Interesting Items 09/11

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Lisa
2. Catholics
3. DACA
4. Deal
5. SPLC
6. Confirmation Bias
7. Comey

1. Lisa. Now that she has demonstrated susceptibility to public stroking by the media, Alaska US Senator Lisa Murkowski is being targeted by media to chart a more “independent” course as Alaska’s senior US senator.  An article in the Huffington Post last week slathers on lavish praise for rejecting O’BamaCare repeal legislation that she has consistently supported since being in the senate.  They also really appreciated her opposition to Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss.  Lisa’s problem with her leftward drift is that the people who voted for her last time around are not going to vote for her next time around.  The HuffPo authorette is not so subtly pushing Lisa to embrace her inner John McCain (or Bernie Sanders) and quit being a Republican and start being an Independent, in other words, switch parties.  Good luck with that, as democrats at all levels despise this state, and despise the resource development industries that fund its operation.  Lisa got a piddling 44% of the votes cast last year against a last minute, unfunded libertarian candidate, former Republican Joe Miller, who defeated her in the 2010 Republican Primary.  She keeps this up, and it will be difficult to break 40% next time around.  Good luck with your new best friends.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lisa-murkowski-independent-obamacare-repeal_us_59aae1c1e4b0354e440ab54a

 

2. Catholics. Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Dick Durbin (D, IL) renewed their assault on Catholic political appointees last week with a series of questions aimed at the religious beliefs of a Trump judicial appointee for a spot on the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, Notre Dame Law School Professor Amy Coney Barrett.  Feinstein fired the first shot noting that “When you read yours speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”  No small number of democrats on the committee gleefully piled on and pushed the issue.  Democrats have long used a religious test to attack practicing Christians and Catholics.  Believers of their favored religions Islam, environmentalism, and Planned Parenthood are just fine.  So it isn’t simply a religious test for Feinstein and her democrat cronies.  Rather, it is religions that they don’t support, specifically Christianity and Catholicism.  Gonna be difficult to win back those rust belt states, heavy with Catholic voters, when you revert to the same arguments used against JFK 67 years ago that Catholics need not apply.  Additionally, going down this path is a bit problematic as the black church is still big in parts of that community outside the ghettos of the blue cities, and unlike past Republicans, President Trump is actively pursuing their support.  Final problem is that their new favorite minority group – Latino illegal immigrants, are mostly Catholic, while their Catholicism will not immediately cancel gratitude for being added to the democrat gravy train, like all long-term corrosive agents, it will weaken their support for democrats over time.  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dianne-feinstein-renews-her-decades-long-crusade-against-catholic-judges/article/2633629

 

3. DACA. This story will be the most fun over the next several months.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last week that President Trump was rescinding O’Bama’s illegal, unconstitutional Executive Order creating Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).  Trump gave congress 60 days to fix the program before he signs the repeal.  This puts Trump in a win-win position, as he is dragging congress kicking and scratching back into the fight immigration debate.  Of course congress can and probably will simply pass a complete amnesty for these people, returning serve, but doing so will need no small number of Republican votes, Republicans who will be universally primaried next year if they dare.  So how many people are we talking about and more importantly, what are their ages?  The most popular number is 800,000 people.  Some estimates are as high as 1.9 million.  Their average ages are 25.  While the so-called DREAMERs are painted exclusively as “children”, they aren’t.  There are no small number of youngsters in that number, giving democrats yet another group of kids to hide behind.  So what is going on?  The DREAMER / DACA is one of the more cynical gambits by democrats in recent years, as it is ultimately a voter registration drive for future democrat voters.  Every single youngster who enters the country illegally, every single DREAMER is the anchor for chain migration for family members left in Mexico and Central America.  So you don’t really end up with 0.8 – 1.9 million new illegals, you actually end up with 2.4 – 7.6 million at a minimum assuming a family of four for each.  That’s a lot of new democrat voters, enough to turn most states into California.  As an extra added attraction, the population that O’Bama allowed into the country contain no small number of gang members (MS13), no small number of Muslims masquerading as Latino, and the younger DREAMERs are all unvaccinated, importing no small number of deadly infectious diseases (tuberculosis, anyone?) into the classrooms.  One of the other things done by the regime was to co-opt church connected social service agencies to handle and resettle the DACA people.  I have heard numbers in the range of $90 million paid to Catholic Church connected agencies so far.  Following the announcement, all the usual suspects turned out with all the usual protests making all the usual arguments.  Democrats and their designated victim groups started judge shopping for their lawsuits, which is going to be its own level of fun, finding an O’Bama or Clinton judge who will say that signing an EO repealing an unconstitutional EO makes it an unconstitutional EO.  Talk about the self-licking ice cream cone.  Hang on, this one is going to be a lot of fun.  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/four-more-states-sue-over-trumps-daca-repeal/article/2634055

