RogerG

June 19, 2024June 20, 2024

The Cultural Revolution Produces More “Counter-Revolutionaries”

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling — Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)

This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it. It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world. “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world. Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state. This is a completely new and radical notion. Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance. People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”. A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.

At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment. You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity. However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order. And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.

Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care. In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:

“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)

Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid. A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.

It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below). He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations. The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify. For them, where’s that in the Bible?

It isn’t. It’s contra-biblical. But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion. Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes. Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state. Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.

The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become. Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting. On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk. The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies. It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia. After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain. Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?

Delays, rows and legal challenges: inside the stalled new NHS gender identity service | Gender ... — Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England

Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children. On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below), Europe is pulling back from the brink. Not so in America. We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations. From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below). These people are making our nation grotesque.

Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution. They are the counter-revolution.

May be an image of 10 people and text — Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.

For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave. Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos. Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below). The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children. It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.

May be an image of 1 person and text — California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta

Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them? Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.

May be an image of the Oval Office and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf

June 18, 2024June 20, 2024

The Progressives’ Modus Operandi: Rule of Law Be Damned

No photo description available. — A bump stock

Progressivism is a totalitarian project. It’s not a rule of law project. It’s an effort to make everyone conform in heart, mind, soul, and behavior to a singular outlook that emanates from a singular social element (bicoastal, urban, white-collar, an academy smothered in radical progressivisms). Ends are all that matters; means are basically irrelevant to them.

It played out again before the Supreme Court. The Left, the home of today’s muscular progressivism, is all aflutter over the Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill (June 14, 2024) to find no legislative warrant to ban bump stocks (see #1 below). It didn’t rule on the propriety of a ban on bump stocks. That’s not the judiciary’s job in our constitutional order. The courts apply the laws in cases before it. It’s simple for the Article III branch: no law, no case. If you want bump stocks prohibited, elect a gung-ho Congress and President to make such a law. It’s a job for legislation. It’s the job of your elected representatives. If not enough of them are elected, don’t act like little caudillos to the rest of us by inventing law where no law exists, playing a pretend game while trampling underfoot the design of our civic order.

The Court’s ruling in Garland v. Cargill hinged on a basic question: Where’s the law to justify Trump’s 2018 order to ban bump stocks? The language of the Federal Firearms Act (1934) and the Gun Control Act (1968) are weak gruel for Trump and the progressive totalitarians among us to magically summon up a legal basis to reach beyond what Congress has authorized. Up until 2018, the ATF repeatedly announced its lack of authority to ban the things. The reason is obvious. The FFA defines an automatic weapon as something integral and internal to the trigger set of the gun, not to the novel and awkward ways a semiautomatic gun is held or shouldered. Sorry, progressives, no law, no case.

One of the progressives’ favorite gambits is to announce a supposedly irrefutable history judgment that is easily refuted. You know, the one that magically transmutes a well-understood individual right into a fashionable government right for a militia. It flies in the face of history. No one up until the rise of 20th century progressivism, and still too few since, viewed grandpa’s shotgun as a part of the National Guard’s armory. 17th century Englishmen were armed to the teeth, and it was codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1688-9. We were founded as transplanted Englishmen in the sense that their culture and norms took root here and were reflected in colonial-state charters/constitutions.

Progressives, admit it, you want to change the Constitution without following the rules, which demands an amendment, or at least a law from the Article I branch and concurrence of the Article II. If the rules are too cumbersome for you, that’s sign that you don’t have enough support. So, don’t try to cram down the people’s throat that for which you don’t have enough support. You’re showing yourselves to be singularly authoritarian, if not totalitarian.

It appears that the ruling denizens of our cities, faculty lounges, and coastal enclaves won’t be happy till everyone eats, dresses, thinks dutifully agnostic, and in all other ways adopts the habits of a Manhattan or Malibu soirée. Sounds pretty totalitarian to me.

But, like the Court majority in Garland v. Cargill, where’s the law? Hopefully, with the exception of someone named Trump being pursued by Alvin Bragg before a Manhattan judge and jury, there’s still enough respect for the rule of law, and the rules, to protect us from the caprice of a small social clique. They still need law, which I pray that we won’t grant them.

