Hyperpartisan media

The media is abandoning any pretense at objectivity. Here's an example. Jorge Ramos not only wants full amnesty for illegal immigrants, but he wants to transform the U.S. into the kind of society those immigrants left. He wants the U.S. to be more like countries in Central and South America (as does President Obama).

I've visited Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, and I wouldn't trade any of them for the U.S.

So who supports Ramos as a supposed reporter?

In my opinion, this "disclosure" by Ramos is full 1984. While it's no doubt true that a person is not responsible for what his/her kids do, in this case, Ramos is proudly partisan. He attacks and defends based on party affiliation. This disclosure amounts to a cynical use of NEWSPEAK to obscure his real agenda, which is to get politicians elected who agree with his views.

It's awesome to watch, especially because so many people fall for it.

Here's the article:

Jorge Ramos, the amnesty activist moonlighting as a Univision and Fusion journalist, revealed in June that his daughter is an employee of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

ANNOUNCEMENT

A note from Jorge Ramos

by Jorge Ramos

http://fusion.net/story/153677/a-note-from-jorge-ramos/

As journalists the most important thing we have is our credibility and integrity. We maintain that, in part, through transparency with our audience, our colleagues and our critics. That is why I am disclosing that my daughter, Paola, has accepted a position working with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

As a father, I am very proud that she has decided to actively participate in our democratic process. I hope that more young people get involved, regardless of political parties or ideological preferences. Our democracy and our future depend on that.

I completely support and respect Paola’s decision. In our family we have always cherished tolerance, dialogue and active participation in what you believe.

Like many reporters who have parents, siblings or other family members that are active in politics, this will not change how I approach my duty as a journalist. I will continue to report with complete independence and ask the tough questions, the same way I have done for the last 30 years.

Jorge Ramos, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is the host of Fusion’s new television news show, “America With Jorge Ramos,” and is a news anchor on the Univision Network. Originally from Mexico and now based in Florida, Ramos is the author of nine best-selling books, most recently, “A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto.”

Full Orwell

President Obama: "War Is Peace"

James Taranto at the WSJ points out that President Obama has finally gone "full Orwell." I agree with Taranto. The President has been leading up to this point for years.

"You might say we’ve always been at war with Westasia. Obama has gone full Orwell here. He claims that his “diplomacy” precludes the possibility of any “sort of war” while acknowledging it will feed a war machine. He is quite literally claiming that war is peace." 
To what is Taranto referring? Here's how he introduces his point:

The question, then, is not whether to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but how.

According to Obama, there are only two ways of answering that question:

So let’s not mince words. The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war—maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.

“Let’s not mince words” serves the same function as “let me be clear”: It prompts the reader to ignore the mincing of words that immediately follows. The next sentence, all of two dozen words, includes two maybes. It asserts that a choice we face “ultimately” will have consequences “soon”—which seems achronological, though maybe Obama means “soon” relative to the age of the universe.

Most telling is the equivocation “some sort of war.” Does Obama really think that by choosing his form of “diplomacy,” America would prevent war of any sort? No. In fact, he acknowledges it will foment several sorts of war:

Now, this is not to say that sanctions relief will provide no benefit to Iran’s military. Let’s stipulate that some of that money will flow to activities that we object to. We have no illusions about the Iranian government, or the significance of the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force. Iran supports terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. It supports proxy groups that threaten our interests and the interests of our allies—including proxy groups who killed our troops in Iraq. They try to destabilize our Gulf partners. But Iran has been engaged in these activities for decades. They engaged in them before sanctions and while sanctions were in place. In fact, Iran even engaged in these activities in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War—a war that cost them nearly a million lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

...,

But there is an even more basic objection to Obama’s statement. Assume for the sake of argument that the “Iranian hard-liners” and the Republicans really do want an all-out military confrontation. Now, consider an example from history when such a result actually obtained. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 8, Congress declared war on Japan. Would it make any sense to say that the Japanese and the U.S. Congress had made “common cause”?

Obama is equating mutual antagonism with its opposite, “common cause.” Again, Orwell put it more pithily: War is peace.

...

It’s all quite a diminution for the man who said, in accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008:

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.

What accounts for Obama’s change in mindset? Are the times less serious now? Are the stakes lower?

"Big Brother"

Although Orwell's book 1984 was popular and influential years ago, I don't think younger generations are very familiar with it. I've mentioned how my students are unaware of it; they haven't studied it in high school, at least. They have heard the term "Big Brother" but they don't  associate it with a totalitarian government; now it's the popular TV show in its 17th season. A google search of "Big Brother" produces pages of hits based on the TV show with no mention of Orwell's character. While I find it fascinating to see Orwell's dystopian vision become reality, kids nowadays seem oblivious to what is happening to them.


Many people write about this, of course, but I came across a review of Mark Levin's book that seems to explain it pretty well, so I'll post that here:

Plunder and Deceit mainly concerns itself with the rising generation of young people. Although they are the victims being fleeced, they are, the author observes, a “generation . . . wedged in its own contradictions.” That is, they vigorously support the very policies that are bringing them to ruin, surrendering their fate to the increasingly autocratic government they claim to distrust. For this reason, Levin’s chapter on the education system’s role in destroying the rising generation’s prospects is worth the price of admission. Why do American schools produce such poorly educated adults while spending vastly more per student than virtually every modern industrialized nation? Because the money is not being spent per student. The universities now employ over 400 percent more people than the 850,000 who worked on campuses a half-century ago, but well over half of them (2.3 million) are administrators and support personnel, not teachers. Schools spend a king’s ransom on capital improvements that are unrelated to academic improvement. The government has essentially taken over the student-loan business, resulting not only in tuition and fee increases to soak up the available dollars but in a burgeoning crisis of debt and non-repayment — a crisis exacerbated by Obama’s policies. And dominated by instructors from a small circle of elite schools, the campus becomes a bastion of “progressive” groupthink, inexorably rendering the classroom a center of indoctrination.

