, many in the black upper-middle and upper class, particularly those in education, sports, entertainment, and government, can gain vicarious victim-privilege and hence social leverage. Thus through a spurious claim to racial brotherhood, they plunder and spend the capital of black suffering many of them have never experienced. They then can enjoy a social cachet and a whiff of exotic authenticity that sets them apart from their bland white counterparts, and that gives them an air of gnostic racial wisdom embodied in the cant phrase, “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

The phoniness of this ploy can be seen in the various claims well off blacks make about their personal experiences of racism. In the 90s it was the epidemic of racist cabdrivers refusing to pick up black passengers. That one faded when research showed that many of the cabdrivers were themselves black, and were prudently avoiding the murder and mayhem they often experienced at the hands of black passengers. Then there was the “driving while black” trope, which focused on the disproportionate number of blacks pulled over for traffic violations like speeding. Department of Justice investigations ended up with sanctions imposed on states for “racial profiling.” But the study done of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike, a much-publicized case of “profiling,” revealed that while blacks were 25% of all speeders, they were 23% of those pulled over. That is, they were underrepresented, not overrepresented, among those stopped.

More recently we have heard affluent, privileged blacks like Eric Holder, and the white father of a half-black son, New York mayor Bill De Blasio, indulge another hackneyed trope, the “talk.” This is the conversation black fathers must have with their sons in order to “train them to be very careful when they have . . . an encounter with a police officer,” as De Blasio said, lest they give a policeman a pretext for the violence incited by their racism. The irony of this claim is that if reflects just how privileged these children are, for people who grow up in the dangerous neighborhoods the police must frequent drink that wisdom in with their mother’s milk. Worse yet, it assumes that a white kid who resists arrest, fights a cop, curses him, or otherwise challenges his authority will be treated with kid gloves. I’ll have to see some hard data before I believe that. The reality is, the biggest danger to a young black man today is not a policeman, but another young black man.

No doubt some blacks have experienced rude cops or cabdrivers, or have been subjected to the other evidence of racism like those Obama claims to have experienced, such as women clutching their purses more closely in an elevator, or locking their car doors at the approach of a black man. But even if true, these slights don’t amount to “systemic racism.” They more likely reflect prejudices, many acquired through unpleasant experiences. If you want to see what real racism looks like, visit this site and peruse its collection of lynching postcards. You’ll see just how much progress has been made over the last half-century.

But facts or even common sense don’t matter when it comes to a narrative with so many beneficiaries, the biggest one being Barack Obama, who never would have become president without it. The saddest part of all this, however, is that the black people truly suffering today aren’t on that list. In the racial narrative, black lives don’t matter.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-racial-narrative-and-its-beneficiaries/

Copyright © 2015 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.

December 31, 2014

Confessions of a Public Defender, Michael Smith Esq., from “Face to Face with Race” [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:07 pm

It may help explain Ferguson. This was one of the stories in Face to Face with Race.

Confessions of a Public Defender

Confessions of a Public Defender

Michael Smith, American Renaissance, May 9, 2014

Still liberal after all these years.

I am a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 per cent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites.

I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. The handful of whites I see commit all kinds of crimes. In my many years as a public defender I have represented only three Asians, and one was half black.

As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. Actual black behavior was a shock to me.

The media invariably sugarcoat black behavior. Even the news reports of the very crimes I dealt with in court were slanted. Television news intentionally leaves out unflattering facts about the accused, and sometimes omits names that are obviously black. All this rocked my liberal, tolerant beliefs, but it took me years to set aside my illusions and accept the reality of what I see every day. I have now served thousands of blacks and their families, protecting their rights and defending them in court. What follow are my observations.

Although blacks are only a small percentage of our community, the courthouse is filled with them: the halls and gallery benches are overflowing with black defendants, families, and crime victims. Most whites with business in court arrive quietly, dress appropriately, and keep their heads down. They get in and get out–if they can–as fast as they can. For blacks, the courthouse is like a carnival. They all seem to know each other: hundreds and hundreds each day, gossiping, laughing loudly, waving, and crowding the halls.

When I am appointed to represent a client I introduce myself and explain that I am his lawyer. I explain the court process and my role in it, and I ask the client some basic questions about himself. At this stage, I can tell with great accuracy how people will react. Hispanics are extremely polite and deferential. An Hispanic will never call me by my first name and will answer my questions directly and with appropriate respect for my position. Whites are similarly respectful.

A black man will never call me Mr. Smith; I am always “Mike.” It is not unusual for a 19-year-old black to refer to me as “dog.” A black may mumble complaints about everything I say, and roll his eyes when I politely interrupt so I can continue with my explanation. Also, everything I say to blacks must be at about the third-grade level. If I slip and use adult language, they get angry because they think I am flaunting my superiority.

At the early stages of a case, I explain the process to my clients. I often do not yet have the information in the police reports. Blacks are unable to understand that I do not yet have answers to all of their questions, but that I will by a certain date. They live in the here and the now and are unable to wait for anything. Usually, by the second meeting with the client I have most of the police reports and understand their case.

Unlike people of other races, blacks never see their lawyer as someone who is there to help them. I am a part of the system against which they are waging war. They often explode with anger at me and are quick to blame me for anything that goes wrong in their case.

Black men often try to trip me up and challenge my knowledge of the law or the facts of the case. I appreciate sincere questions about the elements of the offense or the sentencing guidelines, but blacks ask questions to test me. Unfortunately, they are almost always wrong in their reading, or understanding, of the law, and this can cause friction. I may repeatedly explain the law, and provide copies of the statute showing, for example, why my client must serve six years if convicted, but he continues to believe that a hand-written note from his “cellie” is controlling law.

The risks of trial

The Constitution allows a defendant to make three crucial decisions in his case. He decides whether to plea guilty or not guilty. He decides whether to have a bench trial or a jury trial. He decides whether he will testify or whether he will remain silent. A client who insists on testifying is almost always making a terrible mistake, but I cannot stop him.

Most blacks are unable to speak English well. They cannot conjugate verbs. They have a poor grasp of verb tenses. They have a limited vocabulary. They cannot speak without swearing. They often become hostile on the stand. Many, when they testify, show a complete lack of empathy and are unable to conceal a morality based on the satisfaction of immediate, base needs. This is a disaster, especially in a jury trial. Most jurors are white, and are appalled by the demeanor of uneducated, criminal blacks.

Prosecutors are delighted when a black defendant takes the stand. It is like shooting fish in a barrel. However, the defense usually gets to cross-examine the black victim, who is likely to make just as bad an impression on the stand as the defendant. This is an invaluable gift to the defense, because jurors may not convict a defendant—even if they think he is guilty—if they dislike the victim even more than they dislike the defendant.

Most criminal cases do not go to trial. Often the evidence against the accused is overwhelming, and the chances of conviction are high. The defendant is better off with a plea bargain: pleading guilty to a lesser charge and getting a lighter sentence.

The decision to plea to a lesser charge turns on the strength of the evidence. When blacks ask the ultimate question—”Will we win at trial?”—I tell them I cannot know, but I then describe the strengths and weaknesses of our case. The weaknesses are usually obvious: There are five eyewitnesses against you. Or, you made a confession to both the detective and your grandmother. They found you in possession of a pink cell phone with a case that has rhinestones spelling the name of the victim of the robbery. There is a video of the murderer wearing the same shirt you were wearing when you were arrested, which has the words “In Da Houz” on the back, not to mention you have the same “RIP Pookie 7/4/12” tattoo on your neck as the man in the video. Etc.

If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame you. “You ain’t workin’ fo’ me.” “It like you workin’ with da State.” Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets. It is my firm belief many black are unable to discuss the evidence against them rationally because they cannot view things from the perspective of others. They simply cannot understand how the facts in the case will appear to a jury.

This inability to see things from someone else’s perspective helps explain why there are so many black criminals. They do not understand the pain they are inflicting on others. One of my robbery clients is a good example. He and two co-defendants walked into a small store run by two young women. All three men were wearing masks. They drew handguns and ordered the women into a back room. One man beat a girl with his gun. The second man stood over the second girl while the third man emptied the cash register. All of this was on video.

My client was the one who beat the girl. When he asked me, “What are our chances at trial?” I said, “Not so good.” He immediately got angry, raised his voice, and accused me of working with the prosecution. I asked him how he thought a jury would react to the video. “They don’t care,” he said. I told him the jury would probably feel deeply sympathetic towards these two women and would be angry at him because of how he treated them. I asked him whether he felt bad for the women he had beaten and terrorized. He told me what I suspected—what too many blacks say about the suffering of others: “What do I care? She ain’t me. She ain’t kin. Don’t even know her.”