May be an image of 1 person and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Official Supreme Court ruling in Garland v. Cargill at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-976_e29g.pdf
2. Thanks to Charles C. W. Cooke for his piece in National Review, “CNN’s Dominic Erdozain Is Lying about Firearms Law Again”, 6/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnns-dominic-erdozain-is-lying-about-firearms-law-again/
3. “Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks on guns”, John Fritze et al, CNN, 6/14/2024, at https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/politics/supreme-court-bump-stocks/index.html

June 14, 2024June 17, 2024

We’re Being Fooled, Or Are We Fooling Ourselves?

May be an image of 7 people and text — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined from left by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., speaks to reporters before a vote on legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022. (AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite)

How can a deep red state continue to send a progressive to represent it in the US Senate? How can a state’s electorate continue to elect people who do things that they don’t like? The key word is “continue”. Yet, simultaneously, people consistently register dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in polls. Wrong-track numbers persistently hover in the 60s. We need to explore the possibility that we are being fooled, or, more accurately, allowing ourselves to be fooled. The foolishness is a partnership between political jesters and an impressionable electorate prone to folly. People don’t like the results but go to the polls and contribute to them. Does this make any sense?

Two anecdotes point to the nature of the problem. One is Democrat John Tester’s popularity in red-state Montana. The other is the decimation of California under a raft of policies that originate in a popularly elected super-majority of Democrats ruling the roost on the state’s populous coastal plain and thus in the state capitol. If migration patterns within and out of the state are any indication of the level of dissatisfaction, the state is in a world of hurt that ironically is popularly chosen.

Tester’s prominence in my adopted home state of Montana is particularly vexing. One possible contributing factor is money, the mother’s milk of politics (see #1-#5 below). Tester is a creation of out-of-state money, and a whole lot of it. He’s a boxer with a potent left-right combination. He jabs with his left in the form of money flowing into his personal campaign to project his oneness with tradition, the rural lifestyle, domesticity, veterans, the outdoors, guns, and Montana’s working man. He elicits an image of rubbing elbows with Republicans and Trump, who’s popular in the state.

Tester Ad Features Missing Fingers, Shows How Red-State Dems Still In The Fight - TPM – Talking ... — John Tester in campaign ad

Anyone with half a brain would recognize this to be baloney. As he washes grease and dirt from his hands in a tv ad, the reality is that he’ll go back to Washington to reelect Chuck Schumer of New York for leader of the Senate. This is the same Chuck Schumer who’d pack the Supreme Court with lefties, who’d eliminate the filibuster to make it easier for his congressional allies to mangle voting throughout America by removing the few remaining barriers against fraud such as voter ID, who’d ad DC and Puerto Rico as states to create a lock of four more Democrat senators to guarantee such absurdities into the foreseeable future, turning the whole country into New York and California. Tester is a vote for continued bi-coastal control of the federal Leviathan, with all of their baleful influences.

Tester has the bank for his left jab to burnish his outdoors cred while he has a devastating right in Chuck Schumer’s Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to appeal to the darker angels of a public’s nature. This is a massive negative campaign to paint his opponent, Tim Sheehy, as an out-of-stater bent on raping Montana. Get this? A real out-of-stater from the power elite of New York is smashing Sheehy for allegedly being like him.

Putting aside the fact that Sheehy has beliefs and sentiments more in line with the popular Trump, we need to pull the covers away from Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to expose its rank duplicity. What we see is the darker underbelly of politics. The pro-Tester (no pun intended) group leaves a paper and money trail from DNC-patronized banks right to Schumer’s Senate office and right to the anti-Sheehy ad buys flooding Montana’s airwaves – over $5.6 million worth, and counting, as of June 12 of this year according to Open Secrets (see #4 below).

