Outrageous actions stemming from U.S. Democratic party leaders in the past few weeks show just how upset they are at President Trump’s political wins with the fall midterm elections getting closer and closer. The new message from the left is intolerance for anyone associated with the Trump administration, particularly his Cabinet employees. The liberal message has become quite loud and very clear: Dems have been exhorted to heckle and harass the political opposition wherever and whenever anyone encounters them in public.
Stephanie Wilkinson, who owns the Red Hen restaurant, refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She tweeted about it, President Trump tweeted about it, and now there’s a big uproar and backlash against political bigotry like this.
Egging on the loud-mouthed liberals who are flipping their lids right now, precious months before the midterms, is the astonishingly polarizing Democratic leader Maxine Waters (D-CA), a career politician who knows how to rile up a crowd. She spoke at a Capitol Hill “Keep Families Together” rally on Saturday, June 25, 2018 for about six and a half minutes.
Watching her masterful rhetoric is both mesmerizing and chilling as she yells at her audience. But let’s consider her position and why it is indeed stirring up a negative backlash. Here is a direct quote from Waters’ recent tirade advocating public protest through incivility: “Let’s stay the course. Let’s be sure we show up wherever we have to show up – and if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them! And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”
Trump’s response was quick and incisive, as usual: “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nacy Pelosi, the Face of the Democratic Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make American Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Since her call to public incivility, Waters has received an increase in death threats and canceled two scheduled events this weekend (in Alabama and Texas), according to CNN. Waters remains unapologetic. Her deplorable behavior has now alienated members of even her own political party. According to Fox News, Senate minority leader Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer (D-NY) said in a public statement: “If you disagree with someone or something, stand up, make your voice heard, explain why you think they are wrong and why you are right. Make the argument. Protest peacefully. If you disagree with a politician, organize your fellow citizens to action and vote them out of office.” But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”
Incivility is “being uncivil; discourteous behavior or treatment; or an uncivil act” – in other words, being a rude jerk. In contrast, civil disobedience is “the refusal to obey certain laws or governmental demands for the purpose of influencing legislation or government policy, characterized by the employment of such nonviolent techniques as boycotting, picketing, and nonpayment of taxes.” It would appear the DNC has these two concepts a bit mixed up. In an attempt to become heroes of a fictional civil rights movement, many on the left now sink to the level of common street hoods.
Gov. Henry McMaster’s name appeared on the president’s Twitter feed no fewer than 10 times in the month leading up to his renomination victory in South Carolina Tuesday night, with an 11th tweet late that night to congratulate him on his “BIG election win.”
That high-level endorsement from the president was sent to his more than 50 million Twitter followers – 10 times the population of South Carolina.
It’s no surprise that Trump uses Twitter, his preferred method of unfettered communication, as a megaphone for GOP candidates running in 2018. While the influence of the president’s tweets can’t be measured at the ballot box, the multitude of candidates he’s plugged on Twitter makes clear that he plans on using the platform to broadcast his support in the midterms.
As primary season has kicked into high gear over the last three months, the president has mentioned midterm candidates on Twitter almost 60 times.
The candidates who have come up the most on his feed are also candidates who face tough races, like North Dakota U.S. Senate hopeful and current Rep. Kevin Cramer. Trump tweeted his support for Cramer earlier this month and campaigned for him Wednesday night in Fargo –- rousing the crowd with many of the same lines he so frequently uses to boost chosen GOP candidates on Twitter.
A presidential tweet can be a beacon of hope for GOP candidates: Rep. Dan Donovan of Staten Island won his primary Tuesday on the heels of two tweets from Trump, while California gubernatorial candidate John Cox saw four tweets of presidential support before his primary victory earlier in June – with a fifth congratulatory tweet when he won.
And then there’s Rep. Mark Sanford, who lost the South Carolina House primary to an underdog challenger, State Rep. Katie Arrington. The president stayed quiet about the race on Twitter until mere hours before the polls closed when he tweeted that Sanford was “very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA.” After Sanford’s loss, he said he’d waited to tweet his support for Arrington at the urging of staffers, who thought she wouldn’t win, but that he “had to give it a shot.”
Arrington was in a car accident about 10 days after her win that left her seriously injured. She is expected to recover in the coming weeks.
