Radio America Online News Bureau

Disaster Relief Done Right, Berkeley’s War on Speech, High Heel Hysteria

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Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are all for a robust federal response to assist in the recovery and the rebuilding of the Texas coast, but they also don’t want to see the legislation turn into a spending spree for a bunch of unrelated projects for other parts of the country and they applaud political and policy figures for setting that priority now.  They also unload on the mayor of Berkeley, California, for calling for speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter not to speak on campus because it might set off the Antifa rioters.  And Alexandra explains the litany of double standards as the media and social media savage First Lady Melania Trump for wearing high heels to board Air Force One on her way to survey the devastating floods in Texas.

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Humans Aren’t Responsible for Harvey

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Within the dramatic coverage of Hurricane Harvey and the historic flooding that ensued, the mainstream media repeatedly assert that climate changes triggered by human activity are responsible for the amount of devastation seen along the Texas coast, but a leading critic of the climate change movement says science tells a very different story – that cooling is playing a key role.

Since Friday, record amounts of rainfall have inundated the Houston area, flooding countless homes and roads, and forcing thousands of rescues of stranded residents by emergency responders and area residents.

But as the media share the dramatic stories of rescue and loss, they are also suggesting human activity played a role in the severity of this storm.

“What is the role of man-made climate change in disasters like this one?” asked CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

CNN political contributor Ron Brownstein was even more assertive.

“There is no doubt that climate change, particularly because of the warming of the ocean waters and the gulf waters, makes storms like this more common,” said Brownstein.

CNN anchor John Berman presented climate change as a reason when speaking with former National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read.

“One of the thing we’ve from scientists over the last ten years is that climate change does impact the intensity of many of the storms that we see,” said Berman.

Read did not agree.

“I probably wouldn’t attribute what we’re looking at here.  This is not an uncommon occurrence,” said Read.

So did human activity play a role in the misery being inflicted upon Texas?

“Man-made climate change is not occurring.  There’s no evidence for that whatsoever, and climate changes all the time naturally,” said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg and the author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”

He says partisans are cherry-picking information to advance a narrative.

“They’re taking things out of context.  You’re looking at one event.  When you look at the long-term history of hurricanes and severe weather events, this is well within the normal variability and nothing unusual at all,” said Ball, who posits that government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is using Harvey to further a political point.

“NOAA especially, and the media amplifying it, are doing everything to hype these things because they want to push this whole human-caused global warming agenda,” said Ball.

Even worse, Ball says anyone with the temerity to dispute the government and media line is targeted for ridicule and humiliation.

“To try and get to the truth and to calm things down is almost impossible.  If you dare to even question any of this, it’s ‘Oh, you don’t care about the people that are drowning or the loss of life and so on.  How dare you say that?’  This is what’s going on.  you’re immediately bullied into silence if you dare to try to bring some semblance of reason and evidence and facts to the issue,” said Ball.

So why have we seen record rainfall topping more than 50 inches of rain in Texas and why did the storm just linger on the coast for days?  Ball says it’s actually just the opposite of what the climate change activists would have people believe.

“The reason it parked itself day after day is because the world is cooling down and the cold air is pushing down from the north.  If you look at the weather maps, you’ll see that there were two high pressure ridges to the northwest of where the hurricane would normally go inland and they were preventing it from moving inland.  So it’s actually global cooling that’s causing the problem,” said Ball.

He says tropical storms and hurricanes typically lose steam very quickly once they hit land but Harvey stopped at the worst possible place.

“With Harvey, that’s not fully happening.  Half of it is over the land and half is over the water, so it’s continuing to pick up some of the moisture and that’s feeding the steady rainfalls that are associated with it,” said Ball.

While Harvey’s rainfall totals are the worst on record, Ball says that’s no reason to jump to conclusions about human activity playing a role.

“Has this happened before?  Of course.  It’s just that it hasn’t happened as far as I know in the modern record of hurricane events.  To understand the meteorology of it and to say that this would have occurred in the past is perfectly reasonable,” said Ball.