Impact investing tackles dark money in politics

Here’s how the flim-flam works. Money is laundered from Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, into Majority Forward PAC – a 501(c)(4) group that doesn’t have to disclose its contributors – and from there into LBP. These expenditures go through Dem-linked banks and consultancies in DC and Alexandria, Va. Throughout, Tester has plausible deniability. He can walk the high road of remaining positive about himself while the dirty work of maligning his opponent is performed by mysterious dark forces (see #5 below). It’s morally scandalous, but it works, as it did in the 2022 midterms.

It only works if the residents of Montana allow it. The story of this sleight-of-hand has been out for quite some time, since at least mid-2023. As before a judge, ignorance of it is no excuse. If you don’t know, you should have.

Its success is dependent on inventing fear, fear of something that doesn’t exist: stoking fear of Sheehy to assist the Democrats in continuing to move the country down the “wrong track”, and in the case of California, dread of an ecological disaster. The stage is set for a headlong rush to the emasculation of California’s entire way of life, the most striking “wrong track” that one can imagine.

The state’s entire governmental apparatus is geared to overturning the simple bases of life through a full-on assault on energy. Why? Climate-change hysteria. The fear factor gets people elected to enact edicts that disrupt how its residents pursue life in the most basic ways, and for the worst.

First, the hysteria. California’s popular ruling clique is terrorized, and is terrorizing, by a global average increase of 1.34 degree Celsius since 1880, well within the fluctuations in geologic time. And, besides, warming temps are a much healthier experience for growing food and increasing plant life, and better than the opposite with its plagues and famines and deadly freezes (see #6-7 below). If CO2 is the culprit, plants love it; and that’s the main reason for questioning it as a pollutant, that and our emission of CO2 every time we exhale. Are normal body functions now to be the target of regulatory extinction alongside the internal combustion engine?

The fabricated fright is even more outlandish when they try to strike a chord with the economy-minded by magically spawning imaginary threats to our standard of living. The chutzpah. At worst, according to Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy, the warming will have a modest impact. He decries the hysteria as “shock-journalistic pseudoscience” (see #6 below). Given all the benefits of warming temps, the recent elevated levels of CO2 may be a net plus. The only real threat emanates from California’s ruling claque.

If the fanciful prospect of frying us in the skillet of a 1.34 degrees Celsius increase in 144 years won’t do the trick, maybe the story of twisters and hurricanes run amok will. In today’s politicized jargon, it’s called “extreme weather”. It may work if the fabulists pursue the Big Lie route. The fact is, just looking at hurricanes, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study concludes that there appear to be no “… compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in … [catastrophic] hurricane[s] ….” (see #8 below)

The Big Lie, A Cartoon by Award-Winning Bill Day | Smart City Memphis

Fires might manufacture the necessary panic if hurricanes won’t. But, here again, the world’s total fire-ravaged area hit a new low (see #6 below). Could California’s recent spate of firestorms be a consequence of its uniquely screwball wildlands management policies and its forcible diversion of utility funds away from grid maintenance to “sustainable” pipe dreams? California’s governing choices are proving to be the match in the powder magazine.

What about droughts? Where’s the proof that SUVs and Exxon are triggering droughts? Others report that CO2 reduces drought – warm air carries more moisture (look at the tropics) – and increases food production (see #6 below). Anyway, droughts aren’t an unusual circumstance in a Mediterranean climate. Dry-summer could easily flip into dry-all-year if the normal annual pattern of offshore ocean temps flip, which they normally do in roughly 10-year oscillations. The window is awfully narrow – 5-6 months – for the state to get its annual allotment of precipitation. If it falls short at any time during that brief period, it’s in drought for the rest of the year.

But such attempts at realism are a yawner for the power-hungry utopians who are elected to run the state. Not possessing a shortage of other rhetorical arrows in their quiver, though, they’ll bark out the dubious crisis of rising sea levels. From 1880 to 2023, annual sea elevations have variously increased by an averaged .08 to .14 inches per year, with .06 being the number for 133 of those years (see #6 below). At that rate, it’ll be a couple of geological eras before the state’s foothills become beachfront property. Continental drift is faster.

