Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ category

Will Anti-Trump Republicans Elect Hillary?

June 11, 2016

Will Anti-Trump Republicans Elect Hillary? Power Line, John Hinderaker, June 11, 2016

Yesterday on CNN, Mitt Romney ruled out supporting Donald Trump on grounds of character. Romney called Trump a racist, referring repeatedly to “trickle-down racism,” by which I take it he means racism inspired in future generations by a racist president. When asked at the end of the interview by Wolf Blitzer whether he thinks Trump is a racist, Romney wouldn’t quite say that, but instead responded that Trump’s “comments, time and again, appeal to the racist tendency that exists in some people.” Here is the video; it is only about a minute and a half:

I find the willingness of Republican leaders to allege that Trump is a racist disheartening, if not shocking. We expect that kind of calumny from the Democrats; they accuse pretty much all of their opponents of being racists. (Has Romney forgotten that the Democrats called him a racist, over and over, during the 2012 election? If you have forgotten too, just Google “Mitt Romney racist.”)

Romney’s Exhibit A as evidence of Trump’s racism were his comments about the Trump University judge, which have been discussed ad nauseam. But, while Trump’s attack on Judge Curiel may have been stupid, it wasn’t racist. He merely agreed with liberals that a person of Mexican descent may be biased against Trump because of his position on immigration. What is wrong with that? Ann Coulter’s epic rant is correct:

The entire media — and most of the GOP — have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he’ll build a wall. Now they’re outraged that Trump thinks one Mexican hates him for saying he’ll build a wall.

What else has Trump done that could arguably be racist? His proposed ban on Islamic immigrants is often cited, but that is silly since Islam isn’t a race. Moreover, if he would improve how he articulates his proposal–it isn’t feasible to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., but it would be easy to suspend immigration from majority-Muslim countries, except for refugees from religious persecution–it would be good policy, in my opinion. Likewise, it is absurd to argue that Trump’s stated intention to carry out his constitutional duty by enforcing the immigration laws is racist–yet that claim is frequently made.

Trump has been in the public eye for decades. He has made plenty of enemies and, like any famous, arrogant person, he has lots of detractors. Yet to my knowledge, no one who actually knows Trump or has dealt with him calls him a racist or bigot of any other stripe. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he has never been heard to call anyone a “f****** Jew bastard.”

By endorsing the Democrats’ baseless attacks on Trump, Mitt Romney is doing a terrible disservice, not just to the Republican Party, but to the United States of America.

Cartoons of the Day

June 11, 2016

H/t Power Line

Trump FP dangerous

 

Election choice

 

Glass ceiling

 

Glass ceiling truth

 

Paula Jones

 

Job fair

 

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

Sit Heel

Exclusive — Donald Trump Plans To Continue GOP Legacy Of Leading On Women’s, Civil Rights Against Racist, Sexist Democrats

June 10, 2016

Exclusive — Donald Trump Plans To Continue GOP Legacy Of Leading On Women’s, Civil Rights Against Racist, Sexist Democrats, BreitbartMatthew Boyle, June 10, 2016

donald-trump-supporters-rally-associated-press-640x480AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, tells Breitbart News he plans to continue the rich GOP tradition of standing up for women’s and civil rights in the face of opposition from Democrats.

He also says he plans to help the Republican Party, which led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage and women’s rights—among other big picture moral leadership causes in American history—take more credit for its victories for women’s and civil rights while fighting Democrats who opposed those measures.

“You’re right—100 percent,” Trump told Breitbart News when asked about how the Republican Party led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage.

On Tuesday night, when now presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton assumed the leadership of that party, she whitewashed the Democratic Party’s history of racism, sexism, support for slavery and long history of standing against civil rights for all in America. In fact, as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party in America, Clinton attempted to align herself with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the first ever women’s rights convention organized in large part by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton said in her speech accepting her role as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848. When a small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights, and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred.

Clinton did not mention Cady Stanton, or the fact that the women’s rights leader went on to become one of the nation’s first Republicans. In fact, Stanton’s husband Henry Brewster Stanton—a journalist and a New York State senator—was one of the nation’s leading voices for the abolition of slavery and helped found the Republican Party in New York back in 1856.

Later in the speech, Clinton took a shot at Trump, arguing that he wanted to send America backward—that his trademark campaign phrase “Make America Great Again” was code for taking the country back before all people had civil rights.

“Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander-in-chief,” Clinton said. “And he’s not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico – he’s trying to wall off Americans from each other. When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’ Back to a time when opportunity and dignity were reserved for some, not all, promising his supporters an economy he cannot recreate.”

