The Unbalanced Ninth Circuit Court and the Road to Dystopia

Americans continue to wait for a decision from a three judge panel of the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeal on President Trump’s anti-terrorism travel ban. The panel heard arguments Monday after a federal district court judge stayed the ban.

The president’s ban is designed to provide more protection for Americans from terrorist attacks by preventing individuals or classes of individuals entry into the United States from seven countries that have served as notorious breeding grounds for terrorists and their murderous, destructive acts.

Those countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen.

While some in the media have tried to paint the president as violating the checks and balances of the Constitution for criticizing the district judge who stayed his executive order that contained the ban, other members of the media have begun to zero in on the 9th Circuit’s trespass onto the executive branch.

Here’s what even The New York Times wrote about Judge Michelle Friedland, who appears to think she should decide whether there is enough reason to institute a ban.

“Judge Friedland, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, did not seem persuaded that immediate suspension of travel from the seven countries was necessary.

“‘Has the government pointed to any evidence connecting these countries with terrorism?’” she asked [Department of Justice attorney] Mr. Flentje.

Here is what Mr. Flentje should have said: “It’s none of your damn business. That’s the Constitutional mandate of the executive branch and the statutory authority bestowed on the president by Congressional legislation. You may agree or disagree with the bar we’ve set, or agree or disagree with the conditions and dangers from those countries as we see them, but you have no business directing, and no power to alter, policy because you don’t like it.”

Actually, Mr. Flentje did rebuff her, but not as forcefully.

Friedland’s questions demonstrate two things. First, she wants to unveil the administration’s policy reasoning so it can be attacked. To be sure, both the president and the Congress should explain their policies and their reasoning and the facts behind them. Friedland is not looking for understanding, however; she is looking for targets her thinkalikes can attack and obstruct. That motivation of hers is strictly political, not forensic.

Second, Friedland suggests that courts do, or should have, the authority to negate a policy of the executive branch, not as a matter of law or Constitution, but as a kind of second-guessing review board to contain or uproot policies they opine are not warranted or are not in conformance with their ideology.

The state of Washington’s case generates laughter among anyone who takes law seriously. The state said companies headquartered there, like Microsoft, are negatively affected in their employment practices. In other words, the ban could hinder Microsoft from hiring foreigners, because they don’t want to hire Americans. Not only is that stance anti-American, it defies logic. There are about 7.5 billion people on our planet, and because you cannot hire someone from those terrorist breeding grounds, 7.27 billion people isn’t a big enough employee pool from which to pick?

The attorney representing Washington state spluttered about religious discrimination. Unfortunately for Muslims, the violence woven intrinsically into their tenets and scriptures bloodies and defames their religion. If I were Muslim, I would not want to have to make the argument that I am being discriminated against because my faith tells me and other adherents that I have to kill all the people who don’t accept my faith.

It’s not discrimination against Islam; it’s discrimination against terrorism, unless Islam and terrorism are the same thing.

What’s happened is that a sick, self-hating ideology has overrun our schools and our society and our politics from one end of the spectrum, the end commonly called liberal, and produced intellectual usurpers like Friedland, Gates, and Google, etc., who reject all that made us what we were, our religious, cultural, and political heritage. It’s not true liberalism; it’s a deviant extremism that wants to empty our citizens of their self-respect and replace it with a docile acceptance of whatever the social engineers want to implant in our brains.

In their view, what’s right is wrong; what’s wrong is right. Protecting the lives of American citizens is wrong if it upsets foreigners who don’t belong here in the first place or some concept of “open borders”.

This new social engineering is creating two classes: the elite establishment and its privileged managers and media minions, and everyone else. The establishment is hellbent on acquiring and keeping a share of our minds, and exerting an ever stronger psychological and actual influence over us. There is a reason for the quiet raping of our privacy of which we have been much too docile in our acceptance.

Right now, private and state Internet companies, communication companies, electronic devices companies, media companies, and content-providing companies are listening in on you and watching you. Siri and Alexa may be listening even when you are not talking to them. Your computer camera, phone camera, television, microphone recorder on any of those, can – at least potentially, if not yet actually – pick up and transmit what you are saying and doing. It’s the same with the cloud and any Internet based security system with cameras that you use.

They are getting to know you, whether you want them to or not.

Beware the hook: “a more personalized experience.” It’s a gross lie. They are getting to know you, quietly and intimately, so that they can shape the way you think, guide your behavior.

Beware. It’s just a little now. It will be much, much more later.

Beware!

I know I have mixed in a lot here that is disparate, and that I began with a current event and moved swiftly, and perhaps for some, too far away into the realm of what it is a part of and where it is going. I believe it is something to consider. Things just aren’t right any more. An ugliness is slowly emerging.

No Compassion for Bad Thinking

An administrator at the Ohio State University has drawn outrage after a Facebook post she made in the wake of this week’s brutal attack of 11 people on campus.

Stephanie Clemons Thompson, the assistant director of resident life, wrote that people should have “compassion” for Abdul Artak Ali Razan, the 18-year-old Somali Muslim OSU student who ran over several pedestrians and cut and hacked at others when he went on a rampage Monday. All victims have survived.

Students and others became angry when they learned Thompson had expressed sympathy for the violent perpetrator of the terror acts. They want the university to fire Thompson or Thompson to resign, according to various reports. Others have expressed support for her.

A university police officer shot and killed Razan at the scene when he refused to obey orders to drop his knife and surrender. Bystanders took pictures of Razan’s body and circulated them on the Internet, and massive numbers of people rejoiced in the police officer’s actions and in the killing of the attacker.

Thompson’s Facebook post read, “If you think it is okay to celebrate his death and/or share a photo of his dead body, and I see it in my timeline, I will unfriend you. Think of the pain he must have been in to feel that his actions were the only solution.”

