How the Donkey become the symbol of the Democrats

The king wanted to go fishing, so he called on the royal weather forecaster and inquired as to the weather forecast for the next few hours. 

The weatherman assured him that there was no chance of rain in the coming days, so the king went fishing with his wife, the queen.  On the way he met a farmer on his donkey. 

Upon seeing the king the farmer said, "Your Majesty, you should return to the palace!  In just a short time I expect a huge amount of rain to fall in this area".

The king was polite and considerate, he replied: "I hold the palace  meteorologist in high regard.  He is an extensively educated and experienced professional.  And besides, I pay him very high wages.  He gave me a very different forecast. I trust him."

So the king continued on his way.  However, a short time later a torrential rain fell from the sky.  The King and Queen were totally soaked and their entourage chuckled upon seeing them in such a shameful condition.

Furious, the king returned to the palace and gave the order to fire the professional.  Then he summoned the farmer and offered him the prestigious and high paying role of royal forecaster.

The farmer said, "Your Majesty, I do not know anything about forecasting.  I obtain my information from my donkey.  If I see my donkey's ears drooping, it means with certainty that it will rain."

 

So the king hired the donkey.

And thus began the practice of hiring dumb asses to work in the  government and occupy its highest and most influential positions.

The practice is unbroken to this date and thus, the democrat symbol was born!!!

This Is War

Derek Hunter

Republicans never have been particularly good at the culture war. Sure, they won battles here and there. But even most of those victories turned into losses through court decisions anyway. 

Now we’re in the midst of the ultimate battle in the culture war – the battle for the First Amendment – and if Republicans don’t recognize this is a war and fight like their existence depends on victory, nothing else will matter.

If you had told me five years ago that, in 2017, we’d be debating the nature of free speech and whether American citizens could be blocked from speaking on the campus of a public university because of their politics, I would’ve laughed in your face. But then, I would have had the same reaction if you had told me Donald Trump would be president in 2017, so clearly nothing is impossible.

It’s easy to dismiss the violent mobs in Berkeley, Portland, Washington, D.C., and everywhere else as a “fringe element” because there are relatively few of them and their actions are fringe. But the fringe of the political left is the tail wagging the progressive dog called the Democratic Party.

The most popular Democrat in the party is a slouching, cranky, unkempt septuagenarian who publicly and proudly refuses to call himself a Democrat. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont happily criticized the party when he toured the country with its new chairman on a so-called “unity tour.” Crowds even booed the chairman but cheered the self-described socialist.

When Bernie lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, he did the bare minimum to get on board with the Democratic Party’s establishment. He made appearances, but he kept the organization he’d pulled together to himself, much like President Obama did with his campaign.

Obama rolled what he’d created for himself into Organizing for Action, essentially a campaign infrastructure that exists to create and protect his legacy. It’s proven to be profoundly unhelpful to the Democratic Party as a whole and ineffective getting anyone not named Obama elected.

Sanders took his campaign and created “Our Revolution,” an organization dedicated to moving the Democratic Party even further to the left.

The problem for Democrats is they live in fear of losing the people who support Bernie Sanders, so they have to cater to them.

Sanders is the kid in the neighborhood with all the cool toys. He’ll let you play with them as long as you play how he wants you to play. Attempt to integrate your own ideas, and he’ll take his toys and go home.

Bernie must revel in this position since he correctly understands the nomination process was rigged in favor of Clinton. But for Democrats it’s a horribly short-sighted strategy.

Bernie did lose. It was much closer than expected, but Hillary ultimately won by substantial margins, if much later in the campaign season than she’d hoped. That means he’s less popular with people who show up and vote in Democratic primaries than the wildly unpopular woman who lost the general election.

Uniting those sides is the best hope for Democrats, but Bernie’s fringe isn’t interested in moving toward the party, so the party is moving toward it.

This radical element is becoming the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the second-most-popular Democrat, both have been critical of the violence and intimidation by this mob – but not until they were put on the spot about it. They weren’t moved by principle to do it because, in principle, they agree with the mob.

This small, violent rabble now steers the ship of the Democratic Party. The party, its members, and the academic institutions that helped create them are afraid to speak out against them or their fascistic demands.

But don’t be fooled: Small groups of violent leftists have done significant damage to countries in the past.

The Bolsheviks were a tiny group of determined thugs who took over Russia. The Nazis were a distant second in the 1932 election, yet a year later – through threats and violence – they were in power. On paper, Mao and his allies should have been defeated easily by Chaing Kai-shek and his much larger forces and western supporters, but it went the other way.

History has shown a small group of people, especially when they’re willing to oppress others and commit violence against their fellow countrymen, can attain power. This dance is made easier when both sides sit silently – one out of fear, the other of impotence.

And that’s the problem – Democrats won’t speak out forcefully against their violent fringe because they’re convinced they need them and are busy trying to co-opt and appease them. Republicans won’t for reasons I simply can’t explain.