Never mind the fact that her own husband, former President Bill Clinton, used the phrase“Make America Great Again” multiple times back in the 1990s—a phrase first popularized by former President Ronald Reagan, who used the campaign slogan in his own successful 1980 White House bid—but Clinton is forgetting the history of her own political party. Clinton’s success is built out of a Democratic Party that rose to and clutched onto power by actively suppressing equal rights of not just women, but minorities as well.

Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery then led the country through the Civil War preserving the Union until his assassination, was a Republican. The general public often forgets how influential the Republican Party was in ending slavery—Democrats wanted to continue slavery, while Lincoln’s Republicans wanted to end it—and if it weren’t for the GOP, slavery would not have ended and the Union itself may have fallen apart.

“Some may not realize that the modern Republican Party owes its origin to the fight over slavery nearly two centuries ago,” CNN’s Tom Foreman wrote back in 2012.

In the tumultuous mid-1800s, right before the Civil War, some political activists were concerned about keeping slavery from spreading into new western territories, and they saw no way to stop it through existing political powers: the Democrats and the Whigs (the pro-Congress party of the mid 1800s that largely destroyed itself in the 1852 elections in a battle over slavery). So they formed a new party, taking the name ‘Republicans’ in a salute to earlier American politicians.

As Republicans led the battle against slavery, in 1861 the party’s first U.S. president—Abraham Lincoln—was elected.

“Soon after, slavery fell,” Foreman wrote.

The Whig party disappeared. And the Republicans began a long steady rise in power. Even back then, the party liked to talk about fiscal responsibility — immigration, religion — and the need for a strong business climate. All of this spurred a sympathetic Chicago newspaper to call the Republicans the Grand Old Party, or the GOP.

Republicans have led the way on every major civil rights movement in American history—ending slavery was hardly the only one. What is now the Party of Trump also led the way in granting women the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the women’s rights movement in the 19th Century, was a Republican, as was Susan B. Anthony. So were many of the others involved in the effort. In fact, it was Republicans who led the effort for decades that eventually saw passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which granted women the right vote.

“Most educated Americans vaguely remember that the amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920,” the American Spectator’s David Catron wrote back in 2012.

But the number of people who know anything about the forty-year legislative war that preceded that victory is smaller than the audience of MSNBC. That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later, when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats — including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as “Kaiser Wilson.”

Catron continued by noting that Republicans in Utah—Mormons—granted women the right to vote back in 1870. Then, for years afterwards, Republicans—facing objections from Democrats—over and over again introduced the 19th Amendment for ratification in Congress. Meanwhile, Republican states granted women the right to vote in many other places.

“Meanwhile, the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it,” Catron wrote.

In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women’s suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.

Eventually, Democrats relented and Republicans succeeded in granting women’s suffrage nationally.

“Congress, however, didn’t deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats,” Catron added.

It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.

Later in the 20th Century of course, during the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats again stood against equal rights for all Americans regardless of race or gender. Writing in the Guardian of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act back in 2013, Harry Enten detailed how the Democratic Party opposed civil rights efforts while Republicans backed them.

“80% of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did,” Enten wrote. “Indeed, Minority Leader Republican Everett Dirksen led the fight to end the filibuster. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tried as hard as they could to sustain a filibuster.”

In fact, a PBS special on “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” detailed how systemic racism was embedded into the very fabric of what has now become Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party.

“The Democratic Party identified itself as the ‘white man’s party’ and demonized the Republican Party as being ‘Negro dominated,’ even though whites were in control,” the PBS special writes on its website of the post-Civil War Democrats. “Determined to re-capture the South, Southern Democrats ‘redeemed’ state after state — sometimes peacefully, other times by fraud and violence. By 1877, when Reconstruction was officially over, the Democratic Party controlled every Southern state.”

The PBS special goes on even further to detail how even Northern Democrats tolerated the overt discrimination and racism from their Southern brethren so as to keep their coalition of power together. “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats,” PBS writes.

A deeper more than 30-page report from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU)—called “The Truth About Jim Crow”—details how the Democratic Party was integral to the development of such laws.

“Jim Crow’s political purpose was to keep the white population in power, and the Democratic Party thought of itself as the white man’s party,” one part of the more than 10-page-long section on how the Democratic Party pushed Jim Crow laws reads. “A chronological look at the Jim Crow era will illustrate how Democrats created and exploited Jim Crow.”

