Posts Tagged → Trump
“Jews For America”! Have the cavalry arrived?
Occasionally someone else’s writing gets posted here, either because it should be seen more, or because I could not say it better myself. Here is a unique one, a statement from the group “Jews For America.”
Think on that. That some American Jews even see the need to say this about themselves is quite a statement, and it is happy evidence that not all is lost in the American Jewish world.
Jews For America
Immigration Statement
For Immediate Release
Contact: Rabbi Aryeh Spero
(212) 252-6861 rabbispero@yahoo.com
New York, February 6, 2017 — Rabbi Aryeh Spero, spokesman for Jews For America, stated today:
“We support and commend President Trump for following through on his campaign pledge to protect the American people by stemming migration into this country from high-risk places posing a security threat to America and Americans. Beyond doubt, it is the first and most important duty of a President, or any leader, to protect the lives of a country’s citizens, especially where a possibility exists of terrorists being embedded within a particular immigration flow.
“Securing a country’s borders until a more fool-proof method of vetting is established is unassailable and vital, especially in light of how in Europe and here in America lax vetting has resulted in horrendous explosions and deaths of dozens of innocent people as seen, for example, in Orlando, St. Bernardino, Columbus, Paris, Nice, Berlin, Boston, and Barcelona, as well as other places infiltrated by terrorist plants within certain immigrant groups. Some unvetted or poorly vetted migrants or their offspring may possess ideological and religious hostility to Americans and our way of life and our laws. Saving lives of American citizens is a religious, historic and civic duty.
“There is no parallel between the Jews who fled Europe in the 1930s, who were, as Jews, specific targets for death and Nazi concentration camps, and many today wishing to escape civil war and turmoil in their Mideast countries. There were no Nazi agents embedded within the fleeing Jews nor did any of the Jews harbor a cultural or religious ideology wishing to sew physical destruction on the American people. There were no rabbis in the 1930s sending forth commands worldwide to destroy the ‘infidels’.
“Many initial roll-outs are subject to some confusion and mishaps; however, we believe that protecting a country’s borders and thereby its citizens is an age-old and reasonable imperative as demonstrated in Scripture, which warns of the need to be wary ‘Lest those that may be your enemy enter your domain and become thorns in your sides and pins in your eyes’.
“Hopefully the situation will one day change, but until then, we applaud President Trump for doing what is in the best interests of the American people.”
NPR’s alternative facts undermine media credibility
Seasoned NPR employee Mara Liasson asked a question at a White House press briefing the other day, and it has taken me days to accept the brazenness of her bald-faced lie.
Asking Trump Admin spokesman Sean Spicer about allegations of voter fraud, Liasson asserted that Trump had claimed the number of fraudulent votes in the November 2016 election were between three and five million.
Unfortunately, Spicer is new and did not challenge Liasson’s lie. Trump never claimed that number. He did say he believed between one and two million of the votes for Hillary Clinton were fraudulent. How Liasson arrived at five million votes is something only she knows.
But we know why she did it: Mara Liasson is personally opposed to the Trump Administration.
Unfortunately, Mara Liasson is like the other NPR employees, she is a partisan political activist. Her personal politics shapes her professional behavior. Nothing that Mara Liasson does is news reporting, as in reporting of actual facts. Her brazen creation of alternative facts in this one instance resembles her many prior years of alternative facts creation and fake news aimed at her other political enemies.
In one public moment, Mara Liasson has re-opened the worm can of fake news and alternative facts, used to attack and undermine the mainstream media’s political enemies.
And NPR fans wonder why their credibility is so low, and why there are so many loud calls to defund NPR and strip it of the publicly owned intellectual property it manages, like its trademarks and logos.
UPDATE: Fifteen minutes after writing this, I read a New York Times article published today, written by Richard Fausset, another political activist who wears the credentials of a “news reporter.”
What catches my eye right away is the following statement by Activist Fausset:
“The scrambling of what’s real and what’s illusion began well before Mr. Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway offered the concept of “alternative facts” on Sunday when commenting on false statements by Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and before Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims on Monday that millions of illegal voters cost him a popular vote majority.”
