Baltimore’s 40th murder in May set a new record for homicides in one month. http://nydn.us/1dFgr0g
My friend wrote…
“Lloyd
The American Legion National Convention is scheduled for late August through early September, 2015 in Baltimore City.
Sad to say, I have canceled my reservations as I do not think the Convention is worth the risk to my life as I was very much looking forward to the Convention. Many others of American Legion are canceling due to high risk of being shot and/or killed.
I would very much appreciate your thoughts as you grew up there. No doubt , is a terrible shame to see a great City, Baltimore, go down due to liberal Democrats being in charge for the past 4 decades
Keep the Faith, Brother”
My reply…
“Hey Brother, You are wise for staying away from sin city (Baltimore). Baltimore police are reluctant to do their job for fear of being arrested. http://bsun.md/1LO3ImQ Clearly, the mayor is allowing the inmates to run the asylum. The only thing the vile local Democrat government cares about is protecting their liberal narrative. Baltimore’s mayor considers lives and businesses acceptable collateral damage. http://bit.ly/1KtoyHi It is shameful and evil. God bless, Lloyd”
My wife Mary said perhaps Baltimore will come to it’s senses upon realizing the financial consequences (at least $20 million) of allowing the thugs to wreck havoc. http://fxn.ws/1d3Lx0t I said to her, you are mistaken oh wise and beautiful one. The liberal zealots running Baltimore do not give a rat’s derriere about consequences financial or otherwise. All that matters is furthering their liberal socialist/progressive big government controlling everything and everyone agenda. If Leftists are nothing else, they are persistent, patient and unshakably focused on achieving their goals.
For crying out loud, the Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby is running around acting like an anti-police pit bull, giving speeches in churches to rally the black community against the police. http://bit.ly/1LO05xx Dear Lord what evil has overtaken my former home town? What has so emboldened Leftist Democrats to dismiss all pretense of fairness and legality, openly displaying their liberal bias and intentions?
Before I moved to Florida fifteen years ago, Baltimore was promoted as “Charm City”. I received a citation from former Mayor Kurt Schmoke for the song I wrote about my beloved city. A CD of my song “Hello Baltimore” was included in the city’s Bicentennial time capsule. http://bit.ly/1eHe2lK
Visiting Baltimore five years after I moved, a black Baltimore cop friend told me crime had gotten much worse. He said metal detectors were installed in public schools and almost every black nightclub. This does not support the Left’s claim that cops are the problem.
My brother said his white girlfriend won tickets for a show at the famous Hippodrome theater. The riots made her afraid to venture to downtown Baltimore. My brother dropped her and a female friend off at the theater door and picked them up immediately after the show.
Folks, there is a pony hidden in the pile of excrement which is Baltimore politics. The dire consequences of full blown liberalism are exposed for all the world to see.
Here’s a music video of my song “Hello Baltimore” illustrating my hometown then and now. http://bit.ly/1eHe2lK
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Paul Kengor’s new book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, provides a detailed explanation of why, according to a new Gallup poll, “Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman.” Gallup notes, “Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level.”
What we are witnessing is a “shift to the left” that has been carefully orchestrated and planned over the course of decades. It is a phenomenon known as “cultural Marxism,” the application of Marxism to culture rather than the economic sphere. Kengor’s book, published by an arm of WorldNetDaily, outlines how this movement has operated, naming the names of the individuals and organizations that have been part of it, and how they have reached their zenith under the presidency of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
Significantly, he writes, Obama’s “most enduring legacy may be on American culture,” not in economics or foreign policy.
This seems mystifying, since as a candidate Obama had presented himself as a strong family man and a Christian, with two young daughters and a wife devoted to them. And yet, Kengor, author of The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, has documented how Frank Marshall Davis, a communist atheist and pedophile, had an enormous influence on Obama. Kengor documents this yet again in the chapter of his new book, “The Gay-Marriage President and His Mentor.”
A professor who has written several books on politics, religion, and anti-communism, Kengor focuses on the role of the universities, especially Columbia University, in this cultural transformation. He calls them “indoctrination centers.” The products, he writes, “now pervade other cultural institutions critical to changing society’s opinions: media, television, films, education, and, the greatest influencer of all…the Internet, where they commandeer engines like Google and Yahoo! and Facebook and Mozilla…”
The evil genius behind the “fundamental transformation” of America lies in making it appear that this descent into immorality and paganism is somehow “progressive,” and a move to a higher level of consciousness. The book documents how the Judeo-Christian foundations of this country are being dismantled right before our eyes. It is not an accident. It is the planned destruction of America and the religious values that gave birth to our political and economic freedoms.
