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I attended a meeting yesterday at which I learned about what a local hospital is doing to save the life of babies who are born prematurely. In the case discussed, the mother was addicted and taking drugs during her pregnancy. The baby was 2 lbs at premature birth and 93 days, later when the child left the hospital, it was 5 lbs.
The person talking to us said the issue of "crack" babies was reaching epidemic proportions and the cost to society and the long term harm to babies that survive was tragic. I mention this because technology is allowing babies who never would have survived to do so because equipment now exists that basically duplicates the mystery of the womb.
For Cuomo to favor legislation that legally allows aborting a child several days before a normal birth (due date) borders on murder. (See 1 below.)
Democrats believe voters do not have to present ID's, they oppose possession of guns, they want to tax one's assets and raise rates on the wealthy simply because they are wealthy, they support sanctuary cities, they seem to interpret our Constitution as supporting every entitlement they can dream up, free government medical care, free education, regardless of cost. They are pushing socialism and now seem to favor allowing a woman to abort her child several days before the due date .
This is only a partial list of the extremism Democrats embrace and are selling.
I find it hard to believe Democrats have allowed their party to be pushed so far left of mainstream thinking and still believe these candidates have a practical chance of election. If, in fact, any one of them is elected you can kiss MLK's and my America goodbye. Only a matter of time. (See 1a and 1b below.)
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Ocasio reveals her ignorance once again. (See 2 below.)
Dick
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1)
Democrats Think a Border Wall is Immoral and Infanticide is a Right
This is the state of play into 2020. Democrats have decided to blast through their own historic norms and go straight to radical socialism on the economic front and nihilist social policy. They are, in multiple states, rushing to expand abortion laws to include infanticide immediately after birth while declaring a border wall immoral.
They are championing wealth confiscation and massive income taxes, which would actually be paid by upper income professionals, not the billionaires the left claims. Why? Billionaires mostly play the capital gains tax rate, not the income tax rate.
Howard Schultz, the leftwing billionaire running for President, has some pretty convincing polling that a significant portion of Democrats would rather go with an independent centrist than a progressive Democrat like Elizabeth Warren or Kamal....
Read More..
1a) The State of Trump’s Union
The Democrats’ carpet-bombing of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz’s third-party bid proves one thing: The party thinks whoever it nominates to run against Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.
He won in 2016 in part because so many people voted “against” Hillary Clinton. Now Democrats believe the midterm election results—in which Democrats defeated Republicans in competitive suburban districts everywhere—show that their best bet is to reduce the 2020 election to ABT—Anyone But Trump.
The Dreamers—innocent bystanders to an immigration system Mr. Trump calls “a source of shame”—are the biggest unclaimed political prize in American politics.
1a) The State of Trump’s Union
Here’s how to make sure Nancy Pelosi rises to applaud the president’s speech.
By
The Democrats’ carpet-bombing of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz’s third-party bid proves one thing: The party thinks whoever it nominates to run against Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.
Rather than the distractions of an independent candidate asking what the meaning of “free” is (free health care, free college, free lunch) Democrats want voters focused all the time on Mr. Trump’s bumptious, chaotic personality.
It could be that a lot of voters are on the Trump bubble. But the left’s hysteria over an outlier like Howard Schultz is intriguing. It suggests that if Mr. Trump is re-elected, Democrats are planning to stage a sort of political Jonestown, which for some might be reason enough to vote for the devil you know.
It also suggests that if the Democrats expect to win in 2020 with a strategy of subtraction, then anything additive Mr. Trump can do to make the case for his presidency will put his 40 or 50 Democratic presidential opponents in a hole.
On Tuesday the world will be watching his State of the Union speech. This would be the moment, nearly two years before the election, to wrap this thing up. He could do that by saving the Dreamers.
The Dreamers—innocent bystanders to an immigration system Mr. Trump calls “a source of shame”—are the biggest unclaimed political prize in American politics.
Polls, such as those done by Pew Research, conclude that what most people want is both border security and a solution for the Dreamers.
