President Donald Trump slams socialism: "America was founded on liberty and Independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free."
Watching the State of the Union, Kevin D. Williamson saw America’s dispossessed Ruling Class, conscious of its ownership of the Permanent Mandate of Heaven, looking on, and seething in frustration, as an interloper, representing all the people and classes of society they detest, stood there in the place they know properly belongs to them.
President Donald Trump represents a genuine crisis in the American political order, but it is not the crisis we hear about from rage-addled Democratic hyper-partisans and their media cheerleaders. The fundamental cause of our current convulsion — studiously ignored by almost all concerned — is this: In the United States, the ruling class does not rule. At least, it does not rule right now.
Consider the context.
The ladies and gentlemen of Goldman Sachs liked Mrs. Clinton a great deal in 2016, and their generous donations to her presidential campaign outnumbered their donations to Donald Trump’s campaign by an incredible 70-to-1 margin. Mrs. Clinton was in fact the largest single recipient of Goldman Sachs–affiliated donations that year, whereas Trump’s presidential campaign was way down the list behind not only Mrs. Clinton’s campaign but also the legislative campaigns of such Democrat powers as Steny Hoyer of Maryland, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and newcomer Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The results were similar for many other financial firms: 19-to-1 at JPMorgan, 7-to-1 at Wells Fargo, 27-to-1 at Citigroup, 10-to-1 at Bank of New York, etc. Across the commercial banking industry nationwide, Mrs. Clinton out-raised Trump by a nearly 7-to-1 margin. She beat him 17-to-1 among venture capitalists, 8-to-1 among hedge funds, and 7-to-1 among private-equity firms.
Among people associated with Harvard, Mrs. Clinton’s donations outperformed Trump’s by an an even more incredible 200 to 1. In fact, no Republican even cracked the top 15 at Harvard, and Marco Rubio, at No. 17, didn’t even crack the six-digit mark — and the first of his five digits is a 1. At Princeton, it was Clinton 209-to-1. It was 128-to-1 at Yale.
Mrs. Clinton enjoyed a 100-to-1 margin of support among people associated with Facebook; 76-to-1 among Google employees; 135-to-1 at Apple. Mrs. Clinton beat Trump by only a 4-to-1 margin at Exxon Mobil and 3-to-1 at Walmart.
Presumably, the votes of these donors were distributed in roughly the same way, along with their general sympathies and allegiances.
But money is not the only currency in politics.
Mrs. Clinton also enjoyed the endorsements of the former chairman and CEO of General Motors, the executive chairman of Delta, the former president of Boeing, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce, the founder and chairman of Costco, the CEO of Airbnb, the CEO of Netflix, the founder of DISH, the CEO emeritus of Qualcomm, the former CEO of Avon, the CEO of Tumblr, the former chairman and CEO of Time Warner, the chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, and many others. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich had planned to hold a Trump fund-raiser in his home and was bullied by his peers into canceling the event.
Among the nation’s 100 largest newspapers in 2016, only two — the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times-Union — endorsed Donald Trump. Most endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and those included the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. USA Today, which does not typically endorse candidates, did not endorse Mrs. Clinton but ran a “not-Trump†anti-endorsement, and other newspapers did so, too — more of them, in fact, than endorsed Trump.
Mrs. Clinton won the majority of the vote in almost every state capital — 47 of them. Trump won Carson City, Bismarck, and Pierre, the micro-capitals, respectively, in Nevada, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with fewer residents combined among them than Chattanooga, Tenn. Mrs. Clinton won an average of 76 percent of the vote in the ten largest U.S. cities. Trump won a majority in none of them, nor was he close to a majority in any of them.
All Donald Trump won was a majority of the voters in a substantial majority of the states — 30 states plus the second congressional district in Maine.