Maybe Republicans think the American people see what’s happening and they need only to stay out of the way of the Democrats’ circular firing squad. But it’s more likely they’re afraid. To call out these monsters is to invite attacks, to ensure they’ll show up at town halls and cause scenes.

But someone has to stand up forcefully to them. Someone has to stand up for the Constitution. You’d think elected officials who’d sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend it would speak up when a part of what makes this country fundamentally different than any other on the planet is under assault. But they haven’t.

It’s easier to ignore unpleasant things, but that’s not leadership. The left-wing fringe is at war with our fundamental rights, with an essential part of what it means to be an American. And they’re winning, mostly because everyone else is afraid to fight. Refusing to fight back might make you feel superior; it’s also the most effective way to lose.

We’re in an ideological war over what kind of country we’re going to be going forward, and our elected officials are standing silently as the First Amendment is trampled in the name of “tolerance.” That any, of either party, could tolerate that is truly intolerable.

The Racist, Hate-Preaching 'Anti'-Fascists Are Back

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The Racist, Hate-Preaching 'Anti'-Fascists Are Back

James Lewis

The trouble with being a "revolutionary" who is against everything, including fictional Forces of Evil, is that in the long run, you end up doing Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, and Mussolini all over again. 

The logic of lynch mobs is simple, and it was well summarized by Saul Alinsky, who knew all about raising mobs: "Pick the target, freeze the target, and destroy the target."

The U.S. Army had its own slogan in WWII, which went, "Find 'em, fight 'em, fix 'em." (Except that in practice, the G.I.s used a different word for "fix.")

The principle is the same. Lynch mobs are war mobs, which is why they like to lynch people. They are equal-opportunity mobs, and in Africa, they pit black Africans against other black Africans, like the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, who look like the exact same ethnic group, because they are. But the French colonial administration pitted the two against each other, educated only the Tutsis to speak French, and scapegoated the Hutus. The Rwandan genocide was only a matter of time, because lynch mobs are what they are all over the world.

It's always done for the sake of peace and love, of course.

The psychiatric term for mob psychology is "displacement," which comes down to blaming a safe enemy (who can't strike back) to take out your rage and impotence on your real hate object. It's primitive, infantile thinking, and you're supposed to grow out of it, if your indoctrinators will let you.

These days, white folks are the favorite hate objects of the campus left, especially white boys and men, who are now forced to apologize for their genitals. If they fail to humiliate themselves adequately in their brainwashing groups, they are punished by the commissars. (This was started by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the '60s, which was a Big Lie from the very start. The idea that they started off believing in honest free speech is just another lie. They were always Stalinoids.)

Yes, indeed. Those annoying genitalia make all the trouble in the world, and left-feminists, who are secret prudes, Victorians, and man-haters anyway, are now trying to change their genitalia – or rather, they are relabeling their own organs in order to scapegoat the male variety. Freud was a great ironist because he saw so much self-imposed human nuttiness and suffering in his therapy practice, and the hippie cafés in Vienna were split between hateful Marxists and hateful National Socialists. By 1938, toward the end of his life, Freud had to escape the Nazis to London, where the Freud Museum is now located.

The last time I was in Vienna, the city council had worked up the courage to put a brass plaque on his house in Vienna.

Freud proposed that women, or at least some women, or maybe super-neurotic women, suffer from something he called penis envy. It may sound like a joke to most of us today, but then...then you see the inverted, perverted, and retroverted world of the campus left, and you sort of scratch your head and wonder. Could "The Vagina Monologues" just be a kind of castration mania produced by the ladies of the left?

Since mass delusion, hysteria, and infantile regressions are now a hot theme of the campus left, you just have to wonder.

Vienna around 1900 was a hotbed of interesting sexualities, and Freud found many customers in its cosmopolitan residents. There was Dr. X, the homosexual with paranoia. There was Anna O., who really did have a "museum of symptoms" that changed from day to day, including false pregnancy and every disease imaginable by a whole medical school. We call it "medical student syndrome" today, because when you study one horrible disease after another every week, you're always looking for your own symptoms. Many people are very suggestible anyway, and for poor Anna O., growing up in Victorian Vienna and taking care of her dying father for months on end, coming down with a psychosomatic illnesses was the natural thing to do.

In the end, Bertha Pappenheim (which was her real name) became a famous feminist and the founder of the social work movement in Austria. I feel nothing but compassion for the heroic Ms. Pappenheim.

Freud wrote many case histories of his patients, which often turned out to have a major sexual dimension. But even before Freud, medical doctors in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin talked about multiple sexualities.

There's nothing particularly new about that – the Roman emperor Caligula had his own museum of neurotic symptoms – and when a ruling class has complete control over other human beings, importing their slaves of every color, sex, age, and combat style to fight to the death in front of tens of thousands of cheering Romans, or facing lions like the early Christians had to, all for the sadistic entertainment of the masses...well, every conceivable kind of sexual turn-on and turn-off eventually shows up.

