Author: Papa Giorgio
Information Enigma (Serious Saturday)
Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it require intelligent design? The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design. The video features molecular biologist Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer, author of the books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt. (See more here)
Collateral Damage: The Forgotten War on Coal
Does Voter Fraud Make a Difference? Yes, Yes It Does
In this short example, John Fund confirms that voter fraud would not make a difference nationally in the popular vote that Trump erroneously Tweeted would put him ahead of Hillary — HOWEVER — it does affect smaller races. AND THIS can have very damning consequences on public policy that effects the entire populace.
Illegally.
Here is an article by Byron York:
When 1,099 Felons Vote In Race Won By 312 Ballots
…In the ’08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman’s lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons — all ineligible to vote — who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.
Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted — not just accused, but convicted — of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial. “The numbers aren’t greater,” the authors say, “because the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that they must have been both ineligible, and ‘knowingly’ voted unlawfully.” The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong.
Still, that’s a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes. With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn’t require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.
And that’s just the question of voting by felons. Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.
The election was particularly important because Franken’s victory gave Senate Democrats a 60th vote in favor of President Obama’s national health care proposal — the deciding vote to overcome a Republican filibuster. If Coleman had kept his seat, there would have been no 60th vote, and no Obamacare…..
Someone on LIVELEAK had a great insight! LEFTISTS like to repeat lines, one being from DailyKos, who’e headline reads:
- MORE THAN A BILLION VOTES: 31 CASES OF VOTER FRAUD…
Here is the comment from LiveLeak:
“Wait, 1200 illegal votes in just that one election. What the [effe] happened to “There have only been 31 actual cases of voter fraud in the last decade!” Time for a full recount of all districts across the U.S. Not because it will change anything but because it is easier to tell someone to shut the [effe] up when you have numbers behind your argument.” — Fedup Withitall
Here is the entire interview with John Fund where the above came from AS WELL AS a portion of the WALL STREET JOURNAL article that prompted the interview (video is from the WSJ):
…How common is this? If only we knew. Political correctness has squelched probes of noncitizen voting, so most cases are discovered accidentally instead of through a systematic review of election records.
The bottom line is that the honor system doesn’t work.
The danger looms large in states such as California, which provides driver’s licenses to noncitizens, including those here illegally, and which also does nothing to verify citizenship during voter registration. In a 1996 House race, then-challenger Loretta Sanchez defeated incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan by under 1,000 votes. An investigation by a House committee found 624 invalid votes by noncitizens, nearly enough to overturn the result.
How big is this problem nationally? One district-court administrator estimated in 2005that up to 3% of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period were not U.S. citizens. A September report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation found more than 1,000 noncitizens who had been removed from the voter rolls in eight Virginia counties. Many of them had cast ballots in previous elections, but none was referred for possible prosecution.
The lack of prosecutions is no surprise. In 2011, the Electoral Board in Fairfax County, Va., sent the Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Eric Holder, information about 278 noncitizens registered to vote in Fairfax County, about half of whom had cast ballots in previous elections. There is no record that the Justice Department did anything.
A 2014 study by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University used extensive survey data to estimate that 6.4% of the nation’s noncitizens voted in 2008 and that 2.2% voted in 2010. This study has been criticized by many academics who claim that voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Yet the Heritage Foundation maintains a list of more than 700 recent convictions for voter fraud.
A postelection survey conducted by Americas Majority Foundation found that 2.1% of noncitizens voted in the Nov. 8 election. In the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio, 2.5% and 2.1%, respectively, of noncitizens reported voting. In 2013, pollster McLaughlin & Associates conducted an extensive survey of Hispanics on immigration issues. Its voter-profile tabulation shows that 13% of noncitizens said they were registered to vote. That matches closely the Old Dominion/George Mason study, in which 15.6% of noncitizens said they were registered.
Fixing this problem is very straightforward. The Trump administration should direct the Department of Homeland Security to cooperate with states that want to verify the citizenship of registered voters. Since this will only flag illegal immigrants who have been detained at some point and legal noncitizens, states should pass laws, similar to the one in Kansas, that require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The Justice Department, instead of ignoring the issue, should again start prosecuting these cases.
The bottom line is that the honor system doesn’t work. There are people—like those caught voting illegally—who are willing to exploit these weaknesses that damage election integrity.
