Thomas Sowell is a real mensch. We need more like him.

Thank you, Dr. Sowell, for your relentless dedication to truth and freedom. Enjoy your retirement, sir.

From The Jewish World Review:


12/28/16: Farewell   

Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.

It was very fulfilling to be able to share my thoughts on the events unfolding around us, and to receive feedback from readers across the country — even if it was impossible to answer them all.

Being old-fashioned, I liked to know what the facts were before writing. That required not only a lot of research, it also required keeping up with what was being said in the media.

During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful. With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful.

This made me decide to spend less time following politics and more time on my photography, adding more pictures to my website (www.tsowell.com).

Looking back over the years, as old-timers are apt to do, I see huge changes, both for the better and for the worse.

In material things, there has been almost unbelievable progress. Most Americans did not have refrigerators back in 1930, when I was born. Television was little more than an experiment, and such things as air-conditioning or air travel were only for the very rich.
My own family did not have electricity or hot running water, in my early childhood, which was not unusual for blacks in the South in those days.

It is hard to convey to today's generation the fear that the paralyzing disease of polio inspired, until vaccines put an abrupt end to its long reign of terror in the 1950s.

Most people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things like cable television, microwave ovens and air-conditioning. Most Americans did not have such things, as late as the 1980s. People whom the intelligentsia continue to call the "have-nots" today have things that the "haves" did not have, just a generation ago.

In some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the years. Politics, and especially citizens' trust in their government, has gone way downhill.

Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.

Most of us did not question what he did. He was President of the United States, and he knew things that the rest of us couldn't know — and that was good enough for us. Fortunately, the Soviets backed down. But could any President today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?

Years of lying Presidents — Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially — destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students' faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Goodbye and good luck to all.

12/27/16: Random Thoughts, Looking Back 

  

Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit — even if only to himself — being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both "the greatest generation" that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today, makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission.

"Gratingist" is a perfect neologism.

Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today. Some of the fashionable notions of the 1930s reappeared in the 1960s, often using the very same discredited words and producing the same disastrous consequences.

The old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer, if they disregard the record of the past.

If you want to understand the fatal dangers facing America today, read "The Gathering Storm" by Winston Churchill. The book is not about America, the Middle East or nuclear missiles. But it shows Europe's attitudes and delusions — aimed at peace in the years before the Second World War — which instead ended up bringing on that most terrible war in all of human history.

Black adults, during the years when I was growing up in Harlem, had far less education than black adults today — but far more common sense. In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity, among both blacks and whites.

The first time I traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, as the plane flew into the skies over London I was struck by the thought that, in these skies, a thousand British fighter pilots fought off Hitler's air force and saved both Britain and Western civilization. But how many students today will have any idea of such things, with history being neglected in favor of politically correct rhetoric?

You cannot live a long life without having been forced to change your mind many times about people and things — including in some cases, your whole view of the world. Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface.

In my first overseas trip, I was struck by blatantly obvious differences in behavior among different groups, such as the Malays and the Chinese in Malaysia — and wondered why scholars who were far more well-traveled than I was seemed not to have noticed such things, and to have resorted to all sorts of esoteric theories to explain why some groups earned higher incomes than others.

There are words that were once common, but which are seldom heard any more. The phrase "none of your business" is one of these. Today, everything seems to be the government's business or the media's business. And the word "risque" would be almost impossible to explain to young people, in a world where gross vulgarity is widespread and widely accepted.

Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: "What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?"

Reading about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the widespread retrogressions of Western civilization that followed, was an experience that was sobering, if not crushing. Ancient history in general lets us know how long human beings have been the way they are, and dampens giddy zeal for the latest panaceas, despite how politically correct those panaceas may be.

When I was growing up, we were taught the stories of people whose inventions and scientific discoveries had expanded the lives of millions of other people. Today, students are being taught to admire those who complain, denounce and demand.

The first column I ever wrote, 39 years ago, was titled "The Profits of Doom." This was long before Al Gore made millions of dollars promoting global warming hysteria. Back in 1970, the prevailing hysteria was the threat of a new ice age — promoted by some of the same environmentalists who are promoting global warming hysteria today.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

If you think I was too hard on that dead son of a bitch Castro, read this!

     Armando Valladares is a real man, a gentleman, and a great Christian. Pray, kiddies, that you may never have your faith tested like this brave man and his comrades.

     And when it does happen [as it surely will] pray even harder that you will not be found wanting. The totalitarians of both the left and the right don't give a flying fuck about your body. They want your souls!

                Armando Valladares’s story says more about Fidel Castro than any obituary could. It’s a part of the Fidel Castro story Michael Moore and Sean Penn won’t tell, or don’t know. It’s a story you certainly didn’t hear from the media as they endlessly opined about Castro’s “complicated” legacy. But it reveals so much more about the dictator than they ever could.

