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Monthly Archives: March 2018

Detroit pub refused to serve Irish people at St. Patrick’s Day Parade — to make a point


 

USA TODAY
Ann Zaniewski
22 hrs ago

© Atlas Industries Bill Johns acted as a bouncer Sunday, March 10 2018 outside the “No Irish Pub,” a fake pub set up for one day on Michigan Avenue in Detroit as part of an experiment to raise awareness about how poorly Irish immigrants were once treated in…
DETROIT — The bouncer who called Irish people “lazy” and “lower-class citizens” last weekend at the door of a pub on the bustling parade route of Detroit’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade ignited more than a few tempers.
But he wasn’t trying to spark a fight — just make people think.
It was all part of an experiment to raise awareness about how poorly Irish immigrants were once treated in the U.S. against the backdrop of prominent modern-day conversations about race and immigration.

Creator Dan Margulis had a production company record the scene at the fake, temporary pub and produce a polished video of people’s stunned reactions. The video is posted on his website, NoIrishPub.com.
“On a day when everyone is proclaiming solidarity with an immigrant group … we wanted them to feel what it was like to be treated like an Irish immigrant … years ago in this country, and, hopefully, that would get them to think about the way we treat current immigrant groups,” Margulis said.
Margulis, who works in advertising and lives in Bloomfield Hills, rented an empty space on Michigan Avenue on a strip between popular bars Nemo’s and McShane’s for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Sunday. He hung a sign that said “No Irish Pub.”
People were turned away if they said they were Irish — or were simply wearing green. Only a few of the hundreds of people who tried to enter actually got inside.
Margulis said it was meant to harken back to a time when some businesses would hang “No Irish need apply” signs in their windows.
Century-old newspaper articles that described Irish immigrants as “simians,” “too lazy to work” and members of “a servant race” helped fuel bouncer Bill Johns’ language as he sat outside the pub, telling people they couldn’t come in.
“We don’t need no more immigrants in this country. They’re ruining this country. … The majority of them aren’t helping anybody but themselves,” Johns can be seen on the video telling passers-by.
Margulis said: “People were outraged, and they didn’t understand how someone could be so racist.”
Most people weren’t let in on the secret. The few people who got really angry were given a brochure that explained what was going on. Someone also handed out brochures down the street.
“There were few people who got extremely angry and wanted to fight, and they diffused that,” Margulis said.
He also said: “Our goal wasn’t to make people mad. It was to make people think.”
Margulis said some people who received the handout said they thought the effort was fantastic.
Margulis was inspired to launch “No Irish Pub” by recent media coverage of controversy surrounding the so-called DREAMers and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy.
“The general sentiment (is) that we’re becoming more and more anti-immigrant,” he said. “As we got closer to a day that celebrates immigrants, I thought if those two things collided, I thought maybe it’s a way to get people to think about how we act today. …
“Anything that I think that allows people to experience what it feels like to be discriminated against firsthand, I think it’s good. It shocks people into empathy. I would absolutely do something like this again.”
Follow Ann Zaniewski on Twitter: @AnnZaniewski

Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist’


 

March 12, 20187:40 PM ET
Laurel Walmsley

 

 

In a full-issue article on Australia that ran in National Geographic in 1916, aboriginal Australians were called “savages” who “rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.” The magazine examines its history of racist coverage in its April issue. C.P. Scott (L) and H.E. Gregory (R)/National Geographic 

If National Geographic’s April issue was going to be entirely devoted to the subject of race, the magazine decided it had better take a good hard look at its own history.
Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg asked John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to dive into the magazine’s nearly 130-year archive and report back.
What Mason found was a long tradition of racism in the magazine’s coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.

The April issue of National Geographic is all about race.
National Geographic

“[U]ntil the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,” writes Goldberg in the issue’s editor letter, where she discusses Mason’s findings. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”
Unlike magazines such as Life, “National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture,” Goldberg says, noting that she is the first woman and first Jewish person to helm the magazine – “two groups that also once faced discrimination here.”
To assess the magazine’s coverage historically, Mason delved into old issues and read a couple of key critical studies. He also pored over photographers’ contact sheets, giving him a view of not just the photos that made it into print, but also the decisions that photographers and editors made.
He saw a number of problematic themes emerge.
“The photography, like the articles, didn’t simply emphasize difference, but made difference … very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a hierarchy,” Mason tells NPR. “And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West, and especially the English-speaking world, was at the top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were somewhere underneath.”
For much of its history, the pages of National Geographic depicted the Western world as dynamic, forward-moving and very rational. Meanwhile, Mason says, “the black and brown world was primitive and backwards and generally unchanging.”
One trope that he noticed time and again was photographs showing native people apparently fascinated by Westerners’ technology.
“It’s not simply that cameras and jeeps and airplanes are present,” he says. “It’s the people of color looking at this technology in amusement or bewilderment.” The implication was that Western readers would find humor in such fascination with their everyday goods.
Then there’s how the magazine chose its subject matter. Mason explains that National Geographic had an explicit editorial policy of “nothing unpleasant,” so readers rarely saw war, famine or civic conflict.
He points to an article on South Africa from the early 1960s that barely mentions the Sharpeville Massacre, in which 69 black South Africans were killed by police.

