Tag: politics

Donald Trump is putting the last 38 years of failure on the part of the Republican party’s social conservatives in perspective with his forthright actions in office:

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to ensure that the faith-based and community organizations that form the bedrock of our society have strong advocates in the White House and throughout the Federal Government.

President Trump has signed an Executive Order entitled “Establishment of a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative” in order to:

• provide recommendations on the Administration’s policy agenda affecting faith-based and community programs;
• provide recommendations on programs and policies where faith-based and community organizations may partner and/or deliver more effective solutions to poverty;
• apprise the Administration of any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law; and
• reduce the burdens on the exercise of free religion.

Lest you think this is a mere exercise in meaningless bureaucratic symbolism, it’s definitely alarming the right people.

Anyone following the heinous “religious freedom” laws popping up around the U.S. understands that the coded language in a new executive order signed by Donald Trump yesterday has been used consistently and insidiously by conservatives to remove rights from LGBTQ people and women.

Read the executive order HERE. It’s alarming, to say the least.

This will be used to ensure that businesses and organizations have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on religious beliefs…. Be afraid, be very afraid. This has the fingerprints of organizations like Family Research Council and other anti-LGBTQ hate groups all over it.

(((David Brooks))) is alarmed by the fact that the Left is becoming as unlikely to provide safe haven for his particular form of globalism as the Right

Tribalism is in the air, on the left as well as on the right. It is based on a scarcity mentality, the idea that life is a zero-sum war between us and them. It emphasizes division and conflict, not solidarity and cohesion. It draws out the authoritarian tendencies in any movement. On the right, tribalism brings us the ethnic authoritarianism of Donald Trump. On the left, it seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.

You can see authoritarianism entering the left through two avenues. The first is nationalism. Not long ago, most of the American left tended to think transnationally — partly because problems like climate change are global, partly because it’s hard to regulate a global economy nation by nation, partly because progressives used to be psychologically averse to nationalism.

But national sovereignty is not withering away. Left-wing hostility toward European Union-type multilateral organizations is at record highs. Now a lot of progressive economic thinking is nakedly nationalistic. Bernie Sanders in 2015 derided a more open immigration policy as a “Koch brothers proposal.” It’s the old xenophobia — us or them, screw or be screwed. On trade, the left-wing populists sound like Trump.

The second stream fueling economic authoritarianism is identity politics. It used to be that big political divides were defined by economic interests; now, the cultural dog wags the economic tail. Identity politics defines the core political divides. When many progressives talk about economics these days, they take the habits of mind they developed when talking about identity groups and apply them to economic groups.

Translation: David Brooks’s (((identity group))) is fast running out of political wiggle room. When one very small identity group becomes massively overrepresented among the economically dominant, then obviously the economic redistributionism of the Left is going to merge with identity politics. How can it not?

The Left sees the One Percent as the primary problem. The Right sees the demographic change and economic decline of the nation as the primary problem. And if the One Percent are responsible for the the demographic change and economic decline of the nation, well, then both sides have more than a scapegoat, they have successfully identified the responsible parties.

This, of course, is why Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, and Jennifer Rubin are all calling for a third party. But it’s going to be a very, very small one of virtually no appeal to anyone who is of the nationalist Right or the economic Left. There is not much of a market for a party of warmongering globalists whose primary domestic priority is the economic strip-mining of the lower, middle, and upper-middle classes.

The same situation is developing in the UK, as the media-generated “anti-semitism” of the Labour Party is causing the traditional Labour-supporting Jews there to rapidly migrate to the Conservative Party, where their globalist priorities are unlikely to remain popular or influential for long.

A defeated Labour councillor, Adam Langleben, said it was a source of ‘shame’ for the party that Jewish people had felt obliged to vote based on ‘their safety’.

‘Thanks to all those who voted for myself, Humayune and Agnes today. It was the greatest honour of my life to serve West Hendon,’ he tweeted.  ‘We must NEVER have another election like this. No community group should have their vote dictated by their safety. That should shame us @UKLabour.’

Mr Langelben told the Guardian: ‘Every Jewish Labour household we visited, people said, “not this time.” Activists were being told, “this is a racist party, an anti-Semitic party”, doors were slammed in their faces.

It’s not exactly hard to figure out how that’s going to play out over the next decade. And it occurs to me that the so-called White British population now already had their vote dictated by their safety. That’s why they voted for Brexit.

This is why it was a massive mistake for US states to allow new residents to vote. This rootless nomad is moving on after all of 14 years because he doesn’t like the way the politicians for whom he voted are governing Seattle.

I KNEW Seattle was no longer a place for me when I met with Debora Juarez — the District 5 City Council member I had voted for.

Last September, at what I thought was going to be a friendly one-on-one meeting between an elected official and her constituent, I expressed some concerns that were on my mind. I fretted over the deterioration of a city with which I had fallen in love — a city that, despite my 21 trips to Europe, I still believe to be the most beautiful in the world.