The year was 1959. Castro, a young revolutionary, had seized Cuba’s imagination with talk of democracy and a new vision for its people. It didn’t take long, however, for one follower to discover Castro’s true nature, and for Castro to run up against the limits of his own earthly power.

  Armando Valladares may not have been the first man to challenge the Cuban dictator, but he eventually became the best known. By his own account, the young Valladares was an early supporter of Castro’s revolution, taking a job in the Office of the Ministry of Communications for the Revolutionary Government, where he worked as a postal clerk. But all of that changed when he was asked to put a communist slogan on his desk. It comprised three simple words: “I’m with Fidel.” He refused.

A young artist and poet who also happened to be a Christian, Valladares understood the meaning of the request. What he did not know, and could not know, was how far his own government would go to bend him to its will.

Soon after his refusal to comply, Valladares was arrested by political police at his parents’ home. Faced with trumped up charges of terrorism — a favorite tactic of the Castro regime for silencing dissent — he was given a 30-year sentence. Valladares would spend time in different prison camps for the next 22 years.

The first, La Cabaña, forged some of the very worst memories. “Each night, the firing squad executed scores of men in its trenches,” he told the Becket Fund, which last year honored him with its Canterbury Prize, given annually to a person who embodies an unfailing commitment to religious freedom. “We could hear each phase of the executions, and during this time, these young men — patriots — would die shouting ‘Long live Christ, the King. Down with Communism!’ And then you would hear the gunshots. Every night there were shootings. Every night. Every night. Every night.”

May God have mercy on their brave souls.

Years passed, and the communists fixated on enrolling prisoners in reeducation programs. Valladares, still early in his sentence, was offered the chance at “political rehabilitation” but refused to comply.

He was sent to an even more brutal prison, and the government ramped up its efforts to break his spirit. Armando Valladares may not have been the first man to challenge the Cuban dictator, but he eventually became the best known. “I spent eight years locked in a blackout cell, without sunlight or even artificial light. I never left. I was stuck in a cell, ten feet long, four feet wide, with a hole in the corner to take care of my bodily needs. No running water. Naked. Eight years,” Valladares recalled.“All of the torture, all of the violations of human rights, had one goal: break the prisoner’s resistance and make them accept political rehabilitation. That was their only objective.”

After nearly a decade, prison officials adjusted their terms. If Armando would simply sign a document renouncing his beliefs and embracing Communism, he could return to his family. The choice was simple: physical freedom or spiritual liberty. “For many people, it wasn’t practical to resist. Better to sign the paper and leave,” Valladares said. “But for me, signing that paper would have been spiritual suicide.” So how did Valladares do it? How did his faith and spirit endure during those years alone in prison?

“In the beginning, I embraced God perhaps for fear of losing my life, since I was in danger of being executed,” he told the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. But hearing those men proclaim their love for Christ just prior to their executions moved him in ways he could not have imagined:

"I realized then that Christ could be of help. Not merely by saving my life, but also giving my life, and my death if that was the case, an ethical sense that would dignify them. I believe that it was at that particular moment, and not before, when Christianity, besides being a religious faith, became a way of life that in my own circumstances resulted in resistance — resisting torture, resisting confinement, resisting hunger, and even resisting the constant temptation to join the political rehabilitation and indoctrination programs that would end my predicament.

The battle lines were drawn for Valladares: the material life versus the spiritual life. Castro and his earthly ambitions of a utopian dictatorship versus Christ and His promise of everlasting life for those who follow Him.

Castro fought hard, desperate to strip Valladares of his most valuable possession: his sense of morality. But once again, his faith proved up to the task. “To be Christian under those circumstances meant that I could not hate my tormentors; it meant to maintain the belief the suffering was meaningful because if man gives up his moral and religious values, or if he allows himself to be carried by a desire to hate or for revenge, his existence loses all meaning,” he explained.

Valladares noted often that he was not alone in his spiritual battle with Castro. His fellow Christians showed him the way: I saw dozens of Christians suffering and dying — committed, like myself, to maintaining their dignity and their richness of spirit beyond misery and pain.

"I remember with emotion Gerardo Gonzalez, a Protestant preacher, who knew by heart whole Biblical passages and who would copy them by hand to share with his brothers in belief. I cannot forget this man whom all of us called “Brother in Faith.” He interposed himself before a burst of machine-gun fire to save other prisoners who were beaten in what is known now as the Massacre of Boniato Prison. Gerardo repeated, before dying, the words said by Christ on the cross: 'Forgive them, Father for they know not what they do.' And all of us, when the blood had dried, struggled with our consciences to attain something so difficult yet so beautiful: the ability to forgive our enemies."

