Showing posts with label @jeanneives @sbalich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label @jeanneives @sbalich. Show all posts

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Female Cyclist Who Lost To Transgender 'Woman' Speaks Out: 'NOT Fair'


From the Dailywire

Female Cyclist Who Lost To Transgender 'Woman' Speaks Out: 'NOT Fair'

Screenshot: YouTube
ByAMANDA PRESTIGIACOMO
 454.4k views
On Sunday, biologically male cyclist Rachel McKinnon, competing against biological females, unsurprisingly took home a gold medal at Sunday's UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles.
One of the women he edged out, third-place winner Jennifer Wagner, is not staying silent about the glaring unfairness.
"I was the 3rd place rider. It's definitely NOT fair," wrote Wagner, an American from Houston, in a tweet on Monday, according to The Daily Caller.
The second-place winner, Carolien van Herrikhuyzen, stunningly said the biological male who bested her won an "honest race," citing current rules.
"No one is a transgender to steal anyone's medal. We had an honest race under UCI rules. If you compete you accept the rules, otherwise, don't compete. I can only imagine what she had to go through in her life to be where she is now, how hard it is to fit in," wrote van Herrikhuyzen in a tweet.
Wagner pushed back, "Just because it’s a CURRENT UCI rule doesn’t make it fair or right. And rules can be changed."
As reported by The Daily Wire on Monday, McKinnon blasted critics of his victory as "transphobic bigots."
The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh argued on Wednesday that McKinnon's victory is another reminder that "transgender rights" will always trump women's rights for those on the Left.
"It turns out that the Left does not treat all victim groups equally. Some victims are more important than others," writes Walsh. "There is a hierarchy of victims, in fact, and LGBT folks sit at the very top of it. Their claims of victimhood trump all other claims. Their desires and demands come before everything else. A woman's claim to privacy and agency ends where the demands of the LGBT camp begin. She is entitled to be heard and respected only up to the point that her thoughts and feelings might be inconvenient to the aims of the gay lobby. Her womanhood is treated as something unique, special, and beautiful, right until a man slaps on a wig and changes his name to Rachel. Then, suddenly, unceremoniously, womanhood is an utterly meaningless, superficial thing that any man can appropriate for himself."
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Monday, October 8, 2018

The illness deep within the bones of the republic



By John Kass


The illness deep within the bones of the republic
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John Kass
It is tempting to watch the political spectacle of Democrats destroying Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as if it were only some shameful partisan circus.
Something brutally Roman with a howling mob, blood on the sand; or something medieval, like trial by ordeal, with a mace and an axe and the might of brutes as the elements of God’s will.

Or, better yet, a drama as Spanish as the Inquisition itself.
Because what we’re seeing in the Kavanaugh circus isn’t American, where until very recently — like a few months ago — the accused was given the presumption of innocence.
All that has changed. Now the accused is forced to prove his innocence before accusers who must be believed, accusers who aren’t expected to bring witnesses, accusers who must not under any circumstance be subject to rigorous cross-examination, before judges who have already made up their minds.
What we’re witnessing is the symptom of an illness now deep within the very bones of our republic.
It threatens Republicans now, and Democrats tomorrow. It will threaten even those who don’t give two figs for politics and see all such talk as lies told by knaves to fools.
What we are seeing are founding American principles being swept — among them the presumption of innocence and the rights of the accused — to feed the appetites of power politics
That’s what Kavanaugh is dealing with, having to testify and defend himself against uncorroborated allegations of sexual predation 36 years ago, when he was in high school and in his freshman year of college.
The short-term politics of all this is quite clear, a movement led by cynics and assisted by their handmaidens in the Democratic Media Complex.
It is designed to convince suburban women voters that Republicans are hateful creatures, help Democrats pick up congressional seats in the November midterm elections and do away with President Donald Trump.
But look deeper and you’ll see something else.
The sweeping away of traditions that have been carefully nurtured from the founding of this nation, to protect individual liberty and shield us from the passions of the mob.
Without these principles, we are no longer a republic.
To prove the point, Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono insisted the other day that Kavanaugh’s accusers not only “need to be heard, they need to be believed.”
But asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if Kavanaugh should have the same presumption of innocence as other Americans, here is what Sen. Hirono, a lawyer, said: “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”
In other words, Kavanaugh’s legal decisions on unrelated matters make him guilty of sexual predation, and therefore, he is disqualified.
That is the reasoning of magistrates in the trials of Salem, that is the logic of Torquemada’s Spain, not the principles of the United States of America.
Sen. Hirono says she supports women. But I wonder about American women who are the mothers of boys, women who are the wives of husbands, women who have brothers. Doesn’t what’s happening to Kavanaugh concern them?
A few days ago, there was that story in The New Yorker, that while a freshman at Yale, Kavanaugh exposed himself at a party to a female student, Deborah Ramirez, who couldn’t remember seeing him do it.
The story offered no corroborating eyewitnesses, only hearsay. And still it was published, providing cover for political operatives to peel Kavanaugh’s skin.
Even the New York Times, the great gray liberal battleship in America’s cultural/political wars, wouldn’t touch it. The newspaper explained:
“The New York Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week to corroborate Ms. Ramirez’s story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the episode and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”
No firsthand knowledge? And even the alleged victim was unsure it was Kavanaugh? Then why run it?
But it was published in The New Yorker. And it was defended by the same journalistic class that wonders, publicly, why Americans hold journalism in such low esteem.
This is what happens when tradition and principle is swept away and are subjugated to politics.
As if to mitigate its sin for avoiding the Yale story, The New York Times offers an account of Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook, and the lusty commentary from high school boys who drink beer.
Those of us who were once high school boys may dimly recall that lust was on our minds, oh, every 30 seconds or so, in those rare moments when physics or baseball didn’t intrude upon the urgent requirements of biology.
Now, I don’t know what happened 36 years ago between Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. And I don’t know what happened at Yale in that drunken dorm room party. I refuse to condemn the women making the accusations.
Witnesses might help us understand, but as I write this, they don’t exist.
And as Sen. Hirono and her Democratic colleagues insist, witnesses are irrelevant.
And this is damning.
Somewhere in America, there must be Democrats who read John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” when they were children, Democrats who must be sickened by what is happening and would speak out.
But they must be afraid, lest they, too, are denounced and devoured.
Theirs is a silence breaking the bones of America.
We reap what we sow.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.
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Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Creating the Big Choice, Better Future Campaign



