Modern politics – Page 23 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

August 10, 2022August 11, 2022

Perilous Times in the Age of Mordor, i.e., District of Columbia

See the source image — FBI agents block a point of egress at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early morning 8/8/22.

Two days ago, the FBI conducted a raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. All agree that it was unprecedented. More than that, it was shocking. We’ll have to wait for more information before anything more can be definitively concluded. Still, given all that has happened from 2015 to the present, maybe even going back further to the 1990’s, I am worried for my country.

Yes, we are divided. The red/blue thing is real. No surprise. Also, no surprise, DC is deep, deep blue, almost to the color of deep space, and it just so happens to be the seat of immense federal powers. DC down to its lowliest employee is as one-party as California. The District is a big seat for the Democratic Party, the party of government, alongside the DNC’s other seats in dysfunctional urban nodes, college campuses, most of corporate media, and Fortune 500 boardrooms – the narrow, isolated cultural satraps of America.

What we know at this point is that a DC-headquartered Justice Department directed the DC headquarters of the FBI to pursue a search warrant before a DC federal magistrate so that the DC FBI could fly down to Palm Beach to search the home of a DC-detested ex-president. These dysfunctional urban nodes already have an outsized and sometimes malignant influence on the rest of the country, and none is more noxious than DC, similar in toxicity to Mordor.

Why the sanctioned incursion into Trump’s home? Frankly, it’s odd if we ignore the inordinate bias in the District. Andrew C. McCarthy in a piece yesterday morning reasonably speculates that Biden’s people and their natural allies in the bureaucracy are out to pin criminal charges on Trump. It’s about January 6 and not some classified materials in Trump’s possession. The documents and the Presidential Records Act were just a pretext. Breaking into an ex-president’s personal safe and seizing boxes of documents is actually about using the big net of a broad search to capture pieces of incriminating evidence of other flashier criminality for a big show trial later, a common prosecutorial tactic.

Political Cartoons by Bob Gorrell

Now, think about it. If it’s about January 6, charges in the capitol riot up to now have centered on obstruction of a federal proceeding (counting electoral votes) and defrauding the government (perpetrating lies in order to obstruct). The AG Garland cabal would have to show that Trump plotted the riot and disseminated knowing falsehoods to encourage the criminal actions. That’s a big mountain to climb. Fraud requires a personal understanding that the theories are false. But they’re theories, maybe goofy ones but still theories. Belief in an exotic legal theory is not a crime.

After all, the henchmen of the Democratic Party have been foisting on the public racist anti-racism, CRT, identity favoritism as “equity”, the disjunction of gender from chromosomes, blatant discrimination against people of faith, defund the police, non-prosecution as public safety, and fighting inflation by opening up the fire hose of government money. If eccentric legal theories are fraud, well, how do you rate these? If that is our standard, search warrants could be easily acquired on the Pentagon, CIA headquarters at Langley, the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters in DC), the Justice Department offices, the Treasury Department, the White House, other DC federal office buildings, and almost any college humanities department in the country.

Hanging the prosecution hat on the peg of legal foolhardiness is an exercise in futility. Taking an active part in the riot has equal difficulties. Reveling in the scenes on TV is neither evidence of obstruction or fraud. Unseemly, yes, but not criminal. The anticipated smoking gun may turn out to be a pop gun that a kid put in the oven.

All in all, it’s a risky venture on the part of the donkey party. If nothing comes of this but embarrassment for Trump, red America will be enflamed. What a trade-off: Great dangers in exchange for the likelihood of little reward. The plebes in the hinterlands could very well conclude that the Democratic Party in their DC redoubt is at war with them. And, in a way, they’d be right.

After all, the historical record going back to the 1990’s would encourage the conclusion that a monumental threat to the people arises from DC’s cultural and physical cocoon. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? In both cases, DC-headquartered federal law enforcement in their isolation conducted military-style raids with disastrous results. DC FBI agents on a plane to Ruby Ridge wrote down broad rules of engagement to shoot anyone with a gun at Weaver’s home. And, that they did, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son and his wife as she was holding their infant daughter. A federal agent in commando-style gear was also killed. The ATF for its part conducted a Battle of Kursk operation against a religious sect outside Waco culminating in a lethal fire. The stage for the cataclysms was set in the secluded environs of DC offices.