To Democrats, this is an obvious injustice and an outrage. Theirs is the politics of manifest destiny, with their endless Hegelian insistence that capital-H History is on their side. And not only History but Harvard and Goldman Sachs and Facebook, too. Their sense of entitlement to political power is just a smidgen short of Divine Right, but not much. The obstacle to fulfilling their entitlement is the structure and the constitutional order of the United States, which is neither a direct democracy such as Switzerland’s nor a unitary state such as China’s but a union of states. Hence the aspects of the American system that most reflect this arrangement — the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Bill of Rights — are regarded by the Left as illegitimate, a way to rig the system against History and The People. …
There are many possible ways for the ruling class to respond to that political reality. One is to burrow into the cheap moralism characteristic of our times and insist that those who looked at the choices in 2016 and came to a different conclusion than did the executives of JPMorgan and Citigroup must be driven by some occult malevolence; this is Paul Krugman’s argument, that “good people can’t be good Republicans.†That is a sentiment unworthy of even so trifling and vicious a creature of the New York Times editorial page as Professor Krugman, who once was a highly regarded economist. Equally unworthy is the related sentiment: “Our candidate got 2 percent more of the vote than their guy did in 2016, so it’s only technicalities keeping us out of power. Once we have rectified that, we will simply dominate the other side with our superior numbers.†Never mind that those are only slightly superior numbers and that this advantage is not as fixed as the stars but like all things in the affairs of men subject to change. Is the domination of one group of citizens with their own way of life and their own values by another group of citizens with a different way of life and different values the best outcome? Is that what liberty is for?
As the polling consistently demonstrates, this division is not about policy. It is about hatred.
Michael Barone finds the Transatlantic elite response to its political defeats in 2016 is identical to the response of the Bourbons to the Revolution in France. They are determined to learn nothing and forget nothing.
It was no coincidence that Donald Trump scheduled a trip to Britain, purportedly to inspect one of his golf courses in Scotland, on June 23, 2016. That was the day of the Brexit referendum, in which 52 percent of the electorate — 17.4 million voters — voted for their nation to leave the European Union.
Candidate Trump’s earlier endorsement of Brexit was criticized by elevated opinion as an unfriendly interference in another nation’s internal affairs. Few if any of the scoffers had similarly criticized former President Barack Obama for urging Britons to vote “remain,” even threatening that if they voted “leave” they would go “to the back of the queue†in seeking a free trade deal with the United States.
Thirteen months before Trump’s trip and the British vote, few thought there was any possibility of a Trump candidacy or a Brexit referendum. The shock of Brexit in June and Trump’s victory in November has not been fully absorbed by British or American financial, media, and political elites in all the time since.
30 Democrats in Puerto Rico with 109 lobbyists for weekend despite shutdown
As the gifted British political analyst Douglas Murray writes in National Review, “Instead of accepting the votes and trying to learn from them, elites have expended almost all their available energies trying to pretend that voters in 2016 were bad or duped. The past two years could have been spent trying to learn something or build something. Instead, the best minds of Left and Right have spent their time making claims of ‘racism,’ ‘Russia,’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica.’â€
The unlearning continues. Here, the government (actually, less than one-quarter of the federal government) is “shut down†over Democrats’ resistance to Trump’s demand for funding the border wall — er, barrier — which he negligently failed for two years to obtain from the Republican-majority Congress.
Most Democratic politicians — and, polls show, many Democratic voters — favored border barriers before Trump’s victory. Now, they insist walls are “immoral†and ineffective.
Some poster on Reddit came up with this makeover for Donald Trump.
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In early 1861, after Lincoln’s election, a little girl famously wrote to him, telling him he’d look better with a beard. Old Abe responded by growing one, proving the little girl right.
Taking grooming advice from a member of the public was good for the first Republican president, and it’s bound to be even better for the most recent.
Wesley Pruden hears democrats singing their sad old songs.
The Democrats and the liberals were winning for so long that it never occurred to any of them that the good old days wouldn’t last forever. But the good old days didn’t, and now they’re as ill-tempered as the alligator the day the creek went dry.
An anti-Trump sociology professor at the College of Southern Nevada shot himself on campus last month as way to protest the president, police said.
Mark J. Bird, 69, was found bloodied outside a bathroom in the Charleston campus K building with a self-inflicted gunshot wound the morning of the second day of classes August 28.
He was treated for his wound and later charged with possessing a dangerous weapon on school property, discharging a gun within a prohibited structure and carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.
I’m almost never a fan of the government regulating what private companies can do, short of actual crime. However, what choice would there be if, for instance, the phone company possessing a de facto monopoly decided to block calls made by Republicans?
