Sunday, February 18, 2018




Leftist think tank Eyes Quashing Military Vote  

On the Center for American Progress (CAP) website is a May 12, 2017, article that discusses the “Five Truths About Voter Suppression.” It begins by noting how America “has a troubled history of voter suppression.” But even though the U.S. is past its mid-20th-century Jim Crow epoch, “some lawmakers continue to pursue policies that would undermine our nation’s progress.” The organization takes issue with things like voter ID requirements and early voting scale-backs. Ominously, it warns, “The right to vote is a fundamental pillar of American democracy, but if the new administration succeeds, countless Americans could face barriers to voting ahead of the next election.”

Trump’s targeting Americans’ ability to fairly cast a vote is baloney, of course. In contrast, however, if CAP succeeds in its sinister plan, the military will find it exceedingly more difficult to take part in what CAP rightly calls “a fundamental pillar of American democracy.” Sadly, in addition to its supposed devotion to anti-voter-suppression methods, CAP also believes that efforts to thwart voter suppression should pertain only to select groups and constituents and be contingent on their voting records.

According to The Washington Times: “After years of accusing states of voter suppression, the Center for American Progress, citing election security, wants to make voting tougher for Americans serving overseas in the military. The left-wing public policy group issued a report Monday, ‘Election Security in All 50 States,’ that called for stricter standards to prevent cybermeddling in elections by foreign governments, including banning military stationed abroad from submitting ballots via email or fax. One state that allows such vote casting is Colorado. The center called on the state to ‘prohibit voters stationed or living overseas from returning voted ballots electronically.’”

In other words, CAP is calling for actual voter suppression by virtue of advocating prohibitions on the already limited voting abilities of soldiers. What would prompt such a turnaround? After all, the Times notes, “The report is something of a departure for the center, given its record of fighting for greater ballot access.” Here’s how: To the organization’s chagrin, the Armed Forces are a different breed. Responding to the report, Public Interest Legal Foundation’s J. Christian Adams hit the nail on the head. He rightly points out that the organization doesn’t “like that the military votes against their interests nearly all of the time.” Moreover, “CAP wants to make it easier for felons and criminals to vote, but wants to make it harder for fighting men and women overseas.”

In 1797, John Adams cautioned, “We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” The Center for American Progress would probably claim that it agrees wholeheartedly with that statement. But the way in which it wants to discriminate against its political opponents tells us something very different. In this instance, those “political opponents” are the ones who fight to protect our freedoms — like voting. To put our military members in the crosshairs is adding insult to injury.

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The War That Never Ends
   
There is a war that has lasted longer than the one in Afghanistan. It is the so-called “war on poverty,” launched by President Lyndon Johnson during his State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964.

While the poverty rate dropped from 17.3 percent to 11.1 percent in the ensuing decade, it has remained between 11 percent and 15.2 percent ever since, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Interestingly, as Census figures show, the poverty rate had already begun to decline starting in 1959, five years before the LBJ initiative was announced.

Many conservatives have argued that anti-poverty programs have created a permanent underclass that has little motivation for doing what is necessary to raise them from poverty to independence. These include, among other things, two essentials: a decent education (denied by the Left, which opposes school choice), and a strong two-parent family unit.

In his budget proposal Monday, President Trump is asking Congress to cut certain entitlement programs that have arguably failed to motivate people to emerge from poverty and instead have subsidized and sustained many in poverty.

The Washington Post’s reporting is typical of what the Left has promoted for more than 50 years. It says the proposed budget “takes a hard whack at the poorest Americans, slashing billions of dollars from food stamps, public health insurance and federal housing vouchers, while trying to tilt the programs in more conservative directions.”

If the more liberal directions aren’t working, why not try a more conservative direction? It was the late Jack Kemp, former congressman and secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who best addressed the conservative and most compassionate approach to ending poverty when he said: “Conservatives define compassion not by the number of people who receive some kind of government aid, but rather by the number of people who no longer need it.”

That should be the goal of most federal programs and not just the ones addressing poverty. They should be measured by a standard of success, not seen as permanent entitlements into which increasing amounts of money is poured.

I recall an experience I had a few years ago in Singapore where I asked a taxi driver about that country’s poverty rate. At the time, he said it was less than 2 percent. I asked how that was possible. He replied that Singapore has no welfare. The government will help the truly needy, but if one is able-bodied and doesn’t work, he said, that person gets nothing from the government. The threat of an empty stomach is a prime motivator to find a job and take care of one’s self.

