Agency find out he is near fire they may take him away from us.
They are telling us something but
doubt many are listening..
========================================================================This Thursday my Fraternity Class is going to have a conference call with our former Advisor, Dr.Hank Abraham, who turns 95.
Hank left The University of Pa.'s Political Science Department because of discrimination and immediately was given tenure at The Univ of Va. where he taught until retirement. Hank is the authority on the history of The Supreme Court and spoke for me in Savannah when I was running The JEA Speaker Series.
Hank still conducts a class for seniors, Though wheelchair ridden his mind is as sharp as ever. If there ever was a real life Mr. Chips, I would certainly put Hank up as a formidable candidate.
I can truly say I have been blessed to have had so many wonderful teachers and professors beginning with Miss Higgins in grade school, then Col. Wilkinson, Capt Brewster, Capt. Edwards, Maj. Paget, Col. Mitchell and Col. Burnett in Military School, then Professor Jeremiah, Parker, Harbison and Black in college and Dean Sturges, Professor Sowards and Massey in Law School. Most have passed on by now but they will always be remembered as leaving an indelible impression on me.
I wonder what they would say about the trend in education today, how students are being coddled and graduate with enormous debt and an inability to reason.
My oldest daughter had a comparable experience at Kenyon and his name is Dr. Agresto. John lives in Santa Fe and was gracious enough to ask me to be his representative on St. John's College's Board of Advisors when he was president of the Santa Fe Campus.
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Elect Hillary and The Lincoln Bedroom will be up for sale again.
You know the Clinton's are concerned when they allow James Carville to go on Fox News and defend their honor and foundation.
Carville naturally claims The Clinton Foundation is one of the best at doing good but he ignores statistics which reveal The Foundation gives a very small portion of its income to charity but spends a high proportion on salaries and maintenance of the Clinton's life style. The Foundation attracts donations from the wealthy by delivering access. Even the Savannah Morning News felt compelled to devote an entire editorial Wednesday, castigating the Clinton's behaviour.
Several months ago I posted Charles Krauthammer's op ed explaining how the Clintons were running a corrupt charity at tax payer expense in order to maintain power and enhance their family wealth.
One has to wonder how long America will tolerate these leeches from Arkansas. The prospect of Hillary becoming president goes beyond frightening. It is disgusting. (See 1 and 1a below.)
As for the "Rajun Cajun" I thought he would have been in La. with Obama telling him how to conduct himself.
After Obama's visit his Justice Department issued a warning not to discriminate among people offering to rebuild. More racial divide efforts imputing prejudice to those who are suffering s a result of this tragedy? The man cannot help displaying his manifest antipathy towards white Americans .
But then, Obama's contempt for Congress and our Constitution is even greater.
His two Secretaries of State are among the worst ever. Neither are capable of telling the truth. But then lying is a pattern with this Administration. It is little wonder Americans have come to distrust their government, Their government distrusts them. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Explaining Hollywood and its love affair with liberals and the significance of low information voters
Yesterday, Hillary raised over $6 million while attending a Hollywood fund raiser sponsored by a highly placed executive of Apple Corp. Her Hollywood fund raising efforts continue in L.A today.(See 3 and 3a below.)
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What I hope the message you receive from this memo is the connective link among a press and media that no longer informs, an entertainment segment of our society that hammers home a singular message and an education system that fails to inform future citizens in an unbiased manner.
The liberal message covers every base and by the time citizens reach home plate and the voting booth their is no connection between what they believe and what Our Founding Fathers established and the dictates of our Constitution. Franklin is supposed to have said: 'we have a Republic if we can keep it 'but the trends are very ominously frightening.
Hillary's message is it is all a Right Wing Conspiracy!
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Dick
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1)
A Special Prosecute Her
There are now two troubling stories about Hillary Clinton’s ethics and conflicts of interest. In the first, more widely reported story, Hillary Clinton ran a private email server from her home that contained classified information susceptible to foreign hacking. Contrary to her public statements, Hillary Clinton’s server did contain information that was classified at the time of receipt or transmission.
