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How Chicago Democrats Created Trump’s Border Wall Problem

President Trump’s initiative to build a border wall on the southern border of the U.S. is meeting with an extraordinary amount of resistance from the Democratic Party.   The Democrats have gathered their forces and are exerting an unprecedented resistance to Pres. Trump’s efforts to control illegal immigration, when only a few years ago they voted for a border wall.

In order to understand the anti-wall effort, it’s necessary to briefly review the history of the Democratic Party’s immigration model of politics.  Only an historical perspective can provide the necessary background essential to comprehending the hysterical nature of the DNC’s resistance to President Trump’s border wall project.

The Democrats have a long history of endeavoring to manipulate political power.  Since the governmental leaders of the U.S. are elected, and each person has an equal vote in local, state, and national elections, the Democrats have always attempted to manipulate the numbers of Democrat voters. 

There are two basic facets to the political power game in the U.S.  The first is that all elections take place within geographical boundaries.  This may seem so obvious it is not worth discussing, but a brief review of the Democrat attempt to secure political power will reveal how important geographical boundaries are.

Political power in the U.S. is not inherited, it is based on majority elections within states.  This means that whoever successfully influences voters in a geographical area will win the elections. The earliest blatant attempt at such control was developed and perpetrated by Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1800s.  His scheme of voter manipulation was to map out the location of known voters by their past political preferences.  He ended up ultimately redrawing districts to capture the largest number of known voters who supported his party.  This method is now widely known as gerrymandering and the most outrageously blatant gerrymandered congressional district is Congressional District 4 in IL. This is the district that recently ousted Luis Gutierrez and replaced him with Jesus Garcia in Chicago. 

The Oxford English Dictionary discusses how the term gerrymander was invented in 1812, when a newspaper editor and writer were discussing Governor Gerry’s district.  The district was laid out in a shape that roughly corresponded to the shape of a salamander.  Upon hearing this term, an artist who contributed to newspapers combined Gerry’s name with “salamander” and came up with “gerrymander.”

That the most blatantly gerrymandered congressional district in the entire U.S. is located in Chicago is no coincidence.  Chicago Democrats have long practiced manipulating voters by any means possible. 

The next important date in Chicago’s link to illegal immigration occurred in 1933 when Edward Joseph Kelly was elected Chicago’s mayor. This is important because it started the long line of Chicago’s Democratic mayors which has continued to this day.

This was follow by another landmark date in Chicago’s history of voter manipulation occurred in 1984 when Mayor Harold Washington issued Executive Order 85-1, proclaiming that immigration status shall no longer be a factor in the distribution of Chicago benefits.  Chicago was the first big American city to declare itself, through this statement, a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. 

Mayor Washington declared that immigration status would not be a factor for Chicago residents.  This is critically important because it provided an historical precedent encouraging northward immigration over the southern border and established the Democratic Party’s encouragement of illegal immigration.

After World War II outmigration became a concern for all big northern Democrat-controlled cities since the growth of suburbs and the baby boom prompted young couples to leave big cities and seek more space for their families.  But this outmigration created a huge problem for the big Democratic cities from Boston to Los Angeles: how to restore and stabilize their city’s population and keep control of Congress.  The solution was to allow illegal immigration and support them with benefits. 

Providing illegal immigrants with benefits such as food stamps and housing were crucial, since illegal immigrants were not well educated and did not earn enough income to be self-sufficient.  This concern prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to establish the Great Society welfare programs, and he himself admitted the programs were intended to strengthen America’s big cities.  LBJ stopped the agricultural guest worker program, called the Bracero program, just at the time he started the Great Society. This allowed illegal immigrants to come to Chicago and not worry about being educated well enough to support themselves.  The lack of income was made up through free benefits. 

The Center for Immigration Studies found that by 2005 the average illegal immigrant family in Chicago obtained tens pf thousands of dollars worth of benefits per year, mostly in the value of public education.

The link between education and immigration cannot be underestimated.  In Illinois and other states some of the biggest campaign contributors are teacher unions, and as residents left the big cities the unions needed to keep their jobs and pensions.  Today Chicago is 47% Hispanic, whereas in 1970 it was only 2%.  The need for city residents compelled Democrats to change/ignore all the immigration laws and work to repopulate northern cities.  Not all cities encouraged illegal immigration. Chicago was the first but New York’s mayor Ed Koch made a sanctuary proclamation a few months later.

The die had been cast.  Big northern cities became obsessed with promoting illegal immigration to keep up their populations.  The number of congressional members is totally dependent upon population. But Chicago also turned illegal immigrants into voters. In 1982 the FBI found that 100,000 voters were illegal in that year’s election.  Other cities picked up the practice, but Chicago was the first to have its mayor declare itself a sanctuary for illegal immigration through Mayor Washington’s Executive Order 85-1.

Today Chicago needs federal benefit dollars and deficit spending to finance not only the immigrants but the pensions of its union members.  In Chicago all the high property taxes paid by residents goes only to public-sector pensions.  Illinois has a total of ten cities where all the property taxes go to pensions.  This is putting enormous financial stress on residents, so as a result Chicago and Pelosi are now more motivated than ever to eliminate immigration quotas, keep the southern border open and restore the populations of the traditional Democrat-run big cities.

Only when one fully understands the public sector union demands for money and need to restore big city populations can the battle between President Trump and Nancy Pelosi be fully understood. Pelosi is convinced that if the Democratic big cities give up illegal immigration the Democratic Party is finished.

President Trump’s initiative to build a border wall on the southern border of the U.S. is meeting with an extraordinary amount of resistance from the Democratic Party.   The Democrats have gathered their forces and are exerting an unprecedented resistance to Pres. Trump’s efforts to control illegal immigration, when only a few years ago they voted for a border wall.

In order to understand the anti-wall effort, it’s necessary to briefly review the history of the Democratic Party’s immigration model of politics.  Only an historical perspective can provide the necessary background essential to comprehending the hysterical nature of the DNC’s resistance to President Trump’s border wall project.

The Democrats have a long history of endeavoring to manipulate political power.  Since the governmental leaders of the U.S. are elected, and each person has an equal vote in local, state, and national elections, the Democrats have always attempted to manipulate the numbers of Democrat voters. 

There are two basic facets to the political power game in the U.S.  The first is that all elections take place within geographical boundaries.  This may seem so obvious it is not worth discussing, but a brief review of the Democrat attempt to secure political power will reveal how important geographical boundaries are.

Political power in the U.S. is not inherited, it is based on majority elections within states.  This means that whoever successfully influences voters in a geographical area will win the elections. The earliest blatant attempt at such control was developed and perpetrated by Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1800s.  His scheme of voter manipulation was to map out the location of known voters by their past political preferences.  He ended up ultimately redrawing districts to capture the largest number of known voters who supported his party.  This method is now widely known as gerrymandering and the most outrageously blatant gerrymandered congressional district is Congressional District 4 in IL. This is the district that recently ousted Luis Gutierrez and replaced him with Jesus Garcia in Chicago. 

The Oxford English Dictionary discusses how the term gerrymander was invented in 1812, when a newspaper editor and writer were discussing Governor Gerry’s district.  The district was laid out in a shape that roughly corresponded to the shape of a salamander.  Upon hearing this term, an artist who contributed to newspapers combined Gerry’s name with “salamander” and came up with “gerrymander.”

That the most blatantly gerrymandered congressional district in the entire U.S. is located in Chicago is no coincidence.  Chicago Democrats have long practiced manipulating voters by any means possible. 

The next important date in Chicago’s link to illegal immigration occurred in 1933 when Edward Joseph Kelly was elected Chicago’s mayor. This is important because it started the long line of Chicago’s Democratic mayors which has continued to this day.

This was follow by another landmark date in Chicago’s history of voter manipulation occurred in 1984 when Mayor Harold Washington issued Executive Order 85-1, proclaiming that immigration status shall no longer be a factor in the distribution of Chicago benefits.  Chicago was the first big American city to declare itself, through this statement, a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. 

Mayor Washington declared that immigration status would not be a factor for Chicago residents.  This is critically important because it provided an historical precedent encouraging northward immigration over the southern border and established the Democratic Party’s encouragement of illegal immigration.

