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This Thing is Going to the Court(s) and Worse

USA. Erie. 3th November. Inside the Courthouse opening mailed votes.

“Beyond the margin of fraud” is a cliché but one more true today than ever. Let me be perfectly frank in saying that, in order to limit the “margin”, not every vote should count nor should every potential voter vote. It’s stupendously ridiculous to claim otherwise.

I am one with Andrew C. McCarthy on this in his piece on National Review online. The Supreme Court muddied the waters in a recent 4-4 vote in allowing the Pennsylvania Court to rewrite its election laws but SCOTUS ordered any affected ballots to be held in abeyance till a final determination. This election won’t stop in SCOTUS. Think of the whole range of state and federal courts that’ll have a say on this monstrous flub of an election before we can put “finis” on it. Even then, the final vote will have the lingering smell of a septic tank.

How did we get here? And no, you can’t blame the virus. We can lay fault with the fact that we have forgotten the sole purpose of elections: to register the voice of the people. But how do we know that the tally reflects the “voice”? We don’t, and that’s because of the Democratic Party harangues to “count every vote” while they engage in a full frontal assault on ballot integrity.

The virus has a role . . . as an excuse, a pretext for Castro-style plebiscites. Mail-in voting has always been scandalous since it destroys the secret ballot and no-one knows what happens behind the closed doors of an address. Now we’ve put the gambit on meth. Obstacles in attempts to match signatures, screams of horror against voter ID, and the demand to count everything no matter how mangled underscore the Democrats’ fixation on the need to pile up the pieces of paper as their route to power. At the end of the day, though, did we have an election or merely a greasy slide to power?

Where’s the “voice”? Is it the “voice” of the profoundly uninterested and ignorant? Is it the “voice” of ballot harvesters? Is it the “voice” of the ineligible? No doubt, invalid votes cancel valid ones. So, we have an election that will satisfy few and has a stink rising from it.

Thank you Democrats for ruining a once good thing. In your zeal for power, you’ll only have made your opponents apoplectic. This election will have produced two types of winners: the kind who won in spite of the fraud and those who won with it. For those who rode the current of pungent malfeasance to office, they could be rightly referred to as “your fraudulency”, with no more validity than that.

Will half the country accept a corrupted tally? I kind of doubt it. The Democrats are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Here’s an interesting question: What happens when elections lose their integrity? Elections have often been referred to as peaceful revolutions. The peaceful part is only possible if they are popularly accepted as credible. If the process lacks credibility, forget about the “peaceful” kind. Opposition will be left with no recourse but the violent other type.

The Democrats are playing with fire and an end to civility.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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The Rule of Raw Majoritarianism

Empty envelopes of opened vote-by-mail ballots. (Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images)

** Note: This was written on the day of the Nov. 3 election.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the cantankerous John Adams wrote, “The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty [sic].” Adams’s faith in virtue as the corrective for our personal failings and weaknesses was as sorely tested in his time as it is in ours. He warned his fellow countrymen of excursions into wistful utopianism like the kind that was engorging revolutionary France. He wrote that a proper political order was “an attempt to place Government upon the only Philosophy which can support it, the real constitution of human nature, not upon any wild Visions of its perfectibility [sic]”.

John Adams, 1788

Combine the two comments and you have a dire warning on the current state of affairs in our country. Virtue is in rapid decline alongside an unacknowledged acceptance of the utopianism of human perfectibility.

Giving momentum to these troubling trends is the ingestion of raw majoritarianism by one of the two great political parties, the Democratic Party. I cringe when I hear Pelosi, Schumer, the Squad, and any of the other notable lights who grab a microphone to announce their fealty to “protect our democracy”. Reporters and the public let it slip without comment. What do they mean by “democracy”? For them, it’s raw majoritarianism. Everything for them boils down to 50%+1 of the little pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin.

Democrats today can only see human betterment being achieved under the auspices of an expansive state. Irony of all ironies, Antifa – or Anti-fascists – are pro-fascist in their basic assumptions. They and their kissing cousins in the base and leadership of the Democratic Party would find little disagreement with Mussolini’s famous and pithy dictum, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” – if they only knew, which they don’t.

Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, 1930.