South African gold miners were “entranced by thundering drums” during “vigorous tribal dances,” a 1962 issue reported.
Kip Ross/National Geographic Creative

“There are no voices of black South Africans,” Mason told Goldberg. “That absence is as important as what is in there. The only black people are doing exotic dances … servants or workers. It’s bizarre, actually, to consider what the editors, writers, and photographers had to consciously not see.”
Then there’s the way women of color were often depicted in the magazine: topless.
“Teenage boys could always rely, in the ’50s and ’60s, on National Geographic to show them bare-breasted women as long as the women had brown or black skin,” Mason says. “I think the editors understood this was frankly a selling point to its male readers. Some of the bare-breasted young women are shot in a way that almost resembles glamour shots.”
Mason says the magazine has been dealing with its history implicitly for the last two or three decades, but what made this project different is that Goldberg wanted to make reckoning explicit — “That National Geographic should not do an issue on race without understanding its own complicity in shaping understandings of race and racial hierarchy.”

Although slave labor was used to build homes featured in a 1956 article, the writer contended that they “stand for a chapter of this country’s history every American is proud to remember.” Robert F. Sisson and Donald McBain/National Geographic 
Robert F. Sisson and Donald McBain/National Geographic

For those of us who have spent long afternoons thumbing old issues of the magazine and dreaming of far-off lands, Mason wants to make clear that looking at foreign people and places isn’t a bad thing.
“We’re all curious and we all want to see. I’m not criticizing the idea of being curious about the world. It’s just the other messages that are sent—that it’s not just difference, but inferiority and superiority.”
So where does the storied publication go from here?
One good step would be to invite the diverse contributors to the April issue to become part of the magazine’s regular pool of writers and photographers, Mason suggests.
“Still it’s too often a Westerner who is telling us about Africa or Asia or Latin America,” he says. “There are astonishing photographers from all over the world who have unique visions – not just of their own country, but who could bring a unique vision to photographing Cincinnati, Ohio, if it came to that.”
He notes that the magazine’s images have so often captivated, even when they were stereotypical or skewed. Mason says a number of African photographers have told him that it was magazines like National Geographic and Life that turned them onto photography in the first place.
“They knew that there were problems with the way that they and their people were being represented,” he says. “And yet the photography was often spectacularly good, it was really inviting, and it carried this power. And as young people, these men and women said, I want to do that. I want to make pictures like that.”

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There’s A Central Part Of Irish Heritage That Is Increasingly Overlooked


The American obsession with all things Irish increasingly overlooks the one quality of the Irish people that has enabled that little island to have such an outsized influence on the greater world.

By Casey Chalk
March 16, 2018

President Trump has declared March “Irish-American Heritage Month.” That is fitting, given how much Americans love to brag about their Irish heritage, whether it’s St. Patrick’s Day or not. Irish-themed bumper stickers, Celtic art tattoos, and Celtic crosses are all ubiquitous paraphernalia of Americans eager to assert pride in their ancestral homeland.
About 33 million Americans, or a little over 10 percent of the population claim Irish ancestry. As with every other March 17th, this means we’re in for the usual seas of green clothing, marketing of Irish-themed bric a brac, grocery sales of corned beef, and, of course, the drinking of Guinness. Yet the American obsession with all things Irish increasingly overlooks the one quality of the Irish people that has enabled that little island in the North Atlantic, comparable in size to the state of Indiana, to have such an outsized influence on the greater world: their Christian faith.
The Irish Preserved Christianity…

We should remember that the Emerald Isle was long a backwater of the European world — the Romans, who called it Hibernia, didn’t even bother to try and conquer it. The island was dominated by small Celtic tribal clans constantly at war with one another. Irish life was, to borrow a line from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Patrick, a young Roman-British boy living in the crumbling Roman province of Britannia, was himself captured and sold by Irish slave traders. It was only the introduction of Christianity through the ministry of men like St. Patrick that the distant land underwent a true cultural and spiritual revolution.
Beginning in the sixth century, the island was slowly covered in monasteries, which, as Thomas Cahill recounts in his popular book How the Irish Saved Civilization,” became remarkable centers of learning and cultural preservation in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Christians across Europe traveled to Ireland to participate in the burgeoning Irish monastic tradition. Ireland in turn produced scores of missionary saints and scholars who traveled throughout Europe, facilitating scholarly and religious renewal in the courts of England, France, the Germanic lands, and beyond. Irish missionaries founded monasteries throughout western and central Europe, greatly empowering the growth of Christianity across the continent. The number of Irish saints from this period is simply astounding, and demonstrates the scope and depth of their influence.
… and Christianity Preserved the Irish
In the centuries that followed, Ireland suffered numerous invasions — first by Vikings, then Anglo-Normans. The island endured centuries of warfare and oppression at the hands of outsiders, particularly the Anglo-Norman lords who came to dominate the political landscape. During the reign of English king Henry VIII in the 16th century, a policy of English and Scottish settlement was implemented, further marginalizing the native Irish. Henry also of course broke from the Catholic Church in order to found an autonomous Anglican Church, which he also sought to foist upon the Irish people, who fought to retain their Catholic identity. The Protestant Reformation took a more violent turn under the helm of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, known as “Butcher Cromwell” by the Irish for his scorched earth policies that aimed to eliminate political and religious dissent on the island.
More religious and political persecution followed, particularly in the north of Ireland, where English monarchs sent Calvinist English and Scottish settlers to expand their hegemony over the Irish people. Sadly, the Irish hadn’t seen the worst of it — the introduction of the potato, a staple indigenous to the Western hemisphere, revolutionized Irish agriculture, allowing families to grow a nutritious crop on their small estates. Irish families grew exponentially, while family plots grew smaller and smaller with each generation (for centuries, Irish Catholics were forbidden to purchase or lease land). By the time of the potato blight in the 1840s, there were more than 8 million people living in Ireland (far more than there are even now!). The blight caused widespread famine, and over one million of the Irish people starved to death or perished of diseases related to malnutrition. Their English overlords did little to stem the crisis. In a ten-year period from 1845 to 1855, 1.5 million Irish immigrated to America.

