Here is a short montage via THE DAILY CALLER:
Here is TUCKER CARLSON discussing the rating whores in the media:
Author: Papa Giorgio
The Best is the Enemy of the Better (Repealing Obamacare)
~I want Full Repeal, NO replacement, free markets! ~
The above is a statement from a FB friend… and is the main thrust of this post.
Dennis Prager quickly mentions a Kimberly Strassel article via the WALL STREET JOURNAL. in this short clip Prager also prefaces Trump’s horrible statement about McCain’s being captured with what McCain said about half of America. And principle is thrown to the wayside in people like this not voting to repeal in part Obama-care.
…What do Rand Paul, Susan Collins and John McCain have in common? Very little.
The press corps is busy quizzing the president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader on their plans for tax reform. The question is why they aren’t chasing after the three people who actually hold all the power.
If the past eight months have proved anything, it is that all the 24/7 news coverage of Donald Trump’s antics, all the millions of words devoted to Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s plans, have been a complete waste of space and time. In the end, control of the entire policy agenda in Washington comes down to three senators. Three senators whom most Americans have never had a chance to vote for or against. Three senators who comprise 8% of their party conference. Arizona’s John McCain, Maine’s Susan Collins and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. Forget Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. Meet the Never-Trump Triumvirate.
At least the House Freedom Caucus scuttles GOP legislation based on shared principles. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have also led revolts against bills, again based on shared criticisms. But what do the Arizona maverick, the Maine moderate and the Kentucky libertarian have in common? Very little.
Well, very little save motivations that go beyond policy. And that is the crucial point that is missing from the endless analyses of the McCain-Collins-Paul defections on health care. The media has treated the trio’s excuses for killing their party’s top priority as legit, despite the obvious holes in their objections over policy and process. What in fact binds the three is their crafting of identities based primarily on opposition to their party or Mr. Trump. This matters, because it bodes very ill for tax reform in the Senate. Overcoming policy objections is one thing. Overcoming egos is another.
Mr. McCain, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has decided his final legacy will be a return to the contrarian “straight talk” persona of old, which wins him liberal media plaudits. The Arizonan has never gotten over losing the presidency, and it clearly irks him that Mr. Trump succeeded where he failed. His personal disdain for the president is obvious, and his implausible excuses for opposing the Graham-Cassidy health-care reform are proof that this is personal.
Ms. Collins is reportedly days awa y from deciding whether she’ll ditch the Senate gig and run for governor. That potential campaign has guided her every move for at least a year now—perhaps her entire career—and was clearly among her reasons last summer to abandon her party’s nominee and publicly excoriate Mr. Trump. It is a basic precept in Washington that Sen. Collins votes in whatever way best serves Sen. Collins. Right now that means being Never Trump.
Mr. Paul worked hard during his first Senate campaign to reassure Kentuckians that he was not his father, and it turns out that’s very true. Because even Ron Paul was to be found with his party’s House majority on issues that truly mattered, and largely saved his defections for the lost causes that produced 434-1 votes. Sen. Paul’s standards for “conservative” policy are as varying as the wind, and lately they blow toward whatever position can earn him the title of purest man in Washington.
The press was fixated this week on Mr. McConnell’s bad week, which is an easy piece to write. But it ignores the obvious reality that the Triumvirate seems to have never had any intention of letting its party succeed. After all, a senator who intended to stand firm on “regular order,” as Mr. McCain said, would have informed his colleagues of that demand at the beginning, rather than allow his colleagues to set up for another vote and then dramatically tank it (again) at the last minute. A senator who voted for “skinny” ObamaCare repeal in the summer on the grounds that anything was “better than no repeal,” in the words of Mr. Paul, would not suddenly engineer an unreachable set of demands for his vote on an even better repeal.
The Senate has no lack of lime-lighters. Nor is it low on Trump critics. Think Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Arizona’s Jeff Flake. The difference is that the clear majority of the critics aren’t allowing ambition or disdain get in the way of votes for better policy.
But this raises the question of whether the White House understands that the Triumvirate is also the prize on tax reform. Mr. Trump took a shot at Mr. McConnell this week, but the president needs to shift his focus to those who hold the actual power. Those dinner invites to Chuck and Nancy would be better reserved for Ms. Collins. Its internal conversations need to focus on what forms of flattery or policy or misery might appeal to the political motivations of Messrs. McCain and Paul, and get them on side.