She included these hashtags: #BuckeyeStrong, #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHisName. #BuckeyeStrong refers to the sentiment of solidarity and shared grief among students, faculty, and staffers in the wake of the terror act. #BlackLivesMatter refer to the group that rails against police shootings of black persons whether they are justified or not. #SayHisName similarly refers to saying the name of the black victim of a police shooting and the perceived sense that police shoot blacks because as members of a different race they don’t know them.

Razan was black, and the Facebook page with Thompson’s comments has since been deleted.

Is compassion a proper sentiment to hold in relation to someone who tried to bludgeon and flatten people to death, then carve up a few more after he crashed his car?

Thompson erred in the thinking that produced her statements, and she displayed a gross insensitivity in her choice of when to make them.

First, compassion means to share in the sufferings of another, literally or figuratively, to pity what a person is undergoing. We cannot share in Razan’s alleged suffering because we do not know that he suffered at all and because, even if he had, we suspect his mind may have created a degree of suffering disproportionate to what he experienced.

Second, we cannot feel compassion for Razan because the “solution” to his suffering, to which Thompson so glibly alludes, stands as misplaced or disproportionate to the action he took. Attempting to kill people will not make Americans friendly to Islam or Muslims. Rather, attempting to kill people will make Americans hate Islam and Muslims.

If a person wants to raise his voice in protest, march in protest, or conduct some civil disobedience, that is one thing. If a person wants to run people over and slice and dice them, that is another, and Thompson should have grasped that.

Thirdly, we cannot feel compassion for Razan because he did not seek a positive way to remedy whatever inequities or social ills he perceived and which may have existed.

Razan claimed that the way the United States treated Muslim countries disturbed him and worried at how he would have been looked at if people had seen him pray in the open, which he wanted to do.

I would suggest the real problem for Razan and other violent terrorists and Islamics isn’t the way America or Americans treats Muslim, rather it is in his eyes that kuffars (infidels) seem to have a better life, greater advantage, and more leverage than Muslims: Muslims seem second class to the first-class kuffars when it should be the other way around in Muslim ideology.

It is precisely this bizarre reasoning and classism that has infiltrated and found purchase in Thompson’s thinking. Not content to contend for genuine cases of bad police shootings, Thompson feels that any police shootings of blacks is wrong, and that blacks as a class, even if they are engaging in criminal behavior, should not be shot at by police.

This is the burgeoning racism of the 21^st Century to which Thompson adheres. Because they are black, blacks do not have to follow the law, and when they don’t, they must not suffer the consequences that anyone else would suffer. If a police officer shoots a black, particularly if it is a white police officer, then the officer is guilty of wrong. Thompson seems to live among those who think police officers, whites, Hispanics, and others, should offer themselves up on the altar of black privilege, because blacks have suffered. It is the only way to repay for past racial sins.

The argument is prima facie irrational and, frankly, stupid. It is racist.

The truth is that blacks, whites, Indians, orientals, Hispanics, etc., have been slaughtering and enslaving, not only each other, but their own for millenia. Blacks played a key role in the lucrative slave trade, such as the Dahomey, and willingly and eagerly sold their brothers and sisters into vile servitude. To this day, blacks slaughter each other across the whole continent of Africa, including Somalia, the country from which Razan hailed, a veritable cauldron of violence and death made the more so by the sulfuric tenets of Islam.

Razan came to this country after he and his family spent seven years at a refugee camp in Somalia.

Think about it: he and his family had to flee their Muslim homeland, probably because it was too dangerous to live there and the people were drowning in poverty. Razan’s family did not want to stay in another Muslim country, Pakistan, likely because their fellow Muslims didn’t want them: they would not tolerate the Somali refugees or provide them with opportunities to integrate and prosper, even though they held the same faith.

Instead, the Razans wanted to come to the Christian and Renaissance United States, America, land of the free and home of the brave, the land and people which gave Razan’s family a way to make a living and was giving Razan a chance to receive a university education.

In gratitude, Razan betrayed the security of his fellow students and faculty because of his warped, fantastical, bizarre, sick Muslim ideology. He tried to murder them.

No, Ms. Thompson, we are not going to feel compassion toward Razan. As a Christian I will pray for him. Within the context of what happened, of the choices Razan made, however, I am glad he is dead, that he was shot and stopped from further violence. I celebrate the end of an evil. It’s a natural human response. It is Razan himself who incited that response. It’s as much a gigantic sigh of relief as a celebration of joy.

Do I wish that Razan had been different or that he had made different choices? Yes. I wish he had chosen to respond with gratitude to the people and the country that took in him and his family instead of turning traitor on people who trusted him to be their neighbor in peace.

Do I feel pity for the people whose minds and hearts have been poisoned by Islam? Yes. It’s tough to liberate oneself from the beliefs and culture in which one was trained and raised. To one extent or another, we all have to go through that process of experience and exposure, of skepticism and self-reflection, of discovery, of growth. We have to emerge from the sea of culture, society, and religious belief in which we were raised to walk on dry land as our selves.

That is why America is a free market of ideas country. You can freely, emphatically, peacefully put forth your ideas and back them up with the facts you can find. You can try to persuade others but you cannot compel them to think as you do. You can vociferously critique or criticize others or yourself, and it isn’t a sin.

That isn’t tolerated in Muslim countries, but you are not in a Muslim country. If you try to change us by force, we will stop you by any and all means necessary. The only thing America does not tolerate is the subversion of what America is and stands for.

And for you, Ms. Thompson, you need to examine your own conscience and your support for any movement that blames police officers or white people for everything and exonerates blacks engaged in violent, criminal activity. The movement you support has spurred the mindless murders of police officers all across this country.

Each shooting is a discrete case. Where fear or prejudice is at work in one, we must end it. Fear and prejudice are as much a part of the black psyche as the white because it is an element of our humanity. If you were as compassionate toward police officers as you want to be toward a terrorist, maybe you could help eradicate the shootings you lament instead of promote them.

For that to happen, Ms. Thompson, you must improve and change your thinking.