However, experts who agree that humans do play a role in the changing climate say the volatility and severity of events such as Harvey are proof of their conclusions.  Ball says it’s just the opposite.

“The increased variability of weather, that is what you get when the world starts to cool down.  The cold air starts pushing farther south,  That’s what’s caused the problems with Harvey, and what it does is amplify the variability of the weather and the climate and that’s what we’re seeing happening,” said Ball.

Ball says the cooling planet is just the latest failure of most climate scientists to predict what will happen.

“The fact that all the predictions of temperature that have been made since 1990 have been wrong.  If your forecasts are wrong, your science is wrong,” said Ball.

Ball points to a new British study suggesting 2016 is the warmest year on record as an attempt to keep the political narrative in place in spite of the science.

“They cooked the data to show this.  There is a warm patch down in the southeast of England right now, but the rest of England is below normal temperatures.  So it’s this cherry-picking of data and selectivity of data to push the agenda you’ve sold to the public,” said Ball.

He says the politicians pushing the climate change agenda are too far down the road to turn around now.

“As a bureaucrat, you don’t want to come out and say to the politicians who put their political lives on the line with this, ‘Hey, what I told you was wrong.’  That ain’t going to happen.  This is the difficulty.  When you get it in a bureaucracy, it takes on a life of its own,” said Ball.

Ball says the cooler the earth gets in the coming years, the more the public will see the truth in the climate debate.

“There will be a continued attempt to keep it going but the evidence for cooling will continue to grow.  Gradually, people will start to realize that they’ve been fooled by it,” said Ball.

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Houston Heroes Abound, Kim’s Latest Mischief, Media Playing Climate Card

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are aghast as the threat to life along the Texas coast gets more dire but they are amazed at the tireless efforts by exhausted heroes to save thousands and thousands of lives.  They also disgusted, but not surprised, as North Korea fired a missile over Japan in one of the most provocative acts in years.  And they sigh as the mainstream media leap to the conclusion that man-caused climate change is responsible for the extent of the devastation in Texas.

Also a note to our listeners, Three Martini Lunch will spend next week on vacation before resuming on Monday, September 11.  We will have episodes for the rest of this week.

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Why Cops Are Standing Down in Berkeley and Beyond

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On Sunday, a large group of Antifa activists descended upon a small number of people the group surmised were supporters of President Trump and assaulted them viciously while Berkeley, California, police largely stood by, and policing expert Heather Mac Donald says the passivity from the cops is a result of withering demonization from politicians and the media.

The Washington Post headline described the violence as an Antifa “attack” against “peaceful right-wing protesters.”  This is not the first time Berkeley police have let the violence play out.  Earlier this year, extensive property damage ensued from riots connected with a scheduled University of California speech by Milo Yiannopoulos.

Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the best-selling “The War Against Cops: How the New attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.” She says the seeds for police reticence to intervene were planted in yet another episode of Berkeley unrest in December 2014, as part of a four-day protest against the police by Black Lives Matter.

“The first day of the anti-police, Black Lives Matter riot, the police actually used conventional riot tactics of skirmish lines, of not allowing protesters to get dangerously close,” said Mac Donald.

“The left-wing Berkeley council and mayor, the next day, blamed the police for the violence, rather than the people who were using Molotov cocktails and attacking businesses and police officers and other people,” added Mac Donald.

She says the police could draw only one logical conclusion from that political response.

“The Berkeley police learned their lesson and said, ‘OK, our policy is going to be to allow certainly the destruction of property and if there’s collateral damage to people, so be it.  We are not going to risk again the claim that we are an occupying, fascist force,'” said Mac Donald.

“They’re so worried about a lawful act of force being captured on video and the inevitable press reaction that it was the police’s fault, that they have simply moved into a hunkered down, passive position that, given our current levels of civil hatred in this country, I think is extremely dangerous,” said Mac Donald.