On top of that, Hillary Clinton is under the impression that the FBI says she did nothing wrong. That is not at all what the FBI said, but for reasons that only the most partisan Democrats can fathom, the FBI and Department of Justice have decided to do nothing. The FBI Director, James Comey, largely admitted that they are taking this action because Hillary Clinton’s husband is a former President and she is a major party nominee for President.
Now the Associated Press is reporting that more than half of those who met with Mrs. Clinton while Secretary of State contributed to the Clinton Foundation. The Republican talking point here is somewhat complicated by their nominee also being a donor, but to my knowledge he had no pending business before the Secretary of State.
There has long been a suspicion of the Clintons making money off those who had business before the State Department. At a minimum it seems like a glaring conflict of interest. The cross over between the Foundation and State Department work of Huma Abedin raises numerous concerns that transcend partisan politics.
Americans increasingly distrust Washington, D.C. They see Washington protecting its own. They see President Obama and his administration protecting their preferred interests and the Republicans doing the same. Americans increasingly are cynical of their government and justice system.
As Americans more and more come to the conclusion that the justice system is skewed toward the powerful, they will respect that system less and less. Right now, Americans of both parties, independents, and Americans across the ideological spectrum believe there was something highly irregular about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Likewise, this new report of potential conflicts of interest at the State Department will only amplify those concerns.
The Department of Justice cannot, or at least should not, be seen as a partisan vehicle administering justice only to political opponents of the President. But more and more it seems that way. And we know that neither party is ever willing to step back. A Democrat administration willing to turn a blind eye to its powerful members’ potential corruption and criminal activity will only embolden the next Republican administration to keep the same precedent. The public’s trust in the system, already in a fragile state, will further erode.
There is not much distance between the public’s present trust of the system and rock bottom. At that point, we do risk a discredited system where people neither respect institutions nor adhere to the decrees of those institutions unless caught and punished.
President Obama owes it to the American people to see that justice is done, even to the rich and powerful and well connected. That includes Hillary Clinton. Further, where the perception of injustice and bias exist within our system, the President owes it as an obligation of stewardship in office to rebut that perception, lest that perception become viewed as a fact by American citizens.
We need a special prosecutor to remove the stench of partisan protection from these growing, serious news stories. Only an independent prosecutor will be able to restore the peoples’ trust in the institutions of justice within the federal government. That prosecutor need not be given the broad mandate of Ken Starr, but should look into both the conflicts of interest at the State Department and the email situation.
President Obama and the Attorney General should do their jobs, not protect their friends.
1a)
Hillary Lies Even When She Doesn’t Have To
By Ed Klein
Hillary Clinton has been caught lying again—and this time it’s serious, because she lied to the FBI, which is a federal crime punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment.
During her 3 ½-hour interview with the FBI on July 2, she told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use a personal email account during a private dinner.
Powell denies the story.
“The truth is she was using [her personal email] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did [when I was in office],” he told the New York Post’s Page Six. “Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”
Asked why Clinton’s team was attempting to blame him, he responded, “Why do you think?”
It will come as no surprise to those who have read my books that Hillary is a liar.
Of course, I was not the first person to make that discovery.
In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire labeled her a “congenital liar.”
Carl Bernstein , in his biography of Hillary, A Woman in Charge, noted that she indulged in “subterfuge and eliding.”
David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, famously said, “Everyone in politics lies, but [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
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2)
2a)
In 13 individual payments of $99,999,999.99, the Treasury Department moved a total of 1,299,999,999.87, which roughly amounts to the remaining money owed to Iran.
Obama Admin Won’t Tell Congress How It Paid Iran $1.3 Billion in Taxpayer Funds
Mystery still surrounds payout to Iran
John Kerry / AP
BY:
The Obama administration is withholding from Congress details about how $1.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds was delivered to Iran, according to conversations with lawmakers, who told the Washington Free Beacon that the administration is now stonewalling an official inquiry into the matter.
The Departments of State, Treasury, and Justice have all rebuffed a congressional probe into the circumstances surrounding the $1.3 billion payment to Iran, which is part of an additional $400 million cash payout that occurred just prior to the release of several U.S. hostages and led to accusations that the administration had paid Iran a ransom.
The Obama administration has admitted in recent days that the $400 million cash delivery to Iran was part of an effort to secure the release of these American hostages, raising further questions on Capitol Hill about White House efforts to suppress these details from the public.
