20 thoughts on “News/Politics 2-27-19

  1. A break for Iranian Christians, but questions remain.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/25/iranian_christians_arriving_in_us_but_questions_remain__139574.html

    “Nearly a dozen members of a group of 87 Christian and other religious-minority refugees from Iran — who were marooned in Austria for 2 ½ years — recently began enjoying a series of joyful reunions with family and friends in Los Angeles. Arriving at the airport to the welcoming arms of aunts, uncles, cousins and other extended family members seemed almost surreal after their arduous, 29-month travail, lawyers for the group said.

    The asylum seekers sold all their worldly possessions and left their jobs and life in Iran only to become stranded in Vienna with little hope they would ultimately make it to the U.S. If forced to return to Iran, they would undoubtedly be labeled traitors and face imprisonment or worse – a fear that loomed over them as they waited while their funds were depleted week by week, month by month.

    While the first group is celebrating the sudden breakthrough in their cases, hard questions remain about the reasons behind the U.S. government’s decision to block these refugees from entering the United States after almost all previous applicants under the same program had been accepted.

    U.S. citizens and family members had sponsored the refugees’ applications for asylum in the United States under the Lautenberg Amendment, a law Congress passed three decades ago to facilitate refugee admission of Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. Lawmakers expanded the program in 2004 to include religious minorities persecuted in Iran.

    The program has quietly admitted an estimated 30,000 persecuted Iranians, mainly Jews and Christians, but also Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and members of the Baha’i faith over the last decade, according to U.S. lawmakers familiar with the acceptance record.

    Advocates for the group initially believed the 87 were victims of President Trump’s highly controversial travel ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. On further investigation, they traced the denials to stricter vetting procedures for asylum seekers implemented before Trump took office. After the 87 refugees arrived in Vienna, the designated city for further vetting, in 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security suddenly put the brakes on their applications. DHS later denied their entrance to the U.S. without explanation.

    Legal advocates for the group argue that Congress was clear when it passed the Lautenberg Amendment that if the U.S. government denies any asylum claim, it must provide a reason “to the maximum extent feasible.” However, no explanation came even after the group’s plight attracted the attention and support of a bipartisan group of key members of Congress who called on Vice President Pence to intervene on their behalf in January 2018. A White House official told the Washington Free Beacon early last year that the administration is paying “careful attention to the issue” and was working to find a solution.”

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  2. Further proof it was a lie that it was only gay “rights” they were seeking. It was always about way more, but they couldn’t say it. Now they’re emboldened to try the unthinkable.

    http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/pedophile-project-7-year-old-next-sexual-revolutions-hit-parade/

    “The Pedophile Project: Your 7-Year-Old Is Next On The Sexual Revolution’s Hit Parade”

    “Activists for normalizing pedophilia are on the move. Public acceptance of adult sex with children is the next domino poised to fall in identity politics. It’s being sustained, among other things, by the rapid sexualization of children in the media and in K-12 education.

    We cannot dismiss the campaign to legalize pedophilia as fringy stuff that will get nowhere. It’s real and it’s here and it’s gaining strength. It’s a very logical outgrowth of the nihilism inherent in the sexual revolution.

    If you doubt this, just consider, for example, how unthinkable to many Americans was the recent celebration of infanticide (in the guise of abortion rights) by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Likewise, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam—supposedly a pediatrician—spoke cavalierly about whether to dispose of a living infant who survives abortion.

    They and governors of many other states are betting that your shock will simply wear off and we’ll all eventually get with the infanticide program. People do tend to settle into such shifts, believing it won’t affect them. But the selective dehumanization of children has been going on for a long time now. Why should we think it’ll be any different when the time comes for legalizing pedophilia?

    As with any propaganda campaign that pushes outrageous changes on an unwary public, it’s all about timing. Academics might refer to timing as the Overton Window or the Availability Cascade. But we should all be able to understand the process of conditioning the public to accept the unacceptable.

    First, the groundwork is laid through carefully planned propaganda. There are various types of messaging for various audiences: the medical establishment, the education establishment, legislators, judges, the general public, and so forth. Then the agitation begins with poster people who are “just like you.” And before you know it, it’s all over.”

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  3. China is nervous, thanks to Trump and his policies. 🙂

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/02/good-news-china-is-nervous.php

    “The New York Times reports that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently. He did so, says the Times, in order to convey a sense of “anxious urgency.” The Communist Party, Xi told the officials, faces major risks on all fronts and must batten down the hatches.

    “Globally, sources of turmoil and points of risk are multiplying,” [Xi] told the gathering in January at the Central Party School. At home, he added, “the party is at risk from indolence, incompetence and of becoming divorced from the public.”

    According to the Times, Xi’s anxiety stems mainly from China’s slow economic growth and its “grinding trade fight with the United States.” Significant pressure from the international community over China’s political and business practices “add[] to its difficulties in dealing with its domestic issues,” explains Elizabeth C. Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who wrote “The Third Revolution,” a study of Xi.

    It’s unclear how China will respond to the “major risks” Xi perceives. A rational response would be to reach a trade deal with the U.S. and to modify, at least to some extent, the business practices that the international community is pressuring the regime to change.

    This may not be China’s response. Indeed, the Times’ statement that Xi wants to “batten down the hatches” suggests a different response.

    Either way, I think President Trump deserves considerable credit for applying so much pressure to China. His approach to China may not be flawless, but he has upped the cost to China of its unfair trade and other economic practices. If China’s leader wants to make meaningful concessions in response, that’s great. If he wants to ride out the storm Trump has helped create, at least China won’t be riding quite so high.”