As recently as the 1990s, Kengor points out, there was a bipartisan consensus that children needed to have a dad and a mom. Now, that consensus has been rejected, as fatherless or motherless families are being embraced. Things have happened so quickly, he notes, that “everyday Americans” have even been conditioned to embrace major aspects of this revolutionary change.
As a student of the Marxist notion of dialectical change, I found Kengor’s treatment of the Marxist call for the “abolition of the family” to be fascinating. He devotes several pages to a discussion of what Marx meant by that phrase, and whether abolition means termination or gradual transcendence. What cannot be disputed is that the destruction of the traditional family results in more power for the government to control our lives and interfere with families. “As long as the traditional family is reversed,” he notes, “Marxism is advanced.”
The Marxist viewpoint was openly expressed by Professor Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC, who advocated a “collective notion” of control of children in advertisements for the cable channel. “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families…” she said.
As the family unit withers away, the government would take control of the children.
The next step is for “progress” or “evolution” to a new level, with such concepts and arrangements as multiple wives, group marriages, sibling marriages, fathers and stepfathers marrying daughters and stepdaughters, and uncles marrying nieces.
If you think this is somehow impossible, Kengor quotes directly from a group called “Beyond Marriage,” which has issued a statement, “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision.” Prominent among this group is Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown University law professor and a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under President Obama.
The author of the paper, “Gay Is Good: The Moral Case for Marriage Equality and More,” Feldblum argues, “the moral case for supporting the range of other creative ways in which we currently construct our intimate relations outside of marriage.”
What is particularly disturbing about this progression is that Georgetown advertises itself as the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university. It seems difficult to square its Catholic reputation with having someone like Feldblum on the payroll “teaching” students. Then, again, this is clearly part of the transformation that has been going on for decades and which is meticulously documented in the Kengor book.
Kengor is astounded by this turn of events, about how “everyday mainstream Americans” have come to accept ideas and concepts that are destroying their very own country. “We are breaking new ground in the long, long sweep of human history,” he writes, “and the groundbreakers act as if it is no big deal whatsoever…”
What’s worse, as we have repeatedly noted, the so-called “conservative media” have abandoned the struggle as well, as Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and the once-conservative National Review have endorsed same-sex marriage. (Gutfeld has been rewarded with his own show on the Fox News Channel).
So what is the way out of this cultural collapse?
Kengor, a Roman Catholic, devotes a whole chapter, “The Voice of Sheen,” to the wisdom of Catholic Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who had popular radio and television shows and wrote two important books, Communism and the Conscience of the West, and Peace of Soul. Sheen understood how Marxism was designed to destroy the traditional family.
“The Universal Roman Catholic Church was far and away the dominant international voice of opposition to the communist movement and its tumultuous machinations,” Kengor notes.
Fulton Sheen died in 1979, but DVDs of his talks and programs are still extremely popular among traditional Catholics.
Strangely, Kengor’s book begins with a quotation from Pope Francis about the threat to the family, as if the current pope will somehow emerge as a Fulton Sheen-type of Catholic or world leader. Instead, however, Francis has embraced pro-homosexual priests, the United Nations agenda, liberation theologians, Barack Obama, Raul Castro and Mahmoud Abbas.
By contrast, Sheen supported traditional Catholic teaching on homosexuality and had described how “false compassion” was “gradually growing in this country” to the point where “pity…is shown not to the mugged, but to the mugger…to the dope fiends, to the beatniks, to the prostitutes, to the homosexuals, to the punks…” He spoke up for the “decent man,” who, he said, “is practically off the reservation.”
It seems like he was describing cultural Marxism.
Today, the decent man is not only “off the reservation,” but is in danger of extinction himself.
Ironically, the liberals tried to demonize the late Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) by asking, “Have you no sense of decency?,” when he investigated communists in the federal government. Yet, as the Kengor book makes clear, McCarthy didn’t go far enough; the Marxist manipulation of culture was never examined in the detail that was required.
