04/30/15

Black Mom Changes Leftist Narrative on Violence

The reaction among responsible black and white law-abiding citizens to the black thugs rioting in Baltimore was captured by Toya Graham, the black mother who smacked her son around when she found him on the streets joining the attacks on police. Even liberals in the major media applauded her efforts.

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” she told CBS News, referring to her son and the black youth who died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody.

CBS reported, “Graham, a single mom with six children, denounced the vandalism and violence against police officers. She said rioting in Baltimore is no way to go about getting justice for Freddie Gray and that she doesn’t want that life for her son.”

Graham then appeared on the CBS This Morning Show to discuss the incident and the struggle to raise her children.

The important teaching moment represented by this dramatic incident, a brief moment of sanity in the media, undercut the left-wing effort to somehow blame the police for the riots. As a result, the “progressives” had to go on the attack against the black mother.

Over at Think Progress, the blog of the pro-Obama Center for American Progress, Graham was attacked as a “misguided” mother who exercised bad judgment in holding her son accountable. Writer Kira Lerner said the issue was alleged police violence, not rioting in the streets by black youth.

She quoted a woman with a group opposed to “police brutality” as saying that “While she doesn’t condone the looting that was highlighted by the media in Baltimore Monday night, she said she understands where the violent protesters are coming from.”

Meanwhile, over at Hot Air, a piece by Noah Rothman ran under the headline, “Don’t let urban unrest derail conservative criminal justice reform.” While the riots were underway, he insisted that “a consensus opinion” had emerged on both the left and the right in favor of getting soft on criminals and letting more of them out of prison.

In the wake of what has happened in Baltimore and Ferguson, the Republican primary electorate might be tempted to embrace a “tough on crime” candidate, but “That would be a mistake,” Rothman informed Hot Air readers.

What’s more, he lectured them, the war on drugs has “failed” and there is no alternative to letting “non-violent offenders” out of prison.

In fact, the war on drugs did not fail. David Evans, a special advisor to the Drug Free America Foundation, notes that marijuana use went down among young people by 25 percent from the advent of the Reagan administration’s “Just Say No” campaign to the inauguration of President Obama. “If we had had a reduction in any other health problem in the U.S. of 25 percent, we would consider it an outstanding success,” he said.

Being “tough on crime” is precisely what many observers, including that courageous Baltimore mom, have concluded needs to be done in the inner cities.

Going soft was precisely what the Baltimore mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, had done, accounting for the weak police response to the riots. Former police officer Michael Tremoglie points out that the Baltimore police knew that the mayor had said she wanted “protesters” protected and room furnished for them to “destroy,” and that “They knew that the DOJ [Department of Justice] was ‘monitoring’ what was occurring during the riots.”

Before he came to Hot Air, a site owned by Salem Communications, a Christian firm, Rothman had sung the praises of the pro-marijuana voices in the media such as MSNBC’s Touré. On another occasion, he had highlighted how comedian Kevin Hart and rapper Ice Cube had attacked commentator Nancy Grace’s anti-marijuana comments.

Hot Air, which claims to be the most heavily-trafficked conservative blog on the Internet, has emerged as a forum for pro-marijuana and soft-on-crime viewpoints, most of them articulated by Rothman, a former libertarian writer for Mediaite.

It is certainly true that the Rothman perspective on “criminal justice reform” has been embraced on the left.

As Accuracy in Media noted recently, in an article about a “criminal justice reform” conference held in Washington, D.C., there is a White House-directed effort to enlist conservatives to join with various progressive organizations to weaken laws against a series of violent and non-violent crimes.

Hillary Clinton joined the campaign on Wednesday, saying that “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.”

Some readers at Hot Air were astounded by the advice given by Rothman, who cited the Obama Justice Department as a reliable source of information on criminal justice issues, including alleged police violence.

One said, “Isn’t it great when we can come to Hot Air to read some halfwit ‘conservative’ columnist agree with Eric Holder about root causes?”

Another said, “I don’t think this is a very timely post. At least not whilst the animals are burning, looting, robbing, raping, killing each other and forming alliances with opposing gang bangers to destabilize the structure of society.”

Still another called attention to Heather MacDonald’s piece in the New York Post, “The Perilous New Push to Excuse Lawlessness,” as being “a hundred times better than Noah’s.” The writer said, “She’s an actual conservative who lived through the times when ‘law and order’ were questionable values, and conservatives had to fight hard to implement them.”

MacDonald had referred to “a wide-ranging movement [which] is already under way to transform the criminal justice system in order to avoid a disparate impact on blacks.” But since blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, she said that fulfilling this promise “would require gutting murder statutes, and most other criminal laws,” and that the country’s two-decade-long crime drop would be in jeopardy.

