‘I guess that means our colleagues from California are going to be riding their bicycles back home to their constituents…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Even though House Democrats now set the agenda, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., showed that she was still the one in charge during a hearing earlier this week for the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources titled “Climate Change: Preparing for Energy Transition.”
In the cosmic plane occupied by Ocasio–Cortez, the world is due to end by the year 2031.
That leaves precious little time for Democrats to put in place the ambitious—and costly—agenda that the socialism-loving freshman congresswoman proposed last week.
“The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all,” said the policy framework.
The plan was publicly shared, but was later deleted from her website with Ocasio-Cortez claiming her staff had mistakenly released a preliminary draft.
Among the memorable highlights:
Economic security for those unable and unwilling to work
Green-friendly sustainability makeovers for every building in the U.S.
The elimination of fossil fuels within 10 years
The corresponding phase-out of fossil-fuel-dependent air travel
To show voters that she hadn’t gone off the rails, “AOC” noted that the aim of reaching zero emissions within a decade was a goal, not set in stone but one that could be redefined as political necessity dictated.
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast,” said a frequently-asked question section.
Evidently, those reassurances offered little comfort to the people of Wyoming, the largest coal-producer in the country.
Although mocked and dismissed by many, the “Green New Deal” received offers to co-sponsor from all five of the Senate Democrats who have announced their candidacy for the 2020 presidential race. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also promised, albeit ironically, to put it to a floor vote in the upper chamber.
The attention given to the proposal, along with the topic of the subcommittee hearing on “Preparing for Energy Transition” and the “experts” brought to testify made it no laughing matter for Cheney, who opened her questioning by asking how each of the panelists had arrived that day in Washington.
After four of the six said they used air-travel, Cheney immediately laid into the absurdity of the “Green New Deal” proposal to eliminate fossil fuels within 10 years.
“I would assume we’re not just going to wait 10 years and then all the sudden tell people all the sudden they can’t fly, but that we’ll be in a situation where over the course of ten years we would somehow gradually work our way out of air travel,” she said.
Cheney went on to ask the panel whether they thought the federal government would need to establish rules to prioritize air travel.
“It would seem to me I guess we would then have a situation where the FAA could say for example, you know what, vacation travel—that’s not essential,” she said. “… Would you say that we’re going to have some sort of a vacation commissar set up in the government to determine what kind of air travel makes sense and what kind doesn’t?”
Cheney continued her interrogation by asking who on the panel supported the Green New Deal.
None raised their hands.
“It’s going to be crucially important for us to recognize and understand when we outlaw plane travel, we outlaw gasoline, we outlaw cars—I think actually probably the entire U.S. military—because of the Green New Deal that we are able to explain to our constituents and to people all across this country what that really means,” she continued. “… I guess that means our colleagues from California are going to be riding their bicycles back home to their constituents.”
TRUMP RESPONSE: Why don’t you allow revenue-generating fracking in your state?
Andrew Cuomo (screen shot: CNBC/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose tax-and-spend vision for the Empire State recently was felled by a $2.3 billion budget shortfall, begged President Donald Trump to revoke a $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions.
Cuomo said the SALT provision in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was causing an exodus of wealthy New Yorkers to areas with lower rates, according to Politico.
“You’re hurting the economic engines of the nation,” he said on a radio show Tuesday following his White House visit.
Cuomo appealed to fellow Democrats that repealing the tax reform should be their No. 1 priority. “This should be right at the top of your list,” he said. “If the Republicans ask for the time of day … the Democratic Congress should ask for reform for this SALT tax provision.”
Earlier law provided for virtually limitless tax shelters—such as campaign, super-PAC and nonprofit contributions—which allowed elite 1-percenters in blue-state enclaves to avoid paying their “fair share” in income tax.
Democrats, who have embarked on an all-out blitz to force Trump to turn over his personal tax filings, no doubt suspect that he was a beneficiary of such loopholes during his days as a Manhattan real-estate mogul.
But rather than reverse the overhaul, Trump suggested Cuomo might reconsider some of his revenue-killing liberal policies, such as dialing back a 2014 ban on fracking for natural gas or approving fossil fuel pipelines.
In his recent State of the Union address, Trump touted the fact that the U.S. for the first time in its history had become an energy exporter.
“The President discussed economic growth opportunities for the State of New York, including helping lower energy prices throughout the entire Northeast by allowing low-cost, American energy to thrive with fracking and pipeline systems,” Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.
Like New York, ultra-liberal California has been dealing with the mass-migration of its wealthy tech moguls from pricey regions like Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to more affordable areas like Nevada (although hardly offsetting the in-bound migration from Tijuana).
While Trump may relish the Schaudenfreude of seeing his political adversaries lose their cash cows, however, there may be unintended consequences to his efforts: California’s limousine liberals are not checking their politics at the door as they flee.
Nevada and neighboring Arizona were the only two 2018 Senate races in which Democrats were able to oust incumbent Republicans, due largely to the demographic shifts.
And other states once solid in the red column, such as Texas, are tilting increasingly purple, in part as the result of their own economic prosperity and favorable tax laws.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Although he may not be the world’s richest man anymore, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that he still has way too much money.