No fathers

As a public defender, I have learned many things about people. One is that defendants do not have fathers. If a black even knows the name of his father, he knows of him only as a shadowy person with whom he has absolutely no ties. When a client is sentenced, I often beg for mercy on the grounds that the defendant did not have a father and never had a chance in life. I have often tracked down the man’s father–in jail–and have brought him to the sentencing hearing to testify that he never knew his son and never lifted a finger to help him. Often, this is the first time my client has ever met his father. These meetings are utterly unemotional.

Many black defendants don’t even have mothers who care about them. Many are raised by grandmothers after the state removes the children from an incompetent teenaged mother. Many of these mothers and grandmothers are mentally unstable, and are completely disconnected from the realities they face in court and in life. A 47-year-old grandmother will deny that her grandson has gang ties even though his forehead is tattooed with a gang sign or slogan. When I point this out in as kind and understanding way as I can, she screams at me. When black women start screaming, they invoke the name of Jesus and shout swear words in the same breath.

Black women have great faith in God, but they have a twisted understanding of His role. They do not pray for strength or courage. They pray for results: the satisfaction of immediate needs. One of my clients was a black woman who prayed in a circle with her accomplices for God’s protection from the police before they would set out to commit a robbery.

The mothers and grandmothers pray in the hallways–not for justice, but for acquittal. When I explain that the evidence that their beloved child murdered the shop keeper is overwhelming, and that he should accept the very fair plea bargain I have negotiated, they will tell me that he is going to trial and will “ride with the Lord.” They tell me they speak to God every day and He assures them that the young man will be acquitted.

The mothers and grandmothers do not seem to be able to imagine and understand the consequences of going to trial and losing. Some–and this is a shocking reality it took me a long time to grasp–don’t really care what happens to the client, but want to make it look as though they care. This means pounding their chests in righteous indignation, and insisting on going to trial despite terrible evidence. They refuse to listen to the one person–me–who has the knowledge to make the best recommendation. These people soon lose interest in the case, and stop showing up after about the third or fourth court date. It is then easier for me to convince the client to act in his own best interests and accept a plea agreement.

Part of the problem is that underclass black women begin having babies at age 15. They continue to have babies, with different black men, until they have had five or six. These women do not go to school. They do not work. They are not ashamed to live on public money. They plan their entire lives around the expectation that they will always get free money and never have to work. I do not see this among whites, Hispanics, or any other people.

The black men who become my clients also do not work. They get social security disability payments for a mental defect or for a vague and invisible physical ailment. They do not pay for anything: not for housing (Grandma lives on welfare and he lives with her), not for food (Grandma and the baby-momma share with him), and not for child support. When I learn that my 19-year-old defendant does not work or go to school, I ask, “What do you do all day?” He smiles. “You know, just chill.” These men live in a culture with no expectations, no demands, and no shame.

If you tell a black to dress properly for trial, and don’t give specific instructions, he will arrive in wildly inappropriate clothes. I represented a woman who was on trial for drugs; she wore a baseball cap with a marijuana leaf embroidered on it. I represented a man who wore a shirt that read “rules are for suckers” to his probation hearing. Our office provides suits, shirts, ties, and dresses for clients to wear for jury trials. Often, it takes a whole team of lawyers to persuade a black to wear a shirt and tie instead of gang colors.

From time to time the media report that although blacks are 12 percent of the population they are 40 percent of the prison population. This is supposed to be an outrage that results from unfair treatment by the criminal justice system. What the media only hint at is another staggering reality: recidivism. Black men are arrested and convicted over and over. It is typical for a black man to have five felony convictions before the age of 30. This kind of record is rare among whites and Hispanics, and probably even rarer among Asians.

Stats

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

At one time our office was looking for a motto that defined our philosophy. Someone joked that it should be: “Doesn’t everyone deserve an eleventh chance?”

I am a liberal. I believe that those of us who are able to produce abundance have a moral duty to provide basic food, shelter, and medical care for those who cannot care for themselves. I believe we have this duty even to those who can care for themselves but don’t. This world view requires compassion and a willingness to act on it.

My experience has taught me that we live in a nation in which a jury is more likely to convict a black defendant who has committed a crime against a white. Even the dullest of blacks know this. There would be a lot more black-on-white crime if this were not the case.

However, my experience has also taught me that blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.

I do not know the solution to this problem. I do know that it is wrong to deceive the public. Whatever solutions we seek should be based on the truth rather than what we would prefer was the truth. As for myself, I will continue do my duty to protect the rights of all who need me.

December 29, 2014

Race Mongers All, by Sylvia Thompson [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Historical context, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 7:24 pm

Sylvia Thompson column
Race mongers all, with blood on their hands

Sylvia Thompson
Sylvia Thompson
December 28, 2014

President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and race-hustler Al Sharpton are most definitely complicit in the recent deaths of two New York City police officers. I refuse to listen to the blather that says otherwise. These four race mongers set the stage for the hateful act committed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the murderer. Furthermore, I reject the playing down of this hater’s guilt by branding him “mentally unstable.” He was a typical hateful black person spawned by the Left’s decades-long campaign to brainwash American blacks.

Police officers across the country are rightfully enraged at these despicable men, wielding their enormous political power against the entire law enforcement community. Shunning de Blasio is the least these officers could do to show the leftist mayor how much they despise him. All of America should despise all four of these men.

That said, I focus this commentary on the incredible naivety of so many pundits, such as Greta Van Susteren’s. The pundits are puzzled by Obama’s and Holder’s lack of a convincing response to the murders. These two men, in their positions of authority, refuse to make any genuine attempts to quell the hatred that spawned Brinsley’s murderous scheme, which is why they are culpable.

Classic liberals (and I consider Ms. Van Susteren one of them) are completely clueless when it comes to assessing black behavior. That naivety is what accounts, in my view, for the assumption that most of us blacks are in need of their protection and guidance. It is a condescending attitude, but many of them are completely ignorant of how they come across. I learned this fact over the years, which is why I ignore classic liberals. I follow closely, however, the diabolical leftists. Failure to understand leftism is dangerous.

This naivety also explains why many pundits and educated white Americans are baffled over Obama’s choice of a character, such as Al Sharpton, to be a legitimate representative of black America. It requires an understanding of black elitism to comprehend this behavior. As a non-elite, I have found that black elites, like their counterparts in other ethnic groups, are adept at using people whom they perceive to be beneath them to do their bidding. Blacks of Sharpton’s character are ripe for manipulation. They possess little in intellect and they crave great power. They acquire a perceived power in being near the powerful.

Obama and Holder, and all of their ilk, know that some activities (such as street rabble-rousing) are beneath them. Therefore, they plant the seeds of hatred; Sharpton and his ilk stir up the soil so that the seeds will grow. They provide the poison; the Sharptons stir it into the water and encourage blacks to drink up. In Obama’s eyes, Sharpton is merely a tool.

Greta Van Susteren laments that Obama does not approach blacks such as Senator Tim Scott to assist with issues of race. Simply stated, Senator Scott cannot be used.

Sharpton may well understand this thinly vailed disdain, and it could be that a mutual “using” is taking place. The elitist using the despised black of “the other class” to foment unrest and hatred, as part of the Left’s grand plan to destroy America, and the lower-classed hustler gaining a level of recognition that the circumstances of his birth denied him. Hustlers are skilled manipulators in their own right, and Sharpton has many years of experience under his belt.

We often hear pundits of both races decrying “America still has racism and something has to be done about it.” That excuse is used to further the Left’s agenda of “transforming” (meaning “destroying”) America. Newsflash: We will never be completely rid of racist thinking until Almighty God removes it from the flawed psyche of those who refuse to let go of it. And He will indeed do that, in due time.

Meanwhile, I truly hope that more white Americans will come to an understanding that this whipping rod of “perpetual racism” is a ploy. People on the Left use it because it works. The solution is that Americans who are not racist must stop allowing the Left to use the ploy against them. Reject it; call it out for what it is – a pernicious scheme.

I offer a fervent plea to my fellow Americans of any color who are really sick and tired of it all – stop listening to the race baiters. Even the ones who sound reasonable or wear white collars of the clergy, but will not task blacks with any of the responsibility for their circumstances. The plight of disadvantaged black Americans will not improve until they remove themselves from the yoke of leftist liberalism. They must begin to take personal responsibility for how they live, behave, and rear their children, as well as which leaders and educators they accept into their communities.