Despite cities like Ferguson and Baltimore going up in flames and the rare story of a mother like Toya Graham making a plea for law-and-order, the liberal media are going to make sure that the movement for criminals’ rights that now operates under the goal of achieving “criminal justice reform” will get the lion’s share of the publicity.

Indeed, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” just ran a favorable story about the “Coalition for Public Safety,” which is trying to make the ACLU sound like a reasonable organization conservatives can work with. Based on what was reported, it looks like some conservative groups are taking the bait.

03/8/15

New Zealander: Amnesty Is Obama’s Trump Card To Transform America

Hat Tip: Nelson Abdullah

By: Ginni Thomas
The Daily Caller

Libertarian New Zealander, author and founder of the popular website, KeyWiki.org, Trevor Loudon is spending a lot of time lately telling Americans that “amnesty is the trump card” for President Obama to permanently transform America.

Citing a speech in 2010 by White House consultant and radical leftist, Eliseo Medina, Loudon implores Americans to wake up before it is too late in this video interview. He says, with Mitt Romney losing to Obama in 2012 by 2 and ½ million votes, if Obama can succeed in legalizing “10, 15 or 20 million more votes, almost all of whom will vote Democrat,” Obama can lock in progressive electoral victories for the foreseeable future and “make it practically impossible for the Republicans to ever elect another president.”

As for the Republican consultants who promote Hispanic outreach and the need for amnesty for future Republican victories, Loudon asks why would anyone listen to Karl Rove, “when he has lost so many elections.” Dismissing Rove as “a fool” who “spits on his base,” Loudon believes these consultants and Republicans are doing the bidding of the business community who want cheap labor. Loudon reminds viewers of what Lenin said, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

Asking why new Latinos would be of higher value to Karl Rove and the political consultants than the 20 million conservative Christians currently not registered to vote, Loudon says Rove is demonstrating a “lack of understanding of political realities in his own country.”

Deriding those Republicans or conservatives who still write off President Obama as “incompetent,” he says this is a “power play for control with no viable opposition” reminiscent of what happened in South Africa, Venezuela and Czechoslovakia, with public deception covering up the true nature of regime change.

Although many in his country and in America may not be paying attention to politics, those foreign commentators who are, he says, are troubled by what they see happening. Loudon says, for those “thinking New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians, Brits, French and Germans, they are just freakin’ out. They are so worried. They see what Obama is doing to Israel. They see ISIS expanding in the Middle East. They see China building a big blue-water navy in the Pacific. They see Putin bullying the Ukraine, clearly wanting to reestablish his empire in Europe. They are freaking out because they have just come to the realization that they have been relying on America to defend them… when America is actually working for the other side, in many instances.”

To this self-described libertarian, Obama and his allies have set their sights on not just fundamentally transforming America, but the world. After all, Loudon says, “The world leader who was protecting us from the bad guys [America] is now helping the bad guys.”

Loudon ends with the admonition, “If America loses its Constitution, everything good about America will go. Vladimir Putin, the Chinese and the Iranians will rule the planet,” he says. “What you guys do in the next two years is going to make a huge difference to the fate of our civilization.”

WATCH PART 2:

For more on Trevor Loudon see his book, “The Enemies Within,” and his current short term crowd-sourcing fundraiser effort to produce a movie of the book by next October here.

01/29/15

The Media, Hollywood and the Pro-life Cause

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Ronald Reagan said, “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.” In that context, one fascinating banner at the recent March for Life referred to the “survivors” of the abortion on demand mentality. A Christian pro-life ministry exists to rally the living on behalf of those being denied the right to life.

But the odds are that you didn’t hear or read anything about their presence at this massive demonstration.

The group, Liberty Counsel, notes that the controversy over deflating footballs has garnered enormous media coverage, but the annual anti-abortion March for Life on January 22 got little attention.

“The network media snubbed hundreds of thousands of participants who journeyed to Washington, D.C., to mark the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. NBC and ABC completely ignored the March, and CBS dedicated 15 seconds,” Liberty Counsel pointed out in a message to supporters.

The group went on, “The intentional refusal to report on hundreds of thousands of people—dominated by youth—standing for life in our nation’s Capital is irresponsible.”

As both a regular participant in the March for Life and a media critic, I anticipated this virtual black-out. That’s why I went myself, armed with a video camera. If you’re tired of the coverage of deflated footballs, you can watch my short video from the March for Life that captures only a small part of the demonstration. The crowd was full of young people.

I tried to find the most interesting signs and banners, such as, “There’s nothing progressive about killing the innocent.” This banner shows the moral bankruptcy of the modern-day “progressives” who insist that unborn children have no rights.

I also liked “Je suis un enfant un naitre,” French for “I am a preborn child.” Delegations from France and Italy were at the rally.