No wonder California is the epitome of “wrong track”. The climate caterwauling has led to the election of people who pass laws and enforce them to further nudge the state’s residents down the path to dystopia, and it’s about to get worse for the remaining residents of the state. The state with one of the highest fuel prices in the nation (second only to Hawaii) is dead set on ballooning them to the thermopause (top of the atmosphere). No remorse, the state’s governing super-majority is cheerleading the pain by using it to make you conform to their chosen lifestyle for you. By hook or by crook, for instance, they want to make you trade reliability for range anxiety.

Don’t forget, nothing that they’re doing to their own residents will make a difference for the climate. California’s 38 million (and falling) are pale when compared to China and India’s 2-3 billion. Newsom and company will do more in reducing emissions if they convince Xi and Modi to stop their nations’ march to prosperity. In other words, persuade them to do to their countries what the California Dems are busy doing to the golden state. Good luck, Gavin.

The state’s popularly elected super-majority in Sacramento have created a legal glide path to terminal decline. What’s bad is about to get worse. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), one of the state’s principal eco-commissariats, is using the Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) and cap-and-trade laws to hijack the state’s residents out of their fuel-efficient sedans and big rigs and into dangerously frivolous electric vehicles.

One leg of the double-whammy uses fuel taxes under LCFS. Diesel taxes provide a glimpse into the fate for regular gas, and all fossil fuels. CARB’s timetable for ruination ratchets diesel taxes upwards from 59 cents (2025) to 66 (2026) to $2.41 (2041) (see #9 below). By that time (2041), your perfectly good family sedan and those diesel semi’s trucking down the road will be littering junk yards. I cringe at the thought of chronically empty store shelves and Amazon warehouses in the state and price hikes on everything.

The other leg utilizes the state’s cap-and-trade folderol. CARB has scheduled a lowering of the emissions cap each year (see #9 below). Above that, companies are taxed. It’s all geared to get you as a person or company to trade the reliable (fossil fuels) for the intermittent and unreliable (the “sustainable” stuff). If you think that you’ll do just fine in this brave new world, you’re in need of a drug test. Your prospects only improve if the ruling donkey progressives are stopped electorally. I’m pessimistic on that score.

May be an image of text

Expect “wrong track” to be only thing that rises – that and prices. Did “they” do this to us, or did we choose it? I’m inclined to believe, based on all the evidence, that foolishness is popular. We don’t like the results but still go ahead and choose the cause of our discontents. Montanans might very well choose Chuck Schumer (through Tester) and Californians may prefer degradation for their kids and generations to come. We get the government that we deserve.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Non-profit files FEC complaint against Super PAC’s spending on anti-Sheehy ads”, Nicole Girten, Daily Montanan, 2/24/2024, at https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/14/non-profit-files-fec-complaint-against-super-pacs-spending-on-anti-sheehy-ads/
2. “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, 9/12/2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276
3. “Chuck Schumer Is Behind This Mysterious PAC Meddling in Montana’s GOP Primary”, Joseph Simonson, Washington Free Beacon, 1/26/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/chuck-schumer-is-behind-this-mysterious-pac-meddling-in-montanas-gop-primary/
4. “Last Best Place PAC Outside Spending”, Open Secrets, according to data reported on 6/12/2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail?cmte=C00849729&cycle=2024
5. “Schumer-tied dark money group wires $6 million to GOP primary meddler as Democrats slam anonymous cash”, Gabe Kaminsky, Washington Examiner, 4/24/2024, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/2975704/schumer-dark-money-gop-primary-meddler/
6. “The Green Left Lies Used to Justify Authoritarian Climate Regulation”, John Fund and David Simon, National Reivew, 6/9/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-green-left-lies-used-to-justify-authoritarian-climate-regulation/
7. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, 5/20/2015, at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
8. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Global Warming and Hurricanes”, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), 4/17/2024, at https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
9. “California Gas Prices to Go from Bad to Worse as Dems Move to Tighten Environmental Regulations”, David Zimmerman, National Reivew, 6/12/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-gas-prices-to-go-from-bad-to-worse-as-dems-move-to-tighten-environmental-regulations/

June 9, 2024June 10, 2024

Do People Understand that Progressivism Is the Problem?