Bill Bashes Obamacare; Hillary Laughs at Voters

An amazing thing happened yesterday. Former President Bill Clinton called the Affordable Health Care Act – known widely as “Obamacare” – crazy. In fact, he named it, “the craziest thing in the world.”

The former president said Obamacare was crazy because it has imposed an unbearable burden on middle class Americans who were working “60 hours a week” to pay for it to succeed, a burden that has punished them financially.

It’s not the first time Mr. Clinton has savaged the piece of legislation that the current president, Mr. Obama, considers the signature act of his presidency and his legacy, and which Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, has vowed to perpetuate.

You can hear or read the former president’s exact words here:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/04/politics/bill-clinton-obamacare-craziest-thing/index.html

and here:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/bill-clinton-criticizes-obamacare-calls-u-s-healthcare-crazy-article-1.2817355

To be fair, Mr. Clinton did not advocate for a complete turn away from universal health care, though he did not advocate a strict staying with it either. He did suggest that at least in the respect he described, Obamacare was a failure that needed urgent attention for a remedy.

The bottom line, however, is that “affordable” health care isn’t affordable for everyone. A huge chunk of hardworking Americans, the mainstream of this country, is being punished to make it work. The reason that is so is because huge corporations were granted an inexpensive out from the system, which many have taken, and the 25 million persons now allegedly covered by Obama’s plan put absolutely nothing into it.

Pundits and people alike are struggling to reconcile Mr. Clinton’s denunciation of Obamacare and his wife’s angry, dogmatic support of it. Some explanations have been proposed, and we will review them and add a possibility.

It’s not just that Mr. Clinton disagrees with his wife; it’s that he has more than once disagreed with her on this issue. So there has been time for Hillary’s campaign to school Mr. Clinton on what he can and cannot say. Hillary has said her husband will be a major source of counsel and management in her administration, perhaps her chief advisor. So she knows and has known exactly where he stands.

So what’s up with Mr. Clinton’s denunciation of Obamacare?

Some are explaining it as Bill out of control, in discord with his wife and with Mr. Obama, the latter with whom he shares no lost love. His stunning frankness reveals at the least his intention to influence his wife away from the system constructed by Obamacare, perhaps completely away from universal health care at least as embodied in the existing legislation. Mr. Clinton, who was willing to deal with Republicans to help create a solvent administration that eventually created a financial surplus, wants to see his wife replace the affordable health care act with something different that keeps alive the ideal of universal health care but through pragmatic legislation that would reject Obama’s financially destructive act.

A toned down version of that explanation suggests that Mr. Clinton is signaling to Republicans that Hillary will compromise on the affordable health care act, something she cannot say during her campaign, while signaling faithful Democrats that she will never relinquish the ideal of universal health care. In this scenario, the affordable health care would be modified – significantly – but some sections would be left intact. This also provides a give-and-take with Republicans. In exchange, Hillary will want something else, and she will expect the Republicans to give it to her. For the time being, Mr. Clinton may have to walk back or appear to walk back his comments, but the long term signal is clear: Hillary will deal where Obama wouldn’t. It’s her own version of Trump’s “nothing is sacred, nothing is off the table” without her declaring such.

This is both good and bad for the American people, if it is true. The achievement of ideological and policy objectives requires either overwhelming support or compromise. In this day of polarization, compromise will usually fit the bill. Things will get done, and that alone would be a vast improvement over the Obama administration.

Compromise also reveals, however, the underlying reality of an establishment class divided into two factions who wield power for their enrichment and satisfaction. The give-and-take is for them, and only collaterally, if at all, serves the public in the sense that the public must be kept mollified just enough to go along with their decisions and to remain blind and deaf to what is really going on. It’s a kind of “Shove this bottle of formula in your mouth while mommy and daddy decide what we are doing” philosophy of governance. The baby consumes the formula and falls asleep. Mommy and daddy shovel the baby into the crib in a room upstairs at the back of the house. Mommy and daddy party wildly with the other mommies and daddies downstairs.

In a democracy, each and every citizen is a mommy or daddy. No one should lord over them. However, our system is not set up that way any more, from the limited two parties to the donor class who can pump fistfuls and suitcases of dollars into shaping policy and buying the allegiance of lawmakers. Our democracy is failing us, and too many of us cannot see it.

A third explanation is simply that Mr. Clinton, much older now (70), is speaking with the frankness of age. He’s looked at Obamacare and he doesn’t like it. Mr. Clinton believes it’s a bad policy that doesn’t work, even though his wife may have no desire to make anything but minor tweaks to it. He doesn’t reflect her or her campaign’s thinking at all but, in spite of his prevarications about his sexual conduct, just wants to give his straight observations to his fellow Americans. That neither makes him conservative nor denies his liberality, nor does it mean he stands against universal health care. He just thinks the Obamacare legislation was the wrong tool to get it done, and he’s not going to fudge it for his wife, perhaps much to her chagrin.

This explanation, too, has merit. Mr. Clinton, the politician par excellence, has shown signs of weariness along the campaign trail. He wants people to know what he’s thinking, and even he has his times where he cannot tolerate the BS. Mr. Clinton desires policies that work as much as policies that achieve his objectives. He does not believe the two are incompatible, and he is genuinely shocked at the machinery of the Obamacare legislation, which punishes a large segment of hardworking American citizens.

This looms as a key difference between Mr. Clinton and his wife.

Like Mr. Obama, Hillary stands out as an ideologue first and foremost who pulls and twists reality to conform to her ideology and its desired outcomes. Mr. Clinton is a liberal idealist but a pragmatist, too. He works to achieve his liberal objectives within the shape of reality.

Understand that neither the terms “ideologue” nor “liberal idealist but a pragmatist, too” are intended to imply that either Hillary or Mr. Clinton always act in accordance with their meanings. There are times when all of us wax ideological or pragmatic regardless of the category into which we generally fall. Many times other categories prevail in our reflection and decision-making. Thoughts and emotions swirl within a complexity we don’t always understand, at least not right away.

Generally speaking, however, Hillary and Mr. Clinton can be understood in the manner described.