Through all of these trials, the Irish sought to retain their unique cultural and religious traditions. It was their indelible faith in God that preserved them through these centuries of trials, culminating in the disaster of the potato famine. The Irish brought their deeply-rooted Christian beliefs with them to the United States, having an incalculable impact on the country’s Catholic Church in places like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. To this day, many of America’s Catholic priests are natives of Ireland, and Irish missionaries continue to do their work across the globe. Moreover, the Republic of Ireland, founded in 1922 after a brutal rebellion, is one of the few modern countries established with an explicit allegiance to God (and even the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ!). It remains one of the few countries in Europe that largely prohibits abortion. The world has Irish Christians to thank for much of the good found in this world, and the Irish have their indefatigable Christian identity to thank for their outsized cultural influence.
The Banality of Contemporary Irish Pride
Despite this glorious story of faith and courage amidst great suffering and persecution, contemporary Irish-American identity often ignores its Christian heritage. St. Patrick’s Day is an occasion for cheap, ridiculous green paraphernalia, drunkenness, and debauchery. People pride themselves in their Irish heritage, yet the focus is far more on the food, drink, music, and art than it is on the religious devotion that guided their ancestors through a millennia and a half of hardships. When I studied abroad in Dublin as an undergraduate, most of the American students, like me, were of Irish lineage. Few of them came to Ireland to worship God or step foot in a church. Most came to get sh*t-faced drunk in bars all over the Emerald Isle. The Guinness, Harp, Jameson, and Paddy, among others, never stopped flowing.
I admit, Irish alcohol is a glorious, wonderful thing. Yet it too is a gift from God, to be enjoyed in moderation. Moreover, the Irish didn’t convert Europe, preserve Western civilization, or bless American society by existing in a state of perpetual inebriation. Rather, it was Irish prayers, Irish sermons, Irish rosary beads, and calloused Irish hands that built a cultural heritage known across the world. An Irishman separated from his Christian identity is no Irishman at all. Moreover, I suspect our many non-religious St. Patrick’s Day festivities would be practically unintelligible to our devoutly Christian Irish ancestors.
My admiration for my own Irish heritage runs deep. My mother’s ancestors were all Irish Catholic immigrants to America who came to this country during the famine. They ran bars in Brooklyn and farmed the land in Kansas. They had names like Fitzpatrick, McGahey, Collins, and Casey (the source of my own name). I love Gaelic music, Irish soda bread, Celtic art, and, of course, a cold pint of Guinness. I even proposed to my wife on a St. Patrick’s Day weekend following a concert of the legendary traditional Irish music group The Chieftains. Yet the foundation for all of this is my love for the faith of my fathers, that holy faith, of millions of Irish men and women who were true to God until death. That, more than anything else, is an Irish identity worthy of our pride.
Casey Chalk is a graduate student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College.

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Is This The Other Shoe?


Soviet-born Donald Trump adviser Felix Sater: ‘Send ’em to jail’ if Robert Mueller finds collusion

PETE MADDEN and MEGHAN KENEALLY
Good Morning America
March 16, 2018

Felix Sater is a lot of things. One of them, he says, is misunderstood.
The Soviet-born American businessman, who says he was a “senior advisor to Donald Trump,” has become known for his supporting role in the unfolding drama that is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Sater is often referred to as the convicted felon and onetime stock scammer who promised to “get all of Putins team to buy in” on a proposed plan to build “Trump Tower Moscow” in the heat of the presidential campaign.
“I know how to play it, and we will get this done,” Sater wrote to Trump attorney and confidant Michael Cohen, his childhood friend, in emails published by The Washington Post and The New York Times. “Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA, and we can engineer it.”
The project was abandoned, but as federal investigators launched a wide-ranging probe of alleged Russsian interference in the 2016 election including possible connections to Trump’s campaign and personal businesses, Sater quickly found himself caught in the dragnet. Now, in an exclusive interview with George Stephanopoulos airing Friday morning on Good Morning America, Sater tells ABC News that there is much, much more to his life story.
And he’s right.
“I don’t think if a screenwriter was trying to write this movie that they could make this up,” Sater said.