What Happened to California Republicans? | THAT'S WHAT I'M SCREAMING

We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents. California is the template for what ails us. It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream. Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play. Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.

This progressivism is monstrous. It’s an agent of desolation. Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven. Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity. It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).

All of us are living it. The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess. As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution. Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike. The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye. If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside. If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.

holderfastandfurious.banner.reuters.jpg — Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandal

May be an image of 5 people — Steve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)

Compare the two. Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony. He’s contradicted by the facts. Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year. Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity. Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress. What happened to Holder’s contempt charge? Nothing. It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).

Not true for Bannon. For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead. Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity. I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity. Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty. So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time. But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.

We aren’t that kind of nation any longer. Thanks, progressives.

Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people. The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it. Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump. Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.

It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.

A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, 1980. — A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.

Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA. Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing. No apologies, just convictions.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail ... — Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955

The sad saga doesn’t end there. Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc. It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin. They didn’t sign up for this. Who would?

A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration. The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw. It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities. A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'RESERVED SB SB107 107 Wiener GENDER-AFFIRMING HEAL AL TH CARE GENDER AFFIRMING HE California State Assembly 농의만합전' — Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly

Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California. Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative. How? Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures. The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart. State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative. The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”. The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”. It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”. The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court. The thing is dead, dead.

7th California School District Adopts Policy to Notify Parents of Child’s Gender Status Change ... — Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California

On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life. This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense. It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.

Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster. For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful. Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief? If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback. Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682

June 6, 2024June 7, 2024

The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision — Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA

Who Is Justice Juan Merchan? — Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else. As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob. No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time. It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges. One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo. In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads. Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end. The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime. Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy. Think it through. For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money. There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it. Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime? Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal. The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired. When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would. Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit. The cabal needs a second crime though. How to manufacture one? Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below). Let that sink in. Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime. It can’t be. It’s the stuff of campaigns. Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality. The whole thing is rubbish. Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling. Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted. The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team. Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical. Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot? This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens. Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world. What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”? Some say democracy is messy. No, that’s too nice. This makes us third-rate, all of us.

RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

May 31, 2024June 1, 2024

Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

May be an image of 2 people — Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism? Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief. An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart. Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends. The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd. The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations. The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery. The shame of adultery is not a crime. Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not. According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below). This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it. The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery. The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony. The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan. This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached. A hideous precedent is set. Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country. The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities — Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country. So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action. We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution. And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor. Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order. They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution. And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

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China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong. It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain. The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below). Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom. Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat. The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs. After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs. From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices. In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck. John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.” In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated. Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction. Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge. I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion. Go further. Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world. If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'BIDEN,XI, KHAMENEI X1, KHANXI & PUTIN ไพ Attorneys fare Against at our Political opponents -PHEO ©24ANBRew #KaAиeBorabKaи ew S moeel comics.com EMAIL: hpayne@detroitnews.com'

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

May 27, 2024

Memorial Day, 2024

Below is a rendition of Major Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife before he was killed in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. It captures the loss that we must feel as we visit the graves of the fallen on this Memorial Day. As we walk among the headstones, we realize that war took another brother, son, father, daughter, but not for nothing. It’s a sad commentary on humanity that war has been necessary to stop the worst of our fellow man. Someone must step forward to block them. These graves are of those who did, at the cost of their future years.

Please remember, please commemorate, and please view Sullivan’s last letter home.

