Supreme Court – RESOLVE

Hurricane Deception

By Steve Woodward

The tweet was snarky, as is to be expected. It speculated that President Donald Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Poland, not because of the looming threat of Hurricane Dorian, but because he is lazy and needed an excuse to spend the holiday weekend playing golf, as usual.

Imagine the false outrage had Trump made the trip to Poland? The twitter-sphere would have condemned him for abandoning the homeland amid yet another climate change-generated natural disaster. Dorian is Trump’s Katrina!

Over on Facebook, we’ve encountered a chorus of whiners reacting to Trump’s forthcoming appearance in Fayetteville, NC (Sept. 9), on the eve of a special election for a U.S. congressional seat in NC-9. The outrage centers on a narrative that Trump’s 2020 campaign is saddling municipalities with unprecedented costs, closing in on $1 million, for additional security and other logistical needs when he rolls into to town for his signature rallies.

Naturally, no one mentions how the campaigns of sitting presidents seeking re-election handled these costs in the past. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were called out for similar fiscal “abuses”. Obama used Air Force One to travel with then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a 2016 joint campaign appearance, but a Bush era ethics lawyer had no issues with the arrangement.

It’s an unavoidable problem, Richard Painter said in an interview with ABC News, for presidents who are simultaneously commanders-in-chiefs and the leaders of their respective political parties.

“I don’t think this is controversial,” Painter said. “A president that won’t campaign for his own party isn’t the leader of his own party. If someone claimed that President Bush was abusing taxpayer money to campaign, we would have laughed at that.”

But in the era of Trump this type of reasoned analysis is no longer possible. The narratives build one upon the other in the media’s endless quest to diminish him and marginalize his administration and supporters. His campaign doesn’t reimburse? Of course not, as a businessman he was famous, or so it goes, for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed. Everybody knows that (because it has been repeated for three years running). He’s lazy because he plays rounds of golf despite working more hours than any president since perhaps Abe Lincoln (never mentioned), and granting more media access than any president ever (not even close).

Authors Gary Marcus and Annie Duke explain how unrelenting fake news perpetuates Trump delusion syndrome in a piece they co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, which lays out how the Left and its compliant media hold the truth hostage so effectively. It is a simple matter of exploiting behavior.

In a world of information overload and distraction wrought by technology and daily life as we know it “we tend to assume that whatever we hear is true.” Admittedly, this is an objectionable generalization but it is not aimed at readers of this blog. It is aimed at the growing sector of society identified by Rush Limbaugh as the “low information voter.”

The authors site numerous studies that have demonstrated how vulnerable human beings are to being snookered. A 2017 study by faculty at New York University examined around 500,000 social media messages. Subtle words such as “hate”, “destroy” or “blame” accelerate the spread of these messages by 20% per emotional word.

“Fake news tends to avoid nuance or neutral language and frequently adds layers of emotion and moralizing — all of which makes false items spread much faster than the real thing,” Marcus and Duke wrote. They conclude a war can be waged on fake news by teaching “information literacy” across all age groups.

In WSJ August 31 – September 1 editions, the newspaper profiles prolific novelist Salmon Rushdie. His 14th just-published novel is a contemporary version of a 17th-century classic, “Don Quixote”. His motivation for writing it partially draws on the fake news and reality TV phenomena from which almost no one readily escapes.

“We live in a moment in which truth is stranger than fiction,” Rushdie says, “and so the fiction has to decide how strange it needs to be in order to get close to the truth.”

This week’s fictional thread, which inevitably will work its way back to the Trump White House, is that Hurricane Dorian is another in a series of monster storms delivering “unprecedented” fury.

“The truth is that the storms that are hitting the Caribbean with this intense magnitude are historic, unprecedented, and these storms are manmade storms,” contends Emory University Prof. Tiphanie Yanique in a televised interview with the independent news hour Democracy Now.

The guest and her interviewer, both clearly in lockstep with the climate change narrative, failed to address a well documented chronology of Category 5 hurricanes. The first Cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin was recorded in 1924, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), followed by 34 more through this year. Only four have hit the United States as a Cat 5 across 95 years.

Now, test your information literacy as you read this concluding sentence: The most intense Cat 5 hurricane to make U.S. landfall hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. President Roosevelt was blamed, along with climate change.

Abortion advances, morality declines

By Bill Demastus

The alarming news these past several weeks has awakened Americans to the inhumanity lurking in our nation; legal aborting of a baby at the point of being delivered and, in some cases, after delivery. Aborting at any stage is abhorrent to tens of millions, but to do so at the point of birth is beyond moral comprehension.

This is not only a celebrated and accepted law just passed in New York but also one recently contemplated in Virginia, where its Governor, a pediatric surgeon, expressed public support for post-birth abortion. And, I guess other states will soon follow suit.

