Sunday, September 15, 2019

DEREK HUNTER - WHAT WILL DEMOCRATS DESTROY FIRST: THEMSELVES OR THE COUNTRY..... Well let us look at what they did to Mexifornia


What Will Democrats Destroy First: Themselves Or The Country?

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What did we just watch? Was it a political party committing suicide, or was it the country? We’ll find out next November.
That Democratic debate Thursday was something else, and by something else I mean horrifying. Not only wasn’t there a sane person on that stage, there wasn’t even a mildly crazy adult. “Bat feces crazy” comes to mind.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn’t miss a beat as they promised to spend more money than exists by simply “taxing the rich.” Their health care, free college, student loan forgiveness, everyone gets an electric car, peace, love, and understanding platforms only lacked giving everyone a cash-excreting unicorn. But it’s still early in the process.
Kamala Harris wants to be clear about everything, then avoids every opportunity to get specific. All the candidates have had to disavow some of their past positions for being insufficiently “woke,” but Harris has had to deny everything she’s done that brought her to this point. Being a former prosecutor would normally be a positive, people tend to like not having criminals roaming the streets. Somehow, having served law and order has become a liability in the Democratic Party – you can’t run on supporting cops in the party that hates cops. So Harris, being the only person who finds herself funny, just giggled a lot and spoke in platitudes.
Beto O’Rourke, on the other hand, spoke in his typical series of halting shouts. The cross between Napoleon Dynamite and Butthead’s faux outrage was only eclipsed by his eagerness to continue to dance a jig on the graves of El Paso’s shooting victims. I’d say he’s replaced coherent sentences with cursing and indignation, but he’s never spoken in coherent sentences and likely doesn’t know what indignation means. Someone told him he could win the nomination by calling everyone and everything racist while promising to forcibly take away the most popular rifle in the country and forgot to tell him they were joking. The drunk drivers’ campaign holds the record for setting the world’s largest pile of cash on fire. It, along with his ego, can be seen from space.
Joe Biden gave his best debate performance to date, which is a bit like celebrating your kid getting on base because he was hit by a pitch but otherwise went 0-for-4. It’s amazing how low the bar can be set for a former Vice President of the United States. Not that the job requires any abilities, which made Biden perhaps the most qualified person to have ever held it. His dentures nearly fell out, he lectured on the importance of playing records for kids, and rambled off-topic a couple of times. For him, aces!
It was considered so good for Joe because it was so bad for Julian Castro. The twin who not only split a womb but also a brain with his brother, attacked Biden for being old, repeating three times that Joe had forgotten something he’d said just 2 minutes earlier. The only problem was Castro was the one who was wrong. Oops. Castro’s resume is thinner than his short-term memory. He served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (YAWN) and Mayor of San Antonio, which is just this side of an honorary position with no power aside from wielding scissors at ribbon cutting ceremonies. He would’ve been chosen as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016 because he’s Hispanic, but he couldn’t speak Spanish well enough so she went with a white guy who could. He’s completed his Rosetta Stone Spanish courses now, and seems to be running for the second slot on any ticket based on his last name. Doubtful it’ll be Biden’s now.
Andrew Yang promised to give 10 people $1,000 per month for a year, drawn randomly from people who signed up at his website. My name wasn’t picked, so who cares?
Pete Buttigieg didn’t do himself any favors, he didn’t do any harm either. That’s a problem for him since his time as “flavor of the month” expired several months ago and he’s been relegated to top-tier of the “also-ran” category.
Cory Booker is trying to sell himself as the one candidate who lives in a poor neighborhood. But his parents were executives at IBM and he attended Stanford, Oxford, and Yale, so his “poverty” is closer to tourism and vanity than anything resembling reality. That’s is biggest problem – nothing about him is sincere if you look under the surface. The image he seeks to project to the public is as real as the imaginary friend name “T-Bone” he pretended existed and spoke about often while Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. (Seriously, check it out.)
Amy Klobuchar was on stage too. A fact I had to Google because I couldn’t remember who else was up there but knew there were 10.
One of these people will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, and whichever one ultimately falls out of the clown car needs to be taken seriously. They will have a 50 percent chance of becoming the next president. Then we’ll discover whether we watched a party destroy itself, or the country last Thursday.  
Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses.

