Max has a loving big sister.
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Having slept through the first debate I can only comment on the reviews, which I did in the previous memo. I found Pocahontas disingenuous. She brazenly added a moral component to all her complaints about what is wrong with America while trying to finesse her own behaviour and outright efforts to lie about her own background and why she chose to say what she did.She remains a flawed opportunist with rdical idea in my mind.
I continue to be pained by those who believe you can turn tormented mushrooms into giants.
Tonight I listened to the debate for about 15 minutes. The kindest thing I can say is the number of candidates and the format lend themselves to theater and not depth. At worst, the more I listened the more nauseous I became.
These people are insane.
They should all be deemed " go one better angry nut cases. "
Harris seems to have won the night. Harris is nice looking and was, Willie Brown's mistress., Brown was Speaker of the California House and Mayor of San Francisco.
She also acted in a despicable manner at the Kavanaugh Hearings. and comes across as one angry female.
I did not have an adding machine but it would have been useful considering every prospective candidate was outdoing each other in coming up with freebies and seeking to avoid enforcing laws.
She purposely attacked Biden for voting against busing. Busing actually was a lousy way to enforce a good decision. Yes, it meant young kids were forced to get up very early, go to better schools and then come home late . The response was whites re-integrated and black school children became pawns. I would have transferred the teachers increased the physical assets (read schools) in black neighborhood and support black parents to move wherever they chose.
What The Supreme Court accomplished was a variety of unintended consequences and made young black students pay the price.
Last night's candidates are not the way responsible and serious adults act. How pathetic.
Everything has become an entitlement because everyone, all 330 million Americans are not , nor will they ever be, until we spend more money, let government control our lives and reintroduce Obama by electing Biden and Pamela as his VP because a black women sets the tone as America goes down the drain.
Last night I heard distortion and lies. An isolated and perfect example is that Trump will not include prior conditions in his health plan." This is a blatant lie and the head of The DNC is full of crap. Another is angry Bernie's charge that Trump is a pathological liar and hater.
This is a sick way to try and become president.
In essence, I keep hearing a lot of words and compassionate failed ideas that favor the plight of illegals caused by bad policies and cowardly politicians who have screwed Hillary's our own citizens and who believe if we add more to the list of deplorables and ignore the cost all will work out because liberals are expert at doing God's work.
After all, doing God's work while mocking those who are truly religious feels so good and is so hypocritical! (See 1 and 1a below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hanson on Iran. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Second Debate Night Circus More heat than night one, but not any more light.
By Joseph Klein
Posted By Ruth King
Two white male septuagenarians were the headliners of the second Democrat primary debate held in Miami on Thursday night. Barack Obama’s vice president Joe Biden and Socialist-Democrat Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, leaders of the pack so far in early polling, had the opportunity to go head-to-head, without the distraction of “rising star” Senator Elizabeth Warren on the same stage. She had her place in the spotlight on what turned out to be Wednesday night’s undercard. But the expected jousting never took place. Sanders and Biden largely ignored each other and tried to stick to their respective talking points. Sanders was the revolutionary demanding major transformational change. Biden was the experienced public servant who knew how to get things done. The only issue that they directly sparred on directly with each other was the war in Iraq, which Biden voted for as senator and Sanders opposed.
After the two main contenders, the middle of the pack at Thursday’s debate was represented by California Senator Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The also-rans included John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s former governor; Colorado Senator Michael Bennet; New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand; California Representative Eric Swalwell; writer and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
There is hardly any difference in terms of the leftward-leaning direction the candidates want to take the country. The differences among the candidates lie in their styles of delivery and the speed of transformative change they want to bring about.
The candidates were totally aligned with each other in making President Trump their punching bag. There were 52 mentions of Trump during this second debate, 17 more than on the first night.
Sanders spewed the most pejoratives, calling President Trump a racist, a pathological liar and a phony in one breath. He said that he would expose President Trump as “the fraud that he is.” Biden said that President Trump has ripped the soul out of America and destroyed alliances. Harris called the president America’s leading national security threat. Hickenhooper called him “the worst president in history.” Williamson accused the president of “harnessing fear for political purposes,” which she said she would counter with “love.” And so on.
President Trump’s immigration policies in particular came under fire. The candidates appealed to raw emotion. Their common refrain was to blame the president for “children in cages,” ignoring the fact that children languished in detention during the Obama years.
The candidates offered no solutions to the humanitarian crisis at the border that would ensure the security of the American people. Most of the candidates would de-criminalize illegal entry. All the candidates raised their hands when asked if they would support a health care plan that would cover “undocumented” (i.e., illegal) immigrants. They were clueless to the fact that sanctuary cities, loophole-ridden asylum laws, and lots of free goodies are the magnets that lure more and more people from Central America to make the dangerous trek north in the first place. Making life easier for illegal immigrants, including offering them a path to citizenship, and sending millions of dollars more to the corrupt regimes in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are more important to the Democrat candidates than saving American lives and jobs.