Women marching in DC + Hollywood = end of an era
Hollywood had the power of suggestion, once.
Producing movies that highlighted the best of human attributes, the best of Americanism, of small town communities resulted in Americans spending their hard-won dollars for more meaningful entertainment. Heroes sold tickets.
Then came the strictly action genre, still riding on the saddle of good vs. evil Westerns. Still we were on board, as the Soviets really were an evil empire worthy of being blasted out of the sky by Rambo. Heroes had bigger muscles, bigger guns.
Then came the sanctimonious genre, and Hollywood really poured on its power of suggestion. Stretching Americans’ willingness to budge on principle, Hollywood mistakenly comingled emotion with contrary logic. And so here we are, treated to a long line of Hollywood stars openly at war with the very people and fans who made them stars to begin with. Americans still believe in God and the Bible, even if they are willing to look the other way on certain policy issues. But they are not willing to abandon their core beliefs.
Drawing upon my work as a conservationist, this Hollywood pickle reminds me of the faux “Highbridge/Sturbridge/ Scarsdale/ Woodcroft Crossing” – type low-density developments ravaging America’s best farmland, destroying the very beauty which first drew Americans to live in those places to begin with.
The similarity and irony are too much to ignore. A sense of invulnerability and profligate spending of hard-won resources drive this mentality in both models. But whereas America has a lot of open land left to develop, Hollywood can ill afford to burn its bridges and crossings. If Hollywood becomes the permanent home of the goofball aggrieved and whiny upper middle class, it will not sustain itself. Hollywood may say it is against capitalism, but without capitalism, Hollywood ceases.
Perhaps the strangest example of this self destruction is actor Bradley Cooper’s choice to abandon the heroic persona he adopted for American Sniper, and trade it in for open contempt of Donald Trump and support for Crooked Misogynist Hillary. Cooper had a fan base across America rivaling any actor, and then he detonated it. Similarly, Jack Nicholson is a talented actor garnering appreciation for being a chameleon, but who knew until recently that he not only supervised Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old-girl, but then applauded Polanski years later when he received a Hollywood award in absentia?
Need anything be said about Meryl Streep’s recent hypocrisy? She has been held accountable elsewhere, so we move on here.
These are the acts of clueless people, whose once gentle powers of suggestion once held sway over an American public willing to forgive small differences of opinion, but who are now greatly inflamed by the many acts of war and outright treason committed by their former heroes and heroines.
If you are an actor, whose job it is to pretend to be things and people you are not, then it is highly unlikely you are qualified to comment on anything serious, is what America has learned.
After looking over the signs and placards those marchers carried, and listening to their speeches and bad poetry, I could not help but feel sorry for them. They really do not know what they are protesting.
Oh, sure, they did not vote for Trump. OK. But it is very rare for Americans to protest against the outcome of a fair and square election result. That would be really bad form. Super sore loserish. Wearing suggestive hats isn’t a substantive statement, either. It is juvenile.
The women and men who took to the DC streets Saturday with their Hollywood escorts, protesting God Knows What, are coming from a distant past.
Emerging from their caves, where there was once inequity, to be sure, the America around them today does not square with their views. Take all the updated statistics like, for example, women outnumbering men in American medical schools and law schools. Trying to resurrect the distant past and fuel it with Hollywood’s now over-played power of suggestion just gives us a bigger bonfire on which to watch all of the old vanities burn.
You all can go to bed now. I will be happy to kick the dying embers and watch them blink out into darkness.
Donald Trump proving his detractors wrong, over and over
Donald Trump is proving himself the right choice for president every day, as his enemies melt down over every little thing.
And every little thing thrown at Trump is created out of whole cloth.
His cabinet nominees are subjected to garbage accusations designed to impugn their reputations. For example, Dr. Tom Price, the HHS nominee, whose stockbroker ordered $300.00 (three hundred dollars) worth of stocks without his knowledge, is being attacked with fake news stories that he somehow especially benefited from this. Thank you CNN, 100% fake news.