Just like the cultural descent of the left today. Our college campuses are not that different from imperial Rome. Hollywood is an exact copy of the Weimar Republic.

On our free speech-killing campuses, there is a much feared power class that knows how to punish dissidents, just as Stalin did in Moscow.

Today, the fascist lynch mobs are flying the "Antifa" flag, but we can recognize them by their actions, all right. During the Hitler-Stalin time, it was said that you could turn a Hitler kid into a Komsomol kid in about two minutes, about as fast as Anna O. would turn from one hysterical symptom to another one. Freud and other pioneering sexologists were very good at diagnosis, but as far as I know, they never figured out a way to turn conversion hysteria (which is what Anna O. suffered from) into a mass lynch mob.

But we do know that neurotics and hysterics can be very easily hypnotized, which is what Mussolini did through the first mass electronic medium (radio). All of Italy, all of Hungary, and then all of Germany would be glued to their old-fashioned radios, ready to Sieg Heil in unison, by the millions.

The web is an even more powerful medium than radio and TV, because you can tailor the immersion experience to the user. It's your personal medium of indoctrination. In Italy, the first paranoid web cult was created in the 1990s by Giuseppe Grillo and his internet twin, called the Guru. Starting with old-fashioned computer bulletin boards in the '90s, they attracted thousands and thousands of utterly ignorant teenagers, gave them paranoid scare stories about "jet trails" spreading mind chemicals all over the green countryside of Italia, and hooked them with classical paranoid propaganda.

What is now called the Five Star Movement in Italy controls a quarter of the votes in the national parliament, and it's still run by exactly the same two guys. Mussolini controlled a quarter of the parliament before he decided to overthrow the king via coup d'état, which was cleaner and faster.

This is the same formula that's still used by Kim III in North Korea, by the Pals in the Middle East, the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, the mullahs of Qom. You take a child of three and subject him to 24/7/365 hate propaganda – it's always the same – and by the time he's eight or nine, he's learned to parrot the Party Line, to the great delight of his parents (if he has any).

The rest of their lives are amazingly predictable, because children are very, very vulnerable. They're not going to be able to judge true from false until age ten or older – very much older, in the case of liberals.

It is interesting, therefore, that Hillary's favorite Muslim Brotherhood representative, Huma Abedin, was raised in Saudi Arabia until the age of sixteen. Saudi Arabia allows only one kind of religious children indoctrination, the kind generously shared by the Wahhabi tribe, which has not changed since the 6th century. Huma had sixteen years of Saudi indoctrination. Then the Abedin family came back to the U.K. and later the U.S., and they still make their money from the family "charity," a well known Muslim Brotherhood front. Mr. Abedin Sr. was an M.B. honcho, and Mrs. Abedin is now in charge. Huma is still employed by the "charity," which spreads MB propaganda because that's the only thing they've ever known.

When that Voice of Absolute Power on the radio, or in college ethnic studies groups, peddles the Party Line over and over again, college students are just as helpless as toddlers. They never built a capacity for independent, critical thought. Certainly not in school.

In the first Obama election I talked to a college-age kid who told me he was voting for the Bamster "because Hillary is too white." What?

I asked him where he got indoctrinated, and he told me about the "Anti-Racist Movement" in Minneapolis. I don't think he's ever grown out of that, and you can see the thrills and chills among the marching yoots as Obama is piping up again, threatening to make President Trump respect his (Obama's) "red lines."

Really. He said that.

And the mind-twisted morons who are fighting the cops in Berkeley today are carbon copies. They even wear the same uniforms, practice the same tactics, and shout the same slogans. No wonder Gyuri Schwartz (that is, Soros) loves this stuff.

There is nothing new under the sun, and, as Einstein said very accurately, "two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity." Freud would agree.

One of these days, American taxpayers will get the joke, too.

© 2011 AmericanThinker

Leftists, Ask Yourselves: ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?'

John Steinreich

Since the left views Donald Trump as Hitler and the Republican Party – currently dominant in Congress and the majority of statehouses – as accomplices in his fascist tyranny, the existential question each liberal-progressive ought to be asking himself is the very question a punk rock band made famous as the refrain of their most popular tune.

The lyrics of The Clash's 1982 song "Should I Stay or Should I Go" reflect the singer's indecisiveness about whether he should remain in a relationship with a woman who today entices him and tomorrow plays hard to get. "One day it's fine, and next it's black," sings Mick Jones of his mercurial muse, "so if you want me off your back, well, come on and let me know: should I stay or should I go?" Considering founding member Joe Strummer's overtly leftist politics, the band could hardly have anticipated that their song, whose content is no more serious than an adolescent romance, would now serve as a metaphor for progressives and their love-hate relationship with the United States.

The question as to why liberals simply do not pack up and leave the United States has been on my mind, particularly after a recent conversation with a self-proclaimed "bleeding heart" fellow congregant at my church, who looked at me venomously when I told him I consider myself a constitutionalist. His offense was all the greater because my wife is black.