Perhaps what makes this law so hard to come to grips with is the fact that it is decidedly un-American. It isn’t politics that determine how Americans feel about children, seniors, pets and the down trodden of our society. It’s like moms and apple pie…we just love them in our hearts.

I watch TV commercials nightly requesting donations to save dogs, cats and other animals. The same is true for requests for children’s hospitals and even for funds to help Israeli holocaust survivors.

All of them receive ample funding because Americans are generous to a fault. We are taught from a very young age to give to the poor, be kind to animals and to the old. But are we taught that we should kill off our young when birth is “inconvenient”?

Abortion has been a common procedure probably since Adam and Eve. But, never has it been a celebrated occurrence. Never have we used abortion as a form of family planning as many Americans now do. In fact, they are no longer even called abortion clinics; they are family planning clinics. Young people are being taught that actions do not have to have consequences…everything can be taken care of.

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is legal. The Court did not say abortion is something that one should aspire to. The decision to do so should have a bit more thought going into it than, say, a decision to visit a dentist.

Studies show that from 1970, and through the next 49 years, more than 45 million babies were aborted in the U.S.

Now, more than 1.3 million abortions are carried out per year, based on studies in the U.S. alone. Another unbelievable fact is that 45% of them will be requested by a woman who has had more than one. And, 54% of these women will have been on birth control when they become pregnant. This is exacerbated by the fact that these 1.3 million abortions were the cumulative result of 2.6 million unintended pregnancies – half of them!

I maybe old fashioned, but how in the world could we, in this age of birth control and preventative education, have 2.6 million unintended pregnancies? Please don’t tell me it is simply because poor people can’t afford the pill. Abortions run the gamut of the the social strata — from the very poor to the very rich. I think it is just such an accepted practice that we have become hardened to the fact that we are killing children.

Our society does not seem to care that we are destroying our young. Yes, we are heart broken to see young children at the southern border who have been dragged 1,000 or more miles, and used as cannon fodder to get drug and human traffickers across that border. And yes, we are heart broken to see young children in war zones around the world, wounded and starving because of man’s inhumanity toward man. But if death takes place in a sterile, stainless steel, windowless hospital room it is just a normal health care procedure. No big deal.

I started this by mentioning that Virginia politicians wished to follow New York in adopting this archaic law. I listened to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who is a doctor, in a radio interview (replayed on national TV) describe how you commit infanticide as if he was describing how to avoid getting a blister on your finger. This sad discussion was of no concern to the person giving the interview. Her agitation was over a 40-years-old yearbook where in he had been photographed costumed in black face, or a KKK hood (no one knows which was Northam). The entire Democrat state caucus demanded his resignation, but no concern was addressed toward a proposed law that would allow the murder of an innocent baby.

Experts say one-third of American women will abort at least once by age 45.

Experts also tell us that 49% of all U.S. women are pro-choice, and 45% are pro-life so politics aren’t going to change, even as much as nervous pundits fear they will.

The change, if there is to be one, must come from parents educating their young, not destroying them. It must come from teaching that life is a journey of choices that result in consequences, not a trip to Disneyland. And it must come from both sides of our political arena. What we currently do, as if our God and the world isn’t watching, is a thing we should all be ashamed of, not a trend to celebrate!

History tells us that the Romans dipped Christian babies in tar, and on the head of their spears, lit them up to provide vision for their night games in the coliseum. We are much more sophisticated today. But the Romans at least could rationalize some benefit of their murders – light. We, in civilized society, pay billions of dollars each year to snuff out our babies’ light.

Will we add abortions to our annual celebrations? Don’t we usually lift up those memorable moments that cause celebrations? Coming soon, Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Father’s Day and now in, New York, and, perhaps in your home town, Happy Abortion Day.

Trump train rolls on

Washington and the corrupt mainstream media are abuzz about who to believe amid an embarrassing confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Accusers of Kavanaugh claiming he was some teen-aged sexual predator and raging drunk are losing credibility — if ever they had any — with each passing day.

While Democrat Senators are obsessed with Kavanaugh’s high school days and his yearbook, not his career, and while the media hangs on every word, what can not be challenged is the runaway success story of Donald’s Trump’s presidency. The well orchestrated smear campaign against Judge Kavanaugh might ultimately drive more Republicans than usual to the November mid-term polls to avenge Democrat tactics. But if voters somehow have managed to shut out the confirmation fiasco, what ought to be driving them to the polls to vote for Republicans and secure the GOP’s continued majorities in the U.S. House and Senate is an avalanche of good news drowned out by a scandal-a-day, deranged press corps.

The Trump Administration reached an agreement with Canada and Mexico on the largest trade deal in history, governing $1.2 trillion in trade.

