Using children as f------ shields and thetreacherous Hillary Clinton. (See 1 below.) Stella turns four and she is given a birthday party at school
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Puerto Rico is unable to repay a $400 million bond issue which has come due and because of their status with America they cannot declare bankruptcy.
How did Puerto Rico get into this mess? Well it actually is a very simple explanation. You see Puerto Rico's politicians spent more than they took in on excessive welfare transfers, pensions etc. In other words, they were fiscally irresponsible but then the same thing is going to happen to those who live in Illinois and New Jersey. It is only a matter of time before their fiscal pigeons come home to roost.
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Why do liberals and progressives destroy property as a way of demonstrating against what they dislike? They seem to believe their concept of democracy allows them to destroy public and personal property simply because they are mad and matters are not as they want them. When they take to the streets and destroy police cars etc., even when they are arrested, what kind of charges are brought against them? Do they have to pay for the damages they cause? Do they serve deserved time?
Trump is being blamed for the acts of these rioters because he said things they did not like. How novel.
When I return to Savannah next week, from a family wedding, I am going to burn down the police station because Hillarious said something yesterday I find offensive. She made some disgusting reference to "reservations" and thus, insulted Native Americans. How many more insults do the Navajos, Apaches and their brothers have to take? After all, we white men took their lands, killed their buffaloes (to be "buffaloed" even became an expression) and pillaged their "reservations."
Do we really want to elect a woman as president who seems to have no reservation about using the word "reservations" in order to constantly demean Native Americans? I guess Hillary will soon want to build a high wall around them but I doubt she will be able to get Mexico to fund it like her potential opponent.
These are just a few reasons why I have serious "reservations" about Hillary.
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The SIRC has drafted a letter supporting Peter Miller's candidacy, soon to be mailed and our board received this thanks from an activist stating how important The Landing's vote can be in this prospective low turn out campaign. (See 2 below.)
And like Uncle Sam The SIRC "wants/needs you."
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
Ask your friends and neighbors to join, as this year is the big push to take back the White House. And we have lots of True Perspectives Seminars planned. Family membership is $40, Sustaining membership, $100. Mail or tube to Membership Chair Mary Ann Senkowski, 8 Mainsail Crossing, Savannah, GA 31411. For questions, call or email her at: 912-598-0493, or masenkowski@gmail.com.
I early voted and rarely find myself asking for a Democrat Ballot but this time I wanted to cast for Tony Center and thus had no choice. Peter Muller, who I also voted for, is on all the ballots.
I was dispirited to find on the ballot four or five questions seeking my opinions on items pertaining to PC type entitlements. It is just amazing how liberals keep on giving your money away for "good" causes that morph into citizens becoming more dependent on entitlements than their own efforts. I had no opinion on the issues involved and several were written in a disguised manner so I really did not know what they were asking but I got the drift they wanted you to give someone something.
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I understand Bret's distaste of Trump but I doubt Trump truly understood The America First label and embraced it to convey his version of what he has been saying about America's self inflicted attitude regarding trade, foreign policy initiatives etc. not the message conveyed by the one Bret correctly cites.
As for Cruz, I too understand Bret's distaste for this self serving man but, once again, I believe criticizing Republican leadership is fair game. Why? Because they led the Party into being Democrat Light. Because they lacked the guts to take on some issues to the mat even though they did not have the votes and allowed the party to become "not a dime's worth of difference." No wonder Republicans won so many seats and offices etc.. After all, a vote for a Republican was just another way of voting for Democrats.
Trump is far from ideal and he is not my choice but I do believe, considering who he is and why he has become so popular, he deserves to be cut some slack. After all, the Democrats , as usual, are willing to give their own version of a suitable candidate reams of slack because, to them, winning is everything. Otherwise explain Hillarious and Bernie. Two of the most pathetic candidates they could possibly flush up from the bottom of the sea where mostly scavenger bottom and un-kosher shell fish swim and spawn.
Like it or not this may be the last gasp opportunity for Caucasian America to speak out about their concerns regarding illegal immigration, America flirting with financial disaster and Puerto Rico un- able to bail us out, the decline, if not the abject decimation, of our military response capability, the puny economic recovery and resulting decline in the middle class' ability to maintain itself and finally the matter of unfair trade.
For better or worse, Trump is the only one who has captured the imagination of those with these concerns. His articulation of the solutions may be zany, at best, but they resonate and thus those attracted to him willingly ignore his brash and vulgar mannerisms and delivery etc. Apparently voters no longer question much of what they hear and/or probe deeply as to whether it even makes sense. Obama would never have been elected and then re-elected if they did.
