Planned immigration
If there was any doubt that Biden and the global government are fully backing open borders, here is an interesting document from the World Bank that details the immigration policy and the importance of open borders.
There is a lot to read here but it's worth reading the highlights. I think this puts an end to the claim that democrats and some Republicans actually want open borders.
www.worldbank.org
There is a lot to read here but it's worth reading the highlights. I think this puts an end to the claim that democrats and some Republicans actually want open borders.
World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies
World Development Report 2023 proposes an integrated framework to maximize the development impacts of cross-border movements on both destination and origin countries and on migrants and refugees themselves.
www.worldbank.org
Why Character doesn't matter anymore
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Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore
The “cheerful prudery” of Ned Flanders has given way to vulgarity, misogyny, and partisanship. What does this mean for our witness?
www.christianitytoday.com
I guess Ned Flanders goes to strip clubs now.
Until this week, I hadn’t thought about the caricatured born-again Christian neighbor on the animated series The Simpsons in a long time. New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham mentioned him and his “cheerful prudery” as examples—along with Billy Graham and George W. Bush—of what were once the best-known evangelical Christian figures in the country. Indeed, a 2001 Christianity Today cover story dubbed the character “Saint Flanders.” Evangelical Christians knew that Ned’s “gosh darn it” moral demeanor was meant to lampoon us, and that his “traditional family values” were out of step with an American culture this side of the sexual revolution.
But Ned was no Elmer Gantry. He actually aspired to the sort of personal devotion to prayer, Bible reading, moral chastity, and neighbor-love evangelicals were supposed to want, even if he did so in a treacly, ultra-suburban, middle-class North American way. As Graham points out, were he to emerge today, Flanders would face withering mockery for his moral scruples—but more likely by his white evangelical co-religionists than by his beer-swilling secular cartoon neighbors.
As Graham says, a raunchy “boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.” (This article you are reading right now represents something of this shift, as I spent upward of 15 minutes pondering how to quote Graham’s article without using the word boobs.)
Graham’s analysis is important for American Christians precisely because the shift she describes is not something “out there” in the culture but is instead driven specifically by the very same white evangelical subculture that once insisted that personal character—virtue, to use a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.
Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.
Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.
Wilson, of course, cultivates a cartoonishly “Aren’t we naughty?” vibe not representative of most evangelical Christians. But the problem is the way many other Christians respond: “Well, I wouldn’t say things the way he says them, but …” In the same way, they characterize as just “mean tweets” Donald Trump attacking those claiming to be sexually assaulted by him for their looks or war heroes for being captured or disabled people for their disabilities or valorizing those who attack police officers and ransack the Capitol as “hostages.”
What’s worse is that evangelical Christians—including some I listened to pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications with which I agreed then and agree now)—ridicule as pearl-clutching moralists those who refuse to do exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders for doing, namely, weighting policy agreement over personal character.
In the midst of the late-1990s Clinton scandal, a group of scholars issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency,” which stated:
Those words seem far more distant than a Tocqueville quote now.
Opinion Scott Perry’s phone was seized. Here’s what that tells us.
- By cigaretteman
- Off Topic
- 6 Replies
By Jennifer Rubin
Columnist |
August 10, 2022 at 7:45 a.m. EDT
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) delivers remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 5. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Less than a day after the FBI executed a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, bureau investigators have seized the cellphone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). That tells us a few things.
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We have heard about Perry before. To begin with, the Senate Judiciary Committee last year called him out by name for further inquiry in its report on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And the House select committee investigating the attempted insurrection apparently listened: Perry has come up several times in the select committee’s hearings.
According to hearing testimony, Perry acted as a bridge between then-assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, pushing Clark forward as a possible replacement for acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who was resisting Trump’s fake-elector scheme. Without Perry’s intervention, it’s not clear Clark could have made a move to take Rosen’s job.
Perry also pushed to Meadows the nutty conspiracy that Italian satellites were used to change Trump votes to votes for Joe Biden. And Perry allegedly attended a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting at the White House with other MAGA hard-liners to discuss Trump retaining power. To top it all off, he later asked for a pardon, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson. (Perry has denied this allegation.)
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The seizure is an unusual step, given long-standing concerns about congressional protection under the Constitution’s “speech and debate” clause, which shields members for things they say during the course of their legislative duties (although in criminal cases, this has not slowed down law enforcement).
“To anyone who in past 24 hours indicated the Department of Justice was principally interested in document removal,” impeachment co-counsel Norman Eisen told me, this should be a wake-up call. “[Trump’s] documents are one strand, but this is a reminder there is another important strand.” The phony-elector scheme and the events of Jan. 6 remain squarely in the department’s view.
Eisen noted that given concerns about the speech and debate clause, seizing a phone “from a sitting member of Congress indicates the level of probable cause [the DOJ possesses] as to the false-elector scheme.” In short, investigators must have had powerful evidence to obtain a search warrant.