The report goes on to detail how it was Republicans who ended Jim Crow laws.

Trump, in his latest exclusive interview with Breitbart News, said that Clinton’s rewriting of her Democratic Party’s sordid history on these important narratives is more proof that she is just playing the woman card and the race card for pure political gain—and in opposition of the facts. He also believes that Republicans need to do more to take credit for the party’s leading role in the women’s rights, Civil Rights and slavery abolition movements—all movements the Democrats, the party of Clinton, originally fought against intensely.

“The Democrats have always played that card,” Trump said. “The Republicans have not taken enough credit for what’s taken place. They’ve never taken enough credit for what’s taken place.”

Trump told Breitbart News that he plans to win support across the country despite anyone’s particular race, and aims to seek support from Hispanics and African Americans and white voters alike—and men and women—using the same message delivered to each of them the same way, equally: Jobs and economic opportunity for all. Meanwhile, Clinton, of course, is going to use these race and gender issues to divide Americans into separate classes based on gender and skin color.

“I plan to help Hispanics and African Americans because I’m going to bring jobs back to the country,” Trump said.

She doesn’t know how. I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country, she wouldn’t know where to start. That’s why a lot of the unions, the head people, they routinely endorse the Democrats. Routinely. And they’re having a hard time. Because while they’re dying to endorse the Democrats because that’s where their head people have their lunch and dinner, their membership wants to endorse Trump. Look at the Teamsters. The people within the Teamsters want Trump. They haven’t endorsed yet, and the reason they haven’t endorsed yet is because everybody in the Teamsters wants Trump. The reason they want Trump is because I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country and that’s good for them. It appeals across the lines to people that have small businesses and contracting companies that are not unionized.

When asked about how—when those self-appointed leaders in the African American and Hispanic communities will certainly further the Democratic Party’s agenda and undermine the GOP’s efforts, facts be damned—he plans to get his message out to the actual voters, Trump said it is simple.

“I think that’s been my whole message up to this point,” Trump said. “I’m going to continue to hit it very hard. But I think it’s been very much my own message up to this point, jobs, good trade deals. Last night I talked about it. Great trade deals.”

There are some early signs that Trump—using his unique style of mixing interesting campaigning with his celebrity appeal—might be able to cut through the clutter and reach voters in African American and Hispanic communities that have for years now been outside the GOP’s grasp, despite the Democratic Party’s dark history on civil and women’s rights matters.

As noted by Fox News Latino, Trump’s support among Hispanics is spiking fast according to new data from analytics firm CulturIntel. In fact, he is almost equal with Clinton.

“Based on big data analysis over the last 30 days as of June 1st, Trump reports 37 percent of Hispanic positive sentiment versus 41 percent for Clinton,” CulturIntel writes in the report. “Surprisingly, the candidates tie in negative sentiment across Hispanics at 38 percent; discounting the fact that Latinos default as Democrats or are completely turned off by Trump’s off-color comments. After all, over 50 percent of Latinos identify as political independents.”

Meanwhile, as Gateway Pundit notes in a new report as well based off this and other data, Trump could be on par to win 25 percent of the black vote. It would, the report detailed, lead to a landslide victory for Trump in November. It would also be the first time since 1960, when Richard Nixon failed to beat John F. Kennedy for the presidency before coming back eight years later to win in 1968, that a Republican won such a big percentage of the non-white vote. With black unemployment rates double what they are for whites, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if Trump hammers his jobs message—and corrects the record on Democrats versus Republicans when it comes to civil rights—maybe he could cut into a significant portion of the black electorate.

On top of all of this, as Breitbart News previously reported in an earlier part of this interview, Trump is also zoning in one place where failed 2012 GOP presidential former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not succeed: proving to voters he cares about them.

He said in this interview that he believes that to run the country, a president must “manage with heart”—a sign that he is appealing to the significant portion of the electorate that looks for a president who cares about people like them, qualifications be damned.

While Trump paints Clinton as “Heartless Hillary,” his second nickname for who he also calls “Crooked Hillary,” he could be growing the GOP tent and expanding the electorate based off key analytics that establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., hellbent on amnesty for illegal aliens and jailbreak style “criminal justice reform” crime bills have completely missed.

Liberal Esquire writer visits the border, comes back supporting the wall

June 10, 2016

Liberal Esquire writer visits the border, comes back supporting the wall, American ThinkerThomas Lifson, June 10, 2016

A little knowledge and experience go a long way.  Let’s hope the Trump campaign notices.  Truth Revolt reports:

This week on MSNBC’s Morning JoeEsquire Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden describes sending one of his liberal journalists to the U.S.-Mexico border to find out what the locals are saying about illegal immigration. The journalist came back agreeing with Donald Trump saying, “Build that wall.”