Creating the Big Choice, Better Future Campaign

Creating the Big Choice, Better Future Campaign
Those who believe the elite left-wing “blue wave” theory for the 2018 elections should look at what happened in Texas on Tuesday.
In a special election runoff, Republican Pete Flores successfully flipped Texas State Senate District 19, which borders Mexico and had been in Democratic control for 139 years. Flores, a political newcomer competing against a seasoned former Democratic congressman, won in a district that is 73 percent Hispanic and African American – despite virtually all political analysts’ expectations. I am studying this election for a future op-ed, but I have been told by many Texas Republicans that Flores was able to win because he ran a big choice campaign.
Republicans everywhere should also study this Texas state special election and make the 2018 midterms a big choice election for all American voters. And with only 48 days left until November 6, they must act now.
Candidates, consultants, campaign managers – Republicans at every level – must break out of the small-ball, district-by-district campaign model and create a national message that defines a set of big choices that contrast the Republican positions and those of the Left. Otherwise, the Democrats are very likely to achieve the so-called blue wave the liberal media has been touting for months.
I outlined the need for this kind of campaign (and provided an in-depth look at how to implement it) in my recently released political strategy paper called The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose, which I have shared with a number of Republicans around the country and have made available for Kindle on Amazon.
The paper is broken into four parts, but I’d like to focus on the first, critical concept that I think can help Republicans design and execute the kind of campaign we need to win in 2018 – and again in 2020.
Starting right now, Republicans need to develop a set of core big issues that create a clear vision for a better future for Americans – in completely personal terms, not platitudes. These issues (and the Republican position on them) must be broadly appealing to the vast majority of Americans.
In the paper, I discuss a set of issues that Republicans could include in this big choice election narrative – such as favoring work over welfare, paychecks over food stamps, safe and orderly immigration over dangerous borderless chaos, personal health versus bureaucratic health, and others – but I will expand on those in a future piece. In the meantime, Republicans should think critically – and listen closely to their constituents – to develop and communicate a robust set of big choices to voters over the next few weeks.
It’s critical that each of these big choices is popular. When we developed the Contract with America in 1994 we polled every policy position to be included. Every pledge in the Contract had 70 percent support from Americans – some had 80 percent support. Issues that didn’t have wide appeal, didn’t make it into the Contract. It was that simple.
Despite constant left-wing attacks and media bias, if Republicans put together a set of highly-supported, issues and policies, and contrast them vividly with the unpopular liberal Democratic positions, the American people will support Republicans.
However, it is not enough to attract support for our issues. We also must clearly express how the Democratic alternatives to our positions are personally bad for Americans. This will drive powerful wedges between the Democrats and the American people. As I explain in the paper:
“Big choice campaigns invariably describe a better future, a future worth voting and fighting for, in personal terms. (You will be better off. Your family will be better off. Your community will be better off.) At the same time, the emerging majority describes the threat that the other side presents to potentially make life worse, in similarly personal terms. These aren’t campaigns about abstract philosophy or ideology. These are campaigns about two different ways of life, with two different impacts, at personal levels. They work very hard at finding the right words and images and picking the right fights. Attacking Nancy Pelosi personally seems tactically clever, but tying her to outrageous and unacceptable policies is strategically far more powerful.
“Small choice campaigns look for petty, personal weaknesses. Big choice elections focus on big differences and describing magnets of a better future to attract the voter, while they simultaneously hammer home wedge issues to drive the opposition away from the voter. Too many Republican consultants and candidates have no faith in the American people. They run small choice campaigns because they think that voters can only understand small things.
“The great leaders have all had faith that the American people can understand a lot if it is framed in clear, direct language. This is the job of a big choice campaign.”
Implementing this first key step of developing and contrasting the Republicans’ better future with the Democrats’ destructive future will make it easier to communicate the rest of the big choice campaign.
Not only will developing a suite of popular, big choice positions attract the support of the American people, but it will also help Republicans grow support within the party, build a governing coalition, and strengthen their ability to find and nurture future leaders within the GOP.
In doing so, it will be easier for Republicans to speak with the American people with one voice. This will have the added benefit of allowing us to be more effective in fighting against distortions from the elite media and assaults from the Left.
If Republicans are going to win in 2018, they must not fall into the old campaign habits of personal attacks, niche issues, relying on special interests, or skirmishing district-by-district.
Furthermore, even though the Trump-Republican-led government has brought us an incredible economy, historically low unemployment, a slew of strong judicial appointments, and many other successes, we cannot take for granted that voters will be considering these things on Election Day.
If Republicans want to continue to lead – and continue making America great for all Americans – they must give the voters big choice in November. The clock is ticking.



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