Tomi Lahren “Visits” the Daily Show
(THE BLAZE) On this episode of The Glenn Beck Radio Program, Glenn, Pat and Stu talk about Tomi Lahren’s guest appearance on The Daily Show, with Trevor Noah. GQ stirs the pot saying, “Trevor Noah went to war with Tomi Lahren, the queen of the Alt Right,” Glenn informs the others. The discussion covers how Tomi handled herself while sharing the stage with Trevor and the turn the conversation had on air.
“She is not an Alt Righter,” Glenn exlaims. “This is what I am trying desperately to beg the press, not to do. Please no one will listen to who the Alt Right is, this five percent of the right, no one will listen to who those people are if you paint the brush that everyone is Alt Right, because they’re not, Tomi Lahren is not.” Glenn says in regard to the conversation.
The Donald’s “Fascist” Flag Tweet
Here is how a friend puts the issue:
- “My conservative friends on FB, once proud, loud and arrogant are now incredibly silent. Buyers remorse anyone? Trump’s mental illness is self-illuminated with each passing day. What a freak show…. A year in jail and loss of citizenship for the burning of the flag? Read the constitution much?”
Larry Elder uses some audio (which I add video to) to build up to the main point… and it is this: “HILLARY CLINTON PROPOSED ACTUAL LEGISLATION DOING THIS!” That bill (S.1911, The Flag Protection Act of 2005) was co-sponsored by Clinton, and proposed in part:
- Any person who shall intentionally threaten or intimidate any person or group of persons by burning, or causing to be burned, a flag of the United States shall be fined not more than $100,000, imprisoned for not more than 1 year, or both. (SNOPES)
Democrats Want 100% Control Over Media and Lifestyles
“The biggest challenge that I think we have right now in terms of this divide is that the country receives information from completely different sources.” — Obama
What is funny is that Obama made this interview partly about “fake news,” which is ironic. THE BLAZE explains why:
…Obama then continued:
Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone. The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It’s making people exaggerate or say what’s most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs. And if we are gonna solve that, it’s not going to be simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media; it’s going to be figuring out how do we organize in a virtual world the same way we organize in the physical world. We have to come up with new models.
Absent from Obama’s take on “fake news” was the fact that the very magazine he was speaking to had just been found guilty of, in fact, publishing fake news. Earlier this month, the very same magazine Obama dubbed as “good journalism” was found guilty of defamation for an article written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
Her article titled “A Rape on Campus,” appeared in the December 2014 issue of Rolling Stone and centered around a woman named “Jackie” and an account of a vicious gang rape at the University of Virginia. The story unfortunately turned out to be, well, fake news. The jury in the case found the story was written with reckless disregard for the truth and that Erdely was guilty of false reporting. Rolling Stone and Erdely were ordered to pay $3 million in damages to an administrator at the school who filed the suit….
GAY PATRIOT notes the left’s tendency towards control in all realms of life (public and private):
Let’s review how the American Democrat Left regards political disagreement:
- If someone votes the wrong way, it’s OK to destroy their business.
- If someone holds the wrong view on gay marriage, it’s okay to use the power of the state to destroy their business.
- If someone holds the wrong view on gay marriage, it’s okay to destroy their career.
- If a professor mocks a social justice wanker, they will try and destroy his career.*
It’s like Obama whining yesterday that the reason Hillary lost is because people were able to watch FoxNews in too many public places. Owning 99% of the media isn’t enough; the left must have all of it or it can’t succeed. Is the Democrat Left’s political philosophy so fragile that not even one voice of dissent can be permitted to question it?
[….]
* Love this quote: “Her claims to be a ‘queer Muslim’ are probably part of an act designed to fit into as many victim categories as humanly possible,” Adams elaborates. “Sometimes I wonder whether LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Thespian. So much drama, so few letters in the alphabet.”
Remember these stories?
The Democrat Party Leans On Their Segregationist History
God I hope he is the new DNC CHAIR.
Some info via WEEKLY STANDARD:
In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, Minnesota representative Keith Ellison has emerged as a leading contender to chair the Democratic National Committee. Ellison resides on the far-left fringe of the Democratic party. But perhaps it is a fringe no more. Ellison has received the support not only of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren but also of prospective Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.
[….]
When I speak about Ellison in the Twin Cities, I give a talk titled “The Secret History of Keith Ellison.” The title is facetious. Ellison’s history only became “secret” when he ran for Congress in 2006 and bet his campaign on three lies about his involvement with the Nation of Islam. I recounted and recalled Ellison’s “secret history” in the WEEKLY STANDARD articles “Louis Farrakhan’s First Congressman” and “The Ellison Elision.”
