This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journalon September 5, 2019.
This year’s Democratic presidential candidates have a favorite whipping boy: “powerful interests.” Get ready to hear again in coming weeks how the National Rifle Association rules Washington, how the Koch empire dominates politics, how the right is pouring “dark money” into its agenda. And then remember that these are among the biggest whoppers of the 2020 election. One side will do battle with the aid of a huge and savvy nonprofit political empire—and it isn’t the right. Though the sooner Republicans understand that, the better.
A helpful tutorial arrived this week,“Power Grab,” a new book by Republican former Rep. Jason Chaffetzof Utah. Mr. Chaffetz has been digging into nonprofits since his time as House Oversight Committee chairman, and the book details how powerful the liberal nonprofit sector has grown. It may surprise many Americans—those who read daily stories about conservative “influence”—that the likes of the NRA, Judicial Watch and the National Organization for Marriage barely rank by comparison to the assets and revenue of Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union or the Nature Conservancy.
These aren’t only big political players; they’re the biggest political players. In 2018 the nonprofit watchdog Capital Research Center analyzed grants handed out in the 2014 election year by six big foundations on the right (including the Bradley and Charles Koch foundations) versus six on the left (including the Open Society and Tides foundations). Liberal public-policy charities, organized under chapter 501(c)(3) of the tax code, bagged $7.4 billion of this foundation money in 2014. For conservative charities, the figure was a mere $2.2 billion. That $7.4 billion also dwarfed total 2013-14 campaign receipts to federal, state and local campaigns ($4.1 billion) and spending that cycle by independent groups ($830 million).
They ignore reality and march in lockstep with their base. Did they learn anything from 2016?
By Peggy Noonan June 28, 2019
I’ve received tens of thousands of letters and other communications from Trump supporters the past few years, some of which have sparked extended dialogues. Two I got after last week’s column struck me as pertinent to this moment, and they make insufficiently appreciated points.
A gentleman of early middle age in Kansas City wrote to say he’d sat out the 2016 election because he was dissatisfied with both parties. But now he’s for Donald Trump, and the reason “runs deeper than politics.”
America’s elites in politics, media and the academy have grown oblivious to “the average Joe’s intense disgust” at being morally instructed and “preached to.”
“Every day, Americans are told of the endless ways they are falling short. If we don’t show the ‘proper’ level of understanding according to a talking head, then we are surely racist. If we don’t embrace every sanitized PC talking point, then we must be heartless. If we have the audacity to speak our mind, then we are most definitely a bigot.” These accusations are relentless.
“We are jabbed like a boxer with no gloves on to defend us. And we are fed up. We are tired of being told we aren’t good enough.” He believes the American people are by nature kind and generous—“they would give you the shirt off their back if you were in trouble”—and that “in Donald Trump, voters found a massive sledgehammer that pulverizes the ridiculous notion that Americans aren’t good enough.” Mr. Trump doesn’t buy the guilt narrative.
“It’s surely not about the man at this point. It stopped being about Trump long ago. It is about that counter-punch that has been missing from our culture for far too long.”
The culture of accusation, he says, is breaking us apart.
A reader who grew up upper-middle-class in the South writes on the politics of the situation. His second wife, also a Southerner, grew up poor. She is a former waitress and bartender whose politics he characterizes as “pragmatic liberal.” They watched Mr. Trump’s 2015 announcement together, and he said to her, “He doesn’t have a chance.” She looked at him “with complete conviction” and said, “He’s going to win.”
As the campaign progressed, she never wavered. At the end, with the polls saying Hillary, “I asked my wife how she could be so certain Trump was going to win.” He found her response “astute and telling.”
“She told me, ‘He speaks my language, and there’s a lot more of me than there is of you.’ ”
I have to say after a week of reading such letters that emotionally this cycle feels like 2016 all over again. Various facts are changed (no Mrs. Clinton) but the same basic dynamic pertains—the two Americas talking past each other, the social and cultural resentments, the great estrangement. It’s four years later but we’re re-enacting the trauma of 2016.
And the Democrats again appear to be losing the thread.
They’ve spent the past few months giving the impression they are in a kind of passionate lockstep with a part of their base, the progressives, and detached from everyone else.
And in the debates they doubled down. Both nights had fizz. There was a lot of earnestness and different kinds of brightness.
But what Night One did was pick up the entire party and put it down outside the mainstream and apart from the center.
This is what the candidates said:
They are, functionally, in terms of the effects of their stands, for open borders.
They are in complete agreement with the abortion regime—no reservations or qualms, no sense of just or civilized limits.
They’re all in on identity politics. One candidate warned against denying federally funded abortions to “a trans female.”
Two said they would do away with all private health insurance.
This has to be the most disturbing article I have ever read. Evidently, liberals lack a respect for the dead as they lack respect for the unborn. Several states are trying to pass laws that require proper burials for aborted babies so they won’t be thrown away with medical waste and the liberals are fighting even fighting that law. Tell me again how liberalism is supposed to be all about compassion and caring. Nancy
Washington becomes first state to legalize ‘green funerals’
Process composts human remains into soil
In this April 19, 2019, file photo, Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a company that hopes to use composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains, poses for a photo in a cemetery in Seattle, as she displays a sample of compost material left from the decomposition of a cow using a combination of wood chips, alfalfa and straw. On Tuesday, May 21, 2019, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill into law that allows licensed facilities to offer “natural organic reduction,” which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into soil in a span of several weeks. Th law makes Washington the first state in the U.S. to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File) **FILE**
By Dan Boylan– The Washington Times – Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Washington has become the first state to legalize “green funerals” — the process of mixing human remains with straw and wood chips and placing them in soil to help grow flowers and trees.
