Liberal Mantra

Some Trump Sized Mantras

Published by Papa Giorgio

Okay, we are a few days AFTER this contentious election for ALL involved… both sides went with horrible choices for their nominee and caused not only contentious attitudes with the opposing nominee but an internal struggle as well. That is, the Democrat base did not like Hillary Clinton, and the Republican base did not like Donald Trump. In fact, in the hopes this will give me some credibility for at least what is to follow, I even started a website to defeat Trump and his rise to be the GOP nominee. Trump is not a conservative? He is a Blue-Dog Democrat.

In conversation with a person I respect highly, he said [partially in jest], that, “You can still love Trump. It’s okay with me….” Not realizing that I do not love Trump and started a site to defeat him. I even made it clear out of the 16-other candidates, Trump was my 18th choice. (Get it?)

…Continuing

So, we are a few days after the election and I read posts like:

  • I’m in mourning, again. I’m sad and disgusted that sexism and racism are still alive and kicking in this country. Color, not qualifications were voted into the White House last night.
  • I could sit here and sob about how devastating and pathetic this is. I’m just too pissed. Disappointed. Shocked. Fucking livid. Years of progress diminished in one night. This is not the country I thought I lived in.
  • Everyone better order their tamales now. There won’t be any by Christmas.
    • …another person asked this person: Are you making them?
    • …here is the response: Nope. I’m afraid if I do I will be deported.
    • … the humorous comeback was: Nobody is getting deported till January 20 2017, Christmas tamales are safe.
  • Another person I know posted the graphic to the right:

These are just a few of examples of raw emotion that should be sympathized with. But like in many-a-Facebook post this idea that if people do not agree with my position, they are one of the SIXHIRBs: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted.

One of the best turnarounds I saw from a family member is this:

  • So in class today I finally cried. This presidential unveiling has caused such a stir of emotions for the past 48 hours and it has all been bottled up until this point. We keep playing the blame game and it’s time to stop. Right now I blame myself because I was ignorant to the rest of the country. I didn’t think that everyone didn’t think like me. I lived in a bubble and now I feel like the different one. Because of this huge division right now the last thing we need to do divide it even further….

Wow! What a mature statement. THAT made my heart glad. She even went on to state she wished she had expressed this as clearly in an earlier class as she did on her FB. I agreed, hindsight is 20/20 and we all have said stuff that upon further reflection we could have said better.

All of us. (Especially Bush, and now Trump… NIGHTMARE!)

So, how do I explain some positions my friends and family probably think about a man they seem to fear, and I heard one psychotherapist yesterday say that the reaction of many millennials is like that of a loved one dying. In other words, this is deeply emotional to some. And while I love posting videos of people sobbing like the next dude, this gets us nowhere. So I decided to discuss three main points about Trump and this election to get people to think about what they say. Because it can be misunderstood as calling a friend or family one of those SIXHIRB labels, wounding both our Republic (because who would want to learn or discuss political matters with a racist?), as well as causing misunderstandings between friends.

It makes our political life too easy. A healthy Republic should be tough. Those labels are a cop-out for doing heavy liftin’. One very progressive leaning professor makes the same point about how this thinking harms his students:

Here, for example, is my sister noting her election day experience… and take note, she will never make her vote public:

  • In my 32 years as a registered voter, I have never left the polls feeling so disgusted and embarrassed by my choice. Not that my other option would have made me feel ANY different. I need a shower!

The point here is that people are more complicated than these few labels society has chosen to use. Another example (a few years back) of a dear friends mom smearing people like me is in a post discussing Judge Judy. I know, it’s a pop-culture Baby Boomer thing. Here is what she said with my response:

(She said) “Black people and white people weren’t allowed get married years ago either… if small minded, bigoted people had their way it would still be that way. Gay marriage Is NO different…. religious folks who believe and support same sex marriage ?? They must not be real religious people.”

(I Responded) In other words, a discussion to you is calling me and other readers here “bigots,” and impugning the character of religious gays by creating straw-man arguments of what I (we) say/mean? And when I politely point this out by not pointing out how you name call and use “cards” (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted ~ S.I.X.H.I.R.B.)….

People need to understand what they are saying. I make mistakes all the time. It’s in our nature. You apologize, grow, learn, and move on trying to keep friendships and family close to you. The friend’s mom unfriended me. So in response to my family member I noted something we all do, and it is this:

This election has brought to mind the now famous quote by elite Manhattanite and New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s sweeping presidential victory in 1972:

  • “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.”

There is a tendency to build sound rooms around one’s belief and where they choose to get their information from. WE ARE ALL susceptible to this.

So, part of our journey is allowing in other sources of information…

The conservative has no choice but to encounter leftist ideals. For instance, out of the top twenty most influential sources of news in our country, only two lean right (Fox News and the Washington Times). All the others lean left in their journalism and view of the world. In fact, Rachel Maddow noted her politics are to the left of Mao Zedong. She is more of a commentator though, and the study I am referring to only included straight news sources.

…Continuing.

So if a person is surprised at the outcome, maybe they should engage friends or family and ask questions. The key to doing this is the following, if it is not face-to-face,.and this is something I will at times start out a conversation with:

“By-the-by, for those reading this I will explain what is missing in this type of discussion due to the media used. Genuflecting, care, concern, one being upset (does not entail being “mad”), etc… are all not viewable because we are missing each other’s tone, facial expressions, and the like. I afford the other person I am dialoguing with the best of intentions and read his/her comments as if we were out having a talk over a beer at a bar or meeting a friend at Starbucks. (I say this because there seems to be a phenomenon of etiquette thrown out when talking through email or Face Book, lots more public cussing and gratuitous responses.) You will see that often times I USE CAPS — which in www lingo for YELLING. I am not using it this way, I use it to merely emphasize and often times say as much: *not said in yelling tone, but merely to emphasize*. So in all my discussions I afford the best of thought to the other person as I expect he or she would to me… even if dealing with tough subjects as the above. I have had more practice at this than most, and with half-hour pizza, one hour photo and email vs. ‘snail mail,’ know that important discussions take time to meditate on, inculcate, and to process. So be prepared for a good thought provoking discussion if you so choose one with me.”

Again, we all put into other people’s typed words our own emotional state at that time. The trick is to step away from this tendency… and this can be hard.

I shared what others wrote on election day, can I share mine? I went and cast my ballot for Trump and wrote this afterwords:beer

I voted. It was really hard to overcome my original emotions of dislike for Trump with reason (mind). But this IS the essence of being human… To think and reason beyond our emotive states…

Again, people are complicated and to label them as sexist or racist without really knowing is a travesty to our Republic.

OKAY… I will now post three responses to items of discussion that my guess is those who are very distraught over Trump’s win and view either him or a large segment of the population who voted for him as racist or bigoted, or mean to disabled persons, is more complicated than these labels. First up is this:

Is Mexico Sending Rapists?

When I ask people to offer me an example of Trump’s “racism,” I get a reference to this example most often:

  • “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” ~ Donald J. Trump

Before I add information that I doubt a millennial has heard because either they or their friends are quick to label Trump as being bigoted or racist for saying this, and moving on without further reflection, I want to note that all Republican politicians said to round up illegals in America would be an impossible task. Trump has evolved on his statement that many understood as rounding up 11-million (actually, there are 30-million). ALSO, every Republican politician noted that the Constitution would not allow for the banning of all Muslims coming to our country. Again, our Constitution forbids this. It allows for banning all persons from a country, but not a religious or sectarian belief. He [Trump] has backed away from this as well, as all of us knew he would. In fact, this was removed from his site. Trump is not a politician, but his team is counseling him well.

…Continuing.

Okay. What of Trump’s statement? It surely sounds bigoted at best.

I will shock the reader.

I think that is the most pro-woman statement in a long time by a politician regarding real — violent — crime against women.

Let me explain.

This is from the HUFFINGTON POST:

As the number of Central American women and girls crossing into the U.S. continues to spike, so is the staggering amount of sexual violence waged against these migrants who are in search of a better life.

According to a stunning Fusion investigation, 80 percent of women and girls crossing into the U.S. by way of Mexico are raped during their journey. That’s up from a previous estimate of 60 percent, according to an Amnesty International report…

[….]

Through May, the number of unaccompanied girls younger than 18 caught at the US-Mexico border increased by 77 percent.

But while many of these girls are fleeing their homes because of fears of being sexually assaulted, according to the UNHCR, they are still meeting that same fate on their journey to freedom…

For clarity in the sources for the HUFFPO article, for those that are of the impatient and research non-oriented generation:

✦ 60% Amnesty International Report (PDF)
✦ 80% Is rape the price to pay for migrant women chasing the American Dream? (FUSION)

(UPDATED EDITORIAL BY RPT) To be clear, these rapes are happening by residents who live in towns and districts these migrants are passing through. Other rapes are happening by Coyotajes, as well as many by the men making the trip as well. We know that many Honduren gang-members make the trek, and so, a high percentage of these men (criminals) do in fact cross our border into our nation. Where American women of all ethnic background are subjected to assault. Since we know illegals commit crimes at double the rate of native-born… rape is also part of these increased stats.

NEW STORY

80% of C. American Illegals Raped on Trip to US, Still Dems Encourage Them to Come

…“According to a stunning Fusion investigation, 80 percent of women and girls crossing into the U.S. by way of Mexico are raped during their journey. That’s up from a previous estimate of 60 percent, according to an Amnesty International report,” the well-known news outlet continued….

So, many of the men they travel with are rapping them. Many of the Coyotajes as well take advantage of them. There are what are now being called “rape trees,” which you can learn more about on a previous post of mine, here. Here is how a conversation using this understanding went in the real world:

  • The above exchange was discussed a bit wrong, like Trump, the main idea is lost in the presentation. Gavin McInness made it sound as if the rapes were happening at the border when in actuality they are happening during the entire trip. And the girl thought he meant Coyotes, the real animal. Not Coyotajes. (That was very funny BTW, and why I ended the video like I did.)

What would be the most compassionate step to take? I would say, to control our border. That would help the migrant woman AS WELL AS our own mothers, daughters, and wives. Many from these countries that are experiencing these horrible circumstances are experiencing it because of their government models they have chosen. But this is neither here-nor-there.

The bottom line is that Trump, while not explaining this well at all, was actually making a statement about policy that in the end will protect women. There is this as well dealing with drugs and violence aspect of the comment:

A fresh wave of crime from the infamously violent MS-13 gang in the District of Columbia is being driven by the heavy recruitment of young illegal immigrants.

A surge of minors crossing the U.S. southern border is helping the notorious gang boost their ranks and instigate a new string of violent attacks in the city, reported The Washington Times. Over the past few years a wave of illegal migrant children crossed the U.S. border, and MS-13 appears to be targeting them for recruitment.

“They are certainly susceptible,” Ed Ryan, gang prevention coordinator in Fairfax County, Virginia, told The Washington Times. “They are new, they have very little family, they don’t know the language very well. They are looking for someone who looks like them, talks like them.”

Experts say violence from MS-13, which originally started in California, historically occurs in waves. Currently MS-13, on orders from El Salvador, is ramping up efforts in cities across the U.S. to reestablish their dominance on the streets, reports The Washington Times….

This is just a very short clip of a longer audio (here: ) of John and Ken discussing Mollie Tibbetts and her murderer, Christian Bahena-Rivera. According to the DAILY CALLER, he was employed by a Republican small business owner…

  • “He worked on Yarrabee Farms, which is owned by the family of GOP official Craig Lang, who was a former 2018 Republican candidate for state secretary of agriculture, according to reports by the Des Moines Register.”

…who may have illegally had him in their employ? However, he was an example of the DACA young… so did he have his temporary papers? I have no idea. Nor would I know if he immigrated legally if he would have passed all the checks/balances.

As an side…

Is this man a racist or bigot? He was the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, and spoke out against the racist organization, La Raza, as well as calling workers who crossed the border “illegal immigrants” and “wetbacks.”

“In the mid 1970s, he conducted the ‘Illegals Campaign’ to identify and report illegal workers, ‘an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott’ (of produce from non-unionized farms), according to Pawel. She quotes a memo from Chavez that said, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.”

…“Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration,” Levin said during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News’ Hannity. 

After saying that the premise that “compassion is an open border” is a “new idea” that has been pushed in recent times, Levin said that “a nation has a right to secure its border” and its citizens have a right to know who is coming into their country. 

