US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?
Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?
Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.
History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)
RogerG
* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/
Teachers rally outside the state Capitol for the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters
The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.
PHOENIX, AZ – APRIL 26: Arizona teachers chant in support of the #REDforED movement as they walk through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol on April 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)
It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.
What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.
Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].
RogerG
* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018, http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9
Today’s rambling was inspired by George Will’s column, “Are We Trapped in a Debt Spiral?”* I’ll try to keep this short.
I can’t get away from the old cliché about the spending habits of intoxicated sailors. For us to protect ourselves as we maintain a wide-open spigot for the nanny state, DC is spending us into oblivion. The federal debt monster, according to the babblers in the CBO, will explode from 39% of GDP in 2008 to 96% by 2028. Most likely, it’s worse. In other words, we’re reaching the point of not paying it back. Do the words “Argentina” and “default” have a special meaning?
The National debt is shown behind Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, left, as he makes the semiannual monetary policy report to the House Financial Services Committee, Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2018, in Washington.
How did we get so inebriated? Now there’s a Gordian knot to unravel. My stab at it begins with the practice of labeling defense outlays “discretionary” and that for federal check recipients “mandatory”. It’s a formula for a descent into the deeper circles of Dante’s fiscal inferno.
Who’s to blame? Don’t look any further than the mirror. We chose our representatives and reward them for furthering the insanity. We are comfortable in our fictions. Many of us seem to like a democracy of unelected administrators. Or, how about “fiscal discipline” defined as increasing dependency on the dole while “national security” is construed as Red Chinese-controlled sea lanes? “Contradictio in terminis” (contradiction in terms) anyone?
And come November, we might be getting ready to hand power to a party of people who’ve added dope to the booze. Go figure.
RogerG
* Thanks to “George F. Will: Are we now trapped in a debt spiral?”, George Will, Salt Lake City Tribune/Washington Post, 5/6/2018, https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/05/06/george-f-will-are-we-now-trapped-in-a-debt-spiral/
“The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982) with Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt.
Ever since the Trump ascendancy, the left has been on a tirade. The marches, the gnashing of teeth about fictional prophecies of doom, and the willingness to tramp over broken glass to defeat anyone with an “R” (Republican) after their name are loose in the land. They are ginned up as if on amphetamines. The political season erupted after inauguration and hasn’t let up. It’s the season of living dangerously.
2,500 unhinged protesters hit Boston Common to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 2016.Anti-Trump rally, NYC.Man disrupted and had to be removed from Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R, La.) townhall in Feb. 2017.
Case in point: lefty bankrollers like Tom Steyer and their misnomered “League of Conservation Voters” (LCV) are airing adds hyper-ventilating about the rape of nature by the R’s. The bilge of extremist rhetoric abounds. Here in Montana, the targets are Greg Gianforte and Brian Zinke. I’m sure that the field of fire is national.
So-called “dark money” abounds at the LCV. That’s the money hidden behind a non-profit label, taking full advantage of FEC regs. Peeling back the facade, though, one finds envirotopia’s big-time cleanup hitters.
The “League” ain’t a quaint collection of middle-class hikers. It’s heart is the well-heeled lefty do-gooder, anxious to order our lives according to their semi-literate conscience. The hall of shame includes Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskowitz and wife who cut loose with $5 mill for the “League” in 2016. 2014 saw AFSCME and George Soros ladle a combined $1 mill into the coffers. Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action poured $775,000 into the collection plate. That’s just a sample of the deep pockets.
Lefty billionaire activist Tom Steyer turns to people standing behind him before taking questions during a news conference in Washington, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster).
This campaign has nothing to do with the grassroots. The average Joe and Jane want good jobs and healthy social conditions to raise their families. All the lefties can offer up is DMV-style government, debilitating dependency, and micro-management of our lives, aka California. The whole thing adds up to a social and economic cesspool.
Billie Jo leans back at her homeless encampment near unincorporated Cameron Park in El Dorado County, Ca.A encampment is shown along the Santa Ana River trail on the border of Fountain Valley, Ca.
If they succeed, watch out! It certainly is the season of living dangerously.
RogerG
** Thanks to “League of Conservation Voters: Environmental Group or Democratic Campaign Heavyweight?”, Hayden Ludwig and Kevin Boyd, Capital Research Center, 7/6/2017, https://capitalresearch.org/…/league-of-conservation-voter…/
Comments from readers provide opportunities to further expand on a point. Brevity can lead to leaving some terms obscure – the “reprehensible ideas” for instance in a previous post. In the following exchange, I gave some sense about what I might mean by “reprehensible ideas”.
Respondent: Right now, the most important thing is character and decency. Period. No Faustian bargains with the likes of DT.
My reply:You make much of “character” but say nothing of character-destroying policies. Unleashing an unaccountable administrative state sets the stage for unaccountable government and irresponsible conduct. Class warfare policies puts the power of government agencies into the incitement of envy and envy-based confiscation. Modern progressivism’s lifestyle fascism is the single largest organized threat to faith institutions. Trump’s episodic insults to particular persons creates a much smaller universe of victims than the state’s massive and broad social destruction. Don’t be so animated about Trump’s boorish behavior while refusing to recognize the much more serious assault on our national health from lefty policies. That’s the “reprehensible ideas” part of our current dilemma.
Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco), House Minority Leader
Reprehensible behavior:
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The results of the soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania 18th congressional district election signals a rising tide for the Democrats in November, but not because of any great love for their lefty ideas.
Conor Lamb (D), winning candidate in the 18th congressional district race.
Their (Dems) fortunes rose in direct proportion to the repulsiveness and churlishness of a president with a “R” after his name. Trump is the accelerant for this state of affairs, not love for SDS-type values. (SDS: the 60’s Students for Democratic Society – Tom Hayden’s, et al, group for bringing socialism to America).
This is an election year that will pivot on the choice between reprehensible ideas (Democrats) vs. reprehensible behavior (Trump). Trump has soiled the “R” label. It’s a sad situation when people react to deplorable conduct by turning to people with deplorable ideas.
Time to recycle the wisdom of the historian Robert Blake: ““The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.” We might see it play out in November, and maybe two years later.
Robert Blake, historian, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Say good-bye to your tax cut and guns; say hello to incessant impeachment dramas and the Californication of the federal government.
A month ago, Rep. Pelosi screeched that the Republican tax cut bill would bring about “Armageddon”.
The IRS has released the modified withholding schedules for 2018, as per the recently passed Republican tax bill. Conclusion: rates were cut across the board except for the super rich. The “Armageddon” apparently won’t reach her staff. They, like most everyone else, will experience more take home pay. It’ll also show in their end-of-the-year tax filling.
Patricia Ross, policy advisor to Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi.
Take for instance Patti Ross, a Pelosi policy advisor. I don’t know of her personal background other than she is receiving a $69,750 annual salary. Plugging in the same numbers for the 2017 and 2018 tax years – “Head of Household”, $5,000 in deductions, 2 kids, and no other adjustments for retirement investments, etc. – her tax liability falls from $7,565 in 2017 to $4,938, a savings of $2,627. Her effective tax rate declines from 10.8% in 2017 to 7.1% in 2018.
Mrs. Pelosi has to explain to her staff how a fatter paycheck is “Armageddon”.
The following is a comment to “‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says”, Angela Hart, The Sacramento Bee, 1/19/2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434409.html .
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State officials are not required to enforce federal immigration law. But California actions to not hold suspects of federal detainer requests, refuse to share information, and help facilitate violations of federal immigration law veer awfully close to nullification. Now, upping the ante further, the state’s attorney general threatens prosecution of any employer who adheres to the requests and instructions of federal authorities. Not participating has morphed into obstruction.
Employers in a state, first and foremost, are citizens of the U.S., but merely residents of a state. Patriotism applies to loyalty to the nation, not a state. Mr. Becerra is forcing patriotic employers of the state into obstructing federal authorities in the fulfillment of clear and unambiguous Constitutional powers – Article I, Section 8, clause 3. The state is forcing U.S. citizens within its borders into not cooperating with federal authorities.
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun disagreed over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law. Asked if he had any regrets during his presidency, Jackson said, “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”Andrew Jackson threatened to march into South Carolina and hang the state’s government in 1833 over its nullification of the tariff law. U.S. AG Jeff Sessions needs to indict and submit Mr. Becerra to a perp walk. If the rest of the brood in Sacramento continues to interfere, a criminal conspiracy is at work. Apply RICO.
The following is a reply to a report in the Washington Examiner for 1/17/2018, “Jeff Flake: Congress needs to denounce Trump’s lies or we will walk ‘a very dangerous path'”, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeff-flake-congress-needs-to-denounce-trumps-lies-or-we-will-walk-a-very-dangerous-path/article/2646169
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Senator Jeff Flake (r, Ariz.) in the well of the Senate.
Clearly Jeff Flake (R, Ariz.) has animus for Trump and Trump has animus for anyone who crosses swords with him. In that sense, they’re two peas in a pod. But the promiscuous use of the word “lie” is devaluing the term and causing endless and needless hyperventilation. Jeff isn’t clarifying anything, nor is he on the side of the angels. He has joined the alt-right, the Resistance, Trump, much of the professoriate, the college snow flakes, the Dem’s base/leadership, and almost anyone with access to the internet and facility for explosive hyperbole. Please, everyone, including Mr. Flake, take a breath.
First, let’s clear up this willful misuse of the word “lie” by accessing the dictionary. Here’s a classical definition for Mr. Flake and his comrades-in-arms: “an intentionally false statement”. Can a person be simply mistaken without the guilt of “lying”? Can a person be blinded by their own favoritism to believe an untruth to be a truth? Can a person just jump to a false conclusion without lying? Yes, of course. It happens all the time, particularly in Mr. Flake’s chosen profession, politician.