The barbaric overreaction took place in Oklahoma City in 1995, the second anniversary of the Branch Dividian debacle.

Fast forward to 2016, and DC and its patron, the Democratic Party, are at war with the results of the 2016 presidential election. The nexus of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Obama operatives, the FBI, the CIA, the administrative agencies at one time or another conspired to remove, thwart, and hogtie Trump throughout his term . . . and after. The Clinton Campaign’s Steele dossier. The fraudulent FISC warrants based on it. Crossfire Hurricane. The impeachments, one based on a donkey party agent in the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs chairman subverting the authority of the president as commander in chief to our biggest foreign adversary. And now the hunt for criminal charges against him. It’s monomaniacal.

See the source image

This latest episode smells as bad as the others. If nothing else, any return of the people’s government back to the people demands that DC be broken up. Other than the immediate staff of the three branches, the rest should disburse into the boondocks.

Disband or move the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and DC District Court outside the District. Leave just a municipal court to handle judicial matters for the District’s residents. Currently, a double system of justice – one for R’s and one for D’s – is clearly evident in the District. No good has come of federal judges, prosecutors, juries, and grand juries fully marinated in the DC socio-political eco-system. Till that time, routine changes of venue should be the order of the day. It’s the only way to stop the inherent partisan weaponization of the District’s justice system.

Trump, as personally repugnant as he is, has given us the time of day. The clock says it’s time to give Mordor (DC) an induced coma, or induced recession, in order to save our constitutional republic. Having Mordor look more like today’s Detroit is far healthier for the country than a city with a burgeoning workforce that has forgotten “servant” in public servant. If allowed to fester untreated, a dark time awaits. I don’t think that people outside the blue bubbles are going to tolerate for long an oligarchy run out of Mordor.

Political Cartoons by Tom Stiglich

RogerG

Source:

*” The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid: It’s about the Capitol Riot, Not the Mishandling of Classified Information”, Andrew C. McCarthy, at FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid: Capitol Riot Real Reason | National Review

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022

When Buffoonery Infects the Right

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Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.

The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.

It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.

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The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.

A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.

May be an image of 1 person and indoor — Rick Santorum

It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.

And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?

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How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.

May be an image of 1 person — Robert Lighthizer

Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.

Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.

For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.

The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.

As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.

Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.

Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.

One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.

The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.

Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.

Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.

Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.

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RogerG

Sources:

*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html

August 3, 2022

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)

July 29, 2022

Recession or No?

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Today’s hot question: Are we in a recession? My gut says “yes”; and if not, we’re on the cusp.

One thing needs to be made clear, though. Rational cognitive activity in an election year is as common as “father’s milk” – which, by the way, is seriously presented by some as something other than an oxymoron. After all, this formulation alongside menstruating and pregnant men became artificial possibilities once partisan hucksters succeeded in rhetorically establishing a wall of separation between gender and chromosomes. Do you think that the rest of the language will escape the mutilation?

Yesterday, the demigods of the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced a .9% decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter (April to June) to go along with the 1.6% fall in the first. Two consecutive quarters of falling GDP, a widely accepted marker for a recession by many who are denying it today. Magically, legacy media has discovered a complex answer because . . . it suits their biases. In 1991, when it was George H.W. Bush, an R, in the dock for a slight dip, the “two consecutive” was all the craze. And we got the sex addict Bill Clinton. Ditto for 2008 with W, another R. And we got the Alinsky protégé Barack Obama. It seems that the recession definition is fungible to the advantage of only one side.

