Archive for the ‘Liberals’ Category

Liberals are unhinged over Trump & Israel – New York Post

From the ranting over President Trumps comments on the two-state solution to the revival of the vile dual loyalty charge against American Jews, liberals have gone unhinged over Trump and Israel.

Talking of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict Wednesday, Trump said: Im looking at a two-state and a one-state [solution], and I like the one that both parties like.

The New York Times huffed that hed dangerously backed away; the LA Times, that hed demolished the two-state solution. The Daily News snarked of his ignorance.

Sorry, the ignorance is all on the part of Trumps critics. He simply declined to endorse a Palestinian state for now, preferring instead to defer to the parties.

For the record, a poll out of Israel on Wednesday showed that most Israelis (55 percent) back two states yet only a minority of Palestinians (44 percent) do.

Israelis have long been open to a Palestinian state, if their security is assured. Palestinian leaders have spurned countless offers for just that. The barrier is that they wont accept the existence of the Jewish State.

Meanwhile, at a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) grilled Trumps pick for US envoy to Israel, David Friedman, on his loyalty to America.

We cannot have an ambassador who will bend to Israel, Menendez said, demanding the nominee affirm his loyalty and commitment to the United States.

True, Friedman has been fervent about his support for Israel. But thats no reason to question his allegiance. Doing so only feeds anti-Semitic slurs that American Jews put Israels interests above their own nations.

All this, simply because Trump wants a new approach to Mideast policy. And why not? The old one sure hasnt worked.

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Liberals are unhinged over Trump & Israel - New York Post

Column: Pawns of liberals – The Oakland Press – The Oakland Press

Pawns of Liberals

By Walter E.Williams

Ordinary black people cannot afford to go along with the liberal agenda that calls for undermining police authority. That agenda makes for more black crime victims. Lets look at what works and what doesnt work.

In 1990, New York City adopted the practice in which its police officers might stop and question a pedestrian. If there was suspicion, they would frisk the person for weapons and other contraband. This practice, well within the law, is known as a Terry stop. After two decades of this proactive police program, New York Citys homicides fell from over 2,200 per year to about 300. Blacks were the major beneficiaries of proactive policing. According to Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald author of The War on Cops seeing as black males are the majority of New York Citys homicide victims, more than 10,000 blacks are alive today who would not be had it not been for proactive policing.

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The American Civil Liberties Union and other leftist groups brought suit against proactive policing. A U.S. District Court judge ruled that New York Citys stop and frisk policy violated the 14th Amendments promise of equal protection because black and Hispanic people were subject to stops and searches at a higher rate than whites. But the higher rate was justified. Mac Donald points out that while blacks are 23 percent of New York Citys population, they are responsible for 75 percent of shootings and 70 percent of robberies. Whites are 34 percent of the population of New York City. They are responsible for less than 2 percent of shootings and 4 percent of robberies. If youre trying to prevent shootings and robberies, whom are you going to focus most attention on, blacks or whites?

In 2015, 986 people were shot and killed by police. Of that number, 495 were white (50 percent), and 258 were black (26 percent). Liberals portray shootings by police as racist attacks on blacks. To solve this problem, they want police departments to hire more black police officers. It turns out that the U.S. Justice Department has found that black police officers in San Francisco and Philadelphia are likelier than whites to shoot and use force against black suspects. That finding is consistent with a study of 2,699 fatal police killings between 2013 and 2015, conducted by John R. Lott Jr. and Carlisle E. Moody of the Crime Prevention Research Center, showing that the odds of a black suspects being killed by a black police officer were consistently greater than the odds of a black suspects being killed by a white officer. And little is said about cops killed. Mac Donald reports that in 2013, 42 percent of cop killers were black.

Academic liberals and civil rights spokespeople make the claim that the disproportionate number of blacks in prison is a result of racism. They ignore the fact that black criminal activity is many multiples of that of other racial groups. They argue that differential imprisonment of blacks is a result of the racist war on drugs. Mac Donald says that state prisons contain 88 percent of the nations prison population. Just 4 percent of state prisoners are incarcerated for drug possession. She argues that if drug offenders were removed from the nations prisons, the black incarceration rate would go down from about 37.6 percent to 37.4 percent. The vast majority of blacks in prison are there because of violent crime and mostly against black people.

That brings us to the most tragic aspect of black crime. The primary victims are law-abiding black people who must conduct their lives in fear. Some parents serve their children meals on the floor and sometimes put them to sleep in bathtubs so as to avoid stray bullets. The average American does not live this way and would not tolerate it. And that includes the white liberals who support and make excuses for criminals. Plain decency mandates that we come to the aid of millions of law-abiding people under siege. For their part, black people should stop being pawns for white liberals and support the police who are trying to protect them.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Column: Pawns of liberals - The Oakland Press - The Oakland Press

Terri Lovell: Liberal oppression – Santa Clarita Valley Signal

In the liberal mind, your freedom is their oppression. From 60 Hard Truths about Liberals

I dont think Ive ever heard a more accurate description of the liberal mind. It not only encompasses everything they believe, it accurately explains their bizarre behavior.