During the shutdown fight, President Trump pressed his case for a wall and secure border. Nothing new there. What was new, oddly so, was that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer effectively left the Dreamers out of their arguments. They had only one idea: Whatever Donald Trump is for, we’re against.
The left has pushed the notion that Mr. Trump is racist and anti-immigrant. Implanting that idea more deeply into voters’ minds is surely the reason the Democrats have chosen Stacey Abrams, the black woman and Georgia gubernatorial candidate, to give the party’s reply to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday speech.
The Democrats assume they’ll gain ground with uncommitted voters by posing Ms. Abrams’s presence against what they assume will be Mr. Trump’s riffs on Central American gangs, rapists, drug smugglers and homicidal aliens.
If, in addition, Mr. Trump stands before the world and proposes permanent legal status for the Dreamers and an eventual path to citizenship, the Democrats running on ABT are done. Once Mr. Trump takes the Dreamers away from the Democrats, they’ll never recover.
In the midterm elections, 40 Democrats won in traditionally Republican House districts. Now they are on the bubble. Among those freshman Democrats, Reps. Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Angie Craig (Minn.) have recently acknowledged the need to do more on border security. So has Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat on Congress’s 17-member solve-the-shutdown committee.
But won’t the Trump base abandon him if he saves the Dreamers? Well, yes, he is likely to lose the votes of four or five restrictionist pundits, who will insult him for “caving.” This proposal is too big to be a cave. Mr. Trump has to decide whether the right’s minimal-immigration faction helps or hurts him. The Republicans’ stunning November losses in the Houston and Dallas suburbs suggests this sort of rejectionism has now put Texas—and Mr. Trump—at risk.
As to the real Trump base, he said something once about getting away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and that is still true. But that mindless stereotype is unfair to most of the people who voted for Mr. Trump. Are some anti-immigrant nativists? Yes, and some of the people who will vote for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren in 2020 are anti-Catholic bigots. Welcome to real life.
For the bulk of Mr. Trump’s base, what’s at stake here is mainly two things: the rule of law broadly and border security, which means making a good-faith effort at control, not some impossible leakproof thing.
Mr. Trump put himself in a bind when he said in his nationally televised meeting with Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer that he would take “responsibility” for the shutdown. They went to ground and let him take the blame.
Now Mr. Trump gets to reset the stakes Tuesday by describing the state of the American union. If with that audience he’s the one who invites the Dreamers into the union, see if Nancy Pelosi, on camera right behind him, is the last one in the room still seated. That won’t be a good look.
MLK's legacy is about moral clarity, not easy analogies
Editor's Note: (Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist and distinguished fellow at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. He serves as legal analyst for CBS News Radio and discusses Middle East politics for various cable news networks. The views expressed here are the author's.
Recently, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (although it has also surfaced in Black Lives Matter and amid calls for greater "intersectionality" on college campuses), the civil rights movement, which King led, and the struggle for Palestinian statehood, have been analogized and morally linked -- in ways that might have surprised King himself.
These tortured analogies reject everything King represented. After all, he preached peaceful and "passive nonviolent resistance," both a term of art and a strategy that most Palestinian leaders have never embraced. It's not that they haven't seen "Gandhi." It's that too many of them are dedicated to eradicating Israel, not living beside it. Yes, some Fatah leaders have proposed or advocated a nonviolent resolution to the conflict, but most of them aren't following the path of Gandhi or King.
Michelle Alexander, a columnist for The New York Times, took the occasion of King's day of remembrance to demonstrate her moral courage. She pointed out that when King spoke out against the Vietnam War, he risked alienating anti-Communist Americans and even allies of his movement. But he was a man of conscience, and he could not remain silent.
Unlike President's Day, Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday doesn't inspire mattress sales but rather moments to reflect on matters of racial justice and civil society. Delving into one's own conscience -- as Alexander did to see how she measures up next to King -- is a valuable exercise that many people should emulate this time of year.
Fortunately, like King, she, too, has a pulpit, and she used it to proclaim that there is far too much silence surrounding Palestinian suffering, which she refers toas one of the "great moral challenges of our time." In breaking her own silence, she metaphorically locks arms with King and speculates that were he alive today, he, too, would have become a critic of Israel.