Now, the near-octogenarian Biden, a Democrat, is at the Resolute desk and they’ve discovered “it’s more complicated”. Economist Brian Westbury, no shill of the Left, generally agrees with the complicated explanation. It’s a basket of indices that show a decline in business activity. The GDP numbers are only one part of the picture. The GDP numbers could take a dip if the trade deficit rose; they are subtracted from the general production number. Of course, the trade deficit is just one component of the more significant balance of payments. GDP could fall if consumers coming out of a pandemic lockdown with savings and government debit cards go on a spending splurge, which they did in a binge for all those imported goods from China and other exotic ports of call.

Where does that leave us? Still, in a recession, or awfully close. Bluntly put, it just feels bad. Supply chain problems are still not cured. Climate-change zealotry is still rolling out in executive orders and administrative agencies while playing havoc with utility bills. The war on fossil fuels is rupturing family and business budgets. Rents are skyrocketing. People not living in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, or Malibu, nor able to fly first class, are battered from so many different directions. There is no recession for those who regularly view the country from 35,000 feet.

There is a recession for the moms and dads feeling the pinch of today’s milk prices. For anyone not named Warren Buffett, who’s in a mood to upgrade the kitchen stove? A recession is a broad attitude to hunker down. The Democrats came into power in 2021 with a whip to regulate, ban, and tax their way to their nirvana. That means that they don’t like you. They don’t like the idea of you having a 1,500 square foot suburban ranch house with air conditioning. They have many more “don’t likes”: that you might be white and/or male, that you might own an SUV, that you have a problem with vandals and own a gun, your “heteronormativity”, that you might actually want your children to learn the 3 r’s and to love their country in school, that a family bar-b-cue in your fenced back yard is a cherished moment. Looking around you, after all that’s happened under their watch, what’s there to look forward to? Who’s in a mood to be upbeat and work and spend like it? This isn’t “Morning in America”; it’s the world of Mad Max.

Welcome to the recession, or the onset, and I don’t care much about the musings of the chattering classes on the matter. They sacrificed their credibility long ago.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'THUD The U.S. HAS the FASTEST GROWING ECONOMY in the WORLD... oww!'

RogerG

July 26, 2022

California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

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What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person — Trofim Lysenko in 1938

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

July 23, 2022July 23, 2022

Making Energy Sense, Not a Biden Skill

May be an image of 1 person

President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,

“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”

For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.

May be an image of outdoors and text that says 'Snack Shop Regular 579% 589 599% Plus V-Power Gasoline' — Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.

Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?

Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.

Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?

May be an image of train, railroad and text that says 'not onter ΔE enter tracks' — A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.

May be an image of sky and skyscraper — Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.

May be an image of 4 people and people standing — A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.

And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.

May be an image of cloud and twilight — Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021

May be an image of standing, nature and text — A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.

May be an image of outdoors — Another picture of intermittency: Solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert

We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.

May be an image of coast and nature — Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.

It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.

Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.

And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/

July 17, 2022

Social-Political Tumors in the Depp/Heard Case and the Trump-Russia Con

See the source image

According to verywellhealth.com, a tumor is “. . . an abnormal growth of cells, which serves no purpose in the body.” In addition, “A tumor develops when cells divide too quickly and without control.”

Are tumors limited to biological manifestations? I think not. In today’s culture, the concept applies to the weird nexus of celebrity, media, activism, government, social class, and narrow geographic location that “develops” into an “abnormal” and tight-knit social grouping “too quickly and without control”. Two stories of late illustrate the existence of a kind of social tumor with a decidedly political complexion: (1) the Amber Heard op-ed which led to the famous (infamous?) Johnny Depp lawsuit(s) and (2) the Trump-Russia imbroglio. You won’t need better evidence for the actuality of socio-political tumors.

I find few things as amusing as when the public is shocked to learn of the chaotic nature of the personal lives of celebrities. The recent Depp/Heard dustup provides ample proof of the toxicity of some celebrity marriages. Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation after an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post under Heard’s name characterizing Depp as a wife beater.

May be an image of 4 people — Heard and Depp at the trial.

But that’s only the half of it. “Under her name”? Yes, the op-ed was ghostwritten by ACLU staffers after the organization received a windfall of $1.3 million from her after her divorce settlement with Depp. Her ex-boyfriend, Elon Musk, added $2.2 million to the promised total kitty of $3.5 million. Celebrity divorce, celebrity-sized payouts, and political activism came together in one socio-political tumor, or “abnormal growth”.

