[Investor's Bus Daily] Electoral College: The first acts of a new Congress usually hold great significance. They set a tenor, a tone, for what is to come. If so, Americans should be very worried about the new Democrat-led Congress.
One of the first acts of business last Thursday, mere hours after the new Congress was sworn in, came from Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, as reported by The Daily Caller. His big idea: amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College.
Under Article II of the Constitution, both the president and vice president are decided by a group of electors chosen by a method determined by the individual states' legislators.
Cohen's proposed amendment reads: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
#2
Get rid of the electoral college? A very bad idea. POTUS would always be elected by a handful of large Dem States. The rest of the voters would be disenfranchised. As the Dems go farther left, POTUS would be elected by a handful of States with mostly crazy voters.
Just think, if only the popular vote mattered (and if you included all the stolen votes in the count), Hillary would have been elected last time.
#4
Being elected by the Electoral College may not reflect the popular vote but it is not a cake walk either. Took 63 million votes for Trump to win it.
#10
I heard that 62 counties (out of 3,142) would control the election.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
02/04/2019 16:25 Comments ||
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#11
It is cute that Colorado thinks it would have a chair at the table in a nationwide popular vote system.
Southern California, Pennsylvania and northeast of, maybe Great Lakes coastline, and that is all a candidate needs. That is where all those government dollars, vote fraud, and attention will go.
[The Hill] A private Christian university in Arizona has canceled a planned appearance by conservative writer Ben Shapiro, but said the decision is not "a reflection of his ideologies or the values he represents."
Grand Canyon University (GCU) said in a statement on Saturday that members of the campus community indicated they were "disappointed and offended" by an initial decision to allow Shapiro to speak.
"It was not our intent to disappoint or offend anyone," the Phoenix university said. "It was, rather, to use our position as a Christian university to bring unity to a community that sits amidst a country that is extremely divided and can’t seem to find a path forward toward unity."
The school pointed to its "unique and united community" on campus as an antidote to a "divided America," and called for a "focus on opportunities that bring people together."
Shapiro, the editor of conservative website The Daily Wire, has been blocked from speaking on a number of college campuses, with several citing concerns about the potential for violent protests.
Quoting the Bible, GCU suggested in its statement that officials are taking on the role of "peacemaker" by canceling Shapiro’s appearance.
"If you look at America’s history, the Church has been at its best when it has worked to achieve the kind of peace that Jesus commended: ’Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God’ (Matthew 5:9, ESV)," the statement read. "Making peace in a way that honors Christ is something we will continue to try to do."
#7
Jesus was not about avoiding confrontation. It seems these so-called Christians have forgotten about him chasing the moneychangers out of the temple with an improvised whip.
Then there's the instructions he gives in Luke: He said to them, “But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.
Matthew 10:34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
This liberal/progressive neutering of Jesus is disgusting.
[Breitbart] President Donald Trump detailed his position Sunday on withdrawing troops United States from Afghanistan and Syria.
"We’ve been there for 19 years, almost, we are fighting very well. We’re fighting harder than ever before. I think they’re tired and, I think everybody’s tired," Trump said. "We got to get out of these endless wars and bring our folks back home."
The president discussed the issue with CBS anchor Margeret Brennan in an interview on Sunday.
Trump added that if pockets of terrorists emerged in Afghanistan and Syria, he would have no problem sending the military back to destroy them.
"We’ll come back if we have to. We have very fast airplanes, we have very good cargo planes. We can come back very quickly," he said.
Trump argued against keeping armies on the ground in Afghanistan to fight terrorists.
"You’re going to have pockets, but you’re not going to keep armies there because you have a few people," he said.
Trump said he would keep troops at a military base in Iraq to help fight terrorism in the Middle East and keep eyes on Iran.
"We have a base in Iraq and the base is a fantastic edifice. I mean I was there recently, and I couldn’t believe the money that was spent on these massive runways," he said.