Valladares’s God, too, showed him the way and the light. “There are no impossibilities for those who love and seek God,” he said. “The more ferocious the hate of my jailers, the more my heart would fill with love and a faith that gave me strength to support everything; but not with the conformist or masochistic attitude; rather, full of joy, internal peace and freedom because Christ walked with me in my cell.”

While in prison, Valladares began to write poetry denouncing his oppressors. Without paper or pen, he wrote on cigarette papers and onion skins, using his blood as ink. His wife, whom he met in prison, smuggled the poems to the outside world and they became his first book, From My Wheelchair, released in 1977. “There is nothing dictators fear more than artists, especially poets,” Valladares wrote.

In “Life Was Not Enough,” dedicated to Pedro Luis Boitel, whom he called “an unforgettable brother,” he expanded on the thought:

Life was not enough for you in that torture chamber but there were rifle butts and boots to spare buckets of urine and excrement thrown in your face. They could not forgive you your labors of light and words they feared your smile the eloquence of your hands they feared the fertility of your ideas and your manner of being silent they feared your life, Pedro, and they murdered you . . .

Today, Valladares paints rather than writing poems. His pictures are not scenes of torture and darkness, but vibrant landscapes that depict his soul — the refuge where he survived Castro’s war on his body and his conscience. But in his speech last year to the Becket Fund, he stressed that his experience had taught him the need for vigilance in defense of freedom: Just as there is a very short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what to do, how to think, and how to live. And sometimes your freedom is not taken away at gunpoint but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one small silencing at a time. Never allow the government — or anyone else — to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do. Castro is dead, and there will be countless biographies dedicated to burnishing his legacy. But the best way to understand his life is to appreciate the life of one Cuban dissident he changed forever.

Armando Valladares’s story may never be required reading in Cuban schools, but it needs to be read in every American school. Call it “The Dictator and The Dissident.” It’s quite a yarn.

— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content for Salem Radio Network. He is also the host of Our American Stories. He lives in Oxford, Miss.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Did you wonder why the Clod Prince of Orange chose to whack Boeing?

Here's the skinny, kiddies:

Boeing has a $170 million contract to design the new Air Force One, not REPEAT NOT $4 billion as the orange dictatrix tweeted. Why the lie? (I know, I know. "Because it is still breathing.")

Earlier, Boeing's CEO had publicly questioned the wisdom of Clump's 18th century throwback mercantilist economic fascism and its future effects on the economy.

Beware, kiddies.

Your Humble Narrator courts future trouble with the IRS, the Secret Service, NAMBLA, its Russian equivalent, and the chekists (who are, frankly, the Russian equivalent) OR,

ESTABLISHMENT UBER ALLES! OR, YOU CAN'T DRAIN A SWAMP BY PUTTING THE SWAMP MONSTERS* IN CHARGE.

*Thanks to Mark Levin (My third favorite Jew...Go ahead and try to guess. Here's a hint: Bob Dylan is Number 4.) for that one.

I know you Clumpskyites and AWUGs (Angry White Unemployed Guys) out there don't want to read the truth, but you've got yourselves tangled up in a genuine cult of personality with this orange psychopath and you are either too proud or too ignorant to admit it.

I know you voted for it because you thought it would wreak vengeance on those who have wronged you. That is just stupid on so many levels. The thirst for revenge blinds you and makes you weak and vulnerable. A cold and calculating victory strategy that would put your enemies to flight is what is called for. But no, you'd rather rage and scream at the darkness because it makes you feel better now. Meanwhile, the creature you consider your hero is giving your enemies power to rule over you while you applaud it for its wondrous "honesty" and "outsider" thinking.

SUCKERS.

For example, the guy who is about to become your Treasury Secretary is a George Soros bootlicker. And you claim to be an anti-commie anti-globalist American patriot! You are a sucker and a dumbass.

How about your new Secretary of State? He's been sucking Czarina Putina's strap-on for years and getting rich in return. He' s also a baby-eater, a "climate change" freedom and job destroying fascist and the very definition of globalist elite insider. But I'm sure he loves his dog...as long as it doesn't produce too much methane. Can't wait for those robot dogs...

You suckers.

All you'll need to do is watch the Democrass senators at the confirmation hearings. They will only attack the REAL CONSERVATIVES, the true anti-power, anti-establishment outsiders. Beware of those to whom they give a pass.

And one more thing before I forget. What sane human thinks that creepy little sodomite opressing poor Russia deserves anything more than a .22 to the back of his fat head? (As an amateur Russian historian, I think a bomb thrown at his motorcade is more likely. However, my Russian cousins have proved themselves more than adept at both.)

And I do mean sodomite. All that photo-op judo and hunting and deep sea diving is certainly over-compensating for something. (I wouldn't be surprised if Germaine Greer in drag knows exactly what.) And WTF is up with all that barechested bareback riding? That sort of thing attracts a specific sub-genre. You can look it up.