Sater, 52, says that for the past two decades he has served as a high-level intelligence asset for the DIA, CIA and the FBI. As first reported this week by Buzzfeed News, Sater has helped bust mafia families, capture cybercriminals and pursue top terrorists — including Osama bin Laden — earning praise from some of the country’s top law enforcement officials.
He won’t say whether or not he’s been interviewed by the special counsel, but it’s almost certain that Mueller knows his body of work well. He served as FBI Director for much of Sater’s clandestine career.
As questions have swirled about his supposed loyalty to Russia, Sater is speaking out, recasting himself as an unheralded protector of the United States.
“I am a patriot,” Sater said. “Having the opportunity to serve my country and do anything in its defense was a no brainer. It was, ‘Where do I sign up?’”
A SURPRISING COVERT PAST
Sater says he was recruited as an intelligence asset in perhaps the unlikeliest of places — the bathroom.
He was a young man living in Russia, where he was born, trying to rebuild a business career derailed by what he calls “a bad, stupid, drunken night in a bar.” He had been convicted of felony assault charges and spent a year in prison following a bloody bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a margarita glass.
He needed money so desperately upon his release, he says, that he started working on what he calls “the dark side of Wall Street,” a reference to a so-called “pump-and-dump” stock scheme that reportedly defrauded investors of nearly $40 million.
He was at a dinner party in Moscow when he says one of the guests followed him into the bathroom and identified himself as an agent of the U.S. government. He told Sater that he had unwittingly gained access to a group of high-level Russian intelligence operatives who had valuable information about Russian defense technology.
“They seem to like you,” Sater recalls being told. “You speak Russian. You blend in there. And your country needs you.”
So began, Sater says, his career in espionage. He says he developed assets in several different countries by cultivating cover as a corrupt businessman offering access to illicit schemes and passed information to U.S. agents tasked with handling a variety of threats to national security.
“They used to come to me with cases that had nothing to do with me and ask for my assistance, in which I would enthusiastically and wholeheartedly dive in and try to help,” he said.
He says he tipped off law enforcement to potential assassination attempts on Secretary of State Colin Powell and President George W. Bush; obtained information and photographs about North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear program; lured Russian cybercriminals hacking the U.S. financial system out of hidings so that they could be unmasked and captured.
And, he says, he was even tasked with hunting for Osama bin Laden and managed to turn Mullah Omar’s personal secretary into a key source that provided intelligence about al-Qaeda hideouts.
The information he had obtained was so valuable that when his past caught up with him and he finally faced his sentencing in connection with that multimillion-dollar fraud, the judge let him off with a mere $25,000 fine.
Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate during her confirmation hearing that Sater “provided valuable and sensitive information to the government” and that information was “crucial to national security.”
That work, he says, continues in some unspecified capacity to this day. He said as recently as last year he was asked for “assistance in making evaluations of various foreign governments [and] foreign individuals.”
He reportedly told this story under oath when he testified recently before the House Intelligence Committee, at which point he said even “the Democratic aides who were there to question [me] regarding the Russia-Trump investigation stopped, paused and thanks me for my service to my country.”
“One of the few times in my life that I almost cried,” Sater said.
WHAT HE SAYS HE DID – AND DIDN’T – KNOW
Sater says he made himself valuable to the U.S. government by knowing everything. When it comes to Trump, however, he says he knows next to nothing.
His company, Bayrock Group, began renting office space in Trump Tower. Sater says he introduced himself to Trump in 2000 and began funneling development proposals to Trump’s desk shortly thereafter.
“I would bring him deals,” Sater said.
Sater claims he has helped the Trump Organization secure financing on several major projects, but none has garnered more scrutiny than a failed proposal to build “Trump Tower Moscow” amid the launch of Trump’s controversial campaign for the presidency.
In 2015, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent, which promised a $4 million initial payment to the Trump Organization, to build the tallest building in the world in Moscow. In emails sent to Cohen published by the Post and the Times, Sater appears to celebrate an apparent merger of Trump’s business and political fortunes.
Faced with questions about his boast that he and Cohen could “engineer” a Trump presidency using the deal to court Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support, Sater pleaded ignorance.
“I am not a political person,” Sater said. “I don’t understand the implications of the politics or the various strings that get attached to it and how good or bad it may look.”
Any perceived alignment of Trump’s business and political interests, he said, was purely coincidental.
“I was trying to do a real estate transaction,” Sater told ABC News. “I clearly was not involved in the campaign, nor was I involved in any of the political end, and the hope that a large transaction like that would be built, if that was helpful to his run, that would be great.”
Asked if he knew certain key member of the Trump campaign, he claimed to have had “zero contact” with many of the Trump allies who have fallen under the spotlight. He denied knowing Michael Flynn. And Paul Manafort. And Rick Gates. And George Papadopoulos. And Carter Page.
Asked if then-candidate Trump could have softened his stance on Russia because he was simultaneously pursuing a business deal there, Sater demurred.
“I can’t speak for the president,” he said.
And asked if — given his extensive sources in the both the Russian foreign intelligence services and the Russian criminal underworld — he knew of the effort underway to influence the U.S. election, he issued a forceful denial.
“I was not aware of what they were doing,” Sater said. “I read about it, just like everyone else, in the newspapers.”
Sater called Trump’s claim that he couldn’t pick him out of a lineup “disappointing,” but says Trump has nothing to fear from his testimony to investigators. He is unaware, he said, of any Russian money in any of the Trump projects he worked on and unaware of anyone in Trump’s orbit who may have colluded with foreign powers during the campaign.
If Mueller finds any, Sater recommended stiff penalties.
“Send ‘em to jail,” he said. “Anybody who colluded with anybody– with any other country against America — is guilty of crimes against our country.”
But as for himself, Sater isn’t worried.
“Eventually, it will become known that I’m guilty of trying to build the world’s tallest building,” Sater said, “and that’s about it.”
ABC News’ Matthew Mosk contributed to this report