On the other hand, maybe voters are brighter and more informed than I think because they may assume since nothing gets done in D.C why focus on issues. (See 3 below.)
Sowell and more of his 2016 Campaign Random Thoughts. (See 3a below.)
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Over the coming decades, as America's Jewish population declines numerically and therefore, proportionately, it's influence will shrink and this might have a serious impact on our nation's relationship with Israel. The SIRC's next year President Day speaker discusses the impact of this demographic shift. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Letter to the Editor: THE TRUTH IS LONG OVERDUE!
(released by Esther Levens, CEO & Founder of Unity Coalition.)
The newest revelations regarding the repeated deceptions carried out by Hillary Clinton and President Obama are finally coming to light. They have exposed the betrayal of President Bush's agreement with Israel. Both Hillary and Obama have blatantly ignored Bush's 2004 vital agreement with Israel. They have done everything in their power to wiggle out of those commitments, despite their having been overwhelmingly endorsed by the Senate 95-3 and by the House of Representatives 407-9 in a letter to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
President Bush's letter acknowledged the risks Israel’s proposed unilateral disengagement from Gaza represented - and assured Israel that America would do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan than the Roadmap envisioned by President Bush on June 24, 2002. The US would maintain its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure defensible borders. It’s strongly committed to Israel’s well-being as a Jewish state.
It understood that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement would need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel. It accepted as part of a final peace settlement that Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. It acknowledged that in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it would be unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations would be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of the Six Day War, that all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution had reached the same conclusion.
President Obama’s attempt to disavow Bush’s commitments was first orchestrated by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Also, since coming to office in January, and contrary to the agreement, President Barack Obama has repeatedly called on Israel to halt all settlement activity in Palestinian areas, a demand rejected by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It will be interesting to finally learn in time for the Indiana vote whether American citizens can accept much of the disinformation our current president along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have misrepresented to the American people. Will learning the facts be reflected in the outcome of the Indiana vote?
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2)I would like to take a moment and thank Michael and the entire SIRC board for all of their efforts on our campaign. For those who do not know me my name is Tim Waters. I work part time at Plantation Club and I am helping coordinate Peter's efforts on the ground. I have helped several college students get involved with politics and I have volunteered on numerous local political campaigns.
You can not find another organization in Chatham County that matches SIRC in the dedication and efforts to get involved in local politics. I am extremely grateful for all of your efforts you have put into our campaign. I know Lisa and Peter are also very thankful.
I am confident that we are on track to win a heavy percentage of Skidaway Island's vote. The biggest issue we are dealing with is going to be voter apathy. There is going to be little reason for Republicans to vote in this election unless we do everything it takes to motivate them to show up on May 24th.
This newsletter is going to help the cause. There is not much more we can do to win the Skidaway vote, but we still have to win the rest of the county to win. We are doing our best to make phone calls and to go door to door to the rest of Chatham County. I have personally walked all of Tybee Island, parts of Wilmington Island, and several areas of Savannah for Peter. Besides donating money for advertisements, writing a letter to editor and spreading the word of Peter to all of your friends are some of the last things on the list to help Peter win his campaign.
Thank you again, and lets keep working so we can elect a new judge for Chatham County.
2)I would like to take a moment and thank Michael and the entire SIRC board for all of their efforts on our campaign. For those who do not know me my name is Tim Waters. I work part time at Plantation Club and I am helping coordinate Peter's efforts on the ground. I have helped several college students get involved with politics and I have volunteered on numerous local political campaigns.
You can not find another organization in Chatham County that matches SIRC in the dedication and efforts to get involved in local politics. I am extremely grateful for all of your efforts you have put into our campaign. I know Lisa and Peter are also very thankful.
I am confident that we are on track to win a heavy percentage of Skidaway Island's vote. The biggest issue we are dealing with is going to be voter apathy. There is going to be little reason for Republicans to vote in this election unless we do everything it takes to motivate them to show up on May 24th.
This newsletter is going to help the cause. There is not much more we can do to win the Skidaway vote, but we still have to win the rest of the county to win. We are doing our best to make phone calls and to go door to door to the rest of Chatham County. I have personally walked all of Tybee Island, parts of Wilmington Island, and several areas of Savannah for Peter. Besides donating money for advertisements, writing a letter to editor and spreading the word of Peter to all of your friends are some of the last things on the list to help Peter win his campaign.
Thank you again, and lets keep working so we can elect a new judge for Chatham County.