I told my council member that Northgate, my home, had seen a noticeable increase in litter and graffiti. To my dismay, she seemed to suggest these issues were someone else’s job, not hers. So, I moved on to a bigger issue: homelessness.

When I first moved to Seattle 14 years ago, to attend the University of Washington, homelessness essentially didn’t exist at Northgate. Though I have never been a victim of or witness to a crime, some of my neighbors have been, and they believe homeless camps are the reason. Additionally, the conditions in such camps are often atrocious — not only are the homeless more likely to be victims of violent crime, they are susceptible to infectious disease, such as the hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego that sickened nearly 500 people and has killed 20.

I believe strongly that it is not compassionate to leave people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves to suffer and die on the street. Because many (but certainly not all) homeless people struggle with mental illness or drug addiction, I suggested that Seattle find a way to make it easier to provide treatment to these troubled souls — involuntarily, if need be. It could literally save their lives.

Juarez exclaimed, “What is this? Nazi Germany?” Appalled — in part because my grandparents survived Nazi Germany — I got up and walked out….So, my wife and I are heading to the Eastside. We really would prefer to stay in Seattle. But if safe streets, clean sidewalks, an affordable place to live and polite discourse is asking too much, we’ll gladly seek refuge in a city where quality of life and civility still matter.

Guess what sort of politician this guy is going to vote for in the next election in his new city. Almost certainly the exact same sort of politician he helped elect whose policies he is fleeing now.

This is why skin in the game matters. This is why it is a mistake for farmers to permit nomads to dwell among them, much less be permitted any voice in how they order their societies. When things fall apart, the nomad will move on and the farmers will be left to pick up the pieces as best they can. And this is why no immigrants, foreign or domestic, should be permitted any vote in a democracy or a republic for at least five generations.

The fact that one dislikes the consequences of one’s own vote enough to flee them should be sufficient cause to deny one’s future right to vote. Man’s ideologies and political philosophies have not yet caught up with his transportation technology and his ability to travel around the world to escape the consequences of his actions.

Mytheos Holt performs a post-mortem on the quixotic Evan McMullin campaign:

For the forces that backed him, McMullin was not the first, the second, or even the third choice for his appointed task—namely, to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency in the name of donor-driven True Conservatism™. Rather, the forces that supported McMullin leaped from one anti-Trump hero to another, starting with the plaintive-sloganed Jeb!, continuing with the vapid dreamboat Marco Rubio, and finally ending up desperately lining up behind Ted Cruz because at least he went on their cruises.

What separates McMullin’s backers from other Jeb!, Rubio, or Cruz supporters, however, was their total unwillingness to accept that sometimes a primary just wouldn’t go their way. In many cases, this was because they belonged to a class of people for whom losing wasn’t supposed to happen because of who they were. This was particularly true of Bill Kristol, arguably the man who built what little meager infrastructure there was for McMullin, hoping to put up someone, anyone, who would stop the GOP from rejecting its self-appointed neoconservative establishment rulers, and their domesticated coterie of social conservatives, who, goshdarnit, were just too Christian and principled to limit immigration, or to attack the interests of major metropolitan donor industries.

And so it was that people who had never had to fight to win a primary decided they were going to try and fight back against someone whose only experience was winning a primary he was never supposed to win by sheer force of will. First, they did it by attempting to force a brokered convention, which presumably would have produced someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan as the nominee. All they accomplished was screaming helplessly from the floor of the RNC like a certain highly distressed member of the #Resistance.

Not to be deterred, they then decided to follow in the august footsteps of George Wallace and John Anderson, and run a third party protest candidate to ensure that no True Conservative™ would have to sully his or herself with a vote for Donald Trump. And for a while, their push looked like it might be something to worry about. Names like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or even future Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis were bandied about with excitement. That is, until Romney, Sasse, and Mattis got wind of it and quickly made it plain that on no account were they involved in this, and would you please stop calling, Bill Kristol?!

But even after this, McMullin still wasn’t the first choice. That honor went to the august National Review columnist David French, who entertained the idea for just long enough to get a segment on Fox News complaining about how rude Trump supporters were. Then he promptly fled.

Only then, and finally, after casting about in the “darkness” of the dawning Age of Trump, the disappointed neoconservative Captain Ahabs realized they had to run someone if they wanted to look serious. Enter Evan McMullin, former House Republican Conference Chief Policy Director, former CIA agent, former investment banker, and man with nothing better to do because he was possibly the only unmarried Mormon over the age of 19 in Washington. And so, NeverTrump looked at McMullin, squinted, thought he looked enough like David French, and said: “OK, fine, you’ll do.”