#5
why are we fighting? to protect our Oil and thus our Economy? not any more,
let the sand monkeys slaughter each other, who cares. The Israeli's are fully capable of protecting their interests
#6
We are in these wars because after WW2 the military and political class learned the lesson that if you sit out the war things are far worse when the war drags you in.
That logic worked throughout the cold war, mostly.
They seem unable to see the world is different now and the logic doesn't apply to the long war against Islam. We'd be better off with Special Ops and supporting revolutions but otherwise keeping our troops home and ready.
h/t Instapundit
[TheDiplomat] The growing downward pressure on China’s domestic economy has made the employment situation particularly grim.
At a meeting in July 2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo analyzed the current economic situation and proposed stabilizing employment, finance, foreign trade, and investment to tackle external changes and ensure stable economic operations effectively. Within that list, the Politburo ranked "stabilizing employment" as the first and most important task. In addition, the report of the 19th National Congress of the CCP also stated that employment is pivotal to people’s well-being, noting that instability in employment will affect the standard of living and may ultimately affect social stability.
[Bloomberg] Parents are increasingly demanding contracts that restrict when kids’ caregivers can be on their phone and what they can do online.
Silicon Valley parents are now asking nannies to sign contracts banning them from using their phones for private purposes on the job, according to the New York Times. The report says that other moms will sometimes "out" caregivers by posting pictures of them using their devices. That may seem a little too controlling, but every parent would do well to require a nanny to agree to restrictions on social media use as a condition of employment.
The first reason to have an agreement is that parents need assurances that caregivers won’t be on their phones when they should be watching the children. Distractions from phones don’t just deprive kids of attention. They can also be dangerous. According to the Centers for Disease Control, accidents causing injuries to children under age 5 went up by 10 percent between 2006-2007 and 2011-2012. A study by the Yale University researcher Craig Palsson found that, as the iPhone 3G network expanded into new cities during that timeframe, emergency room visits among children under age 5 increased in those areas. This wasn’t a coincidence, according to Palsson, who argued that "the expansion of smartphones can explain almost the entire increase in child injuries."
Parents also need to give nannies instructions for policing social media use by the kids in their charge. Many moms and dads are setting strict limits on the amount of time kids can spend with screens ‐ or banning devices altogether. Many studies over the past year found that screen time can be extraordinarily damaging to kids. For example, a study published in The Lancet in September found that 8- to 11-year-olds who spend more than two hours per day with screens have lower cognitive function. And a November 2017 report published in Clinical Psychological Science found that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to have outcomes related to suicide, such as depression or actual suicide attempts.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued guidelines on how much time children of different ages should be allowed to spend on devices. They recommend allowing no time at all (except video chats) for children under 18 months and a maximum of 1 hour per day of quality programming for children aged 2-5. Parents need to be clear with caregivers about whether children may use screens, for how much time, and for what purposes.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ‐ Forty years after he defected from the shah’s Imperial Guard to join the Islamic Revolution, Mohammad Reza Tajik, like many Iranians from that time, looks back wistfully at the youthful excitement they felt and the losses they suffered since then.
Working in his woodshop in Tehran, he recounted the deaths of his brother in Iran’s 1980s war with Iraq and of a friend last year in Syria’s long civil war in which Iran is involved.
"No, we did not achieve what we wanted," the 60-year-old former soldier said, his shop warmed in the fierce Tehran winter by a simple wood-fired stove. "Things have changed and revolutionary values have worn out. Today, unfortunately, we still suffer from discrimination, favoritism, corruption and lying, even more than that time."
As the 40th anniversary of the revolution approached, a reporter from The Associated Press walked through the streets of Tehran to speak to those who were alive then about the world-changing moment that saw Iran exchange 2,500 years of monarchy for an Islamic Republic.
They offered a mixed view that is now common in the country as long-standing economic problems worsen amid the U.S. decision last spring to withdraw from the nuclear deal that Iran struck with world powers in 2013. Iran’s currency, the rial, has depreciated rapidly since then, making prices for groceries and clothes skyrocket. Its crucial oil sales remain threatened, and trust in its leadership has eroded.