After World War II outmigration became a concern for all big northern Democrat-controlled cities since the growth of suburbs and the baby boom prompted young couples to leave big cities and seek more space for their families.  But this outmigration created a huge problem for the big Democratic cities from Boston to Los Angeles: how to restore and stabilize their city’s population and keep control of Congress.  The solution was to allow illegal immigration and support them with benefits. 

Providing illegal immigrants with benefits such as food stamps and housing were crucial, since illegal immigrants were not well educated and did not earn enough income to be self-sufficient.  This concern prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to establish the Great Society welfare programs, and he himself admitted the programs were intended to strengthen America’s big cities.  LBJ stopped the agricultural guest worker program, called the Bracero program, just at the time he started the Great Society. This allowed illegal immigrants to come to Chicago and not worry about being educated well enough to support themselves.  The lack of income was made up through free benefits. 

The Center for Immigration Studies found that by 2005 the average illegal immigrant family in Chicago obtained tens pf thousands of dollars worth of benefits per year, mostly in the value of public education.

The link between education and immigration cannot be underestimated.  In Illinois and other states some of the biggest campaign contributors are teacher unions, and as residents left the big cities the unions needed to keep their jobs and pensions.  Today Chicago is 47% Hispanic, whereas in 1970 it was only 2%.  The need for city residents compelled Democrats to change/ignore all the immigration laws and work to repopulate northern cities.  Not all cities encouraged illegal immigration. Chicago was the first but New York’s mayor Ed Koch made a sanctuary proclamation a few months later.

The die had been cast.  Big northern cities became obsessed with promoting illegal immigration to keep up their populations.  The number of congressional members is totally dependent upon population. But Chicago also turned illegal immigrants into voters. In 1982 the FBI found that 100,000 voters were illegal in that year’s election.  Other cities picked up the practice, but Chicago was the first to have its mayor declare itself a sanctuary for illegal immigration through Mayor Washington’s Executive Order 85-1.

Today Chicago needs federal benefit dollars and deficit spending to finance not only the immigrants but the pensions of its union members.  In Chicago all the high property taxes paid by residents goes only to public-sector pensions.  Illinois has a total of ten cities where all the property taxes go to pensions.  This is putting enormous financial stress on residents, so as a result Chicago and Pelosi are now more motivated than ever to eliminate immigration quotas, keep the southern border open and restore the populations of the traditional Democrat-run big cities.

Only when one fully understands the public sector union demands for money and need to restore big city populations can the battle between President Trump and Nancy Pelosi be fully understood. Pelosi is convinced that if the Democratic big cities give up illegal immigration the Democratic Party is finished.

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

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Social Justice Prosecutors

For years, many have bemoaned the slide of America’s higher education system down the slippery slope of moral relativism and the embracing of virtually all facets of progressive dogma while rejecting most elements of conservatism. The mere invitation of a conservative commentator to speak on college campuses is now reason enough for rioting and mass student protests. Bozo the Clown has a better chance of giving a commencement address at an Ivy League school than does Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, or their conservative contemporaries. Nowhere is this truth more prevalent than at our most prestigious law schools, and the products of those schools are now reflecting that decades-long liberal drift.

Individuals from this new class of legal eagles have advanced in all branches of government and at all levels — local, state, and federal. They have attended notable law schools, they are African-American, and they are hellbent on ushering in an era of seeking what today’s liberal law schools are pouring into their students by the bucket full — not “justice” but “social justice.”

Now finding themselves in positions of power, these social justice warriors have a deep-rooted belief in the fundamental unfairness of America in general, and our judicial system in particular. They believe that crimes for which underprivileged groups, namely blacks and Latinos, have higher rates of sentencing and incarceration, are the product of an at best a biased, and at worst a racist system; a system which they are a part of and can find ways to affect. One example is when the Obama/Holder DOJ released 6,000 people from federal prisons and reduced the sentences of as many as 46,000 others as a part of their sentencing-reform efforts in 2015.

Those at the executive and legislative level include names like Barack Obama (a ’91 Harvard Law graduate), Eric Holder (’73 Columbia), Kamala Harris (’89 Cal-Berkeley), and Loretta Lynch (’84 Harvard), among others. These are nationally prominent figures; however, those in the judicial level are of much lesser note. Few Americans can name a judge or two, and judges tend not to be in the news, thus this infiltration has happened largely under the radar. Were it not for the egregiousness of her actions and the celebrity status of Jessie Smollett, Kim Foxx would exist in relative anonymity.

The decision by Cook County Illinois State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (’97 Southern Illinois) to dismiss all sixteen felony charges against  Jessie Smollett, wipe his record clean, seal documents from public view, and allow him to walk with only time served (16 hours of community service at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition) is representative of an ever-growing class of young ethnic-minority lawyers advancing through the ranks of our judicial system and taking it upon themselves to place a thumb on what used to and should be the blind scales of justice in favor of the “marginalized.”

Foxx has drawn the ire of Chicago law enforcement, and apparently this is not the first time. A Washington Post article on Foxx’s malfeasance included this: “It’s outrageous, but this is nothing new for Kim Foxx,” said Martin Preib, second vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge 7.”

The Chicago P.D. has argued that Foxx, who is African-American, has a pattern of favoring offenders over cops. Foxx is not alone. Last November, another young African-American attorney, Rachel Rollins (’99 Georgetown), won her race to become Suffolk County (Boston, MA) district attorney. After the election, Rollins published to her website a list of charges that her office will not be prosecuting, including larceny, shoplifting, drug possession with intent to distribute, and resisting arrest. She is simply not going to prosecute those arrested for these crimes, stating:

 “Instead of prosecuting, these cases should be (1) outright dismissed prior to arraignment or (2) where appropriate, diverted and treated as a civil infraction for which community service is satisfactory…”

As is the case with the cantankerous relationship between prosecutor and police department in Chicago, Rollins and the local P.D. don’t appear to be bosom buddies. Boston Police Protection Union President Michael Leary is quoted as saying:

“Our job is already dangerous. It’s unbelievable to think people are willing to make it more dangerous for us. I fear that officers will begin to see even more aggressiveness than we already face on a daily basis… if there are no consequences, offenders will figure ‘why not resist?’”

Earlier this month, Brooklyn’s new District Attorney Eric Gonzalez (’92 Cornell) introduced what his office has dubbed as “sweeping reforms” via his Justice 2020 Initiative.  According to the DA’s website, “Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced his plan for a groundbreaking initiative to transform Brooklyn’s justice system into a progressive model designed to keep Brooklyn safe and strengthen community trust by ensuring fairness and equal justice for all.” There it is: “equal justice for all.” What do the initiative’s reforms looks like? It’s first two pillars read:

“Considering non-jail resolutions at every juncture of a case…”

“Establishing early release as the default position…”

No discussion about the incredible things liberals do is complete without California. Perhaps following the lead of Contra Costa County (San Francisco Bay Area), which in 2009 announced that assaults, thefts, burglaries, and felony drug cases would no longer be prosecuted, California voters passed Proposition 47, which essentially introduced crime with no consequences to the Golden State.

Prop 47, the “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative” is very pro-thief. Under its provisions, offenses that were once felonies, including shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, and more, are recategorized as misdemeanors. It states that theft of property worth less than $950 is not prosecutable. Such thefts result in the perpetrators getting the equivalent of a warning for J-walking. They face essentially no punishment.

Predictably, retailers and the law-abiding public are feeling the hurt. This quote showed up in National Review: “Every bicycle in our building has been stolen,” says Karen Burns, president of a San Francisco condo association. “I’ve caught so many people stealing packages. They don’t care. They know nothing will happen to them. It’s crazy. It’s horrible.”

Large retailers say shoplifting has increased at least 15 percent, and in some cases doubled since voters approved Prop 47. Fox News wrote that “shoplifting reports to the Los Angeles Police Department jumped by a quarter in the first year,” and added this incredible bit of detail, “We’ve heard of cases where they’re going into stores with a calculator so they can make sure that what they steal is worth less than $950,” said Robin Shakely, Sacramento County assistant chief deputy district attorney.”

The Independent Sentinel carried this story about one local business owner: “Hobby shop owner Perry Lutz says his struggle to survive as a small businessman became a lot harder after California voters reduced theft penalties 1½ years ago.