The system has thoroughly undermined the traditional education mission of cultivating critical thinking and the search for truth. It has substituted Marxist economic determinism and oppression narratives for the ideals of freedom, inalienable rights, individual dignity, courage, and the overcoming of hardships that formerly featured prominently in the teaching of American history — the themes that rightly fostered patriotism. This is a major problem, not just for the country but for a book that primarily appeals to the young on the basis of their self-interest. What if they don’t know what their self-interest is? The very concept of self-interest has been stigmatized, and the young have been conditioned — on campus, in the media, in the popular culture — to prioritize abstractions and purportedly good intentions of government officials over the real-world consequences of government action. For example, Levin points out that experience teaches that the best guarantor of peace is a strong defense, and that if we have war because our enemies are emboldened by our weakness, it will be the young who will be called on to fight and die. Yet the young have been inculcated to believe that military strength causes, rather than prevents, trouble. They support deep slashes in defense spending in order to prop up entitlement programs that are robbing them blind. They support sharp increases in the minimum wage notwithstanding that these unavoidably result in increased youth unemployment and a future dimmed by the failure to acquire basic job skills. They are sympathetic to arguments for open borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants who compete with them for jobs in a stagnant economy. And so on. This is why the task of appealing to the young is such an uphill battle. Levin nevertheless takes heart. The burden is not to persuade every young person that the path to saving the country lies in our civil-society tradition and the Constitution’s limits on government. It is to persuade a critical mass — not just to the point of conviction but to activism. That is how an effective movement starts. The author, in fact, demonstrates this point in a chapter on the machinations of the environmental movement and its “degrowther” shock troops who wage war against prosperity itself. A great deal can be accomplished, and a great many minds moved, by a small, determined minority. Mark Levin has hope because the liberty activists he seeks to inspire will be on the side of the angels. And he has made certain that they will be armed with the facts.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421892/mark-levin-plunder-and-deceit-book-millenials

“ready to take action”

Even George Orwell didn't think of this:

Obama Will Investigate Death of Cecil the Lion, Ignores Planned Parenthood Selling Aborted Babies

George Will summed this up perfectly here: "We are wallowing in this moral swamp because the Supreme Court accelerated the desensitization of the nation by using words and categories about abortion the way infants use knives and forks — with gusto, but sloppily. Because Planned Parenthood’s snout is deep in the federal trough, decent taxpayers find themselves complicit in the organization’s vileness. What kind of a government disdains the deepest convictions of citizens by forcing them to finance what they see in videos — Planned Parenthood operatives chattering about bloody human fragments? “Taxes,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “are what we pay for civilized society.” Today they finance barbarism."

This is how the story was reported by http://www.lifenews.com/2015/07/31/obama-will-investigate-death-of-cecil-the-lion-ignores-planned-parenthood-selling-aborted-babies/:

The killing of Cecil the lion has been at the forefront of international outrage regarding big game hunting and now the Obama administration says they will join in helping investigate his death. The Hill reports that the administration is “ready to take action” and offer support to the Zimbabwean government. Earlier this month, American dentist Walter Palmer killed Cecil outside a Zimbabwean park.

Laury Parramore, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service said, “The Service is deeply concerned about the recent killing of Cecil the lion. We are currently gathering facts about the issue and will assist Zimbabwe officials in whatever manner requested. It is up to all of us — not just the people of Africa — to ensure that healthy, wild populations of animals continue to roam the savanna for generations to come.”

Although it is wonderful that the Obama administration has strong convictions about the killing of animals, it is unbelievable that this concern outweighs the trafficking of baby body parts by Planned Parenthood.

As LifeNews previously reported, President Obama has been virtually silent on the abortion giant’s videos showing their top executives negotiating the sale of aborted babies and sharing how they alter their procedures to obtain salable organs.

However, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said today that the President does not believe there is evidence of Planned Parenthood acting unethically and wouldn’t support legislation to defund them. He said, “On balance, the president would not be supportive of such congressional action. This is a tactic we have seen used before. The president obviously does not support that ongoing effort.”

Unfortunately, this is not surprising since President Obama and Planned Parenthood are best friends.

In 2013, Marjorie Dannenfeiser, the president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said the following about Obama’s support for Planned Parenthood: “There is no industry that President Obama is more willing to protect than the abortion industry and particularly Planned Parenthood, the nation’s biggest abortion provider, which in a single year performed more than 333,000 abortions. The president has defended federal funding for Planned Parenthood to the point of being willing to shut down the government over the continuing resolution battle, and in return they spent a record amount to reelect him in November.”

In 2013, President Obama praised the abortion giant and said he wanted God to bless them. He said, “As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure women have access to quality, affordable health care, and as long as we’ve got to fight to protect a woman’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a president who’s going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way. Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”

Most recently, President Obama has showed his extreme abortion views by threatening to veto the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would protect babies after 20-weeks from abortion based on the concept that they can feel pain. In January, the Obama administration said in a press release: “The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 36, which would unacceptably restrict women’s health and reproductive rights and is an assault on a woman’s right to choose. Women should be able to make their own choices about their bodies and their health care, and Government should not inject itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor.”