The $400 million was part of a $1.7 billion legal settlement reached with Iran earlier this year. Congressional inquiries into how this money reached Iran are failing to get answers.
The State and Treasury Departments declined on Tuesday to answer a series of questions from the Free Beacon about the method in which U.S. taxpayer funds were paid to Iran.
The administration is also withholding key details about the payment from leading members of Congress, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Mike Lee (R., Utah), who launched an inquiry into the matter earlier this month.
The Departments of State, Treasury, and Justice all failed to respond to the inquiry by Monday’s deadline, according to congressional sources tracking the matter.
“The already bizarre circumstances surrounding the $1.7 billion payment to the Islamic Republic have only gotten stranger in the weeks since we learned of the $400 million in cash that was sent to the Iranian regime last January 16th,” Cruz said to the Free Beacon. “If this payment was, as the Obama administration insists, a straightforward settlement of an old debt that it would have cost America more to contest, why all the secrecy?”
The State Department said it does not know how the remaining $1.3 billion was transferred or to whom it was transferred. Cruz described this disclosure as “confounding.”
“It is even more confounding that the State Department spokesman claimed Monday not to know how or to whom the residual $1.3 billion was transferred, although he does know the transaction happened,” Cruz said. “That kind of money doesn’t just transfer itself to a rogue regime still under heavy U.S. sanctions for its sponsorship of terrorism. Someone in our government must have the answers the American people deserve.”
Cruz and Lee are seeking to determine if these payments violated U.S. law. They also requested information about the U.S. officials who negotiated and carried out the payments.
“While we are deeply concerned about the national security implications of the administration’s cash-for-hostages scheme, especially in light of reports that Iran has already arrested additional Americans, the purpose of this letter is to inquire about the legality of the payment,” the senators wrote in an Aug. 12 letter.
“It is imperative that the administration provide a full accounting of its conduct with respect to the $400 million cash payment to Iran,” they wrote. “If the administration violated the law, then Congress and the American people should be made aware of it so that they can hold the appropriate officials accountable and take whatever steps necessary to strengthen the law and prevent any reccurrence.”
While the administration has remained silent about the circumstances surrounding the payment, investigative reporter Claudia Rosett recently disclosed that the Treasury Department transferred just under $1.3 billion to the State Department in 13 “large identical sums.”
The funds, allocated for “foreign claims,” could shine a light on how the administration moved taxpayer funds into the State Department’s purview in order to provide the additional payment to Iran.
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3) The Symbiotic Relationship between Liberal Democrats and Hollywood
There is a mutually supportive relationship between Hollywood elites and the Democrat Party of the U.S. It is interesting to explore this relationship, how it benefits both, and why it continues. Every election cycle, candidates for the Democrat Party go to dinner parties in Hollywood and raise money from all movie industry attendants. These Hollywood dinner fundraisers are the most successful single day events in political campaigns. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton raised$8 million in one evening.
While everyone knows how the Democrat party benefits, the other side of the question is, how Hollywood benefits from their support of Democrats. The answer lies in the ability of Washington to focus the public’s awareness on social, political, and economic issues.
Hollywood and Washington pursue the same goal: to generate the support of the public. Hollywood wants people to buy tickets to see their movies. Liberal Democrats need voters to accept their policy positions and vote for them. The essential connection between Hollywood and liberal Democrats then, lies in the details of what Washington does to influence the preferences of the movie going public.
The origin of this influence is the public school system of the U.S. The American Federation of Teachers has 1.7 million members and the National Education Association has nearly three million members in 14,000 communities. Every day these teachers indoctrinate millions of students into the latest politicized topics, whether it be green energy or climate change. The schoolchildren then go back home and tell their parents about how important it is to control carbon emissions and undo global warming. These two big teacher unions are also two of the biggest campaign donors to Democrats in national as well as state political campaigns.
Hollywood knows that the public officials it finances through dinners will educate the movie going public on the latest topics. Then Hollywood, having a huge potential audience already educated on global warming and the environment, produces movies such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow to cash in on the ready-made audience.