Clarity


Apparently some voters are still holding on to the idea that the current administration is doing good work. If you are a one issue voter and your issue has been addressed then perhaps you ARE satisfied. As a one issue voter perhaps you have not thought of how ALL legislation and Executive orders affect Everyone. This current administration has tweeted us out of the world circle and allowed some bad actors to emerge as world leaders (Forget about previous administration’s lack of action since we still have the same neer do well Congress). We now have Syria, Turkey (to name a couple) killing their citizens with impunity along with assistance from “their Friend” Russia. This administration is so inept in foreign and local policy that the exiting policies (no matter how poor)  have been weakened to the point of being nonexistent. The revolving door of personnel allows for errors in policy with TOTUS looking on and acting on items that will get the most attention for him and are of little to no value for us. Our long time allies have continued to do their work without us but have not dismissed us. The direction of this administration is still unknown and the very countries that have been impugned by our T.I.C. are using his ego to their advantage. The normal way of setting up meetings with estranged countries is by way of back channels and operatives. Those working the back channels work out the details and demands before the heads of government ever meet. With the current dysfunctional administration we have the possibility of progress or regress depending on what TOTUS says. In this case he (TOTUS) definitely is not the smartest person in the room and his minions are supporting him out of fear of being mocked or called out  shows the incoherence of this administration. The scary part is the shallowness of TOTUS’s knowledge in the details. This is not a PTA meeting where parental input can improve the school experience, this is real life where people can die. The majority party has gone out of its way to ignore issues with our election, I suppose their reasoning is to avoid the bullying of TOTUS. This administration has allowed for the rise of the baser elements of our society which can be a  reveal as to where our elected Representatives priorities lie. If these priorities do not include resistance to the poor policies of this administration  then it is time to replace them with people who understand what is required for the office no matter what party they represent. It is upon us, the voters to resist the “reality show”, name calling and lies that have been so prevalent and viral in the past 10 -20 years of elections. These headline grabbing utterances are used to avoid telling us what a candidate or incumbent stands for. Governing is not entertainment, it is a serious business and we as voters need to demand the dignity required to run for office. I believe we should adopt a “no dignity , no vote” attitude towards any candidate or incumbent no matter what party they belong to.

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School shootings shouldn’t be a common occurrence


Posting in Metea High School Paper

Aimee Leal, Photographer • March 8, 2018 • 35 Comments

When I was in elementary school, I didn’t have to worry about someone coming into my school with an AR-15 and shooting whoever was in their path. If anything, I had to worry about if I was going to get a smiley sticker on my popsicle stick for being a good student that day. It’s 2018 now and children all over the country have to take extra precautions in their schools for fatal shootings that they shouldn’t even be hearing about.
Being a junior in high school, I would never have thought to be having class conversations about school shootings and what we would do if we had one. I would never have expected my teacher to tell me that they will do anything in their power to protect their students. I would never have expected my own President to ignore this issue just to have it progress into something so much worse than before. Students in America’s schools are fearing for their lives as more school shootings happen in all areas of the country, whether they are big or small, fatalities or no fatalities, elementary or high school. Why does our government and our own President wait so long to solve the problem? It isn’t something that should be put on the back burner anymore, it is something that needs action.
Trump repealed the Obama-era regulation when he joined office which would require the SSA to send information of people with mental disabilities to the National Background Check System, which to me is a pretty good idea but many others found it shocking that Obama would think that all people with a disability were ‘a harm to society’ since mental disability can mean numerous disabilities. Both sides are completely understandable but wouldn’t mental health checks be far more beneficial for us rather than just selling these assault weapons to just anyone? When an individual causes a school shooting, it is almost always proven that they have some sort of disorder which caused them to do these things to these students. Even recently in Florida, the shooter is said to have mental disorders and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
How long are our political leaders going to keep pushing these problems to the side? America is angry and wants something done. Students are causing uproars and Walk-Outs to protest against these inefficient gun laws because a school shooting can happen anywhere now. The continuous broken promises from our President of action over the last few months is now becoming unacceptable, how can someone who we are supposed to put our trust in ignore such a horrible situation for so long? Something has to be done so I don’t have to walk into my school with a constant guard up in fear of someone walking in, with a gun and opening fire into my hallway. We are tired of our voices being ignored and if something isn’t done, the more common a school shooting will be in America.

