Tag Archives: Barack Hussein Obama

Feb 16 2020

Testing Waters – Drudge: Bloomberg Considering Hillary Clinton as VP on Ticket…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on February 15, 2020 by 

Ever since the DNC Club road-map showed Bloomberg as the likely nominee to move into the Democrat race & assemble all of the ‘Never Bernie’ coalitions under one establishment tent, there has been speculation of a possible alternate motive: to bring Hillary Clinton back into the 2020 race.

Today, Matt Drudge takes that speculation to new levels as he claims exclusive sources to highlight Michael Bloomberg is considering doing exactly what people speculated.

[LINK]

Such a strategy is rather Machiavellian; unfortunately, that type of scheme is exactly what Club leadership would do.  However, that said, this is more likely a test to see just how people would react publicly; and it is drawing apoplectic reaction from the AOC/Bernie wing of Democrat activists.

(Via Daily Mail) Mike Bloomberg is considering making Hillary Clinton his running mate, a source close to his campaign has told Drudge Report.

Polling found the Bloomberg-Clinton combination would be a formidable force to take on Trump in the race for the White House, the source said.

Former New York City Mayor and Democratic candidate Bloomberg is said to be considering even changing his official residence from New York to Colorado or Florida – where he also has homes – because the electoral college makes it difficult for US president and vice-president to reside in the same state.

Under the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, which provides the procedure for electing the president and vice-president, it states that the two people could not both inhabit the same state as the elector.

Bloomberg’s campaign would not confirm or deny the reports when DailyMail.com reached out for comments.(read more)

As we watch the Club -vs- Bernie Sanders dynamic play out I would not put too much emphasis on the Clinton dynamic (¹yet).  More likely for the Club’s intent this story starts to tell donors and “moderates” of a possibility.  The overarching premise is that Bloomberg is maneuvering to be the Club nominee.

Notice how the story, by itself, positions Bloomberg as the presumptive nominee.  Discussion of Bloomberg’s VP selection inherently implants a narrative that Bloomberg will be the nominee.  Thus this is more likely the real motive for the story, and not the details within the story itself.

That approach, establishing the baseline psyche, is typical Club strategy.  The more the Club (and their corporate media) can keep discussing Bloomberg as the nominee, the better it is for his nomination to succeed.

To be the nominee Bloomberg first has to get past Bernie Sanders.  The ‘Never Bernie’ coalition will fall in line to the Club plan, they will put up no resistance.  However, the real energy within the Democrat party is behind the AOC-Bernie caucus.

The strategically placed “rumor” per se’, appears to be more about positioning for Bloomberg, which is step one.  The VP comes much later and will predictably be the bridge between the Club and a massive group of disgruntled activists.

If the DNC can pull-off the Bloomberg nomination; and assuming Bernie would not be the VP choice; Bloomberg’s VP selection will most likely be a progressive woman; and that woman has to be so appealing to the AOC-Bernie group that her appearance will heal the massive fracture created by the Club’s scheme to circumvent Bernie.  It will not be Hillary Clinton because she does not fit that role; and it cannot be AOC.

¹A notable caveat is how the Club has indeed positioned some very serious Hillary Clinton political operatives around the table of the DNC rules committee (Barney Frank and John Podesta).   Those prior selections do lend a modicum of credibility to the ‘sources’ framing the Bloomberg/Clinton ticket theory.

Feb 15 2020

Widespread Poverty Stats Greatly Overstate the Number of Americans Who Are Destitute


By James D. Agresti, January 25, 2020

While pressing her agenda to expand means-tested welfare programs, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is claiming that the federal government’s poverty statistics vastly undercount the number of Americans who are “destitute.”

In reality, the exact opposite is true because those statistics omit a broad range of government benefits, charity, and unreported income. When these are counted, the poorest fifth of U.S. households consume five times more goods and services than the poverty stats reveal. These material resources amount to an average of more than $50,000 per household per year, making the poorest fifth of Americans richer than the averages for all people in most developed nations of the world.

AOC’s Claims

In a recent video, AOC alleges: “You would not know that our country is posting record profits because 40 million Americans are living in poverty right now, and if the poverty line was real—if it was around what some people think it should be—about $38,000 a year, we will be shocked at how much the richest society on the planet is allowing so much of its people to live in destitute [sic].”