Kamala Harris appeared to have had the best night of the ten candidates. First, she came across as the adult in the room, shutting off cross-talk with this quip: “America does not want to witness a food fight, they want to know how we’re going to put food on their table.” Later on during the debate, in what was certainly the most dramatic exchange of the evening, Harris said, “As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak, on the issue of race.” Harris then confronted Biden on race in very personal terms, looking directly at him as she spoke. She excoriated Biden for his remarks on working well with segregationist senators and his opposition as a young senator to busing as a means to achieve integration.
After saying that she did not think that Biden was a racist, Harris said that Biden’s remarks about the segregationist senators were nevertheless “hurtful.” Then she went in for the kill, as Biden could only look on. “It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.”
Biden tried to defend himself by falling back on what he said was his long record of fighting for civil rights. He also tried to minimize the extent to which he had been originally opposed to busing, which he implied that Harris was mischaracterizing.
Bernie Sanders tried to get his 2016 “revolution” mojo back. Gesticulating to make his points, he came out swinging during the first few moments of the debate, aggressively defending his go for broke policy proposals such as Medicare for All, cancellation of student debt and free public college tuition. His problem, however, is they no longer seems so novel as they were in 2016. Other candidates, especially Elizabeth Warren, have stolen his thunder. This time, he came across as a one trick pony, repeating endlessly how we must all rise up against the special interests of Wall Street and the insurance, big pharma, and fossil fuels industries. The audience reaction was not what Sanders was used to his last time around the track.
When Rep. Eric Swalwell said it was time for the elders in the field to pass the torch to a new generation — quoting what Biden had said during his own 1988 presidential campaign – Sanders again turned the issue back to his class warfare theme. “The issue if I may say is not generational. The issue is who has the guts to take on Wall Street, to take on the fossil fuel industry to take on the big money interests,” he said.
Sanders admitted that the middle class would face a tax increase under his Medicare for All proposal but claimed that they would save money over all by not having to pay any deductibles, co-pays or premiums. “Yes they will pay more in taxes but less in health care for what they get,” Sanders said. This is snake oil. Medicare participants today, who have paid into the system, still have to meet deductibles, make co-payments, and in some cases pay additional premiums. There is no reason to expect that Medicare for All will be more generous. In fact, it will almost certainly be less generous as many more people will enter the system. Sanders also said at one point that people would be able to choose their own doctors under his plan, perhaps forgetting that Obama had made the same false claim about Obamacare.
Sanders also made the strange suggestion that it would be constitutional to rotate justices in and out of the Supreme Court to bring new blood onto the Court. Appointments to the Court are for life.
Joe Biden managed to avoid any damaging gaffes, even during his dust up with Kamala Harris that turned out to be the low point of the evening for Biden. Biden confidently portrayed himself as both the experienced pragmatic incrementalist, who is willing to reach across the aisle to get things done, and as the restorer of American values. He also tethered himself to the record of the Obama-Biden administration, particularly on climate change and on Obamacare. Biden praised Obama as the first leader to bring the world together on climate change, referring to the Paris agreement on climate change from which President Trump decided to withdraw the United States. Biden neglected to mention the grossly disproportionate economic burdens the Paris agreement would have placed on the United States. It was a terrible deal, certainly not one to brag about. When discussing Obamacare, which he promised to build upon, Biden inserted a personal note about the tragedies his family has suffered over the years. He declared that he “can’t fathom” what his family would have done without health insurance.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg responded to a question about his handling of the police killing of a black man in his city fairly well, considering the tough week that he had back in South Bend. He accepted responsibility for what happened and expressed his determination “to bring about a day when a white person driving a vehicle and a black person driving a vehicle, when they see a police officer approaching, feels the exact same thing … a feeling not of fear but of safety.”
Buttigieg also delivered what may have been the funniest jibe against President Trump on an otherwise humorless evening. In responding to a question on which foreign relationships each of the candidates would focus on improving first, Buttigieg replied, “We have no idea which of our most important allies [Trump] will have pissed off most” by 2020.
All in all, the second debate was more interesting than the first but no more enlightening. Kamala Harris did very well. Sanders did not. And Biden managed to hold his own despite some bruising from Harris’s offensive on race. Although there were a few moderate voices urging the Democrat Party not to go down the path of socialism, most of the candidates were too afraid of aliening the leftist base of the party. The circus rolls on.
1a)
Obama Built The ‘Cages’ for Illegals, Not Trump, Says Obama ICE Chief
By Matt Margolis
Posted By Ruth King
It was only a few months ago that Democrats were dismissing the crisis at the border as manufactured by Trump, and now they’re comparing migrant detention centers to concentration camps and blaming Trump for “putting kids in cages.”
But for those still trying to blame President Trump, Barack Obama’s former ICE chief, Thomas Homan, has a reality check for them. Speaking at a conference hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, Homan explained that the “cages” Democrats are blaming on Trump were the product of the Obama administration:
“I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built,” said Thomas Homan, who was Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly four years.
At an immigration conference today, Homan, under consideration for a new position of “border czar” in the Trump administration, grew visibly angry answering a question about “cages” often cited by Democratic critics of the president.
