What’s the difference between an op-ed by the New York Times editorial board headlined “Phony Wall, Phony Emergency” and a new column by veteran liberal Times columnist Thomas Friedman in which he admits there is a real, troubling immigration crisis on the border and the best solution is a “high wall with a big gate”?
Answer: Friedman actually went to the border.
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While the Party of stagflation and malaise is distracting America with impeachment hysteria, here’s some good news you might have missed…
And a little more…
No wonder Democrats want to let imprisoned felons vote. By 2020, they’ll be the only Americans left who don’t have jobs.
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Glad to see more people picking up and enlarging on an argument I made when it was first reported that the New York Yankees had banned Kate Smith’s iconic recording of “God Bless America” because some social justice warrior types just discovered that she recorded a couple of songs in the 1930s that are considered offensively racist now. I noted that the Yankees should immediately shut down because they banned black players until 1955, which was far worse and more recent. Now, that idea is getting around. They should learn not to kowtow to the SJW mob, because nobody is ever pure enough for them, no past transgression is ever forgotten, and they will eventually turn and devour you, too.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/23/cancel-kate-smith-must-cancel-new-york-yankees/
For those who actually care about history, Smith recorded nearly 3,000 songs, and it’s questionable how much control she had over what she was expected to sing, especially that early in her career. We do know that when she did have control, during a time when it was scandalous for white singers, especially female, to perform with black musicians, she welcomed many great black musicians onto her radio and TV shows of the ‘40s and ’50s. At this link, Mark Steyn discusses one of the two songs that’s been hauled out of 80-year-old mothballs to incite “OUTRAGE” and notes that it was actually written as a disapproving satire of racist attitudes in the South.
https://www.steynonline.com/9314/edelweiss-uber-alles
Since that first mention here, the Philadelphia Flyers have also turned against Kate Smith, not only banning her recording of "God Bless America," but covering a statue of her with a burqa-like black tarp, then removing it. This despite the fact that Smith’s song had been a good luck charm, and she had been gracious enough to them to sing the National Anthem in person before their Stanley Cup win in 1974.
https://www.foxnews.com/sports/philadelphia-flyers-kate-smith-statue-removed
By the way, while the Flyers have never explicitly banned black players, they are a hockey franchise, and in their 52-year history, they have employed a grand total of six black players.
As long as we’re turning Kate Smith into a non-person for violating 2019 PC standards in 1931, why don’t we also talk about the prejudices she suffered that we would never tolerate today? For instance, at 5’10” and 235 pounds, she was not acclaimed as a body-positive, “big beautiful woman.” Instead, she was the object of endless cruel jokes about her size. She smiled and played along, but friends recalled her crying in her dressing room after nearly every performance because the mockery hurt her so much. Even the headline of her New York Times obituary referred to her as “outsized.” Did any of the PC moralists in Philadelphia think about that when covering her statue with a tarp and removing it because they don’t think her image is fit for the public to see?
During World War II, Kate Smith helped defeat real Nazis by working tirelessly to aid the war effort, helping to sell nearly $600 million in war bonds, far more than any other celebrity. That’s over $10 billion in today’s money. The “social justice warriors” who attack her think they’re fighting “Nazis” when they put on masks and punch elderly men in MAGA caps.
And while we’re on the subject, just what did the Philadelphia Flyers ever do to fight Nazis? Yes, I know the team was founded in 1967. But if we’re going to crucify Kate Smith for not living up to standards that weren’t even invented until 80 years later, I don’t see why we can’t demand that the people attacking her live up to the standards that applied 25 years before they came on the scene.
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Over the years, I’ve heard a number of liberals argue that the “slippery slope” argument is invalid because there’s no such thing as the “slippery slope.” That is, there’s simply no truth to the claim that if you lower standards a little or stop prosecuting less severe crimes or allow just a little bit of anti-social or illegal behavior, that it will lead to worse and worse.
And so, today’s theme of the news is, “Dispatches from the Slippery Slope.”
First up: “Progressives” (or as the more honest ones like Bernie Sanders put it, “socialists”) say it’s unfair that just because people commit felonies, that they should be barred from voting for life. So they argued that after a reasonable period of proving they had reformed, their voting rights should be restored. And then, down the slope we slipped:
Felons' voting rights should be restored immediately after leaving prison…No, they shouldn’t be lost at all, we should be passing out absentee ballots to at least some felons in prison…Then (over the edge) all felons in prison should be allowed to vote, even the Boston Marathon bomber who came here from another country to slaughter as many innocent American citizens as possible.
https://www.westernjournal.com/bernie-sanders-says-boston-marathon-bomber-allowed-vote-prison/
That happened so fast, they must’ve greased the slope with WD-40. It was so far over the edge, it marked the second time in a week that a crazy leftwing position made even Cher sound like a Republican.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/cher-questions-bernie-sanders-boston-bomber-right-vote
But if you still think the “slippery slope” doesn’t exist…
Americans used to rightly believe that life began at conception and dismembering an innocent child in the womb was a heinous act of murder. Then, some judges with no medical degrees decided in “Roe v. Wade” that life only begins after the first trimester of pregnancy. Even though real science has advanced to show us that life begins much sooner, abortion proponents kept pushing the deadline further and further, first through the second trimester, then the third, then right up until the moment of birth, and then, in a full-on assault on both logic and basic human decency, until moments after birth. They went so far over the end of the slope that they actually argued that a baby, already born alive during a “botched” (i.e., unsuccessfully lethal) abortion and now a separate human being with full human and citizenship rights, should be allowed to struggle and die without receiving medical care.
