As I often say, I am a pessimist by nature and a contrarian thinker. As the Jewish New Year begins I decided, as I always do, to put on my optimistic yarmulke and use that as a basis for judging the ensuing year. That said, I still believe a pessimist is someone who has met too many optimists.
So what can go right:
Trends have a way of dying and reversing. America is a very big country and, as a people, we tire quickly and are an impatient lot - "Go West type.". Also, the mass media is in business to make money, no longer inform just entertain. T they can only devote so much time to a single subject. Therefore, I believe the nation is tiring of riots and soon we will have calmer streets, particularly if Trump is re-elected because he will assume he was to stop this nonsense and Atty Gen Barr is certainly in that camp.
Second, if Trump is re-elected, I believe the economy will recover faster, momentum and consumer attitudes/confidence will improve and we will get back on track and head in the pre-pandemic direction which was basically favorable.
Third, I do believe Trump will be re-elected so that bodes well for 2 above. Can you imagine America recharging itself from Biden's gloomy rhetoric, Kamala's nastiness and carping pressure from the Bernie, AOC , Muslim wing of the radical Democrat Party? I see it as a turn off and I do not believe that is what most Americans want to experience after having their lives so impacted by China.
Fourth, should Amy become the next Justice then the prospect of The SCOTUS's direction will, over time, move away from legislating and less controversial decisions might ensue. Liberals will continue to scream and yell but so what. It is now time for conservative thinking to become more prominent and controlling. This means a return to our base, so to speak. More oil on the turbulent waters.
Fifth, awareness of the threat China poses has come front and center and away from Russia. Putin will continue to be a menace but Russia is not the force/power they once were and China is an even greater and growing threat.
Trump is aware of both the military and commercial threat China poses and you cannot confront a problem unless you are aware it even exists. When it comes to corporate theft, using our universities to spy etc. Trump and, now, the Pentagon are aware and even a few members of Congress are up to speed. This can be a rallying point for congressional bi-partisanship.
Fifth, prospects for improving Israeli/Arab relationships, and the blessings that can flow from that, are just beginning to sprout.
Sixth, what Trump began was short circuited politically, legally and administratively by renegade radical Trump Hating Congress persons, namely led by Schumer and Pelosi and I believe Americans are fed up with them and the same for AOC and her Muslim and black congressional nut cases like Waters.
Consequently, Trump should have plenty of opposition but it will not be as disruptive and effective. The man is an impatient, intolerant doer and has learned what power he has at his disposal and can now use same more effectively and in a less encumbered/restricted manner.
There is much that needs to be done by way of infrastructure, MAGA, health care, protecting the survival of SS, Medicare and other critical commitments etc.
I am sure I missed a few items and, of course, where are the unknowns that can throw progress into a cocked hat?
One, Iran's desire for retribution and the Ayatollah's need to survive.
Two, Too much debt and unfunded pension funds.
Three, the ever present threat from the Soros's types who are well funded and committed to bring about our republic's demise. In this category I put the Obama crowd.
I hope my silent majority, deplorable optimism is justified.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This from a dear friend and former institutional client:
The Sam Harris podcast linked by the essay is compelling. He and I do not share tenets of the same faith, nor do we occupy similar points on a political spectrum, but I thought his mental model construction to be well formed and very illuminating.
Quillette continues to be a very good source of thought provoking insight. R------
Many urbanites who thought they’d take a long vacation and get back to the city once the pandemic passed, are now considering sticking around in suburbs and rural areas and not just because of the pandemic.
The organization's top heads are apparently three founding woman and, I seriously doubt, they have an extensive employee structure. Those who riot are paid from other sources and BLM does not spend any money reimbursing black proprietors for destruction their ilk have caused or the furtherance of Black Lives, which, they profess, they want to save because they matter. Matter for what? Pawns to shake down others to finance their Marxist ways?
The bleeding hearts got snookered again.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Happy days are here again
Democrat voter fraud is no sin
What's a little corrupt vote fun
When you can rob without a gun.