Under cover of “civil rights” and their rank notions of equality – meaning equality of outcome – nothing will be allowed to escape the purview of the state. For them, gun ownership is highly suspect and placed under heightened state supervision. Bible-based Christianity and its adherents will be policed for their beliefs and practices. A form of mob intimidation will be unleashed on anyone not courting the ruling party’s line with the connivance of Big Tech and Big Media. The central planning of environmentalism will cover all economic and social activity, governing where we live and how we live. The state will entice more young people into extending their stay in educational mediocrity with “free” college – meaning the national debt and the taxpayer will be larded with the bill. Medicare for All, or whatever they end up calling it, will turn an industry into a branch of the federal government. The remaining rump of the healthcare private sector, if one is allowed to survive, will atrophy into nothingness and single-payer. The financial angle for the bread and circuses will be hiked tax rates and new tax schemes that reflect the poisonous gruel of identity politics. Those targeted with propping up the bloated edifice with ever-larger extractions from their earnings will gradually, if not immediately, flee for safer environs. Welcome to “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” . . . and burgeoning Swiss and Barbados bank accounts.

The Democrats’ zeal for state-sponsored utopia will push the country into a way of life increasingly mediated by politics. The more the state does, the more is decided by politics. And politics, as it is deeply embedded in the Democrats’ brain stem, is a cacophony of avaricious interests and officially-endorsed grievance groups. Politics becomes the jockeying for the biggest slice of the federal budget among the Party’s litany of constituent groups. There is no market for much of anything, only orchestrated pressure campaigns, a growing army of influence peddlers, and crafty wheeling and dealing in the murky world of the revolving door of lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats. Disappearing from the public square is personal volition in the provision and consumption of goods and services as more and more of life is opaquely triaged through DC politics.

All the Democrats need is the sanction of 50%+1 of those pieces of paper crammed into ballot boxes, no matter their origin. After the initial electoral success, they’ll move to permanently warp our Constitutional order to the benefit of their urban political machines which will give them a lock on power for decades. A toothless Supreme Court after court packing, the permanent addition of 4 new Democrat senators, the impotence of the Congressional minority after the euthanization of the filibuster, and the neutering of the Electoral College by extra-Constitutional means does the trick without having to deal with those “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” between the coasts and outside the cities. The question is, can this be done before any blowback in the next midterms? My guess: maybe not all, but much permanent damage will have been accomplished.

So, suburban moms don’t like Trump and in so doing may tilt the electorate into choosing the release into the henhouse of the wolves of socialism and perpetual metropolitan rule. I suppose this is what you get when raw majoritarianism is the arbiter of all matters public and private.

Good luck America.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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I am Worried for My Country

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as, from left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – The Squad – listen during a news conference last year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Public discourse in the public square is dead and sensible deliberation in our institutions is gone. Increasingly our thoughts and speech are hyperbolic. Dramatic audio-visuals in the form of net-connected material such as podcasts and the full range of social media have replaced quiet contemplation and scholarship. Since the schools are mostly absent at the switch, people have little to rely on to mediate what they’re seeing and hearing. And when a extremist ideology comes to dominate one of our major parties, we have all the makings for a catastrophic rift.

See below.

Cultural antecedents are at the root. These antecedents differ by geography. Tradition has a higher survival rate outside the big cities, corporate boardrooms, big media centers, and the classroom. Inside those nuclei, it’s a worldview wedded to hedonistic collectivism. It’s not that metropolitan elites, and those who aspire to be, are hedonists. Their life pattern is typically traditional in marriage and family formation; but it’s what’s in their heads that makes all the difference: hedonistic collectivism. They near-homogenously vote that way. Meaning, they vote left.

The Democratic Party has become the epicenter of this urban belief system. As such, the Party has moved radically left and is essentially an urban phenomena. The belief system is baked in the cake of urban politics, and, by the way, is disseminated to the kids everywhere, but particularly to those in the inter-connected, cell phone world of exurbia-to-core. What we have is an isolated Party that has moved so far left that an uber-liberal like Pelosi is now mainstream. This is not a Party conducive to Truman or JFK any longer.

The Republican Party is essentially where it was since Calvin Coolidge, with only slight deviations. This is expected of a Party more compatible with our philosophical legacy. Key is the understanding of fixed standards going back to the ancient nexus of Jerusalem-Athens.

Therefore, the current political battle lines are Jerusalem-Athens vs. hedonistic collectivism. In Constitution-speak, it’s the real Constitution vs. a “living” one. In the hands of the Left, the rule of law becomes the rule of men but sold as the rule of law.

So, the rift isn’t due to a movement of both parties from each other. It’s a product of the big shift of the Democratic Party to the left, which means a fuller embrace of hedonistic collectivism. Combined with their political throw weight in densely packed urban areas, they can, if they marshal their critical masses, outvote everywhere else. Thus, their worldview has the potential to be imposed throughout the land. 2020 offers their best chance ever.