And Donald Trump is batting 1,000 as he keeps smacking fastballs out of the ballpark. Via Twitter, via honest and plain-spoken responses to ridiculously shallow politics. Which is all liberals have left.
And all I can say is, please keep going, liberals. All you are doing is proving our selection of Trump was correct.
A question and a wish
First the question. Is there a reasonable explanation for Brooklyn lawyer Dan Goldstein’s aggressive harassment of Donald Trump’s daughter yesterday?
After all, the young mother was sitting in a plane with her three kids, minding her own business. Bystanders credited her with being cool under fire, while Goldstein and his partner were escorted off the plane for their disruptive behavior
Goldstein’s partner, Matt Lasner, joked about it on Twitter, then deleted his Twitter account altogether.
What is it about two gay Jewish guys from New York that they have missed out on the meaning of life, the meaning of the holidays, and the joy that comes with treating people nicely?
These two guys are a minority of a minority of a minority. You’d think they would be the most sensitive to not bullying other people. They’re highly educated (which actually probably explains some of this event, given the low quality of most PC academia). They’re financially secure. Where did they leave their manners?
I have a theory: So many urban elites are so completely cut off from the rest of the populace that they really cannot relate, and their disdain simply pours out when they do make contact. After decades of indoctrination by academia and liberal activist media, these folks are so filled with acid hatred for others that they cannot control themselves. In short, they are bigots.
If you want evidence that liberalism is failing, this is a good example. If your beliefs cause you to behave in inhumane ways toward innocent people, then you have bad beliefs.
Dan Goldstein and Matt Lasner are most likely atheists, so it’s tough to say what their core beliefs are or could be. But they make their aggressive liberalism clear to everyone, and that includes being vile and disrespectful to moms with kids minding their own business.
Gentlemen, Daniel and Matthew, if I may be bold enough to call you gentlemen, maybe you can take a hint here for how to treat everyone you meet over the next week, if not your lifetime: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and have a wonderful New Year!
The Sad Situation in Standing Rock
A person must be cold blooded to not at least feel sad for the Standing Rock folks.
This is a group of ancient people who have watched their culture, lifestyle, property, and land heritage melt away under the weight of newer tribes. They really don’t have much left, and now a pipeline threatens to take away even more.
The Dakota Access pipeline is important, heck, all the new pipelines are important because energy independence is critical to American political independence. The more America can rely on domestic energy, the less we need foreign sources of energy. The less we depend on those foreign sources, the freer we are to make tough but necessary decisions about domestic and foreign policy.
What saddens me is the win-lose situation in Standing Rock. The pipeline is presented as a take-it-or-leave-it outcome. Surely there is some other way to resolve this, other than ramming it through. After all, that has been a hallmark of the failed Obama administration and their legislative allies on so many other policy fronts, ramming decisions down everyone’s throats. It is a negative way to run government. It unnecessarily creates winners and losers.
Creating winners and losers is a recipe for serious problems down the road. Resentment runs deep. Grudges are created. Losses are forever mourned.
I know from experience that the Standing Rock situation presents us with an opportunity to create winners and winners.
How well do I recall sitting in a conference room at my office in downtown Harrisburg in 2001. Gathered around the table were representatives from Audubon, Sierra Club, recreational ATV riders, hunters, trail hikers, and the timber industry.
I had successfully negotiated the purchase of a privately owned 12,500-acre inholding in the huge Sproul State Forest from the Litke family. Donna Litke was a neat Pennsylvanian who loved her family’s rugged wilderness land in the northcentral country, but who also had a fiduciary commitment to her family to get the best financial results possible from any purchase. Her private land would become public land after we acquired it.
But Everyone wanted the whole property for their own interests. Or they wanted to block their political opponents from getting something out of it.
After hearing all the crabbing from all sides, left and right, environmental groups and industry, I decided that we would not acquire the property unless everyone got something out of the deal. Everyone needed to share in the success, or else we were not going to see the deal close.
