Wednesday, August 26, 2020


Chaos in Wisconsin City as Rioters Burn Buildings, Attack Police

Once again defiant behavior towards the police by a black criminal leads to a chain of unfortunate events

Rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, burned buildings, looted stores, and attacked police officers overnight on Aug. 23. The mayhem prompted the city and county to issue a curfew until 7 a.m.

A public safety alert urged business owners to consider closing “due to numerous arm[ed] robberies and shots fired calls.”

Video footage showed a number of businesses torched by rioters, including a car dealership.

The agitators clashed with police, attacking them with fireworks and other objects. At one point, a group blocked a sheriff’s vehicle from moving as one brandished a rifle.

Graffiti sprayed around the city suggested Black Lives Matter activists were involved in the chaos. Rioters “were chanting ‘black lives matter’ over and over and over again,” Drew Hernandez, an independent reporter who was on the ground, said in a video message.

Kenosha is located about 40 miles south of Milwaukee and 60 miles north of Chicago, next to Lake Michigan.

The rioting came hours after a black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by police officers when he allegedly resisted arrest. He was rushed to the hospital in serious condition.

Blake’s brother told Lauren Linder, a TMJ reporter, that Blake underwent surgery and was in the intensive care unit.  Blake’s family urged people to remain peaceful.

The state Department of Justice is probing the shooting.

According to court records, Blake had an arrest warrant issued in July for trespassing, third-degree sexual assault, and disorderly conduct.

The Kenosha Police Department said that officers were sent to a portion of 40th Street just after 5 p.m. for a domestic incident.

That response ultimately led to an officer-involved shooting, according to police officials.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Blake “was shot in the back multiple times in broad daylight.”

“While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country,” Evers said in a statement.

“I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long,” he added later.

Evers’s office didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry regarding the potential use of state troopers or the National Guard to quell the unrest.

Republican President Donald Trump twice over the weekend said the federal government would help states and cities deal with rioting, if officials ask for assistance.

“Would bring in National Guard, end problem immediately. ASK!” he wrote on Twitter about the continued mayhem in Portland, Oregon.

“These riots are an antigovernment movement from the Left that are all in Democrat run cities. The mayors have got to let their police do what they know how to do. Would be very easy to suppress or, call in the Federal Government. We will solve problem fast!” he wrote in another tweet.

Federal officers helped deal with anarchy in Portland in July until Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, agreed to send state troopers to assist police officers in responding to the rioting. State troopers later left after the district attorney who oversees the city announced a new policy to presumptively drop some charges against demonstrators.

SOURCE 





Seattle's 'Summer of Love' Mayor Durkan Vetoes Police Budget Cuts

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) must wonder where all this is going.

The city council voted 7-1 this month to slash its police budget. The one vote against was not in defense of police; that council member voted against the cuts because they did not go far enough. The anti-police activist groups, who by and large have the media’s ear in Seattle as they do in every major city, slammed the cuts as not going far enough. Media never turn and ask any real questions of those activist groups, such as “When crime inevitably spikes and people die because the city council did what you want them to do, will you apologize to the mothers of those victims?”

Police Chief Carmen Best resigned after that vote, effective Sept. 2, not because the cuts slashed her pay (which they did), but because the city council’s vote reflected its disrespect for Seattle’s police (which it does). Best has been the lone adult in the city government during most of the crisis.

Durkan was fully on board with the antifa/BLM left, even handing them a slice of downtown Seattle for a while. That slice included both public and private property. When that got out of control, as Chief Best warned and any adult would have expected, Durkan defied reason and declared her hope that it would become a “summer of love.” Instead, the CHOP became a crime story. That’s what forced her to shut it down. The daily violations of Americans’ private property rights, free speech and free press in the “autonomous zone” were not enough.

Durkan’s own love affair with the riots and protests ended when they showed up to protest her on her lawn. You’ve heard of “not in my back yard,” the notion by which the Kennedys, who claim to favor all sorts of alternative energy, nevertheless vetoed windmills when they spoiled the family’s ocean view. Durkan took a “not in my front yard” view of the protesters when they turned up in hers. That was back at the end of June.

Since that time she has faced fast-rising crime on the streets she allegedly governs, a hard left city council that still demands to defund the police, street protests both opposing and supporting the police, and riots that still spring up, though not with quite the same gusto Portland sees night after night.

On Friday Durkan vetoed the city council’s police budget cuts. But she says she still wants to cut their budget. Just, not by as much as city council wants to. And she wants to see a plan.

The cuts would have totaled around $23 million of the remaining $127 million in the budget, KOMO News reported.