 

4. Deal. President Trump saved the leaders of the Stupid Party in congress from yet another attempt at seppuku last week, announcing a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to extend the debt limit three months to December.  The deal included disaster funding for Hurricane Harvey in Texas.  Beltway Republicans looked like someone just took away their cookie, and were crestfallen.  Some of the rest of us, not so much.  From a persuasion standpoint, Trump made a deal.  He got funding for disaster relief.  And he showed he could work with both sides.  He also sent a not so small caliber projectile across the bow of the USS Beltway Republican, reminding them that he can and will work with anyone to get what he wants, and it is perhaps they get off their hands and get to work on his agenda.  From a political standpoint, he saved them from themselves, as congressional Republicans have never won these debt ceiling fights, as they are for all intents and purposes inside baseball that most of the rest of us don’t care about.  He also saved them from the headlines blaming them for holding up disaster relief for a state that voted for them in large numbers, all in all, a win for the Good Guys.  Interestingly, the deal hurts Schumer and Pelosi, as it will anger their wacked out base.  https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/09/11/the-true-conservatives-hype-a-trumpocalypse-in-a-desperate-bid-for-attention-n2379346

 

5. SPLC. The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the more effective leftist NGOs.  Its primary job is to smear conservatives, conservative groups, and related organizations as racist.  It is based in Alabama and is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization which hands out periodic hate group designations.  Over the years, they have been effective and have been casting their nets increasingly widely, for if anyone disagrees with a liberal, not only are they a Nazi, racist, they are now members of a hate group.  Like all good things leftist, money is the key to the operation and power of the SPLC.  Last week comes the news that it pushes millions of dollars overseas as part of its business dealings.  Its 2015 Form 990 documented over $50 million in donations and net assets of $328 million.  Its 990-T, the business tax return for a non-profit, shows “financial interests” in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda, all locations to stash cash from US banking scrutiny.  So why would a US-based nonprofit dealing with human rights or social services need foreign bank accounts?  Will this assist them in reducing poverty in the south?  The SPLC has a staff of 75 lawyers and reported spending only $61,000 in legal services in 2015.  Clearly the SPLC is a fund raising dynamo.  Other than fattening the wallets of its officers, what do those funds actually do other than bash conservatives?  http://freebeacon.com/issues/southern-poverty-law-center-transfers-millions-in-cash-to-offshore-entities/

 

6. Confirmation Bias. Another piece from Scott Adams instructing the reader in the black art of persuasion last week dealt with claims that manmade global warming due to CI2 emissions is causing the latest round of hurricane strikes on mainland US.  Adams notes that if the two storms were actually caused by “climate change” (scare quotes are my addition), this would be a really big deal.  His problem is that as far as he can tell, there have been no actual climate scientists put in front of a camera to say so.  He asks why the silence?  And if actual climate scientists actually believe that “climate change” isn’t causing the storms, isn’t that big news also?  Either or both ought to be front page news.  Instead, we get crickets.  His theory is that science doesn’t know one way or the other if weather extremes are predictive of things to come.  And that would be a problem for news organizations dedicated to reporting climate science risks as real.  Your best and most socially responsible course of action is to ignore climate scientists for now and let the public believe that current temp extremes are a clear sign of climate collapse, essentially reporting what they believe to be the most truthful version of reality by not reporting best thinking on the topic.  By not putting climate scientists in front of the cameras, they avoid the trap of having them say “We can’t tell yet” which would be interpreted by skeptics as support for their view of the world.  The media is allowing the big storms to do the persuasion without any science at all because confirmation bias will drive the viewing public to see the big events as the first big signal of the promised climate disaster.  Adams ends with the following:

So the biggest story in the world is largely ignored by news organizations because – and here I speculate – reporting any uncertainty about climate change is not as persuasive as allowing the public to look out the window and generate their own illusions of certainty while also frightened to death.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/165048861836/are-the-hurricanes-and-temperature-records

 

7. Comey. The more we hear about former FBI Director James Comey, the bigger snake he becomes.  Last week’s revelation was that he started drafting his memo exonerating Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing with her server, e-mails, and mishandling of classified months before he made his public pronouncement that no prosecutor would file charges against her for her actions.  Nothing like the results of an investigation being written before the investigation is over to give us rubes warm fuzzies about upholding the law.  His former employees and O’Bama holdovers in the FBI are fighting public release of Trump dossier information.  They are hiding behind national security rationale for refusing to comply with the FOIA request.  Perhaps it is time to shut down the FBI and rely on some other agency for investigations as these guys are much more interested in being democrats than public servants.  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-fbi-fights-public-release-of-trump-dossier-info/article/2633048

More later –

– AG