"The Founding Fathers presided over one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history," said the chap regarding American slavery, and "the Constitution made blacks three fifths of a person." With these arguments, he intended to shame me into rejecting my affinity for the Constitution because, in his view, anyone sympathetic to the plight of blacks in this country – particularly a white man married to a black woman – would surely look on the founding of the USA with disgust.

My immediate response was that America's transcendent, foundational ideas – that all people are created equal with natural rights and that limited government with separated powers is the best means devised by mankind so far of protecting those rights – could not be invalidated either by my wife's ethnicity or the fact that among the Founders were slaveholders. Then I began to explain the Three-Fifths Clause as a device to curb the power of the slaveholding states, but my interlocutor's brief tolerance for such political incorrectness wore out before I could conclude my thoughts. He cut me off, self-righteously saying: "I'm an attorney, and I've heard all these arguments. I don't need you to tell me anything more." The possibility of productive dialogue between us thus ended.

My nagging thought after this conversation was, if my co-religionist has so much disdain for the U.S. Constitution and so little interest in hearing opinions in favor of it, why in the world would he – and by extension, so many like-minded statists – want to continue living in so hellish a place, governed by a corrupt document and populated by tens of millions who actually cherish it?

Perhaps America's Jacobins stay in this country because they enjoy the freedom of speech protected in the very Constitution they vigorously disdain. Yet instead of expressing gratitude for this liberty, they use it to shout down opposing viewpoints. They contemplate aloud bombing the Trump White House, make constant counter-factual pronouncements that Islam is a religion of peace, and linguistically manipulate people into believing that individuals with male genitalia ought to be allowed unimpeded opportunities to relieve themselves in the women's restroom. Conversely, they detest any idea that does not jibe with their worldview, and they have little self-control in their heavy-handed efforts to stop their opposition from exercising their free speech rights.

The left wants unrestricted free choice regarding whether a baby in the womb lives or dies, but it reviles anyone who wishes to have the freedom of choice to select his own health insurance or where to send his children to school. Leftists express consternation at the plight of the poor, but they give far less charitably to the indigent than do conservatives, and in fact, they prefer to have the strong arm of the government steal from the taxpayers to redistribute money to those whom they themselves do precious little to assist. The Tenth Amendment has wonderful appeal to the neo-Confederates in the sanctuary jurisdictions that reject federal immigration law, but when Arizona attempted to follow that law, as in the case of S.B. 1070 some years ago, the left developed a selective amnesia about the Bill of Rights and fought the Grand Canyon State all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

One can only wonder why progressives bother to stay in a country where they have lost thousands of legislative seats nationally since 2010 and have seen their presidential messiah replaced not by their exalted female demigod, but by an openly flawed, crude, Caucasian, heterosexual, and pro-Christian capitalist with no political experience. Progressives see inequality, injustice, anti-minority racism, misogyny, and oppression of LGBTQ persons every day, all the time in the United States, and they make their disgust with these perceived offenses known loudly through protests, riots, civil unrest, and unhinged interviews with an incredulous Tucker Carlson

To our geographic north lies a European-style welfare state that spends about 35 percent of its federal budget annually on elderly programs, children's services, and health care, and to the south one encounters a Latin American kleptocrat paradise where the only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants to be found are tourists spending their filthy lucre at beach resorts staffed by the downtrodden brown people of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos. What exactly is keeping American lefties from thumbing a ride to Toronto or Tijuana and asking the nice socialists across the border for political asylum?

Progressives have patience only with those who share their opinions, and in their haughtiness, they believe themselves justified in employing the heckler's veto and in thrusting their ideas on everyone around them. Yet despite having cultural control through the universities, the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media for more than half a century, they have been unable to convert enough Americans to give them a lasting majority in the Electoral College.

The White House was occupied by America's first social justice warrior president from 2009 to 2017; his bureaucratic acolytes continue in stealth to do the yeoman's work of stifling traditional American values, but the left is still unable to silence the opposition. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Herman Cain, and others command the attention of millions of Americans on a daily basis, and the Tea Party, Conventionof States, and State of Jeffersonmovements are examples of the grassroots of American patriots who refuse to be subjugated by the collectivist mandarins in the District of Columbia and the various state capitals.

With so much resistance against big government simmering from sea to shining sea, it seems high time for the statists among us start asking themselves if they should pack their Birkenstocks and head off to any number of socialists utopias, from San Salvador to Stockholm, where they can have all the government-run equality they can stomach.

John Steinreich has an M.A. in church history from Colorado Theological Seminary. He has authored two Christian-themed non-fiction books:The Words of God? – the Bible, the Qur'an and How They Are Lived in the Post-9/11 World and A Great Cloud of Witnesses – Lessons for Modern Day Christians from Church History. His works are available on Lulu Press and on Kindle.

© 2011 AmericanThinker

Why Transgenderism Is Progressive Totem

Why Transgenderism Is Progressive Totem

The Federalist - Sunday April 30, 2017

by Sethu A Iyer

There are actual chauvinists, who think women are inferior as a matter of principle, and then there are feminists, who assume the way for women to realize themselves is to emulate the masculinity of men. That leaves no one defending actual femininity. No one, that is, except for romantics such as myself.

