Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Meet the Community Organizers Fighting Against … Barack Obama


By EDWARD MCCLELLAND I Politico

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Locals in the former president’s hometown worry that the new Obama Center will leave them out.

It’s the ultimate in irony: The world’s most famous ex-community organizer is facing a minor uprising from the community where his presidential center is supposed to be built—the same community, in fact, where he got his start in politics.

The center’s troubles became clear last September, when Jeanette Taylor, the education director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, walked into the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago with something on her mind.

She was there for a public meeting with officials from the Obama Foundation, the entity that is building the Obama Center—a monument to the career of former President Barack Obama for which construction is scheduled to begin later this year in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

Taylor so wanted to be first in line for the microphone that nearly a dozen of her fellow community organizers had camped out overnight to save her a spot at the front of the line to get into the event.

As she entered the hotel ballroom, Taylor expected to interrogate a member of the foundation’s staff. Instead, she found herself face to face with Obama himself, appearing by video conference from Washington.

“The library is a great idea, but what about a community benefits agreement?” Taylor asked, referring to a contract between a developer and community organizations that requires investments in, or hiring from, a neighborhood where a project is built. “The first time investment comes to black communities, the first to get kicked out is low-income and working-class people. Why wouldn’t you sign a CBA to protect us?”


Measured as always, Obama began by telling Taylor, “I was a community organizer.” Then he said, “I know the neighborhood. I know that the minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ … next thing I know, I’ve got 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork.”

The answer infuriated Taylor, who pays $1,000 a month for the Woodlawn apartment she shares with her mother and two children, and is worried that the Obama Center’s cachet will drive up neighborhood rents. 

Months later, she is still furious at the former president.

“He got a lot of nerve saying that,” Taylor told me. “He forgotten who he is. He forgot the community got him where he is.”

Taylor is not alone in her complaint. 

Since 2016, more than a dozen local groups—neighborhood organizations, labor unions and tenants’ rights activists—have come together to form the Obama Library South Side Community Benefits Coalition, which is pushing the library to account for local needs. 

At the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught at the law school, more than 100 faculty members signed a letter in January supporting the demands of local organizers.

“There are concerns that the Obama Center as currently planned will not provide the promised development or economic benefits to the neighborhoods,” the letter reads. “It looks to many neighbors that the only new jobs created will be as staff to the Obama Center.”
It is probably no surprise to Obama that activists in the neighborhood he chose for his presidential library are now clamoring for a place at the table: Woodlawn is one of the birthplaces of community organizing. 

Saul Alinsky, whose book Rules for Radicals informed Obama’s own organizing, helped found The Woodlawn Organization to battle the expansion of the University of Chicago (which today is proposing to build a 15-story hotel for Obama Center visitors). 

The campaign for a community benefits agreement is part of a tradition that both predates Obama’s arrival in Chicago and made his career there possible in the first place.
Woodlawn is a poor, African-American neighborhood adjacent to middle-class Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago. 

Woodlawn residents worry that their neighborhood is an ideal target for gentrification, and that the center will raise rents. 

Jeanette Taylor originally moved to Woodlawn because she was priced out of Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood closer to downtown that Chicago Agent magazine calls “the next most-desired neighborhood for developers and homebuyers.” 

Taylor says she doesn’t want to move again, and she is surely not the only one—just 24 percent of Woodlawn residents own their homes.
For them, Obama has gone from sticking it to the man to … being the man.

“Of course, he would have,” says Jeanette Taylor. “But now he’s part of the establishment.”

Edward McClelland is author of “Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President and How to Speak Midwestern.”


Black History Month Progress: PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP PRIORITIZES HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITIES



THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

 “Established by visionary leaders, America’s HBCUs have long played an integral role in our Nation’s history, providing Black Americans opportunities to learn and achieve their dreams.” – President Donald J. Trump



PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP CONTINUES TO PRIORITIZE HBCUs: With the announcement today, President Donald J. Trump demonstrates his commitment to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
  • Today, President Trump announced Johnny Taylor, Jr., the former seven-year President of the Thurgood Marshall College fund, as the Chairman of the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
    • On February 28, 2017, the President signed an Executive Order announcing the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs.
    • Chairman Taylor will work closely with Johnathan Holifield, who was appointed as executive director of the President’s White House Initiative on HBCUs last year.

ADVANCING HCBUs: President Trump has prioritized HBCUs since the beginning of his Administration.
  • President Trump’s February 28, 2017 Executive Order was the earliest any President had signed an Order on HBCUs.
    • In addition to creating the White House Initiative on HBCUs and the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs, the Executive Order created an Interagency Working Group to advance and coordinate the work regarding HBCUs.
    • The President ordered government agencies that regularly interact with HBCUs to develop annual plans to “strengthen the capacity” of those schools.  There are 31 agencies that will submit such plans.
    • The Order will help improve HBCUs’ participation in Federal programs and foster more and better opportunities in higher education.
  • President Trump’s proposed budgets for 2018 and 2019 have maintained funding for HBCUs.
    • The Department of Education worked with HBCUs to protect $80 million in Title III carryover funding.
    • President Trump has called for an additional $20 million in funding for the Strengthening HBCUs program above the amount set in the recent budget deal.
    • The President’s budget has called for an increase of $400 million for the TRIO program and an increase of $300 million for Federal Work Study.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Surprising Black History Month Fact: The US Supreme Court Affirmed Racist Origin Of Gun Control


By Frances Rice


In 2010, the US Supreme Court decided a case that highlighted how gun control laws are rooted in the racist past of the Democratic Party that enacted "Black Codes," which prohibited newly freed slaves from exercising their Second Amendment right to own guns for self-defense.
 
The case of McDonald v. City of Chicago  was filed by black Chicago residents led by Otis McDonald who just wanted to have the right to protect himself from criminals who terrorized him in his home with frequent break-ins. The Court ruled that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to state and local governments.
 
At the heart of the McDonald case is the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that was pushed through by Republicans after the Civil War, which codified that black Americans have the same right under the Second Amendment to bear arms as white Americans.

The only current black US Supreme Court member, Justice Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, courageously delved into the racist origins of gun control laws to demonstrate that such laws have no place in a nation of free people.

The liberal justices on the Court, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor who was appointed by Democrat President Barack Obama, voted against the black plaintiff and his fellow Chicago residents.

The McDonald case provides a bird eye's view of the history of Democratic Party racism. 

Referenced in the Court's opinion is the 1856 Republican Party Platform that includes language about the "right of the people to keep and bear arms."

A key source used by the Court is the book "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877" by Dr. Eric Foner.

Dr. Foner's book reveals how, before the Civil War ended, the Southern States, which were controlled by Democrats for over 100 years, enacted "Slave Codes" that prohibited slaves from owning firearms.

After Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the rebelling States, and after Republicans pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment freeing all the remaining slaves, Democrats in the South persisted in keeping the newly freed slaves from owning guns, the means to protect themselves.

The Supreme Court in the McDonald decision wrote about how, after the Civil War, the Southern States controlled by Democrats passed "Black Codes" to systematically disarm blacks. 

Included in this mass disarmament were the over 180,000 blacks who returned to the South after serving in the Union Army.

In response to the "Black Codes," the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

But the Democrats would not be deterred.

Very soon after the 1866 law was enacted, Alabama, followed by other Southern States, again passed more "Black Codes" that made it illegal for blacks to own firearms.

Cited by the US Supreme Court in the McDonald case as an example of a discriminatory black code is the Mississippi law that stated:

"[N]o freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife."

In one Southern town, according to the US Supreme Court, the marshal confiscated the weapons of the returning black Union soldiers and, at every opportunity, promptly shot black people.

The Court's McDonald decision records that:

"Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves".

In his book about Reconstruction, Dr. Foner revealed that in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was started as a Tennessee social club.

According to Dr. Foner, the Klan became a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party and spread into other Southern States, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders, black and white. Over 3,000 Republicans were killed by the Klan, 1,000 of whom were white.

The Klan would "order the colored men to give up their arms; saying that everybody would be Kukluxed in whose house fire-arms were found.”

In the McDonald decision, the Court pointed out how the Republican-controlled Congress, while debating the Fourteenth Amendment, referred to the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right deserving of protection.

Republican Senator Samuel Pomeroy described three "indispensable" "safeguards of liberty under our form of Government", one of which was the right to keep and bear arms.

Pomeroy said:

"Every man . . . should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.”

Pomeroy's words reflect exactly the sentiment expressed by Otis McDonald and other black plaintiffs who filed a law suit against the Democrat-controlled City of Chicago that had confiscated their weapons, leaving them to the mercy of intruders who had broken open his door and entered his home for vile purposes.


In this episode, Michael reviews the history of American gun control laws and describes the founding of the NRA.

Knowles discusses how:

”Cynical Democrat politicians who failed at every level to prevent the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, are now excusing everybody who had anything to do with preventing the shooting and placing all of the blame on the NRA, a civil rights organization that had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting."

Knowles further states:

“This is par for the course for Democrats, who have long pushed gun control to oppress blacks and other minorities.”

About the video, Knowles says:

“We will analyze the racist history of gun control and the purpose of the Second Amendment.”

The Real Russian Disaster


By Victor Davis Hanson  I NATIONAL REVIEW


The Russian-reset steamroller: spreading hysteria, playing the media, exposing the FBI

Donald Trump has said a lot of silly stuff about Russia, from joking about Vladimir Putin helping to find Hillary’s deleted emails, to naïve musings about the extent of Russian interference into Western democratic elections. But far more important than what he has said is what Trump has done. That same caveat applies to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Start with two givens: Vladimir Putin is neither stupid nor content to watch an aging, shrinking, corrupt, and dysfunctional — but still large and nuclear — Russia recede to second- or third-power status. From 2009 to 2015, in one of the most remarkable and Machiavellian efforts in recent strategic history, Putin almost single-handedly parlayed a deserved losing hand into a winning one. 

He pulled this off by flattering, manipulating, threatening, and outsmarting an inept and politically obsessed Obama administration.


Under the Obama presidency and the tenures of Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Russia made astounding strategic gains — given its intrinsic economic, social, and military weaknesses. 

The Obama reaction was usually incoherent (Putin was caricatured as a “bored kid in the back of the classroom” or as captive of a macho shtick). After each aggressive Russian act, the administration lectured that “it is not in Russia’s interest to . . . ” — as if Obama knew better than a thuggish Putin what was best for autocratic Russia.

A review of Russian inroads, presented in no particular order, is one of the more depressing chapters in post-war U.S. diplomatic history.

Just watching the film clip of Hillary Clinton presenting the red, plastic Jacuzzi button to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva remains painful, more so than even George W. Bush’s simplistic, reassuring commentary after he looked into Putin’s eyes. 

Under the Obama-Clinton reset protocols, Russia was freed from even the mild sanctions installed by the Bush administration, imposed for its 2008 Ossetian aggressions. As thanks, in early 2014, Russia outright annexed Crimea. 

It used its newfound American partnership as an excuse to bully Europe on matters of energy and policy, confident that under American reset, it would face little NATO pushback.

Russia assumed de facto control over large sections of eastern Ukraine. Its aggression sent nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States into a panic and raised fears of another Ukrainian-like intervention — thereby wresting pro-Russians concessions on the premise that it was nearby and unpredictably dangerous while the U.S. was distant and predictably inert. 

Russia succeeded in helping to dismantle previously negotiated U.S. missile-defense arrangements with the Czech Republic and Poland.

Russia since 2013 had sought to interfere in U.S. elections with impunity, so much so that as late as October 18, 2016, on the eve of the anticipated Clinton landslide, Obama mocked any suggestion that an entity could ever successfully warp the outcome of a U.S. election:

“There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections. There’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time, and so I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and make his case to get votes.

After a near 40-year hiatus, Russia was invited into the Middle East by the Obama administration. 

It soon became the power broker in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and to some extent offered passive-aggressive support for Israel and Turkey — a position of influence that it retains to this day and that would now be hard to undo. 

It posed as a “helper” to the Obama administration with Iran and helped broker the disastrous Iran deal — and then used U.S. acquiescence to Iran to fuel the ascendance of the Iran-Hezbollah-Assad crescent.

Unlike the United States, Russia had no need to maintain the nuclear umbrella, which protected the clients of the U.S. post-war alliance. 

Despite America’s nuclear responsibilities, Russia convinced the Obama administration to cut back radically on our stockpile of deployable nuclear weapons. Such promised reductions in deliverable weapons came at a time of massive U.S. defense cuts and cancellations, and delays in missile defense.

Russia was relieved by Obama’s efforts to stall fracking and make huge swathes of American territory off-limits for U.S. oil and gas exploration — as this would tighten global oil markets and enhance Russian petroleum export profits. 

The Obama administration inexplicably approved sale of a sizable portion of scarce U.S. uranium holdings to a Russian company, despite the fact that it was known that investors connected with the Kremlin and uranium interests had paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow. 

In additions, the chairman of the so-called Uranium One consortium gave $2.5 million to the Clinton Foundation, a fact that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not disclose, even though she had promised (during her confirmation process) to reveal all such possible conflicts of interest.

Most significantly, the Obama administration had created a false orthodoxy of détente, a politically correct Lala Land, in which to question any of these lopsided Russian advantages was to be considered idiotic or unpatriotic.

Mitt Romney learned that in the third 2012 presidential debate when he was tagged as a Cold War hack by a snarky Barack Obama for even suggesting that an opportunistic and conniving Russia was our chief geostrategic rival. 

Even when Putin became arrogant and greedy in his winnings, and finally, mostly through hacking, helped to collapse the disastrous Russian-reset misadventure, Hillary Clinton looked back on her role in Russian reset and made the astonishing claim that it had been a success: “I think it was a brilliant stroke, which in retrospect it appears even more so, because look at what we accomplished.”

Barack Obama revealed himself with an open-mic promise to outgoing Russian puppet president Dmitri Medvedev, which, by any reasonable logic, could only be explained as a promise by Obama to retard U.S. missile-defense efforts in Europe in exchange for good Russian behavior during Obama’s reelection bid:

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space. . . . This is my last election. . . . After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Had Donald Trump been caught in such a private conversation offering a Russian president a quid pro quo — massaging future U.S. national defense policy in a pro-Russia direction in exchange for Russian behavior that would help Trump’s electoral chances — he would probably be facing impeachment on grounds of real Russian collusion.

By the 2016 campaign, however, amid allegations of Russian hacking of Democratic and Clinton campaign communications, the Obama administration could no longer see its failed reset as “a brilliant stoke.” 

As a result, the architects of one of these embarrassing concessionary policies, Hillary Clinton,  became not just embarrassed.

She pointed to Trump’s loud bombast as proof that he’d colluded with and appeased the Russians. 

And so began the real collusion between the Clinton campaign and elements in the U.S. government to smear Trump as a Russian patsy.

The odd result of such failed reset policies and bought opposition research was a yarn that the neophyte and recklessly talking Donald Trump was a clever Russian lackey. 

Yet Trump’s strategic, defense, and energy policies, and his later appointments of realist Russian skeptics — such as General James Mattis, General H. R. McMaster, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and, yes, Rex Tillerson — were anathema to Moscow.

The Trump administration has armed Ukrainians, reentered the Middle East to bomb ISIS, squared off against Russia, and decimated Russian mercenaries in Syria. 

Trump also has ensured that the U.S. is well placed to usurp Russia as the world’s largest oil producer within about twelve months.

In just its first year, the Trump administration has armed Ukrainians, reentered the Middle East to bomb ISIS, squared off against Russia, and decimated Russian mercenaries in Syria. 

Trump also has ensured that the U.S. is well placed to usurp Russia as the world’s largest oil producer within about twelve months. 

He upped the defense budget, ordered the updating of the nuclear arsenal, bantered NATO members to increase their defense contributions, and traveled to Eastern Europe to bolster Western solidarity.

Given the media dismissal of Donald Trump and its eagerness to canonize Barack Obama’s eight years with another eight of Hillary Clinton, Russia by late 2016 went from a deity to a demon. 

It was reinvented as Mitt Romney’s enemy of liberal democracy, and, after the election, served as Hillary Clinton’s excuse for losing the election — and Putin became the new ally and collaborator of Donald Trump!

Thus spread the fertilizer that fed the national hysteria leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate a crime — active collusion with the Russians to warp an election — that likely did not exist. 

And if it did exist, it was probably committed by Hillary Clinton, her campaign, members of the Obama administration, and the miscreants of Fusion GPS. 

After months of politicized special-counsel investigations, together with House and Senate investigations, Americans are only now being apprised of what we always should have known from the beginning:

1) Russia implants chaos as cheaply as it can inside the U.S. How bold it is depends on how much it worries about a U.S. response.

During the Obama reset tenure, it felt there were no repercussions and thus few bounds to its disinformation efforts.

2) Like the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign, Moscow was convinced that Hillary Clinton would win the nomination and would be a shoo-in during the general election. 

Predictably, Russia invested comparatively meager resources to encourage pro-Sanders and pro-Trump campaign efforts to stir up trouble. 

It may have hacked into the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails, and perhaps it even found access to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private, illegal, and deleted emails to embarrass the likely future president and perhaps to find avenues for threats of future blackmail against her.

Note well, that if the sure thing had happened — the election of Hillary Clinton — then no one but the Russians might have known, and possibly disclosed at a time and under conditions of their choosing, the shenanigans of Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and his Russian sources.

3) The result of the Russian-fed, Clinton-bought Steele dossier is as depressing as was the earlier Russian wins from the reset:

0 The gullible and partisan FBI hierarchy is now discredited and compromised. 

0 The intelligence agencies, politicized under John Brennan and James Clapper, may soon share the embarrassments of the FBI. 

0 The critical FISA-court protocols have been undermined by deceit and untruth. 

0 The highest echelons of the Obama administration were probably complicit in surveillance of political opponents, spying that was predicated on Russian sources for a bogus dossier.

0 Some Obama officials may well have committed felonies by unmasking the names of U.S. citizens and leaking them to the press.

The verdict on Russia, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign is now becoming clearer. 

Russian reset resurrected Putin’s profile and hurt U.S. interests.

It grew out of a partisan rebuke of the Bush administration’s perceived harshness to Russia and was later massaged to help Barack Obama’s reelection campaign by granting Russia concessions in hopes of a foreign-policy success that would lead to perceived calm. 

Russia deliberately inserted itself into the 2016 election, as it had in previous elections, because:

1) it had suffered few if any prior consequences, 

2) it wanted to sow chaos in the American political system, and 

3) it saw a way to warp Clinton’s efforts to smear Donald Trump, first, no doubt to compromise a likely President Clinton, and, in unexpected fashion, later to undermine an actual President Trump.

At very little cost, Russia has embarrassed American democracy, played the media for the partisans they are, completely discredited the Clinton campaign and name, and created a year of nonstop hysteria to undermine the Trump administration.

And it is not over yet.

Victor Davis Hanson — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson


Monday, February 26, 2018

FedEx: We’re Keeping Our NRA Discount Program In Place, TYVM


By ED MORRISSEY I Hot Air


When does no change constitute big news? When a major corporation delivers a firm riposte to the Politicization Of All Things, even if that delivery didn’t absolutely positively get there overnight. 

After a number of companies cut ties with National Rifle Association members by eliminating discounts, Memphis-based FedEx announced today that it also opposes the NRA’s policy positions. 

However, the carrier refuses to change its discount policies, saying they value their customers for more than just their politics.

Here’s the statement in its entirety, all two paragraphs of it. NRA members won’t like Paragraph 1:

FedEx Corporation’s positions on the issues of gun policy and safety differ from those of the National Rifle Association (NRA).  FedEx opposes assault rifles being in the hands of civilians.  While we strongly support the constitutional right of U.S. citizens to own firearms subject to appropriate background checks, FedEx views assault rifles and large capacity magazines as an inherent potential danger to schools, workplaces, and communities when such weapons are misused.  We therefore support restricting them to the military.  Most important, FedEx believes urgent action is required at the local, state, and Federal level to protect schools and students from incidents such as the horrific tragedy in Florida on February 14th.

However, gun-control advocates won’t like Paragraph 2:

FedEx is a common carrier under Federal law and therefore does not and will not deny service or discriminate against any legal entity regardless of their policy positions or political views.  The NRA is one of hundreds of organizations in our alliances/association Marketing program whose members receive discounted rates for FedEx shipping.  FedEx has never set or changed rates for any of our millions of customers around the world in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues.

Maybe both sides can call this a wash. 

FedEx wants an “assault rifles” ban, but doesn’t actually provide any clarity on what makes a rifle an “assault rifle.” 

The original ban didn’t do much better, opting instead for arbitrary choices that nevertheless didn’t have any real impact on crimes involving long guns, which continued to decline long after the ban expired. 

They also want large capacity magazines banned — some states have done this already — without explaining what capacity makes them “large,” and why their misuse is somehow more deadly than the misuse of other magazines. Perhaps it would be better to focus on the misuse, no?

Still, even with all of those caveats (or perhaps better described as virtue signaling), FedEx refuses to dump its NRA discount program just to satisfy political activists. 

That’s laudable, and surprising, too.  

How often do customers invoke the NRA discount? 

I’ve been a member for several years and never knew it existed, nor was I aware of other such discounts for rental cars, hotels, and so on.

If FedEx closed up its discount program without mentioning it, it might have been the proverbial tree in the unattended forest. 

That makes their public position on keeping the program even more impressive.

That’s not the only pushback on the NRA-discount front today, either. 

Georgia lieutenant governor Casey Cagle, running for governor in November, says he’ll block Delta Airlines’ attempts to restore a key tax break as retribution for their cancellation of an NRA discount:
_______________


I will kill any tax legislation that benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA. Corporations cannot attack conservatives and expect us not to fight back.
______________

Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle (R) said Monday he would block any tax legislation that benefits Delta Airlines after the company ended its discount program for National Rifle Association (NRA) members. …

Delta, which is headquartered in Atlanta, is reportedly seeking state approval to restore a sizable fuel tax break that expired several years ago.

The airline is one of several national corporations to end business partnerships with the NRA in recent days following a mass shooting at a Florida high school.

Cagle, who is running for governor this year, issued a statement accusing those companies of “viewpoint discrimination against conservatives and law-abiding gun owners.”

Perhaps a better question is why that tax break existed at all, a question which could lead to a truly conservative approach to taxation by eliminating all such breaks and charging taxes on a flat rate for all businesses and individuals. 

It’s hardly conservative to conduct social engineering via the tax code or by threatening legislation no matter which direction that social engineering takes.

Although most conservatives will cheer this particular threat from Cagle, it’s yet another demonstration of the crony capitalism that our tax and regulatory system perpetuate.

And yet, it’s tough not to cheer Cagle’s statement. 

The media and corporate worlds have gone far overboard into “othering” millions of lawful gun owners who have nothing to do with mass shootings, both inside the NRA and outside of it. 

Punching back twice as hard sounds pretty attractive after the hysteria and hatred unleashed over the last few days. 

That’s why FedEx’s example of engagement and inclusion deserves to be highlighted and praised.


A READER’S COMMENTS:

M Scott Eiland ·  Maybe Delta should have been clever enough to make sure its taxpayer funded goodies were secured before commencing economic warfare on Americans exercising their First and Second Amendment rights.