Yet Ellison’s history as an active member and local leader of the Nation of Islam remains a deep secret to Ellison’s constituents in his district. He blatantly lied about it when he was running in the 2006 DFL primary. He suppressed it in his 2014 memoir, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. Indeed, in his memoir he presented himself as a critic of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Speaking of Farrakhan, Ellison writes in his memoir: “He could only wax eloquent while scapegoating other groups.” Ellison writes of the Nation of Islam itself: “In the NOI, if you’re not angry in opposition to some group of people (whites, Jews, so-called ‘sellout’ blacks), you don’t have religion.”
He should know. He was speaking from his own personal experience in the cult.
Ellison was not happy when the Star Tribune published my column “Ellison remembers to forget” on its opinion page. In the column I restored some of his own history that he had left out of his memoir. He promptly sent out a fundraising letter to his fans asserting that my column represented “a new low” in the manifestation of anti-Muslim bigotry against him.
The cry of bigotry was another lie, but Ellison invited St. Paul Pioneer Press political reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger and others on his email list to fight back against his alleged victimization with a modest contribution to his campaign. I posted a copy of his fundraising letter to Stassen-Berger in “In which Keith Ellison finds me of use.”
How has Ellison gotten away with his act? It helps to be a Democrat. It helps to be black. It helps to be a Muslim. It helps to have a sympathetic press. It helps to play to a Minneapolis crowd in a one-party town. And yet Ellison seeks to take his act to a national audience. He dreams of higher office.
In his memoir, Ellison recounts his conversion to Islam as a 19-year-old undergraduate at Detroit’s Wayne State University. By the time Ellison graduated from law school at the University of Minnesota, however, he was toeing the Nation of Islam line. When Ellison first ran for public office in Minneapolis in 1998, he was a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam going under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad.
Ellison was still talking up “Minister Farrakhan” at a National Lawyers Guild fundraiser for former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson in 2000. By 2002, however, when Ellison was first elected to the Minnesota legislature, and 2006, when he sought the DFL endorsement to succeed Sabo in Congress, Ellison had abandoned the Nation of Islam and returned to the fold of Islam.
So far as I know, Ellison is the only convert to Islam for whom Islam has served as a way station to the Nation of Islam. How did that work? That’s one part of Ellison’s secret history that actually remains secret.
How Leftists Portray Reality
Dennis Prager reads from an article by Neal Gabler via Bill Moyers’ website — who himself is a far leftist. In reading from the article, Dennis Prager gets ample opportunity to opine. I also included some video of violence done by Hillary/Bernie Sanders supporters [Leftists]. It is well known and documented that Hillary’s campaign may in fact have funded some of what you will see.
At any rate, enjoy the critique of progressivism.
Alex Castellanos & Humberto Fontova Hold Down the MSNBC Fort
The New York Times “Week In Hate” ~ What a Joke!
- “…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.”
Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
- “…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.”
Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.
(See the many myths and examples HERE that will elucidate the past and current history of the Democrat Party. As well as more recent examples HERE , HERE, and HERE.)
Drunk rude or merely rude people understood as racist, misogynistic, bigoted, etc., are said to be the “new norm.” The difference is that these real examples (many are hoaxes) are not leading politicians of a Party or media darlings. Here are just a few of the MANY examples:
➤ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a 2010 interview with journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in which he said that Barack Obama would be successful in his Presidential thanks to being “light-skinned” and speaking “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
➤ Vice President Joe Biden talking the entrepreneurial immigrants that enter our country and run 7-11’s and Dunkin Donuts: “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking!” || “I mean you’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy.”
➤ Who can forget when Al Sharpton reminded us how white people lived in caves and greek people were all gay: “White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”
➤ That time President Obama caught his grandmother being a “typical white person,” whatever that means… “The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”
➤ Not to leave out old ‘Slick Willie,’ here’s a great quote about Obama from former President Bill Clinton, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee…”
➤ “(Obama’s) a nice person, he’s very articulate this is what’s been used against him, but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.” — Dan Rather
(See Larry Elder for more antithesis)
And don’t forget that for twenty-years Obama went to a church that celebrated black nationalism [racism] and sold sermons by and openly celebrated a cult leader (and cop killer), Louis Farrakhan, that teaches the white ethnicity was created on the island of Cyprus over 6,000 years ago and that black “gods” in UFO’s will come to earth to kill the white man (UFO Sermon || and, racist church of twenty years [could you imagine the outcry if Bush went to a similar church?])