Chavez, who was also against ethnic organizations like La Raza, would tell illegal immigrants to get out of the country, especially because they lowered the wages of American workers. And he was often far from compassionate in handling illegal immigrants….

(NATIONAL REVIEW, BREITBART and the HUFFINGTON POST)

Trump Mocks Disabled Reporter ?

This one I believed for a long time. Here is a common way this is added into a litany of grievances:

  • If I owned a business and someone applied for the job that had a history of denigrating women, mocking a reporter with a disability, targeting people of a certain ethnic or religious affiliation, I would not hire that person. I am surprised to see that some would. Perhaps we have different values.

Firstly, it is not my job to correct EVERY detail a person brings up. Even I have a life. Barely, but it’s there… somewhere. So the denigrating women thing makes no real difference to the Democrat, because assaults, murder, and rape are all too common on the left. JFK raped a 16-year old girl in the White House and brought prostitutes into the same House. Ted Kennedy, the “Lion of the Senate,” a hero to the Left assaulted women even killing one in a drunken night out. Bill Clinton either raped or assaulted over 15-women and had sex with prostitutes, and his wife got a man she knew was guilty of rapping so violently a 12-year old girl that she could never have kids her entire life. She laughed about getting this rapist off. She [Hillary], also covered up her husbands attacks. She got so much flack for this that she removed from he campaign website a section detailing her hard work to protect women.rape-drown

Thank you Bernie fans for being tough on her for this!

— But I Digress —

(and have already answered this more here)

My answer to this requires watching a video/audio I worked on and uploaded to my YouTube… but if you want a condensed version that I responded to a person elsewhere on the WWW:

So, what have we learned so far by exchanging ideas in an open forum. Trump was right about the rapists comment, and the best thing to protect women is to control our border (both for the immigrant women and our mothers and daughters).

And the other things we learned is that Trump mocks everyone with the same motions. Childish? Yes. Not ideal for a President. Sure. He wasn’t my 18th choice out of seventeen. But what is said of him is not [often true].

Here is a time-line of each video of Trump mocking various persons (including himself) with the same mannerisms as the media says he expressly used to mock a man’s disability:

The videos used to make the montage are from CATHOLICS 4 TRUMP’S article entitled, “Even MORE Video Evidence Trump Did Not Mock Reporter’s Disability“. Here is the timeline (maroon is before or during the event in question):

✦ May 2005 – Trump imitates a flustered Trump (decade prior to the “event” in question);
✦ October 2015 – Trump imitates flustered bank president (25-days prior to the “event” in question);
✦ November 25, 2015 – Trump imitates flustered reporter and flustered general (during the same speech given as the “event” in question);
✦ February 2016 – Trump imitates flustered Ted Cruz;
✦ October 2016 — Trump imitates a flustered Donna Brazile.

I include this call because it is more concise than my other uploads:

➤ Did Trump Go Full Retard On That Reporter? (Sep 8, 2016)
➤ Larry Elder Slays Fools | Meryl Streep (Jan 10, 2017)

Again, he did this of himself, Ted Cruz, a general, and more. It is his “quirk.” One I hate, but not aimed at anyone in particular to represent a physical condition. (See a much longer report on all this here.)

Here is my “finisher” to a recent discussion via FB on this topic:

No, he was not mocking his disability. He was mocking his reporting. Like he was mocking the general later in that same speech. Unless, wait… Bonnie… you may have something… when Donald J. Trump mocked himself in May 2005, a bank president in October 2015, that general in November 25, 2015, Ted Cruz in February 2016, and Donna Brazile in October 2016…

…h-e was r-e-a-l-l-y mocking that reporter that doesn’t have a disability that causes him to make those motions.

In the opening of John Stossle’s video he deals with this:

Racists Support Trump

First, in the broad sense this has to be true… that is… somewhere in this nation I am sure a racist supports Donald J. Trump. Even if we assume the Klan all voted in unison, he would have gotten 8,000 votes at most! Nationwide.

HOWEVER, as you will see, even the above hypothetical is more complicated than most assume it to be. Let’s just clear the air first on this past charge of Trump not disavowing David Duke (a “famous” racist and past KKK leader) during the run-up-to the nomination: Trump clearly disavowed David Duke’s endorsement. As we will see, the truth about David Duke is more complicated than we often hear. Okay, moving on.

After Trump won the election the media and Hollywood types as well as comedians and Democrat Senators and Representatives all started saying there was a backlash of old-racist-white-men that came out in force and voted for Trump. This just isn’t the case. You can see from just a few of the bullet points from my “Blacks, Hispanics and Gays are Sexist, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Racist” post that this attack on American voters is just a maligning of each and everyone of those peoples character:

  • …Thirteen percent of Muslims voted for Trump, triple the amount that voted Romney, are they are Islamophobic, bigoted, xenophobic, and racist?
  • Eight percent of blacks voted for Trump, seven percent more than Romney — not to mention the black men and women who didn’t vote for the president at all in a higher percentage. These same men and women previously voted twice for Obama. These persons of color… if I understand my detractors correctly, are racist bigots?
  • A higher percentage (almost 30%) of Hispanics voted for Trump, more in fact than voted for Romney. These Hispanic and Latino men and women, like the others, are xenophobic, bigoted, and racist?
  • One hundred-and-ninety-four counties that voted for Obama once switched to GOP in the 2016 election. And, two-hundred-and-nine counties that voted for Obama twice switched to GOP. Many of these people are union members as well as life-long Democrats. Am I now being told that these Democrats who voted for Obama are: racist. sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted?

So you can see from the above and the graphic below that the people who really pushed Trump into the “win” section of the electoral count were minorities and voters who previously voted for Obama either once or both times prior to voting for Trump.

I refer to this with a euphemism from a previous election as

“they were NOT racist before they WERE.”

In other words, according to people I dearly love, these people are now magically racists… but weren’t when they voted for Obama.

Most of these flipped voters were/are Democrats… am I now being told Democrats are racists?

Do you see the dilemma?

Even Michael Moore opined on this:

  • “They’re not racist,” Moore said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America you live in.”everything-is-racist-spongbob-380

However, let us delve into this even more to dispel commonly held myths.

Got your big-boy-pants on?

I have studied four racist cults in-depth: the Nation of Islam, the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, and the Five-Percenters — known also as the Nation of Gods and Earths.

Two of the above four racist cults are both telling their followers to vote for Trump… the KKK and the Nation of Islam. Christian Identity as a cohesive movement is all but dead… and the 5% when they do vote always vote Democrat. IN FACT they all primarily vote Democrat.

A quick history point that is important for the next paragraph:

After the triumph of the civil rights movement and the introduction of a series of civil rights laws, the Klan broke up into various subgroups. Previously these KKK members were Democrats and they continued being so after.

  • “…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.

People do not realize why these groups, especially the KKK, vote Democrat. For instance, out of the four leaders in the “white-power” movement (the KKK subculture) with the most followers, three told their peeps to vote Democrat (Actually, then it was them telling their followers to vote for Obama in 2008).

Here you see some higher ups in this white racist movement telling their people (3-of-the-4) to vote Democrat for the election in 2008:

➤ Tom Metzger: Director, White Aryan Resistance; Career Highlights: Was Grand Dragon of Ku Klux Klan in the 70s; won the Democratic primary during his bid for Congress in 1980…
➤ Ron Edwards: Imperial Wizard, Imperial Klans of America; Career Highlights: Sued in 2007 by the Southern Poverty Law Center for inciting the brutal beating of a Latino teenager; building the IKA into one of the nation’s largest Klan groups by allowing non-Christians to join.
➤ Erich Gliebe: Chairman, National Alliance; Career Highlights: Turning white-power record label, Resistance Records, into a million-dollar-a-year business juggernaut; an 8-0 record as a professional boxer under the nickname, “The Aryan Barbarian.”
➤ Rocky Suhayda: Chairman, American Nazi Party; Career highlights: Being widely quoted bemoaning in the fact that so few Aryan-Americans had the cojones of the 9/11 hijackers: “If we were one-tenth as serious, we might start getting somewhere.”

Yes, most racist groups — INCLUDING THE KKK — voted for a black nominee.

The next question should be, Why?

Reason One
One reason is that these racist white groups are typically socialists. And socialism is a political system that wants the government to run health-care, business, increase central power, etc. Here is a most basic graph of this concept (see to the right – click the graph to go to my combined post on the matter).

“We are socialists, we are ene­mies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” — Hitler

John Toland, Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1976), 223-225.

Reason Two
Another reason a lot of racist whites vote Democrat is they are very poor and use heavily the social services they support ideologically. This was even evident when less than the typical 80% that vote straight Democrat still voted straight Democrat in their respective states but did not vote for Obama.

The other Black Nationalist cults vote heavier [percentage wise] Democratic.

This year is different. You have both Louis Farrakhan telling his followers to vote for Trump, and you have more people in the disjointed KKK telling their people to vote for him. Why this change? I think it is because he has many similar views on issues with Bernie Sanders, as an example,

  • Forty-four percent of Sanders supporters surveyed said they would rather back the presumptive GOP nominee in November, with only 23 percent saying they’d support Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. And 31 percent said would support neither candidate in the likely general election match-up. (THE HILL)

Keep in mind those are voters in the state that put Sander’s into the Senate!

Here is the kicker though regarding the Nation of Islam (NOI). This cult, unlike the KKK, is VERY structured under a single leader. So what Farrakhan says is followed “religiously” by his adherents. Whereas, in the KKK, these leaders are not looked to in the same way Farrakhan is, as some sort of “messianic” figure. So you might have slightly more vote for Trump in the Klan on the recommendation of their leaders. This is different in the structure of the Nation of Islam, the percentages would be almost unanimous in their “lock-step.”

Many will continue to vote straight Democrat the rest of the ticket, in all groups mentioned.

“Racists Vote Republican,” or, “Republican’s Are Old Racist White Men” may be a convenient (actually evil) political narrative to scare a few voters away from the GOP, surely. But the maligning of every Republican nominee since Nixon just is not factually true.

DON’T accept the comparison. Take their arguments and return them packaged in a nice little bow.

Editor’s Aside:

Democrats want to fundamentally change America. I don’t love my wife if I want to fundamentally change her. Black Life Matters protesters teach their children to burn American flags or march down the street CHANTING “What do we want?!” “Dead Cops!” “When do we want them?!” “NOW!” They argue America was founded on nothing but slavery and greed. Hillary Clinton backed this group even going as far as far as saying (at the NAACP) that “systemic racism” needs to be eliminated. Months later calling Americans all racists: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think unfortunately too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other and therefore I think we need all of us to be asked the hard questions ‘why am I feeling this way?’”

Democrats think I am an imperialist white supremacist Christian cisgender capitalist heteropatriarchal male. Apparently however, these many demographic changes across the board [noted above] seem to agree that Trump’s slogan was acceptable, “Make America Great Again.”

One reason many of these hate groups (black and white) are voting for Trump is for border control. A) There is an animosity towards illegal aliens for racist reasons, and B) reasons related to economics as well. A great example would be this video “CHICAGO’S INNER-CITY POOR BLACK COMMUNITY ABANDONING OBAMA’S LIBERAL AGENDA“

To continue this point, one woman said this:

  • A resident of the Austin community, Jean Ray, says after 40 years of Democratic party control over the black community, the policies “are hurting,” and if there were Republicans willing to do the right job in her community, she would vote for them. (More at BREITBART)

So a good reason that black racist groups would have voted Trump includes practical economic concerns, i.e., jobs. Which is why we saw a 7% jump in blacks voting for the Republican candidate… but most likely even they voted Democrat the rest of the ticket.

Reason Three
They HATE (H-A-T-E) Israel, and this is a reason they tend to support Democrats. For instance, on his YouTube, David Duke endorsed Charles Barron for Congress (video on the left). Another endorsement for Hillary was from a KKK leader here in California (right video).

So attributing racism to the GOP is silly, because as a whole, the almost 8,000 KKK members nation wide vote Democrat. AS DO ALL THE OTHER RACIST CULTS IN AMERICA (*booming megaphone affect in a cave*). NOT TO MENTION where all the hub-bub is when all these hate groups vote for Democrats in years past?

In other words, WHY is it only “newsworthy” when they vote for Republicans and not for Democrats?

I smell something fishy here.

I can continue, but this post is already long enough. On the racial issues, I suggest my page entitled: U.S. RACIAL HISTORY. This page deals with the supposed party switch by racist Democrats to Republicans, slavery, American Indian narratives, some VERY PROUD BLACK HISTORY in our country… and the like.