Is the rest of the country ready for the central planning of The Green New Deal (even if modified), centralized and massive gun registration and confiscation, invasions into the pulpit to force alignment with the left’s ethos, carte-blanche to abortion, toothless law enforcement, promiscuous nationwide lockdowns, forced acceptance of transgenderism in all manner of social interaction, the ongoing seeding of leftist ideology in the schools, and the radical restructuring of our Constitutional order to permanently empower the cities and their political machines? I don’t know, but we might be getting ready to have a taste.

My guess is that the rest of the country won’t sit idly by. They won’t wait for the next Congressional bi-elections to right the ship. Anyway, Congress has allowed itself to be turned into a glorified debating society as executive powers have filled the void. Obama proved that you don’t need legislation when you’ve got your phone and pen. An urban-dominated federal government will have tradition-minded areas up against a wall with no escape. The only recourse for those traditionally minded will be extensive civil disobedience and resistance – sadly, some of it will be armed. When you back a person into a corner, things go badly and quickly.

As a teacher in the public schools, I’ve seen this many times. Buckle up for a wild ride. It won’t matter if a new Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress appear to modify their rough edges and compromise. You have to remember that it’s a compromise from the position of the radical left, democrat-socialists in power. In the end, the system still moves left, just at a slightly slower pace – especially after they rigged the system of government through court-packing, defanging the minority after the loss of the filibuster, made the Electoral College an irrelevancy, and cowed the Supreme Court with vicious attacks.

Sanctuary cities point the way in showing that a resistance can thumb their noses at a clear federal authority and get away with it. Likewise, traditionally-minded areas could just as easily follow the same script. Only in this case, these people are more likely to believe in the private ownership of firearms and the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment as a hedge against tyrannical government.

I’m not endorsing this possible outcome. I’m forecasting it. I hope, I hope that I’m wrong.

The outcome of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tx., 1993. Our current flashpoints for violence will occur with groups already sensitive to federal government impositions.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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The Great Deception

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks in Tampa, Florida on September 15, 2020 during a roundtable discussion with Tampa-area veterans and military families. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)

First, let’s stop referring to “election night” on Nov. 3. It’s actually election month or . . . longer, thanks to the COVID craziness and the Democrats’ success in turning our election system into Silly Putty. It’ll be Christmas for lawyers.

If in the end the flamboyant circus mimics the current polls, the American people will get more, much more, than Trump moving out of the White House. They will get Venezuela: Trump out and Maduro clones in. The electorate can’t say that they didn’t vote for the clones. Of course, they voted for the socialists. Not voting for the antidote means the stampede of the toxin. Simple. Sooner than they might wish, they will experience the toxin, socialism.

Socialism offers what no society can deliver: free stuff for everyone all the time. The whole schema is made possible only by deception. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” is the Democrats’ “The Art of Deception” in their campaign for things that aren’t true. Let me count the ways.

Take tax cuts. Democrats don’t like them. Being socialists-without-the-label, they have a near-genetic tic to spasmodically attack the rich in grasping lurches to seize assets; though, they must admit that there’s simply not enough there to fund their laundry list of inanities. That $400,000 DMZ for their beloved tax hikes is horse feathers. There isn’t enough above that DMZ either. And so, capital flees, and we get to relearn the old fact that capital flight is job flight, and another generation living in their parent’s basement way past their prime.

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The Republican tax cuts of late 2017, and Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s congressional vetoes of some of the worst of Obama’s 8-year regulation spree, boosted the economy out of Obama-slumber. Now we might vote ourselves back into the induced coma. The Democrats will hide any of this from adult reasoning because they might be exposed for actually believing in this batty stuff. There are few things more dangerous than the deadly true believer. The problem is, we might learn sometime after Nov. 3 that we turned over the gavel to a bunch of them.

Take the COVID panic that never ceases. This one’s easy. Everyone makes mistakes when you don’t know, and can’t know till later. Take the prima donnas of the donkey party. The top Democrat foghorns were boosting tourism and brandishing the xenophobia canard like a drunk loosens his bank account on the Vegas strip as the virus was slipping into US ports. Their attacks don’t offer anything new but the worst of what had already been tried, and without end. This line of gibberish is the rhetorical equivalent of pond scum. It’s a crime to logic. But don’t expect the party head honchos to let you in on the dirty little secret.