“We’re trying to give it away faster,” Gates said during a joint appearance with his wife, Melinda, to pitch their annual philanthropy newsletter.
But Gates, who last year was officially surpassed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (pre-divorce) on the wealthiest person list, said proposals like radical socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez‘s pitch for a 70 percent income-tax rate would not do the trick.
“These great fortunes were not made through ordinary incomes, so you probably have to look to the capital gains rate and the estate tax if you want to create more equity there,” he said.
In fact, while he supported making the tax system “take a much higher portion from people with great wealth,” Gates said there should be no defined cap on the amount the government can claim from the uber-rich.
“I think if you go so far as to say that there’s a total upper limit, that might have more negatives than positives—but you know, I may have a distorted view of this.”
Gates said he and his wife have lobbied for a higher estate tax—often referred to by critics as the “death tax”—in which Uncle Sam takes his cut from a deceased individual’s earthly possessions prior to inheritance.
“There was actually one year that was good to die in because there was no estate tax,” he joked.
Melinda Gates agreed that the wealthy needed to be hit harder but said the system also needed to be set up in such a way as to “stimulate good growth.”
She pointed to France, which lacks a vibrant tech sector, she claimed, because its tax system had de-incentivized innovation.
The key, she said, was to encourage more charitable giving in areas that weren’t necessarily contributing to the common good.
“Philanthropy can never make up for taxes, but it is that catalytic wedge where we can try things—we can do innovations that you wouldn’t want your government to do with tax dollars.”
Still, she said, higher taxes for the wealthy were also necessary to cover the vast expanse of public services in a perfect world.
“It has to be government that scales up things like health and education,” she said.
Pointing to a multitude of billionaires who were considering entry into the political arena—among them Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, business-media mogul Michael Bloomberg and hedge-fund investor Tom Steyer all eyeing runs against the well-to-do current president—Colbert asked if either Gates had considered running.
Fortunately for the nation’s taxpayers, they have not.
“We work with politicians, but neither of us will choose to run for office. We are specialized in what we dig into and what we know,” Bill Gates said. “And we hope we get good politicians, but we’re not going to run.”
‘Allowing trained professionals with years of expertise to carry … makes our communities safer…’
IMAGE: WFLA News Channel 8 via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As the year anniversary of the Parkland, Fla., school massacre approaches on Thursday, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are using the opportunity to push competing firearms agendas.
Both measures seem unlikely to pass the opposing chamber—and neither directly addresses the conditions under which deranged teenager Nikolas Cruz carried out his attack last Valentine’s Day, killing 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
However, a bill re-introduced by Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., would extend greater protections to vulnerable school systems by updating existing laws to give “good guys with guns” more latitude in concealed-carry laws.
Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, has introduced the LEOSA Reform Act, an update to the original Law Enforcement Officer Safety Act. Its main focus would be to expand the existing code to allow qualified law-enforcement officers and retired officers to carry firearms into public places such as school zones, Amtrak stations and national parks.
“The LEOSA Reform Act will allow our law enforcement officers who have dedicated their lives to protect our communities, to continue doing so by extending their concealed carry privileges,” said Bacon’s office in a news release announcing a Wednesday press conference outside the Capitol.
Retired law-enforcement officers would be eligible to qualify after taking a special, state-approved conceal-carry course.
“Allowing trained professionals with years of expertise to carry could allow them to respond more quickly to emergencies, and makes our communities safer,” said the statement.
The bill was originally introduced last June, cosponsored by Reps. Scott Perry, R-Pa., and John Rutherford, R-Fla., but because it was not enacted by the then-Republican majority before the end of the legislative session, it was cleared from the books.
Since the original bill’s introduction, it has added nine more cosponsors—including bipartisan support from Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pa.
House Democrats also have in their cross-hairs their own bill to massively expand background checks for gun purchases, including the closing of loopholes that allow private sellers to peddle their arsenals without Uncle Sam’s approval.
Steve Scalise/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
Earlier this week, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.—himself a recent victim of politically motivated gun violence—was blocked from testifying before the Judiciary Committee on the Democrat-led bill.
Scalise criticized the Democrats for silencing conservative voices and for capitalizing on the Parkland tragedy, once again, to push an unrelated agenda.
“If their bill would have passed, it would have done nothing to stop the shooting that happened in my case, the shooting that happened in Parkland, a lot of these other tragic shootings,” Scalise said in an interview with Laura Ingraham. “It would take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to have a gun.”
In Scalise’s case, Capitol Police, who were there because of his role as majority whip at the time, engaged crazed Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson in a 10-minute shootout in June 2017 after he opened fire on the Republicans’ practice for the charity Congressional Baseball Game.
“I’ve got a perspective,” Scalise said. “Clearly, mine dealt with something that happened to me, and I saw how guns were used to save people’s lives.”
‘The Democratic Party has made it clear we will not tolerate racism … They just have to do it in a smart way that respects voters’ wishes that Democrats be in charge…’
Ralph Northam, Mark Herring and Justin Fairfax / IMAGE: WAVY TV 10 via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) During the 1950s, the tactic that Democrats in Virginia used to try to defeat federal demands to integrate schools was known as “massive resistance.”