Excerpts from the below article:
"...It is an unfortunate reality that elections can be stolen outright by mail ballot fraud. Election fraud, particularly an organized mail ballot fraud scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in voter disenfranchisement and corruption at the highest level.
Mail ballots are vulnerable to diversion, coercion, and influence by organized vote harvesting schemes. This case demonstrates my commitment to ensuring Texas has the most secure elections in the country, and I thank the Gregg County Sheriff and District Attorney for their continued partnership. Those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas must be held accountable..."
Democrat Primary: Arrests Made in Illegal Ballot Harvesting Scheme
As previously noted, we left Saturday, Sept. 26 and were on the road when Trump announced his Judicial nominee for SCOTUS. If the nominee is the Catholic mother, Democrats on the committee may bury themselves by "borking" her because of her commitment to her faith fearing she will override Roe v Wade. If they take this route I believe they will receive voter blowback as they did when they besmirched Kavanaugh.
Should Trump go with the other favored candidate, a Cuban/American Justice it might help him more, politically speaking, with the Hispanic Community and conservatives who seem to prefer her candidacy.
Time will tell. Either way, Trump will be able to select 3 Justices in 4 years. Quite amazing. Leaked before we left and it was AMY - Ray Bolger's Once In Love With Amy, Always In Love With Amy.
First, Feinstein's Chinese driver turned out to be was a spy now this. She and other Democrats also want to use an un-constitutional religious test for higher office against Trump's possible Catholic Nominee to replace RBG.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This critical information has been stonewalled and should have come out several years ago. More than $40 Million of tax payer money was wasted along with the disruption of a lawful president.
I think Wray's head is on the block as well it should be. He has proven to be a foot dragger.
We will look back on the last four years, from the time Trump and Melania, came down the escalator and he announced he was running for the presidency, as among the most blatantly corrupt period in the history of the Oval Office.
As we are learning, belatedly, because of stonewalling and mass media efforts to cover up same, sleazy Democrats, as is their tendency, engaged in conduct which they attributed to Trump in order to wreck, not only his ability to perform, but also to attack the underlying pillars of our nation.
Their collective actions border on sedition. Their purchase of insurance policies, their contempt for the FISA Courts, their obtaining of illegal warrants, their false dossiers, their corruption and use of the FBI and our intelligence agencies to trap Administration officials are beyond belief.
The complexity of their intrigue and employment of skilled tactics to thwart efforts to discover what they were doing will go down in the annals of our republic as contempt for democratic governance, adherence to the rule of law and, lamentably, continues to this day as the Democrat Party continues association with radicals who want to destroy our nation who are engaged in actually doing this by taking to the streets etc.
If any party ever deserved rejection at the polls Democrats and their corrupt nominees have "legitimately," at least,
Trump's health plan took more time than it should but he was never able to get a coalescing by his party so, I assume, he crafted his own plan and made it public for campaign purposes.
I am sure it will be debated should he be re-elected and it will shape the debate.
Whether Democrats like it or not it is what it is according to Henninger
Biden Can’t Duck Trump’s Court
A Barrett or Lagoa nomination will give voters a choice about the Court’s role.
No other personal story about Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been told more this week than the one about her warm relationship with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. It brings to mind similar stories of the “Friends after 6 p.m.” camaraderie between Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Thanks for the memories, but those days are gone.
With the prospect before us that on Saturday Donald Trump—a president loathed without limit by liberals—will nominate a conservative to the Supreme Court in the shadow of the 2020 election, we’d say “The Godfather” offers a more apt description of our politics just now: We are “going to the mattresses.” To quote Consigliere Chuck Schumer: “Nothing is off the table.” Nancy Pelosi is threatening fusillades of arrows.
How American politics went from live-and-let-live to tribal war is a long story, but the issue in front of us now is the Supreme Court of the United States
That subject alone surfaces an important right-left distinction. While conservatives typically talk about “the court” as an institution and its competing judicial philosophies, Democrats and the left prefer discussing the court in terms of discrete policy goals, such as abortion or various public services.