Her Democratic challenger, Joe Cunningham, said he would also be suspending events “until further notice.”
Trump’s tweets, in 280 characters or less, show both what he looks for in candidates and what he thinks will help them win. Of the almost 60 tweets the president has sent on midterm candidates since April, these are the messages he most repeatedly pushes.
Plugs for support on the tax bill are most popular. Eleven candidates have seen their names on the president’s Twitter feed because they “love” to cut taxes, want to lower taxes or were a “great help” to the president in passing his tax cut bill, according to his tweets.
Nine candidates received a Twitter shoutout for being “strong” and “tough” on crime and the border. Geographically, the candidates he’s tweeted about on border security are spread east to west from New York to California, and as far south as Florida to as far north as North Dakota.
And finally, he hones in on love for the military and veterans — often “our Military” and “our Vets,” in tweets. Over the last three months, he’s tweeted this about six candidates running up and down the ballot in 2018, like Donovan and Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who’s running for re-election this November.
The president’s support for GOP candidates on Twitter has been matched in recent weeks by his campaign rally appearances. In just over a week, he’s traveled to Minnesota to campaign with Rep. Pete Stauber, to South Carolina to campaign with McMaster and, most recently, to North Dakota to campaign with Cramer, who will face Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in November.
Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional face-off in April was not nearly the grilling that some had anticipated. Up against lawmakers who seemed to have only a passing knowledge of Facebook’s inner workings, the famously uncharismatic C.E.O. managed to turn the hearings on their heads. In the end, he emerged largely unscathed, spouting the usual pledges to do better. But in the past week, new reports have emerged showing that Zuckerberg failed to mention some of Facebook’s more questionable data-sharing practices to Congress, throwing Facebook back into purgatory just as it was beginning to claw its way out.
For the second time in a week, The New York Times has published a report revealing the extent of Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships. While Sunday’s report revealed that the social-media giant shared extensive user data with certain companies, at times without those people’s permission, Wednesday’s zeroes in on four of those companies: Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL, all Chinese manufacturers. Huawei’s presence on the list is particularly eyebrow-raising—the Chinese telecommunications-equipment manufacturer has been described by senators attempting to block the U.S. government from using Huawei devices as “effectively an arm of the Chinese government.” The heads of six major U.S. intelligence agencies have warned against buying Huawei phones, and a recently proposed Federal Communications Commission rule could prevent mobile providers from receiving federal money if they allow the company’s devices to be used on their networks.
Facebook’s agreement with Huawei is reportedly not dissimilar to its agreements with American companies like Apple and Amazon—essentially, the tech giant has been helping manufacturers build Facebook functionality into their products, which gives users easy access to Facebook features. To do this successfully, however, Facebook had to give partner companies access to data through private A.P.I.s.; that data reportedly included information about users, their friends, and friends of their friends, including religious and political affiliations and relationship status. In total, Facebook reportedly struck a similar agreement with at least 60 manufacturers, but has been winding down the deals since April, per the Times.
Facebook assured the Times that all data shared with Chinese companies was stored on the devices themselves rather than handed over outright, and Huawei, too, has said it did not collect or store Facebook user data. But that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from sounding the alarm. “We need answers from Facebook,” tweeted top Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Mark Warner on Tuesday. “The whole story, now, not six months from now.” Hours earlier, he had voiced concerns over Facebook’s data-collection practices more generally. “Unfortunately with Facebook, it is a great company, but we’re seeing this pattern repeat itself,” he said at an Axios event. “They’ve got some folks that know politics . . . They should realize: come clean with the whole story in the first 24 hours. Don’t let this dribble out. And I’ve got some very serious questions, particularly because of the ongoing threat that these Chinese telecom companies pose.” Senator John Thune, who leads the Commerce Committee that oversees the Federal Trade Commission, which is assessing whether the company’s data policies violate a 2011 F.T.C. consent decree, is asking Facebook to give Congress more details about its data partnerships. “Facebook is learning hard lessons that meaningful transparency is a high standard to meet,” he told the Times.Even Marco Rubio fired off an ominous tweet. “This could be a very big problem,” he wrote. “If @Facebook granted Huawei special access to social data of Americans this might as well have given it directly to the government of #China.”