Recap
Again, let’s recap for clarity some of my reasons white racist/nationalists cults vote Democrat:

  • They are typically socialist in their political views, and thus support the welfare state for personal financial reasons (poor) and ideological reasoning (socialist); or for the reason that it is a way of controlling minorities (racist reasoning). A modern plantation so-to-speak; There is a shared hatred for Israel and supporting of groups wanting to exterminate the Jews (Palestinians for instance).

This is why a majority STILL supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. She is a socialist at heart, wants a big welfare state, and does not like Israel as much as Trump, who has kids practicing the Jewish religion. Thee ONLY issue a racist could want to vote for Trump on is his immigration policies… hardly a racist position. It has only now become an issue of bigotry and racism because the Left has moved the goal post in the use of language. Racists no longer means “genetically superior,” rather, it mean you disagree with a Democrat and/or hurt their feelings. Otherwise, these people would be RACISTS!

Afterword

What are some of my suggestions to stop or prepare people for future events like this? Talk to friends or family why they are in a particular political party. I have read and studied the “Left” A LOT! But balance in peoples lives are good. I always make this point to express my thinking on this, and it was mainly based on when my boys were going through high school and their friends would pick my brain. It deals with balance:

I often bump into people that have watched some or most of the following “documentaries” I likewise own and have watched all on the following list (one should take note that some of these are shown in public school classrooms):

• Bowling for Columbine
• Roger and Me
• Fahrenheit 9/11
• Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
• Sicko
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Loose Change
• Zeitgeist
• Religulouse
• The God Who Wasn’t There
• Super-Size Me

But rarely do I meet someone of the opposite persuasion from me that have watched any of the following (I own and have watched):

• Celsius41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Dies
• FahrenHYPE 9/11
• Michael & Me
• Michael Moore Hates America
• Bullshit! Fifth Season… Read More (where they tear apart the Wal-Mart documentary)
• Indoctrinate U
• Mine Your Own Business
• Screw Loose Change
• 3-part response to Zeitgeist
• Fat-Head
• Privileged Planet
• Unlocking the Mystery of Life

I am not saying one should go out and watch all these opposing points of views. I am saying that probably the person reading this has seen one or two of the above, was convinced about it, and now proclaim it as “true” without testing their position with balance. Someone who has changed my views in many areas is Thomas Sowell. I can recommend that if a person is really interested in knowing what much of the base of the opposing Party believes… in this case Republicans, to read only one of Dr. Sowells books, “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”

Allow dissent in conversation. Our Republic is suppose to be tough. Enjoy this designed aspect of a healthy country.

Start by listening to the entire chapter entitled “The Real History of Slavery,” by Thomas Sowell (full audio here). Think racist Democrats became Republicans? Read and watch the videos in my post here.

Do not surround yourselves with Mini-Me’s. Bouncing ideas off of a sound board in a studio of all like-minded individuals does not create growth, understanding, and the like. It creates ideological group-think. DO NOT think I am saying this just to my audience. I have to tell myself this all the time. And I often fail. That is what friends and family are for. Grace and love through the hardest of times.

What are my RAW personal thoughts on the matter?

After Democrats elected a President that attended a Nazi-like church of twenty-years and the keynote speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention was a racist, for the left to bring up racism is moot.

They, not me, shot themselves in the foot.

It really does make the person who is a staunch Democrat look silly, hypocritical, and VERY careless when bringing up the topic. In other words, to ignore Obama’s family’s close affiliation (past AND PRESENT) with self stated hard-core racists takes away any respect from me for Democrats speaking ill of some okie Ozark livin’ poor white person who is ignorant who may vote Republican once-in-a-while when for decades the Democrats have highlighted and supported the worse of these police killing cults.

The only death threats I get are from black racist nationalists via a video I did about the cult Jay-Z and Beyonce promote.

So don’t talk to me about “racism” and the KKK voting for Donald Trump… I have a list of black nationalist or black nationalists supporting POLITICIANS that recently or are currently in Congress AND in the highest office of the land. The Oval Office. Not to mention the sorted history of the Klan with a particular political Party.

If you are unwilling to learn history, and the religiously racist cultic backgrounds of what is promoted on the left as mainstream, then you are stuck where you are. Making blanket statements that cause others to wag-their-heads.

Like I said, raw.

No, 17-U.S. Agencies Did Not Say Russia Hacked Dem E-mails

Published by Papa Giorgio

Unfortunately, Russia being behind the hacks is more conjecture than fact. Some have been leaked by Democrats themselves, others may have been leaked by NSA officials getting back at Hillary for the death of some intelligence agency employee’s and the worry that her reckless behavior with State Secrets would continue in the White House. Annnd may some were done by Wikileaks. The funny thing is however that Hillary denies her emails were at the same time she blames Russia.

Hillary Clinton in last night’s presidential debate tried to avoid talking about the substance of the damaging WikiLeaks disclosures of DNC and Clinton campaign officials by claiming 17 U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia was responsible for this. After Clinton made this claim, she scolded Trump for challenging U.S. intelligence professionals who have taken an oath to help defend this country.

What Clinton said was false and misleading. First of all, only two intelligence entities – the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – have weighed in on this issue, not 17 intelligence agencies. And what they said was ambiguous about Russian involvement. An unclassified October 7, 2016 joint DNI-DHS statement on this issue said the hacks

  • …are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europa and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Saying we think the hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts” is far short of saying we have evidence that Russia has been responsible for the hacks. Maybe high-level officials would have authorized them if Russian hackers were responsible, but the DNI and DHS statement did NOT say there was evidence Russia was responsible….

Don’t forget that some are saying that a portion of these WIkiLeaks came from a Democrat operative, that dies in the nick of time:

DNC staffer Seth Rich was mysteriously murdered in the streets of Washington, D.C., on July 10. Although it is being investigated as a robbery, his wallet, credit cards and watch were not taken. The 27-year old was shot in the back on July 10 at 4:15 a.m. near his affluent neighborhood, while he was reportedly walking home from his girlfriend’s apartment. Police still have no suspects, witnesses or motive. His mother told the local NBC station that there were bruises on his face, knees and hands, apparently from trying to fend off his attackers.

[….]

Rich was a data analyst, so it is very possible he could have had access to the DNC’s emails. Julian Assange of Wikileaks said recently on TV that it wasn’t Russian hackers who intercepted the emails, as the Hillary Clinton campaign has alleged; instead, any one of a number of staffers within the DNC could have leaked them.

(RPT)

Did The Party’s Switch?

Published by Papa Giorgio

THE SWITCH

Just a quick intro to this video, it was at a Young American’s Foundation sponsored eveny at the University of Wisconsin, and a professor gets up to correct D’Souza on the Dixiecrat’s all becoming Republicans. It didn’t go well for the professor:

From a wonderful article from Freedom’s Journal Institute’s series, URBAN LEGENDS: The Dixiecrats and the GOP…

THE DIXIECRATS

…During the Philadelphia nominating convention of the Democrat Party in 1948 a number of disgruntled southern segregationist democrats stormed out in protest. They were upset about planks in the new platform that supported Civil Rights.[1]

They left to form a new Party called the State’s Rights Democratic Party also known as the Dixiecrats. Segregationist like George Wallace and other loyalists, although upset, did not bolt from the party; but instead supported another candidate against Harry Truman. According to Kari Frederickson, the goal for the Dixiecrats “was to win the 127 electoral-college votes of the southern states, which would prevent either Republican Party nominee Thomas Dewy or Democrat Harry Truman from winning the 266 electoral votes necessary for election. Under this scenario, the contest would be decided by the House of Representatives, where southern states held 11 of the 48 votes, as each state would get only one vote if no candidate received a majority of electors’ ballots. In a House election, Dixiecrats believed that southern Democrats would be able to deadlock the election until one of the parties had agreed to drop its civil rights plank.”[2]

Notably, this stated aim is apparent in the third plank of the Dixiecrat’s platform which states, “We stand for social and economic justice, which, we believe can be guaranteed to all citizens only by a strict adherence to our Constitution and the avoidance of any invasion or destruction of the constitutional rights of the states and individuals. We oppose the totalitarian, centralized bureaucratic government and the police nation called for by the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions.”[3]

What is even more telling, and speaks directly to the incredulous nature of this urban legend, is the fact that the Dixiecrats rejected the Civil rights platforms of not one, but both parties. Republicans had always supported civil rights since their inception (see GOP party platform here). What was new is that the Democrats, led by Harry Truman, were publicly taking a stand for Civil rights (see Democrat Party Platform here). The ‘totalitarian, centralized bureaucratic government”, according to the Dixiecrats, was the federal government’s enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. With both parties, now, standing for Civil rights the segregationist had no party to go too. Thus, they started their own with the idea of causing a stalemate, which they hoped to break, once both parties relinquished their pro-civil rights planks.

Which way did they go?

The strategy of the State’s Rights Democratic Party failed. Truman was elected and civil rights moved forward with support from both Republicans and Democrats. This begs an answer to the question: So where did the Dixiecrats go? Contrary to legend, it makes no sense for them to join with the Republican Party whose history is replete with civil rights achievements. The answer is, they returned to the Democrat party and rejoined others such as George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox, and Ross Barnett. Interestingly, of the 26 known Dixiecrats (5 governors and 21 senators) only three ever became republicans: Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Mills E. Godwind, Jr. The segregationists in the Senate, on the other hand, would return to their party and fight against the Civil Rights acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proffered the first two Acts.

Eventually, politics in the South began to change. The stranglehold that white segregationist democrats once held over the South began to crumble. The “old guard” gave way to a new generation of politicians. The Republican Party saw an opportunity to make in-roads into the southern states appealing to southern voters. However, this southern strategy was not an appeal to segregationists, but to the new political realities emerging in the south.[4]…

[1] See the 1948 Democrat Party Platform.

[2] Encyclopedia of Alabama – Dixiecrat.

[3] Read more at the American Presidency Project.

[4] I will talk more about the Southern Strategy in another article.

Here is another great excerpt from Ann Coulter from her excellent book, Mugged, regarding this “change dealing with Senators:

In 1948, Thurmond did not run as a “Dixiecan,” he ran as a “Dixiecrat.” As the name indicates, the Dixiecrats were an offshoot of the Democratic Party. When he lost, Thurmond went right back to being a Democrat.

All segregationists were Democrats and—contrary to liberal fables—the vast majority of them remained Democrats for the rest of their lives. Many have famous names—commemorated in buildings and statues and tribute speeches by Bill Clinton. But one never hears about their segregationist pasts, or even Klan memberships. Among them are: Supreme Court justice Hugo Black; Governor George Wallace of Alabama; gubernatorial candidate George Mahoney of Maryland; Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama; Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; and Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia.

But for practical purposes, the most important segregationists were the ones in the U.S. Senate, where civil rights bills went to die. All the segrega­tionists in the Senate were of course, Democrats. All but one remained Democrats for the rest of their lives—and not conservative Democrats. Support for segregation went hand in hand with liberal positions on other issues, too.

The myth of the southern strategy is that southern segregationists were conservatives just waiting for a wink from Nixon to switch parties and join the Reagan revolution. That could not be further from the truth. With the exception of Strom Thurmond—the only one who ever became a Republi-can—they were almost all liberals and remained liberals for the rest of their lives. Of the twelve southern segregationists in the Senate other than Thurmond, only two could conceivably be described as “conservative Democrats.”

The twelve were:

  • Senator Harry Byrd (staunch opponent of anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy);
  • Senator Robert Byrd (proabortion, opponent of 1990 Gulf War and 2002 Iraq War, huge pork barrel spender, sending more than $1 bil­lion to his home state during his tenure, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, won a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America and a 71 percent grade from the American Civil Liberties Union in 2007);
  • Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana (McCarthy opponent, pacifist and opponent of the Vietnam War);
  • Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina (McCarthy opponent, anti-Vietnam War, major Nixon antagonist as head the Watergate Com­mittee that led to the president’s resignation);
  • Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee (ferocious McCarthy oppo­nent despite McCarthy’s popularity in Tennessee, anti-Vietnam War);
  • Senator James Eastland of Mississippi (conservative Democrat, though he supported some of FDR’s New Deal, but was a strong anti-communist);
  • Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas (staunch McCarthy opponent, anti-Vietnam War, big supporter of the United Nations and taxpayer-funded grants given in his name);
  • Senator Walter F. George of Georgia (supported Social Security Act, Tennessee Valley Authority and many portions of the Great Society);
  • Senator Ernest Hollings (initiated federal food stamp program, sup­ported controls on oil, but later became a conservative Democrat, as evidenced by his support for Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court);
  • Senator Russell Long (Senate floor leader on LBJ’s Great Society pro­grams);
  • Senator Richard Russell (strident McCarthy opponent, calling him a “huckster of hysteria,” supported FDR’s New Deal, defended Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, mildly opposed to the Vietnam War);
  • Senator John Stennis (won murder convictions against three blacks based solely on their confessions, which were extracted by vicious police floggings, leading to reversal by the Supreme Court; first senator to publicly attack Joe McCarthy on the Senate floor; and, in his later years, opposed Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court).