Her number of 40 million is roughly equal to the Census Bureau’s figure of 38.1 million, or 11.8% of the U.S. population. This represents merely one of the widely different ways of measuring poverty, but it is the federal government’s official measure, and the media follows suit. As stated in a 2019 paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics: “The official poverty rate is also one of the most cited government statistics in the popular press.”

What’s Excluded

Without vital context—which AOC and most news reports fail to provide—the oft-cited Census poverty stats are highly misleading. For as the Census Bureau explains, they don’t “include the value of noncash benefits such as those provided by SNAP [Food Stamps], Medicare, Medicaid, public housing,” and a host of other goods and services that the poor receive from government and charities. More specifically:

  • Food Stamp beneficiaries received an average of $3,200 per household in Food Stamps during 2017.
  • Medicaid beneficiaries received an average of $7,794 per person in healthcare benefits during 2016.
  • Section 8 voucher beneficiaries received an average of $8,333 per household in rental assistance during 2016.
  • Head Start beneficiaries received an average of $9,871 per child in childcare and preschool benefits during 2017.
  • Other government programs provide noncash welfare benefits in the form of utility assistance, college grants, school lunch, school breakfast, community health centers, family planning services, prescription drugs, job training, legal services, cell phones, cell phone service, and internet service.
  • Federal law requires most hospitals with emergency departments to provide an “examination” and “stabilizing treatment” for anyone who comes to such a facility and requests care for an emergency medical condition or childbirth, regardless of their ability to pay and immigration status.
  • Private charities provide additional benefits to low-income people, such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.

Furthermore, Census income and poverty figures are obtained through household surveys, and low-income households don’t report much of their cash income in such surveys. Regarding this:

  • A study published by the American Economic Journal in 2019 found that 63% of all New York State households who received benefits from two major cash welfare programs did not report any of this money to the Census Bureau.
  • The same study found that people who did report receiving cash welfare from these two programs received an average of 65% more money from the programs than they reported to the Census Bureau.
  • In 2013, the chief actuary of the U.S. Social Security Administration estimated that 3.9 million illegal immigrants worked “in the underground economy” during 2010.
  • In 2016, the IRS reported that 63% of income not reported to the IRS by third parties (like employers) is never reported to the IRS by the people who receive the money.

The Big Picture

An official federal measure that accounts for all of people’s material resources is called “consumption.” Recorded by the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, it is a comprehensive measure of the goods and services consumed by households. It is also the World Bank’s “preferred welfare indicator, for practical reasons of reliability and because consumption is thought to better capture long-run welfare levels than current income.” Significantly, a 2003 paper in the Journal of Human Resources explains that “consumption standards were behind the original setting of the poverty line,” but government changed to the current method because of its “ease of reporting.”

The Bureau of Economic Analysis normally reports consumption for the entire nation and doesn’t break down the data to show how people at different levels fare. However, it published a report in 2012 that does that for 2010. Placed side-by-side with the Census Bureau income figures that underlie its poverty stats, the differences are striking—particularly for the poorest and richest U.S. households:

The federal data graphed above shows that the poorest 20% of U.S. households consumed an average of $57,049 of goods and services per household in 2010, while they reported an average of $11,034 in pre-tax money income to the Census Bureau. This means that widely reported federal poverty stats exclude about 80% of the material resources of low-income households. Put simply, the poorest fifth of U.S. households consume five times more goods and services than the poverty stats reveal.

AOC argues that the federal poverty line for “1 earner & a mother home full-time” should be $38,000/year, as compared to the current line of about $26,000 for a family of four. She attempts to justify this by saying that the current line “doesn’t include cost of childcare, geographic cost of living, or healthcare.” What she neglects to say is that low-income households typically receive such items and many others for free or greatly reduced prices.

In contrast, most U.S. households earn their healthcare, housing, food, childcare, phone service, and such for themselves, while also paying taxes that fund these items for others. As a result, U.S. middle-income households consume only 26% more goods and services than the poorest fifth.

The impacts of this wealth redistribution are even more drastic for the richest fifth of U.S. households, who forfeit a large portion of their income to taxes and receive few government benefits. They report 15 times more pre-tax money income than the poorest fifth of households, but they consume only twice as much goods and services as the poorest fifth.