Every view of gender is essentially religious, in that it isn’t possible to talk about gender without getting to fundamental beliefs about what it means to be human. Progressiveshave already made their decision, with their ideology of gender fluidity and social construction. On the other hand, the general conservative perspective seems to be that man and woman are metaphysical realities before they are social constructs, and that man and woman complement each other in a deep and primordial way.

A Metaphysical Sketch

In the beginning, there was Adam; and because it was not good for man to be alone, the Lord created Eve out of Adam’s own rib. But maybe this was just the repetition of a more ancient trick? Before the beginning, there was the Lord. But it was not good for the Lord to be alone, so he made the woman called Nature out of his own rib. This fits the premise that humans are made in the Lord’s image. This is also a foundational and unabashedly religious understanding of the essence of gender.

Following Søren Kierkegaard, I’ll suggest the human being is a fusion of two components: the spirit and the body. The spirit is inherently masculine, and the body is inherently feminine. (In that sense, it could be suggested that all humans are vaguely androgynous, given that both men and women are both body and spirit.) Although perhaps offensive to modern ears, a wide range of mythical thought strongly reinforces this vision. The Sun is a man, and the Moon is a woman; the Sky is a man, and the Earth is a woman; et cetera. Reality seems to be naturally poetic like that.

Man is tilted toward the spirit, while woman is tilted toward the body. Awareness of this is probably what led Albert Camus to write that in contrast to the nurturing ethos of women, “men go whoring after ideas; a man runs away from his mother, forsakes his love and starts rushing upon adventure.” And here’s G. K. Chesterton on the matter: “Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.” Realism and idealism—body and spirit. Meeting in the middle, generating the living human soul: well, that could be called the project of romance. 

As for the Transgender Hysteria

Given that people who identify as transgender make up only a small fraction of 1 percent of the national population, why have they received such an absurdly outsized share of media attention? This is a good tip-off that there’s something else going on. The transgender issue isn’t primarily about transgender persons. Rather, it has become terrain that progressives want to claim, believing the existence of transgender persons vindicates their view of gender as arbitrary and fluid.

Never mind that transgenderism actually does quite the opposite. It is self-evidently obvious, for anyone who cares to think the matter through, that transgender could be nothing other than a form of severe psychosis. It is fundamentally a matter of a very serious misrelation between the mind and the body. I could hold the sincere and deeply felt belief that I am in fact a kangaroo. But no matter what I do, I will never be a kangaroo; it is not within the scope of possibilities of my nature to become one.

For that matter, I would love to have a self-concept that includes me having wings. But alas, the physical world will not cooperate. I must resign myself to the parameters of this human condition.

Transgender is thus not actually a thing—from which it logically follows that progressives cannot use transgender persons as ammo for their own arguments about the nature of gender. I strongly suspect that for progressives actual transgender persons may have never been as important as the use of those persons as symbols. 

This would explain why such progressives so blithely think it “compassion” to encourage a crazy person to jump off his own cliff. The conservative understanding would instead suggest that compassion consists of trying to talk him down from it. That’s because conservatives tend to believe that there is an objective thing called sanity, and that the attempt to break all limits inherent to the human condition will ultimately result in madness.

In a way, transgenderism can be understood as an apotheosis of progressive ideology. Progressivism is fundamentally about: one, the rejection of any concept of unchanging human nature; and two, loving ideas more than really existing persons. These twin impulses come to a frightening head when it comes to the progressives’ supposed “advocacy” for such deeply troubled human beings.

The Poisoned Well

It’s odd that such basic insights now meet howling demands for political correctness. This suggests men having forgotten what it means to be men, and that women have likewise forgotten what it means to be women. What else could be expected to happen, once people have accepted the idea that the concepts of man and woman are not founded on solid ground, and can be deconstructed at will? Progressives have reversed the categories: they’ve chosen to identify psychosis as ultimate reality, and to consign to the realm of delusion the most basic facts of being a person.

Feminism has ruined everything. The point here is not, of course, to argue against women’s liberty. In regions of the world governed by sharia law, actual feminism—as in, a movement for the freedom of women to express themselves, pursue their dreams—would be a wonderful thing.

This isn’t a question of whether women should be able to become doctors or pilots. Of course they should. But that’s not the meaning of modern feminism. This is an ideology whose endgame is the abolition of gender altogether—and romance along with it. One symptom of this consists of D.C. McAllister’s well-put observation that modern feminism, according to its own logic, automatically classifies all chivalry as chauvinism.

The effect is that of a poisoned well. There is never a strict one-to-one correlation between ideology and reality. Rather, the dominant ideology becomes the general air that everyone within a culture breathes, permeating and twisting everything through its lens in diffused and myriad ways.