“This veto was because the bills, as passed, did not have the type of collaboration that I think we will have going forward, and that I’m hopeful we will have going forward,” Durkan said during a news conference. “There’s some flaws in each of these (bills) that I hope the council can correct, or with discussions, we can find a path forward together.

“I continue to have concerns about council decisions to make cuts before they have a plan,” she added.

Austin’s city council is guilty of the same. They slashed the police budget by a third, with no real plan for what’s next. What’s next is a boatload of police officer departures, a demoralized police department, emboldened criminals, and rising crime everywhere. Stores are increasingly being broken into and robbed across Austin. Police investigators, stretched to their limits, are taking longer to respond. The volume of crime is becoming more than they can keep up with. There was another homicide this weekend. Austin and Seattle are heading down the same path.

These city councils are bowing to hard left pressure groups — well, those city council members who don’t come directly from those groups are bowing to them — and slashing police budgets despite the fact that majorities everywhere oppose it. The hard left activists now control most of our large cities and they are hollowing them out. More than two decades of progress against crime is being undone in a few months. New York may take a decade to recover from Bill de Blasio, if it recovers at all.

Durkan vetoed these police budget cuts but she is no hero in this. She is beginning to behave somewhat responsibly, but it’s probably too late. She already lost her police chief to the mob. Her judgement was abysmal when CHOP sprung up. She only began to see reason when that turned into a crime-ridden abscess in the middle of the city, and when the rioters protested her directly. She’s still trying to appease the leftist activists on the one hand, and the police-supporting majority on the other. She’ll likely face a veto override on this vote, and a challenge from the left in the next election. That’s next year. She won in 2017 thanks to a scandal on the part of the incumbent, and a divided left-tilted vote in the primary. The second-place finisher in that primary was, you guessed it, another hard left local activist. As was the third-place finisher. Remove one and another just takes their place.

SOURCE 







Conservatives Ceded Too Many Battlefields

Government agencies align against us because we don't have people in those jobs.

These days, many conservatives are wondering just how we got to the point where so many government agencies are riddled with people who seem willing to misuse their power for political gain. This has been the case not just in the bowels of the State Department or EPA but even in some areas of law enforcement and the intelligence community. While most of this can be traced to leftists’ penchant for power, one thing didn’t help matters: In far too many arenas of society, conservatives simply ceded the field — often without a fight.

The first field too many conservatives abandoned was pop culture. We’ve discussed the disparity before, but the entertainment industry can bring a lot of influence to bear on the issues, and entertainers give the Left a huge storytelling advantage, also known as “the narrative.”

But those fields aren’t the only ones the Right yielded. In higher academia, conservative professors are often mercilessly hounded until they are compelled to quit — or worse. (See the tragic case of Mike Adams.) These days, the few conservatives who work in higher education are isolated, fighting lonely fights with barely any support. At any point, phony charges of racism, sexism, etc. can be used to end a conservative professor’s career — even with tenure.

We don’t need to look far to see how those consequences mount for conservative professors and students alike. When college is the gateway for becoming a doctor, lawyer, or a vast number of other professions (including government work), professors and administrators become gatekeepers to those career paths.

That gatekeeper status has been abused in multiple ways, whether to freeze out conservatives or to engage in racial discrimination. Is anyone surprised, then, that a blind eye is turned to threats of violence that drive a conservative student out? Oddly enough, those same administrators now are dropping the use of standardized tests — the data of which has been some of the strongest evidence of racial discrimination.

What do you suppose will happen to those students and prospective students who don’t comply with the latest demands of political correctness? Is it any wonder that more than half of conservative students plan to just be quiet and keep their heads down?

In a similar vein, K-12 education also was ceded. These days, expressing conservative views can get a teacher terminated. But we didn’t see actions against the teachers and students who used the Parkland massacre to stage a “walkout” in favor of gun control, which was far more disruptive.

High school teachers, principals, and counselors are gatekeepers for college admission, but so are administrators. They control the hiring, firing, and promotions of those who teach our kids. When leftist activists run public schools, conservative applicants often don’t have much of a chance.

That brings us back to government work. Whether at the federal, state, or local government levels, many conservatives don’t think about the career positions that are involved. Whether they prefer to be in the private sector or they don’t think they can make a difference, or even if it’s just a general aversion to government, they pass up on those positions (law enforcement and national defense are the two general exceptions).

The result is a bureaucracy that has become a threat to our freedoms. Why? Because when everyone in the office thinks conservatives are Nazis — often because they live in a bubble where they don’t even encounter conservatives in real life — it’s easy to give themselves permission to put their thumbs on the scales.