Remarkably, there's not a word in her commentary about genocides in Syria or Myanmar, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen or the occupations in Tibet, Northern Cyprus, Kurdistan or Kashmir. These crisis zones suffer from conditions far worse than mere silence. Most Americans are unaware of their existence at all. And it is also in such places where moral judgment is arguably easier to render than in the murkier precincts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, for Alexander, the injustices against the Palestinians are the most in need of heralding, and the demonization of Israel is the most urgent.
In a region of the world where the stoning and dismembering of women and the torching of homosexuals are treated by some as mere oddities of moral relativism, Alexander could have mentioned many countries that, as she phrases it in her piece, perpetrate "injustices beyond our borders," but she singled out Israel for condemnation.
Why? Despite widespread slanders of ethnic cleansing, there is no genocide against the Palestinians. Their people, in fact, have doubled in population since 1967. Nor are Israel's practices, as Alexander assesses, "reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States," surely not when Arabs serve on the Israeli Supreme Court and can live, work and eat anywhere they choose, vote freely in elections and are represented in parliament. While Israel may be an imperfect democracy, there is no institutionalized racism there that bears any resemblance to Jim Crow -- something King would surely recognize if he were walking the streets of Tel Aviv today.
Alexander reserves her own silence for the real reason for Israel's security fence: not separation but survival.
Alexander's invocation of King is even more disingenuous when one considers that he, and nearly all the leaders of the civil rights movement, were avowed Zionists. Even earlier, in 1948 when the State of Israel was established, the NAACP passed a resolution supporting it. These crusaders for justice didn't see colonial enterprise at work in Jews being given a state in their once-ancestral homeland.
Moreover, they deeply resented any attempts to misappropriate their cause, hijack their language or conflate their struggle with that of others. King feared the very thing that is happening today: diluting the essence of racial justice by introducing false analogies, such as comparing Israel to South Africa, or Gaza to Selma. King was among the first to see how anti-Zionism was a smokescreen for anti-Semitism. He famously said, "when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism!" And he was not alone. More than 200 African-American leaders publicly rejected the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver called it a "travesty upon truth."
The alliance between African-Americans and Jews, which helped galvanize the civil rights era, began to fray by the 1970s. Today it is largely forgotten. Thedisunity within the Women's March and charges of anti-Semitism against some of its founding leaders (which those leaders have denied) is emblematic of this lost love. Black Lives Matter, with its origins in Ferguson, Missouri, coincided with the 2014 war in Gaza. Together they became twin cities of solidarity,inspiring dangerously false comparisons -- like Israel's separation barrier being analogized to maximum-security prisons.
Alexander is not alone in her thinking, although her argument is one-sided and lacks the historical complexity that defines this longstanding dispute. Even many liberal Jews have grown weary of Israel's continued custody over a people with dreams of self-determination. Israel, an otherwise young country, is perceived as a colonial oppressor -- as if Jews have no connection to these biblical lands, despite what the Bible actually says.
King, a reverend himself, famously invoked the saying, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Surely justice should bend for the Jewish people and their homeland, too. Yet, a number of Palestinian leaders, and some in the enabling BDS movement (those who support the boycotting of, divesting from and sanctioning of Israel), are unequivocal in singling out Israel as illegitimate. No two-state solution for them. They are interested in a very different kind of contortion than the one King contemplated -- one of breakage, not bending.
The romance of King's legacy transcends the national holiday and extends throughout the year -- especially in black churches and on college campuses. In 2013, throughout the month of King's birthday, the University of Pennsylvania hosted a Commemorative Symposium on Social Change. Two of the events perpetuated the very canard that King himself debunked -- the falsehood that Zionism is racism. The organization Penn for Palestine screened a film, "Roadmap to Apartheid," and BDS supporters hosted a discussion, "From Birmingham to Nablus." And at universities around the country, student protesters conflate the legacy of King and other civil rights leaders with events such as "Israel Apartheid Week," mock checkpoints and "die-ins," and the posting of mock eviction notices on the doors of dormitories.