By refusing to acknowledge the newly established law of the land that repealed the earlier “separate but equal” treatise, political heavy-hitters like Sen. Harry Byrd and Gov. Mills Godwin managed to forestall the inevitable federal mandate into the early 1970s.
But as some on the Left are fond of saying in the ongoing push to elevate marginalized identity groups, Virginia Democrats were “on the wrong side of history.”
The recent scandals involving the commonwealth’s three top officials, all Democrats, have many echoes of that earlier defeat—not the least of which are the racial undertones and the tensions between social norms of the past and present.
While it is clear they are morally in the wrong, what side of history they fall on rests in the hands of their political allies.
Again, as with the repeal of segregation, it seems the Democrats’ strategy is to try to ride it out and hope it blows over. Facing a veritable minefield of criticism for their hypocrisy and double-standards, prominent party leaders either have sought to deflect and redirect the blame, or to remain deafeningly mute.
To borrow very liberally from Gandhi the term used to refer to his nonviolent protests, some might even consider the Left’s aggressive inaction a form of passive resistance.
‘Believe Women, Unless…’
Justin Fairfax / IMAGE: WTVR CBS 6 via Youtube
Nowhere has such passivity been more evident than in the allegations against Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and their parallels with the Brett Kavanaugh allegations last fall.
Like Kavanaugh, Fairfax was accused by a California college professor of an assault that was jostled into her memory by his sudden appearance in the national spotlight.
Late Friday, details emerged of a second accuser alleging Fairfax raped her while the two were students at Duke University. Details and fallout remained to be seen.
Fairfax’s primary accuser, Vanessa Tyson, who said she was forced to perform oral sex on him when both were graduate students volunteering at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, even hired the same high-profile attorney as Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford.
Several key differences exist: the Tyson account is more detailed than Blasey Ford’s and with fewer holes in the story. Also, there was no apparent alcohol use that might cloud the memories, and it involved only a 15-year gap rather than 35 years.
Despite an early denial, Fairfax also acknowledged that the encounter happened but says it was consensual. And notably, because Tyson is herself a Democrat, the political motives that were ascribed to Blasey Ford’s conveniently timed accusations are far less a factor.
The biggest difference of all, though, is that the chorus of impassioned cries to “Believe women” has fallen silent. Instead, those Democrats who are willing to address it maintain that further investigation is needed before passing judgment and demanding accountability.
“It’s still a he-said, she-said,” the Associated Press quoted state Sen. Barbara Favola as saying.
Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez also hemmed and hawed, stressing the importance of “due process” after having ignored Democrat calls during the Kavanaugh case for chauvinist skeptics to “shut up.”
The Washington Post compiled comments from several prominent Congressional Democrats, and nearly all sought to reserve judgment, in stark contrast with the Kavanaugh hearings.
Most began by couching their equivocations under the qualifier of “I believe we must listen to women, but…”
America Rising, a conservative political-action group, released a video showing even more awkward efforts to dance around the topic.
After the second accuser, Meredith Watson, emerged late on Friday, some of the prominent state-level Democrats appeared to take a firmer position against Fairfax with a statement saying it was time for him to step aside.
Republicans in the legislature indicated they may put forward articles of impeachment.
Fairfax, however, at press time, remained adamant that he would not resign.
Going Underground
In the case of Gov. Ralph Northam, who last Saturday recanted an earlier mea culpa over the blatantly and inexcusably racist images on his personal yearbook page in his senior year of medical school, those who rushed to condemn the governor with near universal calls for his resignation fell largely silent after the Fairfax scandal broke.
However, Northam’s subsequent denial—which in the eyes of many did more harm than good—and his refusal to step down of his own accord, pose a dilemma for his critics. Even if the claims were somehow provable, meaning witnesses came forward to contradict the governor, nothing about wearing blackface or KKK robes in a 35-year-old yearbook violates the law.
Ralph Northam’s 1984 Eastern Medical yearbook / IMAGE: CNN screenshot via Youtube
According to the Associated Press, he has weathered the storm thus far by staying out of sight, using underground tunnels and communicating, if necessary, through a crisis PR firm.
Like many of his fellow Democrats, Northam, who was statutorily limited to a single term as governor, seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach, doing his best to stall while weighing the best strategy to dodge political consequences.
“His best hope of survival in the short term might be the eruption of two other controversies that have since hit the two men next in line to succeed him, both Democrats,” said the AP article. “The party might be loath to oust the three for fear of handing the governor’s office over to the Republican legislative leader who is next in line.
Whitewashing Blackface
To some extent, Northam’s strategy appears to be working. While denying he was in the damaging yearbook photo, Northam admitted to just enough guilt—claiming to have worn blackface for a Michael Jackson dance contest—to shift the focus away from the more damaging—and more likely—possibility that he was the Klansman. He even called on investigators to use facial recognition technology, seeming confident that it would disprove he was the less problematic half of the racist duo.
Meanwhile, copping to a separate, undocumented blackface incident offered him the perfect deflection defense. In the mid-80s, public acceptance of blackface was such that Hollywood was still using it as a vehicle for comedies. Whether or not one now finds it offensive, blackface was prevalent enough in the time period that laying blame on Northam would surely mean setting up other dominoes to fall.