Thus did Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein summarize the battle this week: “Let’s be clear what’s at stake—health insurance for millions of Americans and lifesaving protections for the 129 million people with pre-existing conditions.” It’s about more than that.
In conservative circles, a famous date in the political system’s descent into total war is 1987 and the hearings into Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Those hearings—actually, a show trial—were presided over by Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden, an exercise that included the public excavation of Judge Bork’s history of video rentals, which ironically included Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
With respect, we would like to call Robert Bork back as a witness to what happened to American politics and why we are going to war over what looks to be the nomination of the first conservative woman to the Supreme Court, likely either Judge Amy Coney Barrett or Judge Barbara Lagoa. Back in 1971, Bob Bork saw what was coming.
Writing for the Indiana Law Journal—by some accounts it is the 10th most cited law-journal article of all time—Bork made an argument on behalf of judicial decisions based on principles in the Constitution versus rulings based on personal, albeit strongly held, values.
In an unstated homage to prescient Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts (“Sentence first, verdict afterwards!”) Bork called judging based on personally derived values, “Decisions first, principles later.”
But Bork didn’t find much to be amused about in where such judging would take American democracy, which he posed as a question. What does a man conclude, he asked, about “a Court that does not share his politics or his morality? I can think of nothing except the assertion that he will ignore the Court whenever he can get away with it and overthrow it if he can.”
And here we are, with prominent Democrats such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Sen. Edward Markey and liberal commentators promising to pack the court with additional justices if President Trump (whose 2016 election Democrats have rejected daily the past four years) doesn’t stand down from his constitutional right to appoint RBG’s replacement. They will overthrow the current court, if they can.
A main element of the election is tension between the Biden-led Democratic establishment and the ascendant Sanders-Warren progressives. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acidly put it: “Voting for Joe Biden, it’s not about whether you like him or not, it’s a vote to let democracy live another day.”
Mr. Biden didn’t create this division during the primaries. The Democratic Party has been moving leftward for years on policies affecting personal rights claims, the environment and regulatory authority—so much so that the possibility of liberal-conservative legislative compromise in Congress all but disappeared.
Ever resourceful, the left turned to filing policy-outcome lawsuits whose goals were implemented by policy-oriented federal judges, effectively making the courts a parallel legislature. Decisions first, principles never.
The culture wars fought in so many presidential elections didn’t originate in legislatures. They came out of left-liberal judicial decisions. A Barrett or Lagoa Supreme Court won’t “make” conservative policy. It likely will force policy making back into legislatures, where it belongs.
Robert Bork asked 50 years ago whether Americans understood enough of what was happening to the courts to be able to say they had consented to it. The left’s use of the judiciary as a parallel legislature has rarely been put clearly before Americans, in large part because Democratic candidates won’t talk about it.
With this nomination, which the Senate may confirm days before the election (the real one Nov. 3, not the mail-in tabulation weeks later), Mr. Trump is forcing an important and overdue choice before the country’s voters. We’ll see in Tuesday’s debate whether Mr. Biden can get through the evening ducking the question of the court’s proper role.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As I recently wrote, where is the systemic racism?
Africans Knock on America’s Door
Why would millions want to immigrate if the U.S. is a land of ‘systemic racism’?
By Dave Seminara
The left keeps saying America is systemically racist and President Trump is a white supremacist. So why do so many black Africans want to immigrate?
On Sept. 4 the State Department released statistics on the green-card lottery, a good gauge for U.S. visa demand because anyone with a high-school diploma or specialized work experience is eligible to apply. For fiscal 2020, the number of applicants from 47 eligible Sub-Saharan African nations was 9.2 million, compared with only 2.8 million in fiscal 2011.
