Monthly Archives: January 2013

UPDATED: Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution

Democrats, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Republicans, Welfare

“Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution” is the current column, now on RT. Here’s and excerpt:

“On the heels of Barack Obama’s Las Vegas run-on ramble on the necessity of immigration ‘reform,’ this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he too had “evolved” overnight on the issue. ‘I’m … open-minded enough to say that it is an issue that we do need to evolve on,’ the senator vaporized.

Paul is a Johnny-come-lately to his party’s devolution on immigration. The country was still surveying the debris left by the “D-Bomb” (where “D” stands for demographics), dropped on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012—when, one-by-one, key Republicans began to defect, pledging their commitment to an ‘overhaul of the immigration system’; to ‘reform’; to ‘a comprehensive solution’; to ‘fixing a broken system,’ all well-recognized euphemisms for amnesty.

A tipping point in the demographic shift in the US population had returned Barack Obama to power for a second term. A moratorium on mass immigration, buttressed by strong secessionist and states’ rights movements, might just help delay another such bomb from detonating . But the Republicans were having none of it.

House Speaker John Boehner was soon leading the party of turncoats to the promised (la-la) land, pledging that ‘a comprehensive approach’ was ‘long overdue.’ ‘I’m confident,’ Boehner promised, ‘that the president, myself [and] others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.’

In short succession, our wily pitch men were joined by Republican media mouths who had also ‘evolved’ overnight. Thus, in a career-clinching bid—presumably, to continue playing a part in national politics—Sean Hannity, an influential Fox-News personality, declared that he too had found religion on immigration and now supported a ‘pathway to citizenship.’

Another mantra mouthed by brother-believer Charles Krauthammer and echoed by Sen. Paul was that, ‘The GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanic voters.’ Yes, ‘Inside each Latin American immigrant there’s a Republican waiting to get out,’ mocked Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Mockery for this pie-in-the-sky is warranted. However dispiriting, the reason 71 percent of Hispanic voters broke for Obama is not because Republicans are mean to them—John McCain and George Bush demonstrated that they would wrestle a crocodile for any Hispanic convert, legal, illegal and criminal. This identity group’s political preference is because 60 percent of them live in or near poverty and ‘fully 57 percent use at least one welfare program.’

In his irrational ramble, the president waxed about legalizing the ’11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,’ while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great ‘businesses like Google and Yahoo.’

Fantasies about the future founders of companies like Google and Yahoo, aside—their highly educated corporeal founders are from Russia (Sergey Brin) and Taiwan (Jerry Yang). …”

Read the complete column, “Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution,” now on RT.

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UPDATE: More of a reality check from Pat Buchanan:

Hispanics are not small-government people. They believe in and benefit disproportionately from Big Government.
Some 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, and 52 percent of Hispanic families are headed by single women.
Big Government provides their kids with Head Start before school, free K-through-12 schooling, Pell Grants and student loans for college, and two or three free meals a day at school for the kids.
Big Government provides food stamps, welfare for mom and earned income tax credit checks should she work. Big Government subsidizes her housing and provides free health care for the family through Medicaid.
A Pew Hispanic poll found that by 3-to-1, Hispanics would favor a big government with more services to a small government with fewer services.
Why would these folks vote for a Republican Party that promises to downsize the Big Government upon which they depend for sustenance, security and survival? Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut capital gains, income and inheritance taxes they don’t pay?

David Mamet Packs Heat, Sheds Light

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Constitution, Government, GUNS, Hollywood, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Race, Republicans, The State

In “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm,*” the talented Hollywood playwright, author, director, and producer David Mamet motivates for his individual right to defend life, liberty and property.

As a conventional conservative or Republican, Mamet’s positions are often pat, lacking philosophical depth. For example: He fingers The Bureaucracy as ineffectual because lacking in compassion and common sense. However, like most members of the right-leaning establishment, Mamet is incapable of explaining the underlying dynamic or structure that accounts for the inversion of economic incentives in the bureaucracy, irrespective of the good intentions and good character of the bureaucrats.