This rethinking needs to happen soon, because there will not always be race-baiting professed black leaders in control of this country. There will come a time when leaders will be in charge who are immune to overwrought cries of “racist” and “racism.” And we had better hope that they are decent men, because the game of “payback” will be detrimental if they choose to play it against us twelve percent of the American populace.

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.

Ms. Thompson is a copy editor by trade currently residing in Tennessee. She formerly wrote for the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley California Newsletter and the online conservative blog ChronWatch, also out of California.

She grew up in Southeast Texas during the waning years of Jim Crow-era legalized segregation, and she concludes that race relations in America will never improve, nor will we ever elevate our culture, as long as there are victims to be pandered to and villains to be vilified. America is better served without victims or villains.

© Copyright 2014 by Sylvia Thompson
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sthompson/141228

What is America’ Survival Plan? by Carol Brown [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 6:55 pm

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/what_is_americas_survival_plan_.html

December 26, 2014
What is America’s survival plan?

By Carol Brown

We’re facing the greatest national security threat we have ever known and there is no coherent plan to battle the enemy. This nation is so far behind the eight ball, the president and his minions won’t even name the enemy, no less fight it.

Name = Islam

Even worse, those in positions of power and influence misrepresent what the enemy stands for. Like a pre-recorded announcement that just won’t stop, we are endlessly subjected to the false refrain: Islam is a religion of peace. By Muslim lights, we live in the Dar al Harb, the territory of war, simply because we refuse to accept Islam. We didn’t declare war, Mohammed did.

And when it comes to the threat of Islamic supremacism, it’s not only the left that’s putting us at risk. The right is hardly better, as both parties serve up a boatload of ignorance, complicity, and cowardice on a daily basis. Our elected officials draft legislation, set foreign policy, speak at podiums, sit on panels, write press releases, pen op-eds, and yack away on talk shows about the wonders of Islam. If anyone challenges what they’re peddling, the peddlers get rather hot under the collar. As for the truth-tellers, they are mocked, marginalized, and vilified.

And what a truth it is, as we confront a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination ruled by one religion — an ideology that is infecting every aspect of our culture and which has the potential to destroy all of civilization.

Despite this grave threat, you can count on one hand how many leaders are informed and speaking the truth. And even they — and God bless every single one of them — have offered ideas in bits and pieces, with faint calls to investigate Huma Abedin, a proposal to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a proposal to strip citizenship from Americans who travel overseas to fight for terrorists, along with a few states that passed anti-Sharia laws. Woefully inadequate as these actions are, three-quarters of them barely saw the light of day as the truth-tellers were pilloried and the legislation never came to pass. In any case, the solutions noted above are not an overarching strategy.

Not even close.

How can that be? The most brutal and ruthless enemy is advancing toward us and has infiltrated every arm of our government, and there is hardly a word said, no less a plan offered, as to how to beat them back. Quite the opposite. We are welcoming them with open arms. Giving them the keys to the kingdom.

If we are to survive, this madness must end. And toward that end, I suggest the following:

Name the enemy: If you don’t name the enemy, how can you win the war? Let’s stop talking like idiots. We’re battling a totalitarian ideology as written in the Koran, and the people who follow it. It’s called Islam. Not “radical Islam.” Just Islam. By any standard, the teachings in the Koran are radical. When people say “radical Islam,” it suggests there is some other form of Islam that is more tempered. Moderate, as they say. But such a thing does not exist, except as neglect of scriptural imperatives. And should anyone claim there are peaceful verses please point them to Chapter 2, Verse 106 (Abrogation) which states that later (violent) verses override and/or replace earlier (peaceful) ones.

Stop saying “war on terror”: This expression is vague and minimizes the scope of the battle. We’re fighting Islamic jihad in all its forms — from physical violence to creeping Sharia and everything in between. We are at war with those who follow the teachings of the Koran — whether they are violent jihadists or members of the school board trying to influence curriculum.

Shut down Iran’s nuclear program: Iran is a mortal threat to Israel, the United States, and indeed the entire civilized world. We should not be involved in negotiations with a nation that has declared its murderous intentions against America and her allies. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the world as we know it will be forever altered as a blanket of death will descend. We must destroy Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon before it is too late. And the clock is running down. Quickly.

Address the malevolent influence of the Muslim Brotherhood: It is critical that we address how deeply the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government. We must designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, remove members of the Muslim Brotherhood from government positions, and shut down all Muslim Brotherhood front groups. We cannot survive if the enemy is not only attacking from without, but also from within (per their stated plan). Terrorists have no place on American soil, no less within our government. Identify them, arrest them where appropriate, and send the rest packing.

Stop construction of mosques and shut down most of those already built: Mosques are popping up all across America, with a 75% increase in new construction since 9/11. There are now well over 2,000 mosques in America (some of them “mega mosques”) with no end in sight. Two separate studiesdocument that 80% of mosques in the United States preach jihad. That number is staggering. The situation is intolerable. It pushes the limit of freedom of religion and freedom of speech. A nation cannot endure direct threats against it if it hopes to survive.

Shut down Islamic schools and get Islam out of public school classrooms: We cannot allow Islamic schools to indoctrinate the next generation of Muslim Americans, where students are taught Islamic dominance, forced conversions, death to non-believers, and the destruction of Israel. This is not a reflection of American values and serves as a direct threat to our future. If Muslim Americans want their children to attend such schools, the family should relocate to an Islamic country. We must also remove Islamic propaganda from our public schools, private schools, college and universities. And while we’re on the subject, Muslim colleges are blossoming. The most prominent (Zaytuna College) opened five years ago in Berkeley, California. But there have been others, including the Islamic Online University. At the very least, these institutions must be monitored.

Shut down American jihadist training compounds: We cannot tolerate Muslim enclaves in America where jihadist training is taught. Muslims of America have training compounds scattered throughout the country poised to inflict violence on a massive scale. This cannot stand. America is a nation that is free, not a nation that is stupid. “Anything goes” is not our founding principle. It is sheer insanity to tolerate people and organizations that train jihadists to attack Americans. Plus, last I checked, it’s against the law. We know where thesecompounds are. We must shut them down. Immediately.

Address prisons as breading grounds for Muslim converts: Prisons have become breeding grounds for Islamic converts and jihadist indoctrination. We must block the outside influence from Saudi Arabia and terror states, ensure those in the prison power structure become educated about Islam, and involve subject matter experts to help vet and monitor Muslim chaplains. No one — imams or prisoners — must be allowed to engage in violent rhetoric or activity, Muslim prison gangs must be broken apart, and perks that Muslim prisoners alone get must be stripped away.

Stop immigration from Islamic countries: As seen throughout Europe, it doesn’t take a lot of Muslims to wreak havoc on a nation. To help ensure we don’t wind up like Europe, we must halt all immigration from Islamic countries. The risks are simply too high. No nation has an obligation to allow immigration from any and all countries. And in the case of immigration from Islamic countries, it is impossible to fully vet Muslim immigrants for the following reasons: (1) We cannot know who has an agenda to impose Sharia law (and statsshow most support it). (2) We need to recognize that increasing numbers of Muslims who seem like regular folks are morphing into jihadists. (3) We must understand the role that taqiyya (sanctioned deception) plays in any vetting process. Islam is not compatible with Western values. It is not compatible with Judeo/Christian values. It is not compatible with liberty and freedom. It’s illogical to import people from cultures where some, many, or most individuals hate America and want to destroy everything we stand for. (When considering this issue, one should also keep in mind the 3 stages of jihad.)

Stop moral equivalence: All cultures are not the same. All ideas are not the same. All religions are not the same. Stop speaking as if they are. Islam is the 21st century Nazism. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “We’ve seen this before. There’s a master race; Now there’s a master faith.” Human beings have the ability to discern. Let’s start using this God-given gift. Western cultures are better than Islamic cultures. The idea of liberty is better than the idea of oppression. Values of love and life trump those of darkness, death, and destruction. Everything is not the same. Spread the word.

Ban the burqa and niqab: A person’s face must be exposed for all the obvious reasons. In addition, swaths of fabric draped over and around one’s body mask the human form and can also hide weapons. We’ve already had criminals exploit burqas in order to commit crimes. This sort of identity-hiding garb has no place in a modern, Western society. If a Muslim insists on wearing a burqa I suggest she move to any one of the dozens of Muslim countries where such attire is welcome, if not required. It’s not how we do things in the United States and we shouldn’t start. Cultures are different. Values are different. The United States, thank God, is not an Islamic nation. And we shouldn’t slide any further down the path of embracing Islamic values (such as they are) and norms. Including Islamic dress codes.