Because the Triumvirate made very clear during the health-care debate how it operates. Pretending it won’t do it again is to ignore reality.
I had one gent tell me that all the repeals (or bills changing Obama-care) were keeping up to 90% of the bill. But what was proffered would have killed the rest of the ACA. Here is a helpful visual of what the Republicans proposed:
I found this end to an article at THE FEDERALIST helpful… the part about “incrementalism.” Something the right doesn’t get:
….Donald Trump, who promised throughout his campaign to overturn Obamacare, could immediately put a deadline on the unconstitutional subsidy payments that the Obama administration concocted to keep the bill from imploding. Yes, liberals will continue to claim that conservatives are “sabotaging” the law, but there is no moral, policy, or political reason for the GOP to continue the illegal pay-off of insurance companies. No matter how many welfare dollars Congress ends up pouring into fabricated markets or how much price-fixing they engage in, the “exchanges” are unsustainable. Why would conservatives want to take ownership of those failures?
As the Senate stands now, it’s improbable that Republicans will ever be able to cobble together a bill that will placate both the Susan Collins-John McCain wing and the Mike Lee-Rand Paul wing — in fact, I doubt Collins would vote for a single-payer bill if too many Republicans supported it. Even with more conservatives, I’m highly skeptical that repeal will ever pass. Yet it is not out of the question that help is on the way. Perhaps the GOP’s positioning on health-care reform will lead to midterm disaster. But we’ve heard this one before — sometimes right before a GOP wave election. Fact is, the 2018 Senate map is still not favorable to Dems.
Liberals like to argue that allowing Obamacare to fail would bring a single-payer closer to reality. Well, it is just as likely that prolonging Obamacare’s lifespan would help single-payer, as the next Democratic administration will surely continue to expand the reach of the law. (Unlike the GOP, Democrats don’t shy away from incrementalism.) If Republicans truly believe Obamacare has harmed America, there is no upside in fake bipartisanship. Not for the GOP. And not for the America people.
Proven […sorta], The Obamas Are Racist!
A Librarian from Boston Massachusetts refused Dr. Seuss books from the First Lady. The WASHINGTON FREE BEACON notes this:
- She then characterized Dr. Seuss’s illustrations as racist and said that they were steeped in “racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” listing several examples in her letter
MOONBATTERY notes this: “Liz Phipps Soeiro, a librarian at Cambridgeport School, refused to accept the books, denouncing Dr. Seuss’s cherished works as ‘steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes’.” Here is an excerpt from Liz Phipps Soeiro’s letter:
Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art. Grace Hwang Lynch’s School Library Journal article, “Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away from Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books,” reports on Katie Ishizuka’s work analyzing the minstrel characteristics and trope nature of Seuss’s characters. Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.
Well then, Michelle Obama is a Ra-ra-ra-RAAAAACIST!
ANTIFA – Premeditated Violence
What happens when two guys infiltrate Antifa, live amongst them for weeks, and take part in their deeply rooted tactics of disruption and violence?
HOTAIR has this on the above:
Wednesday I wrote about the far left’s plans to disrupt a speech by Ben Shapiro at the University of Utah. What I didn’t know is that YouTube host Steven Crowder and his producer had infiltrated a local Antifa group and captured them on tape discussing plans and handing out weapons.
[….]
The situation with national media is very different. A Nightline producer has time and resources to take a tape like this and verify the facts, talk with police, even interview the people shown in the clip to get their side. So it’s hard to understand why someone like that wouldn’t be interested in this video, except of course that it makes Antifa look pretty bad. Perhaps if there had been some actual Nazis present to help balance the narrative, but as it is the only story here is far left extremists preparing for violence to shut down a conservative speaker. That’s probably a little to clear-cut for Nightline.
Flashback: NBA Suspends Player Over Anthem
A “prequel” to the flashback… and it deals with the influences of the Nation of Islam (a racist cult) on Kaepernick. DAILY CALLER noted some time ago the “swagger” of his social media:
- “31 of his last 42 posts have strong social justice connotations, often featuring quotes from radical Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, Black Panthers founder Huey Newton and cop killer Assata Shakur,”
Previously I noted that Kaepernick’s girlfriend is involved in a similar strain of Islam that Kaepernick continuously pictures on his INSTAGRAM.