A fourth explanation lies in the dishonesty and pridefulness that blemishes Hillary’s character. Hillary has marked her career by support for policies she varnishes with the rhetoric of “fighting for women” or “fighting for the middle class” or possession of a “fitness” or “temperament” for office or a “resumé of experience” that will bring stability and security and prosperity to American citizens. Yet she, and perhaps her husband, too, mock those who support her, precisely because she knows they are accepting her faux reasoning.

Remember when Hillary was asked whether she wiped her private server of government emails or ordered that her server be wiped? Do you remember what she said and how she said it?

“What, like, with a cloth or something?”

You can surf to YouTube and query “hillary wiped server with cloth”, and you will find a multitude of videos to choose from, including videos from Bloomberg and CNN, enemies of Trump and supporters of Clinton.

“What, like, with a cloth or something?”

The profundity of significance in her faux question does not even lie with its dissembling, although that is an element of the profundity. Rather, it lies with the attitude that gave birth to the dissembling, the notion that she could look reasonably intelligent reporters in the eye and American viewers in the eye and mock them by saying something she knew was disingenuous and something she knew was a flimsy cover for the fact that she did have her server wiped!

That attitude of mockery persists in every defect of her performance as a professional politician. That’s why she lied about sending and receiving classified material on her private server, in violation of the law and the protocols that governed the management of classified material. She already knew she would not be prosecuted. She is saying, “I can do what I want, and you won’t touch me, and I am still going to govern this country and run your lives. I am going to lie to you, make it obvious, and provide an explanation you will be only too willing to accept because I have taken – and you have given me – influence over your minds.”

Hillary Clinton is living proof of Neal Stephenson’s concept of mindshare and the ability of collectives (in his book, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, collective or collectivist corporations) to establish and grow a toehold in people’s minds to the point where people accept and defend that corporate view willingly.

Hillary is not alone. Many other elitist practitioners of mindshare exist on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Indeed, she has drawn endorsements and support from many of them. But the strength of her arrogance and her snobbery elevates her even among other elitist practitioners. Yet her supporters do not, perhaps cannot, because of their intellectual abdication, see it or act on it.

So when Mr. Clinton spits on the features and working of Obamacare, and Hillary allows him to, it is a part of her psychology, of her pattern of gamesmanship: letting Americans know what she really is and yet convincing them to pull the lever for her and her wasteful policies anyway. That’s why she screamed with all the affectation of indignation, “What difference does it make!?” during a senate hearing.

Please, examine carefully what she said. Her reply to the question of obtaining timely information to make a decision about what to do in Benghazi was to say:

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and to do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

First, please note that Hillary was asked to respond to a question about why she didn’t pick up the phone, call the ambassador in Benghazi or others there, to find out exactly what was happening. She avoided answering at first. Afterward, she said she didn’t want to interfere with the process and uttered her notorious “what difference does it make” line.

Second, Hillary was asking about an event over which she had authority and management. She was not someone “outside of the process”. As secretary of state, other than the president, she was the chief part of the process. She, of her own choice, became an aloof outsider to the process with fatal consequences.

Third, Hillary tosses in an axiom about what should be done from this point on to obscure her accountability for what should have been done before the murders by terrorists occurred at Benghazi. Sure, she should figure out what happened, since she didn’t know beforehand, so death can be prevented in the future; that does not exclude the requirement that it was her job to figure out what was going on, either before it went down or as it was going down, to prevent the unnecessary deaths of our four fellow Americans in the first place. That’s why she received classified diplomatic and intelligence information that she illicitly stored on her server.

This is a huge point. Every western country with an embassy or consulate in Benghazi pulled out its people. They pulled out their people because they knew an attack was coming. They knew who it was coming from, too. The only person and the only government in the western world that maintained a diplomatic presence in Benghazi in spite of overwhelming evidence and information that that presence was in peril was the government that spun around the Obama-Hillary axis, the United States.

It’s unfortunate to have to say it, but Hillary has no shame. She then further torqued the whole Benghazi tale and flatly lied to the faces of the relative-survivors of the four Americans murdered about why they had been murdered: Libyans were protesting an anti-Muslim film. Then she lied to everyone else about what she had said to the relatives of the murdered! A mountain of lies!

One cannot exaggerate the immensity and offensiveness of the personal lie Hillary told to the surviving relatives of the Americans murdered in Benghazi. It’s offensiveness is bloated to the greatest, most expansive proportions. And It’s impossible to exaggerate the immensity and the baldfacedness of the lie that an anti-Muslim movie generated the murderous riot in Benghazi. Playing on the guilt some Americans feel about their natural aversion to Islam and its tenets of violence and its prophets of violence, she blamed the murders of four Americans on America and Americans. Americans are anti-Islamic and thus anti-diversity and anti-compassion and so we made a film that ridiculed Mohammed and Islam (thought we had free speech) and WE brought death to our own people. It’s a terrorist’s, and a murderer’s, dream: “I murdered you because you caused me to murder you. It’s your own fault!”

Mindshare. Hillary has captured it from her supporters, well-meaning but terribly misled and intellectually abused supporters. You may not think or believe or even entertain anything ill about Islam or Islamics, but you may think, believe, and entertain anything ill about yourself and your country.

That’s the tie-in with Mr. Clinton’s stunningly frank disembowelment of Obamacare. Hillary is laughing at you, because she and Obama took an ideal, twisted it into an unworkable policy, got you to accept it (got Congress to accept it without even reading it!). She’s telling you, through herself or her husband, that she is feeding you fecal matter and getting you to eat it anyway. She’s telling you, signaling to you, that she is lying to you, and then employing the simplest, most indignant, and most intellectually subversive excuses to protest the truth of her lies, and finally laughing at you when she obtains your acceptance, if not your agreement!

Sophistication and truth are not the same thing.

That has been her victory. That is the contest she really wants to win. Winning the presidency is simply the crown to her pathology of egomania and prevarication.

