91

Politics / PRESIDENT TRUMP'S SPEECH ON VENEZUELA WAS MAGNIFICENT

« Last post by oldsport on Yesterday at 11:11:14 AM »

February 19, 2019
Trump's speech on Venezuela was magnificent
By Thomas Lifson

President Trump's speech yesterday to a wildly enthusiastic crowd at Florida International
University bears legitimate comparison to President Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall!" speech in Berlin.  It may even change history, as Reagan's did.

With many Venezuelan immigrants, Cuban-Americans, and Nicaraguan-Americans in the audience, it was among his best public moments.  He was introduced by First Lady Melania Trump, who made the point that she had escaped a communist tyranny and knows what it feels like to enjoy the freedom of the United States.  Warm-up acts don't get any better than this.


YouTube screen grab.

Because it was given in the daytime, not prime time, many people were unable to see the historic moment on television, so video of the full speech is embedded below.  At this hour, transcripts are not yet available, unfortunately.

There were two related themes: the futility of socialism, which leads to tyranny because it is based on a mistaken concept of human nature, and the need for Venezuelan officials, especially in the military, to disobey any orders to attack Maduro's opposition, members of the National Assembly, Acting President Guaidó and his family, and the aid column (supplied by the United States) that will be heading into Venezuela in five days.  The New York Times chronicles the threat he made:

"We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open," Mr. Trump said.  He urged all members of the Venezuelan military to permit the aid into the country, and advised them to accept the opposition's amnesty offer — or they will find "no safe harbor, no easy exit, and no way out."

"You will lose everything," the president said. ...

If Mr. Maduro's stranglehold on the food and medicine supply can be broken, and he can be shown to have lost control of the border, his legitimacy as the country's president will weaken, the reasoning goes.  If the military can be convinced to not stand between the Venezuelan population and the humanitarian aid, he may fall.

Staging the humanitarian assistance as the test of the loyalty of military and police forces to Maduro, while warning them that there will be no way out after Maduro's inevitable fall, is smart.  Members of the military below the bribed top level of generals have family and friends who are starving.  Firing on or blocking life-saving aid to protect the pride and rule of a corrupt puppet of Cuba, as Trump correctly called him, becomes a betrayal of their own people, one that will have dire consequences after the regime falls.

Trump held out the promise that the last three dominoes of socialist-communist dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere will fall.  Caracas, Managua, and Havana will become free capitals of free nations, and for the first time in human history, an entire hemisphere will be free.

I had goosebumps at that point.  It was right up there with Ronald Reagan saying, "Mr. Chairman, tear down this wall!"

There are skeptics and critics, of course.  The most strident I have found so far come from the right, where The American Conservative called it "irresponsible."  They don't want any military engagement.  But I see that as unlikely, particularly since Colombian forces will be accompanying the aid, most likely, and if the Colombians are attacked by foolish Venezuelan troops and police, those Venezuelan troops can easily be defeated, especially if American airpower is brought in to respond to an attack.

There is almost zero danger that Russia or China will be tempted to intervene and trigger a world war.  Both countries have many billions of dollars in loans and accounts payable at stake in Venezuela, and they realize that Maduro is on his last legs.  They want the successor regime to pay off those debts, because they need the money.  Neither wants to fight a war on the other side of the world, with American supply lines a few hundred miles long, while their supply lines are thousands of miles long, and their air forces have nothing at all like our logistics capabilities.

I think Trump has accurately read the forces at work and is going all in on a goal he deeply believes in.


https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/trumps_speech_on_venezuela_was_magnificent.html

92

Sports Forum / Re: Kap just got paid.

« Last post by oleschoolaggie on Yesterday at 11:06:20 AM »

according to kap's attorney that i heard on cnn, he expects kap to "sign" with an nfl team within a matter of weeks.  and yes, he mentioned that the patriots was amongst 3 teams who have expressed interest including my washington redskins.  i think he would be welcomed with open arms in dc, especially since it is doubtful that injured redskins starting qb alex smith may not recover from his broken leg by next season.

i gotta believe since doug williams is senior vice president of player personnel for the redskins, the only thing that would prevent him from signing kap would be owner daniel snyder...