Here is some background to the “Islam” that Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was part of via DANIEL PIPES:
…An odd controversy briefly dominated the sports pages in March 1996. A player in the National Basketball Association, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to follow the league’s rule requiring that players stand in a “dignified posture” during the national anthem. Instead, since the beginning of the 1995-96 season, Abdul-Rauf had remained seated during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.
A black, 27-year-old former Baptist from Mississippi who had converted to Islam in 1991, he declared that as a Muslim, he could not pay homage to the American flag – which he called a “symbol of oppression, of tyranny.” He argued further that the flag directly contradicted his Islamic faith: “This country has a long history of [oppression]. I don’t think you can argue the facts. You can’t be for God and for oppression. It’s clear in the Koran. Islam is the only way.”
The NBA responded firmly, suspending Abdul-Rauf until he agreed to obey league rules. He missed one game, then capitulated. Two factors probably weighed most heavily on him: losing a cool $31,707 for each game missed, and facing wide opposition to his decision from other Muslims.
Though soon forgotten, this act of defiance raised important questions. When a successful young man earning almost $3 million a year and enjoying wide adulation talks publicly of hating his own country, something is afoot. What that might be is hinted at by a similar case a whole generation earlier, that of the boxer Muhammad Ali. After his conversion in 1960 to a form of Islam (Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam), the former Cassius Clay adopted a set of intensely anti-American attitudes. Most famously, he refused to be drafted by the U.S. military, which led to the forfeit of his heavyweight title. As Muhammad Ali later put it, he stood against “the entire power structure” in the United States, one dominated by Zionists who “are really against the Islam religion.”
[….]
But there are often less happy results when a convert adopts two specific types of Islam: the Nation of Islam (the black-nationalist sect that originated in Detroit in 1930) or the fundamentalist variety (now usually known as Islamism) imported from the Middle East and South Asia. Converts to these forms of Islam are much more likely to turn anti-American.
From its inception, the Nation of Islam has promoted a black-nationalist outlook hostile to mainstream American culture and politics. “You are not American citizens,” Elijah Muhammad, its longtime leader, told his followers. He went to jail for draft evasion instead of enlisting to fight in World War II, and even forbade Nation of Islam members to accept Social Security numbers. Malcolm X, his most famous disciple, contrasted the pure evil of America with the pure good of Islam, saying that an American passport “signifies the exact opposite of what Islam stands for.” Continuing in this spirit, the group’s current leader, Louis Farrakhan, threatened some years ago to “lead an army of black men and women to Washington, D.C., and we will sit down with the president, whoever he may be, and will negotiate for a separate state or territory of our own.” On a 1996 visit to the virulently anti-American regime in Teheran, Farrakhan declared that “God will destroy America at the hands of Muslims.”
Many converts eventually leave the Nation of Islam and join mainstream Islam; those of them who become Islamists are especially likely to continue to disassociate themselves from the surrounding culture in a radical way. Even after his break with the Nation of Islam, for example, Malcolm X announced, “I’m not an American.” Similarly, the one-time radical H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Al-Amin, declares, “When we begin to look critically at the Constitution of the United States… we see that in its main essence it is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded.”…
Does Israel Discriminate Against Arabs?
Does Israel discriminate against Arabs? Is it today’s version of apartheid South Africa? Olga Meshoe, herself a South African whose family experienced apartheid, settles the question once and for all.
The Secret to Success
Is there a “secret” to success? Yes, but it’s not a secret. Michele Tafoya, Sideline Reporter for NBC Sunday Night Football, shares the secret…that you already knew.
The National Anthem Protests — Do Facts Matter? (Larry Elder)
Larry Elder’s EXCELLENT article, via LARRYELDER.COM:
Where was the angry left when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the national anthem protests “dumb and disrespectful”?
Let’s focus on the “dumb” part.
NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who started the protests, did so over the supposed widespread instances of police brutality against blacks. Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. … There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1968 police killings of blacks have declined nearly 75 percent. According to The Washington Post, almost 500 whites were killed by cops in 2015, an average of more than one a day. Two hundred fifty-nine blacks were killed by the police. Most suspects killed by police had a weapon.
Now for some perspective.
Do you know anyone who has been struck by lightning? Neither do most people. Yet each year an average of about 300 Americans are killed or injured by lightning. That’s approximately 40 more than the number of blacks killed by the police in 2015. Is there an “epidemic” of Americans being struck and injured by lightning? We don’t know the number of black men injured by lightning every year, but let’s assume the number is 7 percent of the total people struck by lightning, mirroring the percentage of the black male population in America. That brings the average number of black men injured by lightning to about 21.