People wait in line as a food bank hands out 1,600 food bags at a pop-up pantry in San Francisco, Calif.ornia, on April 20 amid historic work furloughs and layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic. (Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle)

Oh, and then there’s The Green New Deal. Now here’s a bad high school science term paper that was heralded as a serious idea by a college graduate who shouldn’t have graduated who happened to get into Congress from a district that would sooner vote for Fidel Castro than a Republican. Got it? Well, we should know where this is headed. Blowing up the US economy based on the giddy mental burps of a group plagued by an absence of mature discernment won’t end well.

The whole idea is preposterous. Dynamiting a lusty portion of the US economy, promising a gargantuan federal jobs program that past experience has shown won’t work, the Sovietizing of the US economy under central planning, and the resultant shrinkage of our economy, will drag down millions.

Look into what happened to the California north coast after the expansion of the protected lands for redwoods in the 1990’s. The lumber mills evaporated. Go, look at the meteoric rise in those counties of welfare participation and every other social pathology that would presage the meth-addled existence in the decaying hulk of the old rust belt. At that time, the easy-out for Clinton and the gang was re-training for tourism, like today’s re-training for coding. It’s the same old song, and with the same old results.

Again, don’t expect the Democrats to come clean. They hide behind the rhetorical legerdemain of “we’ll phase it out” (Biden) or “managed decline” (Newsom). It’s all meant to make you feel good about them destroying your livelihoods. It’s all meant to have them avoid the use of the word “kill” – as in kill fracking or kill fossil fuels. Even the flighty-headed representative from NY’s 14th congressional district wants a “phase ” out. It’s all word games with your future in the chopping block.

New York’s 14th Congressional District representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

And then there’s the line of attack on Republicans for having the temerity to repeal Obamacare’s colossal boondoggle. Remember the lost insurance plans, the lost doctors, many states relegated to one plan on Obamacare’s exchanges, skyrocketing rates because of mandated coverages so that, for example, men must pay for pap smears, the $250 penalty for refusing to buy what Obama and his crew cooked up, and the creation of a panel of unaccountable czars to pass judgment on the medical futures of seniors?

Into the current maelstrom come the millions of dollars of ads accusing Republicans of threatening the coverage for preexisting conditions. The interesting fact is, the repeal would still allow those policies and grandfather existing ones. All repeal proposals of which I am aware guarantee protections for those people with preexisting conditions. Trump repeatedly stated that he wouldn’t accept any repeal and replacement without it.

So, on what is the assault based? Nothing! They need scary stories to get people to vote for them. Just shower enough money on the lie and it magically becomes true.

A photo of discarded ballots taken the weekend of May 9, 2020 in Las Vegas, NV. Want to vote . . . 11 times? (Photo: Las Vegas Review-Journal)

I’m not sure any of this will matter. 50 million (maybe more?) have already voted by mail. We’ve just experienced the end of ballot integrity, the secret ballot, and new openings for enterprising miscreants in a growing black market for votes. We are well on our way to the sunset of public deliberation and rational discourse. It’s all about power, no matter what. We’ve found a new way to join the ranks of Venezuela. We choose it.

It’s so despicable.

RogerG

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The Exclusionary Rule and Hunter’s Laptop

Hunter (l) and Joe Biden.

The exclusionary rule was an invention of the Supreme Court in 1914 (Weeks v. US). It maintained that evidence gathered in violation of the Constitution had to be excluded in FEDERAL court cases. Mapp v. Ohio in 1961 extended the rule to cases in the state courts meaning that the rule could be used in trials of the vast majority of violent crime in the US like murder, assault, rape, and all manner of serial mayhem. A potentially violent defendant could get off and be released into the public if evidence is tossed on a technicality.

Mapp in booking photograph from 1957. Her conviction of possession of pornographic materials was overturned and the exclusionary rule was extended to the states.

Prior to the Weeks and Mapp decisions, no matter how evidence reached the court, it was admitted if it was ruled accurate and had a bearing on the case. Any police misconduct was expected to be handled administratively.

What’s that got to do with Hunter’s laptop? Well, take a look at the Democrats’ response to the growing controversy. Their only response thus far is to attack the origins of the emails on the laptop without an inkling of proof while entirely avoiding the validity of the contents. It’s what defense lawyers do: attack the police in their methods of gathering the evidence to have it excluded. Biden apologists are resorting to the same stratagem. They have yet to deny the contents of the emails while at the same time bellowing “Russia, Russia, Russia!” Biden sycophants are mimicking the defense bar in working to get the guilty to walk.

Hunter Biden from his laptop.

There’s a bit of the magicians’ illusion going on here, a sleight of hand. Democrats want you to be fixated on the Russians and away from anything that might have you think that Joe is your typical money-grubbing career politician.