Derek Hunter's Latest Book, Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood is available on Amazon


CALIFORNIA HAS THE BIGGEST WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA TO KEEP THEM COMING AND VOTING DEMOCRAT!




California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 09: Antonio DeSilva, who is currently homeless, plays with his dogs outside his tent on September 09, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. A new plan under consideration in the city would bar homeless people from sleeping on sidewalks and streets in more than 25 percent …
Mario Tama/Getty
6:53

Democrat-run, migrant-packed California leads the nation in poverty, according to a Census Bureau report which considers Americans’ housing costs alongside their income from wages and salaries.

The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
High housing costs also helped push New York’s poverty rate up to 14.1 percent, and New Jersey’s rate up to 14 percent, according to Table A5 on page 28 of the report, which is titled The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2018.
The traditional wages-only measure of poverty shows 4.9 million Californians are poor, according to the measure.
But the cash-plus-housing Supplemental Poverty Measure shows 7.1 million California live below the poverty line. That means 18.2 percent — almost one-in-five — of the state’s 40 million residents are considered poor.
A huge factor in California’s nation-leading poverty is the escalating cost of real estate spurred by the growing number of wealthy people who compete for houses near the state’s coastline. “Coastal California is affordable for roughly 15 percent of residents, down from 30 percent in 2000,” said Joel Kotkin, a California expert.
Local politics also reduces the construction of the houses preferred by Californian families, Kotkin wrote in July 2019. “State and local regulations and fees that constrain housing supply, including measures … have blocked expansion of lower-density housing construction on the urban fringe,” he wrote.
But the housing costs are also being driven up by investors from Wall Street and overseas, but also by the federal and state pro-migration policies which are inflating the state’s population, and political hostility to cheap housing.
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.


Many other coastal and immigration-inflated states also have high housing costs which spike their SPM poverty rates:
The 16 states for which the SPM rates were higher than the official poverty rates were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia.
States with less coastline, colder winters, and cheaper land, as well as fewer immigrants, tend to have lower SPM poverty rates.  For example, only 7.9 percent of people in Wisconsin are poor, along with 8.3 percent in Utah, 8.2 percent in New Hampshire, 73 percent in Minnesota, and 6.8 percent in Iowa, according to the SPM study.
The 7.1 million poor Californians comprise one-in-six of the nation’s 42.6 million poor residents.
The cash-only measure shows that California’s 4.8 million cash-poor residents comprise one-in-eight of the nation’s 39 million cash-poor people.
California, however, has a slightly lower rate of SPM poverty than the District of Columbia, where the SPM poverty rate is 18.4 percent.
The Census Bureau explained the difference between the two poverty rates:
The official poverty measure, which has been in use since the 1960s, estimates poverty rates by looking at a family’s or an individual’s cash income. The new measure is a more complex statistic incorporating additional items such as tax payments and work expenses in its family resource estimates. Thresholds used in the new measure are derived from Consumer Expenditure Survey expenditure data on basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing and utilities) and are adjusted for geographic differences in the cost of housing.
Demand for housing is driven up by immigration, says a 2019 report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Immigrants are a major source of household growth and therefore of housing demand,” said the report, titled “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2o19.” The report continued:
Current projections call for the foreign-born population to drive an ever-larger share of household growth. If efforts to curtail immigration prevail, however, future housing demand will be much lower than projected …
even though about 30,000 more households moved out of California each year in 2010–2017 than moved in, in-migration still averaged 165,000 households annually. This made California third only to Florida and Texas in terms of gross household moves into the state.
Immigration impacts housing demands and costs, but it also affects Americans’ wages and salaries, say economists.
For example, Georgetown University professor Harry Holzer told Yahoo News immigration expands national economies but also lowers individuals’ wages and salaries:
This is probably the main reason that immigration generally is good for an overall economy … It increases the supply of workers in various fields, and often reduces the labor costs in those fields for two reasons. Number one … some immigrants are willing to work for less than their native-born counterparts. But also, it’s just extra supply, and an extra supply of workers reduces the costs.
If the immigrants weren’t there, the wages would likely be rising …. And that might be better for some of the native-born folks.
Middle class wages in progressive California have risen by one percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center, Breitbart News reported September 3.
Accelerating automation may make the problem worse for lower-skilled Americans, Holder wrote in an August 2019 paper for the Migration Policy Institute:
More adaptable workers will likely reenroll in higher education and gain the requisite skills needed to land new (and perhaos better) jobs. But others will experience long periods of unemployment, and then either return to the labor market with lower earnings than before or withdraw from the market altogether.
California’s large scale use of H-1B visa-workers is also a problem for Californians. “Foreign workers on H-1B visas offer employers many advantages: they cannot typically quit the employer who hires them without losing their status, their opportunities in their home country often are substantially worse than these U.S. opportunities, and so forth,” according to Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of the school’s Center for Human Resources. He continued:
Wages do not rise to reflect the shortfall [of American workers], U.S. employees do not pursue these fields because of that, and employers then become completely dependent on H-1B workers to fill them. We have seen this play out in earlier periods where nurses and mid-level programming jobs were almost completely filled by foreign workers on these visas.