It seems that the ACLU was very appreciative to Heard, whom they referred to as an “ACLU artist ambassador on women’s rights”. ACLU communications people were all over the op-ed’s composition and dissemination to big media. All of this was born out in the trial. Robin Shulman, an ACLU communications staffer, wrote the first draft with edits from Heard’s lawyers, and Terence Dougherty, the ACLU’s Chief Operating Officer and general counsel, peddled it to the media. Humungous gifts lead to humungous help in hatching a smear.

In the end, the jury in the Depp defamation lawsuit would have none of it. Juries are tied to the evidence at least to some degree. The facts showed that these were two mutually abusive individuals wrapped in nuptials. The verdict ordered Amber Heard to be on the hook for about $10 million to Depp and his legal team. For the life of me, I fail to understand why the ACLU wasn’t in the dock as well since their fingerprints were all over the slander.

Then we come to Durham, the special counsel appointed by then-AG Barr to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia fable. The Sussman trial and subsequently released court documents glaringly expose another “abnormal growth”. This one is composed of two types of cells – the Clinton Campaign and certain federal agencies – developing in cooperation “quickly and without control”. Indeed, they were intertwined like the common root system of birch trees, and like the cells of a tumor. Professional and social courtesies abound. This class of DC operatives are interwoven in a web of friendships, past and present occupational connections, and similar backgrounds and outlooks. All of this is cooped into the narrow confines of the DC metropolitan area. They can’t help running into each other at the soccer field, Whole Foods, and dinner parties. It’s a mutually reinforcing social ecosystem.

The prevalence of the bonds in the social petri dish of DC was on display in the Sussman trial, who was charged with making false and misleading statements to the FBI. Michael Sussman, one of Hillary’s key campaign lawyers and a veteran of the Justice Department’s cybersecurity team, called an old acquaintance, James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel at the time, to kickstart the Hillary campaign’s scheme to connect Trump to Russia under the contrived moniker of Trump being “under federal investigation”. Keep in mind that she was under investigation for the much more real charge of violating her legal responsibility to follow security procedures in her communications as Secretary of State, and the likelihood that she obstructed justice in destroying evidence (her emails, home brew server, hard drives, and cell phones). She desperately needed the distraction of something to pin on Trump.

May be an image of 2 people and beard — Michael Sussman (l), Clinton Campaign lawyer, and John Durham, Special Counsel.

In stepped the malignant cells of the supportive DC tumor. Court records show that Hillary gave the go-ahead to begin the scam. The whole campaign apparatus in DC leapt into motion. The Campaign’s part of the tumor included Fusion GPS and co-founder Glenn Simpson to dig up dirt on Trump, Christopher Steele who provided much of the dirt, Igor Danchenko (a suspected Russian asset) who was Steele’s source, and Rodney Joffe and his Neustar data mining firm (hired by the Hillary Campaign) to help create the illusion of a Trump “backchannel” to Putin through Russia’s Alpha Bank.

May be a closeup of 1 person and beard — Igor Danchenko suspected Russian asset and Christopher Steele’s source for the “dossier”.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'AN' — Glann Simpson of Fusion GPS, the company tasked by the Clinton Campaign to dig up dirt on Trump.

The stage was set for the sales job to friends and acquaintances in the sympathetic administrative state, the other part of the tumor. Sussman texted his old friend at the FBI, James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel:

“Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”

What did Sussman have for Baker? The next day, Sussman plopped on Baker’s desk Joffe’s concocted illusion of Trump-Russia collusion through Alpha Bank. The Hillary campaign lawyer, Sussman, gave the FBI an excuse to do what they were chomping at the bit to do anyway. FBI headquarters opened the investigation with enthusiasm according to the chain of command in Chicago. James Comey was said to be particularly jazzed up. The FBI higher-ups hid the Sussman/Hillary Campaign connection to the alleged “information” by carrying on as if it came from the Justice Department, not the Clinton Campaign. It’s clear that the FBI wasn’t really duped by Sussman. Come on, everyone in the halls of power knew who Sussman worked for. Let’s just say that they wanted to be “duped”. It provided great cover. The rest is a history that’ll live in infamy.