“About a half-dozen times this year, shoplifters have stolen expensive drones or another of the remote-controlled toys he sells in HobbyTown USA, a small shop in Rocklin, northeast of Sacramento. ‘It’s just pretty much open season,’ Lutz said. ‘They’ll pick the $800 unit and just grab it and run out the door.’”

Thieves know that if it’s worth less than $950, they will not be pursued by law enforcement, and even if they are, and they’re caught, there will be no penalty.

This new breed of lawyers who’ve been raised and trained on “social justice” in our law schools are becoming prosecutors and judges and are slowly changing the landscape of our legal system. While they publicly state a belief that their reforms are “making communities safer,” it’s difficult to see how. What they are really doing is enabling criminal behavior in the name of “fairness and equality.” Exactly how it’s fair to allow people to get away with criminal activity is unclear, but this much is certain — they are steadily moving up the justice system ranks.

Derrick Wilburn is a Centennial Institute Fellow and Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives

For years, many have bemoaned the slide of America’s higher education system down the slippery slope of moral relativism and the embracing of virtually all facets of progressive dogma while rejecting most elements of conservatism. The mere invitation of a conservative commentator to speak on college campuses is now reason enough for rioting and mass student protests. Bozo the Clown has a better chance of giving a commencement address at an Ivy League school than does Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, or their conservative contemporaries. Nowhere is this truth more prevalent than at our most prestigious law schools, and the products of those schools are now reflecting that decades-long liberal drift.

Individuals from this new class of legal eagles have advanced in all branches of government and at all levels — local, state, and federal. They have attended notable law schools, they are African-American, and they are hellbent on ushering in an era of seeking what today’s liberal law schools are pouring into their students by the bucket full — not “justice” but “social justice.”

Now finding themselves in positions of power, these social justice warriors have a deep-rooted belief in the fundamental unfairness of America in general, and our judicial system in particular. They believe that crimes for which underprivileged groups, namely blacks and Latinos, have higher rates of sentencing and incarceration, are the product of an at best a biased, and at worst a racist system; a system which they are a part of and can find ways to affect. One example is when the Obama/Holder DOJ released 6,000 people from federal prisons and reduced the sentences of as many as 46,000 others as a part of their sentencing-reform efforts in 2015.

Those at the executive and legislative level include names like Barack Obama (a ’91 Harvard Law graduate), Eric Holder (’73 Columbia), Kamala Harris (’89 Cal-Berkeley), and Loretta Lynch (’84 Harvard), among others. These are nationally prominent figures; however, those in the judicial level are of much lesser note. Few Americans can name a judge or two, and judges tend not to be in the news, thus this infiltration has happened largely under the radar. Were it not for the egregiousness of her actions and the celebrity status of Jessie Smollett, Kim Foxx would exist in relative anonymity.

The decision by Cook County Illinois State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (’97 Southern Illinois) to dismiss all sixteen felony charges against  Jessie Smollett, wipe his record clean, seal documents from public view, and allow him to walk with only time served (16 hours of community service at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition) is representative of an ever-growing class of young ethnic-minority lawyers advancing through the ranks of our judicial system and taking it upon themselves to place a thumb on what used to and should be the blind scales of justice in favor of the “marginalized.”

Foxx has drawn the ire of Chicago law enforcement, and apparently this is not the first time. A Washington Post article on Foxx’s malfeasance included this: “It’s outrageous, but this is nothing new for Kim Foxx,” said Martin Preib, second vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge 7.”

The Chicago P.D. has argued that Foxx, who is African-American, has a pattern of favoring offenders over cops. Foxx is not alone. Last November, another young African-American attorney, Rachel Rollins (’99 Georgetown), won her race to become Suffolk County (Boston, MA) district attorney. After the election, Rollins published to her website a list of charges that her office will not be prosecuting, including larceny, shoplifting, drug possession with intent to distribute, and resisting arrest. She is simply not going to prosecute those arrested for these crimes, stating:

 “Instead of prosecuting, these cases should be (1) outright dismissed prior to arraignment or (2) where appropriate, diverted and treated as a civil infraction for which community service is satisfactory…”

As is the case with the cantankerous relationship between prosecutor and police department in Chicago, Rollins and the local P.D. don’t appear to be bosom buddies. Boston Police Protection Union President Michael Leary is quoted as saying:

“Our job is already dangerous. It’s unbelievable to think people are willing to make it more dangerous for us. I fear that officers will begin to see even more aggressiveness than we already face on a daily basis… if there are no consequences, offenders will figure ‘why not resist?’”

Earlier this month, Brooklyn’s new District Attorney Eric Gonzalez (’92 Cornell) introduced what his office has dubbed as “sweeping reforms” via his Justice 2020 Initiative.  According to the DA’s website, “Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced his plan for a groundbreaking initiative to transform Brooklyn’s justice system into a progressive model designed to keep Brooklyn safe and strengthen community trust by ensuring fairness and equal justice for all.” There it is: “equal justice for all.” What do the initiative’s reforms looks like? It’s first two pillars read:

“Considering non-jail resolutions at every juncture of a case…”

“Establishing early release as the default position…”

No discussion about the incredible things liberals do is complete without California. Perhaps following the lead of Contra Costa County (San Francisco Bay Area), which in 2009 announced that assaults, thefts, burglaries, and felony drug cases would no longer be prosecuted, California voters passed Proposition 47, which essentially introduced crime with no consequences to the Golden State.

Prop 47, the “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative” is very pro-thief. Under its provisions, offenses that were once felonies, including shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, and more, are recategorized as misdemeanors. It states that theft of property worth less than $950 is not prosecutable. Such thefts result in the perpetrators getting the equivalent of a warning for J-walking. They face essentially no punishment.

Predictably, retailers and the law-abiding public are feeling the hurt. This quote showed up in National Review: “Every bicycle in our building has been stolen,” says Karen Burns, president of a San Francisco condo association. “I’ve caught so many people stealing packages. They don’t care. They know nothing will happen to them. It’s crazy. It’s horrible.”

Large retailers say shoplifting has increased at least 15 percent, and in some cases doubled since voters approved Prop 47. Fox News wrote that “shoplifting reports to the Los Angeles Police Department jumped by a quarter in the first year,” and added this incredible bit of detail, “We’ve heard of cases where they’re going into stores with a calculator so they can make sure that what they steal is worth less than $950,” said Robin Shakely, Sacramento County assistant chief deputy district attorney.”

The Independent Sentinel carried this story about one local business owner: “Hobby shop owner Perry Lutz says his struggle to survive as a small businessman became a lot harder after California voters reduced theft penalties 1½ years ago.

“About a half-dozen times this year, shoplifters have stolen expensive drones or another of the remote-controlled toys he sells in HobbyTown USA, a small shop in Rocklin, northeast of Sacramento. ‘It’s just pretty much open season,’ Lutz said. ‘They’ll pick the $800 unit and just grab it and run out the door.’”

Thieves know that if it’s worth less than $950, they will not be pursued by law enforcement, and even if they are, and they’re caught, there will be no penalty.

This new breed of lawyers who’ve been raised and trained on “social justice” in our law schools are becoming prosecutors and judges and are slowly changing the landscape of our legal system. While they publicly state a belief that their reforms are “making communities safer,” it’s difficult to see how. What they are really doing is enabling criminal behavior in the name of “fairness and equality.” Exactly how it’s fair to allow people to get away with criminal activity is unclear, but this much is certain — they are steadily moving up the justice system ranks.

Derrick Wilburn is a Centennial Institute Fellow and Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

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The Case for Trump and a Look at 2020

The Case for Trump by the political and military scholar Victor Davis Hanson is a book dedicated to the “Deplorables.”  It is a fact-based analysis of why Donald Trump was able to win the presidency in 2016.  Beyond that, Hanson sat down with American Thinker and discussed the presidential election in 2020.

Donald Trump ran against both political parties and the East Coast establishment in the 2016 presidential election.  He was the first man ever elected to the nation’s highest office without prior experience in government, politics, or the military.  In a nutshell, Trump appealed to a forgotten but sizable portion of the population: the working and middle classes most negatively impacted by decades of globalism.  Through direct quotes from various individuals on both sides, Hanson makes a powerful case that the elite of both parties hold immense disdain for these middle Americans.