As much as any shame that accrues to her, we the voters are full of shame if we accept her and elect her.

Caveat emptor!

LGBT Members, Rise Up For Trump!

It’s an unfortunate truth that most of us have been hustled or taken advantage of by a slick salesperson with an eroded conscience, whether with a new or used car, or by the hard sell of a timeshare pusher, or the pressure of a boiler room bandit. That is never truer than in politics, a field in which seasoned campaign veterans can employ many devices of deception withdrawn from their vast crypts of cunning.

 

Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stands out among the best. Even as she blows her brass horn about unifying the country, she divides its constituents into little pieces with her mental constructs: the “poor” and “women” and “black lives matter” and “illegal immigrants (she prefers “undocumented aliens”)” and the “LGBT community”, etc. Clinton claims she “fights” for each and every one of them, but her policies harm them, sometimes in the short run but always in the long run. You cannot “fight” for all those groups without losing something somewhere. Those groups themselves will lose.

 

Let me give a few examples before I address the main group I want. The poor ultimately aren’t helped by a welfare system, including the Obamacare measure and unemployment benefits, that spends excessive amounts of money the taxpayers don’t have to give. We near $20 trillion in debt. Sooner or later the banks will break. Clinton damages middle class folks the most because they are the ones fighting unemployment yet they are proportionately footing these welfare bills the most even as they continue their own descent into poverty.

 

A presidential candidate should be standing up for all lives, not just ones of color, especially the lives of our citizens who exercise protection, prevention, and crime-fighting in an official capacity on our behalf. A presidential candidate should execute policies consistent with his or her oath of office to follow the Constitution and the law, not to sanction law-breaking in immigration and residency here. A presidential candidate should stand up for men and women to make sure all receive the same treatment under the law, not that one or the other should receive special advantages. A presidential candidate should not offer lip service to LGBT rights and damn the Second Amendment yet support policies that allow people who hate gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders, not to mention nearly our entire way of life, easy entry into our country so that those people may kill those LGBT citizens.

 

Why is Hillary Clinton a knot of contradiction that endangers the very lives she claims to want to help. The answer is simple: for her, those groups of people are nothing more than “voting blocs” to get elected. She will scam them with her political rhetoric and Clinton Foundation so she can finally clutch the power and level of enrichment she has been craving for years!

 

LGBT community, rise up! Hillary will get you killed with her Swiss cheese immigration policies. Her thinking is defective, unconstitutional, and laced with deadly consequences. Hillary worries about a few guns, but she’s not worried about the bloody religion and culture of Islam, and its legion of fanatics contaminated with hate for you. Triggers don’t pull themselves; it is that hate which pulls the triggers She doesn’t want to offend another one of her cherry-picked groups – Muslims – even though so many of them intend to turn you into a 21^st century holocaust.

 

Let’s face it: someone as intoxicated with hate as jihadists like Omar Mateen would have found another way to kill the innocent night clubbers, if he could not have gotten his hands on guns. He could have set fire to the night club, trapping those inside. He could have bombed it, finding ingredients at local stores. He could have serial-killed several, pretending to be gay and picking up individuals, only to get them alone to beat their heads in with a baseball bat.

 

Hillary’s irrational focus on guns diverts attention from the truth: Muslims think gays are depraved humans who must be eradicated from the face of the planet, along with everyone else who isn’t a Muslim! Read the Koran and its commentaries/interpretative works for yourselves! The moral teaching of the Koran and its interpretative works declare the sexual acts of LGBTers sins; sharia law takes those sins and transmogrifies them into crimes for which the penalty is a painful death, whether by stoning, tossing headlong off a great height, pushing a wall onto them to crush them, or incineration.

 

Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Mohammed, or his first hearers, say (and I am paraphrasing here, but it carries the gist): “Execute the queers!” Hillary says she does not want to allow terrorists into the country, but when she supports indiscriminate permission that allows every Muslim into the United States without proper vetting, she is opening wide the gates for LGBT-hating Muslims to walk in, simmer and boil with hatred, then explode with murderous fury!

 

Trump wants to protect gay lives. He perceives that supporting gay rights remains meaningless if gays are being brutally mass murdered. He wants gays to live in security. He wants gays to be able to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms so the next time a Muslim maniac walks into a gay night club, or any night club for that matter, he’ll be greeted with a hail of bullets that shreds his hateful, sharia, self-righteous ass to pieces!

 

It is presidential candidate Donald Trump who will stop the fanatics from entering the country until we have a way to find out who’s who. Doesn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t the government fulfill its constitutional mandate to protect its citizens in every way that it can? We can support refugee camps with money, if that’s what the taxpayers want, but we are under no obligation to bring them here. They need to stay the hell over there. And if they don’t like conditions over there, maybe Muslims should take a second look at their religion and their culture and ask why they keep slaughtering one another all the time, mutilating and raping their young girls, and murdering women and children just to make a point!

Does Islam Promote Hate, Torture, and Murder?

Wittingly or not, Donald Trump has once more identified the prime issue in U.S. – Middle East relations and a key issue in both legal and illegal immigration.

In an interview with CNN Host Anderson Cooper, Trump stated frankly that he believes that Islam hates us. Below is my transcript of the initial question posed by Cooper, Trump’s response, Cooper’s clarifying question, and Trump’s added response:

COOPER: “Do you think Islam is at war with the West?”

TRUMP: “I think Islam hates us. There’s something [pause], there’s something there tha- that is a tremendous hatred there. There is a tremendous hatred there. We have to get to the bottom of it. There is an unbelievable hatred of us.” [Trump begins another word but Cooper interrupts to ask his qualifying question based on Trump’s last sentence.]

COOPER: “In Islam itself?”

TRUMP: “You’re going to have to figure that out, okay? You’ll get another Pulitzer [Prize for Journalism], right? But you’re going to have to figure that out. But there is a tremendous hatred. And we have to be very vigilant. We have to be very careful, and we can’t allow people coming in to this country who have this hatred of the United States and- and- and of people who are not Muslim.”