What would many women actually dream of, if feminism hadn’t told them what to want? Likewise, what would men think it means to be chivalrous toward women? The sad truth is that now we can’t know, because people have been drinking this water for just far too long. The only way to go is forward.

A Note on Inherent Liberty

The vision of gender I’ve been describing is not prescriptive, which means it isn’t a matter of telling any individual man or woman what to do with his or her life. This is a religious vision of gender—and the whole meaning of religious liberty is that you can hold what ideas you want, express them without fear of revenge, and engage in free association with other like-minded folk. It would be both absurd and wrong to attempt to coerce or force anyone to adhere to this understanding of gender. The point, rather, consists of persuasion, seduction: create and express a thing of beauty, and hope people will come around to seeing it, out of their own free wills.

You can’t negotiate with fanatics; for all their pretty talk, they have no real concept of living and letting live.

Unfortunately, this is not how the progressives tend to see the matter. They want to impose their own religious vision of gender on everyone else. If you don’t agree with them, then you become a bigot by default. They want to punish people who hold heretical views through whatever means are available, including the levers of governmental power. You can’t negotiate with fanatics; for all their pretty talk, they have no real concept of living and letting live.

The idea isn’t to tell living men and women what to do. The idea is freedom, and to oppose a culture that is increasingly hostile toward the old-fashioned beliefs and methods for living in comfort within your own gendered skin. No one “must” accept this vision. But anyone who attempts to foreclose on it, give it no space to exist, surely must be resisted.

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Trump Says China Pressuring North Korea on Missile, Nukes

Trump Says China Pressuring North Korea on Missile, Nukes

The Stream - Sunday April 30, 2017

by Foster Klug Kim Tong Hyung

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- President Donald Trump said in a television interview to be aired Sunday that he believes China’s president has been putting pressure on North Korea as it pursues its missile and nuclear weapons programs.

In an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump said he won’t be happy if North Korea conducts a nuclear test and that he believes Chinese President Xi Jinping won’t be happy, either.

Asked if that means military action, Trump responded: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”

On Saturday, a North Korean mid-range ballistic missile apparently failed shortly after launch, the third test-fire flop this month but a clear message of defiance. North Korean ballistic missile tests are banned by the United Nations because they’re seen as part of the North’s push for a nuclear-tipped missile that can hit the U.S. mainland.

The launch comes at a point of particularly high tension in the region. Trump has sent a nuclear-powered submarine and the USS Carl Vinson aircraft supercarrier to Korean waters and North Korea last week conducted large-scale, live-fire exercises on its eastern coast. The U.S. and South Korea also started installing a missile defense system that is supposed to be partially operational within days and their two navies are staging joint military drills.

Residents in the village of Seongj, where the missile defense system is being installed, scuffled with police on Sunday. About 300 protesters faced off against 800 police and succeeded in blocking two U.S. Army oil trucks from entering the site, local media reported. A few residents were injured or fainted from the scuffle and were transported to a hospital.

The Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, remains a controversial topic in South Korea and presidential front-runner Moon Jae-in even has vowed to reconsider the deployment if he wins the May 9 election. He has said that the security benefits of THAAD would be offset by worsened relations with China, which is the country’s biggest trading partner and is opposed to its deployment.

Trump raised eyebrows in South Korea last week when he said would make Seoul pay $1 billion for the missile defense system. Seoul’s presidential Blue House said Sunday that White House National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster confirmed that the U.S. will not be seeking money for the system.

North Korea didn’t immediately comment on its latest missile launch, though its state media on Saturday reiterated the country’s goal of being able to strike the continental U.S.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry denounced the launch as an “obvious” violation of United Nations resolutions and the latest display of North Korea’s “belligerence and recklessness.”

“We sternly warn that the North Korean government will continue to face a variety of strong punitive measures issued by the U.N. Security Council and others if it continues to reject denuclearization and play with fire in front of the world,” the ministry said.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the missile flew for several minutes and reached a maximum height of 71 kilometers (44 miles) before it apparently failed.

It didn’t immediately provide an estimate on how far the missile flew, but a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said it was likely a medium-range KN-17 ballistic missile. It broke up a few minutes after the launch.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, speaking after a meeting of Japan’s National Security Council, said the missile is believed to have traveled about 50 kilometers (30 miles) and fallen on an inland part of North Korea.

Analysts say the KN-17 is a new Scud-type missile developed by North Korea. The North fired the same type of missile April 16, just a day after a massive military parade where it showed off its expanding missile arsenal, but U.S. officials called that launch a failure.

Some analysts say a missile the North test fired April 5, which U.S. officials identified as a Scud variant, also might have been a KN-17. U.S. officials said that missile spun out of control and crashed into the sea.

Moon Seong Mook, a South Korean analyst and former military official, says that the North would gain valuable knowledge even from failed launches as it continues to improve its technologies for missiles. The South Korean and Japanese assessments about Saturday’s launch indicate that the North fired the missile from a higher-than-normal angle to prevent it from flying too far, he said.

