Friday, November 11, 2016



I’m a woman. And I am so happy Trump won

Corrine Barraclough below rightly skewers feminist talk about glass ceilings.  She says a tough woman will not be held back.  And history shows that. Feminists and the Left (but I repeat myself) regularly ignore the success of Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sheikh Hasina, Benazir Bhutto, Yulia Tymoshenko, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Cristina Kirchner, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Helen Clark, Julia Gillard, Ameenah Gurib, Park Geun-hye, Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May in rising to run their countries. Mr. Obama will remember Helle Thorning-Schmidt.  Mrs. Obama will too.

The glass ceiling has long ago been shattered if you have the political talent required. It's only if your horizons are limited to the USA that you could talk of a glass ceiling. Even there, one might note that three countries that are culturally and ethnically similar to the USA -- Australia, New Zealand and Britain -- have recently had female Prime Ministers -- and Britain in fact still has.

Corrine Barraclough is herself a successful journalist based in Australia





When an increasing number of commentators started talking about Hillary Clinton finally smashing the “glass ceiling” yesterday, my flipping stomach told me the media was entirely out of touch with the majority of voters.

The LA Times reported Clinton’s election night venue was symbolic because “after spending the campaign talking about trying to break the ‘glass ceiling’ by becoming the first female president, she’ll stand under a literal glass ceiling”. I read two feminist articles celebrating her success before the polls had even begun.

“Today is the day,” one wrote with premature self-righteousness. “The day for every woman who has ever been told that she’s not qualified for a position...”

Bore off. It simply doesn’t happen and immigration is a bigger issue than sexism to most. Where have these deluded, self-indulgent obsessions come from? Who really believes the American presidency has anything to do with a few disgruntled feminists being passed over for promotions?

The more Clinton repeatedly leaned on her gender, referenced the “glass ceiling” and wheeled out celebrity friends, the more she showed how out of touch she really is.

The “glass ceiling” doesn’t exist. It is purely a mindset and, ultimately, it is the feeble mindset that sealed Clinton’s fate. Instead, people voted strength to win.

This wasn’t an election about policies. It wasn’t even about Democrats v Republicans. This was a vote of confidence. And isn’t it illogical to put your faith, hope, or trust in a liar? Forced to choose the lesser of two evils, would anyone in their right mind choose a liar over a sexist? Give me the latter any day because the tough can handle sexism.

The tough, stubborn and determined get over sexism. It fuels their ambition, they fight harder and win promotions anyway because attitude trumps gender. They leave dribble about a “glass ceiling” at the door, change strategy and shine if they’re smart.

Only weaklings whine. Hillary Clinton chose to play a feeble, victim card praying it would win her votes. It didn’t.

The media portrayal of Donald Trump repeatedly missed his mass appeal in the same way it misjudged Pauline Hanson — you may label her a raving racist but it is wrong to claim people voted for her because she’s racist, or they are racist by default.

In another’s eyes Hanson is a brave straight talker who will unapologetically push Islamic terrorism to the top of the agenda, speak up for real Australians with little regard for scratching the backs of her elite peers, and be unafraid to ask uncomfortable questions. How many times do we have to be shown it is dangerous to believe our own reality is everyone’s reality?

There is reassurance in Trump’s appointment: that overconfident left wing commentators don’t know the world as well as they think, and that the majority of Americans aren’t pearl-clutching, fainting feminists.

SOURCE






After Challenge from Atheist Group, Football Team Prays on the 50-Yard-Line

A high school football team in Dunmore, Pennsylvania has decided to keep praying before games.

As reported by Pennsylvania station WBRE, Dunmore High School's football team the Bucks were recently told by to stop praying with their coach Jack Henzes before games. The order came after the school received a letter of complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which argued that school prayers that are not voluntary and solely led by students are unconstitutional. School administrators told coach Henzes he would have to stop the prayers.

Before the FFRF complaint, Henzes had been praying with the team for 45 years. "We pray to the good Lord hoping none of our players, or the other players, are hurt because we know how hard they work," he said.

But then students on their own decided to continue to tradition, gathering on the 50-yard-line to recite the Lord's Prayer.
"We're going to go on the 50-yard-line and say the Our Father," Colin Holmes, senior running back and quarterback, told reporter Haley Bianco.

Rebecca Castellano, a parent of a student at Dunmore High School, defended the players: "This community has been built on a foundation of tradition and values and I think this is just one way that we show it. We're very tight-knit here and I think everyone can use a little prayer at one time or another."

The Bucks recently finished the regular season undefeated at 10-0.

SOURCE





Election Results Show There Is No One ‘Hispanic’ Vote

As is well known, this election will start, not end, months or years of probing existential debates for conservatives and liberals. But one trope both sides can discard early is that there is a “Hispanic” vote. As Florida demonstrated, it doesn’t exist.

There is a Mexican-American vote, a Puerto Rican vote, and a Cuban-American vote, and so on. Even those are gross generalizations that hide important regional and generational differences. And of course, many members of these groups stubbornly refuse to revert to stereotype. But for the moment these ethnic groups will do.

People will parse exit polls over the next few weeks, and we will learn more about the vote. But it should be clear that anyone who went on ad infinitum over the past few weeks about a “Hispanic surge in Florida” that would overcome Donald Trump’s strength with working white voters and help Hillary Clinton—as The New York Times said on the eve of the election—was talking hooey.

About the only group of people who benefit from the belief that there is a unified Hispanic personae—politically or culturally—are those who work at groups like La Raza, which live off the fiction that it exists, or the hope that one will come into being.