Keep your eye on the contents and Joe’s denials, if indeed they are denials. Up to now, they haven’t really been. There’s zilch proof of Russian perfidy and each hour increasingly corroborates the emails. Watch the magician’s hands.

RogerG

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On the Electoral College

While reading Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood, I came across a conundrum that pervaded the thinking in the Revolutionary era. Namely, how do you distinguish a constitution from normal legislation? The British blurred the distinction by encompassing legislative acts into their conception of a constitution according to Blackstone and Paley in the 17th and 18th centuries. For them, a constitution included institutions, customs, and legislative acts. The colonists, different in their origins as a political entity, inhabited places that were founded upon colonial charters to establish their political order. From this, they got their view of a foundational document as special, something remarkably different from the normal legislative acts that arise out of a legislative body. To base their governments on something commanding allegiance without reliance on the crown and Parliament, they embraced the idea that constitutions were exceptional and could only command authority if approved and amended in an exceptional manner, such as special conventions requiring super-majorities. This is the origins of our Constitution and its supremacy clause, approval process, and amendment procedures.

The exceptional nature of constitutions coincided with the broad view of those present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 regarding a national chief executive. He was to be an exceptional national personage with a broader basis of legitimacy than the simple majorities to pass bills as in the popularly-elected colonial assemblies. If the chief executive were chosen in like manner, by a popular vote majority, he wouldn’t command the same level of respect that would be expected of a truly national figure with truly national responsibilities.

Under Democrat demands to effectively dismantle the Electoral College, he would come to be seen as reflective of the areas that gave him his majority, which would be limited to a few populous states or highly concentrated urban locales. Areas not supportive would begin to see him as a foreign potentate. Instead of a constitution cementing the country into a “more perfect union”, the popularly-elected president would join the popularly-elected Congress in reshaping the courts to fit the impulsive and ephemeral majorities of the other two branches. Thus, the entire system of government would be seen as rigged against states and areas who would be effectively neutered, which would sow the seeds of rebellion.

Civil war is the probable result of Democrats’ efforts to transplant national power to their one-party fiefdoms. The Democrats are reckless and not deserving of the power if they choose to alienate most of the country. The Founders mean nothing to them, and wisdom to them is limited to their peculiar vision of the world. Everyone else – traditionalists mostly – will quickly come to realize that they are to be perennially excluded.

What’s the incentive of the excluded to remain in a union that was refashioned to fit a narrowly focused demographic with narrowly focused biases? Lincoln’s correct view of the union as inseparable, except under the same extraordinary measures that produced the Constitution, will be contradicted by the new facts on the ground that arise from a political order tailored to the self-interests of one party firmly entrenched in a few states and urban nodes.

Photograph shows a crowd celebrating the victory of the first battle of Manassas at the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Va., 1861. Photograph was taken by D.H. Anderson. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The South was dreadfully wrong in the mid-19th century, but what of modern would-be separatists representing vast stretches between the coasts and outside the inner-cities? The South shamefully defended the hideousness of slavery and mistakenly thought that the acts of state assemblies were sufficient to dissolve the union. But what to make of Democrats using their control of the machinery of the national government to reshape the federal government to their permanent advantage and cutting out flyover country? It matters not if an election gave them majorities to manipulate the levers of government to erode the cement for a “more perfect union”. There are some things that are simply unwise and a popular-vote majority in one election can only paper over the foolishness.

Hiding behind the Democrats’ aggrandizement of power is the necessity for jack-booted power against any opposition that will arise. And opposition will flare up, and sadly some of it will be armed, because opponents will be left with no other option, their sovereign voice having been muzzled.

The Democrats are playing with fire. Does the public understand this? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Here We Go Again, Only Worse

Detroit unemployment office sometime in the 1970’s.

Degringolade: noun, a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition); downfall.

Opinion polls in October show the Democrats are on the cusp of one-party rule, as in California. Are Americans so hot for a recap of the 1970’s? I know that it’s a 50-year-old saga but it should reside in the memories of a sufficient number of people to have some influence on younger relations. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be true.

The ingredients for a replay are present. A poorly informed public seems ready to reregulate the economy, retax the population (hypothetically, the rich), pursue disastrous social engineering crusades, adopt a near-totalitarian refashioning of life in the quest for a fantasy future that was drawn up by non-scientists who mangle science for ideological ends, and gargantuan fiscal and monetary policies that will financially grease the skids for the degringolade.