Mamet also mouths the conventional conservative talking points about affirmative action: that it is based in the mistaken premise that “black people have fewer abilities than white people,” a notion Mamert calls “monstrous.”

The “I love blacks, so I want to make them compete on an equal footing” mantra is as prevalent a platitude among conservatives as it is stupid. Affirmative action is based on the immutable fact of blacks’ lower aggregate scores in academia and in other fields. The “monstrous” part of it is that quotas treat all individual blacks as part of an underachieving, oppressed cohort. As does it lump all whites—the poor, the underprivileged and the victimized too—in a group that needs to suffer for the sake of black upliftment.

Also lackluster or absent is Mamet’s defense of a natural right that predates the constitutional right to bear arms. But Mamet should be appreciated for writing very well, and for being a lone voice for reason and rights in Hollywood, writing that,

…there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.

[SNIP]

* Chelm: From Mamet’s reference to Chelm, I concluded that he is probably Jewish (and well-educated, of course, which he is).

BHO Urges Future Google and Yahoo Founders To Come Out Of The Shadows of Immigration Illegality

Barack Obama, China, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Reason, Russia, Technology

“The time is now, now’s the time, now’s the time, now’s the time,” President Barack Obama banged away, while pressing for “comprehensive immigration reform,” in Las Vegas today.

Appeals to emotion and feelings have always dominated in Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary, if to go by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

Today’s address in Nevada was no exception. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a logical argument in the Obama immigration address. For example: the president waxed about legalizing the “11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,” while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great “businesses like Google and Yahoo.”

The 11 million voting bloc being targeted (and their extended families and villagers, who’ll be joining them somehow under family reunification laws) originates mostly from Latin American.

By Wikipedia’s telling, they tend to be, “as a group,” “less educated than other sections of the U.S. population: 49 percent haven’t completed high school, compared with 9 percent of native-born Americans and 25 percent of legal immigrants.”

Sergey Brin of Google, known as The “Enlightenment Man,” happens to be a Russian who graduated from Stanford.

And what do you know? Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s alma mater is Stanford University too. He is originally from Taipei, Taiwan.

If the founders of Google and Yahoo were as rigorous as Obama with their algorithms—they’d have come up short with their innovations.

Posse Comitatus And Police State USA

Constitution, Homeland Security, Law, Liberty, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, The State

Americans live under a militarized police force. SWAT teams are forever poised to descend on their homes at the drop of a hat. Is it possible that the military will soon be stepping in to do some policing of its own?

The Posse Comitatus Act was supposed to restrict America’s military from acting as a domestic police force, but then none of the limits on power put in place by the Constitution and other legislation have ever stuck, now have they?

Via Drudge comes this ABC report of an especially energetic military drill in a HOUSTON neighborhood. If you hear helicopters or hear gunfire near your homes, don’t worry, assures the reporter.

Another comatose journo, writing for CBS (via Karen De Coster ), is blasé about yet more militarized operations, this time in Miami. The excuse given:

“The training is designed to ensure that military personnel are able to operate in urban areas and to focus on preparations for overseas deployment. It also serves as a mandatory training certification requirement.”

Dig a little and you’ll find a Republican or two behind earlier efforts to undermine Posse Comitatus.

On Sept. 26, President Bush urged Congress to consider revising federal laws so that the U.S. military could seize control immediately in the aftermath of a natural disaster, noting that “it may require change of law. The law the president seems to be referring to is the Posse Comitatus Act, the longstanding federal statute that restricts the government’s ability to use the U.S. military as a police force. Sen. John Warner, R.-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also has signaled his desire to change the law.”

As CATO’s Gene Healy has written , “The Posse Comitatus Act is no barrier to federal troops providing logistical support during natural disasters. Nor does it prohibit the president from using the Army to restore order in extraordinary circumstances — even over the objection of a state governor.”

What it does is set a high bar for the use of federal troops in a policing role. That reflects America’s traditional distrust of using standing armies to enforce order at home, a distrust that’s well-justified.