Category: US Politics

Hundreds of Central American migrants scrambled over a bridge wall and jumped into a river below as they battled to get past authorities stopping them at the Guatemala-Mexico border.

The mob swelled to at least 5,000 people — some estimates go as high as 10,000 — and once past police dressed in riot gear, they resumed their trek to the U.S.-Mexico border. The throng is currently marching toward the Mexican town of Tapachula, “10 abreast in a line stretching approximately a mile,” the Associated Press reported.

At the Suchiate River, some 700 federal p​olice officers from Mexico made no attempt to intervene as hundreds of young men dropped off the bridge into the water, then swam, floated or rafted to Mexico. They are still nearly 1,800 miles from El Paso, Texas, and Google Maps says that would take 573 hours on foot.

They marched on through Mexico like a rag tag army of the poor, shouting triumphantly slogans like “Si se pudo!” or “Yes, we could!” As they passed through Mexican villages on the outskirts of Ciudad Hidalgo, they drew applause, cheers and donations of food and clothing from Mexicans.

Maria Teresa Orellana, a resident of the neighborhood of Lorenzo handed out free sandals to the migrants as they passed. “It’s solidarity,” she said. “They’re our brothers.”

Olivin Castellanos, 58, a truck driver and mason from Villanueva, Honduras, said he took a raft across the river after Mexico blocked the bridge. “No one will stop us, only God,” he said. “We knocked down the door and we continue walking.” He wants to reach the U.S. to work. “I can do this,” he said, pointing to the asphalt under his feet. “I’ve made highways.”

A day earlier, Mexican authorities halted entry to migrants on the bridge, but did allow women with small children in. By evening, the frustrated mob swept over the bridge fence and into Mexico. Nonw were detained when they made it to land.

U.S. officials — and President Trump — warned the marchers when they started the march earlier this month in Honduras.

“We are seriously concerned about the caravan of migrants traveling north from Honduras, with false promises of entering the United States by those who seek to exploit their compatriots,” the U.S. Embassy in Honduras said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if they allow the march to continue.

“The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!” Trump said on Twitter.

But Trump is taking a more pragmatic view of late and said on Saturday that he may have a solution.

“Is that an incredible situation?” Trump said during a campaign rally in Elko, Nevada. “We’re going to figure it out,” he said, suggesting his administration has a solution but planned to keep that information “low key until the election.”

Still, Trump reiterated: “They’re not coming into this country.”

The death of Jamal Khashoggi is something that quite rightly inspires outrage among those on both the left and the right.

However, if  liberal outrage is mostly based on what President Donald Trump has said about it, there’s a good argument to be made that perhaps they’re angry about the wrong thing.

True, the president has thus far been somewhat inconsistent on the death of the Saudi dissident, and Trump’s too-candid answers on the arms deals we have with the kingdom probably won’t make it into any of the president’s 2020 campaign ads.

However, to think that these answers are materially different any than they would have been under the Obama administration — which provided all sorts of cover to the Saudis but couched its “concerns” over Riyadh’s human rights record in language so infected with mealy mouthedness it was virtually useless at the rhetorical level — is to rewrite history to a fantastic extent.

And, while nothing like Khashoggi’s death happened during the eight years Barack Obama occupied the White House, we can look at a similar situation involving a different country — namely, the 2012 Benghazi attack.

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Kris “Tanto” Paronto was certainly looking at it. He’s the former Army Ranger who was providing security to the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, when our facilities were attacked by terrorist forces six years ago. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s a little bit peeved at the vehemence of the criticism against Trump during the Khashoggi situation.

Leftist journalists & liberalists screaming that the President isn’t doing enough to the Saudi’s because one of their own was killed.Where in the hell were you when @BarackObama left 30+ AMERICANS to die in Benghazi Libya including an Ambassador?!!You all are a disgrace .

— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) October 20, 2018

“Leftist journalists & liberalists screaming that the President isn’t doing enough to the Saudi’s because one of their own was killed,” Paronto tweeted.

“Where in the hell were you when @BarackObama left 30+ AMERICANS to die in Benghazi Libya including an Ambassador?!!You all are a disgrace.”

(Four Americans died in the actual attack: U.S. Ambassador Chris Stephens; State Department employee Shaun Smith; and security contractors Tyrone Wood and Glen Doherty.)

Paronto certainly has room to speak about this, given how the media treated Benghazi as a throwaway and those who insisted the administration give answers for the disaster as conspiracy theorists.

Others on Twitter seemed to agree.

Trump said this week in Montana WE WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT Hillary did in BENGHAZI‼️💥🥊

— Sheila Zilinsky 🌐 (@weekndvigilante) October 20, 2018

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Obama gets a free. “get out of jail card” he was and still is a fraud.

— Reverend Bob Levy (@TheRevBobLevy) October 20, 2018

Now, the situations aren’t necessarily equivalent, but I don’t necessarily know that works out to the advantage of the media or Obama administration. At least Trump isn’t blaming Khashoggi’s death on a poorly made YouTube video or screaming, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” at reporters over the journalist’s death.

It’s not like Trump had a chance to intervene and chose not to. None of these things happened.

Does that mean Trump is free from any censure over his handling of the Khashoggi affair? Of course not. Everyone on both sides of the aisle should hold the president accountable when he does something wrong, and in this case some moral congruity — not to mention a show of American diplomatic power — is decidedly called for.

However, everyone should hold the president accountable no matter who he is — and not just when it’s Donald Trump.