Allow people who want to join terror groups overseas to leave the country and ensure it’s a one-way ticket: When we become aware of persons planning to travel overseas to join ISIS or any other terror organization, we should not stop them. There is no reason to have such individuals among us. We should let them go, then slam the door behind them so they can never return: revoke their passport, visa, and U.S. citizenship. They must not be allowed to engage in this treasonous act without consequence (as is currently the case).

Secure the border: The United States must secure its borders so that, among other things, we don’t leave ourselves open to terrorists coming across. It defies common sense and sound national security to have open borders. The border must be secured.

Achieve energy independence: We must break our reliance on oil from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries that are run by dictators who use their power and influence to undermine our nation. There is no reason this great nation cannot become energy independent if we set about to achieve that goal. We have the resources. Now we must find the will.

Stop supporting terror: We must stop all funds that go to the Palestinian Authority. We must investigate Turkey and Qatar as state sponsors of terror and reassess our ties with these nations. We should suspend funding for the UN Human Rights Commission.

Become citizen activists: This battle must be fought on all fronts by everyone. Leftists might be permanent goners, but there are a lot of folks who are simply uninformed. Get involved and speak out. Be savvy about the best way to approach others. Don’t overwhelm. Choose your focus, your words, and your support materials carefully. Here are a few ideas:

Educate others about the Koran: This is critical. Islam is a totalitarian ideology at its core and we must tell it like it is when we speak about it. Educate yourself. Then educate others. Robert Spencer has two excellent books that I highly recommend if you haven’t read them already: The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

Educate others about the 3 stages of jihad: Islam has a methodical method to the bloody madness. Part of that method involves how to advance jihad in three stages to reach its most bellicose form. David Wood of Answering Muslims has an excellent video on the subject, here.

Support people and organizations that are on the front lines of this battle: There are many brave patriots working tirelessly to wake people up to the threat of Islam. They are a great resource and they also need our support. For blogs that focus exclusively on Islam, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among countless examples. See here and here for political action organizations focused exclusively on Islam. (Remember, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. JoiningAct for America, for example, can help provide focus.) For legal centers on the front lines of this battle, see here and here.

Reach out to others in your place of worship: Churches and synagogues should be leading voices in this battle. Sadly, they’re not. “Interfaith dialogue” has become all the rage as many churches and synagogues enable the enemy. In addition, many churches have joined the BDS movement against Israel — a nation on the bleeding edge of the fight against jihad. We must shift this dangerous course. (When enlightening members at your place of worship, theChristian Action Network might be a resource for some that is particularly resonant.)

Know what’s going on in your community: In addition to the construction ofnew mosques, there are myriad ways that creeping Sharia creeps. Stay on top of what’s going on in your community and take action. See here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, and here for a snapshot among an endless battery of examples that are reminders of how vigilant we must be.

Stay on top of what is going on in schools: Whether you have children in school or not, it behooves all of us to know what’s going on in the school system. Lord knows, CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups are campaigning, lobbying, applying pressure, and in some cases, suing to make sure Islam marches through the halls of our public and private schools (as well as colleges and universities). We will all pay a price for the next generation’s brainwashing if we don’t address it. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, and here among countless examples.

Let your elected officials know where you stand and what you expect from them: Most of them are clueless. At best. They need to be educated. Who’s going to educate them? That would be us. We cannot, for example, ever again have an imam lead a prayer in Congress. Not. ever. again.

Contact the media: Speak out about biased and erroneous coverage of Islam, Sharia, and terror. Urge them to stop inviting guests who are members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Educate them about this issue.

Be creative and take initiative: Every day, whether on an international, national scale, or local level, the West is increasingly in the grip of Islamic law. Find ways to speak the truth and educate the public. Here’s an inspiring story: A group of concerned citizens formed an organization called the Counter Jihad Coalition. They created brochures on Islam and, armed with knowledge and these materials, they stand in a public square (in this case, 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California) and educate others. To read more about them and hear an interview, see here.

And: The Counter Jihad Report has compiled a comprehensive list of things citizens can do. Each item on the list links to a page with more detail on the particular area of interest. There are also excellent suggestions on the best ways to approach people. I highly recommend AT readers visit this page where you can explore and find one or two things to act on, here.

In closing, I would like to say that the current state of affairs with respect to our nation’s retreat is unsustainable. We either fight with everything we have, or we will be undone. The terrifying command to “convert or die” will not be a savage reality forced upon people in other nations. It will be bellowed through this land. And while many of us feel overwhelmed with our time and energy stretched thin, please consider that if we don’t take this on now, an inconceivable darkness will envelope our lives that will silence our voices — if not our beating hearts — on this, and every single thing.

No one will be immune to the evil that is coming. Democrats, Republicans and Independents; patriots and dhimmis; men, women, and children; the young, the old and everyone in between; rich and poor; Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists; black, brown, and white; the educated and uneducated; public servants and private sector employees; doctors, teachers, roofers, truck drivers, lawyers, veterinarians, CEO’s, cooks, plumbers, dog walkers; as well as dogs.

America is the ultimate target of this evil. We either fight now, or face the unthinkable later. And later is much sooner than we think.

December 9, 2014

Dick Lamm, former Gov of Colorado (pre-weed) [nc]

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Media Check, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 7:57 pm

AMERICAN SUICIDE

Isn’t it rather amazing how a past Governor of Colorado can focus and zero
in on a major issue facing this State of California.—and now the U.S.

Wherever you stand on this issue, please take the time to read this; it
should wake you from your slumber on this important truth.

We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his
thoughts are particularly poignant.

Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington,
D.C., filled to capacity with many of America’s finest minds and leaders. A
brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Davis Hansen talked about
his latest book, “Mexifornia”, explaining how immigration – both legal and
illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would
march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American
Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a
stunning speech on how to destroy America.

The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the
destruction of the United States. He said, “If you believe that America is
too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America. It is
not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.
Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that
‘An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit
suicide.’â€

“Here is how they do it,” Lamm said.

“FIRST, to destroy America, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual
and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the
tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and
cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it
is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour
Lipset, put it this way: ‘The histories of bilingual and bicultural
societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and
tragedy.’ Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of
national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not
independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an
ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons,
Corsicans and Muslims.”

Lamm went on:

“SECOND, to destroy America, invent ‘multiculturalism’ and encourage
immigrants to maintain their culture. Make it an article of belief that all
cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an
article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely
to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is
out of bounds.”

“THIRD, we could make the United States an ‘Hispanic Quebec’ without much
effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin
Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: ‘The apparent success of our
own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not
by tolerance, but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated
ethnocentricity and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only
tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.’ Lamm said, “I would encourage
all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the
melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to
ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing
their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.”

“FOURTH, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least
educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated,
and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass
have a 50% dropout rate from high school.”

“My FIFTH point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and
business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic
identity, and I would establish the cult of ‘Victimology.’ I would get all
minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the
majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure
on the majority placation.”

“My SIXTH plan for America’s downfall would include dual citizenship, and
promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would
stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are
mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing
each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most
historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation
together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they
belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature;
and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic
games. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all these
bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and
geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. “E.
Pluribus Unum” — From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the
emphasis on the ‘pluribus’ instead of the ‘Unum,’ we will “Balkanize”
America as surely as Kosovo.

“NEXT TO LAST, I would place all subjects off limits. Make it taboo to talk
about anything against the cult of ‘diversity.’ I would find a word similar
to ‘heretic’ in the 16th century – that stopped discussion and paralyzed
thinking. Words like ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobe’ halt discussion and debate.
Having made America a bi-lingual/bi-cultural country, having established
multi-culturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of
‘Victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration
laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for
America, it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant
symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.”

In the LAST minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound
silence followed. Finally he said, “Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis
Hanson’s book ‘Mexifornia.’ His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to
destroy America If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don’t read
that book.”

There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud
above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew
that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly,
darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being
suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our
educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that
practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate ‘diversity.’
American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a
Third World in America. Take note of California and other states. To date,
ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George
Orwell’s book “1984.” In that story, three slogans are engraved in the
Ministry of Truth building: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and
“Ignorance is strength.”

Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the
conference that our nation, and the future of this great democracy, is
deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don’t get this immigration
monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire
and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.

If you care for and love our country as I do, take the time to pass this on
just as I did for you. NOTHING is going to happen if you don’t!