In the Depp-Heard case, a storied civil liberties group is muddied by its zeal to manufacture oppression through defamation. In the Trump-Russia fairy tale, Hillary campaign friendlies in the superstructure of the DC administrative state were essentially adjuncts of the Campaign and the Democratic Party. This is the reality of socio-political tumors that plague America. Like the biological kind, they can be malignant and need to be irradiated. After all, they “serve no purpose” other than as comfortable sinecures for government careerists.

How? Dismantle the administrative monoliths in DC. Scatter them to the wind. The country has about 300 cities in the 100,000 range who’d love to have the headquarters for the Justice Department, its FBI, its ATF, the Department of Homeland Security and its sundry appendages, the Department of Agriculture, etc., etc. It’d be nice to see the pressed suits running the Agriculture Department regularly having to clean manure off their shoes, or maybe the potentates running the show at the EPA having to live in the vicinity of the people whose jobs they destroyed. It’s juicy to think about.

Malignant tumors need oncological treatment. The events of the past six years show DC to be a dangerous concentration of cells that has developed “quickly and without control”. Congress needs to act like a hospital oncology department by flinging the functions of government to the far corners of the nation. Our mode of government would be healthier if DC was more of a ghost town.

As for the Heard-type smear, put an end to the mantra of always “believe her”. Chromosomes should have very little bearing on truth and guilt.

RogerG

Sources:

*Andrew C. McCarthy’s piece on Durham and the Sussman trial: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/russiagate-misunderstood/
*Dan McLaughlin’s piece on the Heard-Depp case: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/amber-heards-aclu-ghostwriters/

July 14, 2022

The Disgraceful Politics of the Grisly

On the right, we have QAnon and tales of a pedophilia ring under the watchful gaze of Hillary Clinton, or something like that. It’s hard to follow politically inspired derangements. If that doesn’t startle, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga., 10th District) has openly speculated on a Jewish conspiracy of space-based lasers to ignite forest fires in California. I hope she was kidding, but one can never be sure with this mouth without a filter.

Why do I mention the cuckoo Right? The delusions of the Left prove that the affliction isn’t one dimensional. Case in point: a story is heralded in the press of a pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to flee the “coat-hanger R’s” of the buckeye state to the “coat-hanger R’s” of Indiana for an abortion, all to heap scorn on the Dobbs decision. The president, exhibiting his usual foot-in-mouth antics before a mic, repeated the story. The story is starting to unravel, and it’s beginning to look more like a tale of an unenforced border, thanks to Biden.

I was initially skeptical of a pregnant 10-year-old. That part now appears to be true, though there’s much more to the story. A pregnant 10-year-old? That’s rape simply by the combination of the two words, and it was reported to Columbus, Ohio, authorities by the girl’s mom on June 22. A suspect was arrested: an illegal border-crosser from Guatemala.

The fable also opens up a can of worms for Columbus. The city, run by lefty Dems, hasn’t officially adopted the moniker of “sanctuary city” but it behaves like one. In 2015, the city issued a “Police Directive” to prohibit police cooperation in the enforcement of immigration law. In 2017, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther (D) was more emphatic. His proclamation announced that “no city department or employee may use city moneys, equipment, or personnel for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending persons based on suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order.” Can’t be much more “sanctuary” than that. Is he equally as insistent when it comes to holding suspects for violating federal counterfeiting or kidnapping laws? I kinda doubt it.

Furthermore, word is leaking out that the sole source for the breaking story was Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indianapolis, a Dem activist and abortion enthusiast. And there is reason to believe that she may not have been the treating physician but only overheard another doctor who was. Anyway, either way, if she or anyone learned of the child sexual abuse and didn’t report it, they become eligible for enrollment in the hoosegow. Don’t be surprised that soon the story gets buried on A-10 as the public’s gaze is redirected to another phony outrage.

The real story is turning out to be the lengths that ideological hopes outrun the facts. Even more troubling, facts are invented or omitted to get at Kavanaugh, the Court, anybody running for office with an “R” after their name, or anyone opposing abortion from conception to the maternity ward crib. Lost in the shuffle is the grisly fact that we’re talking about snuffing out human life. There was a time when, even in states that legalized the procedure, people were disquieted enough about it to keep it private. Not anymore. A couple of days ago, the Schumer-led Senate gave a forum for some to loudly and proudly proclaim theirs. It’s grisly!

Now we have the disgraceful politics of the grisly to add to “defund the police”, neo-Marxist indoctrination everywhere from West Point to kindergarten, school buses unloading kids into a gauntlet of crack heads, immigration lawbreakers being shepherded around the country at taxpayer expense, and people and property under constant assault. And I haven’t gotten to the unraveling economy. Amazing, absolutely amazing!

RogerG

Sources:

*The Columbus Dispatch story: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/indiana-abortionist-dodges-questions-about-story-of-alleged-ten-year-old-rape-victim/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/news/illegal-immigrant-arrested-for-allegedly-raping-ten-year-old-ohio-girl-at-center-of-viral-abortion-story/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* Columbus’s sanctuary city status: https://www.fairus.org/issue/sanctuary-policies/10-largest-sanctuary-cities-united-states
*The background of Dr. Caitlin Bernard: https://spectator.org/caitlin-bernard-abortion-phony-story/

July 13, 2022

Republicans Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity

May be an image of 5 people and people standing — Trump speaks at rally in Ohio in June of 2021.

In 1922, George Bernard Shaw once described Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, and prime minister for a brief time, as a man who “never missed an occasion of losing an opportunity”. Could the same be said of today’s Republican Party? And I say this as a longtime Republican.

Once again, the Democrats have offered victory to Republicans on a silver platter. The Democrats have become the party of Che Guevara. Lefty politics can only produce Venezuela and social and economic ruin. But the Republicans are plagued by Trump and his coterie of followers. With Democrats wreaking havoc on our way of life and heaping dishonor on our country’s reputation (the Afghanistan bugout), you’d think that the country is ready for the adults, the GOP, but the public may not be so disposed for another four years of R-rated presidential behavior and chaotic, impulsive policy making on the fly, and the bullying of serial insults from the office once held by Ronald Reagan, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.

Guess who? Hint: Mar-a-Lago.

The silver platter is born out in polls. Biden is in the dumps in a recent New York Times poll. His countrywide approval rating stands at 33%. His standing within his party isn’t much better. 94% of the party’s 30 and under youth base want somebody else to lead the party along with 64% of everyone registered “D”. Three-quarters of independents disapprove of Biden’s job performance and right/wrong track numbers show 75% wrong, 13% right. It’s a disaster for the AOC’s of the world, except for the possible return of Donald Trump.

Biden is hardly palatable in his own party but in a face-to-face matchup with Trump, he bests Trump 44 to 41 combining all registered voters. Sure, the polls have been extremely problematic: it’s “registered” voters, not voting voters; tech changes have empowered the public to not be bothered by the pollsters; and the polling organizations haven’t come to grips with an electorate that is deeply suspicious of them, their workers, and media allies. But still, they measure an overwhelming displeasure with Biden and the D’s in general. Why wouldn’t they be within the ballpark on Trump?

I suspect that 2016 should have been a comfortable win for the GOP after eight years of the sanctimonious and lefty Obama. Heck, he messed up everyone’s health care. And Hillary comes off as Marie Antoinette. Yet, by any measure, Trump turned “comfortable” into a nail-biter. Four years later, we got another one only with Trump on the losing end. Do we as Republicans want the party of Che to have another bite at the apple in 2022 and 2024?