When it comes to the Obama administration’s shameful handling of the Benghazi attack, the media gave it a pass. The media has suddenly rediscovered the fact that we ought to be angry when innocent life is snuffed out by a terroristic or political entity and the president seems to give off mixed signals.

One can safely assume national reporters didn’t rediscover this anger because of any ethical concern, but instead their concern over who’s in the Oval Office.

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Use it or lose it.

Via The Hill:

Georgia officials removed an estimated 107,000 people from voter rolls because they decided not to vote in prior elections, according to a new report.

An APM Reports analysis found the voters were removed under the state’s “use it or lose it” law, which starts a process for removing people from voter rolls if they fail to vote, respond to a notice or make contact with election officials over a three-year period.

After that three-year span, those who don’t vote or make contact with authorities in two elections can be purged from the voter rolls under the Georgia law.

Such laws, generally enacted by GOP governments, have been growing more common, with at least nine states now having them, according to APM Reports.[…]

Officials who support the laws argue that the policy helps prevent voter fraud, saying that citizens in good standing who have not turned out to multiple elections most likely moved.

Keep reading…

HT: Billie Boy

For most normal people, there are few symbols more harmless than milk.

On its good days, it’s part of beautiful metaphors like “the milk of human kindness.” On its bad days, it’s part of fatalistic shrugs like “there’s no use crying over spilled milk.”

But for deranged American leftists being driven crazy by a world where President Donald Trump is in the White House, milk is getting positively dangerous.

Now, in fact, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has declared that milk, cow’s milk specifically, is a white supremacist symbol and should be boycotted.

Cows’ milk has long been a symbol used by white supremacists.

One more reason to #DitchDairy. https://t.co/EcHYpUmBux

— PETA ❤️🦊 (@peta) October 19, 2018

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That’s a recent Twitter post, but PETA actually published its discontent with cow’s milk in a blog post in March of 2017. In the group’s view, milk is a symbol of white supremacy and it is being used as a metaphor in movies (made by liberals) to emphasize that claim.

The article cited the Quentin Tarantino-directed “Inglorious Bastards” and the racial horror movie “Get Out” as examples.

“As when Christoph Waltz’s character in Inglorious Bastards drinks a glass of milk, and a character in a pivotal scene of Get Out sips the cow secretion, dairy milk has long been embraced as a symbol of white supremacy,” stated PETA.

For those who might have missed the connection between white supremacy and white milk, the idea being floated in some of the racist-fringe elements of the internet is that the ability to digest lactose in milk is a sign of European racial purity because members of human populations in much of the world lose their ability to digest milk when they reach adulthood.

A New York Times article last week about how racist groups are using — or misusing — the study of genetics explains the point:

“In most of the world, the article explains, the gene that allows for the digestion of lactose switches off after childhood. But with the arrival of the first cattle herders in Europe some 5,000 years ago, a chance mutation that left it turned on provided enough of a nutritional leg up that nearly all of those who survived eventually carried it.”

(However, The Times article notes that “a similar bit of evolution turns out to have occurred among cattle breeders in East Africa.” So the ability of adults to digest milk isn’t really limited to Caucasians.)

But activists like PETA aren’t satisfied with simply lumping milk drinkers into the ranks of white supremacy. The PETA blog post further argued that besides being linked to racism, milk consumption supports violence and “rape” against cows by the dairy industry.

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“Aside from ‘lactose-tolerant’ white supremacists, cow’s milk really is the perfect drink of choice for all (even unwitting) supremacists, since the dairy industry inflicts extreme violence on other living beings. PETA is trying to wake people up to the implications of choosing this white beverage and suggesting that they choose something else pronto.

“Rape is perhaps the single most heinous crime involving both power and violence. But it’s standard procedure in the dairy industry,” the blog post stated.

Perhaps the anti-milk movement started started with this article in Metro U.K. in February of 2017 titled “Secret Nazi code kept hidden by ‘milk’ and ‘vegan agenda.’”

Metro argued that milk was an indicator of white supremacy as prominent Twitter members like alt-right leader Richard Spencer and activist-author Milo Yiannopoulos‘ former manager Tim Treadstone posted milk emojis on their bios.

“Some have even gone as far as to post things like ‘Heil Milk’ (yes, really) and ‘down with the vegan agenda’. All rather unsettling,” Metro U.K. reported.

“It’s actually quite a bit more sinister – ‘milk’ has become a symbol of perceived racial purity. And, as a natural follow-on, ‘the vegan agenda’ is believed to be code for ‘the Jewish conspiracy’ – although it could also just refer to any target the alt-right are against,” stated in Metro.

And then The Los Angeles Times jumped on the bandwagon, writing about “Get Out” in March 2017 to report the “Link Between Dairy and Hate.”

“Milk, it has been argued of late, is the new symbol of white supremacy in America, owing to its hue and the notion that lactose intolerance in certain ethnicities means that milk-absorbing Caucasian genetics are superior,” reported the Times.

While PETA is supposed to be all about protecting the rights of animals, the group has certainly have taken an even sharper left turn into the political realm, immersing itself in liberal talking points and agendas.

Unfortunately for PETA and the left, equating racism with conservatives is a tactic that the people just aren’t buying anymore. And equating drinking milk with being a racist is absurd even for a group as absurd as PETA.

It’s pretty hard for me to imagine this latest leftist lunacy gaining any steam as by now most Americans regardless of political persuasion pretty much understand the liberal desperation that has motivated a multitude of bizarre behavior.

And most of that behavior is recognized as such and has been roundly rejected by the populace.

Dairy is as American as apple pie, and apple pie is so much better a-la-mode.

“Got milk?”

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