93

Politics / Re: Dems Oppose Bill Alerting ICE To Illegal Immigrants Trying To Buy Guns

« Last post by CIAA-FAN on Yesterday at 10:28:09 AM »

I'm sure it's not that cut and dry.

You like posting stuff that confuses the issue.

THAT IS HIS MODUS OPERANDI, WHILE OLD SPORT IS JUST PLAIN STUPID.  THEY MAKE A TEAM WORTH WATCHING. 

94

Politics / Re: AN AWKWARD SILENCE

« Last post by CIAA-FAN on Yesterday at 10:26:05 AM »

AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT OUR EUROPEAN ALLIES NOW THINK OF US SINCE TRUMP.

95

Politics / TIME FOR THE KKK TO RIDE AGAIN

« Last post by CIAA-FAN on Yesterday at 10:21:57 AM »

YES.  THIS IS 2019. 
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/19/time-ku-klux-klan-night-ride-again-an-alabama-newspaper-editor-wants-bring-back-lynching/?utm_term=.61335447e2fc

Democracy Dies in Darkness
CIAA-FAN

Morning Mix
‘Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again’: An Alabama newspaper editor wants to bring back lynching

February 19 at 6:30 AM
Two decades ago, the editor of the tiny Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Ala., was being talked about as a potential contender for the Pulitzer Prize. A congressional citation read on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1998 lauded “his truly American heroism and dedication to the truth” and called him “one of Alabama’s finest and most ethical journalists.” Glowing profiles in the New York Times, People magazine and the American Journalism Review highlighted his tenacious reporting and down-home Southern charm.

Now, Goodloe Sutton is back in the news again — this time because he recently called for mass lynchings and suggested that the Ku Klux Klan should return to “clean out” Washington.

“Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again,” began a Feb. 14 editorial in the paper, which went on to claim that Democrats, along with some Republicans, were planning to raise taxes in Alabama. It concluded, “Seems like the Klan would be welcome to raid the gated communities up there.”
Sutton, who is also the paper’s publisher, could not immediately be reached for comment. He told the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he had written the editorial, which ran without a byline, and stood by it.
“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all been better off,” he told the paper, explaining, “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.”
 
During the same conversation, Sutton argued that the KKK “didn’t kill but a few people” and “wasn’t violent until they needed to be,” the Advertiser reported on Monday. He further suggested the Klan, a white supremacist hate group, was comparable to the NAACP. Sutton also added that people could call him, write him a letter or boycott the paper if they disagreed with his views.
When the Advertiser’s Melissa Brown asked him whether it was appropriate for a newspaper publisher to suggest that Americans should be lynched, Sutton replied, “It’s not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we’re talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?”

The editorial — which, like the rest of the paper, was not published online — first started getting attention on Monday afternoon when two student-journalists at Auburn University posted photographs on Twitter. On Monday night, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who prosecuted two members of the Klan for their role in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls, called the editorial “disgusting” and demanded Sutton’s immediate resignation. “I have seen what happens when we stand by while people-especially those with influence- publish racist, hateful views,” he wrote.
Echoing the call for Sutton’s resignation was Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), who wrote, “For the millions of people of color who have been terrorized by white supremacy, this kind of ‘editorializing’ about lynching is not a joke — it is a threat."
 
The criticism was a sharp contrast from 20 years ago, when Sutton was honored on the floor of Congress. “His story is a shining example of the best and the brightest which occurs in America when a single citizen has the bravery to stand alone, in the face of mounting pressure and odds, and stands up for justice and equality,” Rep. Earl F. Hilliard (D-Ala.), the first person of color to represent Alabama in Congress since Reconstruction, said in his May 1998 proclamation.