COOPER: [After initially talking over Trump’s last sentence]: I guess the question is, is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or is there a war between the West and Islam itself?”

TRUMP [After stopping the start of his answer to Cooper’s last question before Cooper had finished asking it]: “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define. It’s very hard to- to separate because you don’t know who’s who.”

The buzzards of political correctness are once again putting us at risk and vilifying Trump for what they consider a bigoted and divisive statement. Trump’s statement comes on the heels of his proposal to temporarily ban all Muslim entry into the United States until effective vetting procedures are established.

Lost in such derision lies the fact that many, if not perhaps an overwhelming majority, of Americans get the same impression. The media itself has reported constantly since Iran took American hostages in the late 1970s the remarks of a variety of Islamic leaders and protesters pronouncing, shouting, or holding high banners that proclaim the United States is “the Great Satan”, “Death to America”, “Behead Those Who Insult Islam”.

Protesters in the Middle East have burned the flag of the United States repeatedly. News Reports have shown or revealed to Americans and Westerners cruel acts of ritual mutilation of female genitalia, the rape and or molestation of women and young children, the senseless brutalizing of al Quaeda and ISIS victims, beheadings of innocent people and children, including many Westerners, sneak attacks and bombings of school buses and stores and other public places, endlesss wars, and cruel genocides of Christians.

Buddhists aren’t committing these acts against Americans or the West. Confucians are committing these acts against them. Hindus aren’t committing these acts against them. Atheists aren’t committing these acts against them, etc.

In vilifying Trump, the media, politicians, and pundits vilify Americans: we who observe the same difficulty and think and speak frankly. They not only stifle free speech, they stifle and manipulate the natural thoughts and feelings that arise from witnessing such empirical realities. We begin to throttle the natural course of human feeling and reasoning within ourselves because we are told it’s inappropriate, wrong, and un-American. When that doesn’t work, the political correctors create “hate” laws to make sure they suppress free expression. It’s like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Most importantly, we lose sight of the identification of the problem, the resolution of it, and of the affirmation of our Americanness.

Americans stand for liberty. Therefore, we stand against those who oppose liberty and who would do violence to our foundational principle of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If our Founding Fathers waged war against the tyranny of the Mother Country, how much more should we, receiving the torch they have passed on to us, wage war against those who seek our personal destruction, the destruction of our faith, in whatever that may be, and the destruction of liberty?

So the specific identification that needs to be made, and to which Trump spoke in his interview, is what lies in Islam that plays a role for so many of its adherents, actively or passively, to hate Westerners, and Americans in particular, and to incite Muslims to a savage frenzy. There may be other, contributing factors to their displeasure. At the root, however, is there something essential to Islam that breeds fanatical hatred in its followers?

The unwillingness to deal with this question riles American citizens who have heard or read that The Koran is littered with core religious tenets that promote hatred and violence against Americans, Westerners, and non-Muslims generally.

I have written previously that one may perform a DuckDuckGo search of “verses of violence in The Koran” to find reliable websites that can help answer that question. I will offer just a few below for the readers’ consideration.

I own a Penguin Classics edition of The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad who became a translator of Arabic classics like The Koran and the Thousand and One Nights. The edition I own is from 1999, contains an introduction, a note to the general reader, a chronology of events in Muhammad’s life, the main text of 114 chapters or surahs, some of which are less than a page long and others longer, some notes, and an index.

Keeping in mind the difficulties inherent in translation and the context of what is written, the sitz-im-leben of the author/speaker and any intervening redactors, I will attempt to present some verses honestly and accurately.

I do not condemn any person who thinks differently from me; as a freeman, I reserve the right to condemn actions that threaten, harm, or destroy the lives of me and my fellow citizens, and I make no apology for that. Elected and appointed officials owe Americans a duty to protect them, to consider and promote their interests and well-being before those of any others. That’s the basis for and the purpose of the formation of our American government.

So, when Trump states “I think Islam hates us” and that “there is a tremendous hatred there”, is he correct?

This is from the chapter called “The Spoils” and begins at what is marked 8:12 through about 8:16:

God revealed his will to the angels, saying, “I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads! Strike off the very tips of their fingers!”

That was because they defied God and his apostle. He that defies God and his apostle shall be sternly punished by God. We said to them, “Taste this. The scourge of the Fire awaits the unbelievers.”

Believers, when you encounter the infidels on the march, do not turn your backs to them in flight. If anyone on that day turns his back to them, except for tactical reasons, or to join another band, he shall incur the wrath of God and Hell shall be his home, an evil fate.

It was not you, but God, who slew them.

Let’s break this down, admitting that with more knowledge and scholarship, our understanding may change.

First, because these verses reveal God’s will, they relieve the Muslim of moral responsibility for his actions. God directs the angels, who in turn encourage the believers. God casts terror into the hearts of infidels. The believer decapitates the infidels, but it is God who slays them.

Second, the objects of wrath deserve the terror and horrible deaths they receive. They are infidels in relation to Islam, kind of like a bed-hopping wife is an infidel in relation to her husband. Infidel comes from the Latin infidelis, “in” (not) “fidelis” (faithful). Contrast that with the Marine Corps. motto, semper fidelis, shortened to “semper fi”, always faithful. In the eyes of the Muslim, those who do not believe in Islam defy God and his apostle with their infidelity. Not only must the infidel taste horrible torture and slaughter here on Earth, he can expect more in the next life, where the scourge of the Fire waits to engulf him.

Third, failure to comply with the directive to torture and slaughter itself merits damnation. The only reason a Muslim should walk away from a fight is to regroup or to gain a tactical advantage. If he walks away for any other reason, he shall incur the wrath of God and Hell shall be his home.

Pretty strong stuff, eh?

So when Trump judiciously, if not grammatically, says that “Islam hates us”, he identifies a prime if murky problem for our representatives, one that is not helped or solved by the venom of the adherents of political correctness who terrorize our thought and speech and whose emotional instability propels them and the nation to rash judgment. Nor is it solved by pretending what The Koran says is not what The Koran says.