The results of a newly released Gallup poll indicates that the Republican Party is at a seven-year high in favorability among American voters.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Oct. 2 at a record high (26,773.94), its 14th record close of 2018.

Consumer confidence rose in September to its highest level in about 18 years. The index rose nearly FOUR points since the August poll.

Across America, African American and Hispanic unemployment is at record lows due to Trump-led tax cuts and sweeping de-regulation that stifled business growth during the Obama years. Jobs and opportunities are flowing into communities.

Employment in North Carolina reflects trends nationwide. In our state, August employment reached an all-time high of more than 4.8 million jobs.

The Gross Domestic Product – which signals the health of our economy — grew at a rate of 4.2% last quarter. Average growth was just above 1% quarterly during the Obama era.

The United States is balancing trade deficits with key partners such as China, ending terrible deals with adversarial nations such as Iraq, and promoting peace in the Korean peninsula by promoting open dialog between President Trump and North Korea’s dictatorial regime.

Spread the word.

Voting is a right and — in 2018 — an obligation

“The Kavanaugh (Supreme Court) nomination … has come down to an undiscoverable accusation. The defeat of a Supreme Court nominee on this basis would be a victory for a level of conscious political nullification not seen in the U.S. for a long time. Republicans in the Senate shouldn’t allow it, and voters in November should not affirm it.” (Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, 09-20-18)

Republicans are approaching one of the most consequential midterm elections of our lifetimes this November 6. We need historically high numbers of motivated voters to maintain Republican majorities in the U.S. House and in the North Carolina General Assembly. That means vote absentee (now), vote early at one of two locations, or vote Nov. 6 at your polling place — and bring friends and neighbors, even if you need to bribe them with coffee and doughnuts!

The smear campaign to derail the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court demonstrates the ruthless intensity Democrats are bringing to the fight. They will do anything, make any claim, to win at any cost to diminish the Trump presidency.

But their counter-offensive itself is diminished by the indisputable facts that America is back! Think about what has been accomplished:

We now enjoy lower taxes and fewer growth-killing regulations.
Consumer confidence and the value of retirement accounts are way up.
We have the lowest unemployment in decades – and the lowest on record for African Americans and Hispanics.
The GDP grew at the rate of 4.2% last quarter (average growth was 1.075% under Mr. Obama).
We are on the road to a modernized and stronger military.

Allowing the Democrats to win will reverse all of these achievements. We can’t let that happen! Be an informed voter, recruit fellow voters, and let’s keep America on the path to greatness. Again.

Thwarting dirty politics

North Carolina Democrat legislators seem to forget they are the minority when the General Assembly is in session, and even express incredulity when Republicans use super-majority votes in representing the will of their constituents.

Of course, it never happened when the roles were reversed! But it was particularly amusing to watch Democrats try to protest when lawmakers returned to Raleigh July 24 to take up two timely bills — a House bill on wording Constitutional amendments on the November ballot, and a Senate bill essentially to stop a wholly inappropriate ploy by state Supreme Court candidate Chris Anglin.

The House bill was in response to a battle over semantics in presenting six amendments to voters this November. It revolved around a typical presumption among Democrats that their constituents are not very smart and need dumbed-down wording to understand the purpose of the amendments. These are the same Democrats who expect to sell higher taxes as a way to spur economic growth.

However, Senate Bill 3 represents a home run by Republicans lawmakers. Passage of the bill thwarts Anglin from appearing on the ballot as a RINO (Republican in name only).

Carolina Journal offered some key insights into how the Stop Anglin story played out, one of which was the factual point that Republicans created the scenario whereby Anglin suddenly became a Republican.

Republican legislators canceled this year’s judicial primaries. They permitted no other process for the major parties to identify the candidate of their choice on the ballot. … Acting roughly 105 days before the election, the General Assembly clearly rewrote election rules in the middle of the process.

Yet no leading Democrat has stepped forward to disparage the chicanery on his side of the political aisle. References to Anglin have feigned ignorance about partisan political factors motivating either the candidate or his backers. It would have been easy for a (Democrat) legislator to distance himself from the Anglin team’s questionable conduct.

On the last possible day in June, Anglin flipped his voter registration to Republican and filed for the Supreme Court race. The Senate bill eliminates political affiliation next to Anglin’s name on the ballot by specifying that any candidate (for any office) may not realign with a different political party if filing 90 days or less.

“It’s clear,” writes Mitch Kokai for the Journal, “to any fair-minded observer that — regardless of Anglin’s original intent — elements within the Democratic Party have latched onto Anglin’s candidacy as a tool to help blunt Barbara Jackson’s vote among Republican voters. Their ultimate goal is to help ensure (Democrat Anita) Earls’ victory.”

Far better for NC Republicans to absorb baseless criticism for “changing the rules” in the middle of the game than to have allowed Anglin to masquerade as a Jackson alternative.