Following the utter meltdown from the GOP after the Mar-a-Lago document retrieval, “seizing a phone is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Eisen said. In other words, Attorney General Merrick Garland will not be intimidated or deterred by Republican caterwauling. If he has probable cause of a crime and finds individuals in possession of materials relating to the crime, he’s going to court to get a search warrant; of that we can now be sure.
The Perry phone warrant also comes just weeks after the phone of former Trump lawyer John Eastman phone was seized and a warrant was executed at Clark’s house. All appearances suggest it did not take long to cull information and to find a critical link to Perry from there; the available testimony indicates it certainly would be logical for investigators to pursue Perry after a review of Clark’s phone.
Of course, you can count on the Republicans — already threatening to retaliate against the Justice Department — to go berserk. They’ll carry on about congressional rights. They’ll promise to use the House Judiciary Committee to “get to the bottom” of all this if they retake control of the chamber.
But it is far from clear that the American voters will be sympathetic in the run-up to the midterms. Trump’s victim-crying and his Republican amplifiers might have used up what’s left of voters’ patience with all the “How dare we get investigated for crimes!”
Republicans seem bent on turning the upcoming elections into a referendum on whether Trump and conspirators can be investigated and held accountable for alleged crimes. But they might not want to start measuring the drapes in the speaker’s office quite yet. Originally, they thought inflation was the winning issue to land them in the majority, but that issue has moved to the back burner thanks to Republican screeching about Trump.
Weeks of hyperventilating from Republican enablers of Trump might not be the best strategy.
Columnist |
August 10, 2022 at 7:45 a.m. EDT
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) delivers remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 5. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Less than a day after the FBI executed a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, bureau investigators have seized the cellphone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). That tells us a few things.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
We have heard about Perry before. To begin with, the Senate Judiciary Committee last year called him out by name for further inquiry in its report on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And the House select committee investigating the attempted insurrection apparently listened: Perry has come up several times in the select committee’s hearings.
According to hearing testimony, Perry acted as a bridge between then-assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, pushing Clark forward as a possible replacement for acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who was resisting Trump’s fake-elector scheme. Without Perry’s intervention, it’s not clear Clark could have made a move to take Rosen’s job.
Perry also pushed to Meadows the nutty conspiracy that Italian satellites were used to change Trump votes to votes for Joe Biden. And Perry allegedly attended a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting at the White House with other MAGA hard-liners to discuss Trump retaining power. To top it all off, he later asked for a pardon, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson. (Perry has denied this allegation.)
Follow Jennifer Rubin's opinionsFollow
The seizure is an unusual step, given long-standing concerns about congressional protection under the Constitution’s “speech and debate” clause, which shields members for things they say during the course of their legislative duties (although in criminal cases, this has not slowed down law enforcement).
“To anyone who in past 24 hours indicated the Department of Justice was principally interested in document removal,” impeachment co-counsel Norman Eisen told me, this should be a wake-up call. “[Trump’s] documents are one strand, but this is a reminder there is another important strand.” The phony-elector scheme and the events of Jan. 6 remain squarely in the department’s view.
Eisen noted that given concerns about the speech and debate clause, seizing a phone “from a sitting member of Congress indicates the level of probable cause [the DOJ possesses] as to the false-elector scheme.” In short, investigators must have had powerful evidence to obtain a search warrant.
Following the utter meltdown from the GOP after the Mar-a-Lago document retrieval, “seizing a phone is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Eisen said. In other words, Attorney General Merrick Garland will not be intimidated or deterred by Republican caterwauling. If he has probable cause of a crime and finds individuals in possession of materials relating to the crime, he’s going to court to get a search warrant; of that we can now be sure.
The Perry phone warrant also comes just weeks after the phone of former Trump lawyer John Eastman phone was seized and a warrant was executed at Clark’s house. All appearances suggest it did not take long to cull information and to find a critical link to Perry from there; the available testimony indicates it certainly would be logical for investigators to pursue Perry after a review of Clark’s phone.
Of course, you can count on the Republicans — already threatening to retaliate against the Justice Department — to go berserk. They’ll carry on about congressional rights. They’ll promise to use the House Judiciary Committee to “get to the bottom” of all this if they retake control of the chamber.
But it is far from clear that the American voters will be sympathetic in the run-up to the midterms. Trump’s victim-crying and his Republican amplifiers might have used up what’s left of voters’ patience with all the “How dare we get investigated for crimes!”
Republicans seem bent on turning the upcoming elections into a referendum on whether Trump and conspirators can be investigated and held accountable for alleged crimes. But they might not want to start measuring the drapes in the speaker’s office quite yet. Originally, they thought inflation was the winning issue to land them in the majority, but that issue has moved to the back burner thanks to Republican screeching about Trump.
Weeks of hyperventilating from Republican enablers of Trump might not be the best strategy.