She says despite the political slings and arrows, the police still have a responsibility to their communities.

“I hope…they will realize that they really owe it to the law-abiding people of this country to maintain order,” said Mac Donald.  “Police use of force is never a pretty sight, but there are times – whether you are subduing a resisting suspect or trying to keep order in a public anarchy situation like we had again this weekend – where it is necessary.”

She says the tone and extent of police intervention in these situations will ultimately be up to the voters in each community.

“It’s really up to the public to decide how much policing it wants.  If the public decides we would rather have crime, we’d rather have anarchy than have the police use their lawful authority, well that’s their decision to make,” said Mac Donald.

If the police continue to hold back, what will we see?

“I fear real civil violence, whether it’s race war of left-right war.  Both sides at the extremes are becoming more emboldened,” said Mac Donald.

Mac Donald makes clear that the most heinous act we’ve seen to date in this escalating violence is the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville earlier this month.  She says that carnage is squarely on the hands of the white supremacists.

However, she also points out that many of the instances of non-lethal are instigated by the likes of Antifa.

“The left certainly has the bit in its teeth at this point.  I hope that Trump still has the moral authority to say this is simply not acceptable.  He ran rightly as a law and order president.  He alone among the candidates saw what was going on with the demonization of the police, with the rising crime levels, with the resistance to cops, with the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers last year,” said Mac Donald.

So how do we get to what most Americans expect in terms of law and order?  Mac Donald says it is going to be tough so long as the media casts such a negative eye on police.

“The media has just been soaked, it’s been saturated in anti-cop hostility for the last 20 years but it has certainly gotten much worse with the Black Lives Matter surge that began in August of 2014,” said Mac Donald.

She says the tragic irony is that the media are hypocrites when it comes to caring about minority deaths.

“The overwhelming victims in the rising crime increase are black.  Nine hundred more black males were killed in 2015, thanks to the Black Lives Matter de-policing, than the previous year.  Even though the media think of itself as so Social Justice Warrior-like, it actually doesn’t give a damn about black lives unless they’re taken by a cop,” said Mac Donald.

 

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Agony and Heroism in Houston, Antifa’s Ugly Reality, Dem Circus Awaits in 2020

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America lay out the extent of the devastation in Southeast Texas but also salute the first responders and big-hearted citizens who are rescuing their neighbors.  They also unload on Antifa, as the leftist mob attacks people in Berkeley and chants, “No Trump. No Wall. No USA at All.”  And they discuss the likely circus car of endless 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls that will make the 17 GOP candidates in 2016 seems like a reasonable number.

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‘They’re Furious at Our Senators’

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Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, is fully behind President Trump’s demand for full congressional funding for a border wall and both he and his constituents are exasperated with the state’s two Republican senators for offering no solutions of their to overhaul or repeal Obamacare.

Gosar is a member of the House Freedom Caucus who fended off a primary challenger backed by national party allies in 2016.  He says the GOP Senate is a major disappointment, with the failure to address Obamacare as the prime example of its inability to get things done.

“What has the Senate done?  They copped out on Obamacare.  And to my senators (Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake), if you didn’t like what the House put forward, where are your ideas?” said Gosar, a dentist who first ran for Congress as part of the tea party wave in 2010.

He says while politicians are posturing, people in his state are suffering from Obamacare.

“We’re catastrophically moving down this pathway where we’re seeing Americans getting a 40-90 percent increase in their premiums coming up.  Obamacare is failing.  There’s not enough money to fix it.  We’re seeing Medicare being implemented in all the group plans, so it behooves us to be big boys and girls and have that conversation,” said Gosar.

Gosar says the anger of Arizonans towards McCain and Flake is palpable everywhere he goes.

“They’re furious at our senators.  There isn’t one meeting I don’t have where people are going off on our two senators.  Leadership comes at a price and that means you have to put solutions on te table.  That means that ‘No’ can;t be your answer, it’s going to be what it takes to be ‘Yes,'” said Gosar.