Given that the available data treat the poorest 20% of households as a single group, while 11.8% of U.S. residents are officially in poverty, one might assume that poor households consume markedly less than the $57,049 average for the group. However, other government data suggests that is not the case. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data on a subset of consumption called “consumer expenditures.” These show a mere $2,179 difference between the lowest 10% of U.S. households and the second lowest 10%. Since consumer expenditures exclude many forms of non-cash welfare, and eligibility for welfaredeclines as income rises, the poorest 10% may consume more goods and services than the second-poorest 10%.

Conclusion

Contrary to AOC, the facts are clear that frequently reported federal poverty stats vastly overstate the number of Americans who are destitute. Moreover, Just Facts’ recent study of data from the World Bank and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that the poorest fifth of Americans consume more goods and services than the averages for all people in most developed nations of the world. In spite of these facts, AOC decries “economic injustice in America” and insists that the U.S. cannot “capitalism our way out of poverty.”

Feb 15 2020

The School Funding Inequity Farce


By James D. Agresti
November 25, 2019

Leading presidential candidates and major media outlets are claiming that school districts with high concentrations of minorities and poor children generally receive less funding per student than other districts. That hasn’t been true for at least half a century, but people are spreading this myth through deceptive studies that exclude federal funds.

In reality, a broad range of credible studies that include all funding sources show that such school districts are as well-financed as others.

The Claims

According to Democrat presidential hopeful and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, “our current approach to school funding at the federal, state, and local level underfunds our schools and results in many students from low-income backgrounds receiving less funding than other students on a per-student basis.”

Along the same lines:

  • Sarah Mervosh of the New York Times reported in early 2019 that “on average, nonwhite districts received about $2,200 less per student than districts that were predominantly white….”
  • Maria Danilova of the Associated Press (AP) reported in 2018 that “the highest-poverty” school districts “receive an average of $1,200 less per child than the least-poor districts, while districts serving the largest numbers of minority students get about $2,000 less than those serving the fewest students of color….”
  • Democrat presidential contender and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders claims that “less is invested in the education of children from low-income families compared with their more affluent peers” because “school districts are funded out of local property taxes.”
  • Clare Lombardo of National Public Radio (NPR) reported in 2019 that “high-poverty districts serving mostly students of color receive about $1,600 less per student than the national average.”

With the exception of Sanders—who provides no evidence to support his claim—all of the others misrepresent their sources by failing to reveal that they ignore federal funds. Moreover, their sources obscure this fact in the following ways:

  • Warren cites a study by the Education Law Center, which refers to federal funding on page 2 but then never accounts for any of it. Instead, the study mentions on page 5 that it uses “actual state and local revenues” for its analysis.
  • The New York Times and NPR cite a report from EdBuild, which doesn’t say a word about the exclusion of federal revenues. Instead, it tacitly slips this into a separate webpage of “research methods“ that references “revenues from state and local sources” while ignoring federal revenues except when subtracting out charter school funding.
  • The AP cites a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that repeatedly mentions federal funding, but when it presents the $1,200 and $2,000 underfunding figures quoted by the AP, it cites a study from the Education Trust that explicitly excludes “federal sources.” The Commission on Civil Rights doesn’t even allude to this fact—and to discover it, readers must go to the footnote and then locate the study from a citation with an unclickable link.

In short, these politicians and journalists never hint that their statistics exclude federal funds, and the sources they appeal to bury this crucial caveat. This ensures that only diligent readers with time to investigate will learn the truth.

Moreover, those who propagate this falsehood often call for more federal funds to fix this contrived disparity. But since they ignore federal funding, their proposals to increase it will not change the statistics they present.

Warren’s K–12 education plan, for instance, makes the false claim quoted above and then calls for “quadrupling Title I funding—an additional $450 billion over the next 10 years—to help ensure that all children get a high-quality public education.” Title I is the largest source of federal K–12 education funding, but because Warren doesn’t count this money in her statistics, her plan won’t affect her own measure of school funding.

The Reality

Wide-ranging studies that include all education funding—like those conducted by the U.S. Department of Education (1996), Ph.D. economist Derek Neal (2006), the left-leaning Urban Institute (2008), and the conservative Heritage Foundation (2011)—have all found that school districts with higher portions of minority students spend about the same amount per student as districts with smaller portions of minorities.

The Urban Institute study, which looks the furthest back in time, found that “differences in spending per pupil in districts serving nonwhite and white students are very small” since at least 1972.

Likewise, a study published by the journal Education Next in 2017 found that “per-student K–12 education funding from all sources (local, state, and federal) is similar, on average, at the districts attended by poor students ($12,961) and non-poor students ($12,640), a difference of 2.5 percent in favor of poor students.” The study also found that “this difference has not changed much since 1994–95,” the earliest data in the study.

