Links - 1st November 2019 (2) (Trump and Baltimore)

Left Jumps Trump For Saying What Democrats Have About Baltimore - "Once again, President Trump’s critics have invoked racial invective in an effort to tarnish his image while ignoring similar comments from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and 2020 presidential hopeful.Less than a week ago, in a reply to Maryland’s Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, who made disparaging comments about the living conditions of asylum-seekers on the southern border, Trump told Cummings to focus his attention on his home district. “Cummings’ District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place. … No human being would want to live there,” Trump wrote. The so-called mainstream media was apoplectic, falling all over themselves to call Trump and his comments racist as quickly as possible.Let’s rewind to a Dec. 8, 2015, speech Sanders delivered in Baltimore: “The fact of the matter is that America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. But anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood [in west Baltimore] would not think you’re in a wealthy nation. You would think that you’re in a Third World country.”The reaction from the same media? Crickets... Even former mayor Catherine Pugh (2016-19), during a walking tour in September 2018, condemned parts of her own city. “What the hell? We should just take all this sh-t down,” she said, regarding the dilapidated and boarded up buildings and row houses in east Baltimore. “You can smell the rats. Oh my G-d, you can smell the dead animals.” While she was absolutely correct, nothing changed during her scandal-ridden administration, ending with her resignation in May of this year after she pushed a series of children’s books in exchange for city contracts. Were Pugh’s comments racist? What about the myriad reports by PBS, The Baltimore Sun, and the New York Times?... Frankly, the city has been slumping for decades under constant Democratic control — politicians who have continued to mishandle things the same way for decades, yet somehow have expected improvements. The last Republican mayor of Baltimore was Theodore McKeldin (1963-67), and the last time a Republican was elected to the City Council was 1939. When one-party rule goes unchecked for decades, complacency, carelessness, and corruption set in. When people condemn President Trump for his remarks while giving a free pass to the politicians making similar comments on the other side of the aisle, they are simply looking for a scapegoat. Trump has been in office two and a half years — he is most certainly not responsible for the strife that has befallen Baltimore... Project Baltimore reported that in 13 of 39 city high schools, zero students were proficient in math. Zero. Let that sink in for a minute. In six more Baltimore high schools, only 1 percent tested proficient. In roughly half the schools, 3,804 students attempted the exam, with a mere 14 proficient in math. Not 14 percent, 14 actual students. It’s no wonder the poverty rate in Baltimore is 22 percent. Incompetent so-called leaders and teachers’ unions have corrupted the public school system. They hide behind tenure while indoctrinating students instead of educating them, condemning the next generation to the consequences of the corrupt and broken system they created. It’s not all their fault, though: the children they teach have largely grown up in chaotic homes that do not value learning. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who spent more than 30 years as a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, reported that 65 percent of the children in Baltimore live within single-parent families, a trend that has been worsening for decades and is statistically worse in black communities compared to white, Hispanic, and Asian communities. Sadly, Baltimore is not an anomaly. See also Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, and St. Louis, just to mention a few... pointing out these things, which should be obvious, gets you labeled with an “-ist” or a “-phobe.”"

Trump Called ‘Racist’ For Saying Baltimore Is ‘Rat’ ‘Infested.’ But PBS Aired Documentary Confirming Trump’s Comments. - "CNN’s Victor Blackwell, for example, lashed out at Trump for suggesting Baltimore was “infested” with rats, claiming the infestation language from Trump was some racist code for black and brown people... PBS aired a documentary called "Rat Film" about the troubled city last year, detailing the issues the president highlighted about Baltimore.The documentary, as one might suspect, was not condemned as "racist" when it was aired."'Rat Film,' a documentary that takes the decades-long fight waged against Baltimore’s rat population and uses it as a lens through which to look at how the city has addressed myriad social issues over the decades, airs tonight on PBS," The Baltimore Sun reported in February 2018. The docu, created by Baltimore filmmaker Theo Anthony, was "a crowd favorite" at Maryland's Film Festival, according to the news outlet... Patch reported last year that Baltimore was among one of the nation’s "Rattiest Cities" according to a report from Orkin, a pest control company."

Baltimore’s new deputy police commissioner gets mugged at gunpoint - "The robbery came just a month after the department launched a new “crime reduction strategy” that it said would “reduce the victimization and fear of victimization of violent crime in Baltimore City.”There have been 185 homicides in the city so far this year, with 166 from shootings, according to the Sun, with only St. Louis having more murders per 100,000 people"

Donald Trump at the Overton Window - "Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting... Politico, along with the rest of the virtue-signaling, chest-less media, sobbed in impotent disbelief. “President Donald Trump on Monday opened new fronts in the bitter tirade he launched over the weekend against Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore, lobbing insults at civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.”You know that the president’s observation was impermissible because Politico called it “bitter,” which ever since Obama’s “bitter clingers” remark has been code for “right-wing redneck.”... What Al Sharpton really is, as the president noted, is a “con man,” a race-hustling mountebank. Thomas Sowell was less polite but more accurate when he said that Sharpton headed “a trail of slime going back more than a quarter of a century, during which he has whipped up mobs and fomented race hatred from the days of the Tawana Brawley ‘rape’ hoax of 1987 to the Duke ‘rape’ hoax of 2006 and the Ferguson riots of 2014.”...
'as morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found, a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions. The same is true of a false charge of sexism or anti-Semitism. This is the lesson we should all have learned from the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of his false and irresponsible charges of communism against liberals, socialists, and others among his critics, many communists and agents of communist influence sought to pass themselves off as Jeffersonian democrats or merely idealistic reformers'...
“People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.” Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.)... Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities. Trump opened the window on that paralyzing darkness when he dared to violate the taboo against criticizing failure when it happened to be presided over by blacks. But to do so is not racist. In fact, it is anti-racist, because it dares to hold everyone, blacks as well as whites, to the same standard."

Democrats Control America’s Most Dangerous Cities. So Why Do They Keep Passing the Buck on Gun Crime? - "Progressives and conservatives traditionally have exhibited different attitudes to the lessons of history. While conservatives have tended to take cues from the past as they build measured hopes for the future, progressives have urged that we break free from tradition in order to create bold and ambitious blueprints for a society they consider to be more just. In the United States, however, this pattern appears to be breaking down, as it is now progressives who tend to embrace a more rigid, backward-looking approach, especially on issues tied to identity. Unlike conservatives, progressives aren’t looking to revive a better, sometimes idealized version of their country. But they have become bogged down in the politics of historical redress, at the expense of forward-looking policies that would actually improve people’s lives. A microcosm of this larger tendency was put on display during last month’s Democratic primary debates, which touched on the issue of urban gun violence. No Democratic presidential candidate expressed a sense of responsibility for the plague of violent crime in America’s cities, even though the largest urban areas are almost all controlled by Democratic politicians... The Democrats like to suggest that the problem of gun crime can’t ever be fully tackled until their party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, at which point they might pass aggressive gun-control legislation at the national level. But the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab has identified a meaningful role for city government initiatives in improving community safety. A 2014 empirical study of a summer-job program found that even part-time, minimum wage jobs can help reduce violent crime among youth in high-crime areas of Chicago by more than 40 percent. The study’s authors speculate that the program’s success is less attributable to poverty alleviation than to the social, psychological and cultural benefits of having a job... Preventing the deaths of today’s black youth would do a lot more good than dwelling on a racist past whose evils can never be undone."