Was America’s Founding Revolutionary Or Conservative?


Dr. Larry Arnn poses the question in the first lecture of Hillsdale College’s free online Constitution 101 course.

By Bre Payton
March 7, 2018

Was America’s founding merely revolutionary? Or in breaking with England, did our Founding Fathers seek to safeguard, conserve if you will, ancient values and truths?
To answer that question, one must view American history through three national crises — its founding, the Civil War, and the rise of progressivism, which still rages on. Increasing hostility to religious freedom and a misguided understanding of the separation of powers prevalent throughout government threaten to unravel America’s constitutional fabric. To keep our freedoms, Americans must understand their true source. We must also understand how our nation’s Founders drafted a Constitution and a system of government devised to protect these liberties.
To Keep Our Freedom, We Must Know Who We Are

In the first lecture of Hillsdale College’s free online Constitution 101 course (which you can take along with me here), Larry Arnn poses a question: “Was the American founding revolutionary or conservative?” He argues that it is both. In seeking to overthrow the rule of the oppressive British government, a revolutionary act, the founders sought to conserve natural law — the highest and oldest source of law.
To understand America, one must understand the country’s four “causes,” the ancient notion that everything man makes has attributes that help explain what a thing’s purpose is. These four causes are: material cause, or the substance a thing is made out of; the efficient cause, or the entity which crafts a thing; the formal cause, a pattern or type something is modeled after; and the final cause, or a thing’s purpose.
America’s material cause is the geographic area of land and its people. Its efficient cause are the men who drafted the Constitution, who fashioned our government and led the revolt against the British crown. The formal cause is the Constitution and our governmental structure. The final cause is the idea of self government as outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration Says Legitimate Rulers Must Subjugate Themselves To Natural Law
The opening words of the Declaration of Independence appeal to an authority higher than the king of England, who these patriots were rebelling against.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

This document puts forth the idea that all men everywhere in the world are equal in the eyes of God and that they are each endowed with rights which no ruler can infringe upon. These ideas, Arnn explains, are ancient ones. Natural law, truth, beauty, the ideal, transcend any one leader or moment in time. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and other ancient thought leaders affirmed natural law’s unchanging nature — a nature that holds supremacy over human lords or masters.
The American Revolution Sought To Conserve Ancient Truths
Writing in approximately 51 B.C.E. Marcus Tullius Cicero states that true law knows not the bounds of time nor space. Natural law does not stop at geographic borders, but is imprinted upon everything in nature itself and is discernible to all men. Cicero states that the source of these laws does not come from man, but from an eternal unchanging source that authored the laws of physics, truth, beauty, and morality into existence.
True law is right reason, consonant with nature, spread through all people. It is constant and eternal; it summons to duty by its orders, it deters from crime by its prohibitions. Its orders and prohibitions to good people are never given in vain; but it does not move the wicked by these orders or prohibitions. It is wrong to pass laws obviating this law; it is not permitted to abrogate any of it; it cannot be totally repealed. We cannot be released from this law by the senate or the people, and it needs no exegete or interpreter like Sextus Aelius. There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one now and another later; but all nations at all times will be bound by this one eternal and unchangeable law, and the god will be the one common master and general (so to speak) of all people. He is the author, expounder, and mover of this law; and the person who does not obey it will be in exile from himself. Insofar as he scorns his nature as a human being, by this very fact he will pay the greatest penalty, even if he escapes all the other things that are generally recognized as punishments.
Cicero’s words echo throughout the Declaration, in which the Founders state it is man’s right to reject a leader who does not subjugate himself to natural law — laws which require a leader to acknowledge the equality of man, his right to worship, and to speak freely without fearing government interference.
These objective realities and the laws of nature are not subject to human rulers, the Founders wrote. Those in authority must submit to these laws. These notions set forth in their Declaration to revolt against the crown were an effort to conserve the ancient principles — truths that had been trampled on by kings who were emboldened by bad theology.

The Founders argue that everyone, even the king, is subject to the laws of nature. In order to be a legitimate ruler, the Founders assert that those in power must recognize and adhere to the laws of nature. If a king or a system of government thwarts these laws, he or she does not posses a legitimate right to rule.
While the American Revolution certainly was revolutionary by definition in that it overthrew the British government in a violent, bloody war, it was not one that threw out tradition and ancient values only to start from scratch. The Founders fought and broke from England in order to preserve these truths and to subjugate themselves to the laws of nature.
Bre Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.