We have already extensive public accommodation law precedents, and the giant left-coast social media and search engines are currently getting away with unconscionable bias toward certain customers.
Zero Hedge agrees with Trump that these companies are treading on dangerous ground.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump lashed out at Google, with his remarks later broadening to include Twitter and Facebook, accusing it of “rigging” search results by presenting only results “from National Left-Wing Media” and accused “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”
Those companies “better be careful because you can’t do that to people,” Trump said later in the Oval Office. “I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population.â€
Google immediately responded, condemning Trump’s charge, and claiming that “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
And yet, as so often happens, in Trump’s crude delivery, the politically incorrect truth was once again found.
According to a memo posted on Facebook’s internal message board titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity”, and which was published by the New York Times, senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige confirmed Trump’s allegation writing that “we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views” and shockingly admitted that “we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.”
The scathing indictment of Facebook’s liberal “mono-culture” continues:
We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.​ HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives†does not apply to causes of “social justice,†immigration, “diversityâ€, and “equality.†On this issues, you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.
“These are not fears without cause” Amerige writes, and continues the stunning disclosure of the company’s biased culture, “Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots. We have made “All Lives Matter†a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive†ideas. We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a “non inclusive environment.†And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical.
Robert Reich served as Secretary of Labor under William Jefferson Clinton. He has also been a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. So, you would think that he’s taken a high school Civics course and/or actually read the Constitution. But you’d clearly be dead wrong.
Robert Reich thinks, that because Impeachment is not likely to occur, and even if it did, Trump’s conviction and removal from office is yet more unlikely, he can personally simply invent a whole new process and procedure to set aside 60-odd million votes and the results of a US presidential election.
Impeachment isn’t enough.
Impeachment would remedy Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.†But impeachment would not remedy Trump’s unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and Cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.
The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.
Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions, and records were made without constitutional authority.
The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.
After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.
It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.
The Constitution also gives Congress and the states the power to amend the Constitution, thereby annulling or altering whatever provisions came before. Here, too, it would logically follow that Congress and the states could, through amendment, annul a presidency they determine to be unconstitutional.
As I’ve said, my betting is Trump remains president at least through 2020 – absent compelling and indisputable evidence he rigged the 2016 election.
But if such evidence comes forth, impeachment isn’t an adequate remedy because Trump’s presidency would be constitutionally illegitimate.
It should be annulled.
What Robert Reich has in mind for Trump is the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany’s tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.
This one is so crazy that I guess even the New York Times turned it down.
. .But the charges against Cohen, like those on which Paul Manafort was also convicted on Tuesday, have nothing to do with Russian meddling or with collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. The Mueller investigation is still what its critics have always claimed: an attempt to bring down the duly elected president of the United States by any (legal) means possible.”
“The most significant lesson of the Trump era in American politics is that no one actually cares about so-called ‘norms’ or ethics or hoary phrases like ‘separation of powers.’ The same people who feign outrage when the president directs his attorney general to consider investigating the conduct of Obama-era officials would have no problem with Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecuting Trump under any imaginable pretext. The elaborate machinery of our judicial system — prosecutors, indictments, hearings, judges, verdicts — is simply an extension of the ruling party’s authority. It cannot be directed against the head of that party, as we were shown during the Clinton administration.”
President Trump’s disgraced former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, copped a plea deal on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that includes his making a criminal campaign contribution in the form of hush money to Stormy Daniels.
Mark Levin and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission Brad Smith discussed this “non-crime” on The Mark Levin Show Tuesday night. Levin correctly points out that Cohen pleaded guilty to “a non-existent crime.”
Brad Smith later tweeted, “No matter how you cut it, paying blackmail to an alleged mistress is not an obligation that exists because you are a candidate, and hence not a campaign expenditure.”…
If in fact legal settlements of personal matters are illegal campaign contributions, then the list of guilty politicians certainly is long. And, as we learned in 2017 about the sexual harassment settlements paid by Congress using a slush fund from taxpayer dollars, the leaders in the House of Representatives of both political parties are implicated by the $17 million in payments over a period of 20 years and at least 268 settlements.
The Deep State is indeed acting like the Star Chamber, getting people to confess to nonexistent crimes to help ensnare others for political reasons.
