WILL THE LEFT RENAME AMERICA?

And New York, Pennsylvania, California and Washington D.C.?

Austin’s Equity Office has recommended renaming the Texas city because of Stephen F. Austin's alleged views on slavery. But why stop at just renaming Austin when Amerigo Vespucci took and sold slaves.

Austin, Texas is named after Stephen F. Austin, but America is named after Amerigo Vespucci.

New York City has been on its own anti-history binge, demoting the statue of the ‘Father of Gynecology’ and tearing out plaques memorializing Robert E. Lee attached to a tree that he had once planted, but it’s got bigger problems. The city is named after King James II whose Royal African Company branded thousands of slaves with DY for the Duke of York.

And New York’s problems don’t end there. Its Bronx borough is named after Jonas Bronck, who was likely killed in an Indian raid. Queens is named after the wife of King Charles II (James’ brother) whose husband was also quite active in the slave trade. New York is full of places named after Charlie and his relatives, like Richmond County, and the city and the state would both have to be renamed.

So would South and North Carolina, named after Charles I, and Maryland, named after his wife, who had authorized a trade in African slaves. The Maryland charter was received by Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, whose family owned slaves. Anne Arundel County is named after Cecil's wife.

New Jersey was named by George Carteret under a grant from Charles II. Carteret was connected to the African slave trade through the Royal African Company. A number of areas in New Jersey are named after him and his family. That includes the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, named after Carteret’s wife.

Royal names are a problem that bedevils even the leftist parts of the country.

Prince George’s County is a reliable Dem area in Maryland populated mostly by African-Americans. And it’s one the wealthiest black areas in the country. But it’s named after Prince George of Denmark. What’s a Danish prince doing in Maryland? George was married to Queen Anne. Anne’s extensive shares in the South Sea Company and his formal role as High Lord Admiral tied him to the slave trade.

Virginia and (West Virginia) are named after Elizabeth I who authorized a trade in slaves and at least one of whose ships carried slaves. Delaware is named after Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, who served as governor of Virginia. His tenure in office predated the importation of African slaves but, was current with the use of indentured servants and Indian slaves. Louisiana is named after Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose Code Noir (Black Code) set out the parameters of slavery.

But leaving behind royals doesn’t help. William Penn, the Quaker and liberal role model after whom Pennsylvania is named, owned slaves. Nor does heading west offer any escape from history.

Over in California, Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s name rests on the city of Vallejo, that of his wife on the city of Benicia. He was also the founding father of Sonoma and San Francisco was also allegedly nearly named after his wife. Vallejo relied on Indian slave labor to maintain his ranch and oversaw an Indian slave labor system. (Vallejo was also responsible for naming Marin County.)

California itself is appropriately enough named after a fictional character, Queen Calafia, who was both black and a slave owner. West Coast political correctness becomes even more confusing as we head up north. Washington is obviously named after a slave owner, but what about Seattle? It’s named after Chief Seattle, an American-Indian leader, environmentalist icon and a slave owner. (Slave ownership by Indian tribes was not uncommon and has led to debates and lawsuits over tribal membership.) 

But back in California, its leftist city has an even bigger problem. Berkeley is named after the Irish empiricist George Berkeley. Berkeley was not only a slave owner, but a vigorous advocate for the enslavement of Africans and Indians. His name has touched off controversy at Yale and UC Berkeley.

Denver is named after James W. Denver, whose tenures as Commissioner of Indian Affairs and as Territorial Governor of Kansas during the struggle between pro and anti-slavery forces were controversial. The same would be true of anyone involved in politics at the time, but the entire anti-history movement is animated by a refusal to see things in any shade other than black or white.

So we can start off by renaming New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, California, Washington, and Maryland. That’s eleven states.

Not to mention the name of the entire country.

And we’ll have to rename Berkeley, New York City, Seattle, Marin County, Austin, Elizabeth and thousands of other cities, town and county names all across the breadth of the United States.

Or we can stop the insanity right now.

The left starts its culture wars with wedge issues. It began with the statues of Confederate generals. But if this goes on, it’s going to end with the renaming of cities, of states and then finally the renaming of the entire United States of America.

These are the stakes.

Either we stop the left’s assault on history or we lose our country. Every time a statue is taken down, a school is renamed, a building is vandalized, a holiday is abolished, we move one step closer to the final undoing of our history. We should not be afraid of the truth. And the truth is that history is complex.