“If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a
nation gone under” – Ronald Reagan

December 8, 2014

White Police killed by Black Perps, by Joseph John [nc]

Filed under: Global Intel, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 7:36 pm

Joseph R. John
To
jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Dec 5 at 3:43 AM

The below listed E-mail is from a retired Federal Law Enforcement Officer, who I once served with. His E-mail outlines how, over a 60 day period this past summer, 4 white Police Officers were murdered by black criminal assailants. Those 4 Police Officers were murdered while trying to enforce the law, like Police officers throughout the nation do daily, at the risk to their lives. The report of the Police Officer murders was obtained from the San Diego Police Department News Group.

Where was Obama, Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesses Jackson, and Farrakhan when those 4 white Police Officers were murdered by black criminals—did they wring their hands, instigate national street demonstrations that are dividing the races, and are they going to insist on 4 federal civil rights investigation by the Justice Department to determine if the civil rights of the 4 white Police Officers were violated by the black criminals? Many other white Police Officers, who enforce the law daily at a risk to their lives, have been murdered since July 2014.

The repeated public comments by Holder and Obama about a criminal, Michael Brown, continues to foment racial strife.. Brown weighed 325 pounds, was high on drugs, robbed a convenience store, manhandled the owner of the convenience store, refused to follow the orders of a Police Officer who was dispatched to investigate the convenience store robbery. Brown then beat the police officer in his own police car while Brown was trying to take the Police Officer’s gun away. After the attack on the Police Officer, Brown refused to halt as ordered by the Police Officer. Instead of halting, Brown turned and tried to attack the Police Officer for a second time. According to the testimony of 5 black witnesses, Brown was charging the Police Officer like a football player, when he was shot in self-defense. A Grand Jury impaneled long before the shooting of Brown occurred, with 3 black members, found Brown’s shooting to be an authorized shooting.

Obama and Holder public comments have resulted in street demonstration, the torching of stores, and the firebombing of many cars which is perpetrating racial divides (Over the past 6 + years, Obama and Holder’s public comments have aggravated and perpetuated racial strife). Holder announced to the nation that he has ordered the Justice Department to conduct a federal civil rights investigation to determine if a criminal high on drugs, who robbed a convenience store, who beat a Police Officer, then tried to disarm the Police Officer, and then tried to charge the Police Officer a second time, had his civil rights violated by the Police Officer.

Holder and Obama have it wrong, the civil rights of a white Police Officer was being violated by a black criminal who attacked him, beat him, tried to disarm him, and was trying to attack him for a second time. Holder and Obama continue to ignore the repeated murders of white Police Officers by black criminals, and charge that there are too many unauthorized shootings of blacks by Police Officers—which is not true.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

Fax: (619) 220-0109

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

From: OFFICER GARY R RICKERT (Ret)
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2014 8:34 PM
To: Joseph R. John
Subject: THE KILLING OF POLICE OFFICERS

Does anyone remember Detective Melvin Santiago? He was a Jersey City police officer who was shot to death just a month ago, on July 13th. Santiago was white. His killer, Lawrence Campbell, was black. Does anyone recall Obama appearing before national television and calling for justice for Officer Santiagos family? Does anyone recall Eric Holder rushing to Jersey City to see that justice was done?

How about Officer Jeffrey Westerfield? He was a Gary, Indiana police officer who was shot to death on July 6, 2014. Officer Westerfield was white, his killer, Carl LeEllis Blount, Jr. was black. where was Obama? Where was Holder?

Officer Perry Renn was an Indianapolis, Indiana police officer who was shot to death July 5, 2014, the day before Officer Westerfield was killed. Officer Renn was white. His killer, Major Davis, was black. I don’t recall any mention by Obama about the untimely death of Officer Renn. and, I doubt that Eric Holder rushed to Indianapolis to make sure justice was served.

Vermillion Parish Deputy Sheriff Allen Bares was gunned down by two men June 23, 2014 in Louisiana. Deputy Bares was white. His two killers, Quintlan Richard and Baylon Taylor were black. Was Obama outraged? Did Eric Holder rush to Louisiana to make sure that the family of Deputy Bares found justice?

Detective Charles Dinwiddie of the Killen, Texas Police Department was murdered on May 11, 2014 by Marvin Lewis Guy, a black male. Officer Dinwiddie was white. Do you recall seeing anything about that on the news? Certainly, the white citizens of Killeen didn’t take to the streets to loot and burn businesses. Do you recall any mention of Obama or Holder here?

Then, there is Officer Kevin Jordan of Griffin, Georgia Police Department. He was gunned down on May 31, 2014. Officer Jordan was black, his killer, Michael Bowman was white. This was a white man murdering a black police officer. Where was Jesse Jackson? Where was “The Reverend” Al Sharpton? Was there looting and burning on the streets of Griffin, Georgia? No, in fact, we don’t recall hearing about this one in the news as well. Why? You can draw your own conclusions.

Over that 60 day period, there have been five reported deaths of police officers by gunshot in the U.S. Of those, four were white officers who were murdered by black men. Blacks complain that white officers treat black men more aggressively on the street. You can draw your own conclusions on that one, as well.

November 23, 2014

As Goes the National Cathedral, So Goes the Nation … If We Allow It, by Sylvia Thompson [nc]

Filed under: Education, Elections, Historical context, Media Check, Political Commentary, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 11:22 pm

Sylvia Thompson column
As goes the National Cathedral, so goes the nation…if we allow it

Sylvia Thompson
Sylvia Thompson
November 22, 2014

Christians need only look at the travesty of Muslims praying to Allah in a house of Almighty God to understand the degree to which Christian leadership has deteriorated in America – the nation founded by Christians for the worship of Christ Jesus.

The worship service was orchestrated by leaders of the National Cathedral, which is an Episcopal denomination. It was touted as outreach.

The Episcopal Church has experienced a decline in membership over recent years, like so many mainline churches, because of its disdain for Holy Scripture. The church has undergone much controversy over its ordination of women as spiritual leaders, its embrace of the homosexual agenda, and its “nuanced” stance toward the killing of the unborn (as characterized by the presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori).

True adherents to the Bible in the Episcopal Church broke away from church leadership when Gene Robinson was ordained a bishop. Robinson is a practicing homosexual who was, at the time, in a scripturally condemned relationship with another man. The biblical Christians formed new congregations, unaffiliated with the main congregation, and they are thriving.

Given this history, the decision by leftist Episcopalian leadership (represented by Gina Campbell, pastor of the cathedral) to host a Muslim worship service is not at all surprising. Church leaders may call it outreach, but to allow the worship of a faith that is blatantly antagonistic to Christianity is an agenda, not outreach.

I listened to a couple of Muslim spokesmen in attendance make the case that this event represented a coming together of Muslims to “condemn” the radical hijackers of their faith. Somehow none of their smooth talk rang true in light of the hatred of Christianity that Islam fosters. Muslims could make a statement of condemnation from one of the many mosques proliferating this country. Why is it necessary to make it in a Christian church? Quick answer, it is not.

This action is a blatant, in-your-face to America’s Christian community, aided and abetted by the Left. The goal of Islam is for its adherents to infiltrate and overthrow whatever land Muslims are allowed to reside in, and a weak American Christian community is perfect fodder for overthrow. I have not heard a lot of comments from Christians to counter this latest Muslim affront.

That is, except for Pastor Franklin Graham and one gutsy Christian woman named Christine Weick.

Ms. Weick maneuvered her way into the Cathedral, which in her telling of the event was something of a miraculous feat in itself. Before this Christian woman was booted out, she was able to announce this statement to those worshippers of another god in God’s house:

“Jesus Christ died on that cross. He is the reason we are to worship only Him. Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior,” she said. “We have built…allowed you your mosques in this country. Why don’t you worship in your mosques and leave our churches alone? We are a country founded on Christian principles.” [1]

With that, she was led from the room by security and handed over to police. She assumed that she would be thrown in jail but she was not. In her description of the response of the men removing her (none of whom said a word), I get the impression that these men detected the irony of it all – a Christian thrown out of a Christian church to accommodate Muslims, in America.

Pastor Graham was the only Christian leader, that I am aware, who took a firm stand. He has exhibited leadership many times in the past when other presumed Christian leaders cowered in fear of speaking out. Or, they have themselves moved away from Scripture and capitulated to our rotting culture. Pastor Graham posted this comment on his Facebook page:

“Tomorrow, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. – one of the most prominent Episcopal churches in America – will host a Muslim prayer service to Allah. It’s sad to see a church open its doors to the worship of anything other than the One True God of the Bible who sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to earth to save us from our sins. Jesus was clear when He said, ‘I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ (John 14:6).” [2]

All biblical Christians know that a church structure does not in itself make a “church.” Christianity is something that a follower of Christ embraces and incorporates into his very being. Knowledge of Scripture and an acceptance of and adherence to its teachings is what makes a Christian, not the building in which services are held. Many Christians around the world have no buildings because they must worship clandestinely.