So the day we sat down with a map of the Litke land, and began to discuss where certain activities could or would best take place, was the day we began to get to a win-win outcome. In the end every interest group got something out of the acquisition. Audubon and Sierra Club saw certain sensitive lands there set aside as natural and wild areas, where logging, road building, and gas drilling would not occur. We created a 1,400-acre ATV riding area on reclaimed and unreclaimed coal mining land there, too, the first one on public land in Pennsylvania, which today has generated substantial economic activity in ultra-rural Beech Creek.
Much of the Litke forest was set aside as “plain vanilla” State Forest, where people can walk, hike, camp, hunt, trap, fish, and cut timber. The streamside railway that came with it became an important rail-trail, drawing tourists (and their dollars) from far and wide.
And I did not learn how to do this cold. Rather, in 1995 to 1996, I had successfully used the same approach in the Middle East Peace Process agricultural projects in Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank when I was at US EPA, representing our agency in the diplomatic process.
Boy, you talk about competing interests! There was no shortage there, but in the end I was dubbed “Little Kissinger” for the sidebar negotiations I created, which got the overall projects back on track. Winners and winners.
My hope is Standing Rock will provoke the best in us. Barack Hussein Obama did nothing to help the folks there, until two weeks ago he made a purely political and symbolic decision against the pipeline. Obama has always been about winners and losers, heck he enjoys creating losers, so who can be surprised by his action here. Like everywhere else over his eight-year tenure, Obama squandered an opportunity to facilitate competing interests find common ground.
And that is what needs to happen at Standing Rock: Common ground.
Aren’t there potential solutions to this standoff that are win-win? I can think of three or four potential solutions that would probably be acceptable to the main parties.
We have a new president who understands the concept and importance of win-win outcomes. Hopefully President Trump appoints a solid and good-faith negotiator to resolve the head-on collision at Standing Rock, for everyone’s benefit.
Winners and winners.
Why this election is important
This election is a public referendum on the way America is run.
Right now we have the US Attorney General personally intervening in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton. Loretta Lynch is personally using her official position in the Obama Administration to block criminal accountability for an American citizen.
Is this the Rule of Law? Is America now being run like a Third World country?
President Richard Nixon went down in flames for crimes much less significant than what Hillary Clinton appears to have committed. Why is Hillary Clinton not being held to the same standard as Nixon?
Both Obama and Clinton use the levers of administrative power to pursue policies they cannot obtain through Congress, per the US Constitution. A weak Republican establishment is more worried about its own political career, and will not confront these unconstitutional abuses of power.
A compliant press that shares the agenda of Obama and Clinton shields both of them from scrutiny and honest news reporting, and viciously attacks people who do try to raise legitimate concerns. The mainstream press is now an attack dog for one political party. Most “news” professionals no longer even pretend to be objective.
Sure, there are two flawed presidential candidates. But one of them has serious criminal issues, while the other just bugs people with his big mouth. The flaws are not comparable or equal. Voters who easily disregard Hillary’s criminality maintain a mindset they will never tolerate with other Americans. They simply want a certain set of policy outcomes enshrined in Federal law or executive actions, regardless of the cost.
This is why this election is so important.
Do Americans want to be run by a strong president, who simply does whatever he or she wants to do, and Congress is more of an advisory body? That is how Rome was run by the Caesars, and the political swings were so wild whenever an administration changed that bodies littered the streets each time. Is this where you want America to go?
Do you really believe that 50% of the American electorate will stand back and let their country fall apart and the rule of law suspended? Civil wars have been fought over less.
Trump is not an ideal candidate, but he is not a criminal, and nowhere near as flawed or as dangerous as Hillary Clinton. Voting for Clinton rewards her criminality. Voting for Trump is voting for a stable America where the rule of law remains. You cannot go wrong with that.
Voting for Hillary?
Voters who select Hillary Clinton now forever disqualify themselves from criticizing any future candidate. There has never been nor is there likely again to be a candidate as unqualified and as corrupt as Clinton.