The only Democratic segregationist in the Senate to become a Republican—Strom Thurmond—did so eighteen years after he ran for president as a Dixiecrat. He was never a member of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan, as Hugo Black and Robert Byrd had been. You could make a lot of money betting people to name one segregationist U.S. senator other than Thurmond. Only the one who became a Republican is remembered for his dark days as a segregationists Democrat.

As for the remaining dozen segregationists, only two—Hollings and Eastland—were what you’d call conservative Democrats. The rest were dyed-in-the-wool liberals taking the left-wing positions on issues of the day. Segregationist beliefs went hand in hand with opposition to Senator Joe McCarthy, opposition to the Vietnam War, support for New Deal and Great Society programs, support for the United Nations, opposition to Nixon and a 100 percent rating from NARAL. Being against civil rights is now and has always been the liberal position.

OPPOSING CIVIL RIGHTS

Related as well is the recorded votes of which party supported the Civil Rights history regarding persons of color

WHICH PARTY OPPOSED CIVIL RIGHTS?

The voting rolls of the Civil Rights laws speak for themselves. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House with 153 out of 244 Democrats voting for it, and 136 out of 171 Republicans. This means that 63 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans voted “yes.” In the Senate, 46 out of 67 Democrats (69 percent) and 27 out of 33 Republicans (82 percent) supported the measure.

The pattern was similar for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It passed the House 333-85, with 24 Republicans and 61 Democrats voting “no.” In the Senate, 94 percent of Republicans compared with 73 percent of Democrats supported the legislation.

Here’s a revealing tidbit: had Republicans voted for the Civil Rights laws in the same proportion as Democrats, these laws would not have passed. Republicans, more than Democrats, are responsible for the second civil rights revolution, just as they were solely responsible for the first one. For the second time around, Republicans were mainly the good guys and Democrats were mainly the bad guys.

Here’s further proof: the main opposition to the Civil Rights Movement came from the Dixiecrats. Note that the Dixiecrats were Democrats; as one pundit [Coulter] wryly notes, they were Dixiecrats and not Dixiecans.

The Dixiecrats originated as a breakaway group from the Democratic Party in 1948. For a time, the Dixiecrats attempted to form a separate party and run their own presidential ticket, but this attempt failed and the Dixiecrats reconstituted themselves as a rebel faction within the Democratic Party.

Joined by other Democrats who did not formally ally themselves with this faction, the Dixiecrats organized protests against desegregation rulings by the Supreme Court. Dixiecrat governors refused to enforce those rulings. Dixiecrats in the Senate also mounted filibusters against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson’s Democratic allies in Congress required Republican votes in order to defeat a Dixiecrat-led filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Leading members of the Dixiecrat faction were James Eastland, Democrat from Mississippi; John Stennis, Democrat from Mississippi; Russell Long, Democrat from Louisiana; Strom Thurmond, Democrat from South Carolina; Herman Talmadge, Democrat from Georgia; J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas; Lester Maddox, Democrat from Georgia; Al Gore Sr., Democrat from Tennessee; and Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia. Of these only Thurmond later joined the Republican Party. The rest of them remained Democrats.

The Dixiecrats weren’t the only racists who opposed civil rights legislation. So did many other Democrats who never joined the Dixiecrat faction. These were racists who preferred to exercise their influence within the Democratic Party, which after all had long been the party of racism, rather than create a new party. Richard Russell of Georgia—who now has a Senate Building named after him—and James Eastland of Mississippi are among the segregationist Democrats who refused to join the Dixiecrat faction.

Now the GOP presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater, did vote against the Civil Rights Act. But Goldwater was no racist. In fact, he had been a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. He was active in integrating the Phoenix public schools. He had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater opposed the 1964 act because it outlawed private as well as public discrimination, and Goldwater believed the federal government did not have legitimate authority to restrict the private sector in that way. I happen to agree with him on this—a position I argued in The End of Racism. Even so, Goldwater’s position was not shared by a majority of his fellow Republicans.

It was Governor Orval Faubus, Democrat of Arkansas, who ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop black students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School—until Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops from the 101st Airborne to enforce desegrega­tion. In retaliation, Faubus shut down all the public high schools in Little Rock for the 1958-59 school year.

It was Governor George Wallace, Democrat of Alabama, who attempted to prevent four black students from enrolling in elementary schools in Huntsville, Alabama, until a federal court in Birmingham intervened. Bull Connor, the infamous southern sheriff who unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters, was a Democrat.

Progressives who cannot refute this history—facts are stubborn things—nevertheless create the fantasy of a Nixon “Southern strategy” that supposedly explains how Republicans cynically appealed to racism in order to convert southern Democrats into Republicans. In reality Nixon had no such strategy—as we have seen, it was Lyndon Johnson who had a southern strategy to keep blacks from defecting to the Repub­lican Party. Johnson, not Nixon, was the true racist, a fact that progres­sive historiography has gone to great lengths to disguise.

Nixon’s political strategy in the 1968 campaign is laid out in Kevin Phillips’s classic work The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips writes that the Nixon campaign knew it could never win the presidency through any kind of racist appeal. Such an appeal, even if it won some converts in some parts of the Lower South, would completely ruin Nixon’s pros­pects in the rest of the country. Nixon’s best bet was to appeal to the rising middle classes of the Upper South on the basis of prosperity and economic opportunity. This is exactly what Nixon did.

There are no statements by Nixon that even remotely suggest he appealed to racism in the 1968 or 1972 campaigns. Nixon never dis­played the hateful, condescending view of blacks that Johnson did. The racist vote in 1968 didn’t go to Nixon; it went to George Wallace. A longtime Democratic segregationist, Wallace campaigned that year on an independent ticket. Nixon won the election but Wallace carried the Deep South states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

Nixon supported expanded civil rights for blacks throughout his career while Johnson was—for the cynical reasons given above—a late convert to the cause. Nixon went far beyond Johnson in this area; in fact, Nixon implemented America’s first affirmative action program which involved the government forcing racist unions in Philadelphia to hire blacks.

To sum up, starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present, progressive Democrats developed a new solution to the problem of what they saw as useless people. In the antebellum era, useless people from the Democratic point of view were mainly employed as slaves. In the postbellum period, southern Democrats repressed, segregated, and subjugated useless people, seeking to prevent them from challenging white suprem­acy or voting Republican. Meanwhile, northern progressives like Mar­garet Sanger sought to prevent useless people from being born. Today’s progressives, building on the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and Johnson, have figured out what to do with useless people: turn them into Democratic voters.

For MANY MORE resources on this topic,

see my page titled, “U.S. RACIAL HISTORY“

Dispelling Benghazi Budget Mantras of the Left

Published by Papa Giorgio

Firstly, here is the video as well as the typical line thrown about on FaceBook: “Senator Chaffetz admitted we have to prioritize, and the Senate voted down funding for additional security in Benghazi. I really love it, especially coming from Chaffetz.”

Here is the rest of the story:

Robert Baldre, The State Department’s Chief Financial Officer For Diplomatic Security, Wrote That “I Do Not Feel That We Have Ever Been At A Point Where We Have Sacrificed Security Due To Lack Of Funding.” “Robert Baldre, your chief financial officer for diplomatic security, stated, and I quote, ‘I do not feel that we have ever been at a point where we have sacrificed security due to lack of funding,’ Rep. Steven Chabot, Ohio Republican, told Mrs. Clinton.” (Guy Taylor and Shaun Waterman, “Tears And Rage: Clinton Testily Defends Depiction Of Benghazi Events,” The Washington Times, 1/23/13)

Senate Homeland Security Report: Congress Has Been Responsive To Appropriating More Money To The State Department For Security-Driven Requests, But Neither The President Nor The State Department Requested Additional Funds For Libya. “At the same time, Congress has generally been responsive in providing supplemental and Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds to the Department of State – more than $1.7 billion since 2007 – in response to emergent, security-driven funding requests, although primarily for facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, there was no supplemental or OCO request made by the President for additional diplomatic security enhancements in FY2010 or FY2011. Neither the Department of State nor Congress made a point of providing additional funds in a supplemental request for Libya, or more specifically, Benghazi.” (“Flashing Red: A Special Report On The Terrorist Attack At Benghazi,” United States Senate Committee On Homeland Security And Government Affairs, 12/30/12, p. 17)

The Washington Post Fact Checker: “The Reality Is That Funding For Embassy Security Has Increased Significantly In Recent Years.” “Moreover, while Boxer claims that Republicans ‘cut’ the budget, she is only comparing it to what the Obama administration proposed. The reality is that funding for embassy security has increased significantly in recent years. The Department of State’s base requests for security funding have increased by 38 percent since Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, and base budget appropriations have increased by 27 percent in the same time period,’ said the bipartisan Senate Homeland Security report on the Benghazi attack.” (Glenn Kessler, “Barbara Boxer’s Claim That GOP Budgets Hampered Benghazi Security,” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, 5/16/13)

I am posting about this because there seems to be a misunderstanding of budgets and who is at fault and how much is given to the parties requesting it.

For instance, a charge always heard during Bush’s presidency was that he cut veterans benefits during his presidency. This was not the case, the Republicans passed continual increases while trimming the growth. In fact, benefits grew quicker under Bush than Clinton!

Similar, but not identically, as the U.S. was withdrawing from Iraq, the budget for the State Dept was trimmed. But before getting to the charts, let’s see what Hillary Clinton said in regards to the spending on Security:

During Previous Congressional Testimony, Clinton Stated That She Would “Be The First To Say” That The State Department’s Prioritization Of Funds Was “Imperfect.”SECRETARY CLINTON: “And I – I would go back to something the chairman said, because this was a point made in the ARB: Consistent shortfalls have required the department to prioritize available funding out of security accounts. And I will be the first to say that the prioritization process was at times imperfect, but as the ARB said, the funds provided were inadequate. So we need to work together to overcome that.” (Secretary Hillary Clinton, Committee On Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 1/23/13)

Clinton Indicated That The State Department’s Designation Of The Benghazi Facility As Temporary Contributed To The State Department Not Allocating Additional Resources To Benghazi. SECRETARY CLINTON: “That’s why we have a huge workforce of people who are given responsibility and expected to carry forward that responsibility and I think designating it as ‘temporary’ in the ARB’s findings did cause an extra level of uncertainty to some extent.

You know, as the chairman said at the very beginning quoting from the ARB, the has been an enculturation in the State Department, the husband (ph) resources to, you know, try to be as — as careful in spending money as possible and then I think adding to that the fact that it was quote, ‘temporary’ you know, probably did lead to some of the confusion that we later saw played out in the cables, but not the — the status of it for the Libyan government.” (Secretary Hillary Clinton, Committee On Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Testimony, 1/23/13)

The State Department Was “Hesitant To Allocate Money” On Security Upgrades On The Benghazi Facility, “A Post That May Be Closing In A Few Months.” “The RSO should be aware that the requests for expensive security upgrades may be difficult to obtain as headquarters is hesitant to allocate money to a post that may be closing in a few months.” (“Review Of The Terrorist Attacks On U.S. Facilities In Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012 Together With Additional Views,” Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, 1/15/14, p. 17)

  • Four Months Before The Benghazi Attack, The State Department Spent $108,000 For An Electric Vehicle Charging Station At The Vienna Embassy. “In May 7, the State Department authorized the U.S. embassy in Vienna to purchase a $108,000 electric vehicle charging station for the embassy motor pool’s new Chevrolet Volts. The purchase was a part of the State Department’s ‘Energy Efficiency Sweep of Europe’ initiative, which included hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on green program expenditures at various U.S. Embassies.” (Representative Mike Kelly, “Libya Security Cut While Vienna Embassy Gained Chevy Volts,” The Washington Times, 10/10/12)
  • In 2009, The State Department Spent Nearly $300,000 On Alcohol.  “Last year alone, the State Department sent taxpayers tabs totaling nearly $300,000 for alcoholic beverages — about twice as much compared to the previous year, according to an analysis of spending records by The Washington Times.” (Jim McElhatton, “Taxpayers Foot State Department’s Stiff Liquor Bill,” The Washington Times, 4/15/10)

Here are the raw numbers, and keep in mind that the draw down if funding was because of the draw down in Iraq:

Take note as well the information gleaned from the following graph:

There has been some back and forth between Republicans and Democrats over funding for security in Libya in the wake of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death. Republicans have questioned whether the State Department had adequate security to protect the ambassador, and Democrats have countered that Republicans tried to cut funding for embassy security. What does the budget record show?