Hanson told American Thinker, “He was not supposed to win.  With the victory, he interrupted sixteen years of a planned progressive agenda.  This election was a referendum on prior credibility.  His victory meant all those who were consulted in the past would be isolated because Trump was not necessarily going to listen to those in the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, Hoover Institution where I work, and the Council on Foreign Affairs, nor was he going to call past presidents for advice.  This was an affront to the entire political establishment.”

Before Trump, Republicans and conservatives usually did not take the initiative, nor did they go on the offense.  ”Trump did just the opposite.  His aggression was very popular among the frustrated Republican voters.  They did not want a John McCain or a Mitt Romney whose often passive attitude they saw as a cancer.  McCain had ignored attacking Reverend Wright and his outrageous comments, while Romney never really objected to what ‘moderator’ Candy Crowley did in the second debate.  Conservative voters were ready for someone who fights back.  They might not like all Trump’s wild comments and tweeting, but they thought Trump’s combative attitude was worth it.” 

Hanson went on to explain that many voters saw Trump as authentic.  Regardless of what audience he was speaking to, he always wore a suit and a tie.  ”He never adopted a southern accent when speaking to voters in that region as Hillary Clinton did, or changed his tone when speaking to the inner city as Barack Obama had, or wore jeans and a flannel shirt at state fairs as Joe Biden did.  Even though he is a multibillionaire, people found Trump more authentic and empathetic.  For example, after Hillary Clinton said she wanted to shut down the coal industry, he went into West Virginia and said he loved the ‘big and beautiful coal.’  He also gives straight answers, not the 50-50 type, such as ‘on the one hand, in theory, maybe we will take a look at that, that is a good question to explore.'”

Fast-forwarding to 2020, Hanson believes that Trump’s track record is pretty good.  He is creating economic opportunity through growth, redressing longstanding trade inequities, reducing costly and poorly conceived overseas entanglements, cutting red tape that restricts business activity, and restricting illegal immigration that threatens wage growth.

Regarding Beto O’Rourke, Hanson believes that his strange background will come back to haunt him in the Democratic primaries.  ”The image he did not want to convey is that he is from a very wealthy white family.  He had used privilege and influence as a young man to get ahead, mostly getting off from serious punishment after a DUI and apparently not charged to the fullest extent for burglarizing a warehouse.  He wrote grotesque stories about killing children, ate dirt, and played a trick on his wife by supposedly putting feces in her bowl.  There seems something sick, mean, weird, and sinister about all of these.  Regarding his policies, he has a hard-left agenda now.  He never says anything concrete about an issue, almost like he is mindlessly vague.  I think the more people know about O’Rourke, the less they will like him.”

His prediction is that Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris will get the Democratic nomination.  ”Trump will be running against one of these candidates.  The issues they are running on are pretty radical, and they do not have the support of 51% of the electorate.  Trump can say, ‘You may find my tweets crass or crude, but I am the only thing between you and socialism.’  The Democratic candidates are in an echo chamber competing to be the one furthest left.”

Hanson makes a good point, considering even anti-Trumper and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said this: “Joe Biden went out and was essentially apologizing for being male, over 50, and white,” and “Beto, or whatever his name is, he virtually apologized for being born affluent and white.”  He also bashed the Democratic policies: “We need a healthy economy, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed by our capitalist system.  If you want to look at the record of a system that is non-capitalistic, just take a look at what was perhaps the wealthiest country in Latin America, and today, people are starving to death.  It’s called Venezuela.”  He went on to say, “I’m a little bit tired of listening to agendas that are pie-in-the-sky that are never going to pass into law, never going to afford.  I think it’s just disingenuous to promote those things as if they are serious issues.  You’ve got to do something that’s practical.”

Will Trump win in 2020?  Hanson thinks he has a very good chance.  ”The Democrats are against the extra oil produced since 2016, the Keystone Pipeline, and the traditional judges appointed.  They will run on issues such as a 90% tax rate, outlawing combustible engines, wanting reparations, radical abortion, abolishing ICE, and abolishing the Electoral college.  In addition, a lot of Latinos where I live, in Central California, do not like the Catholic-bashing by liberals and the effects of thousands of illegal immigrants suddenly in their schools.  Also, the monotonous white-bashing is not popular among the working-class white electorate.  Most of those caricatured are of the working class that do not have white privilege.  For example, a truck-driver working twelve hours a day has very little in common with a Malibu homeowner.”

He predicts that Trump will draw from the traditional Democratic base that includes 40% of the Hispanic vote and 40% of the Jewish vote.  ”About half of the base of the Democratic Party is anti-Semitic and at least half of the party likely also does not like Israel.  Progressives talk recklessly about Israel as evil even though there are 100 other nations in the world, and dozens that are disasters.  The Left only bashes Israel because it is a Jewish state and so they are basically saying, ‘I don’t like Jews.'”

In reading the book, people understand why Trump won, and Hanson also explains the reason he thinks Trump will win again: “the Democrats, who have alienated the middle classes,” would need to get “95% of the black vote, 75% of the Asian vote, 75% of the Hispanic vote, and 70% of the Jewish vote.  I do not think that will happen.”  As they say, from his words to G-d’s ears.

The author writes for American Thinker.  She has done book reviews and author interviews and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.

The Case for Trump by the political and military scholar Victor Davis Hanson is a book dedicated to the “Deplorables.”  It is a fact-based analysis of why Donald Trump was able to win the presidency in 2016.  Beyond that, Hanson sat down with American Thinker and discussed the presidential election in 2020.

Donald Trump ran against both political parties and the East Coast establishment in the 2016 presidential election.  He was the first man ever elected to the nation’s highest office without prior experience in government, politics, or the military.  In a nutshell, Trump appealed to a forgotten but sizable portion of the population: the working and middle classes most negatively impacted by decades of globalism.  Through direct quotes from various individuals on both sides, Hanson makes a powerful case that the elite of both parties hold immense disdain for these middle Americans.

Hanson told American Thinker, “He was not supposed to win.  With the victory, he interrupted sixteen years of a planned progressive agenda.  This election was a referendum on prior credibility.  His victory meant all those who were consulted in the past would be isolated because Trump was not necessarily going to listen to those in the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, Hoover Institution where I work, and the Council on Foreign Affairs, nor was he going to call past presidents for advice.  This was an affront to the entire political establishment.”

Before Trump, Republicans and conservatives usually did not take the initiative, nor did they go on the offense.  ”Trump did just the opposite.  His aggression was very popular among the frustrated Republican voters.  They did not want a John McCain or a Mitt Romney whose often passive attitude they saw as a cancer.  McCain had ignored attacking Reverend Wright and his outrageous comments, while Romney never really objected to what ‘moderator’ Candy Crowley did in the second debate.  Conservative voters were ready for someone who fights back.  They might not like all Trump’s wild comments and tweeting, but they thought Trump’s combative attitude was worth it.” 

Hanson went on to explain that many voters saw Trump as authentic.  Regardless of what audience he was speaking to, he always wore a suit and a tie.  ”He never adopted a southern accent when speaking to voters in that region as Hillary Clinton did, or changed his tone when speaking to the inner city as Barack Obama had, or wore jeans and a flannel shirt at state fairs as Joe Biden did.  Even though he is a multibillionaire, people found Trump more authentic and empathetic.  For example, after Hillary Clinton said she wanted to shut down the coal industry, he went into West Virginia and said he loved the ‘big and beautiful coal.’  He also gives straight answers, not the 50-50 type, such as ‘on the one hand, in theory, maybe we will take a look at that, that is a good question to explore.'”

Fast-forwarding to 2020, Hanson believes that Trump’s track record is pretty good.  He is creating economic opportunity through growth, redressing longstanding trade inequities, reducing costly and poorly conceived overseas entanglements, cutting red tape that restricts business activity, and restricting illegal immigration that threatens wage growth.

Regarding Beto O’Rourke, Hanson believes that his strange background will come back to haunt him in the Democratic primaries.  ”The image he did not want to convey is that he is from a very wealthy white family.  He had used privilege and influence as a young man to get ahead, mostly getting off from serious punishment after a DUI and apparently not charged to the fullest extent for burglarizing a warehouse.  He wrote grotesque stories about killing children, ate dirt, and played a trick on his wife by supposedly putting feces in her bowl.  There seems something sick, mean, weird, and sinister about all of these.  Regarding his policies, he has a hard-left agenda now.  He never says anything concrete about an issue, almost like he is mindlessly vague.  I think the more people know about O’Rourke, the less they will like him.”