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  4. Hoaxes are way more common than most folks realize. The press always hypes the alleged crime against the ….. (insert victim’s identifying features here) But when it’s exposed as a hoax they fell for, they bury it.

    https://quillette.com/2019/02/22/hate-crime-hoaxes-are-more-common-than-you-think/

    “This week Chicago police charged television star Jussie Smollett for disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. Smollett claimed to be the victim of a racist and homophobic attack on January 29, but in the days before the arrest it became clear that police believed Smollett had hired two men to attack him. Other reports implied he was also a suspect in a federal investigation of threatening letters mailed to Smollett the week before the attack. This was all baffling to many people unfamiliar with hate crime hoaxes. The author Roxane Gay tweeted that she “genuinely thought no one, and especially no one that famous, could make something like that up.”

    https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1096946190904479744

    “But people make all sorts of things up, even things like that. More baffling to us than a hate crime hoax is that people would find such hoaxes baffling. Lying is hardly uncommon in our species, and false claims of victimhood, like other lies, become more common when they provide some advantage to the liar and when they’re likely to be believed. That hate crime hoaxes seem strange or the motives unclear might simply be due to a lack of familiarity with them and with their social context. If you want to understand them better, here are three things to know.

    First of all, hate crime hoaxes aren’t new or unusual. In our book The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, we discuss a number of cases of people falsely reporting or even staging hate crimes. In 1997 two black students at Duke University hung a black baby doll from a tree near the spot where the Black Student Alliance was planning a protest. In 1998 a St. Cloud State University student slashed her own face and claimed that two men had assaulted her and yelled anti-gay slurs. In 2004 a visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College slashed the tires of her own car and painted ethnic slurs and a swastika on it. In 2011 a University of Virginia law student published a letter in the law school’s newspaper in which he falsely claimed to have been mistreated by two white police officers.

    More recently, after Donald Trump was elected president, major newspapers published a number of stories about what were apparently Trump-inspired hate crimes, but many of these also turned out to be hoaxes. A black student at Bowling Green State University falsely claimed three white men wearing Trump paraphernalia attacked her. A bisexual student at North Park University claimed to have gotten notes with homophobic slurs from Trump supporters, but the university president later announced the student had written the notes herself.”

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  5. Un-American.

    http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/22/democrats-take-another-judicial-nominee-simply-hes-christian/

    “Religious tests are unacceptable––we should never let people of faith be automatically disqualified from public service due to their closely held beliefs.”

    “Dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, Justice Samuel Alito gravely predicted that “those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

    He was right. In Wisconsin, this campaign of religious intolerance has claimed a new casualty in Gordon Giampietro, President Trump’s former nominee to a vacant seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. He was revealed to be removed from the list of renominations Trump issued on January 22. Democrats have all but ensured that, for the crime of publicly voicing the teachings of his faith, Giampietro will never sit on the federal bench.”

    ‘The Dogma Lives Loudly Within’ People of Faith
    A number of Senate Democrats have famously come to the conclusion that Catholics faithful to the teachings of their church are unfit for public service. In September 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) bizarrely complained that “the dogma lives loudly within” Judge Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that her faith precludes her service on the bench.

    In December 2018, presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-CA) shamefully attempted to make membership in the Knights of Columbus, a renowned Catholic charitable organization, a disqualifying offense. One can apparently be a Catholic, but ought not to be too serious about it.

    That this nonsense has now claimed Giampietro is a shame. His qualifications are beyond question. An assistant general counsel at a Fortune 500 company, he has more than a decade’s experience as a federal prosecutor after becoming a partner at one of Wisconsin’s most successful law firms. He received the approval of the bipartisan Wisconsin Federal Nominating Commission (on which one of us sat), of Wisconsin Sens. Ron Johnson (R) and Tammy Baldwin (D), and of the American Bar Association, which awarded him an official rating of “qualified.”

    But that was before BuzzFeed reported that Giampietro was an unapologetically orthodox Catholic, quoting remarks he had made on Catholic radio criticizing same-sex marriage and birth control and a comment he had posted in response to an article on a Catholic website lamenting that the “original sin” of slavery had spawned a modern legacy of race-based decision-making.”

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  6. I know politics is an ugly game, but oh my………..

    This is what the now removed (but screenshots last forever) Tweet said.

    “Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…

    — Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 26, 2019”

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    Yikes! 🙂

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    Get the popcorn…… 🙂

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  7. Wait until they start taking women’s sports scholarship money too. Then the blow-back will begin.

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  8. From off the internet. Forgot the source already:

    “The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in the case of a threatened World War I memorial in Bladensburg, Md. First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford, who argued the case before the high court, said the lawsuit is a chance to clear up the confusing legal precedent about public displays with religious imagery, which he said everyone seemed to recognize “is in hopeless disarray.”

    The problem is a cross on public property.

    It has been a long time, but I think I recall that there are a million crosses at the Arlington cemetery. There are also Stars of David.

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  9. The US is the only western country to allow child marriage. Republicans have blocked attempts to change this in several states citing cultural traditions eg. pregnant girls need to be married off.

    Meanwhile modern capitalism promotes the sexualization of young girls in advertisements and entertainment.

    Yes, children continued to sexualized but gay men and women are not to be blamed.

    (Not to mention puberty continues to start earlier than ever…..not sure why but the chemicals in our food is my favorite conspiracy theory)

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  10. Its interesting the amount of ink spilled on a faked hate crime. Its as if certain parties want to use the incident to distract from very real hate crimes.

    Meanwhile, a member of the coast guard was arrested prior to a planned attack on journalists, Democrats and other enemies of Trump.

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  11. Yet you and others continue to post and talk about a two bit actor on some mid level TV show. A fake hate crime doesn’t dismiss the existence of white nationalists.

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  12. Like all good theater, rehearsal is a must.

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    And a reminder, bringing a black woman to the show trial is now racist.

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