Now that we can see the damage and destruction all around us, the decent men and women of the United States can see they are in danger of losing their families and their country. The book Takedown is must-reading so we can understand the terrible predicament we are in.
But whether we will get the moral leadership we need from the churches remains to be seen. Some religious leaders will try to make peace with the “change,” while others will resist it on the basis of sound principles based on natural law. Kengor notes that another objective of the cultural Marxists is the complete “takedown of religious institutions,” so more confrontations are on the way. The plan is to “rob” Americans of their First Amendment religious freedoms.
He quotes the aforementioned Feldblum of “Catholic” Georgetown University as saying, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”
Will the Republican presidential candidates come to the defense of the “decent man” and the traditional family? Or will they pander to the progressive constituencies demanding special rights for an increasing number of sexual minorities?
This is an “especially exciting time for extreme leftists,” Kengor writes, for they are “genuinely transforming human nature” and America itself, with “the unwitting support of a huge swatch of oblivious citizens and voters.”
But the American revolutionaries of 1776 faced overwhelming odds and their descendants may not go away quietly.
Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: What Effect Will The Busload Of GOP Candidates Have On 2016?
Ask Marion: I’d say the biggest immediate issue with nearly 20 Republican presidential primary candidates is logistics. Where do you put them all for the first couple of debates, before the numbers thin? How do you fit them all on one stage in the first debate set for August? Do you leave some out, including current and former governors and senators? Or do you hold two different debates in one night — with nine or ten candidates in one hour, and another nine or ten the next? And would either of those approaches be fair? Those were all questions after an earlier suggestion that Republicans might cap the first debate to nine… to twelve participants, which would mean that some prominent names might be excluded. The National Journal reports that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is now walking back the talk about a cap.
On the flip side, the Republican bench is deep and wide giving America some real choices while the Democrat Party has Hillary… yesterday’s politician, equally old and problematic Elizabeth Warren, old self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders and a couple stragglers.
In today’s climate, the 2016 elections, especially after the GOP’s landslide in 2014, should be theirs, if those obstacles can be surmounted and if the base gets out to vote.
Virginia Right!: We have a massive field of candidates already ranging from very good to very bad (in my not so humble opinion).
Having such a large number of candidates can be cumbersome, but it is good to get the ideas out all across the party spectrum. As Jeb Bush struggles in every category but money, it lets the Republicans who watch these things closely know that money may not be the deciding factor.
After 8 years of national devastation by Democrats, the last thing voters are clamoring for is another dynasty. Especially a Bush dynasty.
One of the most dramatic effects of the large field is the effect on the polls. The liberal press is positively awash in glory as Hillary tops pretty much every Republican in their “head to head” polling. But remember, these are the same pollsters that called the UK elections too close to call and completely missed the blowout for the Conservative party and let’s not forget the abysmal results of the last US election where the polls showed Democrats doing much better than they actually did.
Now toss in the huge Republican field and there is absolutely no way any “head to head” polling will produce any meaningful results. Few people are really paying attention at this point, and the responses cannot be trusted. Many Republicans will pick Hillary in a poll over a Republican candidate that is not to their liking. I’d probably pick Hillary in a poll over Lindsey Graham or Chris Christie. But I wouldn’t vote for her on election day.
And we now have O’Malley entering the race along with elderly Socialist kook Bernie Sanders. So far, the Democrats have only had Hillery to pick from. If nothing else, O’Malley will provide some of the Democrat on Democrat mud slinging that has been the mainstay of the GOP so far.
It is much too early to get too worked up on the large field. We are still 18 months away. The cannibalism has just begun. And the dialog will be interesting and enlightening as time goes by.
JoshuaPundit: Ah hah hah hah!!! The Stupid Party strikes again. This is absolutely the Left’s dream come true.
20 or so candidates, all kissing up to the legacy media for space, all fighting tooth and nail like a pack of wild dogs for the same donor money, all saying things it will be impossible for the average low information voter to keep track of,, and ultimately boring quite a few of them. The Democrats will appear focused and centered by comparison, especially with the media helping them,
And of course, all providing oppo research, nasty quotes and video loops free of charge to the Democrats on whomever survives the massacre. Since most of them label themselves as conservatives, one beneficiary will likely Jeb Bush. This is exactly how we would up with John McCain and Mitt Romney.