His prediction is that Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris will get the Democratic nomination.  ”Trump will be running against one of these candidates.  The issues they are running on are pretty radical, and they do not have the support of 51% of the electorate.  Trump can say, ‘You may find my tweets crass or crude, but I am the only thing between you and socialism.’  The Democratic candidates are in an echo chamber competing to be the one furthest left.”

Hanson makes a good point, considering even anti-Trumper and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said this: “Joe Biden went out and was essentially apologizing for being male, over 50, and white,” and “Beto, or whatever his name is, he virtually apologized for being born affluent and white.”  He also bashed the Democratic policies: “We need a healthy economy, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed by our capitalist system.  If you want to look at the record of a system that is non-capitalistic, just take a look at what was perhaps the wealthiest country in Latin America, and today, people are starving to death.  It’s called Venezuela.”  He went on to say, “I’m a little bit tired of listening to agendas that are pie-in-the-sky that are never going to pass into law, never going to afford.  I think it’s just disingenuous to promote those things as if they are serious issues.  You’ve got to do something that’s practical.”

Will Trump win in 2020?  Hanson thinks he has a very good chance.  ”The Democrats are against the extra oil produced since 2016, the Keystone Pipeline, and the traditional judges appointed.  They will run on issues such as a 90% tax rate, outlawing combustible engines, wanting reparations, radical abortion, abolishing ICE, and abolishing the Electoral college.  In addition, a lot of Latinos where I live, in Central California, do not like the Catholic-bashing by liberals and the effects of thousands of illegal immigrants suddenly in their schools.  Also, the monotonous white-bashing is not popular among the working-class white electorate.  Most of those caricatured are of the working class that do not have white privilege.  For example, a truck-driver working twelve hours a day has very little in common with a Malibu homeowner.”

He predicts that Trump will draw from the traditional Democratic base that includes 40% of the Hispanic vote and 40% of the Jewish vote.  ”About half of the base of the Democratic Party is anti-Semitic and at least half of the party likely also does not like Israel.  Progressives talk recklessly about Israel as evil even though there are 100 other nations in the world, and dozens that are disasters.  The Left only bashes Israel because it is a Jewish state and so they are basically saying, ‘I don’t like Jews.'”

In reading the book, people understand why Trump won, and Hanson also explains the reason he thinks Trump will win again: “the Democrats, who have alienated the middle classes,” would need to get “95% of the black vote, 75% of the Asian vote, 75% of the Hispanic vote, and 70% of the Jewish vote.  I do not think that will happen.”  As they say, from his words to G-d’s ears.

The author writes for American Thinker.  She has done book reviews and author interviews and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.

via American Thinker

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/

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Socialist Venezuela now an exploding supernova of spreading infectious disease

So much for all that free health care.

Now for what it looks like up close:

Socialist Venezuela is now an exploding supernova of spreading disease vectors, with its three million fleeing refugees bringing measles, malaria, diptheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, AIDS, Zika, leprosy, dengue chikungunya virus and other diseases long thought to have been eradicated in the early 20th century, with them.

What an advertisement for socialism that is.

It’s the effect of the collapse of the country’s medical system, brought on by socialism’s unsustainable economics, and Venezuela’s Maduro dictatorship (unlike a lot of starving African countries) refusing to permit any aid to enter.

Two alarming news reports (which eerily don’t intersect) have the exact same story:

First, the Washington Post, which cites an academic/NGO report just out:

Venezuela’s health system is in “utter collapse,” according to a report, including the exponential spread of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and diphtheria and “dramatic surges” in infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The report, to be released Thursday by Human Rights Watch and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is among the few that has sought to quantify Venezuela’s misery, as the country has ceased releasing health and nutrition data and retaliated against those who did.

Based on interviews with doctors and other health personnel in Venezuela, conducted by telephone and online; refugees in Colombia and Brazil, including health care professionals; and representatives of humanitarian and international organizations, the report concludes that the United Nations should take the lead providing aid.

Second, there’s this organic report from Bloomberg Latin America columnist Mac Margolis, which features interviews with hospital personnel and public health officials, all seeing the same nightmare on the ground:

Half a century on, Venezuela is a hothouse for malaria again, but also communicable miseries from HIV/AIDS to Zika. Forgotten diseases such as diphtheria and measles rage. Leprosy, tuberculosis and typhoid fever are back, alongside emerging mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya. New HIV infections jumped 24 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Now the worst humanitarian crisis in the Americas risks becoming a hemispheric emergency, as nearly 3 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants ferry their pathogens across the continent.

Here are some particulars:

But when such migrants travel, they also carry ills that Venezuela’s neighbors thought they’d beaten. After logging just one case of measles between 2008 and 2015, Brazil reported more than 10,000 infections last year. Most patients bore D8 genotype measles, the dominant strain circulating in Venezuela. The Venezuela epidemic has also been linked to outbreaks in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

The World Health Organization reckoned that a Venezuelan malaria outbreak was responsible for 84 percent of the increase in infections in the Americas in 2017. Venezuela alone kicked in 53 percent of all reported cases regionally in 2016 and 2017.

 “The human exodus has become a disease exodus. Contagion is one of our most prolific exports,” Venezuelan infectious disease pathologist Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, a member of the Venezuelan National Academy of Medicine, told me.

So as the West is forced to admit Venezuelan refugees (and unlike the Central Americans, these are real ones), each and every one of them is potentially a carrier, if not openly suffering from, of some of the most awful and once-thought-eradicated diseases from the 19th century. Next time a socialist speaks of ‘progress’ remember that this is what socialists deliver on their ‘progress.’

It amounts to biological warfare on the West, given that people outside Venezuela’s socialist zone of misery are going to die from these diseases which had long been eradicated from the capitalist West up until now.

Their defenders may argue that it’s chaotic and unintentional (or even more likely, the result of sanctions on their oligarchs), but Venezuela’s ruling socialists are the ones driving it and fully responsible, prioritizing their own stretch in power over the welfare of their own people in prohibiting aid, refusing even an African model of circumstances. Now they’re creating new problems for the welfare of their neighbors who are getting the diseases, too.

It shows that in socialism, the ends always justifies the means. Venezuela’s Maduro dictatorship has not only have collapsed their own medical system, allowing their people to go to hell, (something all socialist countries throughout the 20th century have had a comparable record on), they have also wiped out disease data, and threatened and punished anyone trying to find out the truth, as the Washington Post report notes at the end. 

Noting that the deprivation long predates recently imposed U.S. sanctions, it said that “Venezuelan authorities under Maduro have concealed the official health information. They have harassed and retaliated against those who collect data or speak out about food and medicine shortages.”

The Washington Post reports that the United Nations should get involved, which is an idea. But good luck with that one, given the Maduroites’ callous indifference to the lives of both its own people and those of its neighbors. They see any intervention as a threat to their own power and are unlikely to allow it. 

This is what socialism is, up close.

Is this an argument for sending in the Marines? Well, it’s arguable, given that the diseases are coming fast, furious and in great diverse quantities as Venezuelans run for their lives from socialism. As disasters go, it’s entirely man-made and entirely preventable and fixable. Impoverished African countries take care of these matters all the time. Socialist Venezuela, by contrast, focuses on jailing the people just trying to find out about it instead.

If no pressure can be applied to the country’s ruling socialists to do something about the matter, not even if it involves the United Nations, it signals a more forceful response is appropriate. There’s such a thing known as a ‘just war,’ and in one, self-defense justifies it.

 

So much for all that free health care.

Now for what it looks like up close:

Socialist Venezuela is now an exploding supernova of spreading disease vectors, with its three million fleeing refugees bringing measles, malaria, diptheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, AIDS, Zika, leprosy, dengue chikungunya virus and other diseases long thought to have been eradicated in the early 20th century, with them.

What an advertisement for socialism that is.

It’s the effect of the collapse of the country’s medical system, brought on by socialism’s unsustainable economics, and Venezuela’s Maduro dictatorship (unlike a lot of starving African countries) refusing to permit any aid to enter.