Judging the past by the present is its own form of cultural appropriation. Long after a revolution against the British Crown, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, New York and many others maintain royal names not because Americans have any allegiance or respect for those dead rulers, but because these places are a part of our history. As are the Indian tribes, the French, the Spanish and all those others too.

Names are not necessarily a form of respect. Identity is, more importantly, a form of memory.

The cultural revolutions of the left promise to purify history by purging it. But that Stalinist solution is a lie. History cannot be purified, only learned from. We are all the descendants of flawed heroes. And we can hope to find the truth of our heroism through our flaws, not by the light of the book burner’s fire.

A hundred nations were plunged into dystopian horrors in search of the garden path to the left’s utopia. That’s all that the left’s rituals of purification and mortification of history, the vandalism of statues and facts, offer America. And it is America. Not Marxville, Leninstadt or Maostan. The flawed explorers, generals, and nobles whose names our cities and states bear are far better than the monsters of the left.

The American Revolution, unlike the French, was based not on a murderous search for leftist revolutionary purity, but on accepting our faults and flaws while trying to still live as our best selves.  Those who search for a better future by destroying the past will move on to destroying the present.

Our choice is clear. Reject the left or rename America.

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Sessions Calls Out Southern Poverty Law Center for Using ‘Hate Group’ Label to ‘Bully’ Conservatives

In a speech highlighting “new hostility” against religious believers in the United States, Attorney General Jeff Sessions specifically called out the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal group known for labeling organizations it opposes as “hate groups.”

Sessions spoke Wednesday to Alliance Defending Freedom’s Summit on Religious Liberty. Alliance Defending Freedom is a nonprofit religious liberty legal group that most recently defended Colorado baker Jack Phillips in his 7-2 victory in the Supreme Court.

The SPLC, a liberal nonprofit group which tracks groups like the Ku Klux Klan, has labeled ADF a hate group, as well as other conservative-leaning organizations.

“People of faith are facing a new hostility. Really some of it is a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith,” Sessions told the ADF conference. “You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts. They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals. They just call people names—like ‘hate group.’ Does that sound familiar?”

Sessions asserted that the SPLC was once a legitimate group in identifying real hate groups. The SPLC has been a partner with the FBI in identifying certain hate groups.

“They have used this designation as a weapon and they have wielded it against conservative organizations that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience,” Sessions said of the hate group label. “They use it to bully and intimidate groups like yours which fight for the religious freedom, the civil rights, and the constitutional rights of others.”

He later said to the ADF, “You and I may not agree on everything—but I wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: You are not a hate group.”

Sessions also announced a new review at the Justice Department.

“Let me say this loud and clear: At the Department of Justice, we will not partner with hate groups. Not on my watch,” Sessions said. “I have ordered a review at the Department of Justice to make sure that we do not partner with any groups that discriminate. We will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith.”

The SPLC took a pre-emptive strike with a public letter on Tuesday criticizing Sessions for speaking to the ADF conference.

“If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail,” SPLC President Richard Cohen said in the letter to Sessions. “It’s inappropriate for the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lend the prestige of his office to this group. And it’s ironic to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.”

In May, ADF announced it had been removed from an Amazon program that donates a percentage from purchases to charities due to Amazon’s reliance on SPLC to vet the charities in that program. In 2017, charity tracker GuideStar noted which charities were seen as hate groups by Southern Poverty Law Center, although the organization eventually reversed course and removed the labels.

The center has also reportedly worked with several of the big tech companies: “Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for ‘hate speech’ or ‘hate groups,’” wrote The Daily Caller News Foundation in June.

Additionally, SPLC is regularly cited by media, including in references to ADF when Sessions spoke to the group last year.

During the Wednesday speech, Sessions, a former Alabama senator, noted the SPLC was established in his home state initially fighting civil rights cases. The attorney general said:

There were hate groups in the South I grew up in. They attacked the life, liberty, and the very worth of minority citizens. You may not know this, but I helped prosecute and secure the death penalty for a klansman who murdered a black teenager in my state. The resulting wrongful death suit led to a $7 million verdict and the bankruptcy of the Klu Klux Klan in the South. That case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But when I spoke to ADF last year, I learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center had classified ADF as a ‘hate group.’ Many in the media simply parroted it as fact. Amazon relied solely on the SPLC designation and removed ADF from its Smile program, which allows customers to donate to charities.

Sessions praised the ADF for having a 9-0 record in the Supreme Court for the last seven years, adding he wished the Justice Department had such a strong record.

The attorney general also discussed the history of religious liberty in the United States.

Sessions talked about attacks on religion in the Middle East, Russia, and the Philippines. But he said the Founders sought to avoid this in the United States. He quoted father of the Constitution and former President James Madison, who first declared religion an unalienable right, leading to the First Amendment.

The attorney general also said the Founders and Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson advanced religious freedom.

“Adams and Jefferson were political opponents—but they agreed on the human right of religious freedom. But that consensus seems to be eroding,” Sessions said. “We’ve seen nuns ordered to pay for contraceptives. We’ve seen U.S. senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about their dogma—a clear reference to their religious beliefs—even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for public office.”

The Justice Department, which recently established a religious freedom task force, has made defending the first freedom a priority, Sessions said.

“Americans from a wide variety of faiths are asking themselves, how much longer until I am in Jack Phillips’ position?” Sessions said. “How much longer until the state, the media, the academy, the tech companies, or the global corporations come down on me because of my beliefs?”

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Outsiders vs. Insiders: Liberals initiated the culture wars, let them feel the noxious effects

“Power is everything” said John Aaron (played by actor Loren Dean) in the movie Apollo 13, warning of bad things to come if the status quo wasn’t altered. Aaron continued, “Without it they don't talk to us, they don’t correct their trajectory, they don’t turn their heatshield around…we gotta turn everything off. Now.”

Aaron's theory is certainly logical when talking about a crippled spacecraft drifting through the vast void of outer space. Out there, power is everything. But here on earth “power” doesn't command the same hegemony. And LeBron James Crooked Hillarywhen it comes to American politics, power is nice -- but “culture” is everything.

President Donald Trump understands this and that’s why he’s chosen to pick very public fights with prominent pundits, Democrats, media figures, celebrities, #NeverTrumpers and even athletes to emphasize his America First positions. Whereas all presidents in the past (mostly) refrained from diving headfirst into the mosh pit of culture with the “popular” class, Trump not only does it – he relishes it too.

Trump recently took on none other than NBA legend LeBron James, a player who’s never hesitated to publicly criticize the president. So why not? Trump tweeted last Friday night, “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”

“Mike” refers to Michael Jordan. The ongoing debate in NBA circles is who is/was better, James or Jordan. Clearly Trump sides with the latter group.

No doubt the skittish “play nice in politics” Republican establishment ruling elites cringed at the thought – an American president going on social media to infer one of the most well-appreciated people in America (James) is not smart. Add the fact James is African-American and their panic must’ve doubled. “Oh no, he’s doing racist stuff again!” they must’ve thought.

Insinuating an athlete (who happens to be black) is something less than intelligent is a dangerous business in America these days. Such a transgression will certainly draw investigation by the politically correct thought police; a faux indictment for high crimes and misdemeanors could easily follow and Trump will inevitably find himself once again run through the hate-wringer on MSNBC, CNN, late night TV and probably ESPN. Like there’s anything new there.

Leftists make “sport” out of bashing the president. That’s our culture today.

It didn’t take long for the media jackals to feast on this latest carcass either. ESPN.com reported on Saturday morning, “James has publicly criticized Trump before. In September 2017, he called Trump a ‘bum’ for rescinding his invitation to the Golden State Warriors to celebrate their championship with a visit to the White House.

“’Going to the White House was a great honor until you showed up!’ James tweeted then...

“’He doesn't understand the power that he has for being the leader of this beautiful country,’ James said ... ‘He doesn't understand how many kids, no matter the race, look up to the president of the United States for guidance, for leadership, for words of encouragement. He doesn't understand that, and that's what makes me more sick than anything, that we have someone that's ... this is the most, this is the No. 1 position in the world.’”

Somehow I’m having a hard time picturing a kid who’s shelling out well over a hundred bucks to wear LeBron James sneakers as “looking up” to Trump. Kids in the street dribbling basketballs couldn’t care less about what’s going on in Washington and largely because of their parents’ – and role models’ -- political affiliations are much more likely to favor Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Eric Holder than they are Donald Trump.

That’s more to their own detriment. Democrats have subjugated, abused and taken for granted African-American (and Hispanic, Asian and every other ethnic minority) voters for a lifetime. Brainless fools like LeBron James are only perpetuating the myth that Democrats are there to help poor people with food stamp applications and voter registration forms. So, if a kid “looks up” to LeBron James and sees him saying harsh things about the American president, who are they more likely to believe? Would they buy Donald Trump shoes?

And assuming these hypothetical kids are even receiving Trump’s side of the story, where would they be hearing it from? Answer: the same media outlets that offer commentary and “news” reporting on everything else, which studies prove is over 90 percent negative towards the current occupant of the White House.

It’s been examined before, but what grants someone like LeBron James the clout and authority to be making value judgments about American politics? Being good at sports isn’t a prerequisite for intelligent commentary. In James’s case he happened to be genetically predisposed to grow unusually tall (6’8”) with superior athletic ability. James was so extraordinary he went straight from high school to NBA stardom – so there doesn’t appear to have been any post-secondary education to broaden the player’s reasoning abilities either.

James is a political partisan too, having appeared at Democrat rallies, including one for Hillary Clinton. He’s entitled to his opinion but it should be noted he isn’t exactly “neutral” here. 

Does the absence of a college degree make one stupid or ignorant? Hardly; but learning how to use one’s noodle to absorb information and process it is a learned skill and it needs to be done off the basketball court. Just like James’ brain excels at split second calculations on how far and how hard to toss a basketball, he likely hasn’t devoted similar practice time into reading political philosophy.

There’s no John Locke in James’ comments. His views sound like they’re straight out of the Barack Obama/Democrat playbook. How’s that for sounding intelligent?

Unfortunately, popular American culture allows people like James to run their mouths – and the “kids” see him as an authority figure. Michael Jordan too – everyone probably remembers the famous Gatorade “Be Like Mike” advertising campaign. Modern day athletes have outsized platforms for commenting on social and cultural issues – and if you’re not a liberal in that capacity you’re made into an awkward example. Why do you think it matters so much when players are publicly chastised for Twitter comments from seven years ago?

For what it’s worth, Jordan and others defended James in the heat of the spat, pointing out that James has dumped tons of money into education charities, etc. As if doing good on one end justifies claiming the president of the United States “divides” the country just because he insists athletes should stand for the flag during the national anthem. If that’s the way they want it, fine.

Ah, how we long for the good 'ol days where everything wasn't automatically politicized. On my recent jaunt to the Ronald Reagan presidential library I noted a rather prominent display dedicated to sports teams' visits to the White House during The Gipper's tenure. Sports winners of all races and creeds smiled alongside the president with no politics to burden the occasion.

Now rhetorical wars are fought through Twitter. Social media has changed the world. But that’s another story. The left’s drive to extinguish traditional American culture continues unabated. If you’re a liberal woman (and a minority) you apparently can articulate blatantly racist views and receive a pass from the squishy class. Or at least get away with years’ worth of jabs – as long as they’re directed at white men.

David French wrote at National Review, “[T]he New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board, and — like clockwork — controversial old tweets promptly surfaced. In them, Jeong expressed some rather interesting views of ‘[dumba** f***ing] white people,’ musing about how much joy she gets ‘out of being cruel to old white men’ and how ‘white men are [bullsh**].’ For good measure she also compared white people to ‘groveling goblins’ and questioned why they’re ‘genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun.’ In a statement, Jeong expressed her regret and explained that she was engaging in ‘counter-trolling’ designed to mimic the language of racists who harassed her online.”

Racists? Is this a case of fighting fire with fire or naked prejudice based on appearance?

French concluded his essay, “A healthy society urges people to reject unhealthy temptations to generalize, and instead urges that we treat our fellow citizens with a degree of grace and to judge them based on their individual actions. Any categorical hatred or disgust stands directly against this virtue. So, yes, anti-white racism is real, and Americans can and should reject it while still keeping in mind matters of gravity and proportion.

“Are we really so far gone that we can’t condemn taking ‘joy’ in being ‘cruel’ to another person on the basis of their race? It’s time to understand a fundamental truth: The denigration of human beings — yes, including white human beings — works its own harm.”

Well put. The matter works both ways. While most folks concede there are still a few reprehensibly backwards people out there (torch bearing bipedal garbage), they’re an incredibly small percentage of the whole. Freedom of speech and thought guarantees the right to be ignorant and no one should be sanctioned for their views as long as they don’t violently (or harmfully) act on them.

Sarah Jeong did act (for years) and now it’s common knowledge as to what she thinks. She’s on the record having said she “enjoys” being cruel and judging by the group. What if a conservative working at a right-leaning publication promoted ill-treatment for a class of citizens (racial or homosexual)? The media would be all over it like flies on buffalo chips.

French’s point is one type of racism shouldn’t be tolerated while others are appropriately condemned. It’s not that hard to figure out. And getting back to LeBron James, why should he be championed on the same liberal cable news channel that negatively reports on the president 24/7/365? Where’s the proportionality here? Is CNN going to bring on Tim Allen (of “Last Man Standing”) to provide balance to James’ remarks about how Trump “divides” us?