That has been the missing ingredient in America’s broken welfare system. Programs need to be reformed and the approach to poverty re-imagined, and not just by the government but also by those who are stuck in poverty, believing there is no way out.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. The key to a better life is inspiration, followed by motivation, followed by perspiration. A change of mindset can produce a change in virtually any circumstance.

President Trump’s budget proposal offers an opportunity to open a new front in the anti-poverty campaign, one that has the potential for success. It worked once before when President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich forged what was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The Left screamed that people would starve. They didn’t. In fact, many found jobs and discovered they no longer had to rely on government. That produced then and can produce again a sense of self-worth that is necessary for the improvement of any life.

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Black History Month

Walter E. Williams
   
Carter G. Woodson, noted scholar, historian and educator, created “Negro History Week” in 1926, which became Black History Month in 1976. Woodson chose February because it coincided with the birthdays of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. Americans should be proud of the tremendous gains made since emancipation. Black Americans, as a group, have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history.

What’s the evidence? If one totaled black income and thought of us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, black Americans would rank among the world’s 20 richest nations. It was a black American, Colin Powell, who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed the world’s mightiest military. There are a few black Americans who are among the world’s richest and most famous personalities. The significance of these achievements is that in 1865, neither a former slave nor a former slave owner would have believed that such gains would be possible in a little over a century. As such, it speaks well of the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as importantly, it speaks well of a nation in which such gains were possible. Those gains would have been impossible anywhere other than the U.S.

Putting greater emphasis on black successes in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds is far superior to focusing on grievances and victimhood. Doing so might teach us some things that could help us today. Black education today is a major problem. Let’s look at some islands of success from yesteryear, when there was far greater racial discrimination and blacks were much poorer.

From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington’s racially segregated Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, as early as 1899, outscored white students in the District of Columbia schools on citywide tests. Dr. Thomas Sowell’s research in Education: Assumptions Versus History documents similar excellence at Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School, Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School, Brooklyn’s Albany Avenue School, New Orleans’ McDonogh 35 High School and others. These excelling students weren’t solely members of the black elite; most had parents who were manual laborers, domestic servants, porters and maintenance men. Academic excellence was obtained with skimpy school budgets, run-down buildings, hand-me-down textbooks and often 40 or 50 students in a class.

Alumni of these schools include Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice (Frederick Douglass), Gen. Benjamin Davis, Dr. Charles Drew, a blood plasma innovator, Robert C. Weaver, the first black Cabinet member, Sen. Edward Brooke, William Hastie, the first black federal judge (Dunbar), and Nobel laureate Martin Luther King Jr. (Booker T. Washington). These examples of pioneering success raise questions about today’s arguments about what’s needed for black academic success. Education experts and civil rights advocates argue that for black academic excellence to occur, there must be racial integration, small classes, big budgets and modern facilities. But earlier black academic successes put a lie to that argument.

In contrast with yesteryear, at today’s Frederick Douglass High School, only 9 percent of students test proficient in English, and only 3 percent do in math. At Paul Laurence Dunbar, 12 percent of pupils are proficient in reading, and 5 percent are proficient in math. At Booker T. Washington, the percentages are 20 in English and 18 in math. In addition to low academic achievement, there’s a level of violence and disrespect to teachers and staff that could not have been imagined, much less tolerated, at these schools during the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century.

Many black political leaders are around my age, 81, such as Rep. Maxine Waters, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Jesse Jackson. Their parents and other authorities would have never accepted the grossly disrespectful, violent behavior that has become the norm at many black schools. Their silence and support of the status quo makes a mockery of black history celebrations and represents a betrayal of epic proportions to the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors in their struggle to make today’s educational opportunities available.

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House Conservatives Gear Up to Hold Line on Immigration

Some conservative lawmakers in the House say they will be uncompromising on legislation to reform the nation’s immigration system, regardless of what more liberal colleagues urge.

“The idea that we are just going to do whatever the Senate says is a little too played out, and it’s really especially wearing thin after we didn’t even make the Senate vote on our budget,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, said Wednesday during Conversations with Conservatives, a monthly meeting with reporters hosted by conservative lawmakers and The Heritage Foundation.