To vote Democrat is a vote for the degringolade. To ignore what a person says in the hope that they won’t do it is the height of folly. Their announced positions are frightening. Medicare for All is socialism for your healthcare. The Green New Deal is totalitarian central planning. Ending fracking is one part of the campaign to kill fossil fuels and destroy supply chains which will escalate the price of everything. Tax increases ostensibly on the rich will atrophy investment capital, the mother’s milk of an economy and your children’s future. “Reimagining” policing is playing with fire since it will result in more miscreants on your streets, fewer repercussions for misbehavior, fewer armed police officers and more poorly-educated social workers dabbling in the mystical arts of human psychology – bottom line: neither you nor your property will be safe. Free college is a budget-busting escapade to produce more ill-informed people with degrees. The codification of infanticide will become a legal fact, at taxpayer expense. Forget about a border meaning anything. Even “modified” doses of any or all of this is the feeding of poison at only a slightly slower drip rate.

It took awhile after 1960 for violent crime to spike by the 1980’s. Vox reported in September 2020 that homicides surged 53% and assaults 14% across 27 US cities this summer when compared to the same period last year. Is this a harbinger of things to come as it was in 1965?
A Chicago police officer picks through debris at the crime scene where a number of people were shot, including a 3-year-old child, in a city park on the south side of Chicago, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)

To chisel all of the above in granite, your constitutional republic will be refashioned to make the entire program a permanent end-state. With the emasculation of the Electoral College, red states will be neutered and all of us will be governed by the ignorant follies emanating from the big cities and the coasts. Once in power, the Democrats will gerrymander the Senate’s rules while packing the body with four more sure-Democrat seats, in addition to packing the Supreme Court. The courts as neutral arbiters in the application of the laws will cease.

FDR’s court-packing scheme from the 1930’s.

If you expect the midterm elections to provide a corrective, you’re going to be very disappointed. The above changes will reduce the impact of any negative blowback after the Democrats have already been in power for two years to implement the revolution. All that California has come to represent will be a national experience.

To see where we are heading, we need to go back to the 20th century and relearn the fact that history is a battle of ideas. Those ideas take us in different directions and have real world consequences. This fact is a central theme of the accompanying video, “Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas”. The program appeared on PBS in the early 2000’s, and while it begins with a focus on 9/11 and globalization, it centers on a century-long debate between free markets and government control of the economy. Two individuals take center stage: John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.

Friedrich Hayek (l) and John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes will become the only true prophet for all things economic to Democrats and British Labourites. Hayek won’t achieve his due till he wins the Nobel prize for economics in the late 1970’s and his ideas are adopted by insurgent Republicans and Tories who would be led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They would end the economic mess left by Keynes and his political handlers mostly in the Democratic and Labour Parties.

Grab a cup of coffee, take some time (a couple of hours), and educate yourself on the real stakes in this election. Don’t go to the polls with only Trump in mind. The candidates carry with them much more than personalities. They also bring a set of programs overlaying a contentious philosophy that will have serious effects on you and generations thereafter.

Please take a look before you mark your ballot.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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How to Ruin a First Lady’s Reputation

Barack and Michelle Obama superimposed over their plush Martha’s Vineyard estate.

First ladies normally leave office with high approvals because they aren’t sullied by the messiness of politics and are normally remembered for their high-minded crusades. Think of Nancy Reagan (just say no), Laura Bush (literacy), the pre-activist Michelle Obama (child nutrition), and Melania Trump (child well-being). When they choose to get into the muck, however, you realize that they were willing participants in a four-year choreographed charade – or 8 years in Michelle’s case. Michelle Obama, very rich and secure, residing in her $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard 7,000 square foot estate, lectures us on our incipient racism and her opponents’ vileness. It’s beyond despicable; it’s ignominious and disgusting. She’s proof that elections can bring out the worst in us. It is doing it do her.

The discreditable side of Michelle Obama has been volubly evident this election. Her latest podcast monologue (see below) is chock full of partisan rhetoric, the kind of bombast that can be easily dismissed by anyone with a brain.

She blithely blasts Trump for no COVID plan. No one has a “plan” till they know the nature of the problem. By her measure, neither did her beloved husband during the Ebola, SARS, swine flu (H1N1) and Zika outbreaks. Biden advisor at the time, Ron Klain, recalled about H1N1,

“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”

Not surprisingly, Michelle didn’t say a word about her husband’s neglect of the mandated stockpiles of PPE and medical supplies such as ventilators.