Within school districts, research published by the Brookings Institution in 2017 found that “on average, poor and minority students receive between 1-2 percent more resources than non-poor or white students in their districts, equivalent to about $65 per pupil.”

The Property Tax Charade

Warren alleges that “school systems rely heavily on local property taxes, shortchanging students in low-income areas.” This was previously the case, but it hasn’t been so for decades. As explained by the Urban Institute:

In the past, because public schools were funded largely by local property taxes, property-rich and -poor school districts differed greatly in expenditures per pupil. Since the early 1970s, however, state legislatures have, on their own initiative or at the behest of state courts, implemented school finance equalization programs to reduce the disparity in within-state education spending.

Consequently, data from the U.S. Department of Education show that local revenues have declined from 83% of all school funding in 1920 to 45% in 2016:

Furthermore, the chart above only shows national averages. These don’t reveal the fact that school districts in low-income areas typically receive greater portions of their budgets from state and federal funds. For example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2011 that some school districts receive no federal Title I education funding, while others receive as much as 36% of their budget from it.

Along with increasing shares of school funding paid by state and federal taxpayers, the inflation-adjusted average spending per student grew by 22 times in the same era:

False Justifications

Some people openly argue that federal funding should be ignored when comparing schools, because this money is meant to help disadvantaged students. However, federal law is at odds with such logic.

The Education Trust, for example, writes that it excludes such funds from its analysis because “federal dollars are intended—and targeted—to provide supplemental services to such specific groups of students as those in poverty, English learners, and students with disabilities.”

In accord with that view, the Obama administration published an issue paper stating that federal education funding “is intended to provide the extra help low-income students need to succeed, but it cannot do that if state and local funds are not evenly distributed to start with.” The administration also drafted regulations to impose this requirement on school districts.

In contrast, the applicable federal law explicitly states that “nothing in this subchapter shall be construed to mandate equalized spending per pupil for a state, local educational agency, or school.” Thus, the Congressional Research Service determined that the Obama administration’s proposed regulations “appear to directly conflict” with the law.

Federal law does require that states and localities not reduce their funding to schools when they receive federal funds. This provision says that states and localities can only use federal funds “to supplement the funds that would, in the absence of such federal funds, be made available from state and local sources,” “not to supplant such funds.” This does not require that funding be equal before or even after federal funding. It simply requires that states and localities don’t cut other funding just because they receive federal funds.

The law also requires that local school districts provide services that “are at least comparable” to all schools within their district before they receive federal funds. New York City, for example, cannot provide unequal services to schools and then use federal funds to equalize them. To meet this requirement, districts must provide similar staff-to-student ratios, “curriculum materials,” and “instructional supplies” to schools in their district in order to receive federal funds.

Nevertheless, politicians and unions sometimes create funding disparities within local school districts by agreeing to contracts that give senior teachers more pay and discretion to choose the schools where they work. These higher-paid teachers tend to avoid inner-city schools with high rates of crime and student discipline problems, resulting in lower spending-per student in poor neighborhoods. Federal law permits this practice by excluding “staff salary differentials for years of employment” from its compliance provisions.

Conclusion

Regardless of any rationale for excluding federal funds from school funding comparisons, it is deceitful to omit such money without even a hint. Yet, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Associated Press are doing just that.

Such disinformation is enabled by advocacy groups like EdBuild and the Education Law Center, which publish reports that exclude federal funds while burying this vital fact.

Warren takes the deception even further by leading people to believe that she actually accounts for federal funds. She does this by claiming that “the current investment in Title I—$15.8 billion—is not nearly enough to make up for state-level funding inequities,” but her supposed evidence for this is a study that excludes all of this money. This provides false grounds to continually demand more from taxpayers and to portray the U.S. education system as systemically racist.

Feb 15 2020

Nevada Poll: Breadline Bernie Holds Commanding Lead – Picks Up Coveted de Blasio Endorsement…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on February 14, 2020 by 

It looks like Bernie Sanders is going to win his third straight Democrat primary given the current polling from Nevada.   The Las Vegas Review Journal conducted a poll of likely caucus attendees (Tuesday through Thursday) shows Bernie Sanders with 25% of the vote.

