Matt Mackowiak
@MattMackowiak
· 6h
No one deserves this comeuppance more than John Weaver.
No one has fucked more people over in life.
Bled self funders dry, attempted to ruin operatives & journalists he doesn’t like, operated w/ lower personal ethics & more deception.
You reap what you sow, asshole.
@jwgop twitter.com/freebeacon/sta…
Whoa! No kidding! Yep, he is right, you do reap what you…
A redesign of the California Department of Corrections website make it harder for voters to inspect Sen. Kamala Harris's record as the state's top cop.
Is this an attempt to hide her ‘tough on crime’ record as CA attorney general?
Who is it, that is pulling the strings for her back in California...???
MSNBC guest Michael Eric Dyson compared the Betsy Ross American flag to the Nazi swastika symbol or a burning Ku Klux Klan cross during an appearance Wednesday.
MSNBC guest Michael Eric Dyson compared the Betsy Ross American flag to the Nazi swastika and a burning Ku Klux Klan cross during an appearance Wednesday.
Nike canceled a release of shoes featuring the iconic flag with the 13 stars representing the original colonies, after former NFL quarterback and liberal activist Colin Kaepernick objected because it was "offensive."
Dyson, a Georgetown University professor who frequently comments on racial issues from a left-wing perspective, defended the cancellation, citing its connection to the revolutionary period and that it was "deeply embroiled in enslavement."
Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti on Friday listed the ways that 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke is unlike the nation's 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.
Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti said Thursday that the emerging field of Democrats running for president in 2020 is "lackluster" and has yet to produce a strong challenger to President Donald Trump.
Likely Democratic voters in primary states are not eager for a third White House run by Hillary Clinton, according to a new poll
The paragraph that stood out for me:
The survey also reveals the top two most important issues to Democratic voters—securing single-payer health care and repeal of the Second Amendment.
But also:
Former vice president Joe Biden leads the field, but with just 29 percent of the vote. Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders is the only other candidate to crack 20 percent, while Clinton shares a distant fourth place with just 8 percent of likely voters saying they would support her in 2020. Oprah Winfrey also secured 8 percent of the vote.
Sixteen percent said they would choose to vote for a candidate not listed.
Clinton does, however, receive more support than several Democrats who are expected to run, including senators Elizabeth Warren (7 percent), Cory Booker (6 percent), and Kamala Harris (3 percent). Porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti, former secretary of state John Kerry, liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) each garnered just 1 percent.
Eric Holder and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz received negligible support.
Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti said Thursday that cities and suburbs are forming separate cultures than more rural areas and smaller towns, creating a "geographic separation" in the United States.
The key trick of Reihan Salam's new book, Melting Pot or Civil War?, is that it neatly bridges the yawning partisan gap on immigration using issues that concern both sides. We can have social equality and solidarity, Salam argues, or we can have immigration; we cannot possibly have both.
At Free Beacon, Charles Fain Lehman reviews Reihan Salam's Melting Pot or Civil War?:
The key trick of Reihan Salam's new book, Melting Pot or Civil War?, is that it neatly bridges the yawning partisan gap on immigration using issues that concern both sides. We can have social equality and solidarity, Salam argues, or we can have immigration; we cannot possibly have both.
Salam's pedigree well-qualifies him to cross the chasm. On one hand, as the executive editor of National Review, he carries impeccable conservative credentials. On the other, being the son of Bengali immigrants who grew up speaking his parents' native tongue at home, he says many expect him to be something of an immigration dove. One suspects that it is this combination of views that leads to Salam's thoughtful, measured conclusion that America in the 21st century needs to rethink how many and what sort of people it lets cross its borders.
There are more immigrants in the United States today than at any previous point—43 million, about 13.5 percent of the population. That population has grown steadily since 1965, swelling through multiple attempts at reform.
This growth implies a rebalancing of the American economy. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the noncitizen resident population is substantially less-skilled than their native-born and naturalized counterparts.
…
It is this combination—the rising immigrant population and its low-skill skew—that concerns Salam. What happens, he asks, in a country with a large, low-skilled population, especially when that group is excluded from the rights and privileges of citizenship?
There are two answers. The first views the influx of low-skilled workers as an unqualified boon, with cheap labor increasing productivity and thus GDP. The natural conclusion is that totally open borders would allow the United States to pick up the unclaimed "trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk" made available by unencumbered migration of labor.
…
Salam is not so sure. Unlike other critics of unrestricted immigration, he does not focus on the adverse impacts of low-skilled arrivals on the least-educated of America's native-born citizens. Rather, he asks, what actually happens to our society when we try to make it rich off of cheap labor?
There are, he points out, countries that far more efficiently extract value from their immigrants than we do. Consider Qatar, where 74 percent of the population are foreign-born workers living as de facto slaves. Or Singapore—a mere 43 percent immigrant—where a noncitizen woman will be summarily deported if she gets pregnant. In both places, large immigrant workforces are used to create stable lifestyles for citizens at the expense of noncitizen labor.
Such conditions are a product of what Salam labels "extreme between-group inequality," in which "disadvantaged groups can justly claim unfair treatment, and advantaged groups are keen to protect their status." This is a natural byproduct of the bifurcation of society mass immigration facilitates. The skilled, powerful top half of the distribution benefits, while the bottom half is kept in servitude by their lack of skill and systematic disenfranchisement.
I’m reminded here of open borders advocate Nathan Smith on how the billion or so immigrants would transform America, with the current citizenry becoming “modern equivalents of the ancient Roman mob, privileged idlers demanding bread and circuses paid for by taxes” on “modern latifundia, worked… by voluntary immigrants… for pay rates that would strike native-born Americans as a form of slave labor,” maintained by the end of “the social safety net, one person, one vote, or non-discrimination in employment” and by walled communities guarded by private security companies or “universal conscription into some sort of national police force” to defend the “sovereignty” of the citizen minority “against a possible immigrant revolution”… only Smith considers it a good thing.
Salam thinks this configuration is unsustainable in America. This is especially because, while first-generation immigrants may be simply happy to make more than they did at home, their children will not be.
"As someone born and raised in neighborhoods transformed by low-skill immigration," he writes, "I can confirm that: ‘You're better off than you would have been had you been born in the Third World!' is not a satisfying riposte. ‘Gee, thanks. I also can't afford my rent.'"
The dissatisfaction of second-generation immigrants—and subsequent backlash from the entrenched native-born "upper" class—is what will lead to Salam's predicted "civil war."
The alternative, then, is the eponymous "melting pot." Salam's fundamental proposal is to curb immigration while simultaneously transitioning to a skills-based immigration system. (There are several other, wonkier ideas, but this is the basic thrust.)
…
Concerns about "extreme inequality" and creating a "more egalitarian economy" are strange to hear from a conservative commentator. But Salam's purpose is more than just preventing income inequality as an evil per se. Rather, he understands that inequality of the sort he describes eats away at social solidarity, driving society apart. It produces exactly the imbalances of power that he sees in nations like Singapore and Qatar and that he would like to avoid in the United States.
Inequality matters not because it is intrinsically unjust, but because an ethnically or socioeconomically unequal society can never be the kind of republic envisioned by the founders. Insofar as open immigration leads to bifurcation, Salam sees immigration restriction as a way to reempower the middle of American society, while simultaneously allowing the immigrants who are already here to slowly join it.
Economically, this would require a step back from welfare-state neoliberalism. No longer able to rely on the immigration engine to boost GDP, policymakers will need to ensure equitable growth through a different historical model, making sure workers' wages rise steadily (a shift that will be facilitated by fewer foreign-born competitors).