Plans don’t take shape till you know the disposition of the enemy. The liberation of Europe in 1944 couldn’t begin until we had some idea of where the Germans were and their capabilities. COVID-19 was special, very special. It’s identification, transmissibility, spread, symptoms, and lethality were unknown in January to … everybody! Once we began to know the enemy, travel bans, quarantines, lockdowns, expansion of medical facilities, therapeutics, and a Manhattan Project for a vaccine were pushed into place. Her podcast harangue was an empty rant without benefit of any suggestions for how she, or Biden, would do it differently. If you buy her balderdash, then, please, for your own sake, stay away from real estate offices. Michelle, you should know better.

Then she goes into a rant about Trump’s mask-wearing tendencies. Apparently, she wants universal mask-wearing at all times, even during moments when the science shows it to be ridiculous. Transmissibility of the virus outdoors has not been established even at this late date. The fear-mongering about the loss of “countless lives” is pure political hot air from science illiterates who are eager to employ generalities to pursue a naked partisan aim.

A real scientific mind, which Michelle shows no indication of having, would recognize the uneven impact on the population. Mitigations need to be targeted on the vulnerable, and, as it turns out, few of us are. Anyone healthy who is infected will have a case of the flu. We know that now; understandably we didn’t in the beginning. Michelle is stuck in January. She shows no sign of recognition of the destroyed lives in emotional depression, delayed medical procedures, job loss, bankrupted fortunes, retarding a child’s mental development, etc., from her favorite mitigations.

A mature adult acknowledges every day that life is a balancing of risk, even down to the decision to get up in the morning. Michelle’s authoritarianism is a recipe for civilizational collapse in a destructive crusade for zero-risk. Michelle, you should know better.

The rant continues in her attack on Trump for “sowing division and hatred” against black and brown people. Her entire line of attack is shattered by the reality on the ground. Residents and shop owners in our urban centers know who’s torching and assaulting people in their neighborhoods. Hint: it isn’t solely “people of color”. Michelle is right if her purpose is to deflect blame for the destruction from black and brown people. As it turns out, it’s white people from her socioeconomic strata who are instigating the mayhem. And, Michelle, mayhem it is. You are gaslighting, not Trump, by asking people to ignore their lyin’ eyes as they watch the Antifa and BLM-inspired pandemonium. Au contraire, you, Michelle, and your Democratic Party allies are complicit in “sowing division and hatred” by manufacturing hypothetical grievances under an unprovable abstraction, systemic racism. It’s a disgraceful attempt to invent racism when you can’t prove it, but you need it as a foil in furtherance of a power grab. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle, no one, Trump included, has called for the arrest of protesters. That’s straw man demagoguery. The demand for law and order concerns the looting, vandalism, assaults, killings, and the setting of businesses ablaze.

Riot-damaged Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.

The many protests around the country are irrelevant to the shooting of cops, the spittle-laced fulminations in their face, the wanton infliction of injury, the homicidal acts of arson at federal buildings, etc., etc. It matters not if the ratio of protest to violence is 10 to 1. Simple protests don’t draw the attention of federal authorities. The 10 riots among the 100 protests is an immediate concern for the victims caught up in the havoc. And when you and your political allies quietly sanction the violence through misdirection, you’re an accomplice. As a mother, Michelle, you should understand this. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle Obama’s behavior during this election season is a primer on how to destroy a first lady’s reputation.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Antifa, Only an Idea?

Joe Biden at the Sept. 30th debate.

Joe Biden in the debate last Tuesday laughably tried to dismiss the threat of “Antifa” by defining the term as an abstraction, an idea only. Or as he might have said, “Nothing there, man.” Tell that to the local shop owners who watched a lifetime’s work go up in flames, or the police officers and other innocents who were maimed and killed by “Antifa” and their kissing cousins, BLM. The denial of reality by the higher-ups in the Dem establishment is astonishing.

Will you let them get away with it?

Antifascist organizers had a visible, and at times violent, presence in Berkeley on Aug. 27, 2017. (Photo: Emilie Raguso)
“Mostly peaceful” arson in Minneapolis in May.

Their logic goes something like this: organized violence doesn’t exist because there isn’t a central command. Oh really? Radical Muslim extremism doesn’t exist either since it’s a shadowy underworld of shifting alliances and individuals. No central command there either. Violent jihadism is only an abstraction, using the Dems’ syntax, since individuals and groups come and go within a constantly-changing web of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other ephemeral groupings among the Sunni and Shia. Again, tell that to the relatives of the occupants of graveyards scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The logic is beyond astounding; it’s insane. When confronted by a bystander, House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, called Antifa a “myth”. And off the Dems and their sympathizers go into their ritual denunciations of white supremacists. In fact, they go further in lumping anyone who dare confront the “myth” on the streets as “white supremacists”. Dems, you can’t have it both ways: organized Antifa doesn’t exist in spite of the charred buildings, new funerals and hospitalizations, but they magically reappear as an implicit counterpoint to their new all-encompassing menace, “white supremacy”. To borrow from Biden, “Come on, man.”