EconomyImmigrationPoliticsH-1BhousingimmigrationMigrantmigrationpoverty


s Dianne Feinstein out to kill off Kamala Harris's presidential bid?



Kamala Harris has always been known for her lean and hungry, pushy, grabby, ambition, which includes a willingness to sleep her way to the top to get what she wants. Her political start began as a social mountaineer with San Francisco's old-money Pacific Heights set dating from her 20s and then just moved onward and upward.
That's not sitting well with California's lizardy old-money senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein, who knows that establishment well.
And so, she's taking some action, as Fox News reports:

BLOG: BIDEN AND FEINSTEIN GO WAY BACK WITH THEIR RED CHINA FOR RAW CASH DEALS SIPHONED THROUGH HER HUSBAND AND HIS SON.
According to reports, Feinstein, the senior senator from the Golden State, will throw a fundraiser next month for Democratic 2020 presidential frontrunner Joe Biden -- and not for Harris, another White House contender whose poll numbers suggest she could probably use some high-profile help.
BLOG: WHAT FEINSTEIN MEANS IS THAT OL' BIDEN IS AS CORRUPT AS SHE IS ANY DAY! 
“My candidate would be Joe Biden,” Feinstein told CNBC back then. “I watched him as vice president. I’ve seen him operate. I’ve seen him perform and I think he brings a level of experience and seniority, which I think is really important.”
The early evening reception will be the first that Feinstein hosts for Biden in the 2020 election, CNBC reported. Her husband has already participated in several fundraising events for Biden, who campaigned for Feinstein in 2018, when she was re-elected by a landslide.
Oh, spare us. Feinstein knows as well as anyone that old Joe is addled and gaffe-tastic. This is more likely about putting Kamala back in her place.
Fox News speculated that this fundraiser among the fatcat donors might just have been payback for Harris's nasty first-debate attack all but accusing Biden of being a Bull Conner racist. Remember Harris's phony earnestness in: "That little girl was me"?
Sure, it's possible. But it's also been known for close to a year that Feinstein considers Harris a wretched parvenu who hasn't paid her dues.
Remember this?
“I’m a big fan of Sen. Harris, and I work with her. But she’s brand-new here, so it takes a little bit of time to get to know somebody,” Feinstein said of the junior senator, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Her press secretary told CNN that Feinstein later added that she certainly likes her California colleague, saying, “Oh, I love Kamala.”
Translation in a plummy accent: Do we know her?
The lagniappe of 'Oh, I love Kamala,' straight from The Sloane Ranger Handbook, is a nice touch.
Hard to get a better old-money passive-aggressive remark than that one. People are either known or unknown in Feinstein's rich circles and it's pretty obvious to Feinstein that Kamala doesn't cut it.
What's more, Feinstein is a 'get off my lawn, whippersnappers' non-ideological sort of small-c conservative, or, as Fox News put it, she pulls rank. Remember this?
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein pulled rank Friday when a group of kids tried to school her on climate change.
After the group sought her support for the Green New Deal, the 85-year-old senior senator from California let them know she wasn't about to be bossed around by a bunch of youngsters.