Of course, quite rapidly it became clear that the chances of McMullin actually becoming president were someplace between zero and hahahahahahahaha . . . wait, what? But becoming president was no longer the point. It was all about sinking Trump, to prove to those awful populists who had dared to think for themselves, and not the way Bill Kristol and Bill Kristol’s donors wanted them to think, that they were servants, and could never live in the Big House as equals.

And so, a simple strategy for denying Trump the presidency was devised: McMullin would try to carve away enough of his voters in states with high Mormon populations so that even if Trump won a couple of swing states, the losses among Mormons would cancel out Trump’s victory. Whether McMullin won those states, or Clinton won them, was beside the point—which was, and only ever was, to hurt Trump. And, for a few moments, the strategy looked like it might work in Utah, right up until the Mormons thought it through, realized how much trouble they’d gone through making themselves part of the Republican coalition in the first place, and decided they’d rather not self-excommunicate for the sake of panicked Beltway grifters. Ultimately, McMullin came in third in Utah, behind even Hillary Clinton.

As has so often been the case, the light of the God-Emperor has revealed the true character of many a cuck and an America Secondist. I find myself wondering if McMullin even has the self-awareness to be ashamed of how he permitted himself to be used by Bill Kristol to screw over so many sanctimonious conservatives.

Then I recall who those sanctimonious conservatives were and how obnoxious they are, and I remember that I don’t care.

The South Korean president says the God-Emperor merits the Nobel Peace Prize:

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has shaken off a suggestion that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that U.S. President Donald Trump “can take the Nobel prize” as long as the Koreas receive peace in return.

Moon made the comment Monday in response to a suggestion that he receive the award by the widow of late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 after a summit with then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Moon held a summit with current leader Kim Jong Un last week in which Moon and Kim, the son of Kim Jong Il, walked together across the tense border and agreed to a raft of initiatives meant to ease animosity. Moon responded to the suggestion of Nobel glory by saying, “President Trump can take the Nobel prize. The only thing we need is peace,” according to the South’s presidential office…. Also on Monday, the North’s parliament adopted a decree to sync its time zone with South Korea’s this Saturday. North Korea’s official news agency said the move was made at the proposal of Kim, who found it was “a painful wrench to see two clocks indicating Pyongyang and Seoul times hanging on a wall of the summit venue.”

President Trump still needs to Drain the Swamp and Build the Wall before he can nail down Rushmore status, but he has already accomplished considerably more than anyone had a right to expect.

There is no question that the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to Donald Trump:

North and South Korea will seek a peace ‘regime’ to end the 68-year Korean War, their leaders announced today, after Kim Jong-un agreed to a ‘complete denuclearisation’ during historic talks. Kim became the first North Korean leader to step into the South for 65 years as he met with President Moon Jae-in for a peace summit.

The two sworn enemies exchanged a warm greeting at the 38th parallel in the truce village of Panmunjom before the pair held talks and planted a commemorative tree together. The dramatic meeting has been seen as a precursor to planned talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump next month.

This afternoon, Kim and Moon embraced warmly after signing a statement in which they declared ‘there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula’. The two countries said they will push for talks with the US, and potentially China, to officially end the 1950-53 conflict, which stopped with an armistice and left the Koreas still technically at war.

They also agreed to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons but did not provide any new specific measures outlining how to achieve the objective.

Kim said: ‘We are going to be one again, as we share the same history, the same language, the same culture, the same blood. We are going to happily look back at the hard times in the past when we achieve a new future. No pain, no gain. Let us go forward, step by step for the bright future together.’

This is a staggering development of the sort we have not seen since 1989. I expect the Nobel committee will give the award to Kim and Moon, of course, but the world knows who really deserves it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is already one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States of America.

And he hasn’t even delivered on either of his signature campaign promises yet. But he will.

We can expect more of this inter-party conflict as whites cease to become the only identity group with influence who can be safely targeted:

California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, the prominent #MeToo activist now under investigation for groping and sexual harassment of former legislative staffers, was reprimanded by former Assembly Speaker John Perez in 2014 for making racially insensitive comments directed toward Asians.

Perez confirmed to POLITICO on Saturday that he had to “strongly admonish” Garcia after she made comments against Asians in a closed-door Assembly Democratic Caucus meeting in 2014 — the same year in which she also acknowledged using homophobic slurs aimed at Perez, the first openly gay speaker of the California State Assembly.

Sources familiar with the incident say Garcia’s anti-Asian remarks came during a legislative battle that arose when Asian-American community activists successfully lobbied to defeat a Democratic proposal to overturn California’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions. They argued that such a move could hurt Asian student admission rates.

Perez in mid-March 2014 announced a move to return the bill to the Senate without any action from the Assembly, effectively blocking its advance. Garcia, the sources said, erupted in anger during a tense meeting of the entire Assembly Democratic caucus.