Tomathy Waters
and another endorsement of Peter from a fellow practitioner:
Bob, I support Peter 100% and told him early on that I would support him.
As an attorney, I can agree with everything you said. Thanks, Steve
As an attorney, I can agree with everything you said. Thanks, Steve
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3)
The GOP Gets What It Deserves
‘America First’ is the inevitable outcome of the Republican descent into populism.
A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head and says: ‘I know just what you mean.’ ”
The joke is supposed to be about life in Czechoslovakia under communism, circa 1977. It conveys exactly what I feel about the moral and mental state of the Republican Party, circa 2016.
Last week, Donald Trump delivered his big foreign-policy speech, built around the theme of “America First.” The term seems to have been planted in his brain by New York Times reporter David Sanger, who asked the Republican front-runner in late March whether it was fair to sum up his foreign policy as “something of an
‘America First’ kind of approach.”
Trump: “Correct, okay? That’s fine.”
Sanger: “Okay? Am I describing this correctly here?”
Trump: “I’ll tell you—you’re getting close. . . . I’m not an isolationist, but I am ‘America First.’ So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’ ”
Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase? Did anyone in his inner circle advise him that it might be unwise to associate himself with a movement whose principal aim was to prevent the United States from helping Winston Churchill fight the Nazis during the Battle of the Atlantic? Once he learned of it—assuming he did—was he at least privately embarrassed? Or was he that much more pleased with himself?
With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?
Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering. Either Mr. Trump stumbled upon his worldview through a dense fog of historical ignorance. Or he is seriously attempting to resurrect the most disastrous and discredited strain of American foreign policy for a new generation of American ignoramuses.
And now he’s about to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assuming a win in Tuesday’s Indiana primary.
It’s true that Mr. Trump benefits from having as his main opponent Ted Cruz, the man recently described by former House Speaker John Boehner as “Lucifer in the flesh.” That’s about right, assuming Lucifer is the fellow who sows discord where harmony once reigned.
In 2014, the “Republican establishment,” as it is now derisively known, succeeded in securing its largest ever majority in the House since 1928. It won nine seats in the Senate and regained the majority for the first time in eight years. The GOP also took control of 31 governorships, with historic gains in state legislatures.
These were significant political achievements, which only awaited a reasonably serious presidential candidate to lead to a sweeping Republican restoration.
Instead, Mr. Cruz used the moment to attempt a party coup by treating every tactical or parliamentary difference of opinion as a test of ideological purity. The party turned on its own leaders, like the much-vilified Mr. Boehner. Then it turned on its (classically) liberal ideas, like free trade and sensible immigration policy.
And now it’s America First time again—the inevitable outcome of the GOP’s descent into populism.
Mr. Cruz, who used to be fond of calling Mr. Trump “my friend Donald” when it seemed opportune, now presents himself as the only man standing between his nemesis and the nomination. But Mr. Cruz’s trashing of his fellow Republicans hastened the arrival of the ultimate party-crasher. Arsonists who set fire to their neighborhood run the risk of burning their own house down.
And then there is the GOP rank-and-file. It is supposed to be sinful for conservative columnists to blame Republican voters for making disastrous choices, at least without the obligatory nods to their patriotism and pain.
But if Democrats don’t get a moral pass for bringing Bernie Sanders this far in the race, Republicans shouldn’t get one for bringing Mr. Trump to the cusp of the nomination. The point of democracy isn’t freedom. It’s political accountability. That goes for elected officials—and for the ones who elect them.
The “white working classes” that are said to form the core of Mr. Trump’s support deserve better than to be patronized with references to their “anger.” They deserve to hear an argument about the disaster they are about to impose on their party, their country and their own economic interests.
A Trump nomination will not destroy the GOP, any more than George McGovern’s nomination destroyed the Democrats. But it all but guarantees another Clinton presidency. How should that make you feel? Note the Kundera punchline atop this column.
3a) Random thoughts on the passing scene:
By Thomas Sowell
One of the problems with being a pessimist is that you can never celebrate when you are proven right.
If what you want from politicians are quick and easy answers, someone is sure to supply them, regardless of which party you follow. History can tell you where quick and easy answers lead. But, if you don't want to bother reading history, you can just wait and relive its catastrophes.
What is "economic power"? What can Bill Gates stop you from doing?
I don't understand how people who cannot predict the weather five days in advance can predict the climate decades from now.
One of history's painful ironies is how often people on the brink of disaster have been preoccupied with trivialities. With a nuclear Iran with intercontinental missiles looming on the horizon, our intelligentsia are preoccupied with calling achievements "privilege" and playing other word games.