Out of the 965 people killed by the police in 2015 (as of Dec. 24), the Post reported (on Dec. 26) that “less than 4 percent” involved an unarmed black man and a white cop, the fact pattern most commonly referred to by anti-police activists like Black Lives Matter. Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.
But blacks are routinely and disproportionately being stopped, pulled over and/or arrested due to police misconduct, right?
No, not according to numerous studies, many by the government. Take traffic stops. In 2013, the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation agency of the Department of Justice, published a study of whether the police, as a result of racial bias, stop blacks more than other drivers. The conclusion? Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”
According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.
But what about the experience of a black person with the police versus that of a white person? The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics regularly studies this, too. Every year, the BJS surveys a representative sample of 70,000 people. Among the questions, the survey asks whether respondents had contact with the police in the last 12 months. If the answer is “yes,” the survey asks a number of follow-up questions, including about use of force.
Let’s concentrate on cases involving use of force.
Lemoine writes: “Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. … Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified.” And keep in mind the much higher levels of crime by mostly black males. It is estimated that half of all homicides are committed by, and mostly against, black males.
In 1995, the federal government looked at 42,500 defendants in the nation’s 75 largest counties. A government statistician, Patrick A. Langan, found “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.” So much for the so-called “institutional racism” in the criminal justice system.
Recently, in Illinois, in a kids’ 8-and-under football league, the entire team, which appeared to be all black, including the coach, took a knee during the national anthem. Asked why, one third-grade player parroted Kaepernick, saying, according to the coach, “Because black people are getting killed, and nobody’s going to jail.”
Facts don’t matter. The coach, presented with a teachable moment, fumbled it away.
Why I Prefer Baseball – By Daniel Henninger
The WALL STREET JOURNAL hurts itself closing article this good and important to the current dialogue surrounding this topic. Here is Daniel’s article:
We’ve arrived at a moment when some choices have to be made. After a lifetime watching America’s three main professional sports—baseball, football and basketball—I’ve decided I prefer baseball.
Starting Tuesday, I’ll exclusively devote what’s left of my sports-viewing budget to the Major League Baseball playoffs. And not just in the hope that my hometown Cleveland Indians will overcome last year’s heartbreaking loss for the ages to the Chicago Cubs.
Set to one side that the reason most Americans can sing the words to their national anthem is that for generations, every American attending a professional baseball game has stood to look at the flag while someone sings “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Many Americans think the last words of the national anthem are “Play ball!”
Baseball is about baseball. The NFL and NBA seem to be about more things than I can process—some of them political, some of them personal.
Baseball has an informal code of on-field conduct, which has held for a hundred years. The NFL doesn’t seem to have an enforceable code of anything.
Last Sunday, after the New York Giants’ wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. caught a touchdown pass, Mr. Beckham got down in the end zone and imitated a dog urinating on a fire hydrant, which the opposing Philadelphia Eagles (who won) took as mockery of their team.
From Babe Ruth 90 years ago to Aaron Judge now, when you hit a home run, you run around the bases and into the dugout. That’s it. No end-zone antics that suggest the sport itself takes a back seat to a personality.
After the Yankees’ Mr. Judge hit his 50th home run this week, a record for a rookie, his teammates had to force him out of the dugout to wave to the cheering crowd.
For some years, the parsons of the sports press have pushed the idea that demonstrations of high-level athletic skill, the result of uncountable hours of practice, were morally insufficient. Athletes, the parsons intoned, had to “give back” by dedicating their status to solving the nation’s endlessly unresolved issues of race, gender and—the inevitable guilt trip they laid on pro athletes—income inequality.
And so last September, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback, reduced the parsonage’s moralistic hectoring of professional athletes to its absurd end by deciding that the pregame national anthem was the place to raise the issue of inner-city policing.
Only the innocent could feign shock that eventually Donald Trump, in his capacity as president of the United States, would go after the kneeling players about the same way you’d hear from a guy sitting in the high seats at a New York Jets game, who by the third quarter is on fumes: “Get that son of a bitch off the field!”
Stepping down to the Trumpian moment, LeBron James tweeted, “U bum!”