(Source)

With the ‘Never Bernie’ vote split five ways, and with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg not on the Nevada ballot, it looks like Bernie is going to win another primary contest.

The Club has been using establishment allies to take shots at Bernie, but the Antifa mob behind his socialist race are swarming and blasting anyone who targets their lightbringer of free stuff.   The Bernie-AOC wing have formed an impenetrable protective membrane around their candidate and most mainstream Democrats do not want to become their targets.  It’s a remarkable dynamic.

Accepting the foregone conclusion, today New York Mayor Bill de Blasio attempts to increase his progressive credentials by proclaiming his support for Bernie.

Daniel Marans

✔@danielmarans

In a statement, he makes the case for Bernie’s electability vis-a-vis Trump.

“Bernie is the candidate to take him on and take him down.”

View image on Twitter

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However, there are a few hitches…. Bernie’s socialized government takeover of healthcare is not sitting well with the Nevada unions.  This might foretell a problem in the future.  The union members do not want to lose their top-tier healthcare plans, and as a consequence they are withholding their endorsement:

NEVADA – Nevada’s culinary union, an influential force in the state’s upcoming caucuses, just fired a shot across the bow of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. In flyers, emails, and text messages, the union warned its members that Sanders’s “Medicare for all” plan would “end Culinary Healthcare.”

The culinary union has good reason to oppose Sanders’s plan. It provides top-tier benefits to 130,000 workers and their families. “Medicare for all” would destroy these benefits and saddle union members with far worse coverage.

Unions across the country have negotiated hard to provide generous health coverage to their members. In 2018, three-quarters of union members had access to dental benefits, compared with just half of nonunion workers. Some unions have even negotiated premium-free health benefits.

Sanders’s “Medicare for all” proposal would invalidate union health plans and force all their members into the same government-run plan as every other person.

In Nevada, that would mean the end of the Culinary Health Fund, which provides some of the best coverage in the state. Benefits include access to a members-only clinic that provides 24/7 urgent care, along with dental, vision, and pediatric care. Union clinics like this tend to offer high-quality care and have helped members save hundreds of dollars a month. (read more)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

✔@AOC

 · 

If this reporting is correct, then there needs to be accountability at the @DNC.

Even if the DNC’s access to the tool was “solely for security testing” as they claim, ProPublica found major hackable vulnerabilities almost immediately – which means they didn’t do their job. https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1228088667752714240 …

Yashar Ali 🐘

✔@yashar

New: Documents reveal DNC was ‘intimately involved’ with Iowa caucus app @hunterw reports https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html …

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

✔@AOC

Candidate preferences aside, the integrity of our primaries are incredibly serious. We cannot afford to be pointing fingers- we need to pinpoint solutions.

If the DNC was responsible for security and there were security failures, we need to address that.https://www.propublica.org/article/the-iowa-caucuses-app-had-another-problem-it-could-have-been-hacked …

The Iowa Caucuses App Had Another Problem: It Could Have Been Hacked — ProPublica

While there is no evidence hackers intercepted or tampered with the results, a security firm consulted by ProPublica found that the app lacks key safeguards.

propublica.org

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Feb 14 2020

Biden Loses His Marbles!


Well. Joe’s marbles are not in New Hampshire…

Joe Biden is done. Stick a fork in him. Kaput!

It’s just a matter of time before sleepy, creepy Joe falls back asleep and dreams of running barefoot through Ukraine cash with Hunter by his side.

The piss-poor performance at the New Hampshire primary confirmed what everyone was thinking, but were afraid to say out loud, Joe Biden will NEVER be the nominee and NEVER be President.

We almost, and we mean ALMOST, feel sorry for Biden. Every time Joe ran for the nomination he lost. The Fake News wanted us to believe that he could beat Trump. After all, Biden was Barack Hussein Obama’s Vice President! It would be the third perfect term of Obama and the end of the anomaly called Trump.

They were wrong.

Again.

Biden came in 5th place in New Hampshire. In fact, he didn’t even show up on primary night, scurrying off to South Carolina before the results were final.

When reporters asked about the bloodbath in NH, all Biden could say was,

“I’m not giving up on New Hampshire! And don’t poke that in my face, okay buddy?”

It’s over Joe.

Who will drop out first? Biden or Warren?

 

StayTooned!