#2
I remember reading of Russian sailors that were upset later over how they helped the communist to come to power well it was too late by then, the deed was done.
[Sultan Knish] The media sold off its own temple last week and no one noticed.
A decade ago, a 643,000 square foot shrine to the media went up off the Washington Mall. The media funded organization behind it boasted that its Great Hall of News atrium was taller than the Sistine Chapel. The pseudo-religious metaphor continued with 50 tons of Tennessee marble being used to "create the First Amendment tablet on the building’s Pennsylvania Avenue facade".
The thousands of artifacts included a 3,262 year old cuneiform brick from ancient Sumeria and a
2,756 year old statue of the Egyptian god Thoth, the mythical inventor of writing, worshiped by the media.
Last week, the $450 million temple constructed by the media to worship itself was sold off for $372 million to Johns Hopkins. There’s no word on whether they threw in the statue of their fallen god.
The fall of the media temple comes just as the media is on the defensive after fallout from a fake news hate campaign targeting a 16-year-old boy based on an out of context video clip. And the only thing that the media can say in defense of its lies about Covington Catholic is that it got them from social media.
That’s also its epitaph. The media doesn’t make the news. It’s just the noisiest part of the echo chamber, amplifying messages from lefty politicians from above and lefty social media trends from below.
...The Newseum white elephant at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue isn’t just narcissistic idolatry, it celebrates an idea of journalism that doesn’t exist. Journalism now is a bunch of millennial social justice activists playing dress-up. They’re not a profession or an industry. They don’t report. They don’t know anything. And they don’t serve the public. It’s not our fault that the people they really work for, won’t pay them.
Journalism is as extinct as the worshipers of Thoth and the Newseum. The media sold off its temple last week, but long before that its hacks and flacks had sold their soul.
[AmericanThinker] The left is advancing without relent while the right remains passive (at best). While idiots drone on about faux -isms and -obias, in reality we’re suffering under the unbearable weight of institutionalized stupidity in the face of evil.
It would not be an overstatement to say that war is being waged against our nation ‐ a war the Republican Party refuses to acknowledge, and therefore will not fight.
The army on the left is made up of an array of dangerous people, including progressives, socialists, communists, anarchists, Islamists, and a host of identity politics splinter groups. Nearly all operate all under the "big tent" called the Democratic Party. And they share one goal: the destruction of America.
And it’s happening fast.
Meanwhile, as the left advances, those in power on the right appear utterly clueless, cowardly, and/or complicit despite the brazen, in-broad-daylight enormity of this assault.
The tactics the left employs are wide-ranging, from outright violence to big tech fascism and everything in between. It’s like an anti-American monster machine with highly coordinated moving parts rolling across the country, targeting institutions, individuals, and ideas it finds "offensive" or "divisive." after almost two decades of this, of trying to sound the alarm, knowing what I do from what I learned growing up where I did, and noticing that the majority of my fellow Americans are too pignorant and just plain uneducated to ever want to listen to actual experience (and I’m not talking about you, dear readers, but all of you and myself don’t exactly constitute a majority), I’m just getting worn out.
#2
You surrender the field to the enemy so often by calling them 'liberals'. They're not. Never been.
They have no problem calling you racists, nazis, or fascists. Long time past to do the same. Don't hesitate to call them socialists or communist, because when the mask falls, as it has been, its what they are. Know thy enemy. They consider you theirs.
#3
Carter was such a bad President that he allowed 3 terms of Reagan to follow and straighten things out again. That is despite watergate and all that still being fresh.
Obama was even worse. The question is did the unemployed masses blame Obama, the Democrats, or just bad luck.
#6
Republicans don't have party discipline because the political class has been filled for decades now with a large number of centrists Democrats who ran as Republicans.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Hill] A private Christian university in Arizona has canceled a planned appearance by conservative writer Ben Shapiro, but said the decision is not "a reflection of his ideologies or the values he represents."
[Bloomberg] Parents are increasingly demanding contracts that restrict when kids’ caregivers can be on their phone and what they can do online.