Image from Virginia Military Institute’s 1968 yearbook depicting cadets in blackface. / IMAGE: WAVY TV 10 via Youtube
And indeed, it didn’t take long for the partisan press to lay cover for the embattled gov by painting a false equivalency to Virginia’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment.
On Thursday, The Virginia Pilotfirst reported that the 1968 yearbook Norment helped edit at Virginia Military Institute included several inappropriate references to minorities.
Astoundingly, more in the media seemed to pick up on that engineered scandal than on any of the earlier ones involving the more prominent Democrats.
But unlike Northam, Norment came out swinging, pointing out that he was one of seven editors, that none of the offensive content was directly traced to him, and that he had, in fact, been a vocal supporter of the integration movement taking place at the time, as evidenced on his personal pages.
“The use of blackface is abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it,” Norment said in a statement. “However, I am not in any of the photos referenced on pages 82 or 122, nor did I take any of the photos in question… I am not surprised that those wanting to engulf Republican leaders in the current situations involving the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General would highlight the yearbook from my graduation a half century ago.”
Muddying the Waters
Mark Herring/IMAGE: YouTube
Another blackface case to emerge in the wake of Northam’s scandal was Attorney General Mark Herring‘s.
Facing the possibility that he, as third in line for the governorship, might come under scrutiny, Herring got out in front of the liability by acknowledging that photographic evidence might exist showing him, too, wearing shoe polish to pay tribute to ’80s rapper Kurtis Blow.
Herring’s confession added several shades of nuance to Northam’s defense—first and foremost by again directing the media focus on the lesser sin that the governor may have committed, ensuring that the story was about blackface and not klansmen. Being lumped in with Herring’s more benign appropriation of skin tone diminished the weight of Northam’s offense by association.
It also introduced the question of degree, posing a problem of whether all instances of blackface were equally egregious and unpardonable. Could one offender be punished and not the other?
For Democrats, who were confronting the possibility that Republican House Speaker Kurt Cox would be next in line after Herring, it also tested the limits of their “moral clarity” versus pragmatism, according to Quentin Kidd, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Kidd likened it to three sinking ships “that suddenly lash themselves together and find they can float.”
Or, as Democrat political operative Zac Petkanas told The Daily Journal, the outcome must determine the consequences.
“The Democratic Party has made it clear we will not tolerate racism or the way some men have treated women,” Petkanas said. “They just have to do it in a smart way that respects voters’ wishes that Democrats be in charge.”
‘Both Sides of the Aisle’?
Like Petkanas, other Democrats seemed to be in total denial of the fact that racism or misogyny could figure into the Democrats legacy in such a way.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a 2020 presidential hopeful, said in scandals such as these, the offender’s party was irrelevant.
“I don’t think this is a party issue,” he told The Daily Journal while expressing doubts that it would impact Democrats in the long term.
Booker, who during the Kavanaugh hearings rode out his own abuse scandal and charges of hypocrisy, opportunistically used the Virginia scandal to point a finger vaguely at Republicans. “We’ve seen these problems on both sides of the aisle. I think this is an issue with a very difficult past, a painful past, a hurtful past that we have. And a lot of the truth telling that’s going on is going to lay the groundwork for reconciliation that we all need.”
But it was unclear what truth telling Booker was referring to, as Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was even more vocal in his denial, pinning the blame for the Democrats’ refusal to face accountability squarely on the shoulders of President Donald Trump.
“This is but a symptom of a greater syndrome that currently plagues our country as a result of not acting on President Trump’s bigotry,” Green said.
Trump, meanwhile, offered his own take that the fallout would help the state move back toward the red column.
Democrats at the top are killing the Great State of Virginia. If the three failing pols were Republicans, far stronger action would be taken. Virginia will come back HOME Republican) in 2020!
But for now, Republicans are relegated to the back seat.
Whether we as a nation will hold our public figures accountable or continue to tacitly condone overt evidence of racism and sexual assault accusations depends on the standard to which Democrats now choose to hold their own.
‘It’s the first step down a dark path to socialism…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On Thursday, advocates of a “Green New Deal” that is warily regarded by many as a socialist power grab took their first step by releasing a legislative framework.
.@AOC unveils #GreenNewDeal: “Today is also the day that we choose to assert ourselves as a global leader in transitioning to 100% renewable energy and charting that path… We should do it because we are an example to the world.” https://t.co/2wVPSEx6SKpic.twitter.com/a6AG8TWtPK
The materials, released by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., immediately raised more red flags when people took notice of the plan to “Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.”
Many on both sides of the aisle have questioned and criticized the shaky math that Ocasio–Cortez and her cohorts have used, which also includes $4.6 trillion at minimum to repair and upgrade infrastructure.
But despite the many questions it raised from its lack of specific funding details, all five of the Democrats currently running for the 2020 presidential nomination said they endorsed it. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., all signed on to cosponsor.
Less enthusiastic was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who downplayed it as being only one of many possible proposals, according to Politico.
Pelosi appeared to mock its vagueness in her comments.