“The feedback I got from our district was pretty strong, like, ‘You guys really let us down on the spending plan, we’re not sure if we are going to hang with you if you let us down on immigration.’ ”

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said his colleagues as well as House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., will face consequences if immigration reform isn’t in line with what President Donald Trump campaigned on in 2016.

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That, he said, includes the solution to those brought to America illegally as children and protected from deportation in 2012 under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump ordered phased out by March 5.

“It is the defining moment for this speaker,” Meadows said of Ryan. “If he gets it wrong, it will have consequences for him, but it will also have consequences for the rest of the Republican Party.”

Meadows added:

We can’t afford to miss the opportunity and do it right because we promised the American people we would do it right. This president was elected largely on an immigration issue that defined him differently than every other candidate, and so it is the defining moment, more so than the budget or anything else that we passed.

“We clearly need to address this issue in March; I’ll just leave it at that,” Ryan said Wednesday.

Trump is asking lawmakers to support an immigration bill, introduced Monday, that mirrors his framework for reforms.

The bill, sponsored by seven senators, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, would allocate $25 billion for border security measures, including radar, physical and virtual fencing, and other technologies. A border wall is among those measures.

“The Grassley bill accomplishes the four pillars of the White House framework: a lasting solution on DACA, ending chain migration, cancelling the visa lottery, and securing the border through building the wall and closing legal loopholes,” Trump said Wednesday in a statement issued by the White House.

“I am asking all senators, in both parties, to support the Grassley bill and to oppose any legislation that fails to fulfill these four pillars—that includes opposing any short-term ‘Band-Aid’ approach,” the president said.

But conservative lawmakers such as Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, are throwing their support behind a House bill proposed by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Jordan said conservatives like the bill that Goodlatte put together with Reps. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho; Michael McCaul, R-Texas; and others:

It’s the only piece of legislation we’ve talked about that is consistent with the mandate of the 2016 election, because it does all the security things, several good policy areas, border security, wall, chain migration, [Diversity] Visa Lottery, E-Verify, sanctuary cities, it does all of the things that regular, commonsense Americans want dealt with. And then it also says we’ll address the DACA situation. So it’s the one bill that is consistent with the mandate of the election, and that’s why we support it.

House Republicans’ whip team started counting votes Wednesday for the Goodlatte bill, Roll Call reported.

“The Goodlatte-McCaul bill is the bill that we’re moving,” Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said. “And if you look at where we start today we are finally at least working on a way to come together to address this problem.”

The Goodlatte bill would give legal status to DACA recipients for three years, which would be renewable, and also end the Diversity Visa Lottery.

The latter is a controversial program that issues green cards granting legal permanent residence to 50,000 immigrants each year, as described in a commentary by David Inserra, a policy analyst specializing in homeland security and immigration at The Heritage Foundation.

The legislation also would require employers to use E-Verify, now a voluntary system, to check the immigration status of workers. And it would authorize a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and other efforts designed to increase border security.

The Grassley plan in the Senate, however, which mirrors Trump’s framework, would grant amnesty to 1.8 million illegal immigrants in exchange for new priorities for legal immigration and more border security, including the president’s promised border wall.

Lawmakers said they will stick to conservative principles in the immigration debate.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., called it “a watershed moment.”

“I … really don’t care what the Senate does, we in the House, we are responsible for a good bill, putting it forward and sticking with it,” Norman said, “because a lot of us just aren’t going to settle for anything just because the Senate wants us to. This is a watershed moment, in my opinion … this was the 2016 election.”

The Grassley bill also would restrict family-based immigration to the nuclear family; budget for increased border security personnel; and close what sponsors call loopholes in the immigration process.

The six other Republican senators whose names are on the bill are Tom Cotton of Arkansas, John Cornyn of Texas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, David Perdue of Georgia, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Joni Ernst of Iowa.

The Grassley bill “grandfathers all pending family-based visa applications in order to reward those who chose to follow the law and immigrate legally,” according to a press release from Cotton’s office. “The allotment for the Diversity Visa Lottery will be reallocated to reduce this backlog and the employment-based visa backlog.”

Meadows said lawmakers in the House like the Goodlatte bill, and Scalise and other leaders should be able to drive support for it.

“I think that when they whip it, it will have more votes than the tax reform bill did when they originally whipped that,” the Freedom Caucus chairman said. “It will have more votes than the budget that we passed had when they originally whipped that. So getting to 218 would be easier to do if we just continued to work the Goodlatte-Labrador bill, and not try to run to some Senate bill.”

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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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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