Why do liberals see your freedom as their oppression? Because everything to them is a zero-sum game. Liberals only win when everyone who opposes them loses.

The Constitution guarantees the rights of individualism and personal freedom. Your God-given rights as an individual are your power. For liberals to satisfy their lust for absolute power, your individual rights must be taken away from you.

The exercise of free speech is a display of individual power. Liberals despise free speech because it is a right they cannot control. If it takes a rioting mob to keep an individual they hate from speaking, and you from hearing it, so be it.

Small, decentralized government is the best protector of individual rights. Your individualism is considered a threat to the liberal goal of centralizing all power under their control. That is why liberals promote the power of the collective over the power of the individual.

Owning a gun is a display of individual power and freedom as well. That is why liberals are forever fighting and restricting the sale of firearms and ammunition.

With individual freedom comes individual responsibility. If liberals were to embrace freedom, they would have to embrace the responsibility that naturally comes with freedom.

When seen as part of the larger collective, liberals are never held accountable for their actions, nor for the actions of those who act on their behalf.

Although most liberal elitists are wealthy, they despise the freedom that ownership of private property and wealth brings to those who consider themselves individualists.

In the mind of a liberal, the only way a conservative could possibly acquire wealth is if it were stolen, or gained by oppressing someone else.

In their quest to transform our country into a collectivist utopia, liberals have taken over the public schools and universities.

They use our innocent children and young adults to expand their own power by teaching them to hate freedom and to despise traditional American values. Instead, students are taught that all our nations problems stem from individualism and the only solution is national collectivism.

Liberal oppressors are relentlessly working to steal and corrupt everything that has made this country the last bastion of freedom on this earth.

Terri Lovell is a lifetime resident of Santa Clarita, a former home school mom, a current College of the Canyons student and a member of a local Republican club.

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Terri Lovell: Liberal oppression - Santa Clarita Valley Signal

The True Origins of the Phrase ‘Bleeding-Heart Liberal’ – Atlas Obscura

Westbrook Pegler with Eleanor Roosevelt. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library/NARA 195810

Westbrook Pegler was extremely good at calling people names. Particularly politicians. In his syndicated newspaper column, he called Franklin D. Roosevelt Moosejaw and mommas boy. Truman was a thin-lipped hater.

Pegler was a bit of hater himself. He didnt like the labor movement, Communists, fascists, Jews, and perhaps most of all, liberals. In one 1938 column, he coined a term for liberals that would eventually come to define conservative scorn for the left. Pegler was the first writer to refer toliberals as bleeding hearts. The context for this then-novel insult? A bill before Congress thataimed tocurb lynching.

Before the 20th century, the phrase bleeding heart was popular in the religious-tinged oratory of 19th century America. Throughout the 1860s, it comes up often in poetry, essays, and political speeches, as an expression of empathy and emotion. I come to you with a bleeding heart, honest and sincere motives, desiring to give you some plain thoughts, said one politician in an 1862 speech. The phrase comes from the religious image of Christs wounded heart, which symbolizes his compassion and love. It was a common enough phrase that London has a Bleeding Heart Yard (featured prominently in the Dickens novel Little Dorrit) which is named after a long-gone sign, once displayed at a local pub, that showed the Sacred Heart.

By the 1930s, though, the phrase had fallen out of common use and Pegler, who one politician called a soul-sick, mud-wallowing gutter scum columnist, recruited it into a new context, as a political insult. He was a master of this art. As a contemporary of his wrote in an academic article on political name-calling, Pegler has coined, or given prominence to, a fair share of unfair words. (Pegler also called the AFL a swollen national racket, economics a side-show science, and Harold Ickes, who ran the Public Works Administration, Donald Duck.)

Pegler first used bleeding heart in a column castigating liberals in Washington for their focus on a bill to provide penalties for lynchings. Pegler wasnt for lynchings, per se, but he argued that they were no longer a problem the federal government should solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and it is obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes. The bill, he thought, was being used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro centers. And here was his conclusion, emphasis ours:

I question the humanitarianism of any professional or semi-pro bleeding heart who clamors that not a single person must be allowed to hunger but would stall the entire legislative program in a fight to ham through a law intended, at the most optimistic figure, to save fourteen lives a year.

Pegler was apparently pleased enough with this use of bleeding heart that he kept it up. He later wrote of professional bleeding hearts who advocated for collective medicine after a woman couldnt find a doctor to help her through labor, and lobbed the insult of bleeding heart Bourn at a rival, left-leaning columnist. By 1940, he had condensed the phrase down to bleeding-heart humanitarians and bleeding-heart liberals.

Peglers usage did not immediately catch on, though. (Perhaps thats because he went on to become so right-wing that he was asked to leave the John Birch Society.) If the New York Times archives is any indication, through the 40s and 50s, bleeding heart was most often used to refer to the flower Lamprocapnos spectabilis, which grows rows of pretty pink blossoms, and occasionally sports.