Two alarming news reports (which eerily don’t intersect) have the exact same story:

First, the Washington Post, which cites an academic/NGO report just out:

Venezuela’s health system is in “utter collapse,” according to a report, including the exponential spread of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and diphtheria and “dramatic surges” in infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The report, to be released Thursday by Human Rights Watch and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is among the few that has sought to quantify Venezuela’s misery, as the country has ceased releasing health and nutrition data and retaliated against those who did.

Based on interviews with doctors and other health personnel in Venezuela, conducted by telephone and online; refugees in Colombia and Brazil, including health care professionals; and representatives of humanitarian and international organizations, the report concludes that the United Nations should take the lead providing aid.

Second, there’s this organic report from Bloomberg Latin America columnist Mac Margolis, which features interviews with hospital personnel and public health officials, all seeing the same nightmare on the ground:

Half a century on, Venezuela is a hothouse for malaria again, but also communicable miseries from HIV/AIDS to Zika. Forgotten diseases such as diphtheria and measles rage. Leprosy, tuberculosis and typhoid fever are back, alongside emerging mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya. New HIV infections jumped 24 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Now the worst humanitarian crisis in the Americas risks becoming a hemispheric emergency, as nearly 3 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants ferry their pathogens across the continent.

Here are some particulars:

But when such migrants travel, they also carry ills that Venezuela’s neighbors thought they’d beaten. After logging just one case of measles between 2008 and 2015, Brazil reported more than 10,000 infections last year. Most patients bore D8 genotype measles, the dominant strain circulating in Venezuela. The Venezuela epidemic has also been linked to outbreaks in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

The World Health Organization reckoned that a Venezuelan malaria outbreak was responsible for 84 percent of the increase in infections in the Americas in 2017. Venezuela alone kicked in 53 percent of all reported cases regionally in 2016 and 2017.

 “The human exodus has become a disease exodus. Contagion is one of our most prolific exports,” Venezuelan infectious disease pathologist Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, a member of the Venezuelan National Academy of Medicine, told me.

So as the West is forced to admit Venezuelan refugees (and unlike the Central Americans, these are real ones), each and every one of them is potentially a carrier, if not openly suffering from, of some of the most awful and once-thought-eradicated diseases from the 19th century. Next time a socialist speaks of ‘progress’ remember that this is what socialists deliver on their ‘progress.’

It amounts to biological warfare on the West, given that people outside Venezuela’s socialist zone of misery are going to die from these diseases which had long been eradicated from the capitalist West up until now.

Their defenders may argue that it’s chaotic and unintentional (or even more likely, the result of sanctions on their oligarchs), but Venezuela’s ruling socialists are the ones driving it and fully responsible, prioritizing their own stretch in power over the welfare of their own people in prohibiting aid, refusing even an African model of circumstances. Now they’re creating new problems for the welfare of their neighbors who are getting the diseases, too.

It shows that in socialism, the ends always justifies the means. Venezuela’s Maduro dictatorship has not only have collapsed their own medical system, allowing their people to go to hell, (something all socialist countries throughout the 20th century have had a comparable record on), they have also wiped out disease data, and threatened and punished anyone trying to find out the truth, as the Washington Post report notes at the end. 

Noting that the deprivation long predates recently imposed U.S. sanctions, it said that “Venezuelan authorities under Maduro have concealed the official health information. They have harassed and retaliated against those who collect data or speak out about food and medicine shortages.”

The Washington Post reports that the United Nations should get involved, which is an idea. But good luck with that one, given the Maduroites’ callous indifference to the lives of both its own people and those of its neighbors. They see any intervention as a threat to their own power and are unlikely to allow it. 

This is what socialism is, up close.

Is this an argument for sending in the Marines? Well, it’s arguable, given that the diseases are coming fast, furious and in great diverse quantities as Venezuelans run for their lives from socialism. As disasters go, it’s entirely man-made and entirely preventable and fixable. Impoverished African countries take care of these matters all the time. Socialist Venezuela, by contrast, focuses on jailing the people just trying to find out about it instead.

If no pressure can be applied to the country’s ruling socialists to do something about the matter, not even if it involves the United Nations, it signals a more forceful response is appropriate. There’s such a thing known as a ‘just war,’ and in one, self-defense justifies it.

 

via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

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A vicious little attempt to steal a New Yorker’s property has city officials’ fingerprints all over it

A man’s home is supposed to be his castle. But this is no longer the case in New York City, according to a Brooklyn man who says that Big Apple officials are aiding and abetting a next-door neighbor’s attempt to steal his property.

It has been a long ordeal for John Hockenjos, 62, and his wife Irina, one whose twists and turns include a false arrest by the NYPD. The problems started in 2009, they say, when the couple Argo and Elen Paumere “purchased the home next to them with plans for an ambitious overhaul. According to the Hockenjoses, red flags flew fast when they were approached to sign documents turning over a two-foot easement to their new neighbor,” as Bklyner reported in 2013.

I spoke to the Hockenjos recently on the phone, and Irina told me their suspicions were borne out. After refusing to sign the documents, the Hockenjoses say that Argo Paumere “went and created a fraudulent land survey that marked a chunk of the driveway as theirs,” as Bklyner put it. The kicker?

The city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) approved it, the Hockenjoses report — and they’ve been battling the Paumeres and city hall ever since.

It’s a battle that has cost the Hockenjoses their jobs, their health and more than $150,000 in legal fees, they say. But the real shock came in February 2012 when John, a former Metropolitan Transit Authority engineer, was falsely arrested by 61st Precinct police.

That dark day was Feb. 5 of that year. The police arrived at the Hockenjoses’ property, in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay section, after being called by Paumere, according to NY’s Daily News. The incident culminated in John’s arrest and felony charges being brought after he was accused of driving at a “high rate of speed, causing an officer “to jump out of the way,” the News reports. But the police had a problem.

No such thing ever happened.

John had video surveillance footage to prove it, too, which showed “the Brooklyn man slowly pulling into his driveway and the cop not even flinching,” to quote the News again. 

In fact, so egregious was the police frame-up that Officer Diego Palacios, who was involved in the arrest, resigned from the NYPD and was indicted by a grand jury “on five kinds of illegal lying, one of them a felony,” reported The New York Times in 2012.

Palacios pled guilty in exchange for a sentence of just four days in prison — just one day longer than John spent in jail after his arrest — but ended up serving only one night. Call it Kim Foxx justice.

Oh, had Palacios’ frame-up been successful, John would have faced seven years behind bars.

As for the land dispute, the Hockenjoses told me they know of other NYC residents in their shoes, people who face what’s essentially the theft of their property due to DOB corruption or incompetence. If this sounds fanciful, consider the comments of former Queens-based state senator Tony Avella, who was a staunch critic of the DOB. 

“It’s something that’s a bottom line issue with the DOB where an applicant just presents an application and they never really check it to see if the size of the property is correct, or whether they own the property or not,” he told Sheepshead Bites (now part of Bklyner) in 2013.”

“The builder says they own part of the property that’s actually the neighbor’s, and the DOB approves it,” he continued. “It’s a very serious issue. Anyone can submit a false application, fraudulent documents and fraudulent land surveys, and no one checks it.”

And once this happens…well, go fight city hall. As Bklyner also tells us, “According to both Avella and the Hockenjoses, the DOB’s modus operandi when they receive complaints about fraudulent documents is to wash its hands of the problem and declare it a property dispute to be handled in civil court.”

“That comes with its own set of problems,” Bklyner further informs. “The Hockenjoses have gone through lawyer after lawyer, some of which [sic] they say took their money and never did any work. Others have refused to take the case because it appears to exist in a sort of legal no-man’s-land.”

“‘They’re saying I’m not going to take this case because it’s not a real estate case, it’s not a property dispute case, it’s a criminal case,’” Irina told Bklyner (this echoes what she related to me). “‘And we go to criminal attorneys and they tell us we need to go to prosecutors. And the prosecutors say it’s a civil case.’”

The bottom line is that the Hockenjoses have spent a good part of the last decade in court, all due, they say, to a neighbor who’s quite a malevolent character. In fact, Irina told me that shortly after the Paumeres moved in, Argo Paumere said bluntly, “I’m going to take your property from you.” After being informed that it wasn’t for sale, he made known that this didn’t matter, Irina states.