That may well be in the future, but as of now, different ethnic groups are motivated by different factors. Mexican-Americans, it appears, punished Trump for saying that Mexico sends us “rapists.” But most of that took place in states out west. In Florida, people of Mexican origin comprised only 15 percent of the “Hispanic” population as of the last Census.

Cuban-Americans, on the other hand, castigated Clinton for supporting President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to the Castro dictatorship. After earlier giving mild backing to the opening to the Castros, Trump in mid-September told Cuban-Americans in Florida that he would reverse Obama’s executive orders unless the communist government instituted political freedoms.

On Oct. 12, Cuban-Americans who are veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Brigade 2506, gave Trump its first presidential endorsement in its 55-year history.

That was enough to turn a 33-41 deficit for Trump among Cuban-Americans into a 52-42 lead in late October, according to a New York Times/Siena poll that said, “Cubans come home to Trump.” And that’s important, as Cubans continue to comprise the lion’s share of the Hispanic population with 30 percent in Florida.

Puerto Ricans, who are important not just in the Northeast but in the area of Florida between Tampa and Daytona Beach as well, may not have wanted to punish either candidate too much.

The so-called “I-4 corridor,” named after the interstate highway that links those two cities, has a population of some 8 million, as big as Virginia’s. About 1 million are estimated to be Puerto Ricans who fled the island’s dire economic situation. Since they are American citizens, they get to vote as soon as they arrive.

Bill Clinton has courted the Puerto Rican vote for decades, and Hillary Clinton went all out to get them. Her campaign ran radio ads in Orlando that were not just in Spanish, but with voices in a Puerto Rican accent. While she may have won many of those votes, clearly it wasn’t enough to win the state.

Amparo Vargas, a Puerto Rican resident of Kissimmee, typified the general ambivalence when she told the Associated Press in September, “She’s a liar. I have no trust in Hillary. And I think Trump is a crazy man.”

So everyone talking about a “Hispanic” vote or a “brown” vote or any such nonsense were merely showing their own wishes for the country to look that way. The reality is that many Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans—especially the ones in Florida, who tend to belong to the professional classes—do not consider themselves anything but white.

Nor would members of either group worry about Trump’s deportation of illegal immigrants. Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and Cubans in the U.S. cannot be illegal because of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows all Cubans who touch dry land safe entry.

Above all, Clinton owes her demise in Florida to Obama, who with trademark hubris pushed his Cuba opening further by allowing in October a United Nations vote against the U.S. embargo on Cuba and liberalized imports of Cuban cigars and rum. His ideological belief in a “brown” Hispanic vote made him fail to understand the Cuban-American vote.

Longtime Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer wrote last week that Obama was convinced to push ahead by a vote by a Florida International University poll in August that showed Cuban-Americans supported his opening to the Castros.

The only problem was that the FIU poll included all Cubans who have immigrated to the U.S. from 1960 to the present. If you break it down into waves that came in 1960-1980, 1980-1994, and 1994-2016, what you find is that a whopping 62 percent of the first group opposed Obama’s Cuba policy, while only 12 percent of the latter group did.

There is only one wrinkle that Obama ignored: 97 percent of citizens in the first group are registered to vote. Among the second group, a mere 43 percent are.

“I wonder what Obama was thinking when he signed the Cuban rum and cigars order—a largely symbolic measure—and when he voted to abstain on the embargo at the U.N., just a few weeks before the U.S. elections. What was the rush to press the normalization pedal just now?” asked Oppenheimer.

Indeed. Generalizing about Hispanic votes, or even Cuban-Americans ones, is fool’s gold. Better to appeal to all Americans with good policies, rather than look at the country as a mosaic of groups.

SOURCE





Margaret Court calls fault: ABC maligned my beliefs

Tennis great Margaret Court says she felt maligned by the [Australian] ABC for her religious beliefs and opposition to gay marriage in interviews to promote her book.

Court, a Perth-based Christian pastor, said the broadcaster was one-sided, barely touching on her church charity work.

She did 22 media appearances to promote her autobiography, including eight with the ABC, but said the national broadcaster was the only outlet that seemed to have an agenda.

“They weren’t really interested in my tennis much; all they were interested in was hitting my beliefs for standing for marriage between a man and a woman,” Court said. “I think we have to look at the fact this is happening, because it was not very nice in there — it was horrible, it was below-the-belt stuff.

“What has gone wrong? It used to be full of good religious programs ... There was nothing about Christianity in my interviews, it was all on gay marriage.”

This morning a delegation of religious leaders will meet ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie to argue against planned cuts to religious programming. The delegation will include the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge and priest Frank Brennan, former South Australian Premier and Anglican priest Lynn Arnold and World Vision chief executive Tim Costello.

Court, a grand slam champion with 24 major titles, has stirred controversy with her hard­line views, including saying she did not want Martina Navratilova to win Wimbledon because she was gay.

Court said the interviews were particularly confronting on prerecorded shows One Plus One with Jane Hutcheon, Radio National Drive with Patricia Karvelas and on ABC Goulburn Murray with Gaye Pattison.

An ABC spokesman said several programs had agreed to ­interview Court while she promoted her book, which mentioned gay marriage. “In this context ABC presenters asked her a broad range of questions relating to her sporting career, life after tennis and her Christian beliefs,” he said.

Court acknowledged she deserved scrutiny, but said most ABC interviewers did not seek to understand her point of view: “It would have been nice if they had come from: why do you have such strong beliefs in this area?”

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

***************************



No comments: