Why Progressives Are Wrong to Revere Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger is a saint in the feminist church. She is a charter member of the progressive hall of fame. Liberals revere this woman who preached “race improvement” and denounced what she called “human weeds”.

Hillary Clinton glows that she is “in awe of” Sanger. She said so in 2009 upon receiving Planned Parenthood’s “highest honor” that year: its coveted Margaret Sanger Award.

Likewise effusive was Nancy Pelosi when she proudly accepted the award in 2014.

Speaking to Planned Parenthood a year earlier, President Barack Obama, hailed the organization founded by this racial eugenicist committed to creating a “race of thoroughbreds” and purging America’s “race of degenerates.”

“Thank you, Planned Parenthood,” and “God bless you,” said Obama to a giddy crowd of ecstatic women. The president commended Planned Parenthood’s “extraordinary” and “remarkable work,” and told the women they do a “great, great job.”

The love by liberals for Planned Parenthood and its founder seems to know no bounds. A professor, blogging at the New York Times, has argued for placing Margaret’s mug on the $20 bill.

And alas, even the Smithsonian, America’s museum, boasts a handsome bust of Sanger in its stately National Portrait Gallery.

>>> To read more on this topic: 13 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger 

Margaret is there enshrined in the Smithsonian’s vaunted “Struggle for Justice” exhibit.

This brings me to my reason for writing here today: a group of angry African-American pastors are demanding the removal of Sanger’s bust from the Smithsonian.

The letter from Ministers Taking a Stand states:

“Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies, an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as ‘the feeble minded;’ speaking at a rally of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers. Also the notorious ‘Negro Project,’ which sought to limit, if not eliminate black births, was her brainchild.”

The pastors quote an infamous December 1939 letter from Sanger to Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Eugenics Society, where, in the context of discussing the Negro Project, Sanger wrote: “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

The succinct, powerful statement from the pastors adds: “Despite these well-documented facts of history, her bust sits proudly in your gallery as a hero of justice. The obvious incongruity is staggering!”

Amen to that.

Via: Daily Caller

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Barack and Valerie’s Great Communist Party Marriage

Rich new information on Valerie Jarrett’s red diaper loyalties and ties.

In my current book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, I write of the phenomenon of Communist Party marriages. “Theirs was the first ‘party marriage’ that I observed,” wrote Whittaker Chambers in Witness, describing the decidedly non-sacramental marriage of two of his Communist Party comrades, before writing of his own “party marriages.”

From Marx and Engels, to Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, to Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, to Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, our comrades on the far left have bequeathed a legacy of noxious ideas on marriage and family. Their political-cultural wreckage is being felt today more than ever. In many ways, it has come to full fruition only now in a culture that gleefully redefines marriage and gives us the likes of Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett in the White House, a damaging political marriage if there ever was one. For seven years now at their home-base at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Obama and Jarrett have been politically and ideologically inseparable. Their White House wedding has fundamentally transformed the country.

Sure, Barack’s matrimonial vow might be to Michelle, but his ideological soulmate has long been Valerie Jarrett. And both Barack and Valerie hail from a truly remarkable line of mentors and family members with deep fidelity to the American Communist Party.

Those political bloodlines are so stunning, so bizarre, especially when they intersect across the generations, that people often react dismissively when presented with the information. I’ve laid out the linkages probably more than anyone, mainly in a book on Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who was a hardcore member of Communist Party USA (card no. 47544) and in several major articles on Valerie Jarrett for The American Spectator, the first one running about 5,000 words and appearing in the July/August 2011 print edition.

Again, the common lines are just incredible—but they are real. And the connections get even more jaw-dropping when you toss in mentors for a third leg of the political trinity responsible for two presidential terms of Barack Obama, one David Axelrod. Axelrod was also influenced by comrades with fond commitments to Communist Party circles, and specifically in rotten, politically misbegotten Chicago. I’ve written of Axelrod’s background, too, for The American Spectator, including a cover piece in the March 2012 print edition.

So, why am I writing now? What’s the latest in this nightmarish political soap opera?

My latest offering here is prompted by the fine work of Judicial Watch, which has obtained by FOIA request the FBI files of three crucial figures who formed Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s most intimate adviser. The three are Jarrett’s father, James Bowman, her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, and her grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor. Judicial Watch has posted these documents online, and I’ve suffered through them carefully with a mix of amazement, agony, and despair for what has happened in this country. They are at once disturbing and depressing, yet further confirmation that the most politically extreme individuals who once agitated and propagandized in our blessed country were able to place their political children as high as the White House in the 21st century. For the old comrades, it simply took time for the seeds to root and flourish—and only then with the harvest made possible by really oblivious American voters who don’t understand the ash-heap of ideological baggage they’ve permitted to be brought into the country’s first house.

I’ll first highlight what’s new in the Judicial Watch cache and then delve into some further connections and insights unique to my knowledge of these individuals and their associations.

What is new is that these files show the highly disturbing level of communist work and associations by no less than three men very close to Valerie Jarrett. They show beyond any doubt that our current president—who I’ve here described as our first Red-Diaper Baby President—has been steered by a longtime leading adviser who, without question, has the classic rearing of a red-diaper baby. Beyond that, the FBI files on Jarrett’s father, James Bowman, are the single biggest revelation. I was plainly not aware of the reservoir of radical activity by Bowman. In my previous research, I could find nothing on Bowman, though I found quite a bit on Vernon Jarrett and a small amount on Robert Rochon Taylor. The Bowman material is shocking.

And finally, though I did not see the name of Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s mentor, in these files, I’m now even further certain that Davis would have not only known these men but worked closely with each. They were all in Chicago at the exact same time and all operating in the exact same close-knit circles of the city’s Communist Party generally and of a much smaller group of African-American communists specifically. Even tinier still, they were Chicago-based African-American communist writers, journalists, Party activists, and agitators. There is simply no way—no way—that James Bowman, Vernon Jarrett, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Frank Marshall Davis did not know and work together. Unimaginable. And thus, here’s an equally intriguing thought: There is simply no way that our nation’s political-ideological first couple, Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett, have not had fond conversations reminiscing about this common ancestry. Boy, to be a fly on the wall for one of those rosy reminiscences down the old Party lane….

That said, here is a person-by-person breakdown of what the Judicial Watch material has unearthed, courtesy of the now publicly viewable FBI files, sprinkled with my own observations:

First, James Bowman. Born in Washington, D.C., February 5, 1923, Bowman eventually resided in Chicago and Denver before moving to Iran in 1955, where Valerie was born. The FBI files state that he attended Howard University from 1939-46, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology followed by a medical degree. He would work for at least two different hospitals in Washington before moving to Chicago to work for Provident Hospital. It was in Chicago that—like Frank Marshall Davis, like Barack Obama—Bowman earned his radical sea-legs and began his political path. He lived in Chicago from roughly 1947-53, precisely when Frank Marshall Davis launched his Chicago Star Communist Party-line newspaper.

Valerie’s father had numerous communist ties. He was a member of a front-group that is new to me, the Association of Internes [sic] and Medical Students, which Congress described as “an organization which has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line.” He was very active on the student front, including with the communist group, American Youth for Democracy, one of Frank Marshall Davis’ favorite organizations. Among other groups listed in Bowman’s file that were likewise favorites of Davis were the International Labor Defense and the awful American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB).

A few words on ACPFB: This group had been so extreme that the Democratic Congress’s huge “Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States” (published in 1944) devoted a lengthy 15-page section just to ACPFB, atop innumerable added references elsewhere in the report. Key members included prominent African-American communists Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, the gushing admirer of Joe Stalin, plus the usual assemblage of duped liberals/progressives, ranging from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to the great Orson Welles, to famed movie actor Edward G. Robinson.

As the Congressional report noted, ACPFB “was founded by the Communist Party in order to exploit racial divisions in the United States for its own revolutionary purposes.” Its modus operandi was to polarize Americans along racial lines in order to advance the Soviet agenda. Closely linked to International Labor Defense, the primary (concealed) intention of ACPFB was to protect foreign communists who came to America and agitated for the Soviet Comintern. The core objective was to prevent deportation of these foreign-born communists living in America. One such figure was German communist Gerhart Eisler, who became a major CPUSA cause, and whose name was omnipresent throughout Frank Marshall Davis’s Chicago Star.

Few communist fronts so directly served Soviet interests. Quite deservedly, ACPFB was designated as a subversive group by the office of President Truman’s attorney general, Tom Clark.

Via: Spectator

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Countering Progressives' Assault on Suburbia

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners.

Some conservatives rightly criticize such intrusive moves, but they generally ignore how Wall Street interests and some developers see forced densification as opportunities for greater profits, often sweetened by public subsidies. Overall, suburban interests are poorly organized, particularly compared to well-connected density lobbies such as the developer-funded Urban Land Institute (ULI), which have opposed suburbanization for nearly 80 years. 

Via: Real Clear Politics

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Is Health Care A Fundamental Human Right or a Service?

How many Americans believe that health care is a fundamental human right? How many Americans believe that it is just a service that must be paid for just like any other service? Good doctors and nurses who train a long time and invest a lot of money in their education expect to be paid well for their expertise and unique skills.

Respectable hospitals cannot operate on the basis of a “fundamental human right,” invented by “progressives,” somebody must pay for health care. Life-saving medical equipment and drugs are expensive.

There is a reason why the best medical care, equipment, drugs, anddoctors in the world exist in capitalism and not in socialist countries. Individual thinking, creativity, and entrepreneurship rewarded by profit have improved our lives and our health. Collectivism resulted in the death of 100 million individuals. Developing each drug cost at least $950 million and researchers and investors expect to be paid for their financial risks, research, and ideas.

Americans have always supported the development of life-saving expensive drugs which were then sold to other nations for much less than we paid at home or were given away for free. Americans have thus subsidized the medical treatment of citizens of many nations.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Progress Michigan Plagiarized Portions of Report on Mackinac Center

A liberal activist group appears to have plagiarized portions of a new report attacking a prominent free market group.

The report was one of a series focusing on the State Policy Network, an affiliation of state-level conservative think tanks. Progress Michigan focused on the Mackinac Center, an SPN-affiliated group in the state.

Passages from the report are nearly identical to portions of a 2011 Mother Jones piece on Mackinac.

Progress Michigan wrote:

Since 2005, the Mackinac Center has promoted changes to Michigan law giving more power and protection to emergency financial managers, state-appointed officials who take over cities or struggling school districts and have broad powers to fix budgets on the brink of collapse.

That passage is nearly identical to Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll’s:

Since 2005, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has urged reforms to Michigan law giving more power and protection to emergency financial managers, state-appointed officials who parachute into ailing cities or school districts and employ drastic measures to fix budgets on the brink of collapse.

Via: WFB

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Obamacare: Who’s Crying Now?

Our progressive friends dislike the taste of their own cooking.

It is wrong, of course, to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. Still, I must confess that I have derived no small amount of schadenfreude from news stories about Obamacare advocates who have been adversely affected by the not-so-Affordable Care Act. It would take a stronger man than yours truly to suppress a smile as the law’s media pimps pule about their canceled health plans, when smug urban progressives get mugged by the reality of “reform,” and lifelong Democrats publicly denounce President Obama as a brazen liar while declaring their intention to become foot soldiers for the Republican Party.

One of the most exquisitely ironic complaints about Obamacare has come from former MSNBC blowhard, Dylan Ratigan. During the debate preceding the law’s passage, this character regularly suggested that we who opposed the Democrat plan to take over U.S. health care were all racists. It appears, however, that this erstwhile scourge of bigotry has now joined the knuckle-dragging enemies of our first black president. Recently, he fired off the following querulous tweet: “I bought a catastrophic health policy for $170/mo when I left MSNBC. Obamacare cancelled the policy. New rate $600/mo. Thnx Mr. President!”

If Ratigan had stopped abusing his opponents long enough to hear what we were saying, he wouldn’t have been surprised by the cancellation. What did he think Obamacare’s authors intended when they stipulated that a plan must provide “minimum” levels of coverage? What did he think the President meant by “cut-rate insurance”? If he had shut up long enough he would have learned the truth, as he himself expressed it in a follow up tweet when he finally pulled his head out of … er … the sand: “I have been a long time advocate of catastrophic with a transparent mkt for routine. Struck me as interesting that that is illegal now.”

Via: American Spectator

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Stop enforcing border laws, say progressives

The federal government should stop deporting illegal immigrants, and should instead create a pan-American zone where Latinos can freely migrate into the United States, says Arturo Carmona, the director of Presente.org, a grassroots Latino organization.

Polls show that Americans are in favor of letting the 11 million illegal immigrants stay, so there’s no point in deporting them, he told The Daily Caller.

Besides, the deportations are an insult to all Latinos, he suggested. “It makes no rational sense to treat a population with such indignity,” said Carmona, a longtime community activist who was picked in January 2012 to head the organization, which claims 250,000 members.

Carmona’s group doesn’t distinguish between the 11 million illegal immigrants and the 30 million legal immigrants in the country.

“Millions of immigrants [are] suffering under the boot of terrible and failed immigration policies of the past five years … [which has led to] the destruction of families of immigrants” because of deportations, said an Oct. 18 statement from Carmona’s group.

Carmona’s group is extreme, but it has the same worldview as the more prominent progressives based in Washington D.C., said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants to reduce the current annual inflow of 1 million people.

“I wish [Presente.org was covered] more in the media because they’re pretty hard core… they’re more of a loose cannon and are willing to say what the [D.C.-based] progressives want, without couching it in comfortable fluff,” he told TheDC.

“I don’t think the [progressives] disagree with [Carmona] in any way,” he said.

Via: Daily Caller
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CONSERVATIVES SHOULD NOT SURRENDER

In a December 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Peter Berekowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argued that big government and the sexual revolution are here to stay. He urged conservatives to get used to it and to content themselves with shaping those realities.

A similar argument was pressed upon Britons in the 19^th century when socialism was in its ascendancy. To that, James Fitzjames Stephen responded: “The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.”

But Stephen and other conservatives of that period did not surrender to the waters. They offered a powerful alternative vision of ordered liberty. That vision and political theory is as potent today as it was more than a century ago.

There is no doubt that the welfare state will be difficult to dismantle. In fact, we are now struggling just to reduce its rate of growth. Yet, it will never be contained without the forceful articulation of the alternative conservative vision.

It is imperative that conservatives challenge the very legitimacy of the welfare state and show that its burdens, both financial and psychological, will inevitably destroy the American Republic. This necessarily means an engagement with progressives over political ideology. Theirs is fundamentally flawed. The conservative vision is the only hope for preserving a governing system that produced a nation that was truly the envy of the rest of the world.

Not all political concepts can coexist. Conservatism and big government cannot coexist. The ideology of American Progressivism, as practiced by the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress, is eroding the foundations of our constitutional system and national economy. That threat will not be defeated by efforts to shape and moderate the progressive ideology. Only a direct challenge holds the promise of achieving what is necessary to save the nation.

Via: Breitbart

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Can the Polls Be Believed?

A raging war has been underway between Republicans/Romney and the mainstream media (MSM)/polling organizations on the accuracy of many recently reported polls.  Both sides have stridently argued their cases in a vicious skirmish that has been decidedly unequal.  The Republicans, the Romney campaign, conservative talk radio, conservative new media and Fox News have valiantly fought the Democrats, the MSM, some polling organizations and the Obama campaign organization.  Yet given just the megaphones owned by the MSM and Obama's bully pulpit, the battle has been the equivalent of brandishing a popgun at a howitzer...the voting public seemingly is not hearing the battle's thunder or is still not deeply engaged in the election. 

So what are the facts...is there a battle plan, an alliance between Obama, the MSM, and polling organizations designed to destroy Romney's candidacy?  Are the polls presenting biased and inaccurate findings?  Are polling organizations deliberately producing misleading results?  In essence are they in cahoots with Obama, the MSM, and liberal/progressive democrats?  Is there any compelling evidence that the MSM is using polling selectively to promote Barack Obama and other democrat office seekers?  And will the constant and continuous bludgeoning of Romney using biased or inaccurate polls damage his presidential chances?

The basic argument that the polls are biased begins with the 2008 presidential election outcome.  Obama won by capturing an electorate composed of 39% Dems, 32% Reps and 29% Independents; this differential is known as a D+7 spread/party affiliation or D+7 electorate.  Barack Obama also defeated John McCain by 7 points in the popular vote.  In contrast, G.W. Bush defeated J. Kerry in 2004 with an electorate containing 37% Dems, 37% Reps and 26% Inds.  The 2008 election was unique in many respects.  Barack Obama was African American, youthful, a skilled speaker, untested, mysterious, cool and the MSM's chosen one.  Anecdotal evidence of the excitement Obama generated was everywhere; on bumpers, on yard signs, on BHO paraphernalia in convenience stores, in conversations at water cooler and the growing hagiographic comments in the press.  A spread of +7 was a rare event in presidential elections and the largest in decades; it followed eight difficult years, two wars, a financial and economic crisis.

Via: American Thinker

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