Fielden went into detail about this accidental journalism:

“You gotta go down there with no preconceived notions, right, just an empty notebook. Go to my former home state and walk the border, drive the border 800 miles and talk to whoever you see and let them tell us what they think about what’s really going on — whether we need a wall, in fact. Instead of hearing it from the debate stage, let’s hear it from the people who are down there everyday.”

The locals’ conclusion? “They said, ‘Build the wall,'” according to Fielden. “They said two things — whether Hispanic, Anglo, Democrat, Republican, uncommitted, clueless, whatever — they said, ‘We want a wall and yet, we want it to be married with some compassion for the people we’re trying to keep from jumping over the wall.'”

The Esquire article explains that Hispanics are the ones who are less sympathetic about illegals crossing the border, far more so than whites. Fielden said they view the situation as unfair because many first generation immigrants came over the legal way and are now having to compete for jobs with those doing it illegally on a daily basis.

“Let ’em get in line,” he said, quoting one local legal immigrant.

Here’s the segment:

The notion that Hispanics who came here legally are disadvantaged by illegal immigration is a powerful one that should resonate among all Americans, including African-Americans.  It turns Donald Trump from a racist into a defender of poor people who play by the rules.

 

Trump Announces Major Speech on Clinton Scandals Next Week!

June 8, 2016

Trump Announces Major Speech on Clinton Scandals Next Week via YouTube, June 7, 2016

Here’s a link to an article at Jonathan Turley’s blog. It notes the Trump University “scandal,” widely covered by the media, and then segues to a far worse scandal involving the Clintons and the Laureate Education for-profit college. Here’s a quote:

The respected Inside Higher Education reported that Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton an obscene $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 to serve as an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities. While Bill Clinton worked as the group’s pitchman, the State Department funneled $55 million to Laureate when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. That would seem a pretty major story but virtually no mainstream media outlet has reported it while running hundreds of stories on the Trump University scandal. [Emphasis added.}

There was even a class action — like the Trump University scandal. Travis et al v. Walden University LLC, was filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Maryland but dismissed in 2015. It is not clear why it was dismissed. However, the size of the contract to Clinton, the payment from State and the widespread complaints over alleged fraud should warrant a modicum of attention to the controversy. The controversy has many of the familiar complaints over fraudulent online programs that take advantage of hard working people.

I found the video posted above in one of the comments appended to the Turley article. Will Trump deal with the Clinton schools scam?

Right Angle: Is Hillary Bat-Guano Crazy?

June 8, 2016

Right Angle: Is Hillary Bat-Guano Crazy? Bill Whittle Channel via YouTube, June 7, 2016

Trump and Democratic Political Incorrectness

June 8, 2016

Trump and Democratic Political Incorrectness, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 8,2016

Trump and PC

Remember the time a presidential candidate suggested that Gandhi used to run “a gas station down in St. Louis.” No it wasn’t Trump. That was Hillary Clinton. Had Trump said it, we would still be hearing about it. But since Hillary Clinton was responsible for it, it went down the memory hole.

Along with her more recent “Colored People Time” gag.

And who can forget the time that Trump said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” But that wasn’t Trump. It was actually Vice President Joe Biden.

But still it was indisputably offensive when Trump told the Asian Chamber of Commerce, “I don’t think you’re smarter than anybody else, but you’ve convinced a lot of us you are.”

Then he followed that up by joking, “One problem that I’ve had today is keeping my Wongs straight.”

You would have to be ridiculously politically incorrect or an outright buffoon to say something like that to the Asian Chamber of Commerce. And this is exactly why Trump is… but wait, those lines actually came from Democratic Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.

Reid recently popped up to call Trump’s comments racist. And he ought to know. Harry Reid believed that Obama was electable because he was “light-skinned” with ”no Negro dialect”.

Memories are short when it comes to Democratic racial and ethnic stereotypes. Not to mention slurs.

Trump is certainly not the only prominent politician who says wildly politically incorrect things. Democrats do it all the time. And they do it in more pointed ways.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez is running for the Senate. Sanchez is a racist who accused the “Vietnamese” of “trying to take this seat” when running against a Vietnamese-American candidate. Last year she managed to ridicule both Hindus and Native Americans with one slur.