We should not avoid the problem out of fear, but we should engage in a healthy national debate. Do Muslims believe those verses are true, or do they now, in the 21^st century, reject them? Are the so-called radical Muslims really radical, or do they just believe exactly what The Koran says?

Those are essential questions.

We should address the problem honestly and openly and rationally and, when needed, with emphatic and successful military force, with the eye toward affirming and securing our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Down with the buzzards of political correctness! Let’s answer the question of whether Islam fosters hate, torture, and murder. If the asnwer is affirmative, we take the appropriate actions that protect American citizens.

Sex Sells, Except When It’s Thrust Against the Donald!

The sneaky Republican establishment cabal planted their most recent attacker in front of the media cameras and microphones Wednesday night. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley delivered the Republican rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union message.

Her job was not the usual one, though. She followed a surreptitious directive to talk as much smack, if not more, against Donald Trump as against Republican arch-foe and high priest of liberalism Obama. The cabal’s strategy was to fashion a different instrument to convey its message, one with tons of sex appeal and a wispy voice to whisper sweet negatives into the ears of American voters. Sex sells, its members no doubt thought, so a young, attractive, relatively unknown but compliant political woman, the daughter of legal immigrants from India – with a carrot of the vice-presidency bobbing nearby – might accomplish with her charms what other candidates and cooperating media had not been able to do to the Donald with all their huff and puff: knife his candidacy in the back to be done with it!

Don’t be too quick to charge me with sexism nor to stifle my free thinking with any censorious indignation. Read Haley’s words:

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she said in a tone fit for a library. “We must resist that temptation.”

Wow! In one sentence she called Trump an angry witch, or maybe a word that rhymes with witch and begins with a “b”. Seductive sea nymphs earned the name “siren” when they called out from their islands and beguiled sailors into shipwrecks with their beautiful, haunting songs.

So let’s see. Building a wall to throttle illegal immigration will shipwreck America? Bringing manufacturing and other jobs back to the U.S. will shipwreck America? Protecting the right to gun ownership, self-defense, and revolution by standing firm on the Second Amendment will shipwreck America? Taking care of our veterans will shipwreck America? Building up our military muscle to regain our position as the indisputable No. 1 military power that destroys ISIS, and that defends our freedom and the rest of the world’s will shipwreck America? Temporarily banning Muslims – the ideological group that spawns the bloodthirsty jihadis – until we can establish effective vetting procedures that will help to keep all our citizens safe will shipwreck America?

Did Haley lock her intellect in a safe deposit box before she stepped in front of the cameras?

I do not doubt that Haley can be a competent politician. When one places oneself in a position beholden to the Republican establishment cabal, however, one compromises one’s intellect. She uninhibitedly proffered a few more reasoning blunders.

First, she suggested that being angry is bad. Funny, the Bible says to be angry but not to sin. She doesn’t get to devalue anger with a label of inappropriateness. It isn’t her job to instruct voters how to feel. Rather, she should represent the feelings of the voters. Candidates who sympathize with or share voters’ anger are doing their jobs.

Second, if the voters are angry, the causes of their anger should be the focus of Haley’s attention and care. She does not have to support every proposed remedy nor every part of every proposed remedy; she should support the feelings voters have for the issues that disturb them and be working industriously to fix those issues. Her babysitter rhetoric, talking down to voters and belittling candidates who are trying to find national and international solutions, doesn’t fit and doesn’t work. I submit to you that Haley herself does not know which proposed remedy proffered by the candidates will make Americans the safest.

Thus, third, Haley alienated Republican voters with her disrespectful rhetoric just to take an establishment swipe at Trump, the Republican frontrunner, and Cruz, who is No. 2 now.

Haley conveyed her next blunder in these words:

“Growing up in the rural South, my family didn’t look like our neighbors. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws (italics and bolding mine), and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in our country.”

Last time I checked, Gov. Haley, illegal immigrants were not abiding by our laws, either when they crossed into our country, unlawfully, or when they decided to continue their illegal visits to remain here, also unlawful. Further, Haley depreciated the value of her own parents’ lawful entry into our country by likening it to the situation of the illegal immigrants.

If we stroll down that intellectual block farther, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, pagans, etc., do not advocate violence against other belief systems, violence such as mass murder, rape, child molestation, etc. Last time I checked, legislatures in our 50 United States passed laws that made those activities unlawful, not to mention morally reprehensible. Shockingly, there is a belief system that does advocate the perpetration of such unlawful activities: Islam.

Don’t take my word for it. If you like your privacy, search out the verses of violence in the Quran on Duckduckgo.com. If you don’t mind being tracked by snoopers, use another search engine. I have not checked, but I would not be surprised to discover that today, Muslim countries, and countries with large Muslim populations, contribute by far the largest quantity of mass and genocidal murders on planet Earth.

Using Haley’s own standard, Muslims should not be allowed into our country on the basis of their ideological and practical commitment to bloody unlawfulness against those who fail to embrace “the prophet” and a host of other related concerns. Infidels are part of the “Great Satan” and must be exterminated.

Finally, the establishment-picked refuter missed the whole point of the voters’ sentiments when she acknowledged that Republican politicians had played a role in the leadership and legislative bankruptcy of the country during the Obama administration, then said they would fix it. No, Nikki, we have given you guys, and girls, more than ample time and opportunity to do your jobs. You failed. Now we want someone else, someone who isn’t part of the establishment cabal, the self-perpetuating liars’ clubs in both parties who serve the monied special interests and only accidentally the common citizens.

See you at the ballot box!