Of life's many surprises, encountering an old flame, years later, is in a class by itself.
Some people seem to think that Donald Trump has great abilities because he is a billionaire. But being born rich and getter richer is not exactly a Horatio Alger miracle.
Of all the disheartening signs of the utter ignorance of so many American college students, nothing so completely disheartened me as seeing on television a black college student who did not know what the Civil War was about. Fifty years ago, it would have been virtually impossible to find a black adult, with even an elementary school education, who did not know what the Civil War was about.
Global warming, due to greenhouse gasses, is the latest in a long series of one-factor theories about a multi-factor world. Such theories have often enjoyed great popularity, despite how often they have turned out to be wrong.
One of the most richly rewarded skills in politics is the ability to make self-interest sound like idealism. Nowhere is this tactic more successful than in so-called "campaign finance reform" laws -- spending restrictions that prevent challenger candidates from buying enough publicity to offset the free publicity that incumbents get from the media.
At one time, it seemed as if the free world had defeated the world of totalitarian dictatorships twice -- first the Nazis and then the Communists. But, with the slow but steady expansion of government control over our lives and the spread of the idea that people who deny "climate change" should be punished as criminals, it seems as if totalitarianism may be winning, after all.
People who want to redistribute wealth often misunderstand the nature and causes of wealth. Tangible wealth can be confiscated, but you cannot confiscate the knowledge which produced that wealth. Countries that confiscated the wealth of some groups and expelled them, destitute, have often seen the economy collapse, while the expelled people became prosperous again elsewhere.
Some people think that Ted Cruz would not have as good a chance against Hillary Clinton as would Donald Trump. They say that Cruz does not have a sparkling style of speaking. But, after months of hearing childish insults from Trump, the public may be ready for some serious adult talk by someone with substance, who can cut right through Hillary's shallow evasions.
To me, beautiful music is whatever music makes you glad to be a human being, whether it is "Musetta's Waltz" from "La Boheme" or "Muskrat Ramble" from New Orleans. Much of what passes for music today makes me wish that, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I can come back as a dolphin.
Republican leaders seem to be worried that Donald Trump will get the nomination and lose the election. Those of us who are not Republicans should worry that Trump will get the nomination and win the election. After all, the fate of the country is a lot more important than the fate of a political party -- and in far greater danger.
As this country continues to degenerate, we hope that it never reaches the desperate stage where only a military coup can rescue it from catastrophes created by feckless politicians. But, if that day ever arrives, we can only hope that the military will do their duty and step in. It is one of the few institutions dedicated to something besides individual self-interest.
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4) Last Word: American Jewry Will No Longer Be the Center of the Jewish World
In the 20th century the American Jewish community was the world’s largest and strongest, and helped establish and protect the Jewish state. The 21st century will be different
In late fall 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and despite the parlous situation of the Jews in British-Mandate Palestine, their leader David Ben-Gurion spent three and a half months in the United States, returning again in November 1941 for a far longer stay of more than nine months. The wartime route from Palestine to the U.S. was lengthy and dangerous, but Ben-Gurion keenly understood not only the prime importance of relations with America but also the fact that the American Jewish community had now become the center of world Jewry.
Indeed, soon enough—and for decades to come—that same Jewish community, the world’s largest and strongest, would play a critical role in the establishment and subsequent support and protection of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.
But that was the 20th century; the 21st will be different. That is the conclusion of my essay in Mosaic, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”
I’m grateful to Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer, and Jack Wertheimer for their kind words about the essay itself and especially for their thoughtful comments on its thesis. Taken together, those comments affirm but also broaden and deepen my argument.
All three of my respondents note the remarkable change in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry since 1948, some of which is due to sheer demographics. At the time of Israel’s founding, as Martin Kramer explains, its Jewish population was one-ninth the size of American Jewry, and was also largely poor and needy. Today, the population ratio is one to one, Israel’s economic situation has improved immeasurably, and its population is growing—even as our numbers in America are being reduced by low birth rates and intermarriage.
As Daniel Gordis puts it, “Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy,” while, by contrast, the “American Jewish survival strategy is struggling.” The trend lines are clear—which is why I suggested in my essay that we American Jews may end up needing what amounts to foreign aid, with the Israelis trying to rescue us, or anyway some of us, as best they can.
The distances between Israeli and American Jews are growing in other ways as well. A couple of generations ago, most Israeli and most American Jews were immigrants from Europe; today, 70 percent of Israeli Jews were born in Israel and an even higher percentage of American Jews were born in the United States. Moreover, something like 90 percent of American Jews are of Ashkenazi heritage, while, as Kramer points out, half of Israeli Jews are of Sephardi or Mizraḥi descent.