“They could be testing a variety of things, such as the thrust of the rocket engine or the separation of stages,” Moon said. “A failure is a failure, but that doesn’t mean the launch was meaningless.”

The two earlier launches were conducted from an eastern coastal area, but Saturday’s missile was fired in the west, from an area near Pukchang, just north of the capital, Pyongyang.

Pope Francis warned that “a good part of humanity” will be destroyed if tensions with North Korea escalate, and he called for diplomacy and a revived United Nations to take the lead in negotiating a resolution.

Francis was asked as he traveled back to Rome from Egypt on Saturday local time (early Sunday morning Seoul time) about North Korean ballistic missile tests and U.S. warnings of “catastrophic” consequences if the world fails to stop them.

“Today, a wider war will destroy not a small part of humanity, but a good part of humanity and culture. Everything. Everything, no? It would be terrible. I don’t think humanity today could bear it,” he told reporters

___

AP writers Matthew Pennington and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this story.

 

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Homeownership Among US Millennials At All Time Low

Homeownership Among US Millennials At All Time Low

Zero Hedge - Sunday April 30, 2017

by Tyler Durden

After dropping to an all time low 62.9% in Q2 of 2016, the US homeownership rate rebounded modestly in the subsequent two quarters, before once again taking a step lower according to the latest Census data, released last week, and which showed that the percentage of US homeowners declined from 63.7% to 63.6% in Q1 of 2017, less than 1% from the all time lows in the series history going back to the mid 1960s.

A breakdown of the data by age group reveals that the primary driver for this latest decline was once again the youngest age cohort. While older Americans, especially those 65 and older, have predictably seen only modest declines in their homeownership in recent decades, it was the youngest age group, those 35 and younger, i.e. the Millennials, who once again decided against owning and chose to rent instead.

As shown in the chart below, the homeownership rate for Americans 35 and younger slumped from 34.7% as of December 2016 to 34.3%, in line with the lowest rate reported by the Census Bureau going back nearly a quarter century. Of note: the largest decline in the homeownership rate following the collapse in the house market occurred for households aged 35 to 44, although it appears to be stabilizing in recent quarters.

And since most young Americans are opting not to own, but rather rent, the latest data from the Census showed that in Q1, the median asking rent was flat at $864, just $6 below the all time high recorded one year earlier.

Broken down by region, there has been a sharp spike in asking rents in the Northeast region, which continues to closely compete with asking rents in the West, i.e., California, with the median rent in the two regions approximately $1,100 and well above rents in either the Midwest or the South.

That said, the contribution from owner-occupied households to overall household growth continues to increase, while the contribution from renters has stabilized after falling sharply in late 2015 and through much of 2016. On a year-over-year basis, the four-quarter moving average of renter-occupied households increased 599,000 in the first quarter, while the four-quarter moving average of owner-occupied households increased 441,000. The gap between the increase in renter- and owner-occupied households was the narrowest since the second quarter of 2007.

Finally, Census also revealed an increase of 158,000 households in the first quarter, following an increase of 47,000 in the fourth quarter of 2016. On a year-over-year basis, the number of households was up 1.219 million in the first quarter, up from 804,000 in the fourth quarter. The HVS data can be noisy, so we focus on year-over-year changes in four-quarter moving averages to assess trends in household formation. On that basis, the increase in households in the first quarter was 1.039 million, up from 878,000 in the fourth quarter.

Source: US Census

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Gergen slams ‘divisive’ Trump speech

Gergen slams ‘divisive’ Trump speech
By Kyle Balluck - 04-30-17 07:27 AM EDT

CNN senior political analyst David Gergen late Saturday said President Trump delivered "the most divisive speech I've ever heard from a sitting American president" at a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania.

"To bring your campaign speech into the presidency is something presidents rarely do," Gergen said on CNN.

"He played to his base and he treated his other listeners, the rest of the people who have been disturbed about him or oppose him, he treated them basically as 'I don't care, I don't give a damn what you think, because you're frankly like the enemy.'"

Gergen, who has advised four U.S. presidents, said he found Trump's speech "deeply disturbing."

Trump held a freewheeling rally in Harrisburg, Pa., late Saturday to celebrate his 100th day in office.

Trump basked in the roars of the crowd as he touted his accomplishments and reiterated his commitment to campaign promises such as repealing ObamaCare and building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump also accused Democrats of obstructing his agenda, taking aim at Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

"Sen. Schumer is bad leader," Trump said. "I've known him a long time. Sen. Schumer is a bad leader. Not a natural leader at all. He works hard to study leadership. When you have to study leadership, you've got problems.

"Sen. Schumer is weak on crime and wants to raise your taxes through the roof. He is a poor leader - known him a long time - and he's leading the Democrats to doom."

Trump also criticized coverage of his first 100 days in office at the rally, held on the same night as the annual, star-studded White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington.

"I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington's swamp, spending my evening with all of you and with a much, much larger crowd and much better people," Trump said.