According to the fiscal year (FY) 2013 Congressional Budget Justification Department of State Operations (p. 11), overall funding for those programs has increased sharply over the past decade. Indeed, Worldwide Security Protection is more than double what it was a decade ago. Despite reductions from budget peaks in FY 2009 and FY 2010, both budget lines are higher than in FY 2008. (continues below chart)

special-libya-security-coll

Comparing FY 2011 actual funding versus the FY 2012 estimate, there appears to be a reduction in Worldwide Security Protection and Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance. But that reduction does not account for additional funding in FY 2012 from Overseas Contingency Operations funds amounting to $236 million for Worldwide Security Protection (p. 63) and $33 million for Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance (p. 467). As a result, total funds for Worldwide Security Protection for FY 2012 are estimated to be $94 million higher than in FY 2011, while Embassy Security, Construction and Maintenance is estimated to be $61 million less than FY 2011. Together, there is a net increase.

[….]

It is tempting to look for a scapegoat for the tragic events in Libya. However, if one exists, the overall budget for embassy security is not it.

(DAILY SIGNAL)

PolitiFact mirrors the GOP POST on this that I have already quoted from

…State Department officials, meanwhile have said publicly that budgets were not a factor.

During a House hearing into the attack on Oct. 10, 2012, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher asked deputy assistant secretary of state Charlene Lamb: “Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”

“No, sir,” Lamb said.

Later, Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, asked, “So there’s not a budget problem. It’s not you all don’t have the money to do this?”

“Sir, it’s a volatile situation. We will move assets to cover that,” Lamb said.

More of the same on May 8, 2013. Responding to a Democratic member who pointed to embassy security spending in recent GOP House budgets, committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., prodded Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya, about Lamb’s previous testimony.

Issa said, “Mr. Nordstrom, you were on that panel. Do you remember what she (Lamb) said?”

“Yes, she said that resources was not an issue,” Nordstrom said. “And I think I would also point to the (Accountability Review Board) report, if I’m not mistaken, that they talked to our chief financial officer with (Diplomatic Security), who also said that resources were not an issue.”

[….]

It’s true that Congress did not fully fund embassy security requests from the Obama administration in recent years, which is what Farrow argues amounts to a “cut.” But funding for embassy security is up from 2008, and up dramatically since before 9/11.

How does this tie into the Benghazi attack? State Department officials and government experts lay more blame on decisions by upper management not to provide the temporary Benghazi facility with more officers and better protections than the availability of money.

Farrow made that very point in his segment, which makes it odd that he led his segment by tying the attack with insufficient congressional funding.

We rate his claim Mostly False.

Old, Rich, White (Obstructionist) Men

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Republicans are the Party of the rich, and run by old, rich white guys who like to say “no” all the time.

NO…

Here are a few stories on Harry Reid’s obstructionism:

It took a while, but the media seem to have finally noticed Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s unprecedented obstructionism.

The New York Times reported last week on Reid’s “brutish style” and “uncompromising control” over the amendments process in the Senate. Why are more people finally catching on to Reid’s flagrant disregard for Senate customs? In part because conservatives aren’t the only ones complaining.

[….]

Moderate Republicans who occasionally vote with Democrats and help broker bipartisan compromise are annoyed as well. Senator Lisa Murkowki of Alaska told the New York Times she was “kind of fed up” with Reid’s obstructionism. “He’s a leader. Why is he not leading this Senate? Why is he choosing to ignore the fact that he has a minority party that he needs to work with, that actually has some decent ideas? Why is he bringing down the institution of the Senate?”

[….]

Some of Reid’s defenders have justified his hostility toward amendments by arguing that he is simply trying to protect vulnerable Democrats from having to vote on politically challenging but ultimately meaningless ones, such as a GOP proposal to repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. In order to avoid these votes, they argue, Reid has been forced to block all amendments through a process known as “filling the tree.”

(NATIONAL REVIEW)

Again, the main point is that Harry Reid was trying to make the Democrat Senators up for revote to only have to deal with local issues in their state… and not for them to be “burdened” with defending bills passed in the Senate:

This is one big reason (the unpopular president is another) that Democrats are desperate to make the election about local issues. The more nationalized the election, the more voters will be inclined to sweep the do-nothing Democrats aside. But those local issues and the big major issues aren’t going to be solved so long as Reid thinks his job is to block and tackle for the White House. These very same Democratic senators who now plead for reelection voted him in and keep him there; they are therefore responsible for the current state of affairs. (Frankly, the one thing that might help Democrats would be for Reid to resign before November. We know that’s not going to happen.)…

(WASHINGTON POST)

Here is another example of Reid’s obstructionism:

Here is an update via AMAC:

Under the control of Senate Democrats, “The Senate went three months this spring without voting on a single legislative amendment, the nitty-gritty kind of work usually at the heart of congressional lawmaking,” The Washington Post reports. “So few bills have been approved this year, and so little else has gotten done, that many senators say they are spending most of their time on insignificant and unrewarding work.”

Check out the stats. Even Democrats have complained about the Senate’s obstruction, and one actually said he was “furious.” When President Obama tried to blame Republicans, his rhetoric didn’t match reality and fact-checkers called him out for it, noting the dozens of jobs bills listed on speaker.gov/jobs that Senate  Democrats are currently blocking.

Here are just 10 of them, ranked in order of bipartisan support:

  • The Hire More Heroes Act (H.R. 3474) passed the House on March 11, 2014, with support from 183 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act (H.R. 10) passed the House on May 9, 2014, with support from 158 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Innovation Act (H.R. 3309) passed the House on December 5, 2013, with support from 130 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 624) passed the House on April 18, 2013, with support from 92 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The American Research and Competitiveness Act (H.R. 4438) passed the House on May 9, 2014, with support from 62 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The America’s Small Business Tax Relief Act (H.R. 4457) passed the House on June 12, 2014, with support from 53 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act (H.R. 6) passed the House on June 25, 2014, with support from 46 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The S Corporation Permanent Tax Relief Act (H.R. 4453) passed the House on June 12, 2014, with support from 42 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act (H.R. 2218) passed the House on July 25, 2013, with support from 39 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.
  • The Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act (H.R. 1105) passed the House on December 4, 2013, with support from 36 Democrats. The Senate has done nothing.

OLD…

Thinking through leftist mantras:

The top three Democrats in leadership are 76 (Pelosi), 77 (Steny Hoyer) and 76 (Jim Clyburn). The average age of the Democratic party leadership is 76.

The top three Republican leaders, in contrast, are 46 (Paul Ryan), 51 (Kevin McCarthy) and 51 (Steve Scalise).

(Gateway Pundit)

“I could run 20 years from now and still be about the same age as the former Secretary of State (Hillary Clinton) is right now” ~ Rep. Governor Scott Brown

✪ Average age of Democrat’s in the House (average age): 74

✪ Average age of House Republicans? 53

(New York Times)

RICH…

Seven of the top ten richest people in Congress are Democrats. The top five donors to unrestricted super PACs reads like a billionaire boys club and are Democratic donors/supporters.

ERGO: the Democratic Party are run by old, rich, white,

obstructionist, men. Not the Republican Party.

CALLS…

Debunking the Top 5 Climate Change Myths (+CONSENSUS)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jump to CONSENSUS…

“The idea that ‘Climate science is settled’ runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.” ~ Steven E. Koonin, Undersecretary of Energy for Science under Obama.

My resource on throwing deniers in jail is the best online:

CROWDER’S REFERENCES…

MYTH: The world is getting hotter at a significant rate.
TRUTH: The world has gotten 1.7 degrees hotter since 1880.

MYTH: Rise in CO2 is dangerous and can directly be traced to man-made emissions.
TRUTH: CO2 isn’t a pollutant. Most of the rise in CO2 is coming from natural sources. 

MYTH: The Ice Sheets are MELTING AWAY!
TRUTH: Antarctic Ice Sheet is growing by billions of tons. Also FAIL: Scientist That Predicted Ice Caps Would Melt in 2013… Now Claims 2016?

MYTH: Climate change models are reliable.
TRUTH: NOAA has been caught skewing data.1

MYTH: Climate change is the consensus of scientists.
FACT: Not all scientists are in agreement over climate change. Also, manmade climate change is still a theory.

MYTH: Hybrid cars are better for the environment.
TRUTH: Not exactly. Production emissions are much higher, the minerals mined for the battered are typically done with little oversight on “non-green ways” and you’re still hurting the environment FAAAAR more by buying a new hybrid than buying used gas.

MYTH: The polar bears are dying off!
TRUTH: There are more polar bears than ever before. Do not ask a polar bear for a coke. It might kill you.

MOAR Sources

CONSENSUS

A great site bringing together the professional as well as the media’s critique of the 97% consensus can be found HERE: 97 Articles Refuting The “97% Consensus” This really the bottom line:

…The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findingswere published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming.” There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shavivand Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch—most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.

Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.

Finally, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing “anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing.”…

(WSJ)

Cook misquoted papers (the one’s he included… not the 8,000 he excluded) as representing consensus… the original post by Popular Technology is HERE, but FORBES did a good job on explaining the discrepancies as stated by the “consensus scientists/specialists.”

…When Popular Technology asked physicist Nicola Scafetta whether Cook and his colleagues accurately classified one of his peer-reviewed papers as supporting the ‘consensus’ position, Scafetta similarly criticized the Skeptical Science classification.

“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a straw man argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission,” Scafetta responded. “What my papers say is that the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.”

“What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. … They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face. … And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006,” Scafetta added.

Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv similarly objected to Cook and colleagues claiming he explicitly supported the ‘consensus’ position about human-induced global warming. Asked if Cook and colleagues accurately represented his paper, Shaviv responded, “Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitivity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century [warming] should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).”

“I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper,” Shaviv added.

To manufacture their misleading asserted consensus, Cook and his colleagues also misclassified various papers as taking “no position” on human-caused global warming. When Cook and his colleagues determined a paper took no position on the issue, they simply pretended, for the purpose of their 97-percent claim, that the paper did not exist.

Morner, a sea level scientist, told Popular Technology that Cook classifying one of his papers as “no position” was “Certainly not correct and certainly misleading. The paper is strongly against AGW [anthropogenic global warming], and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.”

Soon, an astrophysicist, similarly objected to Cook classifying his paper as “no position.”

“I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct,” said Soon.

“I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works,” Soon emphasized…

Here are some visuals… and note that if 75 climatologists are a consensus, or 0.5% is a consensus, then how bout this very short list of specialists rejecting the issue in some form… what kind of consensus is that?

I bet many make the point that these specialists do not count. Let me get this straight… they counted when used to promote consensus but do not now that they say their works were misquoted/misused? Forbes and the Wall Street Journal or leading climatologists/physicists (like top-notch persons in their field like Richard Lindzen or Freeman Dyson as examples — or these 1,000 scientists, or these 3,805 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment and 5,812 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solid, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth.)  aren’t enough… how bout this PEER REVIEWED PAPER delving into the consensus in an in-depth manner. Here is the abstract… followed by some visuals:

Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.

Continuing…

He mentioned most of the experts KNOW how CO2 affects climate. He says he does not and doesn’t think they do either. This has nothing to do with the supposed “consensus” of experts — 97% — who “say” it is driven by mankind. This is known as anthropogenic global warming, of AGW. The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.

Yes, you heard me correctly, seventy-five.

Another study has undergrads and non-specialists (bloggers) search through many articles in peer reviewed journals, and noting that a large majority supported the AGW position. The problem was that they were not specialized in the field of science… AND… they only read the abstracts, not the peer reviewed paper itself. Many of the scientists behind the papers “said” to support AGW rejected that idea. So the specialists THEMSELVES said their papers cannot be read to support the AGW position.