RogerG

May 25, 2024May 27, 2024

Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

May be an image of hospital and text that says 'WWU Pnan DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE'

The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California. Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable. In no educational measure is the state an exemplar. From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack. California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below). But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below). It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area. Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living? It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking. The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing. “Transitioning the economy” is central planning. DEI is central planning. Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning. What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one. It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities. It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis. Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves. The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs. Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face. Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups. They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe. The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”. Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation. For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools. UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs. The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below). No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers. But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room. Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools. The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School. A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding. The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up. The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Americar AmericanSocietyof can Society Anesthesiologists JENNIFER LUCERO, MD, MA ANESTHESIOLOGY AND PERIOPERATIVE MEDICINE'

She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers. From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess. Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office. They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment. Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation. One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything. People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked. She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot. One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound. And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation. The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship. Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests. Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.” If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots. I may not fly again. Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites. It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans. All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections. People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff. A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected. The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime. Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper. Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies. A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms. Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism. You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault. What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies? California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible. If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified. But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron? California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We are left with a rule of thumb. If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from. A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

May 23, 2024May 27, 2024

This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired — Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7. How many of them were raped? How many of them will survive? It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”. The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way. The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them. They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video. Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

May 22, 2024May 23, 2024

Nutters on the Right

The Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene Traveling Freak Show is the Future of the GOP — Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)

JD Vance Screens for Wokeness Among State Department Nominees: Report — Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio)

I’m beginning to wonder if Reagan was right … in reverse. In 1962, he said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.” Well, is the Republican Party leaving me?

No, I have no intention at this juncture of jettisoning the GOP. The other options are too horrible to contemplate. Me, a Democrat, the party of eco-madness and neo-Marxism? A Libertarian, or freedom gone amok? Green? You’ve got to be kidding. Independent? Kinda, but there still remains many sane voices in the GOP to reject abandoning ship.

One of those voices in the wilderness is Mitch McConnell. But sadly, he’s retiring. Yes, that Mitch McConnell, the one with the guts to tell the neo-isolationist and protectionist right to stuff it. The Majorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz/J.D. Vance clown caucus in the party does not represent those who fondly remember Reagan and his legacy, as does Mitch McConnell. Strangely, the circus part of the party has come full circle in support of a thuggish enemy – Putin – and those who treat NATO like it is a mirage – Viktor Orban of Hungary. While history rhymes, it’s more than rhyming here. It’s a replay of 1930s Europe, complete with a revival of America First. McConnell knows it, and spoke up in the well of the Senate last Thursday (5/16) against some of the lunacy (see #1 below).

May be an image of 2 people and text — Sen. Mitch McConnell (l) and Viktor Orban

And I quote from McConnell as he strips away the illusions about Putin as anything other than an architect of a new Axis:

“This week, Putin is in Beijing, tending to what Russia and China have called a ‘friendship without limits.’ But last week, it was President Xi who took to the road. And notably, his warmest welcome was in Budapest, Hungary.”

Yes, he brought up Hungary. It seems to be a habit with Hungary to cozy up to thugs. The country allied with Germany in WWII. Orban is true to form. Quoting McConnell:

“Viktor Orbán’s government has cultivated the PRC as its top trading partner outside the EU. It has given Beijing sweeping law-enforcement authority to hunt dissidents on Hungarian soil. It was the first European country to join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which other European governments — like Prime Minister Meloni’s in Italy — have wisely decided to leave.”

From blocking the entry of Finland and Sweden in NATO and allowing the CCP to nestle its tentacles in his country to the detriment of others (the CCP’s 5G Huawei, etc.), Orban is bent on rhyming with the 1930s. Cavorting with clearly hostile hegemons is not what friends do, and aren’t deserving of angelic portrayals by patsies in American media and the simple-minded in office.

Why this sudden and mysterious affection for goons (Putin) and the disruptors (Orban) of a NATO alliance that has successfully shielded us from World War III in Europe? As for Hungary, frankly, most Americans couldn’t find the country on a map, or identify Orban, or care. Yet, lately, there has emerged a political/media industrial complex in the party built upon “no more foreign wars” and tariffs. You can bet that where this clown car’s radar-love is directed, the complex’s Tucker Carlson will show up to sing their hosannas. Oh, he already has, in Moscow and Budapest.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin — Carlson interviewed Putin, Feb. 2024

American fatigue from the Wars on Terror is understandable, but this astounding abandonment of international and moral responsibilities under the banner of the GOP? Now, that’s an amazing turn.