Homan, who ran Obama’s successful deportation operation, ripped Democrats who question Trump immigration officials on the Obama-era idea.
He cited one Democratic chairman who asked a Trump official, “You still keeping kids in cages?”
Homan, at the conference hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “I would answer the question, ‘The kids are being housed in the same facility built under the Obama administration.’ If you want to call them cages, call them cages. But if the left wants to call them cages and the Democrats want to call them cages then they have to accept the fact that they were built and funded in FY 2015.”
Homan explained that the fencing that separates kids from adults is done for safety reasons. “It’s chain link dividers that keeps children separate from unrelated adults. It’s about protecting children,” he said. He also added it’s only temporary
accommodations until they are moved elsewhere by the Department of Health and Human Services. According to a Google News search, only conservative media seems to be talking about Homan’s comments. Gee, I wonder why.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book,Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published on July 30, 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The U.S. asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace.
Antiwar critics of Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast him as a weak, vacillating leader afraid to call Iran to account.
Trump supporters countered that the president had shown Iran a final gesture of patience—and cleared the way for a stronger retaliation should Iran foolishly interpret his one-time forbearance as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated.
The charge of Trump being an appeaser was strange coming from leftist critics, especially given Trump’s past readiness to bomb Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons, his willingness to destroy ISIS through enhanced air strikes, and his liberation of American forces in Afghanistan from prior confining rules of engagement.
The truth is that Iran and the United States are now engaged in a great chess match. But the stakes are not those of intellectual gymnastics.
The game is no game, but involves the lives, and possible deaths, of thousands.
The latest American-Iranian standoff is not like that of 1979-1981, when theocratic revolutionaries removed the Shah, stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and took American hostages for 444 days—and humiliated America.
Iran fears there are now no such American liabilities. Forty years later, America has no presence in Iran. It has long since given up on bringing Tehran back into the Western fold.
There are no Americans in Iran to be kidnapped and no Iranian allies inside Iran to be saved. Iran has no leverage over the United States, at least not as it did in 1979.
Nor is the current confrontation reminiscent of the 2003-2011 tensions in the region. The United States is not fighting a ground war in the Middle East, much less one on the border of Iran.
The U.S. no longer believes in nation-building the autocratic Middle East into Western-style democracies. American troops are not in jeopardy from Iranian ground attacks. Americans have no financial or psychological capital invested in liberalizing Iraq, much less Iran and its environs.
Nor is the situation like the chronic Iranian tensions of the last 40 years in which an oil-dependent U.S. feared Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, or the sudden cutoff of imported oil, ensuring Nixon-era gas lines.
America is now the largest producer of gas and oil in the world, soon to be the largest exporter as well. The U.S. economy is booming. Iran’s is imploding.
The economies of China, Japan and Europe depend on the free flow of Middle Eastern oil. But China is currently in a trade war of nerves with the United States. An appeasing Europe doesn’t have the desire to help ramp up sanctions on Iran to prevent its nuclearization, nor is it eager to accede to U.S. entreaties to increase defense spending and enhance the NATO alliance. Japan is trying to deny Iranian aggression in fear that the global oil market might spike on news of Persian Gulf tensions.
In other words, both allies and enemies expect the United States to ensure that their shipping and their oil are safe.
Nor are we too concerned for our longtime ally Israel with regard to Iran. An impoverished Iran is bereft of allies and remains an international pariah, desperate to sell its embargoed oil to any rogue autocracy shameless enough to buy it. Israel is nuclear and has never been militarily stronger. It is now self-sufficient in oil and gas.
Israel has forged new ties with China, Russia and the European Union, and renewed its traditionally close relationship with the United States.
Iran’s neighbors in the Arab world are either in a mess or clandestinely allied with Israel. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas have never been weaker vis-a-vis Israel.
Time is on the American side. Each day Iran grows weaker and poorer, and the U.S. stronger and richer.
Iran’s only hope is to draw the Trump administration into a messy Iraq-like ground war, or, at worst, a Balkans-style, months-long bombing campaign—with plenty of CNN footage of civilian collateral damage.
How, then, can the U.S. deter Iranian escalation without getting into an unpopular war before the heated 2020 election? It merely needs to persist in the present standoff: Ramp up the sanctions even tighter and ignore pathetic Iranian attacks on foreign ships.
If Tehran preemptively attacks an American ship or plane, it will be met by a disproportionate response, preferably one aimed not at civilian infrastructure but at the Iranian military hierarchy, Revolutionary Guard and theocratic elite.
Otherwise, the Trump administration can sit back and monitor Iran’s international ostracism and economic isolation while remaining unpredictable and enigmatic, ready to hit back hard at any attack on Americans but without being suckered into an optional war with Iran in the perennial Middle East quagmire.
Otherwise, the Trump administration can sit back and monitor Iran’s international ostracism and economic isolation while remaining unpredictable and enigmatic, ready to hit back hard at any attack on Americans but without being suckered into an optional war with Iran in the perennial Middle East quagmire.
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