Of course, Clump may simply be a Putina sycophant. I'm not saying that Clump itself definitely is a homosexual, but you must admit there appears to be quite a lot of over-compensation going on there, too. (It is a world famous jock-sniffer. Maybe it's just a big sports fan. Maybe it likes to pay powerfully built young men to urinate on it while it reclines naked in its solid gold bathtub. Who knows?)

Has anybody really given any thought to that whole "grab her by the pussy" thing? It doesn't make any sense. It can buy all the pussy it wants and then some. Plus, there are oodles of females all over the world willing to debase themselves just for a contact high from all that money and power. So why the badass predator act? Could it be that l'il Clumpy can't rise to the occasion?

Even if it does like girls, it seems reasonable to assume it needs some kind of violence and/or degradation to get off.

We'll probably never know for sure, because money definitely can buy you happiness, kiddies...or at least the silence of your victims.

Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Laura Ingraham entered her daughter in a Clump beauty contest? Not funny for the child, of course. But then again, who cares about children? Certainly not her mommy, the alleged Catholic, who now votes the straight (and perhaps not so straight) BabyEater ticket.

"In an insane society, the sane man must apear to be insane."

LOOK, KIDDIES! It's Clumpy, the orange threat to love, decency, freedom, and everybody's brain cells!

See Clumpy's tiny hands, kiddies? That means his penis is smaller than that of all the other clowns. Even Harry Reid's.

And it is much, much smaller than Hitlery's strap-on dildo. (Goober II has been getting hit pretty hard in his pooper ever since the election.)

Wage and price controls and tariffs, anyone?

Clumpy the Clown is a cross between Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon without the brains of the former or the boyish charm of the latter.

Sorry, George. You are too little and too late. (Not to mention not conservative enough to be a credible Clump critic.)

From Washington's other newspaper comes the plaintive cry of the not-so-conservative-that-he- doesn't-get-invited-to-all-those-swell-DC-parties Mr. Will. The funny thing is, he's absolutely correct on this one.

Trump’s Carrier deal is the opposite of conservatism

Republicans succumb to the fatal conceit that politicians know better than markets.

So, this is the new conservatism’s recipe for restored greatness: Political coercion shall supplant economic calculation in shaping decisions by companies in what is called, with diminishing accuracy, the private sector. This will be done partly as conservatism’s challenge to liberalism’s supremacy in the victimhood sweepstakes, telling aggrieved groups that they are helpless victims of vast, impersonal forces, against which they can be protected only by government interventions.

Responding to political threats larded with the money of other people, Carrier has somewhat modified its planned transfers of some manufacturing to Mexico. This represents the dawn of bipartisanship: The Republican Party now shares one of progressivism’s defining aspirations — government industrial policy, with the political class picking winners and losers within, and between, economic sectors. This always involves the essence of socialism — capital allocation, whereby government overrides market signals about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Therefore it inevitably subtracts from economic vitality and job creation.

Although the president-elect has yet to dip a toe into the swamp, he practices the calculus by which Washington reasons, the political asymmetry between dispersed costs and concentrated benefits. The damages from government interventions are cumulatively large but, individually, are largely invisible. The beneficiaries are few but identifiable, and their gratitude is telegenic.

When, speaking at the Carrier plant, Vice President-elect Mike Pence said, “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Donald Trump chimed in, “Every time, every time.” When Republican leaders denounce the free market as consistently harmful to Americans, they are repudiating almost everything conservatism has affirmed: Edmund Burke taught that respect for a free society’s spontaneous order would immunize politics from ruinous overreaching — from the hubris of believing that we have the information and power to order society by political willfulness. In an analogous argument, Friedrich Hayek warned against the “fatal conceit” of believing that wielders of political power can supplant the market’s “efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information.” The Republican Party is saying goodbye to all that.

Indiana’s involvement in the Carrier drama exemplifies “entrepreneurial federalism” — states competing to lure businesses. This is neither new nor necessarily reprehensible. There are, however, distinctions to be drawn between creating a favorable climate for business generally and giving direct subsidies to alter the behavior of businesses already operating in the state. And when ad-hoc corporate welfare, including tariffs, becomes national policy, it becomes a new arena of regulation, and hence of rent-seeking, which inevitably corrupts politics. And by sapping economic dynamism, it injures the working class.

The most widely discussed and properly praised book germane to today’s politics is J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the sufferings and pathologies of the white working class, largely of Scots-Irish descent, in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. This cohort, from which Vance comes, is, he says, one of America’s most distinctive subcultures, particularly in its tenacious clinging to traditional mores, many of them destructive.

His book has often been misread as primarily about the toll taken by economic forces — globalization, automation, etc. Actually, Vance casts a cool eye on the theory that “if they only had better access to jobs, other parts of their lives would improve as well.” His primary concern is with “lack of agency” and “learned helplessness” — the passive acceptance of victim status.