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The Artifice of the Deal


Explanation of The Con.MA

Matt Bai 1 hour 16 minutes ago

Remember that time, way back about two weeks ago, when President Trump berated leaders of his own party, in front of a room full of cameras, for being afraid of the NRA, and he vowed to pass a bipartisan bill that would make it harder for kids to get assault rifles?
Yeah, well, in case you missed the latest — which wouldn’t have been hard, since the one-day story was instantly eclipsed by a Cabinet shakeup and a special election — that whole thing went away Monday with a mumbled “never mind” from the White House.
Apparently gun control is really hard, and you actually have to focus on it and change some minds and anger some of your friends. Why go through all that when you’ve already gotten the headline you were after?
Kind of like the time in January when Trump did the same thing on immigration, summoning lawmakers from both parties to the White House and declaring his full support for a bipartisan compromise. That lasted until breakfast the next day.
And you can already see where this alleged breakthrough summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, is probably headed. The shocking announcement last Thursday played on TV like the dramatic opening of a thriller. It’s been a silent movie ever since.
We’ve been covering this presidency for more than a year now, and we’ve seen enough to know that it really isn’t the wild, unpredictable ride we keep saying it is, which is also what Trump would like you to believe. In fact, there’s a highly predictable pattern here, and it all adds up to a breathtaking hypocrisy.
The president who ran an entire campaign against the phoniness and timidity of conventional politics turns out to be phonier and more timid than any of those who came before.

This was Trump’s big appeal to a lot of moderate and independent voters who were understandably disgusted by the state of Washington — the ones who didn’t find his neo-nativism all that inspiring. Trump was supposed to be a man of action and deal making.
Whatever came of it, good or ugly, this wasn’t a guy who would settle for a presidency built on empty slogans and Rose Garden photo-ops.
Trump’s pitch was that candidates were always talking about challenging the norms of Washington, but once they got elected, all they ever did was mouth platitudes from a teleprompter. That’s what Trump meant when he told an Ohio audience last year: “It’s so easy to act presidential, but that’s not going to get it done.”
He was back on this theme even last week, at a rally in Pennsylvania, when he comically mimicked the way a typical president is supposed to endorse candidates, shuffling around the stage and mumbling like a zombie.
Well, all right. But can you imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if President Obama had announced to the world a plan to remake the health care system, and then decided never to bring it up again?
Can you picture a world in which George W. Bush would have gone before Congress vowing to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan, and then issued a terse statement a few days later saying it was too hard so never mind?
This is exactly what Trump does, again and again. Forget the standard photo ops; his entire presidency, save for a giveaway-laden tax bill that actually originated in Congress, is a string of dramatic flourishes, without even the aspiration to translate them into something like actual governance.
Even this big tariff program he announced, which instantly sent world markets into a spiral, turns out to be mostly bravado. The administration is exempting our biggest source of steel imports, Canada, along with Mexico, and it’s already hinting at a deal with the Europeans. In the end, for all the big (and, I think, misguided) talk of protectionism, a fraction of imports will be affected.
And then there was Trump, just this week, visiting the prototype for his long-promised wall in San Diego. You know, the one the Mexicans were supposed to be paying for.
Theatrics, nothing more.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, too, another idea Trump floated the other day, bringing a thousand sleepy headline writers to life: a new space force for the military. (“That could be the big, breaking story,” Trump said helpfully, in case the assembled reporters didn’t know an entertaining nugget when they heard one.)
Never mind that this idea, as the Atlantic wisely noted, has already been out there a while, and Trump’s administration is on record opposing it. Trump was just looking for an attention-getter. He’ll have Mattis training junior Jedi’s in Disneyland before he ever gets around to following up on that one.

None of this should surprise us. As I’ve written many times, Trump personifies the entangling of politics and entertainment.
He comes from the world of “unscripted television,” which is only unscripted in the sense that the actual words aren’t written down for the actor to recite. The plot lines are pre-ordained and calibrated to explode in primetime, the overarching directive being to never bore an audience.
Before that, in the 1980s, Trump honed his celebrity as New York’s serial self-promoter, gaming the gossip columnists the way J. Edgar Hoover once played Walter Winchell. Trump the socialite developer learned at least as much about building brands and expectations as he did about building gaudy towers.
Trump isn’t really a man of action. He’s a man of artifice. He talks and he talks and he talks, the world’s foremost expert on dominating a news cycle, knowing all along that by the time we realize none of it’s real, he’ll have ushered us along to whatever’s next.
And this is the point – that, as an industry, we who chronicle this president and his novel brand of politics seem always to be a step behind the game. During the primaries in 2016, the ratings-obsessed cable channels let Trump call in to shows and carried his rallies live and unedited. (They still do, apparently.)
Only when Trump was well on his way to the nomination did they realize that they’d been played for free advertising. By then, though, Trump had figured out that he could manipulate campaign coverage just by tweeting something outrageous whenever he wanted to change the subject.
Now that Trump is president, we’ve done what we must, which is to cover his various pronouncements with at least some of the solemnity the office demands. When the president of the United States says he’s warming to the idea of a new fleet of space soldiers, because maybe he caught the last half hour of “Contact” on Starz last weekend, we are duty bound to note it.
Generally, I think the media have done a pretty good job of injecting both fact-checking and skepticism into our coverage of Trump, in a way we would have resisted a generation ago.
But we’re still letting this president perform for the cameras as if he were actually planning to govern, without giving nearly as much attention to what happens on the issue once the cameras are gone. We’re still allowing ourselves to be carried along by one dramatic turn after another, because Trump knows instinctively that if he keeps us moving today, we won’t have time to dwell on whatever he promised yesterday.
Trump was dead right about our politics over the years — too much of it became a tired kind of stagecraft. But that kind of stagecraft was almost always designed to sell an agenda.
And that’s the distinction between a serious politician and a con artist. The latter only sells himself.