There was the time that Bill Clinton suggested that, Obama “would have been getting us coffee”. Or when Biden described his future boss as the, “first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy.” Despite two terms in which Republicans were accused of racially stereotyping Obama with secret dog whistles, nothing any major Republican figure said was anywhere as bad as what Obama’s Democratic predecessor and his own Senate ally had said about him.

Democrats actually say politically incorrect things all the time. Trump has become famous because he’s one of the few Republicans who talks like a Democrat and says the sort of things that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid have no problem saying in private and even in public speeches.

A Republican who told the Asian Chamber of Commerce that he had trouble “keeping my Wongs straight” would have been forced out in disgrace by a combination of media pressure and Republican shame. And having standards of respectable civic discourse is not a bad thing. But standards that are applied unilaterally to one side are not standards, they’re weapons.

Political correctness is a weapon brought out to punish political opponents for statements that run the gamut from offensive to those whose offensiveness is entirely manufactured by the media’s political echo chamber, such as Romney’s comments about having binders of qualified female candidates. Challenging political correctness does more than challenge these standards. It challenges the dishonest ways in which they are applied for political purposes.

Any of the above comments would have disqualified a Republican, but barely rate mention for Democrats. The truth about Trump is that he hasn’t said anything that plenty of Democrats haven’t said.

Long before Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, President Carter responded to the Iran hostage crisis by banning Iranians from America. Harry Reid had also proposed eliminating birthright citizenship long before Trump did. Building a wall with Mexico? Hillary Clinton called for it back in the Senate. Before she was condemning “talking about building walls”, she was talking about building walls. And warning that, “A country that cannot control its borders is failing at one of its fundamental obligations”.

The media has made a game out of pretending that everything Trump says is shocking. When Trump poses with a taco bowl and posts, “I love Hispanics”, the media gets giddy with outrage. But when Hillary Clinton foolishly panders to black voters by claiming to carry around hot sauce in her purse or posts, “7 Things Hillary Clinton has in Common with Your Abuela”, there are shrugs.

All politicians have their cringeworthy pandering moments. But the media chooses which of them it plays up and which of them it plays down.

That’s why Trump is shocking only in contrast to a Republican field that had been trained to carefully avoid even the faintest suggestion of insensitive or politically incorrect remarks. And that training did no good whatsoever with a media establishment that insisted on manufacturing gaffes no matter what.

Trump is often just as unrestrained as Democrats are. He feels the same freedom to speak his mind that is enjoyed by Joe Biden or Bill Clinton. He pays as little attention to political correctness as Harry Reid.

And it’s time that we were honest about that.

Sensitivity is not a bad thing. But what we have is not sensitivity as a value, but as a weapon. When one side is free to be as offensive as it wishes to be with no consequences whatsoever, then eventually the other side will escalate to match it. When oversensitivity becomes used to enforce an agenda that limits basic personal freedoms then the reaction to that will run roughshod over any and all sensitivities.

Political correctness, like all forms of censorship, is about power. Not fairness, sensitivity or decency. Trump is taking the license to be politically incorrect back from Democrats. The ability to determine what may or may not be said is the essence of power in a system where discourse dictates elections.

If Democrats are truly outraged by Trump, they might want to try looking in a mirror.

The race-driven San Diego La Raza Association is exactly what’s wrong with the legal system.

June 7, 2016

The race-driven San Diego La Raza Association is exactly what’s wrong with the legal system., American SpectatorJeffrey Lord, June 7, 2016

(Please see also, Trump’s Jujitsu Overthrow of Liberalism and The Donald and The La Raza Judge — DM)

The GOP Establishment is in full flight.

No Abraham Lincolns here.

In a shameful haste to embrace identity politics, the latter the political descendant of slavery and segregation, Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have stunningly given thumbs up to a judge who has made no bones about injecting his ethnic heritage into his role as a lawyer and judge.

In a broadside against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who presiding over the case against Trump University (a case in itself riddled with bad judicial decision-making as the judge has assigned the case to a notoriously Clinton-supporting law firm — more of which later this week), Trump has assailed the Indiana-born judge as “of Mexican heritage” who has “an inherent conflict of interest.”

The response from the Speaker? “It’s reasoning I don’t relate to. I completely disagree with the thinking behind that.” Said McConnell: “I think it’s a big mistake for our party to write off Latino Americans.” Hello? Speaker Ryan can’t relate to standing up to fight racism? Who, Senator McConnell, is writing off Latino Americans? And isn’t it time to get right with Lincoln and write off racism — aka in the 21st century, “identity politics”? Appallingly in the case of Ryan, his latest comments embracing out and out race-driven lawyering and judging comes only weeks after he said he stood for the “Party of Lincoln, Reagan, and Kemp.” Well that didn’t last long. Somewhere Abe, Ronnie, and Jack are baffled as to why their defender has suddenly thrown them over the side to embrace the absolute worst of racial politics.