I make this point to show that the affront to American Christians by Muslims worshipping with their backs to the cross in the National Cathedral is a minor thing, spiritually. But it is a major thing when we assess what it truly represents. It shows that American Muslims, minus the violence, are no different from their radical counterparts. Their goal is to worm their way into American culture so that eventually there will be no other sanctioned worship besides Islam.

It is no coincidence that the rise of the liberal Left in America is accompanied by the spread of Islam in America. Both entities have as a goal the destruction of America as it was founded. And neither will succeed if we do not allow them to succeed.

NOTES:

[1] See WND.com http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/christian-booted-from-national-cathedral-speaks-out/#KDJsJzTVVXOhTfyA.99

[2] See Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/US/Franklin-Graham-Billy-Graham-Muslims-Washington-National-Cathedral/2014/11/17/id/607906/#ixzz3JXMZt9an

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.

Ms. Thompson is a copy editor by trade currently residing in Tennessee. She formerly wrote for the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley California Newsletter and the online conservative blog ChronWatch, also out of California.

She grew up in Southeast Texas during the waning years of Jim Crow-era legalized segregation, and she concludes that race relations in America will never improve, nor will we ever elevate our culture, as long as there are victims to be pandered to and villains to be vilified. America is better served without victims or villains.

© Copyright 2014 by Sylvia Thompson
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sthompson/141122

November 11, 2014

Standardized Testing IS the norm!

Filed under: Education, Elections, Historical context, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 6:02 pm

Standardized Testing
Posted: 11 November 2014

On 4 November 2014, in Missouri, we had several constitutional amendments to pass or refute. Amendment 3 dealt with a state-wide educational mandate that would allow the state government to apply standards, via standardized testing, across the state in order to provide educational uniformity among students pre-K – 12. It also provided for requiring accountability for learning to the teachers, and restricted tenure as well as requiring uniform standards to teacher accreditation. Further, it allowed for the termination of incompetent teachers.

It failed to pass by close to ~80% against and ~20% for.

You should review two earlier posts at this time. One starts with an article posted by Yahoo News, which demonstrates the low level of journalism as well as how poor and substandard the educational system is, my comments at the end are important to both of these posts, and the other is the earlier posted White Paper to the Missouri Senate on Education and Entrepreneurship.

Standardized testing as toxic to education is one of the greatest politico-union hoaxes ever perpetrated on a long-suffering taxpayer. Pay close attention to the FACTS.

The first thing that y’all need to know is that standardized testing was and is an irrefutable fact of the lecture-response form of teaching. Lecture-response is universal throughout the pre-K – 12 American Educational System. Read the White Paper for more. The second thing that you need to know is that there are two forms of textbooks for pre-K – 12. The next time that you see your child, look closely at her textbook.

Open it, look at the publisher’s page, and it probably has a Chicago publisher listed as the publishing company. That is correct, wherever you are in the U.S.A., the odds are that the publisher of your kids’ textbook is the same as everywhere else in the U.S.A., and the publisher is in Chicago. Yupper, everyone HAS THE SAME TEXT BOOK! Now, look at the content.

The book is broken down into modules, sections, and chapters that coincide with the school year. So much for “lesson plans”, when the textbook is designed with internal lesson plans. Oh? Look carefully at the questions at the end of each piece.

Keep in mind, now, that the entire country uses THE SAME TEXTBOOK.

Now, the next time that you attend a P.T.A. meeting, ask to look at THE TEACHER’S textbook. Same publisher and ALMOST the same contents. Look closely at the parts of the book immediately AFTER the questions in your kids’ book.

Do not be shocked. In the teacher’s copy, not only are all of those questions answered, but there are whole paragraphs with what the teacher should be concentrating on, with what questions to ask to guide the students to the correct answer, AND there are suggested TEST QUESTIONS! Where do you think teachers get their test questions?

Yupper, ALL TEACHERS GET THEIR TESTS FROM THE QUESTIONS IN THE SAME TEACHERS’ EDITION OF THE SAME TEXTBOOK! THERE IS ONLY STANDARDIZED TESTING!

So why the argument against standardized testing when no matter where you are, the teachers MUST “teach to the (same) test”?

    The state will only use the same questions to make up the test in the first place; so no matter what, they MUST ‘teach to the test’! Could it be that it takes the granting of the actual grade AWAY from the teacher? Does it mean no more tokens, no more pets, and no more free passes to “minorities”? Does it mean that there will be a true LEVEL playing field, that FAVORITISM will now be ELIMINATED?

    AND, does it mean that incompetent teachers will be exposed for what they are and now vulnerable to replacement with competent teachers?

    Now, a little history lesson: until The Johnson Administration and its “Great Society”, New York City had one of the best public school systems in the U.S.A. The New York Public School System REQUIRED standardized testing at several grades until it was, magically by judicial decree, made racist, and therefore discriminatory. Until The Johnson Administration, the teachers were NOT unionized, tenure was limited, and a teacher did NOT need a Master’s Degree, to teach or to get tenure. Teachers and students did not fear for their lives in any of the schools in New York City in 1960. Parents were involved, teachers were involved, and except for a very few, students were involved.

    During The Clinton Administration, Hilly-Billy wanted Congress to forgive student debt and allow grants for university students taking teaching degrees. What they found out, once the people got involved, was that for every teaching position, there were 2 ½ accredited and licensed teachers!

    Why so many people with teaching licenses, compared to so few jobs?

    Class size in the 1950’s, when kids learned to read, write, and do arithmetic, was between 25 and 35. Now the teachers complain about a class size of 15 and our dropout rate is higher now than it was in 1960.

    Teachers were not required to have an M.Ed. within 10 years of getting their license, or be fired. Why, when if you look at the teachers’ textbook in grades pre-K – 8, is not an Associates’ Degree adequate? Why shouldn’t there be standardized testing and teacher accountability? Keeping in mind, of course, that STANDARDIZED TESTING is already in place and will remain in place for as long as the lecture & response teaching methodology exists.

    Who actually benefits from the current situation? Student? Parent? Teacher?

From Vol. 68 “Law Enforcement Magazine”, [nc]

Filed under: Elections, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 4:38 pm