Sportswriters sometimes use the phrase “lunch bucket” about a player who is mainly interested in doing his job well without drawing attention to himself. Other than someone like Kawhi Leonard of the San Antonio Spurs, you don’t see too many stars in the NFL or NBA described as lunch-bucket guys anymore.
Most future stars of basketball and football are identified while they’re in high school. They often play in special leagues and receive constant visits from coaches at Division I universities.
Once inside the university, these players live and practice in gold-plated facilities. They play on national TV and are talked about nonstop by analysts and the political commentators at ESPN. They get famous young. (Though let it be said, 90% of the non-sports NFL and NBA news was made by maybe 10% of the players, until now.)
The road up in baseball is different. Promising teenagers go from high school into baseball’s minor leagues. They play for teams in places like Delmarva, Clinton and Greenville. They travel by bus and play before crowds not much bigger than what they had in Little League. They rise from A ball to AA (say, the Trenton Thunder) then AAA teams, which are in places most people have heard of, like Toledo, Fresno or El Paso.
Years spent competing and surviving against other skilled players teaches them they have to learn to be a member of a team before anyone calls them a star.
Some might say baseball isn’t political because so many players are from Latin America. But maybe the Latin players are mostly bemused at what the U.S. considers social problems, compared with escaping from Cuba across shark-infested waters or getting out of a dirt-road slum in Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic.
There is an expression in sports: Don’t leave it in the locker room. It means you are supposed to save your best performance for the game. With baseball, that’s still what you get.
We live in a highly polarized country. If people want their sport and its performers to be an affirmation of their politics, feel free. I don’t.
BREAKING: Did Raiders Throw NFL Game Over Anthem?
Driving to a follow up visit I was listening to the Armstrong and Getty Show (The Morning Answer sucks!) and they broke some news that will surely be investigated to be substantiated if true. Due to the quarterback standing during the anthem and the all black offensive line kneeling, there could be some ideological as well as racial animus going on. I included Bill O’Reilly’s thoughts as well. (Follow A&G on TWITTER)
Mitch McConnell Funds GOP Attacks on Conservatives
This is the CONSERVATIVE REVIEW article Mark Levin is reading from:
….According to FEC data, accessed Monday, outside groups have spent nearly $10 million to either support Strange’s candidacy directly, or oppose Moore’s. McConnell’s leadership PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) is responsible for the lion’s share of that spending. The SLF has spent just over $2 million to bolster Strange and nearly $4.5 million, mostly in negative advertising, opposing Moore. That’s over $6.5 million on a race that is, by all appearances, a loss.
Strange’s latest FEC filing, covering activity up to Sept. 6, 2017, showed that of the $4.46 million Strange had either raised or loaned his campaign, over 28 percent came from political action committees. That means that in addition to the nearly $10 million in outside spending, the K Street lobbying class has dumped almost $1.3 million in PAC donations into Strange’s campaign to ensure the status quo in Washington.
Moore, on the other hand has only benefited from a total of $1.35 million spent on his behalf, or to oppose Strange, and had raised — as of his FEC filing covering activity up to Sept. 6 — only $1.42 million, of which only $5,000 was from political action committees.
The most notable independent expenditures on behalf of Moore come from the Great America Alliance and Great America PAC organizations that are run by pro-Trump individuals. Together, in breaking with the president, those organizations have spent just over $170,000 to help Moore. The Senate Conservatives Fund and Senate Conservatives Action have spent just over $900,000 to bolster Moore, in the final stages of the campaign.
Last wee, Breitbart reported that Drew Messer, a senior adviser to the Moore campaign, estimated that $30 million had been spent by Strange and McConnell’s allies against Moore. The data shown here is what was publicly available as of Monday via the FEC.
Surely by using his network’s resources to vastly outspend those supporting Roy Moore, McConnell believes that Strange would fare better against the Democratic candidate Doug Jones. According to an Emerson College poll (PDF) released on Monday, that is not the case. Emerson found Moore with a 52 percent to 30 percent advantage over Jones, while Strange fared worse at 49 percent to 36 percent.
In addition to the $6.5 million spent for Strange and against Roy Moore, McConnell’s leadership PAC spent $2.4 million against conservative House member Mo Brooks leading up to the August primary. That’s a total of around $9 million that McConnell has spent on this campaign to prop up Strange. ….
Bill Cunningham Fills In for Mark Levin