And since most people in the U.S. live in urban areas, and the majority of cities are controlled by Democrats, Democrats have control of the messages most students receive in school. These messages are controlled by the U.S. Department of Education in Washington. They have bureaucrats who devise school projects and convey their messages to the students in the classroom.
So theatergoers leave the movie theater feeling that the ideas they were taught in school are true, and that the best party to protect the middle class is the Democrat Party. The main players in this education-Hollywood complex become very wealthy. Hollywood has a number of actors worth over $400 million, while the highest government pensions go to educators such as university administrators in Illinois who earn $300-$400K a year in retirement.
And oddly, the educators are never held up as rich enemies of the working class, they are not targeted for not paying their fair share of taxes, even though they protect their wealth using tax exempt investments just like Wall Street. Those who run the system are not ostracized, they are not put up to the public as violators of the public trust, as exploiters of the middle class, only the big corporations are. Students are never told about how public unions exploit them.
Actors who don’t play the Hollywood game are punished. Antonio Sabato Jr. found his Hollywood projects cancelled after he spoke at the RNC convention. But when actor Will Smith said America needs to be cleansed of Trump’s ideas, he was not punished. He toed the DNC-Hollywood line. The real reason Hollywood rejects messages from actors such as Sabato is that they don’t want their liberal-Hollywood messaging complex threatened.
These tactics are very effective and are continued after students graduate college: the major news media all sing from the same songbook. Most professors in colleges and universities describe themselves as liberal. They have to be: if they were not they would not be tenured, they won’t get a pension. Today at Illinois public universities half the tuition goes to pensions. This is how government finances censorship: through student loan debt.
The reason the themes of Hollywood movies are important is that they are proof of the symbiotic relationship: that only one standardized perspective will be portrayed in movies and this perspective will be carefully sculptured to enable the DNC to stay in power. The way this is done is by training K-12 and college students to accept only one point of view and punish dissenting opinions as politically incorrect. College students are encouraged to seclude themselves in “safe spaces” to avoid having diverse conversations. It’s a very subtle if Orwellian way to manipulate thought.
College and elementary school administrators are handsomely rewarded. They both make salaries measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and receive lifetime pensions worth millions. Today in Illinois the top 100 pensioners will earn $623 million if they live to age 81.
The losers are the American people. While they voluntarily go to see movies, the mindset they have, the understanding of wealth, society and the economy, is not freely chosen. It is indoctrinated into them by public-school teachers. And their skyrocketing property taxes, which increase the most in states run by Democrats, have driven them into a lower standard of living. Today Illinois has ten cities where all the property taxes paid by residents go solely to public pensions, primarily teacher pensions. They are forced to subsidize the system. They will pay far into the future. Today, there’s $5.6 trillion of unfunded pension debt. And this is never portrayed as exploitive of the middle class.
This multibillion-dollar “Triangle of Truth” involving Washington, Hollywood, and educators goes on year after year. There’s never an end to the new topics that are taught by public teachers, there’s no end to the Federal programs passed to cure them. There never will be, not as long as pubic unions are highly paid, subsidize Democrats in elections, and people pay to see liberal theme-based Hollywood movies.
Anyone who believes that the role of Republicans is intentionally being ignored, needs to learn that public sector unions and Hollywood only give to Democrats, and only liberal/Democrat policies are pursued in public schools.
3a) Why Low-Information Voters Are Worrisome
Sadly, we live in the era of the low-information voter. The second edition of Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance (2016) documents widespread political ignorance among today’s public, including voters. Although nonvoters are abysmally ignorant of politics, voters are not walking, talking political encyclopedias either. Americans are more likely to be well-informed about celebrities, such as the Kardashians, than about political leaders.
Consistent with earlier research, Somin estimates that nearly a third of the American public are “know-nothings,” who possess “little or no relevant knowledge” about public affairs. As he notes, “[i]f the public really is often ignorant [about public affairs], we might have a serious problem on our hands.” (Hint: We do!)
In addition -- either as a cause or a corollary -- a large portion of the public is politically apathetic. Except in times of crisis, most Americans don’t pay much attention to what happens in the political arena, and most don’t care much about what’s going on in U.S. politics. They are more concerned with personal and family matters than with public affairs.