Knowingly choosing Clinton means a voter forfeits their ability to credibly attack future candidates. If Clinton is worth your vote, then anyone is worth voting for, because a candidate cannot be worse than Hillary Clinton.
Sure, you could disagree on policy with a future candidate, but you could not fairly accuse that person of being flawed. If Hillary isn’t too flawed for you now, then no one can ever be flawed again.
Hold Hillary to the same standard you have for other candidates, or forget being taken seriously.
Hypocrosy corrodes credibility. Don’t be a hypocrite. Vote for Trump and hope he’s happy to leave after one term.
Does “dialogue” work?
The words “bipartisanship” and “dialogue” are emphasized as being part and parcel of America’s success, political, financial, cultural.
But have you had, or tried to have, a political dialogue recently? If yes, was it successful?
I have been struck between the eyes by what seems odd, to me, about the dialogues and conversations I have had recently, in person and online.
Americans saying they intend to vote for Hillary Clinton are completely unmoved by her crimes, her private actions, her bullying of her husband’s many rape and sexual harassment victims. There really is nothing Hillary Clinton can do that her supporters won’t overlook.
And there really is nothing that her opponent, Donald Trump, can do that is acceptable to them.
I find this odd, strange, illogical, because objectively weighing out one candidate versus the other leads to a pretty obvious conclusion: Both candidates are flawed, but one is desperately flawed, far more flawed than the other. Why a middle-income, law-abiding American will vote for someone so deeply flawed and unqualified is mysterious to me.
It appears that reason, logic, facts, quantifiable substance are all utterly of no consequence to about fifty percent of the voters.
They are utterly unmoved by the Wikileaks revelations, that one particular political party has a core culture of stealing votes, rigging elections, engaging in the worst sort of voter fraud that undermines the entire premise of representative government. Wikileaks has revealed a group of people in love with power and control, at any cost to the nation, to innocent people, to anyone in their way.
“I hope Hillary did kill Vince Foster. That is totally badass” writes a top, paid, political party functionary whose name is frequently in the news.
This person was revealing this sentiment in a private email that was not supposed to end up in the public view, but public it now is, and so is that person’s mindset. This mindset is quite literally insane, and yet none of Hillary’s supporters seem phased at all by it. It is all OK, apparently, among Hillary’s supporters.
And so on, in like mind, in like words, among the people closest to Hillary Clinton’s lust for power.
The list of crimes against Donald Trump and his supporters grows longer every day, as more and more Wikileaks evidence is revealed.
George Soros and his favored political party paid people to go to Trump rallies and wreak violence, to punch and hurt innocent people, to cause destruction, to stir things up, so that their allies in the establishment press could then accuse the Trump supporters of the misdeeds.
And yet none of this bothers any of the people I have dialogued with in recent weeks and days. They simply do not care, and they are simply going to vote for Hillary Clinton, period, because.
America is premised on dialogue, on reason, on voters making educated decisions that are in the best interest of the polity, which we all share. When so many voters are presented with damning evidence that their candidate is pure evil, and fatally flawed, and they still support that person, then they have abandoned the very foundation of what makes America work.
And this is what is most problematic about Hillary Clinton’s support: It means that end of democracy, the end of our Republic, because Clinton is ready to employ the same illegal, unconstitutional actions that Obama has gotten away with. And once she is president and acting that way, America is headed for a constitutional crisis. Her actions as candidate say everything about her as president.
Every human civilization comes to an end at some point. America is not too big to fail. It is only as strong as the voters who run it. If America presently has fifty percent of its voters lusting after domination over their fellow citizens, and well-reasoned dialogue with them is unpersuasive, then our nation is headed for serious problems.
I hope America dodges this bullet, and gets back on track.
p.s. someone accused me of being a Republican, and therefore naturally supporting Donald Trump. First, Trump is no Republican. Second, I cannot stand the commie Republican Party and I am only a registered Republican because I live in a state with closed primaries and I must hang my hat somewhere; I would be most satisfied as a registered Independent. Third, Trump is running against a political establishment controlled by BOTH political parties. He is an outsider who has no allegiance to any party, but only to the American People, which I and many others find refreshing, even if he is a blathering big mouth. Dialogue provides the means by which we come to well-reasoned conclusions. But not one Hillary Clinton supporter I have met seems interested in a dialogue. Rather, they seem to have utopian dreams of control, domination, and “correct” behavior we all must follow once they are in power. No thanks.