Back then, Sutton was being celebrated for his dogged investigative journalism in the southwestern Alabama city with less than 3,000 residents, which resulted in the local sheriff being sent to federal prison. He and his wife, Jean, who worked alongside him at the paper, had spent nearly four years publishing stories that showed that Marengo County Sheriff Roger Davis was siphoning off government funds, from cashing reimbursement checks that were meant to go to the sheriff’s office to buying an all-terrain vehicle for his daughter with a check from the department’s bank account.
That reporting led to an undercover investigation that put Davis and two of his seven deputies in jail, but it took a toll on “Miss Jean” and “Ole Goodloe,” as the Suttons were known in their rural community. “The stories triggered a backlash,” AJR reported. “One of the elders at the Presbyterian church Sutton attends told him to lay off the sheriff. Sutton says he began losing about $1,000 a week in advertising. And hate mail poured in.”
Talking to the Associated Press in 1998, Sutton said deputies had threatened to plant drugs in their home, and the couple and their oldest son had repeatedly been pulled over and harassed. Davis “started telling anyone who would listen that my oldest son was involved in drugs, my wife was having affairs and I was drunk all the time,” he said. He was finally vindicated in 1997, when Davis pleaded guilty to charges including extortion and soliciting bribes.
 
That same year, two of Davis’s deputies, Wilmer “Sonny″ Breckenridge and Robert Pickens, were arrested along with 68 others in a massive drug bust that, at the time, was the largest in southern Alabama history. Breckenridge, AJR noted, had been the officer whose job was to visit schools and caution students about the dangers of using drugs. Both were ultimately convicted on charges that they had been abusing their positions as law enforcement officers by providing protection to drug dealers.

But by 2015, the Democrat-Reporter, like so many other small papers, was fighting for its life. Sutton had been forced to move out of the building across the street from the county courthouse where he had been based since 1965. “His office now is in a former barbecue restaurant a block away, where pieces of paper are taped to windows carrying the paper’s name,” the Advertiser reported. While the paper had more than 7,000 subscribers in 1998, circulation had fallen to roughly 3,000. Making matters worse, Jean, his managing editor and wife of 39 years, died in 2003 of complications from cancer.

“It was hard for me to go home during that time,” he told the Advertiser. “I was like a zombie for several years after I lost Jean. I didn’t know what to do.” Jean had been the one who first started digging into the rumors of corruption at the sheriff’s office, AJR reported, but since she hated to be in the spotlight, she refused to have her name appear on any of her stories and gave the credit to her editor husband instead.
The AJR profile — which showed Sutton fishing for crawfish and mentioned that Jean liked to bake chocolate chip cookies for the sheriff’s deputies — portrayed the couple as charming, small-town muckrakers. But at some point, the paper turned away from investigative journalism and began publishing more and more racist screeds. Sutton’s “racial references in headlines and stories” had upset many of his readers, the Advertiser acknowledged in 2015, noting that one front-page story about a murder described the perpetrators as “Selma black thugs.”
Asked what the headline might have said if the killers had been white, Sutton didn’t respond but appeared to wink at his interviewer.
 
When Sutton’s comments on the Klan began getting attention on Monday, longtime readers pointed out that it wasn’t the first time that the paper’s editorial page had endorsed extreme or openly racist views. In May 2015, an editorial stated that the mayor of a city “up north” had “displayed her African heritage by not enforcing civilized law.” Another, published in June of that year, called for drug dealers, kidnappers, rapists, thieves and murderers to be hanged “on the courthouse lawn where the public can watch.”
“Dope heads know how to grow marijuana but not cotton,” one August 2014 editorial read. “They don’t pay sales taxes on what they grow so this doesn’t register with the economists who compile the statistics about jobs and employment. This market is dominated by blacks.” That same month, President Barack Obama was described by the paper as a “Kenyan orphan president” who was elected because Americans thought “it would be cool to have a colored man” in the White House. Later, amid the national controversy over football players kneeling during the national anthem, the Democrat-Reporter declared, “That’s what black folks were taught to do two hundred years ago, kneel before a white man.”
Other editorials have disparaged women with crude comments about their weight: Michelle Obama was labeled “a chubby chick” by the Democrat-Reporter, while Hillary Clinton was a “little fat oinker.” In January 2017, an editorial predicting that Clinton would be sent to prison stated: “Fat women are more stupid than trim women. Hillary wasn’t trim.”
Since the editorials are run without a byline, it’s unclear which, if any, were written by Sutton. Archived editions of the Democrat-Reporter from 2012 to 2017 indicate he was responsible for overseeing editorial content and that the paper’s two or three other staff members were in charge of tasks such as layout and production. A since-deleted post on a journalism forum indicates that as recently as December, Sutton had been trying to sell the paper, which he inherited from his father in the 1980s.
To some local lawmakers, the news that the Democrat-Reporter’s publisher was wishing for the return of the most notorious hate group in American history came as no surprise.