The flat-out-wrongness of that argument should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a complete sociopath. And yet, when it became necessary to pass bills saying doctors couldn’t just stand by and do nothing while a living baby dies, we actually had people like the Governor of Virginia, Ralph “Blackface Yearbook” Northam (no, unlike Democrats and the media, we didn’t forget that, either) argue in favor of it; and Democrats in the House and Senate block attempts to give the most basic protection to those children.
Now, even after a no-brainer bill to protect “born alive” babies passed in North Carolina with even some Democratic support, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has vetoed it…
And Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is threatening to do the same…
Evers makes sure to quote the (utterly irrelevant here) cliché that “women should be able to make choices about their health care.” What do the woman’s health care choices have to do with the issue of whether to aid a baby that’s now 20 feet away from her? They’ve been mouthing that phrase for so long, they now do it out of habit even when it makes no sense whatsoever.
Again, if you don’t believe in the “slippery slope,” cast your mind back a few decades and try to imagine the governors of states like North Carolina or Wisconsin vetoing a bill to stop doctors from just standing around and letting a newborn baby die.
Finally, here’s one small story that’s indicative of an entire society sliding down the slippery slope and heading over the cliff.
Starbucks decided that virtue-signaling about race and other hot button leftist topics was more important than pleasing customers. Customers weren’t pleased, and social justice warriors just smelled weakness. So they next attacked Starbucks for not letting homeless people take up space in their stores for hours on end in urban areas, even when they smelled awful and weren’t buying anything (a longtime standard business practice down the slippery slope.) So Starbucks gave in, in effect turning its urban stores into homeless shelters. Here’s how popular that was with customers…
And now that they’re running homeless shelters, they’re experiencing the problems of a homeless shelter, like people shooting up in the bathrooms and leaving dangerous used drug needles behind. Since they can’t do something mean and radical, like banning junkies from shooting up in a private business’s bathroom, they just inched down the slope a little further.
Take this same welcoming attitude toward anti-social and criminal behavior and apply it to entire cities via decades of liberal Democrat governance and you get the problems of Detroit, Chicago, New York, L.A. and of course, San Francisco. At the link is a map showing all the places where human feces has been reported in public places in San Francisco since 2011. If you don’t want to click on it, let me assure you that it’s basically a map of San Francisco covered in brown.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/328492
Now, even Dallas, Texas, has a recently-elected Democratic County District Attorney who has announced “reforms” that amount to a list of “petty” crimes he plans to ignore. These include trespassing, minor drug possession and non-violent theft of items worth up to $750 for personal use, on the assumption that it must’ve been stolen “of necessity,” and why punish the needy (what about the victims who need their $750 property back because they worked to earn the money to pay for it or the store owners who have to pay to replace it?) As you might imagine, this is going over like a lead balloon with local police and sheriffs.
https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2019/04/council-members-attempt-to-dent-john-creuzots-reforms/
Dallas has turned recently into a solidly blue city surrounded by more conservative suburbs that would be affected by the County DA's "reforms" that amount to simply not enforcing the law. Dallas is still the #1 city in America for gaining population while other cities that already follow these types of policies are losing population. Obviously, some of them are moving to Dallas and voting for the same suicidal policies that fouled the liberal nests they left behind. A cautionary tale for Dallas voters to reject the slippery slope before it’s too late.
And all of this is a cautionary note for Americans who are now being harangued by the media to give Congress and the White House back to Democrats so they can do for the whole nation what they did for San Francisco and Starbucks. One of them is even the former CEO of Starbucks. If you think that putting them back in power is a good idea, then I have to assume you’ve been shooting up drugs in a Starbucks bathroom yourself.
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Yet another reason why I like Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas: when Sen. Elizabeth Warren is pandering for votes by promising to cancel out student loan debt (at a cost to taxpayers of $650 billion), Crenshaw dares to point out the hypocrisy.
https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/1120737254455087105
“Progressives” like Warren love to bash the “rich,” but as Crenshaw notes, her debt relief plan would apply to people making up to $250,000 a year. So taxpayers who never went to college and sweat away at blue collar jobs would have to help pay for the expensive college loans that people who make five times or more money than they do voluntarily chose to take out. Sounds like exploiting the poor to help the “rich” to me. I thought that according to folks like Sen. Warren, that’s what we eeeevil Republicans do.
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Tucker: Republicans shouldn't get too confident about 2020
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