Here is reality, clearly stated!
Sheriff Diehl would like to share an article with everyone: Picture the following hypothetical scenario: A chief at a press conference states, “Ladies and gentlemen I have gathered you here today, because police use of force cases are routinely mishandled by journalists and community leaders. It is my belief that journalists and community leaders may do a better job in this area if they have at least a basic understanding of what a justified use of force looks like.” There are three things the public needs to know about contacts with police; 1. Be courteous 2. Be cooperative 3. Be compliant Criminality, Not Color = It is important for you to convey to the public that police officers pursue criminality, not color. Officers must have a reason to make contact with an individual. They must be able to explain later in court that they had either a reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe the individual had committed or was about to commit an offense. The fact is that more than 95 percent of police contacts are handled without rising above the level of dialog. This is because most people are cooperative and compliant. This is the way it should be, because it is unlawful to resist and or obstruct an officer, while in the performance of his/her duty. If a person disagrees with a stop or an arrest, the place to argue the case vigorously is in a court of law, not on the street. Force Options = When an officer meets resistance, officers are trained to use a level of force justified by the specific threat, or resistance they are presented with. For example, if a person pulls away from an officer making an arrest and snaps, “Don’t you touch me,” the officer can choose to apply a compliance hold to that person. These holds are designed to convince the person to comply. When a suspect is actively resisting, the officer can also choose to disengage and deploy a TASER or utilize pepper spray to overcome that resistance. It might surprise some people to discover that when a suspect strikes an officer, or even acts as if he or she is about to strike an officer, that officer can legally deliver impacts with what we call personal body weapons. Officers can punch, kick, or strike with elbows and/or knees to defend themselves and/or make an arrest. Officers can also choose to deliver baton impacts to targeted areas on the body. Officers can even strike a suspect more than once if once does not stop the suspect’s threat. If a suspect tries to hit an officer, don’t be surprised when that officer hits back. Use of Deadly Force = I’ve never heard an officer say at the beginning of a shift, “I hope I get to shoot someone today.” While the vast majority of officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty, some have to. When an officer is faced with the threat of death or great bodily injury — or someone they are sworn to protect is faced with that same imminent threat — an officer is justified in using deadly force. There are three generally held misconceptions about deadly force that continually arise and need to be addressed: 1. An officer can shoot an unarmed man under certain conditions. An officer may have to use deadly force on an unarmed man who is larger, stronger, and/or attempting to disarm the officer, for example. In the case of a suspect, who is battering an officer to the point that he or she may suffer death or great bodily harm, the use of deadly force is defensible. Police officers do not have to sustain a severe beating in the line of duty. Other factors that could justify an officer’s choice to utilize deadly force are the extent of that officer’s injury, exhaustion, or the number of assaultive adversaries the officer is confronted with. 2. An officer can, in certain conditions, shoot someone in the back. You see if a suspect is fleeing and their escape presents an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to the community at large, the use of deadly force can be justified. On some occasions a round might enter through the back, because of the dynamics of the circumstance. 3. Officers are not — and never will be — trained to shoot to wound or shoot weapons out of subjects’ hands. These are not realistic options. Handguns are not accurate enough to deliberately attempt such things when lives are on the line. The Bottom Line = From 2003 to 2012, 535 officers were killed in the line of duty in this country. Another 580,000 were injured in the line of duty. I’m afraid that policing — which is already a dangerous profession — is becoming even more so, because of anti-police rhetoric and inaccurate reporting in use of force cases. If every person contacted by officers were to remain courteous, cooperative, and compliant, there would never be a need to employ force. The reality is, however, that although most people will cooperate, some people will resist arrest. It is not easy for a lone police officer to get a resistive suspect into handcuffs. If it looks rough, that’s because it is rough. Police work is a contact sport, but for cops there is no second place. If someone in the public sees a cop struggling with a suspect and decides not to give him/her a hand, they should at least give them the benefit of the doubt. Cops are not asking for citizens to get into the arena with them — they would just like the audience to stop cheering for the other team. The only way to get these three extremely simple ideas out to our communities is for you to take this information and share it, with both your fellow officers and with your community members. The above article was originally released in Volume 68 of the Law Enforcement Magazine.
Cass County Sheriffs Office

Sheriff Diehl would like to share an article with everyone:

Picture the following hypothetical scenario: A chief at a press conference states, “Ladies and gentlemen I have gathered you here today, because police use of force cases are routinely mishandled by journalists and community leaders. It is my belief that journalists and community leaders may do a better job in this area if they have at least a basic understanding of what a justified use of force looks like.”

There are three things the public needs to know about contacts with police;

1. Be courteous
2. Be cooperative
3. Be compliant

Criminality, Not Color = It is important for you to convey to the public that police officers pursue criminality, not color. Officers must have a reason to make contact with an individual. They must be able to explain later in court that they had either a reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe the individual had committed or was about to commit an offense.

The fact is that more than 95 percent of police contacts are handled without rising above the level of dialog. This is because most people are cooperative and compliant. This is the way it should be, because it is unlawful to resist and or obstruct an officer, while in the performance of his/her duty.

If a person disagrees with a stop or an arrest, the place to argue the case vigorously is in a court of law, not on the street.

Force Options = When an officer meets resistance, officers are trained to use a level of force justified by the specific threat, or resistance they are presented with. For example, if a person pulls away from an officer making an arrest and snaps, “Don’t you touch me,” the officer can choose to apply a compliance hold to that person.

These holds are designed to convince the person to comply.

When a suspect is actively resisting, the officer can also choose to disengage and deploy a TASER or utilize pepper spray to overcome that resistance.

It might surprise some people to discover that when a suspect strikes an officer, or even acts as if he or she is about to strike an officer, that officer can legally deliver impacts with what we call personal body weapons.

Officers can punch, kick, or strike with elbows and/or knees to defend themselves and/or make an arrest.

Officers can also choose to deliver baton impacts to targeted areas on the body. Officers can even strike a suspect more than once if once does not stop the suspect’s threat. If a suspect tries to hit an officer, don’t be surprised when that officer hits back.

Use of Deadly Force = I’ve never heard an officer say at the beginning of a shift, “I hope I get to shoot someone today.”

While the vast majority of officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty, some have to. When an officer is faced with the threat of death or great bodily injury — or someone they are sworn to protect is faced with that same imminent threat — an officer is justified in using deadly force.

There are three generally held misconceptions about deadly force that continually arise and need to be addressed:

1. An officer can shoot an unarmed man under certain conditions.
An officer may have to use deadly force on an unarmed man who is larger, stronger, and/or attempting to disarm the officer, for example. In the case of a suspect, who is battering an officer to the point that he or she may suffer death or great bodily harm, the use of deadly force is defensible. Police officers do not have to sustain a severe beating in the line of duty.

Other factors that could justify an officer’s choice to utilize deadly force are the extent of that officer’s injury, exhaustion, or the number of assaultive adversaries the officer is confronted with.

2. An officer can, in certain conditions, shoot someone in the back.
You see if a suspect is fleeing and their escape presents an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to the community at large, the use of deadly force can be justified. On some occasions a round might enter through the back, because of the dynamics of the circumstance.

3. Officers are not — and never will be — trained to shoot to wound or shoot weapons out of subjects’ hands.

These are not realistic options. Handguns are not accurate enough to deliberately attempt such things when lives are on the line.

The Bottom Line = From 2003 to 2012, 535 officers were killed in the line of duty in this country. Another 580,000 were injured in the line of duty.

I’m afraid that policing — which is already a dangerous profession — is becoming even more so, because of anti-police rhetoric and inaccurate reporting in use of force cases.

If every person contacted by officers were to remain courteous, cooperative, and compliant, there would never be a need to employ force. The reality is, however, that although most people will cooperate, some people will resist arrest.

It is not easy for a lone police officer to get a resistive suspect into handcuffs. If it looks rough, that’s because it is rough.

Police work is a contact sport, but for cops there is no second place. If someone in the public sees a cop struggling with a suspect and decides not to give him/her a hand, they should at least give them the benefit of the doubt.

Cops are not asking for citizens to get into the arena with them — they would just like the audience to stop cheering for the other team.

The only way to get these three extremely simple ideas out to our communities is for you to take this information and share it, with both your fellow officers and with your community members.

The above article was originally released in Volume 68 of the Law Enforcement Magazine.

November 3, 2014

Massive Voter Fraud, Capt John USN [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Law Enforcement, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 8:41 pm

Joseph R. John
To
jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Today at 4:03 AM

In the 2008 Presidential election, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) had 1200 neighborhood chapters with 500,000 members in 100 major cities across the nation; ACORN was funded by Congress to register voters. ACORN employed massive Voter Fraud to get Obama elected. In 2009, in the wake of the production of video tapes portraying members of ACORN engaged in the registration of illegal aliens, a nationwide controversy erupted. ACORN was found to be falsifying then filing voter registration forms in Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, Indiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, California, Wisconsin, Washington, New York, and Illinois, resulting in felony convictions in Federal Court in those states for Voter Fraud. As a result, millions of illegal votes were cast by illegal voters, and the previous funding for ACORN to register voters was terminated by Congress. ACORN was disbanded following multiple convictions for felony Voter Fraud in Federal courts in multiple states. The Obama administration morphed the 1200 ACORN chapters into many newly named organizations in 50 states, and those newly named organization employed the same ACORN operatives who are being well funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as they continued perpetrating massive Voter Fraud in the 2012 Presidential election.

It was reported in the below listed article, that in the 2012 Presidential election, that 6.4% of the 124,026,000 votes cast by voters, or 7,937,664 vote cast, were cast by illegal aliens. For 6 years Holder, following Obama’s instructions, has been aggressively filing law suits against any state that passes a voter photo ID law to prevent them from opposing the massive Voter Fraud again in 2012, like they did in 2008 and the number of illegal aliens voters grew in to over 7 million voters in 2012. States have been passing voter ID laws requiring that voters present a photo voter ID, in order to vote at the polls for comparison to the list of registered voters.