In response to these dire warnings, Facebook has argued that doing business with Huawei and other Chinese companies simply made sense. “Huawei is the third largest mobile manufacturer globally and its devices are used by people all around the world, including in the United States. Facebook along with many other U.S. tech companies have worked with them,” Facebook mobile-partnerships exec Francisco Varela told Axios in a statement. “Facebook’s integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL were controlled from the get go—and we approved the Facebook experiences these companies built . . . all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei’s servers.” But even if Facebook user data didn’t make its way to the Chinese government, or even to Chinese manufacturers on a permanent basis, the company’s failure to disclose the partnership could inflame hostilities on Capitol Hill at a crucial moment. Facebook’s business, after all, depends on trust. And though at first glance its partnership with Chinese manufacturers seems far more benign than its failure to stop Cambridge Analytica from siphoning user data, in the face of regulatory threats and public scrutiny, the situation’s optics, rather than its substance, may prove more important.
One has to ask just what world do our politicians and news media folks live in?
The news industry is largely a one-way communication. They report what they consider the most important events of the day and tell us how we should think about those events – the latter of which takes up the vast majority of the radio/television time and most of the column inches in the print media.
If I considered media to be an accurate reflection of our American culture and society, I would not like us very much. According to the politicians and the media that reports on them, we are a racist nation – hardly improved from the days of Democrat slavery and segregation. We are a nation that oppresses women into second-class citizenship. We have heartless immigration policies because we hate foreigners. We have no compassion for the poor, the infirm, the elderly and, at the other end of the life cycle, the children.
We are a warring nation that occupies foreign lands to steal their treasure – most often oil. Our desire to own guns makes us insensitive to mass killings, unwarranted police shootings and the safety of the unarmed. The character of the American masses is described as ignorant, hateful, immoral, cowardly, and prejudiced – a veritable basket of deplorables.
For the most part, however, that terrible place is mostly a fictional world – almost like a computer game in which we play out fantasy conflicts created by media programmers – or more accurately by editors and producers. It is a pretend world based on concocted narratives that supplant the larger reality.
But then there is the real world. The one we wake up to in the morning and travel throughout the day. For most of us, it is a bright sunny world with dozens – maybe hundreds – of interactions with real people in real time – people of diverse backgrounds, different income brackets, different careers, different ethnicity, gender, age and lifestyle.
In my case, it might be a stop for breakfast at a favorite Jewish deli where everyone is greeted like old friends. We pass people of all sizes, shapes and appearances as we walk down the street or through the mall. Some smile and nod. For lunch, it may be a black-owned rib joint where the sauce is hot and the conversation is cool. I may need to stop by the auto shop for a small repair or oil change performed by a couple of young Hispanics. If my son is with me, he will speak them in Spanish thanks to the Mexican lady who helped raise him as a second mother.
If I stumble, the hands of strangers reach down to help me up – white hands, black hands, brown hands. Just a bunch of good people. I may drive a very liberal older woman to the grocery or drug store and will joke about our political differences. I might bring her to my favorite pizza parlor for a classic Chicago-style treat. If there are other Chicagoans in the eatery, we may very well end up in a conversation about the Windy City.
On Wednesday, I bowl with friends. As I look over the other lanes, I see people of all kinds bowling together. A black homeless fellow we befriended will stop by to watch. One of my bowling partners will bring him home for a meal, a shower and to have his clothes washed. Occasionally, she will buy him clothes, reading glasses or other needs. During the summer, we might find scores of young kids on a bowling outing — again of all backgrounds. They goof around, laugh a lot and make a lot of noise – but none of us adults are bothered.
My neighbors include blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Arabs and virtually every nationality you can name. And they are all quite neighborly. What is not remarkable – but rather common – are the number of people who will offer a helping hand without being asked. There is the lady down the way who drops off cake every now and then – and for no reason other than kindness.
No matter where I go within my community or even when I travel to other locations, 99.9 percent of the people I meet and interact with are friendly, often with a good sense of humor. Oh yeah, there are a few jerks out there, but they are few and far between.