Anyway, an abundant power to divine the mind of a person is required to fulfill the “intentional” part of the definition. Ancient Greeks would read a flock of birds to access the will of the gods.
Etruscan wall painting from Tomba degli Auguri (c. 530 BC) showing two augurs practicing ornithomancy – divination through an examination of the actions of birds.
What do today’s politicians and activists use to see the unseen? I have no answer other than their own unchecked mendacity for their real or imagined opponents. Thus, any weakness of the mind can be contorted into the worst possible violations of the moral code.
Has Mr. Flake joined the ranks of the cranks and crazies? You know, the people occupying the Area 51 zone of the political space. If so, he’ll get more than he bargained for. He’ll get no restrained judges or a government with limits. He’ll end up like the czarist critic of 1917 finding himself in the company of the Bolshevik goons.
Bolshevik goons on patrol in Leningrad looking for policemen to brutalize, October 1917.Protestors run through the street before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States Friday — capping his improbable journey to the White House and beginning a four-year term that promises to shake up Washington and the world. / AFP / ZACH GIBSON (Photo credit should read ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)
The following is my posted response to Kevin D. Williamson’s column in National Review Online, “From Sea to Shining Sea”, 1/7/2018, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455208/conservatives-have-abandoned-coasts-cities-bad-move.
KDW,
Okay, let’s make a play for New York and California, and the rest of the blue dots on the election map. Yes, Republicans and conservatives seem to have abandoned them. But the interrogatives pinch me awake, especially how, who, what, when. The land of B1 Bob Dornan (ex-R, Santa Ana/Anaheim) is as firmly Demland as almost any of the precincts around Harvard. “Anacrime” and “Stabba Ana” are more than putdowns. They’re signs of the state-of-play in formerly conservative strongholds in a state that is more reflective of Nancy Pelosi than Ronald Reagan.
Nancy Pelosi, D, CaliforniaA Santa Ana Crime Scene Investigator takes photographs after a male was shot while riding a bicycle in the 3900 block of West 5th Street around 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night in Santa Ana. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: KEVIN WARN, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER – 05/19/15 – A man riding a bicycle was shot to death in Santa Ana, police said today around 11:40 p.m.. The unidentified victim was riding in the 3900 block of West 5th Street when police received reports of shots fired and a victim down, Santa Ana police Sgt. Matt Hermans said. The victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, Hermans said.Homeless encampment near freeway in Anaheim, Ca.
Napoleon was allegedly famous for having said, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.” He could afford to say that. At that point in his career, he was unrivaled on the battlefield. What advantages do Republicans possess in areas currently on the verge of secession after the near-nullification of federal immigration law? Certainly, Rudy Guiliani won a couple of terms as NYC mayor, but it was after the city had cemented a reputation as an open sewer and murder capital of the world. The lesson: Take Vienna after the plague has set in.
1970s NYC street scene.1970s NYC sqeegee boys. A form of aggressive pandhanding accosting motorists.Undercover cop arrests a mugger on a NYC subway. The city’s subway system averaged 250 felonies a week during the early 80s. By 1990, annual homicides in New York peaked at 2,245.Pictured, a woman exits the subway station at Grand Central among a score of sleeping homeless individuals sometime in the 1980s.The urban decay led to the mayoral victory of Rudy Giuliani (r) over David Dinkins (l) in 1993.
The rot will have to ravage a lot more before Republicans have a real shot on the lefty coasts. Heck, the Republicans couldn’t field a candidate in California’s last Senate race. It was a brawl between two Dems: Loretta Sanchez – the big cheese of B1 Bob’s old district – and the lefty attorney general, Kemala Harris, the eventual winner … and scourge.
Poison is popular in California, as it is in the rest of blue-world. Scan the list of the recent popular initiatives. It’s become the land of the perpetual high, tax rape, greenie everything, transgender everything, and a plethora of petty annoyances like expensive eggs, pricey gas, skirting the Heller decision with clamps on ammunition, empty plastic bag carousels at the grocery store, etc., etc.
The state legislature could be confused with the staff of the Resistance, Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQ… lobby. The governor travels around as the independent potentate of his own personal satrap. It’s not much of an exaggeration to ask if they’re channeling Nicolas Maduro and his consiglieres.
It must be said, though, that the bi-coastal insanities mirror the national map. These states are really blue along the coast and a scattering of blue dots elsewhere. But the red areas are shrinking as the sober flee the asylums. Andrew Breitbart was famous for exclaiming, “Politics is downstream from culture”. A cliché to be true, but still accurate. The culture is frightening for a church-going anyone with a spouse and a couple of kids.
County-by-county breakdown for Prop. 67, the ban on free plastic shopping bags.
So, how do we [conservatives] make a play? Take resources from Erie County where we have a shot and give them to lonely opponents of the lefty kleptocracy in California? If you’re talking about seed money to keep the movement alive, then I’m with you, KDW. If you’re talking about an abrasion-free message, call me comrade. After that, the zero-sum game presents too big of a toll.
Pray for rot. To borrow from addiction therapy, hitting bottom may work wonders.