What Trump the candidate has done to the party’s fortunes, he’s trying to accomplish with his endorsements this time around. He’s saddled the party with Senate candidates who have the surprising ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (Oz in Penn., Vance in Ohio, etc.). Like his own campaigns, shoe-ins become tossups, all of it occurring at a very propitious time for the GOP. We might be left with desperate prayers, crossed fingers, and magical incantations to avoid a Schumer-controlled Senate eliminating the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, concocting four new Democrat senators from two new Democrat state-fiefdoms, and the Soviet-style central planning of the Green New Deal. Manchin and Sinema may not be in a position to save us.

I’m daily praying for Trump to enjoy his family, great golf, and further business success in retirement.

May be a cartoon of one or more people

RogerG

July 11, 2022July 11, 2022

The January 6 Committee: Another “High-Tech Political Lynching” (to borrow from Clarence Thomas)

May be an image of 8 people, people standing and text that says 'JANUARY 6TH Attack on the United States Capitol EXIT 恭者' — The January 6 Committee during Cipollone’s closed-door hearing.

In a June 17 post, I stated, “. . . the January 6 Committee is a farce and Donald Trump is a scoundrel.” I stand by those conclusions.

That said, a scoundrel need not be a criminal, and the attempt to make the scoundrel one by hook or by crook is an embarrassment to the country. Thanks, Liz Cheney, for lending your esteemed family name to political behavior that is reminiscent of banana republics and the worst political thuggery of the twentieth century. Andrew C. McCarthy in his column (see below) on the latest happenings of the January 6th Committee exposes the abomination.

The Committee’s sleight-of-hand maneuvering included the demand that Trump counselor Pat Cipollone testify to add weight to Cassidy Hutchinson’s (aide to Mark Meadows) earlier hearsay testimony that Trump came unglued after his January 6 speech.

May be an image of 1 person and suit — Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White Houe counsel

The Committee then molded the interview in a manner not to allow him to contradict Hutchinson’s hearsay. Everyone in DC knew that he would, so what did they do? They didn’t give him the opportunity. Thus, committee hanging judge Zoe Lofgren (D, Ca.), on a committee of hanging judges, soiled herself with the claim that Cipollone “did not contradict other witnesses”. Of course, he didn’t. The questioning was structured in such a way as to not allow him to. What a sham.

Power-hungry prosecutors have a number of techniques at hand to twist testimony. One is to never ask the witness simply what the person saw, said, or did – point by point. Contradictions would inevitably arise between the two accounts. That isn’t good when the goal of the show trial is to put on a show of guilt. If witness-A’s testimony does the trick, don’t allow witness-B to mess up the script. And, by the way, declare to the public that B “confirmed” A.

Our modern politics has become a theater of the absurd. In this latest episode, we have a tabloid, combustible, self-indulgent ex-president, a neo-Marxist revolutionary party enthralled by Marx’s ends-justify-means modus operandi, a press that functions as the public relations arm of the revolution, and a couple members of the opposition party who are so blinded by fury at the then-oval-office rascal to the point of cooperating with the revolution. Stephen King couldn’t come up with a more dramatic cast of characters for a thriller . . . or horror show.

Or maybe Clarence Thomas’s assessment is more accurate when he described his “Borking” as a “high-tech lynching”. Revolutionary parties seldom have scruples when the revolution is all that matters. For them, a “lynching” is just fine.

May be a cartoon of text that says '"A11 News FORECAST Chance ParHy Apocalypse Clovdy ThatFits" The Daily Spleen wit BOMBSHELL: JAN. 6 WITNESS HEARD FROM A FRIEND OF A GUY THAT TRUMP'S RUSSIAN HOOKERS GAVE SECRET SERVICE DRIVER A GOLDEN SHOWER IN PRESIDENTIAL LIMO FROM RUSSIA WITH Love PREZ Jan.6 Comm. Adjourns to Burn Down Supreme Court Haynέ 022 AnDREWs mcmeeL EMAIL: hpayne@detroitnews.com'

RogerG
*Andrew C. McCarthy’s column on the Cipollone testimony: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-january-6-committees-gamesmanship-on-cipollones-testimony/