The Washington-based firm Recompose has pioneered human composting, which has been hailed as more affordable and environmentally friendly than caskets or cremation — America’s most popular form of burial.
“The idea of returning to earth resonates with many different faiths around the world,” Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, told The Washington Times. “And nature is really good at death.”
Some opposition to the new law came from the Catholic Church, which argued that the composting technique fails to follow church doctrine on the treatment of the dead.
But Washington state’s association of funeral directors supported the initiative, echoing sentiments expressed by the National Funeral Directors Association that the method offers environmental benefits at lower costs.
I am posting this article on our conservative women’s forum website under the category Culture Rot. The Democrat Party is rotting at its core and a number of Republicans have also lost their moral compass too. Disgusting ! Thanks to Jeff Miller for sharing this article. Please note: This was a difficult article to copy and paste as there are several videos in the article so I suggest you click on the link provided to read the entire article and view the videos. Where are the liberals who pride themselves on being compassionate and caring? Nancy
House fails to override Cooper’s veto of abortion bill
By Matthew Burns, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor, & Laura Leslie, WRAL Capitol Bureau chief
RALEIGH, N.C. — After weeks of delay, House Republicans on Wednesday failed in their attempt to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the “born alive” abortion bill.
The House voted 67-53 after almost an hour of emotional debate to override the veto, falling five votes short of the three-fifths majority needed for an override.
Senate Bill 359, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, would make it a felony for a doctor not to provide care for an infant born after a botched abortion. It also would create a duty for other health care professionals to report any such failure to act.
, R-Carteret. insisted Wednesday that isn’t the case as she pleaded for an override.
“Babies born from an abortion are not protected in our statutes,” McElraft said. “Why should those babies not have the same rights as a baby born naturally?”
A number of override supporters argued that the bill isn’t about abortion rights, only about human decency.
“We’re called to be kind and loving. That’s all we’re asking,” said Rep.
This article was written in 2014 but is even more relevant today as we can plainly see how the seeds of destructive feminism are now in full bloom One very glaring example is the extreme late term abortion bills that were just passed and celebrated in several states by Democrats.
Thanks to Frank Roche for sharing this article with us. Nancy
Mallory Millett resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. CFO for several corporations, she is a long-standing member of The David Horowitz Freedom Center and sits on the Board of Regents for the Center for Security Policy.
It’s completely woven throughout the fabric of The Democratic Party. It’s not the Dems of your grandfathers….not by a very long shot! It’s been entirely taken over by the radical Marxist Left which is made up of ideals and ideas which could not be more antipathetic to everything for which America stands. Period. We’ve been invaded from within. Our largest and deadliest Trojan Horses are the Universities. We did not win the Cold War. We’ve been snookered by clever operators. They took over our children and our media and that was that!
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.
During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”
What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.
Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me. Katie said, “Come to New York. We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”
I hadn’t seen her for years. Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage. I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.
And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”
It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:
“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”
Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.
There are two articles and one video link in this email. All deal with late term abortion. The video is an animated video of how a late term abortion is done and is really very upsetting. The first article is ” It is Never Necessary to Kill Baby for Health, Life of Mother ” where doctors and nurses speak out on this issue.
The second article is regarding the bill that was introduced by Republicans in the House to give medical aid to a baby that survives an abortion. Democrats blocked that bill. How much lower can the Democrats go ?
Thanks to Cindy Chuey and Charlie Hendrix for sharing these articles and video. Nancy
A number of pro-life obstetricians and nurses nationwide have spoken out against the New York Reproductive Health Act signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week, which not only codifies the “right” to an abortion, but also allows mothers to obtain an abortion past the 24-week mark and without limitation if the child in their womb is not expected to survive, or to “protect” the mother’s health or life.
“Every individual who becomes pregnant has the fundamental right to choose to carry the pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion,” the Reproductive Health Act, signed into law on Tuesday, reads in part. “A health care practitioner … may perform an abortion when … the patient is within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of pregnancy, or there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.”
The language reflects the 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade, in which Justice Harry Blackmun, nominated to the bench by Republican president Richard Nixon, wrote, “If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability [written in the ruling to be as early as 24 weeks], it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”
“I want to clear something up so that there is absolutely no doubt,” Dr. Omar Hamada of Tennessee, who outlined that he has delivered more than 2,500 babies, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “There’s not a single fetal or maternal condition that requires third trimester abortion. Not one. Delivery, yes. Abortion, no. There is absolutely no medical reason to kill a near term or term infant. For any reason.”
“If there’s a problem—and there are problems in the third trimester, both with the babies and with the mom that require delivery—just deliver the baby. We don’t have to kill it,” Hamada further explained to Fox News.
Dr. David McKnight, also of Tennessee, likewise said that if a concern arises, the baby is simply delivered via C-section. There is no need to kill the child to save the mother.
This is a rather humorous video of the differences between the Democrat and Republican parties (actually, it is not so funny as it highlights the stark differences between the two parties!) Be sure you vote as the future of this country depends of us, the voters ! Please share with your friends Nancy