Do you really want this double standard?
Why Are Double Standards Bad?
A double standard is where a stringent expectation is applied to one person, and a different, much looser expectation is held for someone else.
The problem with double standards is they are hypocritical.
Where there is hypocrisy, especially in what is supposed to be representative government, there are frustrated, even angry people on the other side. All of the social contracts that underpin representative government break down in a double standard environment.
In this presidential race there are all kinds of double standards at play.
Exactly 6,378.7 women have now suddenly come forward to accuse Donald Trump of unwanted sexual advances and “groping.”
Where all these aggrieved women were over the past thirty years remains a huge mystery. Suddenly, weeks before the election, they all emerge from the shadows. They cite facts that are physically impossible, socially improbable.
That many of them are known political activists is not surprising.
The mainstream media, which is now openly an arm of just one political party, and which has abandoned actual news reporting, has granted these women instantaneous credibility and constant access to cameras and sympathetic talking heads.
On the other hand, Bill Clinton is a known rapist and sexual harasser, and his wife, Hillary Clinton, has been his enabler over decades. Hillary has made it her mission to destroy the lives and reputations of each of the many accusers who have dared reveal their painful experiences with Bill.
Working carefully with Hillary has been the mainstream press, which is in news blackout mode now. The very real female victims of Hillary and Bill Clinton are actually ignored.
And the WikiLeaks data dump? Emails demonstrating just how incredibly corrupt, criminal, and evil Hillary is…these are not news to the CBS-NBC-ABC-NPR-NYT-WAPO-PBS political activists posing as fair minded arbiters of fact and accuracy. America’s news organizations are literally ignoring actual facts, hugely important facts, that undermine the political candidate they have chosen.
And they are trumpeting obviously false accusations made against Trump. It is an obvious diversion from the WikiLeaks data dump so damaging to Clinton.
What is happening is an avalanche loss of credibility, even as the mainstream media attempts to define only itself as bona fide news organizations, and to exclude citizen reporters and others who actually report news. The citizen reporters’ fault is they are reporting actual facts that the politicized media refuse to acknowledge, because those facts undermine the mainstream media’s political agenda.
How are citizens supposed to make sense of this double standard? Aside from using a double standard to advance an agenda by duping the citizenry, the beneficiaries of double standards signal a more important truth: They do not stand by the Rule of Law.
The Rule of Law is a core principle, probably THE core principle, of representative government.
The Rule of Law means that big or small, rich or poor, every citizen is treated equally under the law. No one is too big, or too important, to go to jail.
Well, that is until Hillary Clinton walked free, away from a criminal enterprise shades of which are sending others to jail right now.
And so Hillary is showing that she wants to lead America, and she will use every trick to be able to do that, and once she is in power, she will suspend the Rule of Law any way she can, to advance her political agenda.
Dear liberal friends, are you really willing and able to sacrifice America for the temporary advancement of your political agenda? Do you not realize this is a precursor for tyranny and totalitarianism? Do you not look at recent European history and see parallels with where we are today? What if you were the ones facing the lying media? Would you be OK with where things are now in this race? After all, only the fake mainstream media are breathing life into Hillary’s campaign. If conservatives controlled the media, you would be enraged. Please tell me you are not this shallow.
I do not understand how my liberal friends so gleefully embrace Hillary Clinton. I am not gleefully embracing Trump. Rather, I am simply recognizing that he is the far lesser evil of the two of them. Hell, he is not evil, he is a buffoon. He does not share my own agenda, other than maintaining the Rule of Law.
Hillary means the end of the rule of law, and the beginning of life by a double standard. There is no democracy or republic or representative government anywhere that can survive that.