All of this has taken its toll in feelings of inter-community solidarity, and so has another factor mentioned in my essay: the detachment of most American Jews from the combined ritual and communal moorings that held Jews together for 2,000 years of exile. Driving this point home is the sad tale that Gordis tells about an uncle of his. A former executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee, this uncle has taken to the public prints to proclaim that “in every important way Israel has failed to realize its promise for me.”
Gordis rightly underscores those amazing final words—“for me”—as if the task of Israelis, who live in a region “leaning toward perpetual war,” were “to soothe the moral disquiet of Jews whose circumstances are “more peaceful and stable than any environment in the history of humankind since Adam.” Writing with similar bite, Jack Wertheimer, the eminent American Jewish historian and an acute, unblinking analyst of contemporary realities, records that growing numbers of American Jews have become so “deracinated” as to lose all empathy with fellow Jews living in “a neighborhood considerably more dangerous than brownstone Brooklyn or the Edenic communities of the San Francisco Bay.”
Sadly, in this context, none of my three respondents has protested that I’m dead wrong in my analysis and that the future glows brightly both for the American Jewish community itself and for its relationship with Israel. Nor does any of the three offer a magic formula to extricate ourselves from our troubles, because there is none. To the contrary, all appear to accept, as I do, the further and all but inevitable weakening of the non-Orthodox American Jewish community.
Still, their comments do suggest some paths forward.
One of them is critical: an Israel-oriented education that will take in the enormous miracle of the recreation of a Jewish state after two millennia, absorbing its history and the lessons contained in that history, and inculcating a knowledge of the Hebrew language. About 10 percent of American Jews say they can carry on a conversation in Hebrew; I would bet that most of them are Orthodox—themselves by far a minority within the community as a whole. Gordis correctly refers to the “essentially across-the-board neglect of Hebrew-language literacy as a community priority.”
This is not the case in other Diaspora communities. Jews elsewhere not only are likelier to speak Hebrew but, correlatively, visit Israel more frequently, and acquire a more thorough Jewish education. In the UK, for example, 60 percent of Jewish children attend day schools.
For American Jews outside the Orthodox community, such day schools hold little attraction. I suspect they strike many as contrary to the long-prevailing desire for full integration into America society: the central goal of American Jews who in the decades after World War II did not struggle to move to Evanston and Scarsdale and Beverly Hills in order to send their children to Jewish schools.
But that integration is now a fact, and staring the American non-Orthodox in the face is the prospect of Jewish assimilation leading to Jewish extinction. That being the reality, is it possible that day schools might be re-examined?
One critical barrier here, even for the moderately affluent, is financial: on top of the other burdens of engaged Jewish life—synagogue dues, summer camps, kosher food, and so forth—day schools are an expensive proposition. Especially in localities boasting excellent public schools, they may seem either beyond reach or unnecessary, or both. And here, to make things worse, the organized community’s priorities are upside-down. Rather than making sure that a day-school education is affordable and available to all who want it—as Jack Wertheimer has tirelessly advocated—Jewish agencies have not only undervalued the relative worth of such an education but have often led the fight against extending any help at all to religious schools in general, even in the form of vouchers, tuition tax credits, or other tax breaks that are clearly constitutional.
The day-school movement in America is one of the proven secrets of continuing Orthodox strength and solidarity. As Wertheimer has written, a day-school education “greatly increases the chances of children learning the skills necessary for participation in religious life, for living active Jewish lives, and for identifying strongly with other Jews.” One can only hope that non-Orthodox Jews and Jewish organizations seeking to survive in America will reconsider its benefits and relax their visceral and ideological opposition to communal and other forms of support for non-public schools.
Whether or not they do, however, I join my three respondents in fearing the near-irreversibility of the underlying trends contributing to the weakening of the American Jewish community. All the more reason, then, to keep front and center in one’s consciousness the single key fact of modern Jewish existence: for the first time in 2,000 years there is a Jewish state, it is growing and thriving, and it is becoming the center of world Jewish life. Would we want it otherwise? American Jews today may be declining in strength and centrality, but they are also witness to and can actively participate in the miracle of the Jewish state. In Daniel Gordis’s words, Israel is “the Jewish people’s last remaining hope.” It is also something more: something, in Martin Kramer’s words, that we should always regard just as a hundred generations of Jews before us would have done—with “pure wonder.”
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