Over in the Wall Street Journal, our friends on the editorial board have written an entire editorial on the subject entitled:

Trump and the ‘Mexican’ Judge

Why equating ethnicity with judicial bias is so offensive.

Well, yes, “equating ethnicity with judicial bias” is offensive. Yet the WSJ has not a solitary word revealing to readers that Judge Curiel has been actively associated with the racially-centric San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association — a group entirely devoted to “equating ethnicity with judicial bias.” An association Curiel listed on his questionnaire filed with the Senate Judiciary Committee. The group, as I noted over at NewsBusters, specifically states its mission on its website as follows:

Our purpose is to advance the cause of equality, empowerment and justice for Latino attorneys and the Latino community in San Diego County through service and advocacy.

Note. The group supports “equality, empowerment and justice” not for all attorneys in San Diego — only for “Latino attorneys.”

Listing eight “goals” of the group, every one of which are ethnocentric, the first three reading:

  • Increase the overall number of Latinos in the legal profession.
  • Encourage and support Latino and Latina judicial candidates to apply to the bench.
  • Advocate for the promotion and retention of Latino and Latina attorneys and judicial officers.

Note well goal number two — “Encourage and support Latino and Latina judicial candidates to apply to the bench.” In other words? The group wants to put not qualified attorneys of any color or gender on the bench. No, the insistence is a racially-oriented drive to put only one group — a group pre-selected by ethnic heritage on the bench. (Can you imagine the uproar if the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had belonged to a “white attorneys association”? Answer: Yes, you can.) Why might this be? The answer is obvious.

In a day and age when the working assumption by the Left is that all minorities, Latinos in this case, are liberal, the way to liberal decisions is by backing openly race-centric judges of Latino heritage. To get decisions from the bench that are geared to supporting Latinos — not all Americans — but Latinos only.

This idea, by the way, is certainly not limited to Latinos. Recall the demand that retiring Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall be replaced by a black nominee. President George H.W. Bush obliged with Judge Clarence Thomas. Thomas was quickly attacked by liberals the moment they realized he was a conservative. He is to this day attacked for being an “Uncle Tom” and a “traitor” to his race because the working assumption is that if you are black you are a liberal. And so it is with Latinos — and in this case Judge Curiel.

Most assuredly, Judge Gonzalo Curiel has gone out of his way to not only openly tie himself to this group of racially directed lawyers — but to participate in the left-wing agenda favored so deeply by leftist race-driven Hispanics. In 2014 the Judge served as a member of the group’s 2014 Scholarship Selection Committee, which in turn awarded a $1,500 scholarship to a self-advertised “undocumented.” Think of that for a moment. The very first act of this student was to break American law, and Judge Curiel awards him a scholarship — for law school!

In a blink Ryan and McConnell have shown exactly why Donald Trump has blown away the Republican Establishment in the GOP primary season. The GOP Establishment has lay down with the flea-infected mangy old political dog of racism — a left wing dependable from the days when Democratic Party co-founders Jefferson and Jackson allied the new-born party with slave owners. Later to turn into a permanent racial party appealing to every race-centered group from segregationists to Al Sharpton and today’s Black Lives Matter, not to mention various “La Raza” oriented groups of varying pedigree. As the GOP Establishment takes it cues from the Left — hence the charge that GOP Establishment types are “Democrat-lite” or RINOS on issues ranging from the economy to social issues — so now are they mimicking the Left on race, signing on for the out-and-out racism of “identity politics.”

Take a look here to see just how this game of race and gender is played by leftist California judges — and Judge Curiel. (Hat tip: Attorney Mark Pulliam, who formerly practiced in San Diego and now calls Texas home.)

Recall that on his Senate Judiciary Committee form, Curiel said that he was a member of the “California Judges Association.” And back there a mere year ago in January of 2015, the California Judges Association was enthusiastically supportive of a decision from the California Supreme Court that ruled, as reported by Fox News, this:

California’s Supreme Court voted Friday to prohibit state judges from belonging to the Boy Scouts on grounds that the group discriminates against gays.

The court said its seven justices unanimously voted to heed a recommendation by its ethics advisory committee barring judges’ affiliation with the organization.