“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”
Energy advocates also shredded the vague proposal as a moonshot.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the world is ending in 12 years, and her only solution is a 14-page document without any specifics or numbers,” said Power The Future Executive Director Daniel Turner. ” I don’t agree with Michael Bloomberg often, but he is dead-on when he calls the so-called Green New Deal a ‘pie in the sky’ idea.”
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Work, blasted it as a raw deal for American taxpayers.
“It’s a socialist manifesto that lays out a laundry list of government giveaways,” he said. “… As Democrats take a hard left turn, this radical proposal would take our growing economy off the cliff and our nation into bankruptcy. It’s the first step down a dark path to socialism.”
In his State of the Union address earlier this week, President Donald Trump vowed to fight efforts to turn the U.S. into a socialist nation resembling Venezuela.
In response, Ocasio–Cortez, 29, who drew comparisons to a surly teenager for remaining seated and refusing to applaud during the speech’s calls for compromise, said that Trump—despite his having ushered in one of the strongest economies in U.S. history and established the country for the first time as an energy exporter—had offered up no vision for how to lead the country.
Why should I be “spirited and warm” for this embarrassment of a #SOTU?
Tonight was an unsettling night for our country. The president failed to offer any plan, any vision at all, for our future.
We’re flying without a pilot. And I‘m not here to comfort anyone about that fact. https://t.co/7bu3QXFMnC
‘Virginians and people across the country deserve better from their leaders…’
Tom Perez / IMAGE: Fox59.com screenshot
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez is understandably responsible for putting a positive spin on the party’s message.
But as scandal embroiled Virginia’s top three Democrats on Thursday, those spins turned into back-flips.
The commonwealth’s current leadership crisis touched on at least two crucial topics that Democrats over the past couple years have trumpeted and demanded public figures be held accountable for: racism and sexual assault.
In an interview Wednesday with an Indianapolis Fox affiliate, however, Perez struggled to distance and extricate himself—and the DNC—from any moral culpability, saying it was up to the state-level Democrats to pass judgment and determine the consequences.
“I have continued to have conversations with people inside Virginia, leaders there, because I think it’s really important when situations of this nature arise to make sure I’m having conversations with people who are truly on the front lines,” Perez said.
Ralph Northam
The saga began when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was revealed to have included on his medical school yearbook page a photograph of two individuals—one in blackface and the other in Ku Klux Klan regalia.
After Big League Politics broke the story, Northam seemed to acknowledge that he was one of the two (without saying which), eliciting nearly universal calls for his resignation from members of both political parties.
To his credit, Perez was among them.
JUST IN: DNC Chair Tom Perez calls for Gov. Northam to resign: “Virginians and people across the country deserve better from their leaders, and it is clear that Ralph Northam has lost their trust and his ability to govern.” pic.twitter.com/rvgWHrtXB5
But after recanting his confession in a bizarre press conference last weekend, Northam has since resisted the resignation calls and thus far dodged accountability, while few seem to be pressing the issue any farther.
Justin Fairfax
Justin Fairfax / IMAGE: WTVR CBS 6 via Youtube
From a political standpoint, Democrats’ condemnation of Northam hinged on the fact that his lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was an even more radical progressive, with the added benefit of being black.
Those reassurances came crashing down, however, when sexual-assault allegations surfaced against Fairfax, which he initially denied before acknowledging that a “consensual” encounter took place during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
In some ways, the allegations closely mirrored those raised against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last fall, although they were more detailed and recent than the Kavanaugh claims, with several other factors making them a more credible case.
But while Christine Blasey Ford‘s uncorroborated accusations and the corresponding #MeToo movement saw Democrats demanding that sexual-assault victims be given the benefit of the doubt, Perez sang a somewhat different tune for Fairfax.
Although still appearing to uphold the “Believe women” mantra, Perez hypocritically downplayed Fairfax accuser Dr. Vanessa Tyson’s charges of forcible fellatio, referring to them euphemistically as “sexual misconduct.”
Dr. Vanessa Tyson / IMAGE: Angela Shelton via Youtube
“Anytime a woman comes forward with an allegation of, uh, sexual misconduct we take those seriously and she must always be treated with respect, and the person accused must always be treated with the appropriate due process,” Perez said.
Unfortunately, conservative demands for precisely that fell on deaf ears during the Kavanaugh hearing, where “due process” and “presumption of innocence” against the dubious claims were, in some instances, aggressively mocked and dismissed on the Left.
Rather than condemn the calls from people like Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, that men needed to “shut up,” Perez instead blamed the manufactured rape crisis on “toxic masculinity,” going so far as to declare himself a “feminist” in a softball interview last October with the liberal blog Quartz.
By contrast, Perez told Fox 59 on Wednesday that he didn’t have all the facts yet on the Fairfax accusations. “I’m a big believer in trying to do my best and do due diligence before making judgments of that nature,” he said.
The Fairfax double-speak was not the first time Perez was called out for his disingenuous rhetoric over women’s sexual assault. His own former deputy, Rep. Keith Ellison, now the attorney general of Minnesota, also escaped accountability last year for allegedly assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
When pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper as to whether Ellison accuser Karen Monahan should be given the benefit of the doubt, Perez quickly deflected.