But while the networks didn’t cover the march, it should be noted that Hollywood last year actually produced a pro-life film, “Gimme Shelter,” with powerful acting performances and well-known actors. The critics panned it. The audiences loved it.

Based on a true story, “Gimme Shelter” is about a pregnant teenager who finds help in a Catholic shelter for unwed mothers.

In real life, Kathy DiFiore turned her own New Jersey home into that shelter for mothers and their babies. She met with President Reagan, who thanked her for what she was doing. In the film, viewers catch a glimpse of the photo of Kathy Difiore and Reagan, taken on January 22, 1988, another anniversary of the March for Life.

DiFiore writes about the day that photo was taken, saying she told Reagan, “You are doing what our Founding Fathers did. You are bringing us back to God’s values. That is what you are doing and we thank you for that.”

Reagan told Kathy DiFiore and other members of the pro-life group meeting with him in the White House that the decision legalizing abortion-on-demand was wrong because “these children are already human beings [and] are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He referred to remarks he had made in a telephone call to the March for Life, discussing how 24 prestigious doctors had responded to his comments that “These babies are human beings.”

Those were some of the comments he had made about unborn children feeling pain during an abortion. They deserve more attention, now that a vote on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” was sabotaged by Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC).

At the time he made these remarks, Reagan had said, “there was an outcry—enraged criticism and angry denials. But criticism wasn’t the only response.”

The entire text included these comments about the science behind the observation that unborn children feel pain during abortions. Reagan said, “It so happened that I received a letter signed by 24 medical doctors, including eminent physicians like the former chief of pediatrics at the St. Louis City Hospital and the president of the New York State Medical Society. They discussed recent advances in medical technology and concluded: ‘Mr. President, in drawing attention to the capability of the human fetus to feel pain, you stand on firmly established ground.’”

A master communicator, Reagan effectively rebutted the “progressive” argument that the unborn have no rights. He said, “…our opponents tell us not to interfere with abortion. They tell us not to impose our morality on those who wish to allow or participate in the taking of the life of infants before birth. Yet no one calls it imposing morality to prohibit the taking of life after a child is born. We’re told about a woman’s right to control her own body. But doesn’t the unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Or would our critics say that to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is to impose morality? Are we to forget the entire moral mission of our nation through its history?”

Today, however, the Reagan vision has been abandoned, even by some in the conservative media.

The Fox Business Network just gave a former MTV personality, who calls herself “Kennedy,” an hour a night to promote her extreme libertarian views. Regarding her abandonment of the conservative label, she has said, “Social conservatism was really bringing me down.” She became a “Gary Johnson libertarian,” named after the pro-pot, former New Mexico governor. Her book features a photo of her virtually naked on a horse, and even the table of contents is marked by obscenities.

Put forward as a role model for young people, she is a supporter of same-sex marriage and “pro-choice” on abortion. That is, “pro-choice” for the mother and not her child.

She says, “Abortion, to me, is an issue of personal responsibility.” No. Based on any objective standard, this issue involves two people.

The Daily Beast reports that Kennedy, “in a notorious appearance as a presenter on the 1994 Video Music Awards—simulated oral sex on her microphone. This, while an unsuspecting Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York, stood beside her on camera and, oblivious to Kennedy’s lewd sideshow, blathered on about how great it was to have the awards show back in Manhattan.”

A much better pick for a program on Fox would have been any of the young women leaders in the pro-life movement such as Kristan Hawkins, Lila Rose, or Kristina Garza.

In response to the virtual media blackout of the March for Life, Lila Rose of Live Action said, “The continued media blackout on abortion disregards the primary obligation of journalism: to accurately report, investigate, and tell truth without bias. While mainstream media perpetuate a silence on the March for Life, the unjust killing of 3,000 preborn children in the womb by abortion continues each and every day. We must speak for society’s littlest and weakest members, and give voice to those who are the victims of the greatest human rights abuse of our day.”

Wouldn’t it be great to have a young female pro-life voice like that on either the Fox News Channel or the Fox Business Network?

Instead, the trend is to go in a libertarian direction and play down those “divisive” social issues. Being pro-abortion, pro-gay, and pro-pot is now the “in” thing. This constitutes another attempt at demoralizing the pro-life side.

In his book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, Reagan told pro-lifers not to lose hope. “Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart,” he said. “This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives.”

He added, “…we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed.”

But the abortion industry and its defenders in the media are doing their best to keep this sacred value suppressed, by outright ignoring it.