Even when states offered to pay for the issuance of those voter photo IDs, Holder still filed suits against the states to oppose the requirement for a photo voter ID, by saying those ;laws were designed to suppress minorities from voting. The long term goal of Obama and his leftists and Marxist supporters appointees in the bloated bureaucracy is to CHANGE the Republic into a one party Socialist State. Obama’s leftist supporters are continuing the employment of Voter Fraud to register more illegal aliens than the 7.937,644 illegal aliens that voted in 2012.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL-Senate) addressed the US Senate in a 30-minute floor speech and alerted the nation to the fact that after the November 4th election, Obama is preparing, once again, to unilaterally circumvent Federal Immigration Laws by issuing an Executive Order in order to violate Federal Immigration Law and the US Constitution, without the consent of Congress. Obama had previously violated Federal Immigration Laws, without the consent of Congress, by issuing an Executive Oder to prevent ICE from deporting nearly 1 million illegal aliens, termed Dreamers, who are now protected from deportation by the Obama administration’s ill-conceived Deferred Action-Childhood Arrival Program (DACA).

Obama gave temporary lawful status to those illegal aliens in the DACA program, up to age 31, and provided them with identity documents, expediting their rapid pathway to citizenship, without so much as a face-to-face interview with ICE or Immigration officials. The Obama administration has made it very easy for another 1 million Illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses and register to vote, when those 1 million Dreamers are added to the 7,937,6644 illegal aliens who violated Federal Law by voting in 2012, there will be nearly 9 million Illegal aliens violating Federal Law and voting on November 4th. The Obama administration knows the that Immigration Service does not have the resources to conduct field investigations of the 1 million DACA Illegal aliens, in order to check their applications, so the Immigration Service could uncover fraud, determine if they have criminal records, or determine if they might be listed in the CIA terrorist data base. Although Congressional leaders have the power of the purse, they have done absolutely nothing to cancel the funding required to expedite the pathway to citizenship for the DACA program.

After the November election, according to Senator Sessions, Obama is planning to issue another Executive Order, that will provide legal status and work authorization cards to an additional 5 to 6 million illegal aliens in the United States. Obama plans to issue those work permits to 6 million illegal aliens at a time when 44 million American citizens are unemployed & on food stamps, all American citizens would be required to compete for jobs with the 6 million Illegal aliens Obama plans to issue work permits to. When those 6 million illegal aliens, are added to the 1 million DACA illegal aliens previously provided with legal status, and the 7,937,664 illegal aliens who illegally voted in 2012. Obama will have been behind and responsible for helping nearly 15 million illegal aliens to register to vote for President in 2016.

Current examples of the massive Voter Fraud:

Maryland–Massive voter fraud in Maryland has been uncovered where illegal aliens who say they are not citizens on jury duty survey forms are found to have registered to vote by the thousands http://conservativebyte.com/2014/10/massive-non-citizen-voting-uncovered-maryland/ Early voting just started in Maryland, but there are already accusations that some voting machines are changing Republican votes to Democrat Now Republicans are calling for an investigation by the State Board of Elections.

Illinois—Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start last Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. Republican state Representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote at the Schaumburg Public Library. “I tried to vote for myself and instead it cast a vote for my opponent.” Moynihan said Cook County Board of Elections Deputy Communications Director, Jim Scalzitti, told Illinois Watchdog, the machine was taken out of service to be tested

North Carolina—The North Carolina Board of Elections has found 1,425 registered voters who likely are illegal aliens. The audit sample 10,000 registered voters in with data provided by the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles and the US Department of Homeland Security.

New York—A single Bronx voter listed in official records as being 164 years old led to the Board of Elections officials to review their files—–where they turned up another 849 New Yorkers who were supposedly alive when Abraham Lincoln was President.

Examples of Voter Fraud in Connecticut, Kentucky, Georgia, Virginia, Minnesota, Alabama, Texas, Massachusetts, Tennessee, California, Idaho, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida, South Dakota, Nevada, Oregon, Iowa, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island, etc. can be reviewed by clicking on the link https://www.rnla.org/votefraud.asp

To prevent the massive scale Voter Fraud underway being perpetrated by the Obama administration, every state should pass laws to require voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a vote at the polls. The Republicans in Congress must use the power of the purse to shut down the issuance of legal documents to provide legal status for DACA illegal aliens and the 6 million Illegal aliens that Obama plans to provide legal state to. The Governors of every state should close down the issuance of drivers licenses for illegal aliens, so they cannot use their drivers licenses as proof of residence, so they can register to vote. We encourage voters to volunteer to be poll observers or poll workers to assure Federal voting laws are observed on November 4th.

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

President Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” Speech on October 27, 1964

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

Fax: (619) 220-0109

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WaPo Publishes Scientific Evidence of Voter Fraud on a Massive Scale — As Previously Predicted By This Here Very Blog

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:29 pm

What you are about to read should be front-page news in every newspaper in the country tomorrow. You know it won’t be — but I want you to treat it as that important . . . because it is. Jesse Richman and David Earnest write in the Washington Post:

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

This is astonishing — but Richman and Earnest fail to convey just how astonishing it is . . . because they don’t explain how many people they are talking about.

Allow me to remedy that.

The progressive think tank Center for American Progress puts the number of noncitizens in the U.S. at 22.1 million in 2012. Of these, “13.3 million were legal permanent residents, 11.3 million were unauthorized migrants, and 1.9 million were on temporary visas.” These numbers are roughly consistent with numbers offered by the Department of Homeland Security (.pdf) and Kaiser Health News. So let’s take 22 million as our number of noncitizens.

Richman and Earnest estimate that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008. 6.4% of 22 million is 1,408,000.

That’s 1.4 million illegal votes likely cast in the presidential election of 2008.

Richman and Earnest also estimate that 2.2% of noncitizens voted in 2010. (In off-year elections, such as 2010 and the approaching election in 2014, turnout is obviously lower.) 2.2% of 22 million is 484,000. That’s nearly half a million illegal votes likely cast in the election of 2010 (and the same number could be cast in the upcoming election).

How important is this? Richman and Earnest say:

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given 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.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but . . . ah, hell. Y’all know I actually love to say I told you so. And I have, repeatedly. In November 2008, I cited reports that huge increases in Latino voter registration had accompanied huge increases in illegal immigrant populations, and argued that this was probably not a coincidence. As I said then:

It certainly seems logically possible that there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal votes cast in this past election. If this is true, it is possible that illegal immigrants decided this election.

If Richman and Earnest are correct, there may well have been hundreds of thousands, indeed almost a million and a half, votes cast by noncitizens (including legal residents who may not vote in federal elections, as well as illegals). And I argued in 2010:

Over time, as our population increases, your vote becomes worth less and less. This problem is exacerbated by factors such as voter fraud. Oh, I know: the liberals all assure us that there is no such thing. But let’s just take one likely rich vein of illegal votes: votes cast by illegal immigrants. What’s that, you say? Votes cast by illegal immigrants? Yes. Estimates say that there are anywhere from 10 million to 18 million illegal immigrants in the country. This means millions are of voting age. What’s more, many of them are experts at obtaining false documents, allowing them to work, drive, and participate in all other aspects of civic life. Do we really think that none of them vote? None? Let’s go with a conservative estimate of 10,000,000 illegal immigrants. If only one percent of them vote — just one percent! — that’s 100,000 illegal votes. That is voter fraud on a massive scale — certainly enough to tip a close election. This sort of thing dilutes your vote.

One percent? In 2010, Richman and Earnest say it was more than two percent, and in 2008 it was more than six percent. And again, I overlooked the population of legal noncitizen permanent residents, which more than doubles the number of people we are talking about. But, although my numbers were conservative, I will modestly concede that I totally nailed the main point — which is: hundreds of thousands of illegal votes are potentially being cast in every federal election, and nobody talks about it.

Always trust content from Patterico.

P.S. I can’t leave this post without noting this by Richman and Earnest:

We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

Really? That’s “strikingly ineffective”? (Well, yeah, it could be a lot better. But read on.)

The converse of that is that more than a quarter of the people who were asked for voter ID did not vote. We’re not told how many of the 1.4 million who voted illegally in the 2008 election were asked for IDs, but if voter ID laws were in effect in all 50 states, rather than only about 15 states, we might see over 25% of 1.4 million illegal votes prevented in a presidential election. That’s over 350,000 illegal votes that could potentially be prevented by voter ID laws.

Now: I’m perfectly happy to consider other means for preventing illegal voting. But voter ID laws work, and this study helps prove it.

This is hugely important, folks. Bookmark this post, right now. The next time people try to tell you there is no such thing as voter fraud, I want you to take this link and shove it right down their throats.

P.P.S. The authors do say: “Finally, extrapolation to specific state-level or district-level election outcomes is fraught with substantial uncertainty.” We can’t know for sure whether the extrapolation I present here is overstated, understated, or completely accurate. But one thing we can say: despite the false claims by the left, there is definitely massive voter fraud occurring in every federal election.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Blog at WordPress.com.