Mark Herring
As questions over succession arose this week, Virginia’s Attorney General Mark Herring, third in line for the governorship, came forward Wednesday to acknowledge that he, like Northam, had worn blackface during the 1980s.
At the time, there was little public condemnation of it, with major film releases like 1986’s “Soul Man” using blackface as a vehicle for comedy. In more recent years, however, the blackface act has been associated with racist minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era that perpetuated negative stereotypes and caricatured the entire race.
Mark Herring/IMAGE: YouTube
Controversies, regardless of the intentions behind them, have ensnared everyone from elementary school teachers to college students to Hollywood celebrities.
Simply defending the use of blackface in Halloween costumes resulted in “Today” show co-host Megyn Kelly being drummed out in disgrace last year.
And in a recent opinion piece for the Arizona Republic, one black restaurant patron declared that it was even inappropriate for the establishment to have an old photograph of Welsh mine workers covered in coal dust because it made him uncomfortable.
But again, on the topic of blackface, Perez avoided taking a direct stance criticizing Herring.
“The black caucus of Virginia has been meeting with the attorney general today, and I haven’t had the opportunity because I’ve been going from meeting to meeting to get a read-out of those meetings to see what is their sense of the, uh, appropriate course of action,” he said.
Even more brazenly, Perez tried to put a positive spin on the attorney general’s actions. He commended Herring for pro-actively coming forward with the potentially disqualifying scandal, ignoring the fact that Virginia’s top two officials had done the exact opposite with denials and stonewalling.
“I was heartened by Attorney General Herring’s acknowledgement—affirmative acknowledgement—of what he’d done in the past and why it was wrong and his coming forward to apologize and atone,” Perez said.
‘Antithetical to What We Stand For’
Ralph Northam’s 1984 Eastern Medical yearbook / IMAGE: CNN screenshot via Youtube
Of course, even when Perez was criticizing the Virginia Democrats’ conduct, he somehow managed to slip an abject falsehood in the place of a mea culpa.
“The revelations involving the governor and the attorney general, um, are antithetical to what we stand for in the Democratic Party,” he said.
Historical scholars, on the other hand, would contend that it was the Southern Democratic Party of yore, in Virginia and other states, that fostered the racist attitudes of Jim Crow and the KKK in the first place, even after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
During school integration efforts, powerful Democratic politicians in Virginia, such as Sen. Harry Byrd, led a campaign of massive resistance that lasted into the early 1970s.
West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, who had been a KKK member and had filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, went on to become the longest serving Democrat in the Senate. As President pro tempore, he was third in line for the presidency, after Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when he died in 2010.
Less than a decade later, acknowledgement and atonement seem to be the last things on Perez’s mind.
“These things have no place in the Democratic Party, and that’s why we take them so seriously,” he said.
‘I wish her no harm or humiliation, nor do I seek to denigrate her or diminish her voice. But I cannot agree with a description of events that I know is not true…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax found himself defiantly fighting for his political life this week and hinted at fellow Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam orchestrating a smear campaign against him, the woman at the center of a sexual-assault scandal went public with her story.
Vanessa Tyson, an associate professor of politics at California’s Scripps College, released a three-page statement through the law firm Katz, Marshall and Banks, relaying the lurid details of the 2004 assault where Fairfax allegedly forced her to perform oral sex in a hotel room during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Statement of Dr. Vanessa Tyson, who has accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault in 2004:
“After the assault, I suffered from both deep humiliation and shame,” Tyson said in the statement. “I did not speak about it for years, and I (like most survivors) suppressed those memories and emotions…”
They flooded back, however, when she saw an October 2017 article about Fairfax’s run for lieutenant governor.
“The image hit me like a ton of bricks,” she said, “triggering buried traumatic memories and the feelings of humiliation I’d felt so intensely…”
As noted by Breitbart, many other parallels exist between the two cases, but their key difference—the fact that Fairfax is an African–American Democrat who last week seemed poised to ascend into the governor’s seat—also underscored the many egregious hypocrisies and double standards of the Left.
While The Washington Post was quick to jump on Blasey Ford’s account, despite a lack of corroboration, it spiked Tyson’s story when she first approached the Jeff Bezos-owned paper a year ago.
Tyson’s account also differs from Blasey Ford’s in the precision and level of detail, the fact that both acknowledge and remember the encounter, as well as the fact that both were fully mature adults—at the time graduate students—and that there is no apparent political motive, both being Democratic supporters.
The silence on the Fairfax allegations starkly demonstrates how, for many on the Left, the Blasey Ford allegations and even weaker charges against Kavanaugh were a just a handy partisan and ideological weapon https://t.co/AihtBjhYYj
Fairfax issued a rebuttal to Tyson’s statement in which he maintained that their encounter was “consensual.”
“I wish her no harm or humiliation, nor do I seek to denigrate her or diminish her voice. But I cannot agree with a description of events that I know is not true,” he said.
Fairfax seemed the heir apparent to the gubernatorial seat last week after Northam admitted—before later recanting—that he had posed in a racist photograph featured on his 1984 medical school yearbook page.