Tina

Feb 14 2020

The 2020 Elections & the Coming Violence


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics

Re-Posted Feb 14, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

Democracy is dying and it just looks like we have to go into the crash and burn. President Trump won more votes than any incumbent ever in history in New Hampshire. His rallies attract more people than any other and in most cases, all others combined. The Democrats have adopted such a left-wing agenda that it is truly scaring the “silent majority” who most often are never represented in the polls. In the Democratic camp, Bernie supporters realize that the game is rigged.

There are fears emerging among Bernie supporters that his nomination will be stolen like the last time. They fear that party-bosses claim that they have rewritten the nomination rules after the nasty 2016 primary race to quell a backlash from Sanders’ supporters, that will not matter here in 2020 – watch! Last time, the influence of the “superdelegates” backed Hillary which was not represented by any democratic vote. That is how the party can ignore the primaries when they do not like the result. They are absolutely correct – they will never allow Bernie to represent the party in November.

Even Bloomberg is acting very left-wing and many see him with resentment. The common complaint is that he made all his money and now wants to oppress the small business owners with his insane environmental regulations. He thinks he can just buy the presidency and vows to outspend Trump. Hillary outspent Trump by 10:1 so 2016 showed that money was not the deciding factor. Bloomberg is a very dangerous guy for his decision on the stop-and-frisk illustrates that his claim that crime was just too high and he had to do something demonstrates he has no respect for constitutional rights. This is not a dictatorship and many see his Napoleon Complex a very dangerous. Bloomberg News will, of course, pitch him to the world just like CNN will oppose Trump regardless of who the Democratic candidate will be. My bet is on Hillary still – (OPINION).

The real problem to emerge is interesting. When Obama was elected, we did not hear Republicans claiming “he’s not my president!” Something has seriously changed. Historically, everyone who voted for the losing candidate simply moved on and that was the end of the contest. This time, the left is hell-bent on oppressing the right and this is not what civilization is supposed to be about. No matter who wins in 2020, either side will just not accept a loss. This will lead to violence this time far more than people realize.

This is just not going to end well and it is part of the collapse in confidence in the bond market and governments. CNN and the rest of the biased media are fueling this divide. They just do not care what they are doing to the nation. We are no longer a democracy or a viable civilization that benefitsLIBERTY. It is all about suppressing the opponent.

This is why the backlash is becoming evidence from both sides. If the winner is not respected as the president, then what is the purpose of even having a unified country? The United States becomes the Free-For-All of States. We have New York declaring it is a “sanctuary” state issuing IDs to illegal aliens who then do not pay taxes or are ineligible to vote legally? So they defend people who cannot even vote or pay taxes? Very strange thinking indeed

Feb 13 2020

Pete-Amy Mash-Up Candidate Would Have Killed Bernie in His Own Backyard


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Get on over to The Patriot Post: America’s News Digest, if you love Bill Whittle http://bit.ly/30Z89tM —– While the media anoints Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner coming out of New Hampshire, the numbers show that moderates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar combined clobbered the avowed socialist. In other words, a Pete-Amy mash-up candidate would have killed Bernie in his own backyard. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren seem headed for the exits. Will Black voters rescue Joe from his destiny as the most electable presidential candidate never to win a primary? Join our Members and help produce this show https://BillWhittle.com/register/ Come with Bill Whittle on a Caribbean cruise. Deadline fast approaches: http://bit.ly/StratoCruise2020

Feb 13 2020

The Plight of the Democrats – Hillary to the Rescue?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics

Posted Feb 13, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

 

COMMENT: I was raised a Democrat. Your forecast that the Democrats would split by 2020 which you made more than 10 years ago I did not believe at the time. Flash forward, Joe Biden, who the Democrats wanted to impeach Trump for influencing the election against him, has been proven to be a joke. Biden came in fourth in Iowa behind a professed communist, an open Gay guy, and a fake Indian. In New Hampshire, he even came in fifth behind Amy Klobuchar who is a lawyer. I now concede that the Democratic party has no choice but to split. I never thought I would say this, but Trump looks normal against this crowd.

OP

REPLY: With each passing day, the Democrats appear to be collapsing into the abyss. My father was also a Democrat. That was the thing coming out of the Great Depression. But those days are gone. The Democrats, behind the curtain, realize now that they are incapable of defeating President Trump as he emerges from his impeachment proceedings stronger than he was before. His polls have risen to a 49% approval rating — the highest to date since taking office.