Another study (pictured in the graph above) tries to save an earlier one with tainted information based on abstracts — a very UNSCIENTIFIC way to get to consensus (that is, relying on abstracts). Not only was this study based on abstracts, again, non specialists categorized them. Yet another study was merely based on search parameters/results. Here is more info (mainly links) for the not-faint-of-heart.

In reality, nearly half of specialists in the fields related reject man causing climates change.

And a good portion of those that do reject the claim that it is detrimental to our planet.

Only 13% saw relatively little danger (ratings of 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale); the rest were about evenly split between the 44% who see moderate to high danger (ratings of 4 to 7) and 41% who see very high or grave danger (ratings of 8 to 10). (Forbes)

Here is a list of scientists with varying views on the cause of “Climate Change,” and here is a list of 31,000 who stand against man as the primary cause.

AGAIN, to be clear, and to quote the post by STEVEN CROWDER:

…Also, this is kind of inconvenient, but needs to be said. The “97% of Climate Scientists Agree” meme all the climate-change robots harp on and on about is actually a load of pure organic manure, better left to grow your weed than fuel your global warming climate change passions.

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

In other words:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” ~ Joseph Goebbels (Adolf Hitler’s Propagandist)

Put that in your hookah and smoke it. Remember that little tidbit when you insist unborn babies are not humans, especially when you refuse to look at any evidence. Tell me again about how much you respect science.

Also good to remember anytime somebody is pushing anything on you? Follow the money. ‘Cause guess what, kids? There’s a lot of money in saying the Earth is warming and it’s totes our fault…

From The National Review: In truth, the overwhelming majority of climate-research funding comes from the federal government and left-wing foundations. And while the energy industry funds both sides of the climate debate, the government/foundation monies go only toward research that advances the warming regulatory agenda. With a clear public-policy outcome in mind, the government/foundation gravy train is a much greater threat to scientific integrity.

And here are some more points from Obama’s man:

For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

  • The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.
  • Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

  • The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.
  • The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.
  • Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.
  • A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

BREITBART adds to the idea of the “Cooked” Cook paper with a real survey:

Nearly six in ten climate scientists don’t adhere to the so-called “consensus” on man-made climate change, a new study by the Dutch government has found. The results contradict the oft-cited claim that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming.

The study, by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, a government body, invited 6550 scientists working in climate related fields, including climate physics, climate impact, and mitigation, to take part in a survey on their views of climate science.

Of the 1868 who responded, just 43 percent agreed with the IPCC that “It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of [global warming] from 1951 to 2010 was caused by [human activity]”. Even with the “don’t knows” removed that figure increases only to 47 percent, still leaving a majority of climate scientists who do not subscribe to the IPCC’s statement.

The findings directly contradict the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists endorse the view that humans are responsible for global warming, as first made by Cook et al in a paper published in Environment Research Letters.

Cook’s paper has since been extremely widely debunked, yet so ingrained has the 97 percent consensus claim become that The Guardian has an entire section named after it, and President Obama has cited it on Twitter.

Commenting on the new study, Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova said: “Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “97%” certainty.”…

…read it all…

Some Resources

No matter what you think of the following long and short lists… the bottom line is this, WAY more than 75-Climatologists think that man is either not the main contributor to global warming at all, or that global warming is not a catastrophe waiting to happen:

Larry Elder Exemplifies Effective Political Conversations

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder recalls a very recent conversation he had with a person who has “drank” from the media cool-aid. While his conversation is highlighted here, it is good to put some stats and facts on 3×5 cards and memorize some of them. When you do this it will be easier to recall them in general, polite, conversation. Our goal is to change peoples minds. Larry does a good job in helping us do this.

Enjoy.

22-Military Suicides a Day? ~ No (Military Mantras)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This post is not to diminish a horrible and tragic act of suicide, it is just bringing some sober thoughts to the all too commonly used 22-vets a day commit suicide. If you want the skinny now without the long post to follow, here it is:

A more recent study, which surveyed 1.3 million veterans who were discharged between 2001 and 2007, found that “Between 2001 and 2009, there were 1650 deployed veterans and 7703 non-deployed veteran deaths. Of those, 351 were suicides among deployed veterans and 1517 were suicides among non-deployed veterans. That means over nine years, there was not quite one veteran suicide a day,” according to the Washington Post.

(Task and Purpose)

This stat is spread to merely to promote politicians at the expense of truth… would be my guess.

The things to pull from the above 2011 video are:

  1. Its not deployment (PTSD);
  2. Its not financial reasons;
  3. It is the same age group in the general population that commit suicide.

This post is a combination of a newer report from FOX News (above) and an older post from my old blog in May of 2009. First however, I will deal with the 22-vets commit suicide every day number: The L.A. Times notes the following:

That number comes from a study published in early 2013 by researchers at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. But the recent wars were not the study’s primary focus. In fact, they play a minor role in veteran suicides overall.

The VA researchers used death records from 21 states to come up with a 2010 national estimate for veterans of all ages. As a group, veterans are old. Military service being far rarer than it was in the days of the draft, more than 91% of the nation’s 22 million veterans are at least 35 years old, and the overwhelming majority did not serve in the post-9/11 era.

About 72% of veterans are at least 50. It is not surprising, then, that the VA found that people in this age group account for 69% of veteran suicides — or more than 15 of the 22 per day.

Many experts believe that the farther a veteran is from military service, the less likely it is that his or her suicide has anything to do with his or her time in uniform. In other words, many older veterans are killing themselves for the same reasons that other civilians in the same age group kill themselves: depression and other mental health problems coupled with difficult life circumstances.

The VA analysis does not attempt to determine rates of veteran suicide or how they compare with rates for people who never served.

[….]

One more step was required to make the comparisons relevant. California veterans under 35 are about 80% male, and nearly half are over 29. A straight comparison to the general population in that age group would be less than ideal, since suicide and accident rates vary significantly by gender and age.

The Times adjusted the non-veteran death rates so they reflected the age and gender mix of the veteran population.

As the story explained, suicide and accident rates were substantially higher for veterans. Over the six years examined by The Times, 329 California veterans under 35 took their own lives. That amounts to an average annual rate of 27 suicides per 100,000 veterans.

If that rate were to hold true across the country, about 530 young veterans are committing suicide each year — roughly 1.5 each day…

In a very recent conversation that has expanded my thinking a bit on this topic… is that… people hear 22-vets commit suicide and then rush to pass political bills that help with:

  • PTSD,
  • physical pain not managed by meds,
  • survivors guilt,
  • and difficult reintegration,
  • etc.

But ~ this mainly deals with the suicides of young vets returning from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [which AGAIN, are not 22-a-day!].

Since the bulk of the suicides are in the 50-year old range, those “fix-its” are missing most of the veterans that need something else.

What was just pointed out to me as well that fighting cancer or other serious illnesses increase the probability of suicide. For instance:

  • The researchers found that, in all countries combined, the number of suicides observed among the breast cancer patients was 37% higher than expected, on the basis of general population rates. That figure translates into four extra suicides per 100,000 person-years, according to the study’s lead author, Catherine Schairer, Ph.D., of NCI’s division of cancer epidemiology and genetics. In the United States, 245 breast cancer survivors committed suicide, making the risk 50% greater than would be normally expected, she said.

(Journal of the National Cancer Institute)

Just to be clear –veterans– who could be retired for decades, get cancer treatments [even if successful], and for whatever variable of reasons, commits suicide due to depression caused by this serious illness… this is wrapped up in the suicide statistics.

Here is WebMD:

…Although any illness can trigger depressed feelings, the risk of chronic illness and depression gets higher with the severity of the illness and the level of life disruption it causes. The risk of depression is generally 10-25% for women and 5-12% for men. However, people with a chronic illness face a much higher risk — between 25-33%. Risk is especially high in someone who has a history of depression.

Depression caused by chronic disease often makes the condition worse, especially if the illness causes pain and fatigue or it limits a person’s ability to interact with others. Depression can intensify pain, as well as fatigue and sluggishness. The combination of chronic illness and depression might lead you to isolate yourself, which is likely to make the depression even worse…

[….]

  • Heart attack: 40%-65% experience depression
  • Coronary artery disease (without heart attack): 18%-20% experience depression
  • Parkinson’s disease: 40% experience depression
  • Multiple sclerosis: 40% experience depression
  • Stroke: 10%-27% experience depression
  • Cancer: 25% experience depression
  • Diabetes: 25% experience depression
  • Chronic pain syndrome:  30%-54% experience depression

So the older members of the veteran community have these same maladies, and these statistics from serious illnesses SURELY play a roll VERSUS merely “being in the military.”

WHAT we can do or HOW we can help the vets is something I cannot answer.

But if all you have is the VA to help in your fight against cancer or heart disease, PTSD, or prompt medical responses to any number of things — getting a more private response versus “government care” is the answer that I think would help the most.

When all the factors of gender, race, age, etc. are plugged into the suicide rate in the military: if your son or daughter join the military their chances of commiting suicide lessen slightly. You combine this with other healthy activities such as marriage, regular church attendance, etc… and the rate drops even lower. There are many factors at play in this post, a person’s predisposition, religiousity, serious illness, etc. — it isn’t “cut’n’dry” in other words. ALL that being said, my main purpose of this post however is to deal with media myths and bad media headlines.

THE FOLLOWING COMES FROM MY OLD BLOG:

Spin Masters: Military * Stats + Bias = Liberal Agenda (MSNBC & NPR) [May 09, 2009]

I have recently come across this wonderful blogger/retired physician. Her name is Nancy Reyes, her catalogued articles can be found at the Blogger News Network, and her blog is not typically about political affairs at all: FinestKind Clinic and Fish Market. (She mainly writes on health issues or food.) How, you may ask did I come across this blogger/physician? Well, I overheard in a conversation someone mention the high suicide rates of our military are higher than the rest of the country. I remember hearing Michael Medved (if memory serves) going through the stats and correcting a caller on this subject. But very similar to other stats used by politicians in the past few elections (just as examples) these stats are easily shown to be misstated or misused. When I hear people make these claims – suicide rates of our military, unequal pay between genders, anthropogenic global warming, and the like — I often think how these people can make decisions and assumptions on statements made by media that has been proven to be biased time-and-time again.

There have been many studies done on where NPR for instance comes down on the side of the abortion controversy with how many stories and experts who give their input on the matter; the amount of “experts” brought in to support the Palestinian view of things versus how many people they bring in to support the Israeli view of the conflict; the amount of pro-2nd Amendment versus how many stories it lines up with “experts” who are for more gun regulation. The graph below is an example of NPR’s use of conservative versus liberal think tanks in the presentation of their stories (see graph below):

Heck, there are whole sites committed to following and exposing NPR’s biased reporting, one is NPR Sucks, for example. Another small article shows why this seems to be the case, a liberal slant to reporting that is, is one entitled, “Few Reporters Describe Themselves as Conservatives.” This isn’t a “big conspiracy,” rather, it is a culture born in the universities about 40 years ago. All this being said, I think the below articles are a must read. The reader should see my already mentioned link to ad to his or her understanding of how stats are misused. While keeping those examples in mind, the crux of the misuse of the below stats is this:

  • By comparing a population that is 90 percent men to the general population, you are comparing apples and oranges.

Suicide attempts are more common in the female population, but the men who try it succeed at a higher rate. Taking this higher rate in men (which the military is primarily composed of) and then comparing this to the population as a whole (men and women in other words) is skewing the results.

Army desertion rate up 80%? More lying with statistics

Last week, it was CBS jiggling the numbers to bash the war in Iraq by stating Veterans had a suicide rate of 18, much higher than the civilian population’s rate of 11 (ignoring that it was only slightly higher than the suicide rate for men, which was 17, and a heck of a lot lower than the rate for doctors, which is 30/100 000 per year).

This week the headline is “Army Desertion rate up 80%”.

The problem? the number “80%” implies a huge increase. But in statistics, if you start with a small number, it doesn’t take a large number to get a huge increase.

So the actual numbers are an increase from 0.7 % to 0.9%. For those of you who are numerically challenged, both those numbers are less than one percent:

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier.

Many of the desertions are soldiers who don’t want to go back to a war, but many are about soldiers with family problems. Many wives and families are severely stressed by their husband or wife going overseas, and sometimes soldiers just disappear because their families need them more than the Army. Often they report in later, and get an administrative discharge. The article implies the majority are war protesters and says that Canada no longer welcomes them, but the article does not give hard data on this.