In addition to hearing his constituents vent about their senators, he’s also hearing about their hardships created by our current health care system.

“I have represented most of the rural parts of Arizona.  They’ve got a piece of paper that says they have health insurance but they can’t afford to pay the co-pays and deductibles.  It’s a travesty.  They see no job growth out here.  They don’t see opportunity.  Those were all the things they were promised,” said Gosar.

Gosar says Trump has done what we can to improve conditions but Congress needs to do the heavy lifting.

“Whether it be tax breaks, tax cuts, getting government out of the way, this president has done his fair share with the Congressional Review Act and with executive orders to streamline the regulatory process.  Now Congress has got to respond.  It can’t continue working in a broken, dysfunctional fashion,” said Gosar.

Dr. Kelli Ward, a former Arizona state senator, is already running against Flake in next year’s GOP primary.  Ward challenged McCain last year and lost badly in the primary, leaving some conservatives to push for Gosar and other conservatives to enter the fray.

Gosar says he’s thought about but is not close to any decision.

“We’ll see.  That’s as good as we can say at this point in time,” said Gosar.  “We want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason.  I don’t need another title, I’ve got four titles above congressman: that’s a husband, a father, a citizen, and a doctor,” said Gosar.

Just a few days ago, President Trump held a campaign rally in Phoenix.  In addition to sparring with the media and defending his response to the chaos in Charlottesville, Trump demanded Congress fund his central campaign promise of a wall along the southern border, even vowing to shut down the government to make it happen.

Gosar says no one should be surprised by Trump’s blunt tactics.

“This gentleman is not built as a politician and that’s why America voted him in.  He’s a disrupter.  The business as usual has got to stop.  We’re $20 trillion in debt,” said Gosar.

He also says not approving the money would be a huge mistake.

“I don’t think I would cross the president and I don’t think I would cross the American people.  This is something the American people want.  So far the Senate has let them down in regards to promises they made on Obamacare and so I think they’re getting restless.  They don’t see solutions but they see a man that’s struggling to make sure that he honors the promises that he made to those people,” said Gosar.

Gosar also asserts that the controversy over the wall is only a creation of the past decade.

“The wall was authorized over a decade ago and it was a bipartisan effort.  A sovereign country has a right to defend and dictate it’s borders,” said Gosar.

So how did this become such a political lightning rod?

“It’s because the political correctness in the media has gotten into people,” he said.

Another hot-button issue is the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.  He says all contracts ought to be renegotiated every few years and NAFTA has been on the books for more than two decades.  He says the issues of border security and trade are very closely linked.

“I think these are all interwoven and I think the president has a good thought process about how to drag all these together to get what he believes the American people want because they voted for him.  He made no qualms about border security and building the wall,” said Gosar.

Gosar also applauds Trump sending more border patrol agents and immigration judges to stem the tide of illegal entries and to adjudicate cases much more quickly.  He does, however, urge the president to make more personnel nominations in the Justice Department and elsewhere to improve the effort even more.

But with Trump in a very public battle with members of his own party about blame over Obamacare and other issues, will any big ticket items on the GOP agenda actually get done when Congress returns next month?

Gosar says they have no choice.

“Winston Churchill made the famous analogy saying, ‘You can always count on Americans to do the right thing when they’ve exhausted everything else.  Well, here’s our sign looking at Congress..  We’ve exhausted everything else, at least from the House.  We’ve got over 200 bills over there waiting on the Senate to take a look at,” said Gosar.

While he can’t say for sure what will get done, Gosar says if one big thing can get to Trump’s desk, other major priorities will fall like dominoes.

“The atmosphere is going to be very confrontational.  It’s going to be very high stakes.  But once that first brick falls, a lot of this stuff is going to fall right in line,” said Gosar, who personally hopes Obamacare repeal is the first brick to fall.

“I would hope that it’s health care, because I think that sets the stage for tax breaks [and] the budget and that looks at a positive influence for the American people to move forward,” said Gosar.