And aside from the false arrest, the Hockenjoses say that the Paumeres have continually made false charges against them, resulting in actions by city inspectors that the couple has had to fight. The stress has been overwhelming, they state.

The Hockenjoses also believe that more than just garden-variety bureaucratic incompetence is at work: They suspect that Argo Paumere has connections with city officials. The false arrest certainly lends this theory credence, of course. Whatever the case, it’s a very strange story — and one many Americans wouldn’t expect to hear in these United States.

It’s a continuing story, too, as the Hockenjoses fight on. Hopefully, they’ll get the help they deserve, somewhere, and justice will finally be done.

 

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Image credit: Harald Groven, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Byrakrati.png

 

A man’s home is supposed to be his castle. But this is no longer the case in New York City, according to a Brooklyn man who says that Big Apple officials are aiding and abetting a next-door neighbor’s attempt to steal his property.

It has been a long ordeal for John Hockenjos, 62, and his wife Irina, one whose twists and turns include a false arrest by the NYPD. The problems started in 2009, they say, when the couple Argo and Elen Paumere “purchased the home next to them with plans for an ambitious overhaul. According to the Hockenjoses, red flags flew fast when they were approached to sign documents turning over a two-foot easement to their new neighbor,” as Bklyner reported in 2013.

I spoke to the Hockenjos recently on the phone, and Irina told me their suspicions were borne out. After refusing to sign the documents, the Hockenjoses say that Argo Paumere “went and created a fraudulent land survey that marked a chunk of the driveway as theirs,” as Bklyner put it. The kicker?

The city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) approved it, the Hockenjoses report — and they’ve been battling the Paumeres and city hall ever since.

It’s a battle that has cost the Hockenjoses their jobs, their health and more than $150,000 in legal fees, they say. But the real shock came in February 2012 when John, a former Metropolitan Transit Authority engineer, was falsely arrested by 61st Precinct police.

That dark day was Feb. 5 of that year. The police arrived at the Hockenjoses’ property, in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay section, after being called by Paumere, according to NY’s Daily News. The incident culminated in John’s arrest and felony charges being brought after he was accused of driving at a “high rate of speed, causing an officer “to jump out of the way,” the News reports. But the police had a problem.

No such thing ever happened.

John had video surveillance footage to prove it, too, which showed “the Brooklyn man slowly pulling into his driveway and the cop not even flinching,” to quote the News again. 

In fact, so egregious was the police frame-up that Officer Diego Palacios, who was involved in the arrest, resigned from the NYPD and was indicted by a grand jury “on five kinds of illegal lying, one of them a felony,” reported The New York Times in 2012.

Palacios pled guilty in exchange for a sentence of just four days in prison — just one day longer than John spent in jail after his arrest — but ended up serving only one night. Call it Kim Foxx justice.

Oh, had Palacios’ frame-up been successful, John would have faced seven years behind bars.

As for the land dispute, the Hockenjoses told me they know of other NYC residents in their shoes, people who face what’s essentially the theft of their property due to DOB corruption or incompetence. If this sounds fanciful, consider the comments of former Queens-based state senator Tony Avella, who was a staunch critic of the DOB. 

“It’s something that’s a bottom line issue with the DOB where an applicant just presents an application and they never really check it to see if the size of the property is correct, or whether they own the property or not,” he told Sheepshead Bites (now part of Bklyner) in 2013.”

“The builder says they own part of the property that’s actually the neighbor’s, and the DOB approves it,” he continued. “It’s a very serious issue. Anyone can submit a false application, fraudulent documents and fraudulent land surveys, and no one checks it.”

And once this happens…well, go fight city hall. As Bklyner also tells us, “According to both Avella and the Hockenjoses, the DOB’s modus operandi when they receive complaints about fraudulent documents is to wash its hands of the problem and declare it a property dispute to be handled in civil court.”

“That comes with its own set of problems,” Bklyner further informs. “The Hockenjoses have gone through lawyer after lawyer, some of which [sic] they say took their money and never did any work. Others have refused to take the case because it appears to exist in a sort of legal no-man’s-land.”

“‘They’re saying I’m not going to take this case because it’s not a real estate case, it’s not a property dispute case, it’s a criminal case,’” Irina told Bklyner (this echoes what she related to me). “‘And we go to criminal attorneys and they tell us we need to go to prosecutors. And the prosecutors say it’s a civil case.’”

The bottom line is that the Hockenjoses have spent a good part of the last decade in court, all due, they say, to a neighbor who’s quite a malevolent character. In fact, Irina told me that shortly after the Paumeres moved in, Argo Paumere said bluntly, “I’m going to take your property from you.” After being informed that it wasn’t for sale, he made known that this didn’t matter, Irina states.

And aside from the false arrest, the Hockenjoses say that the Paumeres have continually made false charges against them, resulting in actions by city inspectors that the couple has had to fight. The stress has been overwhelming, they state.

The Hockenjoses also believe that more than just garden-variety bureaucratic incompetence is at work: They suspect that Argo Paumere has connections with city officials. The false arrest certainly lends this theory credence, of course. Whatever the case, it’s a very strange story — and one many Americans wouldn’t expect to hear in these United States.

It’s a continuing story, too, as the Hockenjoses fight on. Hopefully, they’ll get the help they deserve, somewhere, and justice will finally be done.

 

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Image credit: Harald Groven, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Byrakrati.png

 

via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

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Virtue Signaling Razor Maker Promotes Grotesque Obesity With New Ad

Razor company Gillette alienated an untold number of customers with a controversial ad that condemned “toxic masculinity” earlier in the year in a bid to appeal to loopy millennials in a sad sign of the times.

The ad spot drew much criticism in that it reinforced the media portrayal of males as emasculated bumbling doofuses as the fanatical left looks to neuter males who they have already done a damned fine job of turning into effeminate sissies and the demonization is only going to increase with the election coming and the ghoulish specter of Hillary lurking in the shadows.

Now Gillette is rolling out a new ad campaign featuring a morbidly obese “plus-sized” model to promote the manufacturer’s Venus line of products that are marketed for women.

According to Gillette:

Venus is committed to representing beautiful women of all shapes, sizes, and skin types because ALL types of beautiful skin deserve to be shown. We love Anna because she lives out loud and loves her skin no matter how the “rules” say she should display it.

Anna O’Brien – who is featured in the ad – was previously in the news for an experiment that went awry last year when she posed in a bikini in Times Square expecting to be mocked for being grotesquely obese but instead, was shocked by how many fat fetishists wanted to immerse themselves inside of her bodily folds.

Via soft core porn women’s trash rag Cosmopolitan, “I Posed in a Bikini in Times Square. I Was Expecting Comments from Haters, But What I Actually Heard Was Way More Disheartening”:

  “Let’s do this,” I said out loud. My clothes dropped all the way to the ground, and the voices around me became clear.

“I want to suck on them tasty toes.”

“Hey baby, let me butter them biscuits for you.”

I looked up to see three men with camera phones filming me. Our eyes met, and one uttered, “Twerk for the camera baby, show them how that ass clap.”

Tears began to well up. I was prepared to be pointed at, shamed, and called fat. I didn’t expect to be fetishized.

My mind jolted back to my reality as a man reached forward to hand me his mixed CD. As I pushed it away, he tried to grab hold of my wrist to talk to me. I yanked my hand back. “Hard pass,” I screamed with the toughest face I could muster. “No thank you. Please leave me alone.”

He stepped back into the crowd that was slowly forming, and his friend then began to call out to me. “I’m just showing love for a BBW, baby. I want you to know that men want you. We love them big booty queens like you. Show off for your fans, baby.”

My tears turned to anger, and the words began to fly out of my mouth: “It doesn’t make it OK. You’re disgusting. Please stop. Please just stop…” The man justified his response by saying that plus women “don’t know they’re f*ckable.”

Some people will never be happy.

The company is also featuring a transgender in its latest campaign:

Aside from the morally bereft decision to glorify obesity at a time when diabetes is at record levels, Gillette’s questionable choice to promote a message that implies that men should saw their own balls off using thir own products may not be a windfall for shareholders in the long run.

via Downtrend.com

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Sanders calls for federal ban on right to work laws

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders addressed a powerful union in Las Vegas yesterday and announced his support for a federal ban on state right to work laws.