BLOG: THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN MADE A VAST FORTUNE SERVING CRIMINAL OPERATIONS LIKE PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO AND BANK OF AMERICA AND THE FREAKING PARASITE TRIAL LAWYERS! 
“You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that,” Feinstein continued. “I’ve gotten elected, I just ran. I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality. And I know what I’m doing. So you know, maybe people should listen a little bit.
So just the fundraiser in Harris's home state of California was a shiv in the side to Kamala.
Why is that? 
Well, for one thing, the Democratic political set widely believes that to win the presidency, one must win California. Harris is from California, so that stacks things in her favor. 
Now Feinstein is marshalling money from California Biden's way? So that they give their money to him and feel 'donor fatigue' when Kamala comes calling?
The matter is compounded by the fact that the California Democratic campaign fatcats weren't impressed with Harris's performance in the third debate, as this CNBC report here indicates. Feinstein knows those people and may very well be egging them toward Biden, or at least piling on.
Here's another thing: Money from fatcats over little-people donations is Kamala's vulnerable spot. The queen of fake Twitter followers is also highly reliant on big dollar donors over the little guys, even as the New York Times tries to claim she's changing that. Well, maybe she is, but if she is, it would be in the infant stage and in any case, they're taking her word for it. More likely, she still relies on the big boys, because that's what she knows.
Which would mean that Feinstein's bid to separate Harris from that cash lifeline is like that of General Grant at Vicksburg, targeting Confederate supply lines. The California dinosaur strategizes.
The Feinstein fundraiser, which will channel and suction big money toward Biden, can't help but come at a cost to Harris. And Feinstein, right in the middle of the Pacific Heights crowd, is lobbing her cannon ball where the funds are richest and Kamala's ties are tightest.
It almost looks like a concerted chess move to checkmate the upstart. And given the evidence of Feinstein's antipathy toward Harris, one can't help but think it's all intentional.

The Electability Myth of Joe Biden



The leftstream media characterization of Joe Biden is that he is moderate, likable, and the most electable Democrat candidate.  He is affable Uncle Joe, the self-made lunchbox-toting common man of the people. 
In truth, he is none of the above.
Joe the Moderate
The "Biden as moderate" canard is getting increasingly hard to defend.  On the economy-, car-, and cow-killing $93-trillion Green New Deal, Biden was asked if it goes too far or is unrealistically promising too much.
He answered, "No, no it's not."
When previously asked if there would be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in his administration, Biden answered, "No...we would make sure it's eliminated, and no more subsidies for either one of those, period."
Green New Deal?  Two thumbs up.  Fossil fuels?  Fracking and coal?  Kill them.  How he would eliminate them is one of history's great mysteries.  
Not content to destroy the economy, Biden has embraced the full gamut of abortion radicalism, to include flipping to oppose the Hyde Amendment, which forbids taxpayer funds to pay for most abortions.  This is the amendment that pro-abortion Democrats traditionally use to hide their radicalism, but Biden threw off even that fig leaf.
He said, "I can't justify leaving millions of women without the health care they need.  If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support [the amendment]."
The death-cult pro-abortion groups love Biden because they know he is fully committed to their hellish agenda. 
On border security, Biden's position is indistinguishable from those of the other radicals in the party.  His hand went up when asked if he is in favor of decriminalizing border security and providing taxpayer-funded health care to non-citizens. 
When asked about immigration detention centers, he answered, "Close them down!  By the way, we don't need them!"  Apparently, arguing that nations don't need borders exemplifies moderation.
Biden is a panderer with no core convictions.  Today's Democrat primary voters are radical, so Biden is a radical.  His positions are all but indistinguishable from those of socialists Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  The entire Democrat primary has been an extremism arms race, and Biden regularly ups the ante.
Affable Uncle Joe
The media regularly compliment Biden for his sterling personality.  He's that crazy but lovable uncle we should all want to meet for a beer to swap stories about toiling for a workman's wage in the coal mines.  But, like most of Biden's biography, his entire persona is a lie.
Biden has always been a plagiarist and prevaricator.  Most of his lies have served his own biography.  These are among the creepiest of lies.  He is relentless in his biography-building.  He was the original valor thief, seeking to steal the best parts of other people's biographies to add to his own. 
The media gloss over these bold lies as gaffes.  But these lies speak to a serious character defect.  Biden is egocentric, delusional, and small-minded.  This lying addiction is not something new that can be explained away as a symptom of a failing mind.  It has been the central strand of Biden's political DNA since before dinosaurs wandered the earth.
So, okay, Biden may be a liar, but at least he's a nice guy.  Um...not so much. 
Would a nice guy tell black Americans that Republicans are going to "put you all back in chains"?
Would a first-rate personality say candidate Barack Obama was the first "mainstream African-American," an "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," implying that other black Americans are lacking in all these qualities and that Obama was somehow a new invention?  This is one of the most outrageously racist comments I've seen in recent years.
Biden apologized to Obama, the one black American he wasn't really insulting.  He should have apologized to everyone else.  Pro-civility Biden is not very civil at all. 
There is also Biden's penchant for making women and girls uncomfortable, a habit that would be treated entirely different if he were a Republican.  Imagine if Vice President Mike Pence liked to bend over and sniff girls' hair, or grab a woman's arm and hold her essentially captive until he is done talking to her.
Somehow, I don't think the leftstream media would tell us it was just Mike being Mike, an endearing old-fashioned character trait.  Instead, they would have painted him as the worst kind of pedophile and misogynist.
So if Biden is not moderate and not likable, what is he basing his electability argument on?
Electable Biden, the Political Unicorn
Biden has pulled off his greatest trick yet in convincing a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party, particularly the power brokers, that he is the most electable Democrat.  He argues that he is an establishment moderate Democrat who has broad electoral appeal.  That's about as true as his recent war story.
He's also argued that his exemplary personality will exert a gravitational pull on voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  But what will matter more to these voters: that Biden claims to have once been a coal miner or that he has promised to destroy coal miners?
Those voters who crossed over to vote for President Trump against a fake, condescending liberal politician who excites nobody are not going to cross back over to vote for...a fake, condescending liberal politician who excites nobody.  Many Republicans are pulling for Biden, not because they like him, but because they consider him the weakest candidate. 
Liberals will line up to vote for anyone not named Trump.  The real battle is for independents and former Democrats who crossed over in 2016.  Because of this, the most electable Democrat candidate is Tulsi Gabbard.  Biden is not going to win disaffected voters back, nor will he drive turnout among the identity politics–obsessed Democrat base. 
Gabbard, while liberal, has interesting things to say and embraces positions that could attract independents.  She doesn't emanate raw hatred and contempt toward the military, police, and America.  She acknowledges that we need borders and, while still an abortion radical, at least admits that some abortions should be restricted, which puts her way outside the Democrat mainstream. 
This is not an endorsement.  Gabbard is liberal and would be a poor choice.  But, unlike the rest of the Democrat candidates, she is prone to occasional bouts of sanity.  After both of the first two Democrat debates, she was among the most Googled candidates.  She is this year's Bernie Sanders, the candidate the Democrat establishment buried.  The Democrats did the Republicans a huge favor, because Gabbard would have been a tough out.  
Instead, the Democrats are on course to elect an avowed socialist or a close facsimile in Biden.  To loosely paraphrase advice given by Napoleon, never interfere with the Democrat establishment when it's in the process of destroying itself by nominating a boring, radical, unlikable liar like Lunchbox Joe.
Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.

China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat




Ten weeks of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the Hong Kong airport.

Ominously, Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as "deranged" acts that are "the first signs of terrorism," and vowed a merciless crackdown on the perpetrators.

China is being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force, as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would reveal the character of President Xi Jinping's Communist dictatorship, as well as Beijing's long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5 million.

Yet this is not the only internal or border concern of Xi's regime.
Millions of Muslim Uighurs in China's west are in concentration camps undergoing "re-education" to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession and the creation of a new East Turkestan.
In June, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22 crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.
President Rodrigo Duterte's reluctance to resist China's fortification in the South China Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.
China's claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.
Any Taiwanese declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.
While Taiwan's request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai's unofficial visit.
The vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a decade ago, not enough to create the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in the countryside seeking work.
And talks have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which, says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing's "seven deadly sins" in dealing with the United States:
China steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S. companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.
Such practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Moreover, China has used the accumulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.
With President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two economies?
Only Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.
If the American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the course, will not be the USA.
For three years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia's theft of emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Yet the greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing's theft in 2014 of the personnel files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of them holding top-secret clearances.
Compromised by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a "treasure trove of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works for the United States government."
"A very big deal from a national security ... and counterintelligence perspective," said Comey. And Xi's China, not Putin's Russia, committed the crime. Yet America's elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of cyberaggresion.
Undeniably, Russia is a rival. But Putin's economy is the size of Italy's while China's economy challenges our own. And China's population is 10 times that of Russia, and four times that of the USA.
Manifestly, China is the greater menace.
Are Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by the rules of reciprocal trade?
Or will Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in 2001?
This issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia, if not the world.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend Beyond Chinese Spy

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

 

August 6, 2018 Last Updated: August 7, 2018
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein speaks during a Committee hearing on Cambridge Analytica and data privacy in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
News Analysis
Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no one.
The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended functions at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.
At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances behind his exit, and no charges were filed.
Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be targeted by Chinese intelligence.
The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to “funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.
“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.
Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence for the classified information she might possess through her position on the intelligence committee.
She might also be the target of “influence operations”—a subtler approach, by which Chinese operatives would try to steer Feinstein into promoting policies that might benefit the Chinese regime.
According to the article, “For many years, Ms. Feinstein has tried to promote friendship and trade with China, and she has countered critics of the Chinese human-rights record by emphasizing what she described in a Senate speech last year as ‘major improvements in human rights’ there.”

Conciliatory to Communists

Feinstein’s conciliatory approach to communist governments began in the mid-1950s, when she served in the Stanford University student government.
Before her senior year, Dianne Goldman, as she was then known, traveled to Europe on a student trip led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The agenda included a possible meeting with Yugoslav communist revolutionary Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
In January 1955, a vigorous debate erupted on the Stanford student executive, over whether to support a proposed visit of seven Soviet journalists to the United States.
According to Stanford Daily reports of the time, executive member Sam Palmer asserted that “nothing can be lost in allowing them to come over.”
He was supported by both Goldman and Don Peck, who claimed that it was important to show “Russia that the United States is not an Iron Curtain country—that we are willing to let Communists enter.”
The ayes won, and Goldman went on to personally host the delegation from the Soviet Writers Union when they toured Stanford’s campus later that year.
Thirty years later, while serving as mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein issued an official city proclamation in support of that year’s World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow.
This international propaganda event was organized by the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth and was supported in the United States by the Communist Party USA and similar groups.
Feinstein traveled to Moscow in December of that year as part of a trade delegation of 450 U.S. businessmen and public officials.
A little over a year later, on Jan. 27, 1987, Soviet Consul General Valentin Kamenev presented Feinstein with a Soviet streetcar: “A streetcar named desire.” Also present at the ceremony was Viktor Zhelezny, deputy chief of public transport for the Russian Republic.

Bridges to Communist China

Building bridges to the People’s Republic of China, however, seems to have been an even higher priority for Feinstein.
One of Feinstein’s first acts on becoming mayor of San Francisco in January 1979, was to visit Shanghai to establish sister-city relations.
The next apparent priority was re-establishing passenger airline service between China and the United States. Service was restored on Jan. 8, 1981, after a “32-year hiatus when a Boeing 747 with 139 Chinese passengers arrived exactly on time at San Francisco International Airport,” according to The New York Times.
Feinstein and Chinese Consul General Hu Ding-yi held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, “which included a cake, decorated with ‘CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] Welcome to San Francisco,’ and two bottles of champagne.” Feinstein described the landing as “an historic and exciting occasion.”
Feinstein went on to visit Shanghai several times in her official capacity and built a close personal relationship with then-Mayor Jiang Zemin.
According to the San Jose Mercury: “He [Jiang] once invited her and her husband to see Mao Tse-tung’s bedroom in his old residence, the first foreigners to do so. Feinstein had entertained Jiang in San Francisco, dancing with him as he sang ‘When We Were Young.'”
This relationship proved fruitful in 1999, when President Bill Clinton was pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization.
A visit to Washington that year by Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, which many had hoped would seal the deal, produced nothing. Relations got even worse after U.S. bombers accidentally destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that May.
Feinstein, stepped in to offer assistance to the administration. She volunteered to use her personal relationship with now-Chinese regime leader Jiang, to get negotiations back on track.
In August 1999, the White House dispatched Feinstein to China, with a hand-written note to Jiang from President Clinton, urging a resumption of talks.
“Senator Feinstein played a critical role in paving the way for this critical trade agreement,” White House press officer Elizabeth Newman said.
Feinstein and Jiang met Aug. 16 in the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, where the senator handed over President Clinton’s letter.
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury in November 1999, Feinstein said, that she felt the only way China would enter into WTO negotiations again was with the backing of Jiang.
Feinstein said, in offering her services as an intermediary to Clinton and national security adviser Sandy Berger, “I said I’d be prepared to do it if they felt it would be helpful, and they said they did think it would be helpful and please do it.”
Jiang was “receptive and particularly pleased that Clinton had taken the time to personally write a note to him,’’ Feinstein said.
“I think he listened, and we had substantial discussions on the subject. … I was successful in getting the Chinese interested in beginning to resume negotiations on the subject,” Feinstein said in the November 1999 interview.

Human Rights

Significantly, Feinstein said she expected approval of the new trade status, which would remove the “annual congressional review that many believe continues to put pressure on China to reform its economy and human-rights record.”
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would get the trade status it coveted, without having to do anything of significance to improve its abysmal human-rights record.
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization and has used that trade access to build the world’s second-strongest economy, and a world-class military.
If anything, the CCP’s human-rights record is worse today. Certainly, their repressive technologies are far more powerful.
At the time, Feinstein’s colleague, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressed grave concerns about the deal.
“Once they get permanent (normal trade relations status), all leverage from the US on behalf of business is over because they have what they want permanently,” Pelosi said, in the San Jose Mercury article. “They have violated their agreements in terms of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, they have violated their agreements in terms of trade, they have violated their agreements on international covenants on human rights. Why is that we think they are then going to honor their commitments they make for WTO?”
All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government.
Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S. politician.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated who led Dianne Feinstein’s student trip to Europe. The trip was led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The Epoch Times regrets the error.


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