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The Tale Of Apathy And Its Long Range Effects


During the last 15 to 20 years we have had several types of President (regardless of party ). Each one has advisors good and bad who sometimes pushed agendas that at once followed the President’s agenda while simultaneously coloring that agenda with their own hues. These deviations from the main agenda has many times cause great harm and sometimes great good. The point is that we as voters need to be well versed in the issues of the world that can cause harm to us personally. We have always relied on the people we elect to look after our interests but recent political history should make us realize that there is very little will to look after our interests by our elected. The many labels that are flouted as being the one to adhere to because it will get us what we want is patently false. There is not one or any combination of labeled factions that will get us what we need or want. The truth ( which we cannot or will not get from elected officials) is the world is at our feet and without our European, Southeast Asian, Canadian and Southern American  neighbors we will be in trouble. These other regions have many of the same issues as we have and the same less than stellar leaders or even worse. It is unfortunate that part of being a politician is to be  prolific and persuasive in moving around the facts of many if not all issues. Our sole job as citizens is to pursue our own truths not by following the rallying cries of TV and radio personalities whose sole interest is providing listeners and viewers for their sponsors. The content of their shows often have no basis in fact but are steeped in the institutionalized biases that keep us separated as multiracial and multi ethnic people. This has been the electoral train for many years and we need to stop the train and get off. The way to do this is education. Education is simply reading several publications on line or in print, listening to several broadcasts. There will always be opposite views but these views should make you think and seek the truth of these views in other places. There are several fact checking sites and available for free, I would advise everyone to spend some time in looking for them. I could list them but it is possible that not enough people will put the minimal time into looking at them. I feel that not listing them will encourage the braver ones of you reading this will seek these sites out and become more enlightened on items you currently believe and see the fault in some things you thought were true. We are at this point victims of a chaotic administration using unfounded information as a basis for decisions. We currently have biggest con game since Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff going on right now! The overly effusive signing of “rollbacks” and executive orders that appear to deregulate but in reality harm us all whether you see immediate effects or not. Our Resident is still in campaign mode rather than Governing (or learning to govern). Essentially he has hired people who will do what they want with his blessing some of the time and will unashamedly bash them when he is not in agreement. We are in a time of much greater peril than we were at the onset of WWII. Our economy at this time is going well but n a very rickety set of rails. The only thing we can do is to keep pushing aside the political wool away from our eyes and understand that this administration is in it for themselves not the people who elected them. This is an unprecedented  time in America but possibly needed to wake us up and illuminate the true nature of our long serving politicians. The upcoming elections are the first step in reinventing our political system by electing different people and continue to replace when required until anyone who runs for office understands that we the people want and demand good government. We are the controllers of term limits.

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Do As I Say Not As I Do


People
Stephanie Petit 20 hrs ago

Ben Carson Reportedly Has a $31K Dining Set in His Office
A Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official claims she was demoted after failing to “find money” beyond a $5,000 cap to redecorate the dining room in incoming Secretary Ben Carson’s office.
Helen Foster was told “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair” after pointing out the legal spending limit for decorating the office, CNN reports, citing a November 2017 complaint. The former senior official said she was told about the redecorating initiative by Acting Secretary Craig Clemmensen, who said Carson’s wife Candy wanted the office upgraded. This occurred ahead of Carson’s appointment to the position.
Foster also claims she was demoted in retaliation, and reassigned to oversee privacy and Freedom of Information Act requests.
“I was put into a job that was made up, something in the federal government we call the ‘rubber room,’ and then I protested and asked to be put on detail until I could find another job,” she told CNN.

The department later spent over $31,000 on a new hardwood table, chairs and hutch for the dining room adjacent to Carson’s office. The furniture has reportedly not yet been delivered. A department official says they replaced the original set because it was in disrepair.
The former esteemed brain surgeon “didn’t know the table had been purchased” but has no plans to return it, HUD spokesman Raffi Williams told The New York Times.
ABC News also reported that HUD, whose responsibilities include providing affordable housing to more than 4.3 million low-income families, spent $1,100 trying to repair the chairs in the dining set before buying the new furniture. They also spent about $3,400 on new blinds for the office.
“The most frustrating part of all this was spending so much time on this issue,” a former HUD employee with knowledge of the situation told CNN. “Instead of focusing on HUD’s mission, we were talking about furniture for the Secretary’s office.”

The White House’s 2019 budget proposes to slash HUD’s budget by $8.8 billion. In a tweet earlier this month, Carson said, “The proposed budget is focused on moving more people toward self-sufficiency through reforming rental assistance programs and moving aging public housing to more sustainable platforms.

It’s worth mentioning that EPA manager Scott Pruitt is spending $139,000 for new doors, Secretary Ryan Zinke has a” special” flag raising ceremony when he is in or out of the office aside from his tax payer financed charter flights. How many other “perks” are being accessed on the public dime by this administration aside from the “Resident’s” trips to Mar-a-Lago? MA.

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