Jeffrey Tambor Departs ‘Transparent’ Amid Sexual Harassment Allegations
8 women reportedly come forward with sexual harassment allegations against TV legend Charlie Rose
Bill Clinton is facing NEW accusations of sexual assault by four women
Perhaps it is time to move onto claims of racism.
Black Female Writer For Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter Quits. She Says Dunham Is A Racist.
If you haven’t followed Star Trek actor George Takei on Twitter, then you are to be congratulated because you haven’t wasted time following his idiotic fulminations. If one is a “celebrity” and “gay”, like Takei, it seems one can say anything with impunity. Now it seems the centre-right has learned the lesson as well, as this latest news shows.
A former model and actor is accusing Star Trek icon George Takei of sexual assault in 1981. The accuser, Scott R. Brunton, who was 23 at the time of the alleged incident, claims that Takei took advantage of him when he was most vulnerable.
“This happened a long time ago, but I have never forgotten it,” Brunton tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “It is one of those stories you tell with a group of people when people are recounting bizarre instances in their lives, this always comes up. I have been telling it for years, but I am suddenly very nervous telling it.”
Isn’t 1981 before the Statute of Limitations of some kind? Who cares about “due process“?!
This past Wednesday, college presidents and Title IX coordinators met on Capitol Hill to discuss the issue of campus sexual assault and what to do under the new Trump administration.
Under the Obama administration, colleges were required to adjudicate accusations of sexual assault in a way that denied due process and the presumption of innocence. While President Donald Trump hasn’t spoken on the issue, the media has stoked fears that his administration will roll back protections for accusers, who are always labeled as “victims.”
One thing that went totally awry in the 2016 US election was the polling. For a campaign like Clinton’,s which was entirely data oriented, this was a death knell. In this campaign it wasn’t just the earlier polls that were wrong, but exit polls as well. Was it media malpractice or something else?
An article in Esquire shares some untold behind-the-scenes stories from the campaign including these about the exit polls.
Bret Baier, Fox News chief political anchor: We got the exit polls at 5 p.m. in a big office on the executive floor. Rupert Murdoch and all the staff were there. It looked like we were going to call the race for Hillary Clinton at 10:30 or 11 p.m.
Steve Bannon: The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.
Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, Trump’s religious adviser: I called Sean Hannity and said, “I really think he’s going to win tonight.” Sean said, “Well, I’m glad you do, because the exit polls don’t look good.” I found out later that Trump was very pessimistic, too.
Steve Bannon: Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.” Drudge snapped us out of it, saying, “You guys are a couple of jamokes. Wait until the second exit polls come out, or later.” We called the candidate and told him what the numbers were and what Drudge had said. And then we said, “Hey, ya know, we left it all on the field. Did everything we can do. Let’s just see how it turns out.”
Media malpractice might account for some of the problems, but this survey by CATO Institute highlights how people with center-right political orientation are less willing to share their political opinion and more likely to self-censor. It probably explains why Brexit polling was also wrong.
Earlier the Economist stated the following about the Catalonian independence.
Mr Puigdemont invokes “the legitimate right to self-determination of a thousand-year-old nation”. National and international law is against him. Spain’s constitution of 1978—approved by over 90% of Catalan voters in a referendum—granted the regions great autonomy. But it affirmed “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation”. Only the Spanish parliament can change the constitution. Catalonia’s own autonomy statute, which Mr Puigdemont’s law would replace, can only be amended by a two-thirds majority of its parliament. And the Council of Europe, which Mr Puigdemont consulted, said in June that any referendum must be carried out “in full compliance with the constitution”.
Globalist, like Economist, should not be so dismissive because every upstanding globalist, are there any other kind, knows that UN supersedes all. Following excerpt is from International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Spain is a signatory.
PART I
Article 1
1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
3. The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.
Flashback: Oct 26, 2016
From Washington Examiner
….Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The California Republican has been pursuing the dossier more aggressively than anyone else, and it was his Oct. 4 subpoena for the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that handled the dossier, that finally shook loose the information….
Sometime in October 2016 — that is, at the height of the presidential campaign — Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”
It was an astonishing turn: the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election….
When the Post story broke Tuesday night, some journalists noted that Democrats involved in the story had been lying about their role. “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong,’” tweeted the New York Times’ Ken Vogel. “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” added the Times’ Maggie Haberman.
Daily Mail provides a summary of where things stand for center-right in Europe after the Austrian election.
Austria
The eurosceptic and anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPOe) came close to winning the presidency in December, which would have made its leader the European Union’s first far-right president.
One of Europe’s most established nationalist parties, it is forecast to come second or third in this weekend’s vote and could become junior coalition partners to the favourites, the conservative People’s Party (OeVP).
Founded in 1956 by ex-Nazis, the party earned a stunning second place in 1999 elections with nearly 27 percent.
Last year its candidate Norbert Hofer narrowly lost a presidential runoff against Greens-backed economics professor Alexander Van der Bellen.
Germany
The openly anti-immigration and Islamophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the third-biggest party in the Bundestag after the September election, a political earthquake for post-war Germany.
The party took nearly 13 percent of the votes, having failed in the 2013 election to make even the five percent required for representation in parliament.