Does anyone think that the IRS’s Lois Lerner would have dared try what she did if there were conservatives in the organization who had the ability to preserve documents and pass them to trustworthy media outlets? Would “John Doe” have happened in Wisconsin if those plotting that nefarious abuse worried about whistleblowers? If leftists trying to destroy the NRA for the “crime” of opposing gun control worried that internal discussions could find their way to the public, would they have backed off? Would coworkers have gone along if they knew colleagues who were sympathetic to conservative arguments?

The cession of multiple arenas to the Left has generated a perfect storm where those in pop culture paint Republicans and conservatives in the worst light, and the portrayals broadcast by the media eventually convince others that they have to act “to save democracy.” The bubbles that were built didn’t just come from the Left’s efforts over decades (although it was the primary factor); they also came from indifference on the Right.

Because conservatives didn’t even show up for the battles that had to be fought long ago, they face harder battles today. Things can and must be turned around, but it will be a very difficult fight.

SOURCE 







Democrats Are Waging War Against Tradition and the Constitution

Several of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates favored the abolishment of the Electoral College. Or, as once-confident candidate Elizabeth Warren put it, “I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College.”

Furor over the Electoral College among the left arose from the 2000 and 2016 elections. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular votes. But, like three earlier presidents, they lost the Electoral College voting — and with it the presidency.

The Founding Fathers saw a purpose in the Electoral College. It ensured that small, rural states would retain importance in national elections.

The Electoral College lessened the chance of voting fraud affecting the outcome of a national vote by compartmentalizing the outcome among the various states. It usually turns the presidential election into a contest between two major parties that alone have the resources to campaign nationwide.

The college is antithetical to the parliamentary systems of Europe. There, a multiplicity of small extremist parties form and break coalitions to select heads of state, often without transparency.

Yet to change the U.S. Constitution is hard — and by intent.

Historically, an amendment has required a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and an additional ratification by three-fourths of the states through votes of their legislatures.

There is a chance that some states could render void the Electoral College without formally amending the Constitution.

To circumvent the Constitution, Democrats have pushed “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” an agreement among a group of states that would force state electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote and ignore their own state tallies. Already, 15 states totaling 73 percent of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency have joined.

Liberal academics have an array of proposed constitutional changes. Why do two Wyoming senators each represent about 290,000 voters while each California senator represents 20 million?

Forget that the founders established a constitutional republic, not a radical democracy, in order to check and balance popular and often volatile public opinion. One way was by creating an upper-house Senate that would slow down the pulse of the more populist House of Representatives.

Nevertheless, there is an ongoing effort to dream up ways to create more, and apparently liberal, senators — to change the rules rather than the hearts and minds of the voters.

In his recent eulogy at John Lewis’s funeral, Barack Obama proposed giving statehood to liberal Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. That would instantly give Democrats four additional senators.

Others want senators allotted by population. That was the argument in a recent Atlantic article titled “The Path to Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Just One,”

There is nothing in the Constitution that specifies the exact size and makeup of the Supreme Court. It only offers guidance on how justices are appointed and confirmed, and that there will be a chief justice. But since 1869, the Supreme Court has been fixed at eight associate justices and one chief justice.

Democratic primary candidates Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren said they would consider ending that 151-year tradition and “pack” the court with additional justices in the fashion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed 1937 effort.

The left is apparently afraid of a second Donald Trump presidential term that might allow him four or five Supreme Court picks over eight years in office.

The effect of such appointments could be mitigated by expanding the court to 12 or more justices, along with altering the rules for selecting them.

In his eulogy for Lewis, Obama also called for an end to the Senate filibuster. He claimed it was a racist relic from the Jim Crow era used to stymie needed social change.

Given recent polling, Obama now apparently believes Trump will lose the election, and Congress with it. But he also seems to fear that fundamental progressive transformation could be checked by a filibuster-happy Republican Senate minority.

Democrats were perfectly happy with the filibuster — or the mere threat of the filibuster — from 2017 to 2019, when the Democratic Senate minority blocked much of the Trump agenda.

Efforts to change time-honored rules for short-term gain are becoming more common.

Sanctuary cities nullify federal immigration law to empower illegal immigration. The nonenforcement of laws against rioting and looting has become common in big cities. The First Amendment is inert on college campuses.

The left should beware. Politics are volatile and often change. When Democrats destroy longstanding rules for short-term advantage, they may regret it when they too are in need of sober traditions and the U.S. Constitution.

SOURCE  

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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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