"That kind of ignorance is the reason I don’t even subscribe to the paper,” A.J. McCampbell, a Democratic state representative, told AL.com.

96

Sports Forum / Re: FAMU hit with postseason ban in four sports

« Last post by Que82 on Yesterday at 10:18:54 AM »

You are absolutely right, but since Southern was the example used, I was just making sure that others know that we weren't given any preferential treatment during our post-season ban period.  Like Bluedog stated, other SWAC folks pitched a hissy fit when the SWAC didn't ban us from the SCG.

That was over 4 years ago.  I think everyone is pretty much over it by now and if they aren't I doubt if your diatribe changed their mind.   

In that case, it should have never been brought up in this discussion, but since it was, I just want folks to know, Southern wasn't given any preferential treatment 4 years ago.

? Dude it was brought up because I didn't understand the post season ban and I remembered that situation, you are acting like it was shade on Southern.  Either you are ultra sensitive or you have to have the last word.    In any case the floor is yours.

Being ultra-sensitive is when one doesn't like another person's reply.  It seems to you don't like my replies.  As I previously stated, I'm just making sure that folks on this BOARD understand that SU did not get any preferential treatment by being eligible to participate in the SCG during our NCAA ban period.  This entire back and forth discusion was brought on by your confusion, but I'm sure you don't see it that way. I'm sure if someone erroneously used AAMU as an example, you probably would be the first to correct them with other examples to prove your point.

I wasn't gonna respond until you said I used Southern as an example erroneously. What did I say that was erroneous? I'm sure if I said something that was erroneous about Southern, Bluedog would have something to say about it and yet you seem to be the only one that has a problem.  If someone says something that is the truth about AAMU I have nothing to say.  I posted an article to support what I said.  You confirmed it, so I'm not so sure what was so erroneous about the Southern example.  AS a matter of fact the whole comment I made had nothing to do about Southern receiving any preferential treatment it was about the ruling from the NCAA.  You made this into something it wasn't.  Maybe you are confused as well and need to go back and read what I posted.

"Being ultra-sensitive is when one doesn't like another person's reply."

It seems you didn't like my reply when I brought up the Southern situation so I guess that means the descriptor that you used fits you well. 

97

Sports Forum / Re: Ameer Jackson, former WSSU player, thriving in pro league in the middle east....

« Last post by Maroon and Gray on Yesterday at 10:16:47 AM »

does anyone attend these games?  Looks like the arenas are empty.

98

Politics / Re: Finally, Olds..t has a candidate he can believe in....

« Last post by Maroon and Gray on Yesterday at 10:08:45 AM »

DJT's base are in lock step with the racist, sexist agenda this administration preaches daily.  The daily 'show' is just that a show.

With all the changes within the administration there has been one constant, Stephen Miller.  His message keeps all the base glued together.

The problem for y04185 and oldsport is that if DJT is ultimately successful, the base will come for them just like they are focused on the Mexicans and Central Americans.

99

Sports Forum / Ameer Jackson, former WSSU player, thriving in pro league in the middle east....

« Last post by wssupickle on Yesterday at 10:05:10 AM »

https://www.journalnow.com/sports/wssu/ram_ramblings/ram-ramblings-ameer-jackson-has-very-successful-season-in-pro/article_ee0900a2-3455-11e9-95cc-7f58bc861d36.html

100

Politics / Re: Dems Oppose Bill Alerting ICE To Illegal Immigrants Trying To Buy Guns

« Last post by Maroon and Gray on Yesterday at 09:54:53 AM »

I'm sure it's not that cut and dry.

You like posting stuff that confuses the issue.