“This makes me feel like I want to punch the next Asian person I see in the face,” according to sources present at the meeting and other legislative sources who were told about the comments in the immediate aftermath.

It is beginning to look like there will be a Hispanic-Jewish alliance battling the Asians for control of the Democratic Party. Which is why LA Mayor Garcetti, who is the poster boy for that alliance, will be heavily pushed to be the next Democratic candidate for President.

Reince Priebus is determined to return the Washington Generals Republican Party to its more customary role of permanent defeat and retreat:

Priebus acknowledged Trump is, in some ways, not like any other Republican president. Trump is “extremely unique” in his personal style, Priebus said, and his campaign themes refocused the Republican Party on a populist message…. “I think post-Trump, the party returns to its traditional role and its traditional platform. It’s a Trump brand and he owns it and he has a way of protecting it,” Priebus said.

He’s proud to be a Republican because at least he knows he’ll lose.
He’ll surrender to the Democrats and he’ll defend the right to choose.
He’ll gladly stand up next to you and give up your liberty.
Cause there ain’t no doubt he loves to lose, God bless the GOP!

Like the Tea Party, both Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan proved to be Congressional failures, if not frauds:

In the aftermath of the Democratic waves in 2008, Ryan, McCarthy, and Eric Cantor presented themselves to Republican voters as The Young Guns – a new generation of conservatives largely untainted by the poor decisions of the Bush Administration, ready to lead in a time when Republicans were downtrodden and Democrats ebullient about the possibilities of the Obama years. Of the three, only Ryan had something particularly interesting to say: he was a blue-eyed salesman for the cod liver oil of entitlement reform. And he achieved something truly amazing: he got Republicans, at least for a time, to grasp that third rail. They voted for his reform plans reluctantly at first, but once they discovered the “throw granny off a cliff” ads had little power, their cowardice gradually dissipated.

Ryan was the most important Republican in Washington from 2009 to 2016. He now seems like a throwback from a bygone era, when voters expected their politicians to be straight-laced, honest, and sincere. He was serious, and dedicated himself to trying to tell stories to the American people about the fiscal direction of the country – stories which voters mostly ignored because they always seemed to involve hard news and histograms. Wisconsin nice and a truly decent person, Ryan’s approach was doomed in an era that values none of those things. It values the ferocity, the abandon of confrontational politics, not grand bargains and compromise.

We’ll see if the same proves to be true of Kevin McCarthy or not. Ryan seemed to start off well enough, but he rapidly disappeared into the weeds of cuckservatism and rendered himself irrelevant even before he became an ineffectual candidate for Vice-President. He proved to be timid and feckless non-leader in a time of intensifying cultural war.

And while I always thought it was unattractive, doesn’t the ticket of Romney-Ryan look even more ludicrous in hindsight than it did at the time? Even if Ryan is not being retired at the God-Emperor’s behest due to a Dennis Hastert-style problem.

It’s hard to know how much of this is genuine and how much is political smokescreen. But at this point, I’m a little surprised Trump hasn’t simply fired Mueller, Rosenstein, and everyone else who is part of, or playing along with, the legal charade:

President Donald Trump is considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, multiple people familiar with the discussions tell CNN, a move that has gained urgency following the raid of the office of the President’s personal lawyer.

Such an action could potentially further Trump’s goal of trying to put greater limits on special counsel Robert Mueller.

This is one of several options — including going so far as to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions — Trump is weighing in the aftermath of the FBI’s decision Monday to raid the office of Michael Cohen, the President’s personal lawyer and longtime confidant. Officials say if Trump acts, Rosenstein is his most likely target, but it’s unclear whether even such a dramatic firing like this would be enough to satisfy the President.

Trump has long been angry at top Justice Department officials, who he feels have not done enough to protect him from Mueller’s ongoing probe. But two sources said the raid could mark a tipping point that would prompt the President to take more aggressive action against the special counsel.

Firing Mueller could throw Trump’s presidency into crisis and not all of Trump’s legal advisers are on board. One source said Rosenstein wouldn’t be fired.

But some of Trump’s legal advisers are telling him they now have a stronger case against Rosenstein. They believe Rosenstein crossed the line in what he can and cannot pursue. And they consider him conflicted since he is a potential witness in the special counsel’s investigation because he wrote the memo that justified firing former FBI Director James Comey. The legal advisers also believe they have successfully argued to the American public that the FBI is tainted and think they can make the same case against Rosenstein.

A senior administration official said the White House has been discussing potential options with key congressional Republican leaders, fearful of “blindsiding them.” A person familiar with the conversations says a top congressional Republican advised the White House not to fire Rosenstein.

What a surprise that the do-nothing Republican leaders are fearful and advise doing nothing. That’s like saying that a fish recommends water. But President Trump not only has the legal authority to fire these jokers, thanks to Obama, he also has the legal authority to declare them enemies of the state and order drone strikes on them.