One theory of the 2016 election is that the white working class rebelled not just against economic disappointments but also against condescension, demanding not just material amelioration but, even more, recognition of its dignity. It is, however, difficult for people to believe in their own dignity when they believe that their choices are powerless to alter their lives’ trajectories. Eventually, they will detect the condescension in the government’s message that their fortunes are determined not by things done by them but by things done to them.

Such people are susceptible to charismatic presidential leadership, with its promise that executive power without limits can deliver them from unhappiness by delivering to them public goods. In contrast, there was dignity in the Joad family (of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”). When the Dust Bowl smothered Oklahoma, the Joads were not enervated, they moved west in search of work.
What formerly was called conservatism resisted the permeation of society by politics, and particularly by the sort of unconstrained executive power that has been wielded by the 44th president. The man who will be the 45th forthrightly and comprehensively repudiates the traditional conservative agenda and, in reversing it, embraces his predecessor’s executive swagger.

Read more here:
Lawrence H. Summers: Trump’s Carrier deal could permanently damage American capitalism

George F. Will: Donald Trump’s rise reflects American conservatism’s decay

Bernie Sanders: Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump

The best weapon against fascism is...

From Uni Watch via @czabe:

Paul Lukas‏@UniWatch Nov 17

Proposed 'Skins rebranding by @losbrooklyn.

Fidel Castro, ROT IN HELL, YOU BLOOD-SOAKED COCKSUCKER! (My apologies to all practioners of non-euclidean sex. Castro was much worse than you.)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A NEW AMERICAN RECORD! or, NO MATTER WHO YOU VOTE FOR, THE GOVERNMENT GETS IN!

125 million dumbasses! 125 million suckers! 125 million I TOLD YOU SOS! (Yeah, that is an S.O.S as well.) If you voted for either Clump, THIS MEANS YOU!

Prepare to reap the whirlwind, kiddies

The orange clown has begun its reign of terror (a bit earlier than even Your Humble Narrator imagined) just as the Bolsheviks did - by turning on its political allies first (They are naturally the softest targets, after all. Who could imagine Comrade Lenin - oops I mean Clump of course - would not wipe outour common enemies as soon as we handed him power?

Certainly not Sean O'Spammity! Certainly not Rash Dimbulb! Certainly not The Savage Weiner! And most definitely not the oh-so-conveniently "Catholic" Sauron Ingraham!

Or maybe they did...

Guess what happens when you betray your principles, your country, and you God, kiddies.

YOU LOSE EVERYTHING!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Orange Clump isn't going after Hitlery. It literally holds every position on every issue. If that isn't madness, the word has lost all meaning.

Read its own words spoken to The Old Gray Whore unless you value your own sanity and your soul:

Donald Trump's New York Times Interview: Full Transcript

Media|Less Defiant Trump at The Times: 'I Hope We Can All Get Along'

Trump, in Interview, Moderates Views but Defies Conventions

Donald Trump's New York Times Interview in 12 Tweets

And here's one from Washington's other newspaper...

Trump's new interview with the New York Times isn't reassuring

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!

Mittens The Pompadoured Pussy is so far inside he's become an INSIDE-OUTER!

Now he's got his marvelous head of hair inside Clump's orange colon! (That's right, kiddies, I didn't vote for him, either.)

Do any of you Clumpskyites need more evidence you've been had? You suckers are gonna get it soon...and you're gonna get it hard. Time to bend over and grab your ankles...

Donald Trump-Mitt Romne.y meeting another wild 2016 twist

CNN‎

Trump Meets With Romney as He Starts to Look Outside His Inner Circle

New York Times‎

Trump, Romney have 'far-reaching conversation' at meeting

Washington Post‎

More news...


P.S. I told you the orange clown was no outsider. Suckers!

Why haven't Steve Bannon and Germaine Greer ever been seen together?????????

Germaine Greer [above].




Germaine Greer in drag.



Because the clod prince of the ACK! right and the real women-hating commie cow ARE ONE AND THE SAME!

Remember, kiddies, if it fucks like a fascist, steals like a fascist, and murders like a fascist, it is a fascist.

Your humble narrator's conscience will allow him to sleep easily for the next four years...

...because I had the decency and common sense to vote for Castle & Bradley of the Constitution Party. You poor bastards who voted for Orange or Distaff Clump will get no sympathy from these quarters.

     Now is the time to destroy the orange-faced clown with the dead badger on its head.

     Good times...good times...

Oooooooooo...look at all the outsiders!

From I Hate Fox News:

Reince Priebus is Trump’s Appointed Chief of Staff

by Soy Chingon | Nov 13, 2016

Reported by The New York Times WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump on Sunday chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose...