Residents of the countries that send the most immigrants—including Brazil, China, India and Mexico—may not apply. Hopefuls apply in the fall and receive their visas a year or more later, so fiscal 2011 applicants would have applied in the fall of 2009. Nigeria, the lone African country excluded from the program, was eligible until 2015. Between fiscal 2010 and 2016, an average of 14.9 million foreign nationals in all registered for the annual lottery. From 2017 and 2020, the average figure was 21.9 million a year.
The Trump administration, which has sought to eliminate the program, recently tightened its eligibility requirements, and subsequently applications for the fiscal 2021 program sank to 11.8 million. Lottery winners who didn’t obtain visas because of Trump’s June moratorium on immigration sued, and a federal judge ordered the State Department to resume processing visas. A group called African Communities Together is also suing over a new requirement that applicants have valid passports. The application period for the 2021 program was last fall, so there’s no connection to this year’s racial unrest, and the dip is likely attributable to the new application requirements.Clearly most aspiring immigrants from Africa don’t buy the left’s thesis that America is a racist country. Why should they? By most measures African immigrants are successful. Pew Research reports that African immigrants are more likely than Americans overall to have a college degree, and a recent study from the University of Kansas reveals that their labor-force participation rate is 73%, 10 points higher than that of the overall population. By some measures, Nigerians are the most successful immigrant group in the country. Fifty-nine percent have a college degree, more than double the population as a whole; and in 2018 their median household income was nearly $7,000 higher than the average.
If leftists really believed America is a hostile, dangerous place for nonwhites, wouldn’t they be warning potential immigrants from Africa and elsewhere not to come?
Mr. Seminara is a journalist and former diplomat. He is author of “Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches From the Margins of Europe.”
Writers subdued their egos and encouraged readers to think. Nowadays it’s all about arousing emotion
By Lance Morrow
My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.
That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”
The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?
If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”
The journalistic paragon of my youth was David Broder, who covered politics for the Star and later moved to the Washington Post. He was everything that a reporter in the old model ought to be: dispassionate, nonpartisan, encyclopedic in his knowledge of his subject. Broder had not a trace of the disabling egotism, ruthless ambition or partisan zealotry that afflict media stars today.
It would be silly to idealize the old journalism, which had its problems, including excessive deference to authority and massive sins of omission in the scope of its curiosity; anyway, it belonged to a different world. But it had this virtue: The work, subduing the ego of the reporter, implied respect for the independent mind of the reader.
Alas, the independent, nonpartisan mind went out of fashion years ago in politics, media, academia and even corporate life. Emphasis on the integrity of individual judgment has all but disappeared in the face of identity politics, the religion of diversity and the radical corruption of American universities—the effect everywhere intensified by this year’s obsessive and, one might say, compulsory racialism. America won’t be an honest country until those influences have been defeated or have burned themselves out. It may take years, a generation or two.
For now, in the annus insanus of 2020, we are afflicted by a pandemic of media phoniness. Plastering the facts with attitude—tilting the story to the party line, moralizing it, sentimentalizing it, propagandizing it—is the way of noisy, distracted cable news and, increasingly, of all media. Not a sparrow falls without the New York Times, in its news columns, telling the reader that the bird was shot by a “white supremacist.” News is laid before the citizen’s mind so packaged and tarted up with a narrative line that the simple facts are often impossible to discern.
This is not honest reporting but garish, partisan fabulation. Its object is not to inform, or to encourage reflection, but to stimulate feelings. Let not the listener or viewer or reader be detained by thought but instead move briskly on to emotions, which are the addictive and highly profitable drugs in which big media traffic. News media become crack houses of information and, all the while, ruthless participants in the struggle for political power and for what the parsons on “Morning Joe“ call “the soul of America.”
Journalism’s metaphysical decline proceeds parallel to the deterioration of American politics. In both fields, we behold the lingering death of public trust. The energies that flow into the vacuum left by the departure of trust are self-righteousness, violence of mind and an ineffable stupidity—the civic despair and hysteria that have become the style of poor, miserable 2020.
Mr. Morrow’s latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”