This sort of day is not unusual in America. I suspect most Americans have similar experiences. It is the way we live. We are overwhelmingly good, kind and moral people who care about our families, our friends, our neighbors and even strangers when an opportunity presents itself. We tend to be more tolerant and respectful than intolerant and disrespectful. We do know or even recognize those terrible masses of Americans we hear about on the news. They are not us.
Sadly, I fear that our media outlets give a false impression of the United States to all those who live beyond our borders. Led by the concentration of negativism and conflict that appears on the nightly news, those folks in foreign lands come to believe in the fictional ugly America.
It would do us all a lot of good if we were to occasionally look away from the America on the television screen and look out the window. Yes, we have differences of opinion and can play them out according to the rules in the ugly America cyber game the media produces, or we can look at the real America and feel good about this nation – and about ourselves.
Late last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government officials have to obtain a warrant in order to track an individual’s location data via cell phone records over an extended period of time.
“In the 5-4 ruling, the court said police generally need a court-approved warrant to get access to the data, setting a higher legal hurdle than previously existed under federal law. The court said obtaining such data without a warrant from wireless carriers, as police routinely do, amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment,” writes Newsmax.
In the case named Carpenter v. United States, the court ruled in Timothy Carpenter’s favor after he filed the suit after police connected him to several armed robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Ohio and Michigan. His location data was tracked by police for 127 days back in 2011.
Carpenter’s lawyers argued that the police violated the Fourth Amendment because they needed “probable cause” to get Carpenter’s digital records from third-party carriers, therefore should have gotten a warrant.
“We hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through CSLI (cell-site location information),” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the court’s ruling. “Although such (cell phone) records are generated for commercial purposes, that distinction does not negate Carpenter’s anticipation of privacy in his physical location.”
Roberts also pointed out that technology is both a blessing and a curse, along with playing a “pervasive and insistent part of daily life.”
“Virtually any activity on the phone generates, including incoming calls, texts, or e-mails and countless other data connections that a phone automatically makes when checking for news, weather, or social media updates,” said Roberts. “Here the progress of science has afforded law enforcement a powerful new tool to carry out its important responsibilities. This tool risks Government encroachment of the sort the Framers after consulting the lessons of history, drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent.”
This is the latest case where the court has boost privacy rights in the digital realm, but government officials can still get access to real-time location information.
This is still a step in the right direction and a victory for privacy advocates.
“For 40 years, the assumption has been that individuals have no expectation of privacy in any information we voluntarily share with third parties — from phone records to bank statements to how and where we buy and sell goods,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst. “Even though today’s ruling argues that cell-site location data is unique, it’s easy to see how it will open the door to countless other contexts in which privacy advocates and criminal defendants will argue for similar privacy protections – and similar warrant requirements.”
ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler expressed similar sentiments and said the case was “a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights in the digital age.”
“The Supreme Court has given privacy law an update that it has badly needed for many years, finally bringing it in line with the realities of modern life,” said Wessler.
Author’s note: We still have a long way to go, but this case will likely inspire more rulings that protect individual’s privacy rights and personal data.
Editor’s note: Our privacy rights are the key to all of the rights guaranteed under the Constitution. Are we ever going to reverse this trend?
A majority of voters blame the parents of children who are separated at the border for the current illegal immigration crisis — not the federal government, according to a new survey.
The results give an interesting look into how people feel about who is ultimately responsible for the immigration debacle, which is now playing out on television screens around the world.
When families are arrested and separated after attempting to enter the United States illegally, 54 percent of likely U.S. voters say the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. Just 35 percent of those surveyed believe the federal government is more to blame for enforcing the law. Another 11 percent say they are not sure.
These are the findings of a new Rasmussen Report survey conducted by phone and online interviews from June 19 – 20. Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to stop the policy of separating families of those caught entering the U.S. illegally along the U.S.–Mexico border.
Further analysis of the survey shows that 82 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of voters not affiliated with either major political party feel the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. But 60 percent of Democrats say the government is more to blame for enforcing the law.
The survey also queried participants about how aggressively the Trump Administration was enforcing the rule to separate children from parents. Once again, the results showed partisan divisions, with 75 percent of Democrats saying the Trump administration is too aggressive. Only 23 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of unaffiliated voters felt the administration was too aggressive.