Dems, not trusting Trump, want permanent ObamaCare fix

Dems, not trusting Trump, want permanent ObamaCare fix
By Mike Lillis - 04-30-17 08:15 AM EDT

Rank-and-file Democrats in the House aren't satisfied with President Trump's offer to make critical ObamaCare payments as part of a deal to keep the government funded and prevent a shutdown.

They're seeking a permanent legislative fix to the issue, something they believe would stabilize the healthcare law.

And they say they don't trust Trump to stick to his word in making the payments, which if withheld could cause havoc in ObamaCare's exchanges.

"Whenever he says, 'Take me at my word,' it's going to worry every Democrat in the House," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said of Trump. "And probably even people who vote for it understand that the president's word changes like Washington weather."

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) echoed that concern, questioning whether Trump's commitment is "binding."

The payments to insurers, known as cost-sharing reductions (CSRs), have been made by the executive branches under both Trump and Obama to offset losses to companies that provide care to low-income consumers.

If the payments end, companies would be barred from charging these consumers deductibles, but it could cause them to pull out of the market, reducing access to healthcare for the poor. People who make between 100 percent and 250 percent of the poverty line are eligible for the assistance.

House Republicans sued the Obama administration over the payments, arguing that Congress never appropriated them and that they are unconstitutional. The House GOP won an initial court decision, and the Trump administration has to decide whether to appeal.

Trump previously has suggested he could end the payments or use them as leverage in talks aimed at getting Democrats to agree to changes to ObamaCare.

But this week, Trump sought to defuse threats by Democrats to withhold support for a spending bill over the issue by saying that he would continue to make the payments.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accepted Trump's offer.

But other Democrats want more: a permanent fix. And they say they may not support the government spending bill if it excludes specific language guaranteeing the payments.

"If I don't have confidence that President Trump will continue the payments, I won't even consider voting for it," Butterfield said of the spending bill. "I need some reassurance from the administration, some type of declaration not just from the president but from the whole administration - from the secretary on down, [Mick] Mulvaney and the rest of them."

An erosion of Democratic support for an omnibus spending bill would complicate passage of the legislation, as GOP leaders are expected to need a significant number of Democratic votes to move the spending package through each chamber.

Congress on Friday passed a stopgap measure to fund the government for seven days, but lawmakers are still haggling over a larger package to extend the funding through the remainder of fiscal 2017, which runs through September. A failure to act by the end of next Friday (May 5) would shutter much of the federal government.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has rejected the idea of including funding for the payments in the spending bill - "We're not doing that," he said.

How long the payments will continue, however, remains unknown.

"While we agreed to go ahead and make the CSR payments for now, we haven't made a final decision about future commitments," a White House official said in an email.

The lack of certainty is the reason some Democrats are now pressing to secure the subsidies as part of the current spending debate.

"The problem is they're going to pay April's payments and then May's payments are coming up May 20, and you can't run a health plan on a month-by-month basis. So that's why this is a critical issue," said Rep. Ami Bera (D), a California physician.

"At a minimum we ought to guarantee those payments for five years, if not make them permanent. The omnibus would be the right place to do that."

The House Democrats are not alone in their concern. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is also dubious about Trump's commitment to the payments.

"[A] short pause in this Administration's saber-rattling isn't enough to calm the uncertainty they're causing in our health care system," Murray said in a statement.

Both Schumer and Pelosi on Friday defended their decision to accept Trump's offer without legislative assurances to back it up.

"They understand that the public knows that if they renege on this commitment, that premiums will go up. It's going to cost the federal government more. It's not a good idea," Pelosi said. "I think we're in a good place with them on this."

Schumer also downplayed the threat that the payments would cease.

"The same forces that forced them to say 'yes' the first time are still going to be in effect for quite a while," he said.

Many Democrats will almost certainly adopt the position of their respective leaders when the spending package hits the chamber floors. Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), for instance, said he trusts Pelosi's negotiating prowess enough to follow her lead on the omnibus vote.

"Nobody knows how to make a deal better than Nancy," he said. "This is her wheelhouse."

Yet other Democrats suggested their leaders have placed too much weight on Trump's promise to continue the subsidies - payments, they argue, he was legally obligated to make to begin with.

"The president is not giving us something or doing us a favor by doing what he is supposed to do, which is to keep the insurance markets from being totally freaking wrecked," said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). "So if that's what we believe we should be getting out of leadership, or through our leverage, then we just miscalculated."

It's unclear how many Democrats might hinge their votes on the fate of the CSR language. Party leaders have vowed not to instigate a government shutdown, and they'll face plenty of pressure to provide votes if they get what they want on other issues, such as women's reproductive health, consumer financial protection and healthcare in Puerto Rico.

With so many parts still in motion, even the harshest Trump critics are keeping their powder dry on the omnibus vote.

"I need to see what the leadership is going to say," Cleaver said, referring to the ObamaCare subsidies.

"That doesn't mean I'm going to follow them, but maybe they have a level of comfort that I don't presently share."

Scott Wong contributed.