This affront to language and logic is a common staple of our current political discourse. For another example, there’s the “mostly peaceful” protests. By that logic, the Bolshevik Revolution and its Red Terror were “mostly peaceful”. The French Revolution and its Reign of Terror were also “mostly peaceful”. Mao was a “mostly peaceful” tyrant. Ditto for Stalin. Jack the Ripper was “moistly peaceful”. How much time in his life was devoted to murdering women?

Debris from the “mostly peaceful” desecration of churches during the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.
“Mostly peaceful” corpses from the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.

Are we so rattled in our minds that some of us can seriously entertain this gibberish. The Dems and their fellow travelers trot out as proof FBI Director Christopher Wray’s recent reference to Antifa as a movement and not an organization. It proves nothing. Locally-organized, intense social media interaction with comrades, and funding sources showing up as plane tickets and rental trucks filled with supplies and munitions, indicate something far more systematized than sporadic “mostly peaceful” protesters incited by “white supremacists”, who just so happen to be protecting their neighborhoods and shops.

The rented box truck was spotted at 2pm on Wednesday in Louisville, as Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was still speaking at a press conference about the grand jury findings in the Breonna Taylor case. (photo: Daily Mail)

Here’s a question for the gullible: Can something be organized without a formal national directorate? Antifa central doesn’t have to exist in the world of the internet. All that is necessary is fanatics with an internet connection. We have an abundance of both, so the know-how, inspiration, hooligans, and money will take care of themselves.

To borrow again from Biden, “Come on, man!”

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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“The Great Awokening” of White Liberal Democrats

Matthew Iglesias from the Vox bio page.

Matthew Iglesias is onto something in his April 2019 Vox piece entitled “The Great Awokening”. While I don’t agree with everything that he has to say, he makes sense with his central point: white liberals have shifted far left.

Ronald Reagan was famous for having said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” And oh how they have left many of the rest of us behind as well.

Shortly after Trump announced his infection with the coronavirus, Twitter, that cacophonous funhouse of the easily ignitable, was aflame with wishes for his death. From whence cometh the vitriol? It arose from the fever swamps of the comfortable, mostly white liberal Democrats whose militant views dominate today’s Party.

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez looks on during the Democratic Presidential Committee summer meeting on August 23, 2019 in San Francisco. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Iglesias mostly focuses on the Party’s embrace of the far left’s take on racial issues like the now-ritualistic censure of the esoteric “systemic racism” – which is carte blanche for federal government intrusion into all aspects of a person’s life and thus producing the clamor’s totalitarian flavor – and the snakepit of racial reparations. But it’s more than that. The rise of the hard left in the Party is apparent in the Party’s tolerance of socialism, with or without the modifier of “democratic” (AOC, The Squad, and Bernie), and the green socialism of The Green New Deal. Ideas once rejected out of hand in the Party’s leadership circles are now part of the coalition to be negotiated with.

Like COVID, these new risible ideological commitments were easily transmissible in the form of a green light from the Party’s elites to the base. Many Dems not already there, the more moderate core, were pulled like the gravity of a large planet further left. The rest may have kept their party affiliation but were no longer reliable, having been repelled by the Party’s leftward leap. Could this help explain 2016? Could be.

Michelle Bassaro, a Trump supporter, in her apartment in Nanty Glo, Pa. She said she voted for the Democrat in her district in the midterm election to balance the administration’s power. (Credit. (photo: Ross Mantle for The New York Times)

Interestingly, according to Iglesias, the beneficiaries of the new left-wing Party, the famous “other”, particularly “people of color”, don’t seem to be so enamored of this vision as Iglesias makes clear in his reading of a variety of social surveys. Here’s an opening for Trump and the Republicans.

This election is said by many to be a referendum on Trump. Yes, it is, but it is also a referendum on a new hard left Democratic Party. The question is, which referendum will win out? The first happenstance is only possible if the electorate is so ill-informed of the danger, or the Democrats’ succeed in their usual dirty tricks of stuffing the ballot boxes – or more accurately the mailboxes.

Now that possibility might produce a third option: a fraud election.

Please, be my guest, read the article.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.