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Could Kasich Bid Help Trump? Cuba’s Commie Tactics, Pelosi vs. Free Speech

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America consider whether an independent ticket of Republican John Kasich and Democrat John Hickenlooper in 2020 would damage President Trump or simply dilute the anti-Trump vote.  They also demand a firm response from the Trump administration as the evidence of hostile Cuban acts against our diplomats in Havana piles up.  And they unload on House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi for trying to deny a permit for a “Patriot Prayer” event in San Francisco because such a gathering is akin to “shouting wolf in a crowded theater.”

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Texas Judge vs. Voter ID

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A federal judge in Texas shot down a proposed voter identification law for the fourth time, citing intentional discrimination against minorities, but a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity says previous court decisions and existing federal law are on the side of the Lone Star State.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos prevented Texas from implementing parts of a 2011 voter ID law and completely rejected a reworked law crafted by lawmakers to comply with an earlier defeat at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ramos says the legislation clearly has the hallmarks of discrimination, both for amending the previous law rather than starting over and for increasing penalties for anyone caught lying as to why they don’t have government-issued photo identification.

But critics of Ramos say her decision is far less complicated than that.

“This judge, an Obama appointee, has shown her bias from the very beginning, when her first opinion said that there was no reason to pass a voter ID law other than to discriminate,” said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation.  He is also a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Von Spakovsky says the original Texas law required government-issued photo identification from all voters.  He says the amended version offered far more leniency.

“They changed it to say if you show up at a polling place and you don’t have an ID, you’ll still be able to vote if you simply sign a form that says I had a reasonable impediment that kept me from getting a photo ID and you show some document that’s got your name and address on it,” said von Spakovsky.

He says that could include a bank statement or a utility bill and adds there are no barriers in Texas to getting a photo ID or bringing an acceptable alternative to the polls.

“Texas provides a free photo ID to anyone who doesn’t already have one.  Second, they’ve even gotten rid of that requirement by saying all you’ve got to show is a document with your name and address on it .  It doesn’t cost you anything to bring a utility bill, or a bank statement, or some other government document,” said von Spakovsky.

He also laughs off Ramos for considering tougher penalties for lying on a government form to be discrimination.

“She claims that’s voter intimidation.  Again, punishing lying on a voting form is not voter intimidation, yet that’s the claim that she makes,” said von Spakovsky.

Von Spakovsky says Texas has another thing on its side as it prepares to appeal: existing federal law.

“Texas copied a federal requirement.  Under federal law in the Help America Vote Act of 2002, anyone who registers by mail, the first time they go vote they have to show some form of ID, and the forms of ID are specifically listed as exactly the same thing,” said von Spakovsky.

“So [Ramos] is basically saying that the same kind of requirement Texas put in, which is identical to a federal requirement – a federal law – that’s been upheld in the courts, that that’s somehow intentional discrimination .  I mean that’s just crazy,” said von Spakovsky.

As a result, von Spakovsky fully expects Texas to win its next battle in the appeals court, in part because doing otherwise would be tantamount to ruling against itself.

“I have a hard time believing they’re going to uphold what this judge is saying, also because of the fact that the changes that were made by Texas actually followed a guide or outline that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals itself wrote in its prior opinions,” said von Spakovsky.

A dozen states require some form of government-issued identification.  And within those states, von Spakovsky says there is proof that such policies do not discriminate.

“All of the claims that this will keep, for example, minority voters out of the polls we know is not true.  States like Georgia and Indiana have had their ID requirements in place for more than a decade.  In fact, turnout of African-Americans in Georgia went up after this law.  A lot of people think it’s because it improves public confidence in the election process,” said von Spakovsky.

While von Spakovsky admits many opponents of voter ID laws truly believe minorities and the poor are being disenfranchised, he says others just don’t like closer scrutiny of the voting process.