Because nothing says freedom quite like forcing people to join a union against their will.

The Hill:

Speaking to the International Association of Machinists at the union’s conference in Las Vegas, Sanders said as president he would push legislation in Congress to prohibit the laws. Right-to-work laws bar unionized workplaces from negotiating contracts under which all members who benefit from the contract must contribute dues. Twenty-six states currently have right-to-work laws on the books.

“We need elected officials and candidates at every level to get serious about speaking out for the trade union movement. This should not be an afterthought,” Sanders said. “If we’re talking about growing wages, providing health care to all people, having a progressive tax system, the trade union movement must be in the middle of all of those discussions.”

If workers want to unionize, more power to them. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be forced into it. Such a simple, elegant definition of freedom is lost on socialists like Sanders because a disturbing number of his proposals are coercive in nature.

You want health insurance? You will be forced into the Medicare program. Scared of climate change? You will be forced to severely alter your behavior. You have “too much money” (whatever the hell that means)? The government will forcefully lighten your purse.

Socialists don’t like freedom because they believe you’re too stupid to take care of yourself. That’s the bottom line when it comes to a Sanders candidacy and it’s why ultimately, he will lose.

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders addressed a powerful union in Las Vegas yesterday and announced his support for a federal ban on state right to work laws.

Because nothing says freedom quite like forcing people to join a union against their will.

The Hill:

Speaking to the International Association of Machinists at the union’s conference in Las Vegas, Sanders said as president he would push legislation in Congress to prohibit the laws. Right-to-work laws bar unionized workplaces from negotiating contracts under which all members who benefit from the contract must contribute dues. Twenty-six states currently have right-to-work laws on the books.

“We need elected officials and candidates at every level to get serious about speaking out for the trade union movement. This should not be an afterthought,” Sanders said. “If we’re talking about growing wages, providing health care to all people, having a progressive tax system, the trade union movement must be in the middle of all of those discussions.”

If workers want to unionize, more power to them. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be forced into it. Such a simple, elegant definition of freedom is lost on socialists like Sanders because a disturbing number of his proposals are coercive in nature.

You want health insurance? You will be forced into the Medicare program. Scared of climate change? You will be forced to severely alter your behavior. You have “too much money” (whatever the hell that means)? The government will forcefully lighten your purse.

Socialists don’t like freedom because they believe you’re too stupid to take care of yourself. That’s the bottom line when it comes to a Sanders candidacy and it’s why ultimately, he will lose.

via American Thinker Blog

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Purge: Nielsen isn’t the only one leaving DHS

The recent ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, followed quickly by the head of the Secret Service represented a major shakeup in the power structure and direction of the department. But this morning we’re learning that the personnel changes aren’t stopping there. More firings/resignations are in the offing and people who have worked at DHS – both past and present – are expressing concerns that this will generate massive disruption in the agency’s mission. (Government Executive)

President Trump on Monday executed a dramatic overhaul of leadership at the Homeland Security Department, adding several top officials and component chiefs to the list of top brass removed from their jobs in recent days.

The White House confirmed Randolph “Tex” Alles would step down as head of the Secret Service, just one day after Trump announced the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen…

“I don’t think anything is like what we’ve seen today under the current administration,” said Jay Ahern, whose more than three decades in federal service included CBP’s head of the Office of Field Operations during the George W. Bush administration and acting CBP commissioner during the Obama administration. “Wholesale change, that’s not necessarily a healthy thing.”

There are some other big names supposedly on the list of those who need to clean out their desks. While not officially confirmed yet, L. Francis Cissna, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is also on the way out. He will reportedly be joined by the DHS General Counsel, John Mitnick. We still don’t know who will be in charge of ICE, but it’s not going to be Ron Vitiello.

The nomination of CBP chief Kevin McAleenan to head DHS is leading to some further complications. First of all, it means that we now don’t have anyone at the top of Customs and Border Patrol, at least temporarily. In addition to that, the laws covering the creation of DHS have some “order of succession” rules built into them which aren’t applicable to the rest of the cabinet. Following those rules, the Undersecretary for Management (Claire Grady) would probably have had to replace Nielsen, so it looks like she’ll be departing also to clear the way for McAleenan.

I understand that the President is very frustrated with the lack of progress in addressing the situation on the southern border. It’s a mess, and he’s being fought tooth and nail every step of the way by Democrats in Congress and judges in multiple courts where his policies are being challenged. But this amount of change in executive positions taking place in such a short period of time is worrisome. If all of these groups are going to be going in a new, “tougher” direction, the workers responsible for all of these assignments are going to be left in some sort of limbo until new marching orders are received. And planning and rolling out these sorts of systemic changes takes time. I don’t know if the President thinks he’s executing a coup of the deep state here or what, but we need a functional DHS pretty much 24/7 and these moves could lead to stagnation in the short term.

The post Purge: Nielsen isn’t the only one leaving DHS appeared first on Hot Air.

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US Secret Service director says he wasn’t fired

Don’t you just hate it when a liberal narrative falls apart? 

Well, not really. And in the case of Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, who was reportedly fired yesterday, the narrative has gone off the rails.

Conventional wisdom in the last 24 hours has Donald Trump engaged in a “purge” of Homeland Security. No so, says Alles, who stressed the “orderly transition” at DHS.

Reuters:

“No doubt you have seen media reports regarding my ‘firing.’ I assure you that this is not the case, and in fact was told weeks ago by the administration that transitions in leadership should be expected across the Department of Homeland Security,” Alles said in a message to Secret Service agents.

“The president has directed an orderly transition in leadership for this agency and I intend to abide by that direction,” Alles said.

Sounds more like a reorganization than a “purge” to me. But then, “purge” is so much more dramatic, don’t you think?

The president doesn’t like the direction DHS is taking.

Neither Trump nor the White House has explained the overhaul of DHS, but the president’s anger over a recent surge in migrants from Central America has been well documented. The DHS oversees immigration and border security.

The Republican president made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece in his run for office in 2016, promising to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Trump has said he will make border security a key part of his campaign for re-election in 2020.

Senior senators from both parties said they were concerned about a vacuum in leadership at the agency, which also oversees the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration, among other critical functions.

A bureaucracy like DHS pretty much runs itself, so a “vacuum in leadership” doesn’t exist. At least, it won’t exist for very long. Meanwhile, the paper keeps flowing, paychecks are paid, and those in temporary positions of leadership are still protecting the country.

I guess it just goes to show that the press can gin up hysteria and outrage over just about anything.

Don’t you just hate it when a liberal narrative falls apart? 

Well, not really. And in the case of Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, who was reportedly fired yesterday, the narrative has gone off the rails.

Conventional wisdom in the last 24 hours has Donald Trump engaged in a “purge” of Homeland Security. No so, says Alles, who stressed the “orderly transition” at DHS.

Reuters:

“No doubt you have seen media reports regarding my ‘firing.’ I assure you that this is not the case, and in fact was told weeks ago by the administration that transitions in leadership should be expected across the Department of Homeland Security,” Alles said in a message to Secret Service agents.

“The president has directed an orderly transition in leadership for this agency and I intend to abide by that direction,” Alles said.

Sounds more like a reorganization than a “purge” to me. But then, “purge” is so much more dramatic, don’t you think?

The president doesn’t like the direction DHS is taking.

Neither Trump nor the White House has explained the overhaul of DHS, but the president’s anger over a recent surge in migrants from Central America has been well documented. The DHS oversees immigration and border security.

The Republican president made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece in his run for office in 2016, promising to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Trump has said he will make border security a key part of his campaign for re-election in 2020.

Senior senators from both parties said they were concerned about a vacuum in leadership at the agency, which also oversees the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration, among other critical functions.

A bureaucracy like DHS pretty much runs itself, so a “vacuum in leadership” doesn’t exist. At least, it won’t exist for very long. Meanwhile, the paper keeps flowing, paychecks are paid, and those in temporary positions of leadership are still protecting the country.

I guess it just goes to show that the press can gin up hysteria and outrage over just about anything.

via American Thinker Blog

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