12/19/14

Surprise: The Koch Brothers are Not Conservatives

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham acted surprised that David Koch would give an interview to Barbara Walters and talk about his radical “libertarian” views. Koch appeared in Walters’ ABC special program on “The 10 Most Fascinating People Of 2014.” The interview was featured in various stories highlighting Koch’s personal views as a “social liberal.” He’s for abortion and homosexual rights. But that’s not all. He’s also a major supporter of the Cato Institute, which recently featured NSA defector Edward Snowden at its “Surveillance Conference.”

David Koch’s foreign policy views are very far to the left as well—a fact that many conservatives may not realize.

We have heard it from the left so many times that Koch is an extreme “conservative” or right-winger that we have taken this claim for granted. It is definitely not the case. He’s sinking a lot of money into Republican and some conservative groups, but that doesn’t make him a conservative. In fact, as the Walters special showed, he doesn’t accept the conservative label. However, he does emphasize his free market views on economic and fiscal issues.

I am trying to get some comment from David Koch about Cato’s embrace of Snowden. The Koch brothers have an extensive public relations apparatus that includes the major Koch spokesman, Philip Ellender, a registered Democrat in Louisiana who serves as the President and COO of the Government & Public Affairs department of Koch Companies Public Sector. I have asked Robert A. Tappan, Director of External Relations for Koch Companies Public Sector, to provide an explanation of the Koch Brothers support for Cato and Snowden.

David and Charles Koch were two “shareholders” in the Cato Institute, and were involved in a lawsuit that resulted in John Allison (the former CEO of BB&T) replacing Ed Crane, who retired as Cato’s CEO. According to a press release, “For Charles Koch and David Koch, the agreement helps ensure that Cato will be a principled organization that is effective in advancing a free society.”

What this means in terms of Cato’s embrace of Snowden is a matter of discussion. Snowden is a captive of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is definitely not a free society but is a place where Koch Industries does business. (Koch Industries also does business in Communist China.) Do the Kochs approve of Cato’s embrace of Snowden? David Koch, who served as the Executive Vice President of Koch Industries, Inc., continues to serve on Cato’s board. Cato’s 2013 annual report lists the Charles Koch Foundation as a financial backer.

As we have reported in the past, the Cato Institute published a three-page interview with Snowden mouthpiece Glenn Greenwald in the July/August 2014 issue of the Cato Policy Report. Cato called Greenwald’s NSA disclosures “explosive,” which is true in the sense that the communications intelligence agencies of free countries like the U.S. and Israel have been hobbled by the publicity given to the stolen documents he received and publicized. National security experts also say Snowden’s disclosures facilitated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rise of ISIS.

Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute’s board of directors, has written that if a deal is worked out, Snowden could return to the U.S. and “be held accountable for other actions, not yet disclosed, that amount to espionage—traditionally defined as transmitting national defense information with intent or reason to believe that it will be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation.”

In view of these comments, not knowing the full extent of the damage he has done, why would Cato give Snowden a platform? His video appearance at the Cato Surveillance Conference had to have been arranged with the help of the Russian security agents who guard Snowden and regulate access to him. Why would Cato participate in such an arrangement?

David Koch also serves on the board of the Reason Foundation, which sponsors Reason magazine. It, too, is pro-Snowden, having published such articles as, “Thank You, Edward Snowden.” The author called Snowden a “whistleblower,” which is a falsehood.

Martin Edwin Andersen, the first national security whistleblower to be given the “Public Servant Award” by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, strongly disputes the idea that Snowden is a whistleblower. He calls Snowden a national security leaker who engaged in theft, fled the country to escape justice, and is now “in the protective embraces of Olympic Russian police-state champion Vladimir Putin.”

By the way, Cato also supports Obama’s policy of appeasing the Castro regime in Cuba. It ran an article when Chuck Hagel was nominated as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, saying the former senator was correct in calling the idea “goofy” that the Havana regime constitutes a terrorist threat to the United States. Cato said nothing about the American terrorists who fled to Cuba and are being protected by the Castro regime. One, Joanne Chesimard, is a convicted cop-killer. The other major American terrorist in Cuba, William Morales, was a bomb-maker for the FALN, which killed four Americans in the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York City.

Obama’s scheme to normalize relations with Cuba does not include the return of these terrorists to face justice in the U.S.

Hagel has since left the administration, but the Koch-funded Cato Institute is still around, exercising its influence on Washington policy makers. Cato hailed the release of the Senate Democrats’ so-called “torture report,” calling it “long overdue.”

The Kochs’ support for this group may prove to be more surprising than the “news” to some conservatives that David Koch is a liberal on social issues. The Koch Brothers are very liberal on foreign policy, too. We previously commented on a Charles Koch Institute forum featuring a foreign policy talking head who has no problem with Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

So why are the Kochs sinking money into Republican-oriented and even some conservative groups? It’s time for traditional conservatives to examine what appears to be a Koch plan to move the Republican Party to the left on social and foreign policy issues.