“There are other people who don’t want anything that will make elections more secure.  These are people who want to be able to easily steal votes.  Texas has a history of voter fraud, including a lot of people who go into poor neighborhoods and purchase and buy votes,” said von Spakovsky.

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GOP’s Endless Infighting, Trump’s Troubling Polls, Hillary’s Delusion

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America sigh as public squabbles between President Trump and GOP congressional leaders and members leaves us wondering if they will get anything consequential accomplished by the end of the year.  They also wince as terrible poll numbers for President Trump on several questions reflect what may be a rough road ahead for Republicans in 2018.  And they roll their eyes and unload on Hillary Clinton over her new book excerpts.

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Immigration Battle Awaits Congress Upon Return

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Along with tax reform, the debt ceiling, spending bills, and maybe another crack at health care legislation, Congress also has the chance to address immigration policy, and a leading advocate of tougher immigration standards says compromises can be made so long as the most important elements wind up in the final bill.

Center for Immigration Reform Research Director Steven Camarota says President Trump has already improved our homeland security and positioned the country better for reform simply by enforcing the laws on the books.

“Having Trump in there, whatever else you may think of him, he’s pushing enforcement.  He’s going after illegal immigrants and those who are criminal aliens.  He’s trying to increase work site enforcement and get the cooperation of local law enforcement.  All of that makes sense and that’s a very big deal,” said Camarota.

But he says enforcement of current laws only goes so far.

“It doesn’t do that much to address the overall issue of numbers.  How many people can we assimilate?  What is the absorption capacity of America’s physical infrastructure?  What is the absorption capacity of schools?  That’s why numbers all matter so much,” said Camarota.

“Unless we start bringing the legal numbers, which are enormous and account for three-fourth’s of all immigrants, we’re not going to deal with many of the problems the country faces stemming from immigration,” said Camarota.

Earlier this summer, President Trump introduced the RAISE Act, which most notably lower levels of legal immigration and also require immigrants to be able to support themselves financially and be proficient in English.

A quick head count of the Senate shows that bill essentially dead on arrival.  In  addition to most or all Democrats lining up against the legislation, several Republicans are also balking at it, including members of the 2013 Gang of Eight, such as John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

But Camarota believes a good bill can still get done and he is willing to offer a major priority of Democrats as enticement.

“One of the ways it might pass is if it were part of a compromise that gave some kind of legal status to those illegal immigrants who came at young ages in return for the provisions of the RAISE Act.  These are the people currently covered by the program called DACA (often called ‘Dreamers’),” said Camarota.

But Camarota was very clear about what he believes needs to be in the bill.

“Obviously, (we need) enforcement, controlling the border, going after the employers who hire people who are illegally here, and an entry-exit system that records the arrival and departure of people,” said Camarota.

“Foreigners come into the United States 200 million times or more a year on a time-limited basis.  That means they have a temporary visa, a tourist, a guest worker, a foreign student.  We don’t keep track of the time we’re here, so we don’t know if the time limit has been honored,” said Camarota.

Camarota would also like to see a much stricter definition of family members who can be allowed in, primarily limiting the option to spouses and dependent children.

However, he also says the benefits of immigration to the immigrant, and not just the nation, ought to considered.

“I realize that the immigrants themselves may benefit by coming here and maybe that’s something to think about.  Maybe that’s why we should continue to have a reasonable pace of immigration.  But it doesn’t, to my mind, justify, the enormous amount of legal immigration, nor does it justify tolerating illegal immigration,” said Camarota.

The immigration issue is a political tinder box right now.  The debates over the Trump travel bans grew very intense that will likely spill over into this struggle.  Camarota says Trump brings good and bad qualities into this debate.

“To his credit, Trump has at least been willing to address some of the big issues.  Not to his credit, he has not done so in a careful and sensitive way and he’s contributed in that way to polarization,” said Camarota.

But he says it’s not just Trump who has to take a more sober look at this debate.

“Careful, intelligent, fact-based discourse is hard for most people and a polarized environment makes it harder,” said Camarota.

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