How does a skewed understanding of the plight of the Palestinians honor King's legacy of truth? After all, the Palestinians could have had a state of their own, even if it meant sacrificing some important security and nationality priorities, had they accepted the various land-for-peace proposals that Israel offered over the years. King received prison sentences and death threats, not olive branches, from Southern governors. If he were alive today, he might lament the squandered opportunities for peace.
It is certainly true that what King believed in the 1960s, when Israel was regarded as a socially-democratic underdog, may have changed over time as it became a regional superpower. Five decades later, with the expansion of settlements, two intifadas, checkpoints and curfews, King's romance with Israel might have waned. He could still admire its religious freedom, pluralistic makeup and start-up moxie, but the fate of the Palestinians might have weighed on him, too.
As for violence perpetrated by Palestinians, especially within Hamas but also, to some degree, among Palestinians living in the West Bank, in a world of hardened absolutes, King might, as others did, have come to doubt the virtues of nonviolent resistance. After all, should the moral claims of a people for self-determination be forfeited simply because so many of them resort to violence? King was not unfamiliar with such moral and tactical conflicts. He had competition, in Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, for the hearts of African-Americans. If the cause of a people is just, does their moral authority disappear simply because they employ violent means -- even if they sacrifice their own civilians for a perceived greater good?
Unlike Alexander, I can't speak for King -- but I believe it does. Moral authority, not to mention global sympathy, can be forfeited when some leaders, when choices are presented to them, consistently choose rejectionism over pragmatism and reconciliation.
This much we do know. The only nation in the Middle East or Persian Gulf where civil rights exist for racial minorities, homosexuals and women is Israel. It is to Israel where Ethiopian Jews were airlifted from Sudan, escaping famine and civil war, and where an Israeli-born Ethiopian woman was in 2013 crowned Miss Israel. It's also in Israel where a forest is named for King.
Some essential truths, like the moral clarity of nonviolence, are beyond distortion. And Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and the various efforts undertaken to memorialize him throughout the year are not the time to undermine that.
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2)
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to a criticism of her from former Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz on Wednesday by portraying herself as a victim of classism and ended up embarrassing herself.
"I respect the Democratic Party. I no longer feel affiliated because I don't know their views represent the majority of Americans. I don't think we want a 70 percent income tax in America," Schultz said in a CNBC interview on Monday. "The way I’ve come to this decision is, I believe that if I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things that I know in my heart I do not believe, and I would have to be disingenuous."
2)
Ocasio-Cortez Attacks Howard Schultz, Embarrasses Herself With Major Mistake
By Ryan Saavedra
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to a criticism of her from former Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz on Wednesday by portraying herself as a victim of classism and ended up embarrassing herself.
"I respect the Democratic Party. I no longer feel affiliated because I don't know their views represent the majority of Americans. I don't think we want a 70 percent income tax in America," Schultz said in a CNBC interview on Monday. "The way I’ve come to this decision is, I believe that if I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things that I know in my heart I do not believe, and I would have to be disingenuous."
"Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for President that they need to 'work their way up' or that 'maybe they should start with city council first'?" Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Ocasio-Cortez's tweet suggests that she most likely did not know about Schultz's background, which is a literal rags-to-riches story. Business Insider reported:
- Schultz was born on July 19, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said growing up in the projects — "loosely described as the other side of the tracks"
- He experienced poverty at an early age. When Schultz was 7 years old, his father broke his ankle while working as a truck driver picking up and delivering diapers. At the time, his father had no health insurance or worker's compensation, and the family was left with no income.
Schultz worked various low-level jobs — including as a bartender, which was Ocasio-Cortez's previous occupation — until he landed a sales role at Xerox. Schultz left Xerox for a role at a housewares company called Hammarplast, where he worked his way up to vice president. While working at Hammarplast, Schultz discovered Starbucks and later convinced Starbucks to hire him as the director of retail operations and marketing. Several years later, Schultz bought Starbucks and eventually went on to become a self-made billionaire. That is the very definition of someone "working their way up."
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