Got that? It’s OK for Judge Curiel and a small army of California judges and lawyers to belong to the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association — a group openly discriminating against non-Latinos — but it’s not OK for a California judge to belong to the Boy Scouts — the Boy Scouts! — because “the group discriminates against gays.”

It doesn’t get more racist than that.

Let’s be blunt. There’s no room for identity politics in the party of Lincoln. The fact that Paul Ryan (Paul Ryan!) and Mitch McConnell would stand up and defend outright race-driven politics is utterly disgraceful.

Here, to refresh, is Abraham Lincoln himself on the subject of race. Lincoln, as noted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, said he hoped to “‘penetrate the human soul’ until…‘all this quibbling about this man and the other man — this race and that race and the other race being inferior’” was gone from America. In more recent times, there is President John F. Kennedy telling the nation in his televised address over the racial turmoil in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama that “race has no place in American life or law.”And so it doesn’t.

Now today’s GOP Establishment, led by Speaker Ryan and Senator McConnell, are saying that Donald Trump, a defendant in the rigged trial that is the witch hunt for Trump University, must be quiet about this insistent racialization of the federal bench and the law itself. Trump is being told that now that he is the soon-to-be heir to the leadership of Lincoln’s party he must sign on to the idea that it’s perfectly OK to insist that race has a decided priority in both American life and law and that he, Donald Trump, as a defendant has no right to call attention to something that left-wing racial advocates boast of freely. Recall that when it came to light that then Supreme Court Obama-nominee Sonia Sotomayor was found to be saying in speeches that a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male,” leftist were thrilled.

Now? Donald Trump is calling out this flat-out racism by targeting a judge for what might be called the judge’s “wise Latino” ways? Suddenly the GOP Establishment is attacking —Trump?

This is shameful. But totally in character for the GOP Leadership in Congress that long ago abandoned principle for political correctness.

Speaker Ryan and Senator McConnell should be embarrassed.

More to come on the rigged case against Trump University.

The Donald and The La Raza Judge

June 7, 2016

The Donald and The La Raza Judge, TownhallPat Buchanan, June 7, 2016

(I seem to recall members of La Raza (“The Race”) protesting violently at recent Trump rallies. However, it would probably have been better had Trump filed a motion with the court asking the judge to recuse himself. — DM)

Trump judge

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge?

Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is of Mexican descent.

Can there be any defense of a statement so horrific?

Just this. First, Trump has a perfect right to be angry about the judge’s rulings and to question his motives. Second, there are grounds for believing Trump is right.

On May 27, Curiel, at the request of The Washington Post, made public plaintiff accusations against Trump University — that the whole thing was a scam. The Post, which Bob Woodward tells us has 20 reporters digging for dirt in Trump’s past, had a field day.

And who is Curiel?

An appointee of President Obama, he has for years been associated with the La Raza Lawyers Association of San Diego, which supports pro-illegal immigrant organizations.

Set aside the folly of letting Clinton surrogates like the Post distract him from the message he should be delivering, what did Trump do to be smeared by a bipartisan media mob as a “racist”?

He attacked the independence of the judiciary, we are told.

But Presidents Jefferson and Jackson attacked the Supreme Court, and FDR, fed up with New Deal programs being struck down, tried to “pack the court” by raising the number of justices to 15 if necessary.

Abraham Lincoln leveled “that eminent tribunal” in his first inaugural, and once considered arresting Chief Justice Roger Taney.

The conservative movement was propelled by attacks on the Warren Court. In the ’50s and ’60s, “Impeach Earl Warren!” was plastered on billboards and bumper stickers all across God’s country.

The judiciary is independent, but that does not mean that federal judges are exempt from the same robust criticism as presidents or members of Congress.

Obama himself attacked the Citizens United decision in a State of the Union address, with the justices sitting right in front of him.

But Trump’s real hanging offense was that he brought up the judge’s ancestry, as the son of Mexican immigrants, implying that he was something of a judicial version of Univision’s Jorge Ramos.

Apparently, it is now not only politically incorrect, but, in Newt Gingrich’s term, “inexcusable,” to bring up the religious, racial or ethnic background of a judge, or suggest this might influence his actions on the bench.

But these things matter.

Does Newt think that when LBJ appointed Thurgood Marshall, ex-head of the NAACP, to the Supreme Court, he did not think Marshall would bring his unique experience as a black man and civil rights leader to the bench?

Surely, that was among the reasons Marshall was appointed.

When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a woman of Puerto Rican descent who went through college on affirmative action scholarships, did Obama think this would not influence her decision when it came to whether or not to abolish affirmative action?