Donald Trump Is Picking His Cabinet. Here’s a Shortlist.

A list of possibilities for key posts in the new administration.

White House Chief of Staff

The chief of staff manages the work and personnel of the West Wing, steering the president's agenda and tending to important relationships. The role will take on outsize importance in a White House run by Mr. Trump, who has no experience in policy making and little in the way of connections to key players in Washington.

Reince Priebus Mr. Trump announced Sunday that he had chosen Mr. Priebus, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Stephen K. Bannon The right-wing media executive and chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign was also considered, but Mr. Trump instead named him chief strategist and senior counselor in the White House. Some have denounced the move, warning that Mr. Bannon represents nationalist and racist views.

Secretary of State

Whether Mr. Trump picks an ideologue or a seasoned foreign policy hand from past Republican administrations, his challenge will be that the State Department is the centerpiece of the post-1945 experiment of alliance-building and globalism, which Mr. Trump said he would dismantle.

John R. Bolton Former United States ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush

Bob Corker Senator from Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Newt Gingrich Former House speaker

Zalmay Khalilzad Former United States ambassador to Afghanistan

Stanley A. McChrystal Former senior military commander in Afghanistan

Treasury Secretary

The secretary will be responsible for government borrowing in financial markets, assisting in any rewrite of the tax code and overseeing the Internal Revenue Service. The Treasury Department also carries out or lifts financial sanctions against foreign enemies — which are key to President Obama’s Iran deal and rapprochement with Cuba.

Thomas Barrack Jr. Founder, chairman and executive chairman of Colony Capital; private equity and real estate investor

Jeb Hensarling Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee

Steven Mnuchin Former Goldman Sachs executive and Mr. Trump’s campaign finance chairman

Tim Pawlenty Former Minnesota governor

Defense Secretary

The incoming secretary will shape the fight against the Islamic State while overseeing a military that is struggling to put in place two Obama-era initiatives: integrating women into combat roles and allowing transgender people to serve openly. Both could be rolled back.

Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee

Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (he would need a waiver from Congress because of a seven-year rule for retired officers)

Stephen J. Hadley National security adviser under George W. Bush

Jon Kyl Former senator from Arizona

Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama who is a prominent immigration opponent

Attorney General

The nation's top law enforcement official will have the authority for carrying out Mr. Trump's “law and order” platform, including his threat to “jail” Hillary Clinton. The nominee can change how civil rights laws are enforced.

Chris Christie New Jersey governor

Rudolph W. Giuliani Former New York mayor

Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama

Interior Secretary

The Interior Department manages the nation’s public lands and waters. The next secretary will decide the fate of Obama-era rules that stop public land development; curb the exploration of oil, coal and gas; and promote wind and solar power on public lands.

Jan Brewer Former Arizona governor

Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner

Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company

Forrest Lucas President of Lucas Oil Products, which manufactures automotive lubricants, additives and greases

Sarah Palin Former Alaska governor

Agriculture Secretary

The agriculture secretary oversees America's farming industry, inspects food quality and provides income-based food assistance. The department also helps develop international markets for American products, giving the next secretary partial responsibility to carry out Mr. Trump's positions on trade.

Sam Brownback Kansas governor

Chuck Conner Chief executive officer of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives

Sid Miller Texas agricultural commissioner

Sonny Perdue Former Georgia governor

Commerce Secretary

The Commerce Department has been a perennial target for budget cuts, but the secretary oversees a diverse portfolio, including the Census, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Chris Christie New Jersey governor

Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company

Lewis M. Eisenberg Private equity chief for Granite Capital International Group

Labor Secretary

The Labor Department enforces rules that protect the nation’s workers, distributes benefits to the unemployed and publishes economic data like the monthly jobs report. The new secretary will be in charge of keeping Mr. Trump’s promise to dismantle many Obama-era rules covering the vast work force of federal contractors.

Victoria A. Lipnic Equal Employment Opportunity commissioner and work force policy counsel to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce

Health and Human Services Secretary

The secretary will help Mr. Trump achieve one of his central campaign promises: to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The department approves new drugs, regulates the food supply, operates biomedical research, and runs Medicare and Medicaid, which insure more than 100 million people.

Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate

Mike Huckabee Former Arkansas governor and 2016 presidential candidate

Bobby Jindal Former Louisiana governor who served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals

Rick Scott Florida governor and former chief executive of a large hospital chain

Energy Secretary

Despite its name, the primary purview of the Energy Department is to protect and manage the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

James L. Connaughton Chief executive of Nautilus Data Technologies and former environmental adviser to President George W. Bush

Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner

Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company

Education Secretary

Mr. Trump has said he wants to drastically shrink the Education Department and shift responsibilities for curriculum research, development and education aid to state and local governments.

Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate

Williamson M. Evers Education expert at the Hoover Institution, a think tank

Secretary of Veterans Affairs

The secretary will face the task of improving the image of a department Mr. Trump has widely criticized. Mr. Trump repeatedly argued that the Obama administration neglected the country's veterans, and he said that improving their care was one of his top priorities.

Jeff Miller Retired chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee

Homeland Security Secretary

The hodgepodge agency, formed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has one key role in the Trump administration: guarding the United States’ borders. If Mr. Trump makes good on his promises of widespread deportations and building walls, this secretary will have to carry them out.

Joe Arpaio Departing sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.

David A. Clarke Jr. Milwaukee County sheriff

Michael McCaul Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee

Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama

E.P.A. Administrator

The Environmental Protection Agency, which issues and oversees environmental regulations, is under threat from the president-elect, who has vowed to dismantle the agency “in almost every form.”

Myron Ebell A director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate change skeptic

Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner who was involved in drafting the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990

Jeffrey R. Holmstead Lawyer with Bracewell L.L.P. and former deputy E.P.A. administrator in the George W. Bush administration

U.S. Trade Representative

The president’s chief trade negotiator will have the odd role of opposing new trade deals, trying to rewrite old ones and bolstering the enforcement of what Mr. Trump sees as unfair trade, especially with China.

Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company, and a critic of Chinese trade practices

U.N. Ambassador

Second to the secretary of state, the United States ambassador to the United Nations will be the primary face of America to the world, representing the country’s interests at the Security Council on a host of issues, from Middle East peace to nuclear proliferation.

Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee

Richard Grenell Former spokesman for the United States ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration

C.I.A. Director / Director of National Intelligence

Mr. Trump takes over at a time of diverse and complex threats to American security. The new C.I.A. director will have to decide whether to undo a C.I.A. “modernization” plan put in place this year by Director John O. Brennan, and how to proceed if the president-elect orders a resumption of harsh interrogation tactics — which critics have described as torture — for terrorism suspects.

Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

Peter Hoekstra Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

Mike Rogers Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

Frances Townsend Former homeland security adviser under George W. Bush

National Security Adviser

The national security adviser, although not a member of the cabinet, is a critical gatekeeper for policy proposals from the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies, a function that takes on more importance given Mr. Trump's lack of experience in elective office.

Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

     

It is time for everybody to start ignoring G. "Wiz" Terry Madonna.

     One of the biggest fatheads in the history of fatheads really screwed the pooch this time, kiddies. His last "opinion poll" had Distaff Clump beating Orange Clump by 11 points in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This Democrass party apparatchik is propped up by the lazy and corrupt media and his own shameless self- promotion. It is time somebody takes this moron to the dog track and leaves him there.

AMERICA CHOOSES 4 MORE YEARS OF FASCISM!

     Yes, kiddies, the inevitable has happened, but this time it is right-fascism. Corporatism and big government will continue to run roughshod over us little people, contrary to the masturbatory fantasies of the False Conservatives [Rash Dimbulb, Sean Spamity, Laura "No, seriously, I really am Catholic" Ingraham, The Savage Weiner, et al.]

     We real conservatives will be the first targets of Clump The Orange. [Doubt me? Just look to Uncle Joe Stalin for the answer. The first people he liquidated were his "allies" on the left, like the Mensheviks. Ever seen a live Menshevik, kiddies? Nope, me neither.] But rest assured IT will get around to everyone who dares to say mean and nasty things about IT. For instance, just wait until white working men don't magically get jobs and the price of EVERYTHING they buy goes sky high due to the tariffs IT promised will punish those evil foreigners and cure cancer at the same time. They'll turn on the Orange Clown in a heartbeat and he will return the favor with bloodthirsty vengeance.

     And don't get me started on the Orangenald and Big Babykilling. If Planned Black Genocide was on the NYSE, it would be time to take the kids' college fund and BUY!
    
   

As always, I urge you to buy lots of guns and lots of ammo and teach every man, woman , and child you love how to use them. You're going to need all the help you can get.

Bob Dylan is a real mensch.

After telling The Community Organizer From The High Yellow Lagoon to suck it, ol' Bobby Z did the same to the cretinous Swedes of the Nobel Committee.

The saga of Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize continues.

Mr. Dylan became the first musician to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this month, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics had the same artistic value as novels and poetry. But no one knows how Mr. Dylan feels about the honor. He has made no public statements, and a brief reference added to his website (“Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature”) was quickly removed after the news media caught wind of it.

Mr. Dylan’s ambivalence to one of the world’s most prestigious honors, and the uncertainty about whether he will accept it, appears to have begun to wear on the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. On Saturday, an academy member called Mr. Dylan “impolite and arrogant.”

“One can say that it is impolite and arrogant,” the member, Per Wastberg, a writer, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, according to a translation by The Associated Press. “He is who he is.”