Democratic Party leaders are frustrated that there are still too many running for the post of president and their traditional hopeful is off the top list — Joe Biden. Even Bernie Sanders can beat Joe Biden. Activists remain uncertain about how to beat Trump and have become deeply concerned about a nominating race that remains crowded and is growing more acrimonious. Therein lies the conspiracy to draft Hillary at the convention.

The Democrats see Trump as a corrosive figure who beat Hillary, despite the fact that she outspent him during the election 10-1. Yet, while vilifying Trump for his tweets, they too all have their own Twitter platforms. This time, they see that Trump is well-funded for his campaign and he is tailoring a reelection bid around the strong economy and visceral appeals to his ardent supporters. His supporters see the Democrats as insane Socialists and environmentalists who are out to destroy their way of life by taxing them to death under the excuse of saving the planet.

Michael Bloomberg thinks he can simply buy the election and vows to outspend Trump. Many see Bloomberg as having a Napoleon Complex, but he claims that he understands the science behind climate change and will shut down coal plants. He shows commuters driving their cars to work in his campaign without mentioning that he would do to America what Greenpeace has done to Europe. Bloomberg also was very against the black community. Tapes have surfaced about his comments with respect to blacks.

Bloomberg ordered the police to stop and search anyone at any time, disregarding their constitutional rights. That was taken to Federal Court. In Floyd v. City of New York on August 12, 2013, US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that stop-and-frisks had been used in an unconstitutional manner and directed the police to adopt a written policy to specify where such stops were authorized. And Bloomberg thinks he is qualified to be president?

I think anyone should realize that police cannot stop and search people on the street without reason. It took a federal judge to tell him you can’t do that? He had to admit publicly he was wrong. My problem with that attitude is his decision making. Anyone would know that was illegal, but he did it anyway. That is just one of the incidents that many use to cite him as having a Napoleon complex. To me, that shows he is NOT qualified to be president. An apology is not sufficient. You might as well say throwing people in prison without trials is also legal until a judge has to rule stop!

Impeaching Trump for asking Ukraine to investigate Biden’s involvement in ordering the shut down of any investigation into the corruption of the company that hired his son was too in your face and hypocritical for the average person. Biden himself interfered in Ukraine in the same precise manner they accused Trump of doing. Trump’s strong political standing has vindicated him because of the Democrat’s stupid approach to use impeachment in an attempt to manipulate the 2020 election.

Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, which is a city with a population of only 102,000, is just not seen as someone capable of handling the office on a grand international scale. The Democrats themselves do not want him, for they see he has never held an elected federal office. So, like Trump, they do not see him as one of them. They fear that he remains unknown to the majority of Americans, and despite his magical rise to the top of the slate, what they fail to grasp is that in a field of Socialists and corrupt politicians like Biden, he may be the only normal person standing up these days. They are also concerned that his fundraising is coming from corporates who fear Warren and Sanders.

All of this is adding up to Hillary for President. She is waiting patiently in the wings far from the arrows of fellow Democrats. She wants to rise to the stage as a heroine who the nation turns to for survival. The one thing we can say about Hillary, she has always been for sale to the highest bidder. You can rest assured that the bankers will be on top. She stole the nomination from Bernie the last time. She will do the same this time

Feb 13 2020

South Carolina Primary: Warren Cuts Advertising Spend – Biden’s Last Stand?…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on February 12, 2020 by 

Joe Biden is staking out Nevada and South Carolina for his re-launch strategy; in a sad attempt to give the impression of viability where none exists.

Meanwhile having suffered a terrible defeat, coming in fourth place in her backyard state of New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren is recognizing the voters are just not buying her pandering wokeness any more.

As many expected the inauthentic nature of Warren is a big part of the problem; the other issue is her constant fibbing and creepy phoniness.  It also didn’t help when Senator Warren announced a nine-year-old transgender kid would be picking her cabinet.

The collapse of the two weakest remaining candidates, aptly named “Injun-Joe’, is a slow-motion train wreck with a foregone conclusion.  Absent of an influx of cash, after the South Carolina primary on Feb 29th both Warren and Biden will likely suspend their campaigns.

Bernie Sanders remains the favorite to collect most delegates before the convention.  Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are second and third.  Most pundits estimate when Biden drops-out his support will likely split between Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Similarly when Warren drops out half of her support will follow Buttigieg and Klobuchar and the other half will break-off and go with Sanders.