There are really only two possible bright spots I see. Hopefully we’ll be down to 3 or so serious candidates by the end of 2015. And two, if this many clowns are vying to be ringmaster of the circus, the real polls they’ve commissioned as opposed to the propaganda fed to the peasants by the media must be a lot more favorable to a Republican in the White House than we’re being lead to believe.
The Glittering Eye: The large Republican field tells us several things. Keep in mind that every U.S. senator at least at some point imagines him or herself a president-in-waiting. One of the things that the large field tells us is that there are a lot of youngish but very senior Republican senator and governors or ex-governors. That’s sometimes referred to as a “deep bench” but I think that’s overly kind.
The other thing that it tells us is that today’s Republican Party, although much more ideological than it used to be, still brings together some pretty disparate elements. Social conservatives, libertarians, and the “Republican establishment” (to the extent that there is a Republican establishment any more). That would yield a minimum of three candidates if each candidate represented only one of those elements. But they don’t. They represent combinations of those elements plus a few others so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of candidates.
As an outsider the advice I’d offer is to heed Reagan’s old Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of they fellow Republican. They should keep their sights trained on the president, Hillary Clinton, and the Democrats. Speaking ill of Republicans is the press’s job.
Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason: What is a Republican? Looking at the cast of candidates and potential candidates running for president on the GOP ticket, very few can be considered true Republicans. Traditionally, a Republican is someone who supports free market capitalism, limited federal government, conservative social values, a strong military, and above all respects the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
Who among the current candidates can be counted as a true Republican? I believe this is what is hurting the party, and not necessarily the number of candidates. The big government progressives who call themselves Republicans are hurting the base and the party platform. Libertarian Rand Paul has the Young Republicans’ support for all the wrong reasons. It is becoming more and more difficult for the average voter to know where a candidate stands and that they can be trusted to keep their campaign promises once elected.
Sadly, I expect the number of candidates will hurt the party leading up to the presidential election in 2016, dividing Republican voters based on the issues most important to them. I also believe this will help propel Jeb Bush to the top of the list as the candidates drop out and throw their support, and money, behind him.
Wolf Howling: What a deep bench the Republicans are fielding this year, with sixteen people declared or expected to declare soon. It is an embarrassment of riches, and the amazing thing is that most of them are serious candidates who could in fact gain the nomination. There are just a few – Donald Trump, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham – who, in my view, likely stand no chance. This deep field stands in direct contrast to the Democrat field of one tired old scandal ridden lady.
The problem for Republicans will be to quickly winnow the field. Inevitably, some who are worthy of consideration are going to get shafted because of limitations on who will be able to appear at the initial debates. But still, by the time the later rounds of the primaries arrive, we should have several strong candidates who have distinguished themselves from the pack. I think this is good for the party. It adds a real element of drama to the race, and that should capture national attention and most of the headlines as the primary season unfolds.
Bookworm Room: Considering how often the mainstream media cuts conservative voices out of the debate, there’s something to be said for having a wide variety of conservatives advocating their particular brand of conservativism, from Rand Paul’s loopy libertarianism (I prefer the Charles Murray variety myself) to Mike Huckabee’s old-fashioned southern Democrat demagoguery dressed up as conservativism, each of them adds something.
My fear, of course, is that Americans, rather than listening to the candidates, will tune out the tumult of voices — especially after the mainstream media gets done pillorying them as racists, homophobes, misogynists, warmongers, wacko birds, and whatever other labels it can stick on people who believe in the Constitution and believe in a constitutional America. My hope is that the most articulate voices among the crowd, such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Carly Fiorina, even if they don’t prevail in the primaries, are able to turn voters on to the virtues of a true constitutional republic.
My other fear is that the big money in politics (including Left-wing groups intent upon making mischief), will keep Jeb’s candidacy afloat long enough for disaffected, confused, or disgusted voters to go for a familiar name.
Bottom line: Win or lose, these candidates have the potential to be good. They also create an irresistible target for the MSM, which will treat the Republican primary like a turkey shoot — and unfortunately, the establishment Republicans, like the pledges in Animal House, will bend over and show the target on their craven backsides:
Also put an especial emphasis on Nat’l Security and Foreign Policy. Iowa will tell the tale – a culling if ye will – getting the top tier cats on the top tier. For now – the more the merrier!
Well, there you have it!
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In Memoriam My beloved husband Garry Hamilton passed on 09/24/22I will love you always...
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