After Mr. Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize was announced, Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she did not know if Mr. Dylan would attend the award ceremony in December because she had not been able to get in touch with him. Mr. Wastberg told the newspaper that the committee would not try to contact him again.

“We have agreed not to lift a finger. The ball lies entirely on his half,” he said. “You can speculate as much as you want but we don’t.”

The Swedish Academy moved quickly on Saturday to distance itself from Mr. Wastberg’s remarks. Ms. Danius said in a statement that every person awarded a Nobel Prize can make his or her own decision about how to respond.

“The Swedish Academy has never held a view on a prizewinner’s decision in this context, neither will it now, regardless of the decision reached,” the statement said. “A member of the academy, Per Wastberg, has publicly expressed his disappointment at Bob Dylan’s omitted response. This is Mr. Wastberg’s private opinion and is not to be taken as the official standpoint of the Swedish Academy.”

Mr. Wastberg’s criticisms, however, were met with amusement — some of it bitter. Some cheered the spectacle of a musical icon thumbing his nose at the Nobel Prize, while others seemed to share Mr. Wastberg’s frustration with a musician known for his aloofness. Mr. Dylan rarely gives interviews or interacts with audiences at concerts.

“Nobel’s fan crush on Dylan seems to be turning sour,” the novelist Hari Kunzru posted on Twitter. “Soon they’ll be stalking him and send weird stuff in the mail.”

James Wolcott, a columnist for Vanity Fair, noted that Mr. Dylan’s lack of response was not the same as actively turning down the prize as some laureates, like Jean Paul Sartre, have done. Mr. Wolcott said it was a mistake to celebrate the musician’s reticence.

“‘That’s just Dylan being Dylan.’ You could substitute any egotist’s name in that formulation,” he said on Twitter. “Trump being Trump. Kanye being Kanye.”

When the award was announced, some in the literary world criticized the decision to give it to one of the 20th century’s most well-known musicians. Those early murmurs of dissent have only grown amid Mr. Dylan’s apparent indifference to an honor that can transform the career of a lesser-known writer.

“Bob Dylan now has a chance to do something truly great for literature: reject the Nobel Prize for Literature,” the poet Amy King wrote on PEN America’s website after the organization asked writers and publishers to respond to the award. “Great literature is not easily consumed like pop songs that rhyme.”

The fascist and sodomite left has always thought they owned Mr. Dylan. God bless Bob Dylan! May he always confound the comfortable non-thinkers!

The War Against the One, True Church continues apace.

The proud pervert just won Round One in the courts. No surprise there. When was the last time you saw or heard of a judge who wasn't a left-fascist death-worshipper?

Lesbian sues NJ Catholic high school for firing - Crux

HACKENSACK, N.J. - A woman is suing a Roman Catholic school in New Jersey, alleging the school violated the state’s discrimination law when she was fired because she’s married to a woman.
The suit alleges that Paramus Catholic High School; its president, James P. Vail; and the Archdiocese of Newark, led by Archbishop John Myers, violated anti-discrimination laws and intentionally inflicted emotional distress.

An attorney for Paramus Catholic High School said on Friday they plan to ask a judge to dismiss Kate Drumgoole’s suit.

In court papers, the lawyer argues Drumgoogle was dismissed for failing to abide by the tenets of the faith when she entered into a same-sex marriage, and not because of her sexual orientation.
Attorney Christopher Westrick also argues that the defendants’ conduct is protected under the First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion and freedom from government entanglement within religion.

Drumgoole was not dismissed for being a lesbian, the filing asserts, but “for violating the Ministerial Policies and the Code of Ethics - in failing to abide by the tenets of the Roman Catholic faith, i.e. by entering into a same sex marriage.”

Drumgoogle told The Record newspaper she was fired as dean of guidance and head coach of the basketball team in January after administrators learned she was married to a woman..

Hmmm...I wonder why she didn't tell them. Could it be she new it was against the rules? Or was her conscience bothering her? No, it couldn't be that. Sodomy is a good thing...at least that is what our moral and intellectual superiors scream at us from behind their guns.

Drumgoogle says other faculty members remain employed even though they don’t abide by the church’s tenets, including several faculty who are divorced, at least one who has a child out of wedlock, various employees who  cohabitate with members of the opposite sex, at least one other teacher who is gay, and another teacher whose nude photographs have been circulated online.
A graduate of the school herself, Drumgoole told The Record she was “proud to be a part of such a diverse school community that exposed students to so much, and I also felt it was an honor to serve my alma mater.”

According to New Ways Ministry, a pro-LGBT advocacy group, more than 50 gays and lesbians have either been fired or had employment offers rescinded at Catholic institutions in America since 2010. In most cases, the cause for termination was not sexual orientation, but the fact that the person had entered into a same-sex marriage.