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in a speech at Berkeley law school and in other forums.

Translation: Ethnicity matters, and my Latina background helps guide my decisions.

All of us are products of our family, faith, race and ethnic group. And the suggestion in these attacks on Trump that judges and justices always rise about such irrelevant considerations, and decide solely on the merits, is naive nonsense.

There are reasons why defense lawyers seek “changes of venue” and avoid the courtrooms of “hanging judges.”

When Obama reflexively called Sgt. Crowley “stupid” after Crowley’s 2009 encounter with that black professor at Harvard, and said of Trayvon Martin, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” was he not speaking as an African-American, as well as a president?

Pressed by John Dickerson on CBS, Trump said it’s “possible” a Muslim judge might be biased against him as well.

Another “inexcusable” outrage.

But does anyone think that if Obama appointed a Muslim to the Supreme Court, the LGBT community would not be demanding of all Democratic Senators that they receive assurances that the Muslim judge’s religious views on homosexuality would never affect his court decisions, before they voted to put him on the bench?

When Richard Nixon appointed Judge Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court, it was partly because he was a distinguished jurist of South Carolina ancestry. And the Democrats who tore Haynsworth to pieces did so because they feared he would not repudiate his Southern heritage and any and all ideas and beliefs associated with it.

To many liberals, all white Southern males are citizens under eternal suspicion of being racists. The most depressing thing about this episode is to see Republicans rushing to stomp on Trump, to show the left how well they have mastered their liberal catechism.

WAPO Columnist: Let’s Gang Up on Trump!

June 6, 2016

WAPO Columnist: Let’s Gang Up on Trump!, Power LineJohn Hinderaker, June 6, 2016

The Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, who is also a former Public Editor of the New York Times, has an idea that she claims is novel, but may sound familiar to Republicans: news outlets should coordinate their efforts to defeat Donald Trump! It really is an extraordinary column:

Media outlets have given the likely Republican presidential nominee something like $2 billion worth of free exposure and, in many cases, let him get away with blatant falsehoods — even about something as basic as whether he did or didn’t support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall liberal columnists objecting to Trump’s free publicity during the primary season, when it helped him defeat Republicans who would have been stronger general election candidates.

Fairness is of utmost importance, no doubt, whether the reporting is on Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. But what, exactly, does it mean in campaign coverage? It should mean keeping an open mind, not bringing preconceived ideas to one’s reporting, and listening seriously to candidates’ explanations.

It should never mean false equivalency, where equal time and emphasis are given to candidates or dissembling is allowed to go unchallenged. …

News outlets ought to rethink the purpose of their campaign coverage. It’s not to be equally nice to all candidates. It’s to provide Americans with the hard information they need to decide who is fit to lead the country.

In other words, the job of a reporter is to help win the election for Hillary Clinton. It isn’t long before this conclusion becomes explicit:

There have been encouraging moments: CNN’s Jake Tapper pushing Trump hard for clarity on an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Fox’s Megyn Kelly (before she went all fan-girl) asking a searing question about Trump’s treatment of women in a Republican debate. The Times’s investigation into Trump’s hiring of foreign workers at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. The Post’s reporters pushing so hard for answers on Twitter about claimed charitable contributions to veterans that Trump found it necessary to hold a news conference.

We need much more of this in every medium. Every day, in every news cycle.

Every day, every news cycle, in every medium: beat up on Trump!

Rather than promoting the same treatment for each candidate, how about this: rigorous and sustained truth-telling in the public’s interest. Citizens deserve some fairness, too.

Don’t treat Trump the same way you would treat a Democrat!

It’s time for tough follow-up questions, time for TV news to pick up on some of the hard-hitting reporting being done elsewhere, and maybe — radical notion alert! — it’s even time for news organizations to get together and prepare to defend themselves.

So news organizations should form a cabal to smear Donald Trump. But, hey, it’s self-defense!

That won’t come naturally to these highly competitive outfits, but given the assault on press rights that surely would come with a Trump presidency, strength in numbers is a far better idea than providing even-handed, nonconfrontational coverage.

What is the “assault on press rights” that “surely” would accompany a Trump presidency? It’s hard to say. Maybe she is referring to Trump’s desire to liberalize defamation law, or maybe she imagines there is a press right not to be contradicted. In any event, it’s not every day you see a journalist come out openly against “even-handed coverage,” while advocating ganging up on a disfavored politician, i.e., “strength in numbers.” We always knew that this is how liberals think, but it is unusual to see one of them put it in writing.