Sundry Notes on the Pope, the President, the Donald, Dr. Carson, Mind Control, Tim Tebow, and Legion Field

Here are some short takes on sundry items on the news:

The president’s guest list for the Pope:   The president pokes the predominant and representative Christian religion in the world, the Catholic Church, in the eye with his guest list, which includes a bunch of prelates and theologians who stridently disagree with the Christian Catholic faith and want to shove their circus shows down people’s throats. If I were the Pope, I would just bypass the White House and converse with the faithful, who need uplifting and sound, sober teaching, especially in light of this country’s failed economic and foreign policies and dispiriting secularism, not the jabbering of a president who attended a “church” that preached violence and hate.

Calling Donald Trump’s not correcting a questioner’s comments a “failure”:   Don’t ever believe the media isn’t egregiously biased, including unfair and imbalanced Fox News. When they report that Trump “failed” to correct a questioner’s comments about Muslims and the president’s place of birth, you can see it for yourself. Who says Trump “failed”? By what standard? Why does Trump have a responsibility to correct the questioner? Let Fox and the other crony networks correct the questioner instead of funnel us to the political conclusions they want us to reach. See next item.

Muslims want Dr. Carson to drop out of the presidential primary race:   Dr. Carson said he would not want a Muslim to be the leader of the United States. I wouldn’t either. Their culture and religious beliefs are toxic and contradict our own Christian and cultural beliefs. Some pundits like to throw out that there is some moral prohibition to holding a man’s religion against him. How can a voter not consider the totality of a man’s beliefs? If you believe that people should convert to Islam or be killed, don’t you think that’s important to know, and don’t you think you would vote against a man who believed that?

And isn’t it funny how the two poll leaders in the Republican primary are being attacked right and left? Any chance the Republican establishment will keep squealing about Trump and Carson and whomever else they don’t want to win the nomination? You can see Bush standing in the shadows, calling in all the favors he can, wielding his wads of tens of millions in cash, plotting how to get rid of anyone in his path. He has little to offer, so he must work with his establishment friends to make sure an acceptable, Washington insider, establishment approved, same ole same ole candidate gets the nomination.

Don’t be controlled. See beyond. Make them accept the candidate YOU want.

Scott Walker:   Walker ended his quest for the presidency Monday. Good riddance. While he was around, he was bought and paid for by the Inner Powers. Hearing anyone, but especially himself, laud his support for the “hard working man” elicits derisive laughter. Do you mean like the teachers you crushed? Was wiping away their negotiating power supportive of teacher workers? How free is the market when only one side has the power to control everything? Like Bush, he likes to have ten guys around him when he goes to fight one guy. Bullies! They are utterly sickening!

Ideology:   Don’t let ideology alone determine your vote. And don’t let the insiders tell you what conservatism or liberalism or anything else is or has to be. You are the rank-and-file of any movement or party. You determine the ideology. Seek someone who promotes good, wise policies that benefit the most Americans, a balance between the need to profit and the need to do the right thing. Party platforms aren’t static. They change over time. Nothing has to stay the same.

The fat cats will always try to get inside your mind, take it over with nonstop marketing and advertising, and keep it in their intellectual dungeon. They want you to support the policies they want by getting you to think those policies equate to patriotism and love of liberty. They aim the other barrel of their shotgun at the people and policies they need to smear because those policies, if they were enacted, would prevent their unrestrained greed and self enlargement at the expense of the middle and lower classes. The battleground is your mind. Do not fall for their strategy and tactics. Safeguard your intellectual distinction and integrity.

Tim Tebow:   The sports world is abuzz with the possibility that a couple of teams who lost their starting quarterbacks to injury may reach out to Tim Tebow as a backup or possible starter. After demonstrating effectiveness and improved passing form and completion rate during the preseason, Philadelphia Eagles Head Coach Chip Kelly unceremoniously dumped Tebow – after praising him over and over in camp – saying he wasn’t good enough to be the Eagles third-string quarterback. Kelly brought in Jacksonville Jaguars castoff Stephen Morris to be the third. A few days later, Kelly dumped Morris. Then he brought in Thaddeus Lewis. Never heard of him. Who knows whether he’ll last. I’m just trying to understand how any coach thinks these guys are better than a QB with a proven, NFL winning record, including a playoff victory against the best pass defense in the league in 2011.

Amazing. Meanwhile, the quarterbacks Kelly did keep aren’t doing the job, and Kelly himself is talking about evaluating everyone, including starting QB Sam Bradford. So what was the purpose of training camp and the preseason?

What’s really astonishing is the vehemence and repetitiveness of the anti-Tebow commenters to stories of Tebow’s possible acquisition by the Bears or the Cowboys, or by some Eagles commenters. They loudly trumpet that Tebow is no good, not an NFL quarterback, can’t play quarterback, etc. How do they know? They don’t. They just repeat the things they have heard sports bozos say over and over again. Even funnier, they acknowledge how bad their own teams are or how bad their backup QBs are, but persist in thinking that bringing in a proven winner would create disaster! So Brandon Weeden, who bombed in quarterback-starved Cleveland, will take the reins in Dallas, and Jimmy Clausen, whom I like but who boasts a 1-10 record in games he started, will take over for the Bears. I will tell you one thing: Jay Cutler will never win a Super Bowl. In fact, he will never get to an NFC Championship game and probably not even the playoffs. And Peyton Manning will never win another Super Bowl. So Elway can keep searching for his miracle man. I think he already had him.

Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama:   This stadium has been the second home of the Alabama Crimson Tide for years and hosted the U.S. Women’s National Team Victory Tour friendly soccer game against Haiti on Sunday, which our girls won, 8-0. As great as the USWNT is and plays, Legion Field stunk! It’s an old, decrepit looking stadium with a shoddy artificial field, off-color scoreboard monitor, worn scoreboard, high school-like concessions, lighting towers that are highly corroded and look as if they could collapse at any moment, a dumpy, high school-like dirt and gravel parking lot, no accommodation for shuttle buses – just a thoroughly, shockingly ugly and old giant gray shanty of a stadium!

I cannot believe Alabama, a team of great pride and accomplishment, ever plays at such a dirty, ramshackle facility. Shame on the city of Birmingham! Shame!