Or Julian Castro being the 2012 Democratic National Convention keynote speaker who is part of a racist, socialist organization — La Raza — and who’s mother was the founder in her area (a chapter of): Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA).
Whatever happened to the days of people like Caesar Chavez, founder of the UFW, who saw these movements now fully integrated into the Democratic Party, as the racist organizations they are:
“I hear more and more Mexicans talking about la raza—to build up their pride, you know,” Chavez told Peter Matthiessen, the co-founder of the Paris Review, for a profile piece in The New Yorker in 1969. “Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say ‘la raza,’ you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and it won’t stop there.”… ~ CHAVEZ
Or the many examples of black people targeting white people that are never reported as racist (just a handful of the many examples):
- Milwaukee madness: White people ‘hunted’ for attacks
- A Very Dangerous Game: Young blacks who attack people of other races for fun are getting no media attention
- Are Race Riots News?
- Hundreds of racist Black youths attack Whites at Wisconsin State Fair
- Cell Phone Video Shows Gang Of Black Teens Brutally Attack White Baltimore Man — Neighbor Says It Was Racial Attack!
- WATCH: Charlotte Riots Man Attacked in Parking Garage Beating Video
- Pair charged in explosive device at elementary school; planned to shoot cops, start race war
- Black Lives Matter ~ George Wallace Approved
- Black Lives Matter ~ Killer Political Cult
- Countering BLM and PC Language Police
- The Gruesome Story of a Murdered Tennessee Couple You May Have Never Heard – But That You Will Never Forget
The point being you will never see a section in the New York Times dedicated to these violent attacks against whites or examples of Democrats being bigoted (or if a Republican said them, racist).
In a recent conversation I was given examples of Christian terrorism. The First example being a British white supremacist who murdered a Parliament member named Jo Cox. First, this person was part of an anti-Christian racist cult who themselves are socialists… not capitalists. After I pointed this out I was quickly inundated with many links to articles. I tried to get this gal to button down on one of the “top-ten” lists she linked, entitled: “10 worst examples of Christian or far-right terrorism.” You see, many people who are stuck in a closed minded position will do this “Gish Gallop” and merely post many links with no explanation or ability to pause and deal with specific examples in these long lists.
I tried to get her to engae on the article linked above. I took the first and eighth example to make my point. Quoting my portion from the discussion, as she merely responded with more links: “Mmmm, Salon, this will be fun. I am sure they note the 29,817 terrorist attacks since 9/11 done in the name of YHWH — ER — sorry, I meant Islamic attacks invoking ALLAH.”
I continue…
Shilley W., let us look at Salon’s #1 – the Murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi by Frank Roque.
SINCE YOU posted the link, you should be familiar with the cases and be ready to discuss them. (Which is why I link to posts on my site typically, because I am familiar with them.)
Do you have evidence that Roque is a Christian? I have studied racists cults in-depth, and a good portion of my over 5,000 books are geared to world religions, the occult, and cults.
(I see you just like to post links… this may be an opportunity for you to enter into dialogue.)
I would say that Salone failed in their prime example of #1 to connect this to Christianity at all.
Not to mention he — Roque — did not do this claiming the example of Jesus or YHWH as his source. LIKE Jonathan Dienst.
You are bringing up non-sequiturs.
Let me repeat that…
You are bringing up non-sequiturs.
After more links I continued…
Shilley W., so you are admitting the vacuousness of your first link to Salon?
You see, rather than get you on a “Gish Gallop,” I would rather you camp on a specific and see if your understanding matches with reality.
I will choose another example to see if Salon is telling the truth on Joseph Stack (#8):
The things said in his [Joseph Stack’s] manifesto seem to all be taken straight from Michael Moore movies?
✦ Anti-health care system = Sicko
✦ Anti-Capitalism = Capitalism, a Love Story
✦ IRS cronyism with businesses = Capitalism, a Love Story
✦ Anti-Bush = Fahrenheit 9/11
✦ Blames Big Corporations for job issues = The Big One
[…..]
…Joe Stack was a liberal. As I point out…
✦ Hated George W. Bush and his “cronies”
✦ Hated Big Pharma
✦ Hated Big Insurance
✦ Hated GM executives
✦ Hated organized religion
✦ Refers favorably to communism
✦ And in his last words before dying, denigrates capitalism.