Bleeding heart wasrevived in a political context in 1954, by another infamous right-winger, Joe McCarthy, who called Edward R. Murrow one of the extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio. It wasnt until the 1960s that it really started to come into common use, though. In 1963, the satirical columnist Russell Baker put it on a list of political insults: If one is called a phoney, about the only thing he can do is come back with some epithet like, anti-intellectual or bleeding-heart liberalor you must be one of those peace nuts. By the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan, then newly elected governor of California, had picked it up as a way to describe his political trajectory. I was quite the bleeding-heart liberal once, he told Newsweek. By 1970, he was known as a former bleeding heart Democrat.

After that, the phrase was fully ensconced in political short-hand and quickly claimed by liberals as a positive trait. You are called a bleeding heart liberal because you have a heart for the poor, one told the Times. Count me with the bleeding heart liberals, an NAACP lawyer wrote in a letter to the editor.

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The True Origins of the Phrase 'Bleeding-Heart Liberal' - Atlas Obscura

How liberals are preparing for next week’s town halls – CNN

And mimic some of the tea party's tactics: Stay local and organize around the goal of thwarting President Donald Trump.

That's what Organizing for Action -- the group that evolved from President Barack Obama's political campaign structure -- is teaching 25,000 liberal activists in a series of six webinars and calls ahead of next week's congressional recess. Another webinar is set for Thursday night, where the organization plans to train thousands more.

Progressives see the recess as their best opportunity to capitalize on the surging energy in the Democratic base and convince Republicans to break from Trump and back away from their pledge to repeal Obama's health care law.

Some Republicans -- including Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz and White House press secretary Sean Spicer -- have cast the massive turnout at recent town halls one reliant on out-of-state, professional activists. But those activist organizations are telling their members to take just the opposite approach.

"If you're not a member of Congress's constituent, they don't actually care what you think," Matt Traldi, one of the five co-founders of Indivisible, said during a recent Organizing for Action webinar.

Traldi and Angel Padilla, a former congressional staffer and another Indivisible co-founder, urged those listening -- many of them newly engaged in politics and preparing to attend their first town halls -- to arrive with direct asks for their lawmakers.

"How to ask a solid question -- something like, can you guarantee that no one through your vote will lose coverage?" Padilla said.

The goal, Traldi said, is to show that members of Congress are "out of touch with the rest of our congressional district -- you can tell by the way they're acting."

"If there's no recording, if there's no pictures, if there's nothing in the press, then it's almost like it didn't happen from the perspective of everybody who wasn't there at the time," Traldi said.

As Congress heads into its week-long break, progressive groups are scrambling to push their members toward town halls and events in their districts.

MoveOn.org has launched a website -- ResistanceRecess.com -- that's serving as a hub for events, from congressional town halls (based on former Hillary Clinton field organizer Jimmy Dahman's TownHallProject.com) to events organized by local chapters of the Indivisible movement.

"The most important thing is for people to come equipped with a knowledge of how this stuff affects their lives," said Mike Wikler, MoveOn.org's Washington director.

"Telling your own story -- yourself, your family member, what it would mean for your mother, your grandmother, if Medicaid support for nursing homes were cut off -- giving people the confidence to go and be authentic about speaking the truth," he said.

And there's one more important component MoveOn is telling its members via emails and texts, he said: capture it all on Facebook Live.

Wikler said the idea is to send Republicans from an uncertain posture on how they'll repeal and replace Obamacare "into full-blown retreat."

The liberal blog DailyKos.com is directing members to the site, Wikler said. And MoveOn is working with Protect Our Care, a coalition of pro-Obamacare groups that is directing doctors, nurses, patients and others affected by the Affordable Care Act to events to speak to their personal experiences.

Other left-leaning groups are similarly trying to halt Republican actions.

Planned Parenthood is planning a major push across the country during the congressional recess -- aiming to mobilize the 139,000 people who have signed up as volunteers since the election.

After the election, it launched a "Planned Parenthood Defenders" digital tool to train its most committed volunteers, with more than 50,000 people signed up so far, 2,300 of whom have committed to hosting a meet-up for local activists and set a time and date. Already, 330 groups have met.

"A lot of folks that are really pissed off that this administration and Republican extremists are targeting Planned Parenthood," said Kelley Robinson, Planned Parenthood's deputy national organizing director.

Supporting the organization, she said, "also means standing with all the communities they serve -- that means standing with immigrants, standing with refugees, standing with LGBT people."

Planned Parenthood is also scheduling several of its own events targeting Republicans who did not schedule town halls during the break.

In Nevada, Planned Parenthood has organized an "empty chair" town hall where it invited Republican Sen. Dean Heller, a Democratic target in the 2018 midterms.

On February 25, Planned Parenthood is planning a rally in Milwaukee -- where patients from House Speaker Paul Ryan's district will be featured.

"What our task is to do over recess," Robinson said, "is to really give these folks a megaphone -- making clear that there is a price to pay for what they do to women's health care."

CNN's MJ Lee contributed to this report.

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How liberals are preparing for next week's town halls - CNN