Many just don’t like the Army, and it has nothing to do with the war. This NYTimes article notes that the number who actually deserted the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan was 109 (out of the 1 million military who served in these areas since 2003). The real worry is that some of the deserters are not anti war as much as suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome and cannot face staying in the military. Others have family problems, such as spouses theatening child custody or divorce. The military is sensitive to these problems, and tries to work out helping the soldier rather than punishing him or her.

As a comparison, the article admits that during Viet Nam, the desertion rate was 5%, and many were for being against that war.

Finally, if you go down to the end of the article, you find the desertion rates for the Navy, Marines, and Air Force are either stable or have gone down.

Nope, can’t publish good news, folks, let’s just move along…

Yup….just ignore the headline.

The war in Iraq is going well, so we have to find bad news to report…..

But just wait a week. Christmas is coming and the MSM will start their annual deluge of articles explaining why Christ was just a myth and Christians are delusional.

[….]

The Military and Suicides, Part One: Spinning statistics

The US Army is very worried about suicide and injuries in returning veterans. Stress in soldiers, and in returning veterans, is nothing new:

During World War II, PTSD was an even more serious problem. In the European Theater, 25 percent of all casualties were serious PTSD cases, compared to about 20 percent today. In the Pacific Theater, the rate varied widely, depending on the campaign. In some of the most intense fighting, like Okinawa in 1945, PTSD accounted for over a third of all wounded. In Iraq, less than ten percent of the wounded are PTSD, but the more troops serve in a combat zone, in combat jobs, the more likely they are to develop PTSD. This has been known for over a century.

One of the results of this is, alas, suicide.

The annual suicide statistics of the military/VA have been released.

The good news? The suicide rate remains low.

The bad news? The press is spinning the numbers to fit into the “Evil Iraq war is killing soldiers” and “the Military doesn’t care about the soldiers” meme (to fit the ultimate meme: Evil Bush’s war and evil Republicans don’t care).

Well, never mind the politics. I’m a doctor. Suicide is a major public health problem in the US (and in many countries). But there are a lot of myths out there.

So let’s look at myth number one:

CNN article: Headline: Army Suicide rates could top nation’s this year.

The story is not half bad, but you have to dig into the actual statistics to find the details.

As of August, 62 Army soldiers have committed suicide, and 31 cases of possible suicide remain under investigation, according to Army statistics. Last year, the Army recorded 115 suicides among its ranks, which was also higher than the previous year.

Well, one would expect a higher rate of returning veterans, who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress syndrome.

Problem: By not placing it into the context of total number of those who served in the Army, we cannot do a comparison.

But the third paragraph is the real problem:

Army officials said that if the trend continues this year, it will pass the nation’s suicide rate of 19.5 people per 100,000, a 2005 figure considered the most recent by the government.

That, my friends, is spin.

You see, suicide rates vary by age and by sex.

Although women have a higher rate of attempted suicide, men die of suicide at a much higher rate than the general population.

The rate of suicide of the general population is 19.5

The rate of suicide in men from the ages of 20 to 35 in 1980 was 24.

The rate of suicide in women from the ages of 20 to 35 was 5.

By comparing a population that is 90 percent men to the general population, you are comparing apples and oranges.

Certain groups: older men, alcoholics, minorities, and those with mental health problems, have a higher rate also.

So CNN assures us:

According to the VA, about 46 of 100,000 males between the ages of 18 and 29 utilizing VA services committed suicide in 2006, compared with about 27 the year before.

A very high rate. Except this is not the general population: this is the rate of those using the VA services, including those with mental health problems. By eliminating the healthy from the statistics, it makes the rate look higher than if the numbers included the entire population of military personnel.

The rest of the article goes on to say the VA is going to improve care for those with PTSS and depression.

So it’s not like nothing is being done: they are just trying to improve the care of the veterans.

For example, unmentioned in the article is that a pre 2001 program in the AirForce was credited with lowering it’s suicide rate from 16.4 yo 9.4 per 100 000 in two years.

Ironically, the article citing the Air Force is not about military suicides, but about suicides in physicians.

Eva Schernhammer and Graham Colditz examined the results of 25 studies of physician suicides and concluded that male doctors killed themselves at a rate 41 percent higher than that of other men and women. The more startling finding was that female doctors take their lives at a rate more than twice (2.27 times) that of the general public.

Leonardo DiCaprio ~ The 2015 “Boob” Award

Published by Papa Giorgio

“For such a model there is no need to ask the question ‘Is the model true?’. If ‘truth’ is to be the ‘whole truth’ the answer must be ‘No’. The only question of interest is ‘Is the model illuminating and useful?’”

  • Restated: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”

(WUWT)

  • JoNova wriley says, “He [DiCaprio] may feel the heat, but the satellites didn’t ‘feel’ a record, and nor would ice cores, stalagmites, corals, sediments, or any other part of the natural world that has existed for longer than 41 years. Meh.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is even considering quitting acting to battle global warming. What a boob. Keep in mind NASA came out early to say 2014 was the warmest on record… and they retracted that [sorta] by saying, “NASA climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right.” (As a relevant side note, now even Michael Mann admits the almost 19-year PAUSE is in fact real.)

Here, Reason Magazine notes the silliness just in satellite data (which started in 1979) in regards to DiCaprio’s statement above:

…satellite temperature data from climatologists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville suggest that 2015 was third warmest year since 1979 when satellite measurements began. The past year was particularly warm because of a large El Nino in the Pacific Ocean in which a massive amount of warm water sloshes toward South America from Asia. The phenomenon warms the atmosphere, but now appears to be fading which suggests that 2016 will be cooler than last year. 

Forbes notes,

Satellite temperature readings going back to 1979 show 1998 was by far the warmest year in the satellite era, followed by 2010. 2015 comes in third. And these results are only for the period since 1979.

2015 should have been warmer. This past year saw what is likely the most powerful El Nino during the satellite temperature record. With a record El Nino, we should have experienced record high temperatures. Yet we didn’t.

A record El Nino resulting in less-than-record temperatures is another sign that global warming is not all that activists crack it up to be. Indeed, if a record strong El Nino cannot bring global temperatures back to the warmth of 1998, what can – and when will that be? 18 years after 1998, global warming still has not created the runaway warming we were told to expect.

(Foden Toons of Facebook)

What else is DiCaprio wrong on? Reason continues with him,

DiCaprio expressed his concern for how climate change will deleteriously affect “indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people.” First, the good news is that the World Bank reports that absolute poverty (defined as living on less than $1.90 per day) has now fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population. The global rate of absolute poverty was 37 percent as recently as 1990. In large measure this amazing improvement in poverty rates stems from hundreds of millions of poor people gaining access to modern energy supplies. Total electric generating capacity has more than doubled since 1990 and most of that energy is produced by burning fossil fuels. DiCaprio would be better advised to direct his aid toward connecting the 1.2 billion underprivileged people who are still without electricity to modern power plants.

The Canadian Broadcasting Center noted that “The 41-year-old actor again highlighted his experience of a sudden change in temperature and loss of snow while filming The Revenant in southern Alberta as evidence of a warming globe.” One person at WUWT notes:

The key word here is “again”.

After the general hilarity that ensued his first blunder, Di Caprio’s handlers must have told him he made quite a basic mistake. So to see this 41 y old multi millionaire once again tell the world such a blatant idiotic line means that either he is an idiot or he is a dishonest advocate, for whom everything, or anything, is good to advance his proselytism, regardless of truth.

To end — again — with JoNova‘s comment, “He [DiCaprio] may feel the heat, but the satellites didn’t ‘feel’ a record, and nor would ice cores, stalagmites, corals, sediments, or any other part of the natural world that has existed for longer than 41 years. Meh.”

Truth doesn’t matter if you are rich, apparently, of a leftist. This has in the past led to great pains.

Was The Iraq War About Oil?

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • (CNNMoney.com) — Despite claims by some critics that the Bush administration invaded Iraq to take control of its oil, the first contracts with major oil firms from Iraq’s new government are likely to go not to U.S. companies, but rather to companies from China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. ~ via my old site in April of 2007.

SWEETNESS-N-LIGHT points out in their post on the subject that China will get about 80% of the oil from Iraq:

…The International Energy Agency expects China to become the main customer for Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, recently declared “a new trade axis is being formed between Baghdad and Beijing.” Birol said that about 80 percent of Iraq’s future oil exports were expected to go to Asia, mainly to China.

Iraq’s potential for oil production is huge. The International Energy Agency predicts that Iraqi production will more than double in the next eight years and that the country will be by far the largest contributor to growth in the global oil supply over the next two decades. By the 2030s, the agency expects Iraq to become the second largest global oil exporter, overtaking Russia…

Iraq hasn’t become the bonanza for big Western international oil companies that some might have expected when the U.S. invaded 10 years ago…

The below is an update from 2013, 10-years after the war… I am going to highlight something for the reader to emphasize the proclivity of the Professional Left in dumbing down complicated choices and simplifying history. It comes from FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE:

Now that the tenth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom has arrived, the American left has taken another opportunity to revive the trope that going to war in that nation “was all about oil.” The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald is one such revivalist. In a column on Monday he’s magnanimous enough to concede that saying the war in Iraq was fought strictly for oil is an “oversimplification.” Yet just as quickly, he can’t contain himself. “But the fact that oil is a major factor in every Western military action in the Middle East is so self-evident that it’s astonishing that it’s even considered debatable, let alone some fringe and edgy idea,” he contends. The war for oil mantra may be self-evident to Greenwald and his fellow travelers, but the facts say otherwise.

If oil were a major factor for prosecuting war in Iraq, it stands to reason the United States would be getting substantial amounts of it. It may come as a shock to Greenwald as well as a number of other Americans, but with regard to importing oil, the overwhelming percentage of our imported oil does not come from the Middle East. Canada and Latin America provide the United States with 34.7 percent of our imported oil. Africa provides another 10.3 percent. The entire Persian Gulf, led by Saudi Arabia at 8.1 percent, provides us with a total of 12.9 percent of our imported oil.

As recently as December 2012, Iraq provided the United States with approximately 14.3 million barrels of oil out of a total of about 298 million barrels imported, or 4.8 percent of our total imports. And as this chart indicates, we were importing the highest amount of oil from Iraq before we went to war to oust Saddam Hussein.

Furthermore, the United States fully supported the United Nations’ oil embargo against Iraq, imposed when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, despite the reality that we were far more dependent on imported oil then than we are now. We continued to support it even when it was revealed that the eventual softening of those sanctions, known as the oil for food program, revealed that Russia, France and a number of other nations were collaborating with Saddam Hussein to violate sanctions in return for billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains. Of the 52 countries named in a report compiled by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker detailing the scandal, only 28 even wanted the evidence, and the United States led the way in prosecuting those implicated.

In 2010, the UN Security Council lifted most of the remaining sanctions. The Security Council said it “recognizes that the situation now existing in Iraq is significantly different from that which existed at the time of the adoption of resolution 661” in 1990. In other words, they recognized that Butcher of Baghdad and his brutal dictatorship had been tossed on the ash heap of history, and a relatively stable government had taken its place. The Council also voted to return control of Iraq’s oil and natural gas revenue to the government by June 30 of that year. “Iraq is on the cusp of something remarkable–a stable, self-reliant nation,” said Vice President Joe Biden, who chaired the meeting.

It is precisely that self-reliant nation–not an oil-rich client state of America–that Iraq is becoming.

If America went to war in Iraq mostly for oil, it would stand to reason that we would maintain a stranglehold on both their supply and production. Ten years after the war began, China has emerged as one of the main beneficiaries of a relatively stable Iraqi government and a country that, after two decades, is poised to become the world’s third largest oil exporter. Trade between Iraq and China has doubled almost 34 times, soaring from $517 million in 2002, to $17.5 billion by the end of last year. If current trends continue, it will replace the U.S. as Iraq’s largest trading partner.

Furthermore, the first postwar oil license awarded by the Iraqi government in 2008 was to the state-run China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), in the form of a $3.5 billion development contract for Iraqi oil field Al-Ahdab. In December 2009, in the second round of bids to develop Iraq’s vast untapped oil reserves (following a June auction allowing foreign companies the chance to increase production at existing fields), China and Russia emerged with the lion’s share of the contracts. At the time, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani envisioned a bright future. “Our principal objective is to increase our oil production from 2.4 million barrels per day to more than four million in the next five years,” he said.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL notes more recently that these many myths presented to us by the Left are deserving of being retired:

…OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there wasGeorge W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired….