You see… what is THOUGHT to be examples of “Christian” or “Right Wing” terrorism, are in fact the opposite.
Dennis Prager Discusses Fidel Castro’s Death
- “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)
- “Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.” (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)
- “Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official “Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)
- “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)
- “Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)
- “Castro’s personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country.” (Barbara Walters.)
- “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)
(See More Below)
Here is the WALL STREET JOURNAL article Prager is reading from:
Fidel Castro’s legacy of 57 years in power is best understood by the fates of two groups of his countrymen—those who remained in Cuba and suffered impoverishment and dictatorship, and those who were lucky or brave enough to flee to America to make their way in freedom. No progressive nostalgia after his death Friday at age 90 should disguise this murderous and tragic record.
Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters.
The terror produced a mass exodus. An April 1961 attempt by the CIA and a small force of expatriate Cubans to overthrow Castro was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in a fiasco for the Kennedy Administration. Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and their 1962 attempt to establish a Soviet missile base on Cuba nearly led to nuclear war. The crisis was averted after President Kennedy sent warships to intercept the missiles, but the Soviets extracted a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again.
The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in doctors and dentists and daily calorie consumption per capita. Its infant-mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.
Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the past half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.
All the while Fidel and his brother Raúl sought to spread their Communist revolution throughout the world, especially in Latin America. They backed the FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Their propaganda about peasant egalitarian movements beguiled thousands of Westerners, from celebrities likeSean Penn and Danny Glover to Secretary of State John Kerry, who on a visit to Havana called the U.S. and Cuba “prisoners of history.” The prisoners are in Cuban jails.
On this score, President Obama’s morally antiseptic statement Saturday on Castro is an insult to his victims. “We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” Mr. Obama said. “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” Donald Trump, by contrast, called Castro a “dictator” and expressed hope for a “free Cuba.”
Mr. Obama’s 2014 decision to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations has provided new business opportunities for the regime but has yielded nothing in additional freedom. Americans can now travel and make limited investment in Cuba but hard-currency wages for workers are confiscated by the government in return for nearly worthless pesos. In 2006 Forbes estimated Fidel’s net worth, based on his control of “a web of state-owned companies,” at $900 million.
[….]
Castro’s Cuba exists today as a reminder of the worst of the 20th century when dictators invoked socialist ideals to hammer human beings into nails for the state. Too many Western fellow-travelers indulged its fantasies as long as they didn’t have to live there. Perhaps the influence of Cuba’s exiles will be able, over time, to reseed the message of liberty on the island. But freedom starts by seeing clearly the human suffering that Fidel Castro wrought.
Here are some Cuban-Americans Hearing the News of Fidel’s death (descriptions are via BREITBART):
Ninety-three-year-old Pablo Suarez, her husband, tells AmericaTeVe that Flora had made the decision to flee communist Cuba. “She said at night, ‘We’re going tonight,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ ‘Well, if you’re not going, I’m taking the kids.”
Her family purchased the flag more than 20 years ago to celebrate Castro’s death.
Another video surfacing on social media shows an unnamed older Cuban gentleman as his children tell him that Fidel Castro has died. They tease him with good news from Cuba, to which he replies, “Good news from Cuba? I never expect any good news from Cuba.”
“It’s not freedom, but it’s something good: Fidel died,” a relative tells him.
In disbelief, the man tells her, “Fidel has died before,” before letting it sink in. He added, “He should have died 56 years ago”
Here is a Cuban refugee who has alzheimers being told Fidel Castro is dead…
Flora Suarez left Cuba in 1965 with her husband and children, never to return. Now 85 years old, Suarez suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, her family told the Miami-based AmericaTeVe. She does not remember her children’s names, but she understood when her daughter told her that Fidel Castro had died.
“I have the best news in the world for you. … What is this? It’s the flag,” her daughter says in the video, wrapping her in a large Cuban flag. “Fidel fell. He fell. … The day is here”
Another great article found over at FAITH WIRE:
Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.
Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.
Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.
In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.
Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.
Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.
Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?
[….]
But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial. It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.
The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.
Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.
Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.
“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.
On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”
“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We executive from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.
According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.
It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:
- “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)
- “Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.” (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)
- “Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official “Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)
- “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)
- “Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)
- “Castro’s personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country.” (Barbara Walters.)
- “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)