Many prominent figures from both political parties called on him to resign, but he has thus far resisted.
It remains to be seen whether the weight of Fairfax’s scandal will cause some in the party to dial back their demands or suddenly fall silent.
Compounding the crisis, Attorney General Mark Herring, third in line for the governorship by Virginia law, said a photograph from the 1980s showed him, like Northam, wearing blackface.
While all three are Democrats, the fourth and final person in the succession order would be Kirk Cox, the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. But even as Cox called on Northam to resign, he said Monday that the state legislature would be unlikely to pursue impeachment charges.
“I think there’s a rightful hesitation about a removal from office,” Cox said. “Impeachment—that’s a very high standard.”
‘I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted….’
Elizabeth Warren/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After long denying that she had benefited from false claims of minority status early in her professional career, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is doing damage control from revelations that she listed “American Indian” on her 1986 Texas State Bar card.
Using an open records request, The Washington Post obtained the previously undisclosed document and broke the story on Tuesday, hours before President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was guaranteed to dominate the next day’s news cycle.
“I can’t go back,” Warren said in an interview with The Post. “But I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted.”
It was previously known, but sparsely reported, that Warren had identified as a minority in the 1986 Association of American Law Schools Faculty Directory, released a year before she accepted a prestigious position at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
As Mary Katharine Ham noted in The Federalist, “Both Harvard and Penn touted her minority status in literature about their law schools.”
After apologizing to the Cherokee Nation recently for having taken a widely-mocked DNA test that revealed only a trace of Indian DNA—less than the typical American Caucasian—Warren attempted to bury the lede by tacking on in her Post interview that it was also intended to cover her earlier exploitation of minority status while at the Ivy League law schools.
“I told him I was sorry for furthering confusion about tribal citizenship,” Warren told The Post, referencing a conversation between herself and Bill John Baker, principal chief of the Cherokee. “I am also sorry for not being more mindful about this decades ago. We had a good conversation.”
Elizabeth Warren’s 1986 Texas Bar card/ IMAGE: Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
While it seems Warren, one of the first major Democratic candidates to formally announce her 2020 bid for the White House, hoped to get out in front of the controversy, or at least appear to be addressing it proactively, the Post revelation poses further challenges to her judgment, ethics and integrity.
Warren has attempted to play against type by casting herself as a champion of the common folk, chugging a beer on New Year’s Eve, and calling on her fellow Democrats to disavow dark money funding and rely only on grassroots donations.
But she has been unable to live down her own past history of benefiting from the same things she claims now to oppose, including having her early political career bolstered by billionaire George Soros.
Soros indicated that he planned on sitting out the crowded Democratic presidential primary instead of financially or otherwise backing a specific candidate.
Warren also seems to have lost the crucial support of her own home-base newspaper, The Boston Globe. While The Globe had long laid cover for her on the Cherokee-gate scandal—asserting without evidence that she never benefited from minority status and also that her DNA test supported her heritage claims—it discouraged her from running for the White House after her November re-election race showed declining support in the liberal stronghold of Massachusetts.
One of the most vocal supporters of Warren’s floundering campaign, however, has been President Donald Trump. Although Trump had yet to comment on the latest developments as of Wednesday morning, he has routinely mocked “Pocahontas” on Twitter over the false heritage claims and expressed hope that she will be selected to run against him.
Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice.
‘We must choose whether we are defined by our differences or whether we dare to transcend them…’
Donald Trump / IMAGE: Screenshot via Yahoo News
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With nary a mention of the government shutdown looming in 10 more days, President Donald Trump spent much of his roughly 90-minute State of the Union address seeking common ground and focusing on American “greatness” past, present and future.
“Tonight, I ask you to choose greatness,” he said, riffing on his 2016 “Make America Great Again” campaign theme.
The anniversaries of two landmark American events provided anchor points for the president: the 75th anniversary of America’s D-Day assault launching the liberation of Europe, and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
Trump, whose invited guest list featured an array of heroes and survivors—including several Holocaust survivors and three World War II veterans who helped to rescue them—called on the divided Congress to reflect on the momentous events that preceded them in the annals of America.
“Together we represent the most extraordinary nation in all of history,” he said. “What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered? I ask the men and women of this Congress—look at the opportunities before us.”
In his tone and in several of his agenda items, Trump seemed to deliberately be reaching across the aisle, thus giving the partisan opposition in Congress little room to heckle or jeer.
He even gamely indulged them at times, offering a nod to the record number of women present in the new Congress, many clad in white, who pointedly observed the irony that voter disdain for the president had, in some cases, helped elect them.
“You weren’t supposed to do that. Thank you very much,” he deadpanned in one of the evening’s moments of levity as the Congressional Democrats raised the roof.
World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors were among those Trump honored at his 2018 State of the Union address. / IMAGE: Screenshot via Yahoo News
Another of the speech’s lighter moments came with the chamber’s singing “Happy Birthday” to 81-year-old Dachau concentration camp survivor Judah Samet.
“They wouldn’t do that for me,” Trump observed.
The president emphasized the major successes of his first two years in the White House—among them one of the most robust and sustained economic booms ever witnessed in U.S. history and a growing energy independence.