(read it all)

See more about the “behind the scenes” machinations that included Alan Greenspan at COLUMBIA JOURNALISM JOURNAL. REUTERS noted the clarification as well…

 

The “Evil” Rich Hide Their Money ~ Mantra

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • Was America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, a greedy robber baron, a generous philanthropist, or both? And did the oil tycoon exploit America’s poor or give them access to much-needed energy? Historian and Hillsdale College professor Burt Folsom, author of “The Myth of the Robber Barons,” reveals the truth about the Rockefeller empire.

A number to keep in your mind as you read is about how much you have to earn to be in the top 1% ~ and is why “being rich” is a fluid matter and why so many move in and out of this designation of “rich.” There is opportunity for all in this market-based system. And the rich-get-poorer while the poor-get-richer! One should note as well that this number changes by geography as well.

The richest percentile of Americans makes many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So how could a $135,000 salary make you a one-percenter? If you’re 31 or younger, that figure puts you ahead of 99 percent of your age group.

[….] 

This chart partially explains why the 1 percent is such a fluid club (about half of the top 1 percent flips over every year.) To stay in the top percentile, a 30-year-old earning $130,000 in 2010 would have to raise her salary by $80,000 by 35, and then another $70,000 before she turned 45.

In an article I enjoyed, “10 Myths in the Movie ‘Inequality for all‘.” I do think however that the article does not explain each point well enough. A good example of this is their point number two, that reads:

number 2

Just a quick addition to the above before getting to my example. When banks have large sums of money they invest that capital in loans, investment in the markets, and the like. This leads to funding many of the retirement packages the elderly retire on, creates job growth and opportunity for the poor, and all the other benefits that follow from it. So if all the rich did was stuff their money into banks ~ Great! However, as we will see from a oft tarred-and-feathered favorite whipping boys of the left, this just isn’t the case… in which case we go beyond saying “Great!” to “Hallelujah, I hope the rich-get-richer!”

I will use the EVIL Koch Brothers to make my point. The first point is that these uber rich persons give a lot of money to various “good works.” Here NewsMax zeroes in on the issue:

The Kochs’ critics are free to disagree with the Kansas industrialists and their libertarian ideas. However, most who despise the Kochs would be shocked by what these “greedy capitalists” do with their profits, beyond campaign donations.

For starters, the Kochs, support university programs and think tanks that try “to understand the nature of human freedom and how that freedom leads to prosperity,” as the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) explains.

The Kochs fund cures and treatments.CKF underwrites research and teaching at Brown, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Vassar, and some 245 other colleges. This includes a speaker series, reading group, and essay contest at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in Harry Reid’s home state. Koch Industries (which offers same-sex spousal benefits to its legally married employees) also donated $814,000 to the Kansas State University Office of Diversity to assist “historically under-represented students.”

David Koch survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people, including everyone else in first class. He soon was diagnosed with, and then endured, prostate cancer. These challenges reinforced his passion for medical philanthropy. Among $506 million in such gifts, his major grants include:

  1. $25 million to Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to eliminate genitourinary malignancies.
  2. $100 million for cancer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  3. $100 million for a new ambulatory care center at New York Presbyterian Hospital. This donation actually triggered an outbreak of mental illness among leftists who decried Koch’s nine-digit check.

“Quality care, not Koch care!” unionized nurses screamed outside Koch’s Park Avenue apartment. Never mind that his contributions create work for unionized nurses.

The Kochs back the arts.

Elizabeth B. Koch, Charles’ wife, launched the Koch Cultural Trust. It has furnished $1.8 million in grants to artists and musicians with ties to Kansas.

David Koch supports PBS’ documentary series “Nova.” He also is a paleo-philanthropist, having given $15 million to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for a Hall of Human Origins and another $35 million to update its fossil and dinosaur displays in Washington, D.C. New York’s American Museum of Natural History will enjoy a new Dinosaur Wing, thanks to David’s $20 million gift.

David also donated $100 million in 2008 to modernize the former New York State Theater at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, home to the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.

The Kochs also steward the environment.

“Koch Industries, Inc. takes a leadership role in the promotion of biodiversity, wildlife habitat enhancement, land restoration and conservation education,” according to Wildlife Habitat Council president Robert Johnson. “Koch and its subsidiaries maintain Council-certified programs at 10 facilities throughout the United States,” including Montana’s 300,000-acre Matador Cattle Company Beaverhead Ranch.

Flint Hills Resources (a Koch company) helps Ducks Unlimited maintain 36,000 acres of waterfowl habitat on 116 Minnesota lakes. Thus, Ducks Unlimited gave the company its Emerald Teal Award.

…ETC…

Another point worth making is one from my own life. I have never worked for a poor person. So let us apply this to our Koch example. Koch Industries “employs about 60,000 people in the United States and another 40,000 in 59 other countries.” These are people, real people, providing sustenance to their kids, spouse, community (in being able to donate to causes they support), and the like. In our own and in the other countries Koch Industries hires people… this job may be what is keeping said family from poverty.

NATIONAL REVIEW points out the following:

Politicians often divide Americans between “the rich” and “working people,” implying that the rich don’t work for their money. Complaining about the tax deal, Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) contemptuously referred to the rich as “trust-funders,” suggesting that most had done nothing to earn their wealth. But in reality, roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be rich. They didn’t inherit their wealth; they earned it.

In fact, several studies indicate that the rich work very hard for their wealth. For example, research by professors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst found that the working time for upper-income professionals has increased since 1965, while working time for low-skill, low-income workers has decreased. Similarly, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work more than 49 hours per week has dropped by half since 1980. But among the top fifth of earners, work weeks in excess of 49 hours have increased by 80 percent. Dalton Conley, chairman of NYU’s sociology department, concludes that “higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.”

Research by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed that those earning more than $100,000 per year spent on average less than 20 percent of their time on leisure activities, compared with more than a third of their time for people who earned less than $20,000 per year. Kahneman concluded that “being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things.”

The rich are not sitting by the pool, sipping their cocktails; they are sitting in their offices, working their behinds off….

People do not realize this, but about 80% of America’s Millionaires are first gen rich, started with nothing and became wealthy. The Left has this idea of people being rich by the luck of inheritance… which isn’t bad itself. If I was able to “make it,” I would want to leave my kids my money. But the reality is more like INVESTOPEDIA points out:

  1. Millionaires Don’t Pay Their Taxes
    Fact: It is estimated that millionaires, those in the top 1% of earners, pay about 40% of all taxes. Current tax regulation shifts may change these numbers to make this even larger than that – so think twice before accusing the millionaires in America of not paying taxes. (Do you know when you’re going to retire? It might not be as soon as you think. Read The New Retirement Age.)
  2. Millionaires Just Inherited Their Money
    According to Thomas J. Stanley’s book, “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy,” only 20% of millionaires inherited their riches. The other 80% are what you’d call nouveau riche: first generation millionaires who earned their cash on their own. Many millionaires simply worked, saved and lived within their means to generate their wealth – think accountants and managers: regular people going to work every day. Most millionaires didn’t get their riches overnight when a rich relative died – they worked for the money.
  3. Millionaires Feel Rich
    From the outside looking in, you would think that millionaires feel rich and secure, but that’s not so. Most millionaires worry about retirement, their kids’ college fund and the mortgage just like the rest of us. Those worries are greatest among new millionaires, the people who just recently acquired their wealth. (For more, see Don’t Forget The Kids: Save For Their Education And Retirement.)
  4. Millionaires Have High-Paying Jobs
    It certainly doesn’t hurt to be gainfully employed, but half of all millionaires are self-employed or own a business. It does help to have a college degree, as about 80% are college graduates, though only 18% have master’s degrees.
  5. Millionaires All Drive Fancy Cars
    You can get that idea of the rich guy in a fancy German car out of your head when you think of a millionaire: they actually drive a Ford, with the carmaker topping the millionaire preferred car list at 9.4%. Cadillacs run second on the millionaires’ favorite car list, and Lincolns third according to onmoneymaking.com.Car payments are an investment with little return, which is why someone looking to grow wealth avoids high-priced vehicles in favor of a more economical set of wheels. (For more, see 10 Steps To Retire A Millionaire.)
  6. Millionaires Hang Around the Golf Course All Day
    Those millionaires are all retired, with nothing else to do but hang around the golf course, right? Wrong: only 20% of millionaires are retirees, with a full 80% still going to work. It’s not as glamorous or fun, but millionaires go to work just like you do; it’s how the money gets in the bank.
  7. Millionaires Are Elitists
    We’ve already established that most millionaires earned their money not inherited it, still go to work, drive a Ford and worry about their kids’ college expenses. Sounds a lot like the rest of America, right? Millionaires come in all shapes and sizes – some may be elitists, but most are just regular Joes who successfully managed their money.

The Bottom Line
Maybe you see a pattern here: today’s millionaires are people who live within their means, budget and spend wisely, and focus on financial independence first. These are habits that take discipline, but ones we can all adopt to begin growing wealth….

Which brings us back to NATIONAL REVIEW’S article:

…The Left also makes two other contradictory claims about the rich and their wealth. On the one hand, we are told that the rich spend their money frivolously. Perhaps some do, but this ignores the fact that frivolous expenditures often provide jobs and income for the rest of us. Back in 1990, for example, Congress decided to impose a “luxury tax” on such frivolous items as high-priced automobiles, aircraft, jewelry, furs, and yachts. The tax “worked” in a sense. The rich bought fewer luxury goods — and thousands of Americans who worked in the jewelry, aircraft, and boating industries lost their jobs. According to a study done for the Joint Economic Committee, the tax destroyed 7,600 jobs in the yacht-building industry alone.

On the other hand, we are told that lower taxes on the wealthy won’t help the economy because the rich don’t spend enough of their money. That old-fashioned Keynesian economics — which assumes economic growth is driven by consumer demand — ignores the fact that money not spent by the rich is not simply stuffed under millionaires’ mattresses. The savings of the rich provides the investment capital that funds new ventures, creates new jobs, and spurs innovation. The money that the rich save and invest is the money that companies use to start or expand businesses, buy machinery and other physical capital, or hire workers.

No doubt there are dishonest or unscrupulous businessmen who have gotten rich by taking advantage of others. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Paris Hiltons of the world, flitting through life with a sense of entitlement that they haven’t earned. But most wealthy Americans have worked hard for what they have, pay more than their fair share of taxes, give generously to charity, and, most important, drive the economic growth that all of us non-rich people rely on.

That’s something to remember the next time that politicians start to beat the drums of class warfare.

What do these “class warfare” politicians do to create jobs and wealth? Not much. You can see more on this and other subjects via my ECON 101 Topics Page. In the following 11-minute audio, Radio talk show hos Michael Medved sheds some light on the Koch’s and takes a dissenting call on the matter:

Again, I will let other’s share my point about the rich with the Koch’s as my example:

  1. Koch Industries employs about 100,000 globally (60,000 in the US alone).
  2. Koch Companies support more than 200,000 US jobs and “about $11.8 billion in compensation and benefits.”
  3. Of Koch Companies’ 60,000 US employees, approximately one-third are unionized.
  4. Koch Industries and the Charles Koch Foundation’s partnership with the United Negro College Fund has resulted in a “$25 million grant that will provide nearly 3,000 merit-based awards to African American undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctorate students seeking scholarship assistance.”
  5. Globally, Koch companies “have earned 917 awards for safety, environmental excellence, community stewardship, innovation, and customer service.”
  6. Koch Industries has sponsored the Special Olympics in Wichita, Kansas for the past 33 years.
  7. “Through the Helping Heroes initiative, Koch companies have contributed nearly $230,000 to emergency response organizations in communities where they operate since 2011.” Koch’s Georgia- Pacific Bucket BrigadeTM program, “has contributed more than $1 million to fire units in communities where the company operates to meet critical needs, as well as provide educational materials to schools.”
  8. Through the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, Koch has contributed or pledged “more than $1.2 billion to cancer research, medical centers, educational institutions, arts and cultural institutions, and to assist public policy organizations.”
  9. David Koch’s charitable foundation also provided $100 million to New York Presbyterian Hospital to build a new ambulatory care center, as well as $28 million to research causes.
  10. Yet another major Koch grant contributed $100 million to research cancer at MIT.
  11. Flint Hill Industries (a Koch company) earned a Clean Air Award from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The question is “what happens when you do tax the rich”? Well, we know from past experience: