Is Amazon’s Minimum Wage Move a Political Ploy?

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Amazon made headlines yesterday after it announced it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour, a move that will impact more than 350,000 of its U.S. employees beginning November 1st. This decision came in the wake of harsh criticisms claiming that the online retailer both underpays and mistreats its workers. And while these accusations are largely exaggerated if not completely unfounded, CEO Jeff Bezos still caved in and appeased his critics.

To be sure, it is better for a private company to raise its own wage rates than for it to be forced to by the government. But how voluntary is it really when you have powerful government figures constantly making threats against the company? The minimum wage may be an act made under duress, in order to forestall government regulation and punishment.

Moreover, before we roll out the red carpet and celebrate Bezos for this move, it would be wise to take a closer look at why he did it. Once you look beneath the surface, the company’s motives seem less than pure.

The War on Amazon

Amazon is by no means an underdog in the world of online retail. However, while the company is beloved by consumers, it has been the target of politicians and leftists who hate the rich and are obsessed with income inequality. The higher Jeff Bezos’ net worth rises, the more criticism he seems to attract. But this criticism isn’t limited to the left alone.

President Trump has had a has had a love affair with condemning the company and has even accused Bezos of killing American jobs and chastised him for taking advantage of corporate tax breaks. Trump has also frequently blamed the company for the death of brick-and-mortar retailers, as well as for owning The Washington Post, which is sometimes critical of the president. But most of the flack Bezos’ has received has come from the left.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has routinely attacked the company and accused it of violating antitrust laws. And in a not-so-subtle blow, Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill blatantly named the “Stop BEZOS Act.” While the bill’s title is actually an acronym for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act,” its name was clearly not an accident.

Sanders’s bill is a direct attack on Amazon and seeks to levy a 100 percent tax on government benefits, like food stamps, utilized by its employees. Though the bill would apply to any company with over 500 employees, Sanders called out Amazon by name and accused Bezos of paying his employees so little that they had no choice but to turn to the government for help.

Sanders also commented:

In other words, the taxpayers of this country would no longer be subsidizing the wealthiest people in this country who are paying their workers inadequate wages. Despite low unemployment, we end up having tens of millions of Americans working at wages that are just so low that they can’t adequately take care of their families.

The bill was introduced last month, right after it was announced that Amazon’s market cap had reached $1 trillion and that Bezos was now the richest man in the world—a level of success that progressives like Sanders despise. But accusing the company of forcing its employees on food stamps is extremely misleading. Many of Amazon’s employees are temp or seasonal workers who were already using government welfare programs prior to their employment with the company. In fact, when Snopes dug deeper into the claim, it found that 11.8 percent of Amazon’s Ohio employees might be on food stamps, but that this number was merely an estimate that could not be confirmed.

This perpetual criticism from progressives has turned Bezos into something of a hero to those who support the free market. But this latest wage increase may change all that, as it has led many to wonder if the tables have turned and the bullied has now become the bully.

The Bullied Becomes the Bully

It is one thing for Amazon to independently come to this decision on its own and to take it upon itself to actively encourage other companies to do the same. After all, in a truly free market, it would be up to each company to work with its employees to set wage rates without the government intervening. But that isn’t what Amazon has done. Instead, Bezos also recently announced that it would begin lobbying for an increase in the federal minimum wage, using the government to coerce other companies into raising their rates, as well. And the timing of this decision was not random.

The Wall Street Journal has astutely described Bezos’ decision as “political insurance.” Not only does the wage increase help the company look more sympathetic and provide some protection against the likes of Sanders and Warren, but it also helps squash the competition.

As it stands today, the market for warehouse workers is highly competitive. And with the holiday season quickly approaching, online retailers will be hiring a decent number of seasonal employees to keep up with increased consumer demand. Amazon, for example, plans to hire 100,000 temporary employees this season. And for the companies who cannot afford to shell out $15 an hour for seasonal employees, this means missing out on high-quality workers.

Competition, and especially competition for highly-skilled workers, is key to the market process, but this is not what Bezos is doing. As the Wall Street Journal says, “Mr. Bezos’s $15 wage would be a lot more praiseworthy if he hadn’t combined it with a plea for government to raise the labor costs of his competitors.” But unfortunately, the situation is actually even murkier than this.

Amazon has already begun automating many of its warehouse positions, especially in China. In fact, one of its warehouses in China currently has only four human workers. With the rapid rate in which Amazon has been automating, it is likely that the rise in the minimum wage won’t really impact the company. If only a handful of your employees are human, then raising the minimum wage means very little. And since other companies cannot afford to incorporate AI as quickly as Bezos can, this puts the competition in a rough spot.

Again, all this would be fine if Amazon wasn’t simultaneously pushing for the government to get involved in regulating the wage rates of its competitors, intentionally putting them at a disadvantage.

Summing up the entire situation perfectly, financial investor and commentator Peter Schiff writes:

Bezos is no fool. He will reduce his headcount, and step up his automation effort to eliminate as many low-skilled jobs from Amazon. Then he will lobby Congress to increase the minimum wage for his competitors that still employ lower-skilled workers. As these competitors will lack the resources to automate, they will be driven out of business, and all their workers will lose their jobs. Less competition will make it easier for Amazon to raise prices.

As an entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos is an absolute hero and a benefactor of the human race. But our crony-capitalist political system can corrupt even the best of us.

COLUMN BY

Brittany Hunter

Brittany Hunter

Brittany is a writer and editor for the Foundation for Economic Education. Additionally, she is a co-host of Beltway Banthas, a podcast that combines Star Wars and politics. Brittany believes that the most effective way to promote individual liberty and free-market economics is by telling timely stories that highlight timeless principles.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images was republished with permission.

U.S. Attorney in Colorado may shut down pot shops. Here’s why.

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U.S. Attorney Bob Troyer

Writing in the Denver Post, U.S. Attorney in Colorado, Bob Troyer, says you may see his counterparts begin to criminally prosecute licensed marijuana businesses and their investors. Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012 but has not gotten what proponents promised. Here’s what it’s gotten instead:

Youth

  • Youth marijuana use is 85 percent higher than the national average.
  • The industry targets kids by selling marijuana consumption devices to avoid detection like vape pens that look like high-lighters and eye-liner.
  • Marketers advertise super high potency gummi candies to youth whose developing brains make them more vulnerable to addiction. The vast amount of industry profits come from heavy and addicted users.

Marijuana-Related Traffic Fatalities

  • Marijuana-related traffic fatalities are up 151 percent.

Environmental Damage

  • An indoor marijuana grow consumes 17 times more power than an average residence.
  • Each marijuana plant consumes 2.2 liters of water—per day.

Contaminated Products

  • Colorado has issued more than 40 recalls of plants laced with pesticides and mold.

Burgeoning Black Market

  • Rather than being eliminated, the state’s black market has exploded. Colorado has become a source state for international drug trafficking and money laundering operations from Cuba, China, Mexico, and elsewhere.
  • Last year, the regulated industry produced 6.4 metric tons of unaccounted-for marijuana. More than 80,000 black-market plants were found on Colorado’s federal lands.

Read U.S. Attorney Troyer’s op-ed here.

Colorado legalized marijuana commercialization for medical use in 2009 followed by recreational use three years later. Like Colorado, the other seven states that fully legalized marijuana commercialized the drug for medical use first.

If you don’t want your state to become Colorado 2.0, make sure your state senator and state representative hear from you. Now, they are hearing exclusively from the marijuana industry, which is contributing to their campaigns.

If you live in Colorado or one of the seven other states with full legalization, ask your legislators to modify or repeal legalization.

If you live in a state that allows medical use of the drug, ask your legislators to prevent full legalization and to modify or repeal medical legalization.

If you live in a state that has done neither, work with your legislators to keep it that way.

You can find your state representative and state senator along with their contact information here. To the left, click on “Engage.” Click on “Who represents me?”

Colorado produced over 6 million marijuana plants, more than one plant for every man, woman, and child in the state.

Between January and June 2018, Colorado marijuana cultivators grew 6,011,678 marijuana plants, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division. The data come from the division’s just released mid-year update.

Reading from the bottom of the graph above, the counties of Denver (A-dark blue), Pueblo (B-dark red), El Paso (C-green), and Boulder (D-purple) produced 80 percent of the plants grown across the state. See key, below.

Access Marijuana Enforcement Division report here. This key and graph above are on pages 7 and 8.

Violent crime up 25 percent in Colorado since 2013, latest CBI report shows

Crime has surged in Colorado since the state legalized marijuana, says the Colorado Crime Bureau of Investigation:

  • violent crime up 25 percent (18,426 in 2013 to 23,009 in 2017)
  • aggravated assaults up 31 percent (9,714 to 12,711)
  • drug violations up 53 percent (13,878 to 21,166)
  • motor vehicle thefts up a whopping 73 percent (12,806 to 22,187)

Colorado legalized marijuana for medical use in 2000, legalized dispensaries in 2009, and legalized “recreational,” “retail,” or “adult use” (choose one, the state has used all three names) marijuana in 2012.

Read Denver Post story here. Access Colorado Crime Stats here.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Thomas Bjornstad on Unsplash.

VIDEO: How the Democratic Party is being taken over by 57,000 Socialists and Communists

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DECLASSIFIED reports:

The Communist Party USA explained plans on May 23 [2018] to subvert the Democratic Party, alongside socialist and communist organizations including Democratic Socialists of America, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, LeftRoots, and others. In some U.S. states, communist party members are barred from becoming elected officials, yet through this latest effort, democrats may unwittingly vote communists into office.

ABOUT DECLASSIFIED

Declassified is a new channel from The Epoch Times focused on unseen wars, unconventional weapons, political analysis, and related topics. Join hosts Joshua Philipp and Gina Shakespeare as they speak with some of the leading experts in the field about security issues that are often little known, but that affect all of us.

Topics Declassified will cover: subversion, psychological warfare, space warfare, crime, espionage, terrorism, ideology, unconventional weapons, military, law enforcement, patriotism and traditional values.

Mission: Chasing the truth, grounding all statements in facts, preventing people from being misinformed and misled — The Epoch Times is a return to traditional and authentic journalism.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Rochelle Brown on Unsplash.

GOP Picks Cotton to Lead Justice Fight

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The only bars liberals seem preoccupied with are the ones Brett Kavanaugh visited in college. But Senate Democrats may want to focus on a bar of another kind: the Washington, D.C. Bar. According to Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), that’s the investigation Americans should be watching. Because, unlike the FBI’s seventh trip through Brett Kavanaugh’s past, the Bar Association could prove who’s actually lying. And as far as he’s concerned, it’s not who the media thinks it is.

“Just look at the timeline that came to light during the hearing last week,” Senator Cotton told me on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “Shortly after Miss Ford went to Dianne Feinstein, what happened? They recommended that she hire a left-wing attorney from Washington, D.C. to represent her. Attorneys who then went on to lie to Ms. Ford, apparently — because she testified last week that she didn’t know the Judiciary Committee had offered to fly to California to interview her. And that if she had known that, she would have accepted the offer, rather than go through the circus the Democrats put her through.” Dr. Ford has been just as abused and exploited by the Left as Kavanaugh, he insists. “They betrayed her.” Remember, he points out, “Ms. Ford said all along that she didn’t want her allegations to be made public.”

Like a lot of Republicans, Cotton was shocked to find out that Dr. Ford hadn’t been told about the Judiciary Committee’s offer to meet with her privately in California. “If you were gonna come out to see me, I would have happily hosted you and would have been happy to speak to you out there. It wasn’t clear to me that that was the case.” If Dr. Ford’s attorneys lied to her, hoping to turn this into a public spectacle that hurt Kavanaugh, that’s a violation of the D.C. Bar.

And that’s not the only time Democrats took advantage of Dr. Ford, Cotton insisted. What most people don’t understand is that there’s a well-established procedure for allegations like hers. The two senior members of the committee — in this case, Republican Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) — work with the FBI to review the matter quietly. “I can tell you, Tony, it happens all the time — hundreds of times for all of the nominees that are vetted. And it’s not uncommon for the FBI to discover something in a nominee’s background like abuse or a drinking problem or a gambling problem. And the nominee will frequently withdraw — and do so discreetly…”

“Let’s just remember what happened here,” Senator Cotton went on. “Ms. Ford sent a letter, confidentially, to Dianne Feinstein in late July raising these allegations… Dianne Feinstein hid it from Chuck Grassley, she hid it from the FBI. She and Chuck Schumer kept it in their back pocket until after Judge Kavanaugh’s hearing, until after they had a private session to ask about any sensitive matters, and then linked it to the media right before the vote — solely to try to torpedo his nomination. The media got it, and only Dianne Feinstein and the Democratic congresswoman from California and their staffs had it, so it had to come from them somehow. And I think Congress needs to get to the bottom of it.”

In the meantime, voters in battleground states aren’t going easy on Democrats. At the West Virginia Pumpkin Festival on Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin (D) got an earful from locals, who made it clear: “If you don’t vote for him, I won’t vote for you.” “I get that a lot,” Manchin said. Another yelled, “Vote Kavanaugh!” and Manchin insisted, “I hear you.” If he doesn’t, he’ll almost certainly hear the polls, which showed just how potent the issue is. West Virginia voters are solidly in Kavanaugh’s camp, supporting his confirmation by a 30-point margin (58 percent to 28). Out in North Dakota, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D) is feeling the heat of the Kavanaugh nomination, as Republican challenger Kevin Cramer continues to surge ahead, now with as much as a 10-percent lead.

The numbers follow the trend in Missouri, where red-state Democrat Claire McCaskill is watching her advantage melt away in the firestorm of the Kavanaugh hearings. Like a lot of Americans, they understand what the debate about the courts is all about. That’s why the issue topped the social conservatives’ list of concerns in 2016. They know the Left will use the court as a hammer to beat the country into submission on views that are too radical and unpopular to survive democratically.

Most voters agree with Senator Cotton, who knows what the Left is interested in — and it isn’t the truth. “They don’t want to get to the facts, they don’t want to reach a reasonable conclusion. They want to destroy Brett Kavanaugh and keep the president from filling this vacancy on the Supreme Court.”

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Tony Perkins Washington Update. It is republished with permission.

VIDEO: TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk Smashing Socialism — Top 5 Takedowns

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MUST WATCH! Charlie Kirk Spent 2017 Smashing Socialism! Here Are The Top 5 Takedowns! #SocialismSucks

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EDITORS NOTE: The video and featured image are courtesy of TPUSA.com.

P.T. Barnum Had Nothing on the Democrats’ Freak Show

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The Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus that I attended in my youth showcased acts like the freak show in which people with all sorts of bizarre physical features would attract millions of morbidly curious wide-eyed visitors.

But even Tom Thumb and the Siamese twins, the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy, and the head of Medusa that “turned men into stone” had nothing on the oddities of the 2018 circus that billed itself as the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee’s Hearing to determine if Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s selection for the Supreme Court, is fit for that august position.

Those oddities, however, were not physical, but rather deformities of character, integrity, honor.

After an exhaustive interview process, a marathon of visiting members of Congress for personal interviews, and being investigated six times by the FBI for his position as U.S. Circuit Judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (and other lofty positions), the married father of two adorable young daughters seemed headed straight to take his place beside the president’s former pick, conservative jurist Neil Gorsuch.

But wait! What is this slithering worm in the ointment?

It was the prospect of a majority of conservative justices on the highest court in the land eventually overturning their most cherished law—the “right” to kill in-utero embryos, fetuses, and babies…right up to the ninth month of pregnancy! And we all know how proud State Legislator Obama was about his legislation in Chicago that allowed doctors to snuff the lives out of living, breathing infants who survived the gruesome abortion procedure.

As far as the left is concerned, you can take military strength, low taxes, high employment (for blacks, Hispanics, women and youth), the genuine protection of our borders, equitable treaties between the U.S. and other countries, huge inroads in foreign policy, on and on and on, and throw them all in the garbage in comparison to the absolute Holy Grail of leftism: abortion.

THE PLAN

The Democrats’ initial plan to quash the Kavanaugh nomination was to grill him so relentlessly and to examine his judicial decisions so microscopically that personal and professional flaws would be found to disqualify him for the job. It turned out, to their everlasting anguish, that he passed all the tests with flying colors and the only remaining procedure was a vote in the Senate which promised to be narrow but successful.

Then quite suddenly—literally out of the blue, it seemed—came a challenge to Judge Kavanaugh’s heretofore sterling reputation: an accusation from a female professor in California that when teenager Kavanaugh and his friend were 17 and drunk, he groped her 15-year-old self and her bathing-suit-clad body and put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. Her report was a little sketchy—not sure of the date or venue—but quite sure of the perpetrator.

Where did this challenge come from? Why none other than the Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Senator Dianne Feinstein from California, who said that almost two months earlier she had received a letter from the aggrieved professor, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, but was asked to keep it secret.

Obviously Sen. Feinstein or a member of her staff leaked the confidential letter to a member of the always-accommodating leftist media…and the race was on for all the Progressives to express their terminal outrage and demand—DEMAND!—to question the judge about this 36-year-old accusation.

Don’t ask these evolved politicians the color of their neckties two days ago or what they ate for dinner three nights ago, but trust them when they say that a memory from drunk teenagers almost 40 years ago is credible. Can’t make this up!

Better than the dog-faced boy!

THE STARS OF THE D.C. FREAK SHOW

RING ONE: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, to the greatest show on earth. Watch the magic taking place in the center ring as the craven leftwing media elevate innuendo over truth, lies over objective reality, fantasy over rationality.

Yes, they have tried and utterly failed to destroy the Trump presidency since the day citizen Trump and his gorgeous wife Melania came down the escalator to announce his intentions to run for president. In fact, nothing the media have done, said, invented, distorted, fabricated and twisted has diminished the president’s blazing effectiveness and successes. The media bosses—aka media whores—are leftists and globalists at heart and have aided and abetted every effort to undermine the president and have paid their shills (anchors, reporters, commentators, et al) to do the same.

But watch as they continue to contort themselves into knots never before seen in the human species!

RING TWO: In the second of our three rings is the left’s newest darling, the 51-year-old woman, wife, mother, widely traveled jet-setter (who’s afraid to fly, she says), and aggrieved party. Observe the professor, Christine Blasey Ford, as she speaks in a widdie biddie, liddle three-year-old voice, implying, at least to me, that the accused predators of her teens must have been attracted to what was then goo goo gurgles that sounded like an 18-month-old widdle baby!

But wait! In all the media blather, why has no mention been made of what famed radio host Michael Savage has alleged, that Dr. Ford is deeply tied to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)?

“She just so happens to head up the CIA undergraduate internship program at Stanford University,” Savage reveals. And her brother Ralph, “used to work for the International Law Firm of Baker, Hostetler…the firm that created Fusion GPS,” the company that wrote the [phony] Russian “dossier” that was fraudulently used to try to destroy the Trump presidency.

Savage continues: “Baker Hostetler is located in the same building where the CIA operates three companies…all operated by Ralph Blasey II, the father of Christine. Also that Christine’s Grandfather was Nicholas Deak—former CIA Director William Casey acknowledged Deak’s decades of service to the CIA.”

For that matter, why have the media not investigated or brought to public awareness Professor Ford’s extensive writings on—ta da—abortion? According to Mary L. Davenport, M.D., Dr. Ford “has 21 articles listed in PubMed…six of them are on Mifepristone, the abortion pill.”

Mmmm….CIA connections, a fetish with abortions. Nothing to see here. After all, she was “credible.” Really? Does that mean she was able to read her answers without drooling? Refer to her hippocampus without laughing out loud?

But the question remains: what don’t we know about her background? What notes did her therapist take that have not been publicly revealed? Does she have borderline personality disorder? Is she a sociopath, the type who can look directly in your eyes and lie through her teeth or pass any number of lie detector tests without blinking an eye?

Will the FBI investigation this week include those therapist’s notes and more in-depth information about the professor who can’t seem to remember where or when the groping incident took place and cannot explain why the people she claims were present during the incident all deny being there and, in one case, knowing her!

RING THREE: In the third ring of our three-ring circus is ranking Judiciary Committee member Senator Dianne Feinstein, the arch manipulator of the hearings. After the judge presented an airtight explanation of his whereabouts on the evening in question, even providing a decades-old calendar proving he was nowhere near the teenage get-together, Sen. Feinstein, writer Roger Simon reports, “was up to her old tricks…reading a litany of recent accusations against Kavanaugh so ludicrous even the New York Times wouldn’t print them.”

As Monica Showalter spells out, about Sen. Feinstein’s decision to sit on Dr. Ford’s letter for 60 days: “Sen. Dianne Feinstein dropped herself to the bottom of the barrel as a political hack.  Her performance, from start to finish, was a disgrace.  It was so bad, so loathsome, even to the left, that it’s hard to think it won’t cost her Senate seat, where she is in a tight race this November… being challenged by a crazed far leftist of the worst Sacramento-swamp stripe. Couple it with her employment of that Chinese spy for 20 years and her defense of the Steele dossier, and an ugly Jurassic partisan hack picture emerges.”

And the inimitable Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), clearly directing his remarks to Sen. Feinstein, had this to say: “To the person who leaked Dr. Ford’s letter, to the person who breached Dr. Ford’s anonymity, and to the person who did not tell her she could have avoided this by testifying privately in her home in California, you know who you are. You should bow your head in shame, in my opinion, and you should hide your head in a bag every day for the rest of your natural life.”

Oh… and Sen. Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has served the university of Palo Alto as a member of the University of California Board of Regents since 2002. Kinda ironic that this is where Christine Blasey Ford works!

JOINING THE CAST

Hard to know if D.C. is a magnet for political freaks or if the very business of politics itself produces them. Whatever…in 2018, there seem to be 20 circuses worth of these Democrat miscreants, pathological liars, career victims, and raving hypocrites.

They were all on display during the hearings, still saturated in Trump Derangement Syndrome, still entertaining the unicorn fantasy of a Blue Wave in November, still displaying all the character defects that led their role model Hillary to go down in ignominious defeat in November of 2016.

First is Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), whose obsessive, nearly psychotic hatred of President Trump—much like that of his fellow Arizonan, the late John McCain—compels him to try to sabotage every facet of the president’s agenda. Also like McCain, he is an easy touch for the attention and kudos of the left, who he collaborates with at every turn.

As JudyBeth Wagoner explains: “Soon-to-be United States ex-Senator Jeff Flake just can’t overcome his bitterness as a swamp creature being drained from the Washington swamp. He continues to inject his worthless progressive sentiment into the national conversation, even though his representation was rejected by his own constituents…[he] went to Washington by presenting himself as a conservative Tea Party candidate. Once there he betrayed the people who put him in office and became a flaming progressive establishment hack.”

So there was the hack, “trapped” in an elevator—cameras and microphones at the ready to capture the entire phony scene—with an aggrieved woman pleading with him to take women’s grievances seriously. The clearly orchestrated scenario impelled the senator—Roger Simon calls Sen. Flake “the captain in the #NeverTrump resistance movement from within the Republican Party”—to ask for another week so the FBI could investigate further.

Well whaddaya know? That shrieking harpy was none other than Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director for the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund, the latter heavily funded by Trump-loather George Soros.

And did I fail to mention this little factoid that makes every Flake move and word stink to high heaven? Specifically, as reported by Joe Hoft for Gateway Pundit, the last person Sen. Flake called before asking for another week of Supreme Insanity was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—which “sends a clear message that the Deep State is now involved in the Supreme Court nomination process.” The anti-Trump Deep State, I might add.

“The fact that Flake contacted Rosenstein (Redactenstein) should worry the entire country,” Hoft continues. “Who in Rosenstein’s corrupt DOJ or FBI should be investigating anything related to the President? God help this country…”

Perhaps Karin McQuillan explains the Flake phenomenon best. “Jeff Flake is an ambitious man. His ambition is to sabotage President Trump, the Republican Party, and Trump voters by any means possible. Flake sides with the Left on cultural issues, on immigration, on the war on coal. [He] was a reliable ally for Obama on those causes and more…his only major accomplishment was joining the ‘Gang of 8’ open borders initiative.”

“Flake plotted a mini-coup on Friday morning to snatch away Kavanaugh’s moral victory over the Democrats’ smear campaign. [He] is doing the most despicable thing any of us have seen in politics in our lifetimes—using uncorroborated and implausible allegations from 36 years ago to launch scummy attacks against a decent man,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “No amount of rhetoric about ‘healing the country’ can cover Flake’s perfidious deed.”

Then there is Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) who repeatedly lied and lied and lied about serving in the military in Vietnam. Think about that. Is that not the definition of unbalanced, irresponsible, pathological? Yet, when confronted with the truth, he repeated the lie! As writer Daniel John Sobieski has pointed out: “Sen. Blumenthal asked Kavanaugh to explain the judicial concept of ‘falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,’ a phrase that means ‘false in one thing, false in everything’ and allows jurors to discount the entire testimony of someone caught lying on a particular point. This pearl of wisdom came from a man who himself lied that he served in Vietnam, something Sen. Tom Cotton has rightly noted and condemned. In fact, Blumenthal…sought at least five military deferments and eventually landed a spot in the Marine Reserve, where he was essentially guaranteed not to serve in the conflict itself, The New York Times reported.”

Then there is Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the man who is famous for comparing brave American soldiers to Nazis.

And who can forget Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose recent notoriety, as detailed by Debra Heine, describes the senator’s own written words, not 36 years ago, but in the student-run Stanford Daily newspaper in 1992 in which Booker admitted to taking advantage of an intoxicated classmate: “New Year’s Eve 1984 I will never forget. I was 15. As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss. As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next ‘move’ as if it were a chess game. With the ‘Top Gun’ slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark,’” he continued, without explaining what he meant by “mark.”

Booker returned to the subject of “date rape” a few months later: “But by my second column, as I raised my noble pen to address the issue of date rape, I realized that the person holding it wasn’t so noble after all,” he wrote. “With this issue as with so many others, a dash of sincere introspection has revealed to me a dangerous gap—a gap between my beliefs and my actions.”

What? No trial for this self-admitted groper for what Heine calls his own lurid sexual misconduct allegations? And this man is judging Judge Kavanaugh!

There are so many other guilty-until-proven-innocent Democrats, the most egregious of whom is Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), a lawyer who uttered perhaps the most blazingly idiotic statement of this entire travesty of a hearing: “I believe Dr. Blasey Ford because she’s telling the truth.”

According to writer Michael Anton, The Gillibrand Standard is now that “accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.”

There is “but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard,” Anton continues: “It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations—with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports—against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared.”

Incidentally, as reported by Seth Barron in The City Journal, “in 11 years of serving in Congress, Gillibrand has sponsored just one bill that became law—the naming of a post office in Washington Heights after deceased councilman Stanley Michels.”

Astoundingly, both she and the above-mentioned species actually win elections!

THE BRIGHT LIGHT AHEAD

Personally, I’m confident of Judge Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court of the United States. And there is more good news ahead.

Writer Larry Schweikart believes that when Sen. Feinstein hatched her malevolent plot in July, “when Christine Ford’s letter first arrived on her desk, it was at that time almost certain that she believed—based on polling—that the Democrats stood a chance of taking the Senate in November.” The strategy she devised was to delay, delay, delay the Kavanaugh nomination.

Today, he continues, “not only will the Democrats stand no realistic chance of winning the Senate, but it increasingly looks as though they will lose another five to seven seats, and if [Sen. Feinstein’s] trick has incensed enough Republicans to turn out, they could face a 60-seat majority next January.”

Schweikart concludes by saying that “California Senator Dianne Feinstein has done something even President Donald Trump could not do: Awaken the sleeping giant of the Republican electorate to defeat the Democrats in the 2018 midterms—she has mobilized a somnambulant Republican base and filled it with a terrible resolve!”

RELATED VIDEO: The Narrative Against Kavanaugh Will Backfire on the Left.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images originally appeared in the Canada Free Press.

The Destruction Of Presumed Innocence Invites Societal Chaos

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The American left accelerated its attack on every precept of civil society this month by arguing that the presumption of innocence, as the leftists would say, “isn’t really a thing.”

The context for this latest assault is that, in its unquenchable zeal for power, the left is willing to dismiss principles that have guided human interaction for centuries just so they may have a chance at preserving a more liberal court. Specifically, their latest claim is that Judge Brett Kavanaugh need not be presumed innocent until proven guilty during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee because those hearings are not a trial. In point of fact, the left’s contention, once again, is patently false.

The fact is that in every facet of human interaction an individual is presumed to be innocent. Consider what would happen if this were not the case. Under such circumstances it would be totally appropriate for one to randomly beat up any person with whom he or she comes into contact because the recipient of the punishment is presumed to be guilty of whatever it is that he is suspected of doing.

For example, if the left’s contention that presumed innocence is only true in trials then it would be perfectly appropriate for me to walk up to a man that I presumed to be guilty of sleeping with my wife and beat him up. Or if you want to be more formal about it, it would be perfectly appropriate for me to call the police, merely tell them that the accused had slept with my wife and have the police apply the appropriate statutorily prescribed punishment upon my wife and him for adultery.

Indeed, if it were not for everyone’s presumption of innocence in every facet of life, then there would be no room for formal society since we would all be involved in an endless and random maze of revenges and counter-revenges against each other because everyone around us would be presumed guilty of whatever we want; a hopeless and absurd situation indeed.

But such is the world of the left.

The fact is, and what the left is trying to make us forget, is that everyone around us starts with a presumption of innocence. If you call your plumber to work on your home, you do not interact with him under the presumption of shoddy workmanship. You believe he or she will do a good job, or at least is capable of it. If you go to the drugstore, you presume that the pharmacist is going to give you the correct tablets and that the pharmaceutical company placed the correct chemicals in the tablets. We do this because of the presumption of innocence under which everyone is held consciously, or subconsciously.

To be sure, trial proceedings are much more formal affairs and much different than what takes place in extra-judicial human interactions, but the differences lie not in the presumption of innocence. The differences lie in how we prove guilt and the safeguards with which to prove it. In short, there are only two things that vary between the ruminations of a court and public interactions: 1) the evidence we are allowed to consider; and 2) the amount of evidence required in order to arrive at the conclusion.

Let us first consider the evidence we are allowed to consider. In court, particularly in criminal courts, there are a myriad of rules that determine what evidence may be used against the defendant. The reason for this is that the courts want to only allow the most reliable pieces of evidence into the fray because the consequence of making a wrong decision can potentially be that an innocent woman gets sent to jail.

In the arena of human interaction, anything the individual wishes to consider may be taken into account. For example, if John’s mother tells John that Steve said that his wife, Mary, had been sleeping with Charles, John is free to consider that piece of evidence in passing judgment upon Mary’s and Charles’s conducts. But you will never be able to introduce that hearsay comment into a court of law to establish the fact that Mary is sleeping with Charles.

Why the difference? Well because the consequence of the information laid upon John is potentially to upset him and cause him to act on that information. The same information given to a court can have much broader implications as the court carries with it the power of the state in enacting penalties.

Then we consider the amount of evidence required to make the point. Again, in the forum of personal interactions, the standard is whatever the recipient wants it to be…in other words; anything goes. In our example, John is free to personally act against his wife based only on the information his mother gave him. However, if John does that sufficiently frequently, then he will quickly learn the consequences of making false accusations and of running on unsubstantiated or uncorroborated evidence because, sooner rather than later, his information is going to lead him to the wrong conclusions and his life will be thrown into chaos.

In legal proceedings, the amount of evidence required varies. For example, to begin many proceedings all that may be needed is a scintilla of evidence, or “just the smell of evidence.” So, a person appearing before a committee to say that someone raped someone 35 years prior absent any other evidence may be enough for that committee to look into it, but it is certainly insufficient for the committee to reach any conclusion against the nominee, or take any action against him or her.

Usually, the lowest burden of proof with which to take actions is the more likely than not standard. Here, the amount of evidence presented would be so strong so as to make an impartial mind conclude that it was more likely than not that the accusation is true, or that the event took place. I can tell you that absent any other corroborating evidence there is no situation where the mere accusation by one person of an event that took place 35 years earlier would ever reach the more likely than not standard. Doing so would be equivalent to adopting the presumption of guilt standard, which I laid out at the opening of this article and society could not have ever developed.

For a criminal trial, the level of proof would be beyond reasonable doubt, or as legal scholars describe it, at least 95% sure. This is the highest level of proof employed and a burden that is admittedly too strict for either the court of public opinion or a hearing.

For a hearing, the more appropriate level is either more likely than not, or a preponderance of the evidence (at least 80% sure). Either way, the burden of proof is much higher than that required to merely consider an allegation.

It is clear that the stakes in the fight against leftist policies have now increased from the regression to socialism or the intrusion of government onto our civil liberties to a defense of the very foundational steeples of our society.

According to the left, it is now okay for women to divorce their husbands merely because the husbands are Republicans. It is okay to harass a President merely because he won. It is okay to call someone guilty and permanently ruin him or her. And it is okay to equate a vote based on a certain set of facts with a globally broad statement applicable to a whole class of people who have no knowledge or personal association with the established facts upon which the vote is made.

This is the world according to the left. It is a world permissive of totalitarian dictatorships, a world that allows blacks to be enslaved or mercilessly discriminated against, and a world where justice does not exist except for those who are part of the ruling class.

If this is sounding very close to the realities that existed in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Mao’s China — and those called for in Antifa’s, MeToo’s, and Black Lives Matters’ America — that’s because it is. Each of those systems is all too willing to cast away presumptions of innocence, burdens of proof, and evidentiary requirements before imparting upon an individual the full wrath of government.

Let’s hope that in today’s America, there are still enough of us who are willing to stand up for our civil liberties and for the absolute right to be presumed innocent until and unless we are proven guilty. Ordered society depends on it.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act. The featured photo by Pierrick VAN-TROOST on Unsplash.

The Vortex — White, Conservative, Straight, Christian Male. Search him out and destroy.

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TRANSCRIPT

For those who have been politically or culturally asleep for the past 40 years, the Left — which is to say, godless communists disguised as do-good social justice socialists — have been hacking away at a number of categories that must be destroyed in order for them to prevail and impose their tyranny on the nation.

One category is race — if you are white, you are bad. You enjoy white privilege. You belong to a class that is horrid by nature and must be overthrown.

It’s interesting and telling that in almost every assessment of the Brett Kavanaugh controversy that media have singled out that all eleven senate judiciary republicans are white. Race has nothing to do with this story. Every single person involved is Caucasian, yet there it is: old white men.

Then we, of course, get the charge of being conservative, which means right-wing, alt-right, extremist. And we all know extremism is bad. Being labeled an extremist is the worst possible thing, but only if you are a conservative extremist.

Planned Parenthood extremism is perfectly acceptable because, well, it’s not conservative. In all of this, we need to make sure and lump in being straight — or heterosexual — because, again, that’s bad. Heterosexuals are unfeeling, non-compassionate by nature, and heterosexuality being opposed to homosexuality by nature makes it automatically bad.

Christian — or in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, specifically Catholic — is tantamount to complete unacceptability by the Left. It is, after all, Catholicism which built Western civilization — that heterosexual, patriarchal, politically conservative, Caucasian empire of evil that must be dismantled however possible.

And the coup de grace of the entire war — Kavanaugh is a male — which means he must shut up and sit down and not talk, and likewise with any men who defend him or even question Blasey Ford’s claims that with each passing day become less and less believable.

Damn the facts — he’s a man, a male, and he is, therefore, wrong and must be disbelieved and belittled. And when you add in that he’s a white, conservative, straight, Catholic male, well this is simply intolerable. He must be destroyed.

This must not be allowed to continue. All that is male is bad — it’s toxic. Every male should simply be content to sit back with his juvenile video games and self-indulgent porn habit and let women run the world.

In today’s political and social climate — created and helped along by the diabolical — whatever is masculine is evil. Men must be reduced to sniveling mama’s boys who have been socially castrated. It is a case of toxic masculinity to confront.

Truth cannot be asserted if someone’s feelings are upset. The entire world exists so that the feelings of radical feminism can be affirmed. When you take this template and lay it across what’s going on in the Church, it causes much to come into sharp focus.

Why has the Catholic priesthood been so devastated? Precisely because truth has been replaced for feelings, and this has been pushed by the homosexualist crowd so they don’t have to face the truth of their own sexual depravity. It cannot be and should not be surprising that what is happening in the culture is happening.

What evil happens in the culture first happens in the Church because the Church is the only body on Earth with the supernatural mission to fight and destroy evil. All man-made institutions and bodies will fail sooner or later because they were not established by God — only the Catholic Church was.

So this rejection of heterosexuality and masculinity, of conservatism and faith, that we see so evidently on display in the Kavanaugh case, has been able to reach this point exactly because it has already been happening in the Church for decades.

Too many Catholic leaders have acquiesced, have given into the shrieks of radical feminism simply because they have become more feminine than masculine themselves. They no longer have a touchstone to that which is masculine, so they flounder about, grasping and groping for something to seize to stem the tide of destruction of the Faith.

Many of them are massively effeminate; most have been emasculated; all of them practically speaking are at a loss to do anything to restore the Church. This is why we see the victory of radical feminism’s tyranny because too many men have refused to accept the mantle of suffering and sacrifice which is part and parcel of being a man.

If this all sounds familiar — just look at what happened in the Garden of Eden: A radical feminist bullied a cowardly man, and here we are today.

Satan hates — absolutely hates with a burning passion — authentic masculinity. It was authentic masculinity that was assumed by the eternal Logos which destroyed his kingdom and opened the possibility of salvation.

Men, especially white, conservative, straight, Christian men, need to pick up your heads and realize how you are being demonized — just turn on a TV and watch.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump defends Kavanaugh: ‘Very scary time for young men in America’

EDITORS NOTE: This video originally appeared on The Church Militant. The edited featured photo is by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash.

Promise Kept. NAFTA Gone.

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A deal experts said was dead in the water materialized over the weekend when Canada announced it had reached an agreement with the United States to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  The deal came about as a frustrated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a late night meeting with his cabinet.  Indeed, the materialization of an agreement serving to improve America’s trade position in North America would not have occurred were it not for the negotiating prowess and vision of President Donald Trump.

The workings of the trade deal actually date back to before President Trump’s election.  From the beginning of his campaign, then-Candidate Trump voiced his frustration at the United States’ involvement in a deal that was hurting American workers.  Calling them “bad deals,” Trump expressed his befuddlement at how politicians could agree to such catastrophic trade deals.  NAFTA quickly became a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign for president and the object of his ridicule.

Upon assuming power, President Trump wasted no time threatening the stability of NAFTA by announcing his intention to pull the United States out of it.  Predictably, the naysayers took to the airwaves, arguing that NAFTA was a creator of jobs.  Investor Dennis Gartman called such a move, “egregiously stupid,” and CNBC proudly published his opinion.  Meanwhile at Forbes Magazine, Professor J. Bradford DeLong called the prospect of leaving NAFTA, “a disaster” while Stuart Anderson, the author of the article, mocked Trump by stating that visual aids were needed to teach the President why leaving NAFTA was a bad idea.  Anderson held nothing back when he concluded, “Donald Trump does not know much about the trade agreement he has so frequently criticized.”

Undeterred, President Trump continued to place his disapproval of NAFTA at the center of public discourse.  Recognizing his greater advantage over Mexico, he then pealed America’s southern neighbor into a separate agreement that did not include Canada calling it a “terrific agreement for everybody.”

With the Mexican trade deal solidified, Trump turned his attention to Canada, this time suggesting that he might leave Canada out of the deal if it did not negotiate.

Canada remained defiant.  “We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class,” said a spokesman for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.  For Canada, there were a number of sticking points to a new deal. First the NAFTA dispute resolution process that protected the cultural exemptions was “fundamental.”  This “exemption” protected Canadian artistic products, including media outlets. Understandably, Canadians feel threatened that American networks might buy Canadian media affiliates and essentially control their media coverage.  Further, the abandonment of Canada’s tariffs on American dairy products was considered too great a threat to be acceptable.

But President Trump remained undeterred.  He imposed an October 1 deadline upon Canada, insisting that if it did not provide the text for a new trade deal to the United States Congress by that time he would move ahead with the deal with Mexico and exclude Canada.

Trudeau did the only thing he could and called for “common sense to prevail.”  He appealed to Canada’s partners, including the European Union, to ramp up their pressure on the United States.  But the reality was that Canada could ill afford to be kept out of a new North American trade agreement.  The Canadian dollar was weakening, and the prospect of Canada continuing without a treaty seemed like a doomsday scenario for its economy; and for Trudeau’s impending reelection.

With negotiations seemingly hopelessly stalled as recently as late September, Canadian negotiators went to work.  And by Sunday, September 30, the two countries agreed to terms.  The new agreement, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is nothing short of revolutionary.  Among other provisions, the USMCA curbs Canada’s high tariffs and low quotas on American dairy product; drops the percentage of a car needing to be manufactured in China that would still allow it to be considered “North American;” includes provisions that help NFL advertising; and forces Canada and Mexico to respect American drug patents for ten years.  And Canada gets to keep its cultural resolution process exemption.

In a very real sense, the trade deal vindicates President Trump.  He identified a palpable problem in North American trade and placed his political capital on the line to see it terminated.  As a result, Trump emerged much stronger, an important perception at a time when he is knee deep in trade negotiations with China.  But more importantly, President Trump’s priority of protecting American workers and improving the environment for American businesses prevailed.

There is also the glaring realization that these new agreements would have never come to fruition without President Trump.  The events leading to Sunday’s breakthrough would never have been possible without Trump’s aggressive, even bombastic style. Most importantly, when President Trump said he would walk away from the deal, he was believable, forcing all players to look hard at the possibility of having no deal at all.

Say what you want about President Trump, he has become America’s greatest weapon in international negotiations, much to the joy of the American worker.

RELATED ARTICLE: How the Economic Boom Is Lifting Latino Communities

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Federalist Pages. The featured photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash.

VIDEO: Radical Billionaires Love Andy Gillum

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FLORIDA ELECTION ALERT – PLEASE WATCH AND SHARE!

George Soros and Tom Steyer are pouring millions of THEIR dollars into the Florida Governor’s race, to advance their radical, Progressive agenda.

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VIDEO: Search-and-Destroy Tactics Against Kavanaugh Are No Laughing Matter

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SNL Takes a Jab at Kavanaugh’s Confirmation

“I don’t really think it’s a laughing matter. When you look at what the Democrats are doing—basically trying to destroy someone’s life and destroy his family because they’re worried about him getting on the Supreme Court and overturning Roe v. Wade—it’s hard for me to really laugh at.” —Amber Athey, The Daily Caller

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Lidya Nada on Unsplash.

Here’s What Will Happen In This Week From Hell Brought To You By Jeff Flake

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Here’s what’s going to happen this week. It does not require a Biblical-level prophet or a crystal ball. As a longtime mainstream media journalist and political consultant, I can see this as clearly as if I had it straight from Mount Sinai — minus the actual divine revelation. Seriously, just seeing forward by looking backward.

First and foremost, at least one other allegation of a woman or women being sexually assaulted by Judge Brett Kavanaugh will breathlessly emerge after extensive consultation with Democratic lawyers and operatives. This is all but guaranteed. Somehow, another one will come forward because the heirs to the Anita Hill and “bimbo eruptions” teams under Sen. Ted Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton are always with us. Mark it down. It’s coming.

Next is just as clear: The FBI is conducting a background check of the allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh that will change nothing. It will not be a criminal investigation. Based on the complete lack of investigatable details, evidence and witnesses — unless some others magically “emerge” — this will be inconclusive. It has to be, at least based on what we know, with every named witnesses to the alleged event denying it happened in sworn statements that carry felony charges if they lied. It’s the only outcome, and of course Democrats know that and knew that all along.

When the inconclusive report is issued next Friday or before, Democrats will howl that this changes nothing because the Republicans put an artificial time limit on the FBI. They were not allowed time to conduct an investigation, to do their job. Democrats will also charge, without evidence because that is obviously an old-fashion idea nowadays, that the Trump administration tied the FBI’s hands. They will continue to work on the empty husk of the one-time Sen. Jeff Flake and on GOP moderate Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.

The FBI is also investigating the claims of Deborah Ramirez, even though she had told friends she was not even sure it was Kavanaugh — until Democratic lawyers helped her remember for sure that it was. There is also nothing to follow here unless Ramirez is coached to suddenly remember others who will “verify” her story. Yes, it is difficult not to be cynical that Democrats will create more fiction, and get away with it.

So barring some miraculous and convenient memory recall by “witnesses,” both of these investigations will determine nothing more than we already know.

The FBI apparently is not investigating the “gang train rape” nonsense by the porn lawyer huckster, or at least not the woman that claimed it. If not, late in the week there will be a call for that investigation as more women victims of the rape trains will “come forward” to extend things another week.

The hundreds of women who have nothing but glowing praise for Judge Kavanaugh from the past 30 years will be totally ignored. Those women will not “be believed.” The women who clerked intimately for Kavanaugh who, to a woman, claim this is nothing like the man who mentored them, will not “be believed.”

Democrats such as Sens. Corey Booker and Kamala Harris will continue to run their 2020 presidential campaigns over the tattered remnants of the U.S. Senate, stomping forward to trample anything between them and a grandstand — the U.S. Constitution, fair-mindedness, morals, women and children.

Shrieking banshee activists, male and female, will continue shrieking raw emotional nonsense, but will be part and parcel with the hysterical mob that will attempt to disrupt and destroy the lives of the Kavanaughs, the GOP Senators, Trump appointees and anyone with a MAGA hat. Meanwhile, Democrats will operate in virtual peace and calm because conservatives don’t act like 1930s Brown Shirts.

More liberal organizations such as the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, will come out opposed to Kavanaugh, spaced throughout the week to suggest a growing tide against the Judge. Watch for them, and for the timing of the release of their statements. It’s calculated. I know how this works.

If there is any doubt as to the ACLU’s total subjugation of Americans’ civil liberties to leftist political orthodoxy, it is contained in the ACLU’s own resolution passed by its Board:

“The ACLU opposes the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. There are credible allegations that Judge Kavanaugh has engaged in serious misconduct that have not been adequately investigated by the Senate. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s credible testimony, subsequent allegations of sexual misconduct, the inadequate investigation, and Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony at the hearing lead us to doubt Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

“This is not a decision taken lightly. We cannot remain silent under these extraordinary circumstances about a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land. The standard for such an appointment should be high, and the burden is on the nominee. That burden is not met as long as there are unresolved questions regarding the credible allegations of sexual assault.”  

So the organization that has tasked itself with protecting Americans’ civil liberties will jettison innocent until proven guilty and due process to side with an evidence-free 36-year-old allegation that also happens to be impossible to disprove because the accuser cannot remember any details that could corroborate or exonerate other than the other four people she claims were there — who all deny it. This group claims to be defending civil liberties.

The media will continue with breathless, awful, partisan hackery on a daily basis, with wall to wall coverage and rehashing, and with Kavanaugh absorbing 96 percent of the negative reporting of the accusers’ side. Literally. And the pre-planned rollout of new revelations and liberal organizations opposing will get headline-blasting coverage. Jeff Flake will be ever ready if there is a mic or adulation to be had.

The vote, when it is taken, will be taken with no new information and the same three Republican Senators who were always the three that would decide the vote will still decide the vote. The farce will move forward.

The questions are: How does the Senate move forward after this? Unknown.

And how does the nation move forward? Like it always has when the politicians fail her. Because Americans are actually far better than what is going on in Washington, D.C.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act. The edited featured photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash.

Blasey Ford’s Curious Omission

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There was something curiously missing from Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s Thursday Senate testimony, something quite relevant to her basic claims. Please consider the following segment from her testimony about the alleged (circa) 1982 sexual assault by SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh:

Both Brett and Mark [Judge] were drunkenly laughing during the attack. …During this assault, Mark came over and jumped on the bed twice while Brett was on top of me. And the last time that he did this, we toppled over and Brett was no longer on top of me. I was able to get up and run out of the room.

Now please read the corresponding segment from her original letter, sent months ago to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.):

Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with Judge. …At one point when Judge jumped onto the bed, the weight on me was substantial. The pile toppled, and the two scrapped with each other.

After a few attempts to get away, I was able to take this opportune moment to get up and run across to a hallway bathroom.

What jumps out at you? “[T]he two scrapped with each other.” “Scrapped.”

I related this aspect of Ford’s story to a woman close to me at a Saturday affair and asked, “What does that tell you?”

She responded, “That they weren’t that interested in her.”

Now, don’t misunderstand me. The incident Ford describes would be sexual misconduct and surely morally wrong. But assuming it happened — and let’s for argument’s sake say that Ford was assaulted by a boy (whether Kavanaugh or someone else) in the manner she describes — it’s quite understandable why she omitted mention of the scrapping from her Senate testimony.

It severely weakens her case.

Question: Would a boy intent upon raping a girl begin scrapping with a friend in the midst of passionate attack?

Were I to take Ford’s Senate testimony at face value, I’d have to say that, yes, probability dictates it very well could have been an attempted rape. But reading her original letter, I’d say that the incident sounds like something else: drunken high-school hijinks where two guys did, admittedly, cross a serious line — but not one on whose far side lies rape. That’s how significant the “scrapping” omission is.

To reiterate, the boys’ alleged actions would be wrong regardless. The point, however, is that there’s a lot of moral real estate between inappropriate, alcohol-fueled, sexually aggressive physicality and the heinous crime of rape.

Based on Ford’s original letter, a very logical interpretation of the alleged incident is that it did in fact involve drunken horseplay gone wrong. Note that boys are very physical (which is why they wrestle with each other so much); even more so when they’re inebriated. So the boys in question, inhibitions released by booze, slip into testosterone-goofing mode. This is evidenced by their hysterical laughter. One of them then gets inappropriately physical with Ford before they get physical with each other — they were getting physical, period.

The only difference is that since Ford was a girl and teen boys have sky-high libidos, the drunken horseplay with her assumed a sexual tone.

Of course, again, this is just an interpretation. But it’s one strongly suggested by the boys’ laughing and scrapping.

Ford and her handlers surely agree, too, more or less. Why else would they have omitted mention of the scrapping from the Senate testimony? After all, the professor doesn’t remember much from that allegedly known incident in that unknown house in that unknown neighborhood in that uncertain year. But that the boys “scrapped” is something that, her original letter informs, she did recall.

It’s entirely implausible that the omission could have been a mere oversight. Remember that Ford’s testimony was written out, and she, her lawyer and perhaps even some handlers undoubtedly scoured it with a fine-tooth comb. They wanted to maximize its impact and ensure she didn’t perjure herself. The only reasonable explanation is that they purposely, tactically omitted part of the story.

There would only be a strong case that Kavanaugh (again, assuming it happened and he was the perpetrator) was attempting rape if the scrapping were the result of white-knight intervention by Judge. But Ford never even implied that this was a possibility. Rather, she painted a horseplay scenario, where Judge twice jumped on the bed, with the second leap resulting in a toppling of all three.

Of course, Ford could also claim that, on second thought, she wasn’t sure if the boys actually did scrap. But then we’d have to ask: If she imagined that, what else did she imagine?

Ford’s Senate omission was strikingly significant, and Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who questioned both the professor and Kavanaugh, should have asked about it. After all, attempting to commit the heinous crime of rape, even as an older minor, would certainly reflect damningly upon a person’s character. But it would be completely unfair to epitomize a man’s whole life based on one incident of lewd, aggressive, drunken high-school horseplay.

So Professor Christine Ford didn’t reveal anything new in her Thursday testimony — except, perhaps, in what she failed to say.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

RELATED ARTICLE: Why This Victim of Attempted Rape, Physical Assault Supports Kavanaugh

EDITORS NOTE: The edited featured photo is by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.

Judge rules California Sanctuary State Law Unconstitutional. California Attorney General We Don’t Care!

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Eye Witness News ABC Channel 7 reports:

An Orange County judge on Thursday ruled that SB54, California’s so-called “sanctuary state” law, is unconstitutional.

The Superior Court judge said the law violates the rights of charter cities.

The ruling comes in response to a challenge from Huntington Beach officials. The city opposed the controversial law, arguing it infringes on local governments’ authority. The judge agreed, saying cities must be allowed to police themselves.

The law bars some cooperation between local cities and federal officials enforcing immigration laws. Exceptions include cases that involve violent or serious felonies.

Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates called the ruling a victory for the state’s 121 charter cities.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Despite an Orange County judge’s ruling this week that California’s so-called sanctuary protections for immigrants who are in the country illegally are unconstitutional as they apply to charter cities, state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said Friday that the state would continue to uphold its laws.

“Preserving the safety and constitutional rights of all our people is a statewide imperative which cannot be undermined by contrary local rules,” Becerra said in a statement. “We will continue working to ensure that our values and laws like the California Values Act are upheld throughout our state.”

Jennifer Molina, press secretary for the attorney general’s office, declined to comment on the likelihood of an appeal.

Huntington Beach on Thursday became the first city to successfully challenge the California Values Act, also known as Senate Bill 54, after Orange County Superior Court Judge James Crandall affirmed that the law violates its local control as a charter city — one governed by a charter adopted by local voters.

Not that California State Attorney General Becerra’s statement “Preserving the safety and constitutional rights of all our people is a statewide imperative which cannot be undermined by contrary local rules…” But those people in California illegally are not citizens either of California nor America. They have no legal status unless granted citizenship by the federal government.

It appears that in California, like in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the rule of law does not apply to Democrats, only to their political opponents?

RELATED ARTICLE: Orange County Board votes to join Trump admin lawsuit against CA over sanctuary law

With Senators Like These, No Wonder America’s In Trouble

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As the smear campaign against Judge Brett Kavanaugh continues, it is clear that the anti-Trump resistance has brought out the worst in many Democratic Party Senators. Senators Chris Coons of Delaware and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are Exhibit A in the cutthroat, gutter-class attacks to which Republicans must put a halt.

First, it was Hirono who told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Kavanaugh’s pro-life beliefs make sexual assault accusations against him believable. The block quote below highlights just one of the at least three times she mentioned Kavanaugh’s pro-life beliefs in a discussion about sexual assault:

TAPPER: Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?

HIRONO: I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.

As I said, his credibility is already very questionable in my mind and in the minds of a lot of my fellow Judiciary Committee members, the Democrats.

So he comes, and — when I say that he’s very outcome-driven, he has an ideological agenda, is very outcome-driven. And I can sit here and talk to you about some of the cases that exemplifies his, in my view, inability to be fair in the cases that come before him.

This is a person that is going to be sitting on our Supreme Court, making decisions that will impact women’s reproductive choice. He has a — he very much is against women’s reproductive choice.

TAPPER: Mm-hmm.

HIRONO: And I can tell you two very important cases in which he applied the same standard, but came to totally different results to make it much harder for women to get this kind of coverage.

So there’s — there are so many indications of his own lack of credibility. And I put that in a context.

TAPPER: It sounds to me like you’re saying, because you don’t trust him on policy and because you don’t believe him when he says, for instance, that he does not have an opinion on Roe v. Wade, you don’t believe him about this allegation about what happened at this party in 1982? Is that fair?:

Coons’ comments were, if possible, actually worse than Hirono’s. At least she’s just being a party hack, albeit on a critical issue. (Though she’s also a hypocrite — Hirono is a supporter of Planned Parenthood despite the abortion company’s complicity in hiding sex abuse.) Coons is a Yale Law graduate, which means he knows better than to say that Kavanaugh has the burden of proof regarding innocence.

Yet that’s exactly what he did on MSNBC:

Mr. Coons said that Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez “have nothing to gain” and have put themselves “at legal risk” by accusing Mr. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in his teen years.

“It is Judge Kavanaugh who is seeking a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and who I think now bears the burden of disproving these allegations,” said Mr. Coons in a Monday interview on MSNBC, “rather than Dr. Ford and Deborah Ramirez who should be dismissed with slanderous accusations.”

This pathetic effort at #Resistance to President Donald Trump’s excellent nominee would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. It’s past time for the hackery to stop and for Kavanaugh to be approved to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column is republished with permission.