As long as Buttigieg and Klobuchar remain in the race – Bernie is in position to win the nomination with around 30 to 40 percent of the total vote. However, Mike Bloomberg is the wild card.  The DNC supports mini-mike as an emergency in case no-one can stop Bernie Sanders.

That’s the way it looks heading into Nevada, and there will likely be new polling dropping on Thursday and Friday.

Feb 12 2020

Antifascism, a worthy cause


by Tabitha Korol and Kevin O’Neil

We can all fight for a cause, but “The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil. – Marcus Tullius Cicero

They began as idealists, working to save the French-Jewish army Captain Alfred Dreyfus who’d been falsely accused of conspiring with the Prussian army.  The Dreyfus Affair of the mid-1890s and early 1900s was the impulsion for people to unite in support of the rights of the individual before a military authority that was rightly seen to be draconian and dismissive.  A worthy cause, yet the case divided France into the anti-Dreyfusards, fascist, Jew-hating ultranationalists, and the “Dreyfusards,” the anti-fascists who formed associations and humanitarian consensus to gain his exoneration.                

Today’s anti-fascists, “Antifa,” miss the point if they see themselves as successors to the Dreyfusards.  The latter were inspired by love of the individual, a positive inspiration, whereas Antifa is motivated by negative hatred for the establishment and the abuse of the individual who happens to disagree with them

Defining the term fascism has proven notoriously difficult.  There were German antifascists in the early 1900s who joined the Jewish working class to fight for dignity and better wages, and Italian antifascists who fought against Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party and Hitler’s growing influence.  There were also Spanish antifascists both before and during Spain’s civil war, with writers Orwell and Hemingway among their ranks.

But there are sufficient differences between the various fascist regimes that make it virtually impossible to identify a commonality.  However, most leading scholars agree that all fascists support the violent revolutionary overthrow of the state’s entire government to be replaced with a totalitarian system that diminishes the value of the individual to a mere component of the whole.  Any difference of opinion is seen as fair game to be silenced.

Antifa are a burgeoning collection of discontented militant-leftist groups who, convinced that white supremacism was responsible for chattel slavery and the Holocaust, are allied in their attempt to overthrow “white” western government by any means available, including violence.

British political theorist Roger Griffin, author of “The Nature of Fascism,” wrote, “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is … palingenetic,”  which means that a “rebirth” would follow the demolition of the existing political order.  By this scholarly definition, Antifa’s own methods and goals fulfill the criteria – not of anti-fascism – but of Fascism!

After interviewing 61 current members in 17 countries, Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” asserts that militant antifascism is a “reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted” after World War II and into recent years. They argue that every fascist or white-supremacist group has the potential of being the start of Mussolini’s original hundred or Hitler’s first fifty-four members of the German Workers’ Party.  Hence, they believe they have a righteous obligation to stop what they regard as fascist “violence, incivility, discrimination, and speeches that stimulate further white supremacy, oppression and genocide.”

      And fascism, real fascism, must be opposed.  Edmund Burke’s statement was never more apposite, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

In “The View from My Window:  The Ethics of Using Violence to Fight Fascism,” Elie Wiesel recalled familiar riots while he was watching one play out below his fifth-floor window in Berkeley.  It brought to mind the millions of people who fought fascism throughout Europe and he suitably wondered at what point resistance to fascism may be justifiable.

A very sobering question!  And whatever the “point” is at which action is justified, one thing is certain: we must be able to define fascism and be convinced that the group we oppose is truly fascistic.

Not only had Wiesel witnessed real fascism at work, but had suffered from it, and lost both parents and a sister to the Nazis.  He recalled the brave month-long resistance of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto when the Nazis came to liquidate it, April 19, 1943.   Move than fifty-six thousand Jews were killed, very few escaping.  This is the face of real fascism.

America is not Warsaw; neither is it remotely similar.  We are not ruled by an authoritarian power, and our laws are not for the subjugation of the individual but for his/her protection.  Antifa must ask themselves if they are even capable of actually recognizing true Fascism.

Columnist Mark Thiessen wrote in The Washington Times (6.30.17) that Antifa was the “moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.”  The statement may or may not be prescient, but it will not be the first time in history that a movement that began as an ideological liberator abandoned reason and descended into violence and incoherent rage.  In the famous words of Goya, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

If Antifa truly aspire to being worthy successors to the antifascist groups of history, they must urgently learn the meaning and methods of fascism and be prepared to come to some very disturbing conclusions.

abitha Korol

https://tinyurl.com/y7e6z63d