And who’s really doing the “dividing” in America anyway when even some local Democrat authorities stand to the side while leftist anarchist mobs intimidate and threaten ICE employees and local residents who just want to go about their jobs and lives? The recent situation in Portland was particularly disturbing.

Andy Ngo reported in the Wall Street Journal, “A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19. They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent ‘guards’ to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. ‘At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,’ the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week.

“Signs called ICE employees ‘Nazis’ and ‘white supremacists.’ Others accused them of running a ‘concentration camp,’ and demanded open borders and prosecution of ICE agents. Along a wall, vandals wrote the names of ICE staff, encouraging others to publish their private information online. Federal workers were defenseless. An ICE officer, who asked that his name not be published, told me one of his colleagues was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp. Later people showed up at his house. Another had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the ‘Gestapo.’”

Ngo’s article is shocking, well worth the read if you’ve got a Wall Street Journal subscription. It should be noted when a larger federal police force finally went in to clean out the human anti-ICE vermin the “protesters” singled out one of the officers by race. Ngo observed, “They repeatedly called a black officer ‘traitor’ and ‘house n—.’ They shouted that they knew where the officers lived, and published more addresses online.”

Why doesn’t CNN’s Don Lemon probe LeBron James or Colin Kaepernick for their thoughts on what took place in Portland? Why shouldn’t these supposedly wise athletes be asked for their views on abolishing ICE? If ball players are so quick to defend leftist NFL flag dissenters, how do they feel about African-American policemen being called “traitor” and “house n----” by scumbag leftist “protesters” who are only there to cause trouble and disrupt?

President Trump is entirely correct to take sides in the culture war and if he needs to bring up LeBron James’s name to cause a stir and get people to focus on what’s going on out there, so be it. Democrats are the ones who’ve turned up the rhetorical heat – let them bathe in the burnt-out ashes.

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Australia is deplorably racist. It was founded on a racist document and hasn’t improved (?)

The writer below, Jack Latimore, is a "Goori", descended from an Aboriginal tribe in Victoria, apparently.  His rant below offers only three isolated incidents in support of his assertion that Australians are racist. Such thin "evidence" is entirely unable to support any generalizations. I can give you many other anecdotes which suggest an opposite conclusion.  You need general data -- such as survey results -- to support generalizations.   It is sad that a Goori man has shown himself to be so intellectually incompetent

The recent surge in racism is not an anomaly. For many white, liberal-minded Australians, recent media commentary over the appearance of a notorious white nationalist on the Sky News channel was the first indication that our society remains deeply stricken by racism. And for many of them, the subsequent banning of said individual and the news channel’s “icing” of the particular program on which he appeared is a sufficient practical and symbolic rejection of racism. For others, the concern is that it is too little too late. The neo-Nazi is out of the bag. By banning him from ever appearing on its channel again, Sky News has centred – or normalised – its regular hard-right editorials. It doesn’t matter a jot if this was an intended or inadvertent consequence.

But this incident is only a tile in the much larger colonial project that continues to impact the lives of not just First Nations peoples, but the majority of people of colour in Australia. It’s a racial ideology that’s seemingly in perpetual motion in this country, which has been present since at least federation and arguably further back, with the arrival of “enlightened” Europeans roughly 250 years ago. The recent surge in racism merely stems from this blight, and in terms of timespan, it goes well beyond what occurred at Sky News last Sunday night.

In the past fortnight alone, concerted attacks by Australian racists on media figures such as Osman Faruqi and Benjamin Law have caught my attention. In Faruqi’s case, the racialised and disproportionate abuse he received for supporting the banning of plastic bags from supermarkets has threatened to silence his activity on Twitter. Meanwhile, the racial abuse directed at Law involved a thinly-veiled death threat for suggesting Virgin Australia cease broadcasting Sky News in their lounges.

On Wednesday, to bring attention to the toxicity of the abuse being directed towards outspoken people of colour, I tweeted a screenshot of an email from “whitepride” titled “fuck you abo dogs” that was sent to the administrators of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders online platform, IndigenousX. Other established and emerging First Nations writers and commentators have informed me they have also experienced an upsurge of similar abuse in recent weeks. It should surprise nobody that the racists feel emboldened.

If this kind of racial vilification reflects the current social environment, how is it possible for Aboriginal people to feel optimistic about a “reconciled” future in Australia? Particularly when the kinds of attitudes that consider us “dirty black dogs” are so valued by embattled Australian politicians every time a dicey election rolls around.

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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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