It has more than 90 seats on the benches of the parliament that meets for the first time on October 24.
France
Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN), founded by her firebrand father Jean-Marie in 1972, took nearly 34 percent of votes in the May presidential election run-off won by Emmanuel Macron
This was double her father’s 17.8 percent score when he reached the second round in 2002.
In campaigning, Le Pen vowed to abandon the euro, reinstate control of the nation’s borders and curb immigration if she won.
But the party fared badly in June parliamentary elections, taking just eight seats out of 577.
Tensions since then burst into the open when Le Pen’s right-hand man Florian Philippot quit and looks set to go his own way.
Hungary
The Movement for a Better Hungary, known as Jobbik, is ultra-nationalist and eurosceptic. It is the second largest party in the legislature but has been outflanked by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s own hardline anti-immigration stance.
Italy
The Northern League is a ‘regionalist’ formation that evolved into an anti-euro and anti-immigrant party that secured 18 seats in the 2013 parliamentary election.
The next general election must be held by spring 2018 and the party is hovering at around 14 percent of voter intentions.
Greece
The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn finished third in the September 2015 election, with seven percent of the vote and 18 MPs. One later defected and the party is now the fourth biggest in parliament.
Sweden
The Sweden Democrats party, with roots in the neo-Nazi movement, made a breakthrough in September 2014 to become the country’s third biggest party with 48 of 349 seats and nearly 13 percent of the vote.
Netherlands
The anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders in March became the second party in parliament, with 20 seats in the 150-member parliament.
Bulgaria
The nationalist United Patriots coalition entered government for the first time in May after coming third in a March election. It is the junior party in the governing coalition.
Slovakia
In March 2016 the People’s Party Our Slovakia benefited from Europe’s refugee crisis to enter parliament for the first time, winning 14 seats out of 150.
The Federalist examines how “The radicalization of the Democratic Party is transforming everything that happens in America into another battle in our unending culture war.”
For all their shortcomings, conservatives at least have a limiting principle for politics. Most of them believe, for example, in the principles enshrined in the Constitution and maintain that no matter how bad things are, the Bill of Rights is a necessary bulwark, sometimes the only bulwark, against tyranny and violence. In contrast, here’s Timothy Egan of The New York Times arguing unabashedly for the repeal of the Second and Fifth Amendments.
The rapid radicalization of Democrats along these lines follows a ruthless logic about the entire premise of the American constitutional order. If you believe, as progressives increasingly do, that America was founded under false pretenses and built on racial oppression, then why bother conserving it? And why bother trying to compromise with those on the other side, especially if they reject progressives’ unifying theory that America is forever cursed by its original sin of slavery, which nothing can expiate?
Before you scoff, understand that this view of race and America is increasingly mainstream on the American Left. To read someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose recent article in The Atlantic is a manifesto of racial identity politics that argues Trump’s presidency is based on white supremacy, is to realize that progressive elites no longer believe they can share a republic with conservatives, or really anyone with whom they disagree.
Coates has attained near god-like status among progressives with his oracular writings on race and politics, which take for granted the immutability of race and racial animus. So it’s deeply disturbing when he writes, as he does in a new collection of essays, that “should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.”…..
For a sincere progressive, almost everything that happened in the past is a crime against the present, and the only greatness America can attain is by repudiating its past and shaming—or silencing, if possible—all those who believe preserving our constitutional order is the best way for all of us to get along.
Seen in that light, the radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans. It means, among other things, that the culture war is now going to encompass everything, and that it will never end.
Several exit poll studies after the 2016 US election pointed out that some counties in the Rust Belt underwent a 30-point vote swing. Lot of those who voted for Obama in 2012 switched their vote to Trump in 2016. Did all of them suddenly become racist as the leftist press asserts?
George Soros wanted an answer to the same question and funded a study.
“The three researchers who conducted the study are Stacy Harwood, a professor urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Harris Beider, a visiting professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; and Kusminder Chahal, a researcher at Coventry University in England.
While the study’s primary stated goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the white working class, an unstated goal of the study is to help the American left and the Democratic Party recapture some meaningful chunk of the white working-class voting bloc.”
The study made the following observations.
White working-class voters are sick and tired of political correctness and identity politics
“We can’t even say what we feel,” says a Tacoma interviewee who voted for Trump because “he’s actually saying this stuff that many people across America are thinking.”
Trump-supporting members of the white working class also despise identity politics and they perceive the Democratic Party “as the party of identity politics.”
“Some in our study had grown up in staunch Democrat families and had previously supported Democrat candidates,” the researchers explain. “Yet the view is that politicians are more interested in looking after communities of color than white working-class communities.”
White working-class voters think ‘white privilege’ is a bunch of idiotic claptrap
The study participants describe “white privilege” as nonsense.
“Participants felt they were struggling because they lived paycheck to paycheck, had two or three jobs, and worked hard to put food on the table,” the researchers say. “Their limited economic means and lack of upward mobility did not seem like white privilege.”
“The working class has been abandoned or exiled by the Democrats”
“The working class has been abandoned or exiled by the Democrats,” the study flatly concludes.