You can see the rigmarole starting when Trump came down the escalator in 2015. Trump, looking for political leverage against Jeb Bush in the party primary, bashed not only Jeb, but his brother, George. The “forever wars” chant entered the party bloodstream to be picked up by kooks. His breathtaking win in 2016 sent shockwaves and a green light to the easily deranged. It was more than policies. It was an implicit sanction for brusque presentation, personality, and policies. Aping Trump is now a fad. Watch Kerry Lake, Arizona GOP Senate candidate.

Making the NATO countries “pay their fair share” didn’t stop there for the batty. For many of them, NATO made Putin an enemy. Sound familiar? Not too long ago, we were accused of making Ho Chi Minh an enemy. America First of 1940 said the same thing of Hitler. Remember? Expansion of NATO to cover countries in the maw of a Putin anxious to reconstitute “Russia’s near abroad” (Echoes of lebensraum?) is blamed for his tanks crossing borders and seeking solace in the arms of the grotesquely ambitious like Xi and the mullahs of Iran. And the Anglo-French alliance of the 1930s unleashed the Wehrmacht. Right? Sounds like pretzel logic. Sounds like appeasement, the 1938 Munich Agreement (look it up).

Add in the Russia hoax of 2016-17 and the Democrats’ Trump impeachment soap operas, which incorporated Ukraine into the sordid tale, and we have the preternaturally disposed thug-lovers in the party leaping into Putin’s arms and assisting his conquest of Ukraine through abandonment and betrayal. On the heels of Biden’s bugout from Afghanistan, who would want to be dependent on us? Israel, are you listening?

The inauspicious nexus of war fatigue and Trump couldn’t come at a worse time. Are Americans really prepared for the blowback? Right now, the well-balanced in the party are rudderless. Too many in the party are enchanted by almost anything that oozes out of Trump’s mouth.

One thing that dribbled out is his promise to end the Ukraine War in 24 hours (see #3 below). How? A Ukraine surrender. Think this thing through. The showman of the “art of the deal” would threaten both Zelensky and Putin, as if there’s a moral equivalence. To threaten Zelensky, he must be willing to cut off aid. For the Kremlin thug, he promises to arm Ukraine to the teeth, something that we should be doing anyway. He can’t do both at the same time.

The first is realistic since many in the Trump wing of the party are already chomping at the bit to have a Russian expeditionary force in Kyiv. As for the second, aid to Ukraine up to now hasn’t caused Putin to flinch one iota, especially if “boots on the ground” is off the table. He’s developed new alliances and markets for his fossil fuels. He’s resorted to human wave assaults, marking as conscripts nearly anyone on two legs, including the imprisoned, not shirking from blitz tactics targeting huge civilian targets. Cracks appear in NATO (Orban’s Hungary) and in America. He’s got every reason to stick it out. After all, Trump’s rise on the political scene – “no more forever wars” – and Biden’s bugout philosophy are testament to America’s longevity and dependability. In the end, “24 hours” is a Ukraine surrender.

This is what today’s America delivers: a nutty right enthralled by gorillas and, of course, a left in ecstasy of kumbaya. It’s the goofy right that bothers me the most. I expect it of the left. Reagan conservatism was the counterbalance of sanity. With the Reagan wing waxing, the right can no longer be trusted to keep the world from teetering into the arms of this new Axis. In fact, the batty on the right thinks that we can live without the world. Remember America First?

The nutter right can’t grasp the fact that for America to be first, allies must be a close second – allies both commercially and strategically. Allies reduce the burden on America’s sons and daughters. It’s a simple equation.

Republicans need to park the clown car.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. You can read Mitch McConnell’s whole speech at “McConnell Remarks On Resisting Chinese Influence in NATO”, 5/16/2024, at https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcconnell-remarks-on-resisting-chinese-influence-in-nato
2. Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for bringing to my attention McConnell’s speech at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mcconnell-vs-orban/
3. “Trump describes how he could solve Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours”, Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 7/16/2023, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-describes-how-he-could-solve-russia-ukraine-conflict-24-hours