He also underscored several promises he had kept where others before him had faltered, such as working with Canada and Mexico on a revamped trade deal to replace NAFTA.
“For years politicians promised [American workers] they would renegotiate for a better deal, but no one ever tried until now,” he said.
Trump outlined a number of policy objectives where compromise already had been achieved, such as criminal justice reform. He introduced guests including recently commuted prisoner Alice Johnson and Matthew Charles, the first person released under the new First Step program.
He also discussed several initiatives that Democrats could readily applaud, such as infrastructure improvements and healthcare reforms (while preserving Obamacare’s protections of pre-existing conditions), and he proposed a new goal to eradicate the HIV virus in America and beyond within 10 years, while also taking on childhood cancer. (Seated next to First Lady Melania Trump was a young brain-cancer survivor, Grace Eline, whom he introduced.)
On some of the more contentious points in the president’s speech—such as border security, abortion, socialism and anti-Semitism—Trump effectively framed his argument in moral terms that brought clear discomfort to the Democrats in the audience who have undermined American norms.
“In the past, most of the people in this room voted for a wall, but the proper wall never got built. I will get it built,” he pledged.
Sen. Bernie Sanders reacts to Trump vowing not to let America become a socialist country. / IMAGE: Screenshot via Yahoo News
Trump also promised never to abolish ICE and never to allow America to become a socialist country—both directed at the leftist extremists in the room who had made those objectives centerpieces in their recent campaign promises.
Addressing the scourges of drug- and human-trafficking, sexual assault, gang affiliation and other immigration-related crimes, Trump touted the “moral duty” of border enforcement.
“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate. It is actually very cruel,” he said.
He gave a nod to the “Angel Moms and Dads”—parents of those killed by illegal immigrants—who figured prominently into his previous State of the Union, and he introduced Debra Bissel, who only three weeks ago lost her parents after they were shot to death by an illegal immigrant at their home in Reno, Nevada.
But Trump also recognized the benefits and the necessity of an immigration system that works, deflating Democrats’ past efforts to frame mass migration at the border as a humanitarian crisis.
“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” he said. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”
Trump deftly used a call for paid parental leave, which drew Democrat applause, to transition into one of the other major points of division—and likely a major battle in the lead-up to 2020—abortion.
Condemning the New York legislature’s passage of a law supporting partial-birth abortion and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam‘s recent comments advocating for post-natal infanticide in some cases, Trump said, “There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days.”
He called on Congress to pursue legislation against late-term abortions, saying “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life.”
Trump touched on a number of foreign policy issues, including his withdrawal of troops from Syria and ongoing overtures for peace in both North Korea and Afghanistan, where he has recently engaged Taliban leaders in talks.
“We do not know if we will achieve an agreement,” he said, “but we do know after two decades of war, the time has come to at least try to achieve peace.”
However, Trump reserved particularly harsh criticism for Iran, calling to mind for some, perhaps, George W. Bush’s inclusion of it with Iraq and North Korea in the infamous “Axis of Evil.”
The phrase in Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union speech in 2002 marked the first sign since the Jimmy Carter administration of a strained relationship with the fundamentalist Islamic republic, now believed to be a major sponsor of Middle Eastern terrorism.
After undoing the Obama administration’s efforts to ease Iranian tensions with a tepid anti-nuclearization deal, and instead implementing what he described as the toughest sanctions the U.S. had ever imposed, Trump said Iran was continuing to do “bad things.”
Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were alluded to in with a criticism of anti-Semitism. / IMAGE: Screenshot via Yahoo News
“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people,” he said.
Trump likewise called for a unified effort in condemning American-based anti-Semitism, as some freshmen Democratic congresswomen have faced criticism for their attacks on Jews in Israel.
He introduced SWAT officer Timothy Matson, an injured hero who helped confront the shooter in the recent massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
Calling anti-Semitism a “vile poison,” Trump said, “With one voice we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs.”
In another move that was likely to disarm his domestic political adversaries, Trump also criticized Russia and mentioned his recent withdrawal from the outdated Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
“While we followed the agreement and the rules to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms,” he said.
Trump said the U.S. had no choice but to withdraw. “Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others, or perhaps we can’t—in which case we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrates as Trump recognizes the women in Congress. / IMAGE: Screenshot via Yahoo News
But early on in his speech, the president emphasized the need for domestic political foes to come together and remain united in order to tackle the threats from abroad.
He pointed specifically at the ongoing investigations against his 2016 campaign and its alleged foreign ties—although little has yet been presented to implicate him, despite the convictions of several former advisers.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States, and the only things that can stop it are foolish wars, politics and ridiculous partisan investigations,” Trump said. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”
Capping off his speech with a note of optimism, Trump, whose delivery stood out as more eloquent and focused than in other addresses, took a surprisingly poetic turn.
“Our biggest victories are still to come,” he said. “We have not yet begun to dream. We must choose whether we are defined by our differences or whether we dare to transcend them. We must choose whether we will squander our inheritance—or whether we will proudly declare that we are Americans. We do the incredible. We defy the impossible. We conquer the unknown.”