(I do not mention America’s low voter turnout rates when writing about apathy. Although some focus on low turnout rates – relative to other western nations – when discussing apathy, voting is not always, and perhaps not even usually, a reliable indicator of how attentive people are to public affairs. Some people who are turned off by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may not vote in 2016, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t pay attention to public affairs.)
When it comes to the quest for the presidency in 2016, what are we to make of the fact that Americans are more familiar with Donald Trump the TV celebrity than they are with his policy proposals? In addition, substantial percentages of people who supported one of the Democrats seeking the presidency weren’t very well-informed about their favorite candidate. When young people who supported the 74-year-old socialist, Bernie Sanders, were asked to explain what socialism means, they tended to offer only vacuous definitions. In addition, one wonders what percentage of Hillary Clinton’s backers are aware of her promise to raise taxes by one trillion dollars over a ten-year period, and, if necessary, to do so via an executive order?
Americans’ political apathy and ignorance are especially worrisome when one considers that the U.S. political system was created by men who assumed – hoped? – that the Republic would be sustained by an engaged and informed populace. James Madison, often said to be the Constitution’s father, wrote that “[a] popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president, wrote that we should “[e]ducate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
If our republic ever was truly a government of, by, and for the people, that is but a dim memory. Today, the U.S. is governed by a ruling class – which constitutes at most only 15% of the populace, and that ruling class – dominated by Democrats, along with a few Republicans who are willing to be minority partners – has corrupted our country.
An obvious question for someone worried about the American public’s political apathy and ignorance is: “Hasn’t it been like this for decades? Therefore, what’s new?”
At first blush, one is inclined to answer yes, and thereby undermine much of the raison d’être for this essay.
On second thought, however, there are grounds for worrying about today’s political apathy and ignorance.
Compare, for example, the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 with those between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012. In 1960, a candidate had eight minutes to make a case, and his opponent then had two-and-one-half minutes to rebut him. Each candidate had three minutes for a closing statement. By 2012, each candidate had only two minutes to respond to a question posed by the moderator.
It isn’t just debates’ formats that bespeak shortened attention spans, and consequent increased ignorance. Campaign ads have grown briefer and briefer and consequently far less informative in recent decades. Ads are now much less likely to tout the qualities and policies of the candidate they are designed to favor, and far more inclined to stress the opponent’s negative qualities and/or policies. Patterns of media campaign coverage have deteriorated as well.
It would be wrong to assume that presidential debates are the only venue by which ordinary people learn about public affairs. We should remember, nevertheless, that the audiences for debates are larger and more heterogeneous than those for any other campaign-related event, including the national nominating conventions. Debate formats, moreover, can provide useful insights into the information base of public opinion at the time they are held. A candidate cannot convey the same quantity, and quality, of information in two minutes that Kennedy and Nixon could get across on an important issue in 1960.
Some say what this points to is the American public’s seriously shortened attention span since 1960. Whatever it says, the result is a less politically informed electorate these days than as recently as 1960.
Moreover, government, especially in the age of Obama, has never been bigger, more powerful, and more pervasive in Americans’ lives. As Somin notes, the bigger and more intrusive government is, the more it behooves citizens to be politically attentive and knowledgeable.
According to Madison, “a people who mean to be their own governors should arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Note Madison’s use of the word “arm” in the context of acquiring political information. If one is knowledgeable about public affairs, according to Madison and those who agree with him, one is armed with the facts that will enable her/him to defend herself/himself against the inevitable attempts by big government to limit liberty.
The attentive and knowledgeable citizen can defend herself/himself against governmental depredations. The apathetic and ignorant one is at the ruling class’s mercy.
If the typical citizen attaches far less importance to the political arena than to personal matters such as family, work, health, friends, and even entertainment, should we be surprised that in 2016 many people will cast ballots based on little, if any, knowledge of the major issues facing the nation, and of the candidates’ positions on those issues? Should we be surprised that both major parties have nominated presidential candidates with the highest disapproval rates on record? Should it surprise us that, in both parties, prospective candidates who may have been better qualified for the presidency than those who have been nominated either chose not to enter the nomination fray, or were eliminated from consideration?
If low-information voters constitute a large portion of today’s electorate, wouldn’t America’s Founders (assuming they could live again) be right to fear for the republic’s future? Shouldn’t we?
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