Biden – Page 4 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

November 16, 2022November 17, 2022

American Elections: You Don’t Have to Win the Argument, Just Win the Vote

May be an image of 1 person and standing — Pres. Biden making his September 6, 2022, speech in Philadelphia

Margaret Thatcher once said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It’s become a cliché, but sometimes clichés are nonetheless true. Then again, we can make them no longer true. Today, it’s increasingly apparent that winning arguments aren’t necessary. You can win the vote without an argument, program, plan, defense, etc. Brand your opponents, refashion the election system to your likes, then harvest the votes. Thus, it’s possible to have a majority government of mediocrities, strident revolutionaries, nincompoops, power-seeking narcissists, and a laughingstock to the world. Welcome to America 2022.

See the source image — Margaret Thatcher

Throughout 2022, I expected, like everyone else, a red wave for the midterms. It didn’t happen. I wasn’t the only one gobsmacked. The whole conservative commentariat was left filling baskets with jaws lying on the floor, including their own. Oftentimes, shock is soon followed by scapegoating those who we already had a well-established emotional investment in disliking. It’s a way of never having to admit you’re wrong. A prime example would be the Fox News primetime lineup of entertainer-critics and their gaggle of contributors such as Mollie Hemingway. They aren’t the only ones.

For others on the right, they talk and write as if we’re still in the bygone era when going to the precinct polling place, being handed a ballot, and taking it to a privacy cubicle to mark it in the sanctity of your conscience was the default setting for elections. Today, the secret ballot is dead due to the machinations of the Democratic Party and the excuse of COVID. Pundits like National Review’s Jim Geraghty refuse to recognize how voter behavior and electioneering has been dramatically altered for the worse as a result. The character and personality of our elections has mutated beyond recognition. People adapt to new environments, sometimes grotesquely. Do we need a psychologist to remind us?

The nightly Fox News primetime lineup replaced talk radio as opinion setters on the right. They glommed onto the rising Trump phenomena and out came the jargon of the “establishment” and “RHINO“ as objects of derision, and a romantic attachment to the “outsider”. The terms are invoked like magical incantations, absent of much content. The words are ways of emoting.

Earlier this week, speaking of gobsmacked, Hemingway on Ingraham’s show jumped at the opportunity to blame the leaders of the party – the “establishment” – for the debacle. She’s right, to a point, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that most everyone on the right was caught off-guard. So, they condemn others for believing what they believed. Got that? Theirs is a criticism of others for reading the tea leaves as they did. It’s rank hypocrisy.

As the French philosopher and writer Rochefoucauld pithily put it, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The vice of never having to say your sorry makes a hypocrite of us all.

Then we have the refusal to accept the fact that elections have radically changed, altering for the worse electioneering and what is expected of the voter. Jim Geraghty fell into this trap. He dismisses “conspiracies” as an explanation of the outcome, as do I. But a “conspiracy” is one thing, a revival of Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine on a national scale is another. Bribery or a voter roll littered with the dead isn’t necessary. Just warp the system under the color of law so you don’t have to cheat. Some of the chicanery of an older time is legally permitted today. Many, many states have no-fault mail-in balloting and early voting. Ballots are shotgunned through the mail in some states from long out-of-date voter rolls. The secret ballot is dead, dead, dead, as ballots go into domiciles and get marked God-knows-how. Ballot harvesting invites highly partisan activists into the space between the voter’s conscience and its delivery into the box.

No, Hugh Hewitt, the harvesting isn’t the innocent act of collecting them. The older safeguards abounded not because everyone will violate moral norms without them. There’s a reason for the fingerprinting and background checks for school personnel. Without them, more miscreants will be quietly enabled to molest the kids. Ditto for partisan activists being kept as far away as possible from a person’s vote and its depository. The older voting safeguards were confidence-builders for the voter to be safe with his or her choice.

Geraghty cited the unevenness of the results throughout the ballot as proof of the absence of a “conspiracy”. For one, the election was not a conspiracy but exhibited the characteristics of political-machine style electioneering made possible by early voting, mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, etc. For instance, Laxalt loses the Nevada Senate race but the Republican captures the governorship. This line of thought ignores how a political machine might operate, particularly a national one, like stressing high-profile races, a laser-beam focus on keeping control of the House and Senate, and how closely a candidate adheres to the script. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – with emphasis on the “must-haves” frees up space on the ballot for disparate choices.

Hemingway dismisses candidate quality, as do I, and Geraghty thought it mattered. I think that if it was of consequence, both parties had a problem. Blake Masters was a novice and John Fetterman was unable to hold a train of thought or put a sentence or line of logic together. Katie Hobbs was a glaring millennial-uptalking/valley girl/airhead. The list is long and filled with charlatans and wastrels. Many Democrats refused to debate or only agreed to one after enough votes were locked up in early voting. Joe Biden in 2020 showed how political-machine campaigning is tailor-made for a basement strategy. This election season had few debates and very little face-to-face campaigning by the Democrats. The strategy was to hunker down, avoid any risk, and tar the other side with over-powering evil.

Was Chicago’s Richard Daley or Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett ever known for their debate prowess? Their expertise was in running the machine of an army of operatives steeped in favor-peddling. Today, single potentates aren’t necessary, just have an overwhelming fundraising advantage to build a machine that facilitates a safe space/basement presence on a nonexistent campaign trail.

See the source image

Nobody was put through a wringer to make the average voter ferret out their preferences, because the wringer was absent, or reduced to irrelevance. In many places, especially in blue states, for many voters, the campaign season began and ended within a week or two after receiving their ballot in the mail. The machine went to work locking up these votes ASAP at favorable moments in a news cycle that they helped engineer with an always compliant media. Make broad, spurious charges – “a threat to democracy” or “MAGA Republicans” or “they want women to die” [abortion, Dobbs] – and contort anything to reinforce their self-created stereotype of their opponents (the Paul Pelosi incident). But, by all means, flood the bank with early votes before the public’s attention is drawn to the real issues, the ones that are hammering their daily lives.

In this election, given its structure, issues really didn’t matter – inflation, the border, the Kabul disaster, XY “girls” invading girls’ bathrooms and sports, crime, kids barred from their schools, urban barbarity, greenie authoritarianism, etc. – in order to keep the eyes trained on the meanie Republicans. That’s the reason for hunkering down and let Biden occasionally emerge from his bunker to plaster the meanies.

This style of campaigning leads to some real eye-opening results. The “they want to women to die” led to an endorsement of what can only be described as infanticide in more than a few states. Some state constitutions became festooned with carte blanche abortion. Persistent polls for decades have shown a popular rejection of late-term abortion. Did people really know that they were embracing it, and, in some cases, forcing other people to pay for them or others to perform them under criminal sanction, without parental consent? Did people really know that the “health of the mother” language is subterfuge for late-term abortion? In my own state, Montana, the voters couldn’t bring themselves to protect a baby who survived one. If there is a Judgment Day or some moment of cosmic justice, many souls are imperiled by what they were led to spuriously believe. In some not-to-distant future, will “my body, my choice” join the ranks alongside “racial purity”?

These results, grotesque as they are, are only possible if the vetting of traditional campaigning is replaced by our newly minted political-machine style. We’ll only get more of what we didn’t intend in a government filled with acolytes of the mindless talking point. Highly partisan activists and political groupies seldom make for statesmen/women.

Geraghty, Hemingway, Ingraham, and me too, would probably agree on the need for Republicans to follow suit. It’s a time of reciprocal escalation to avoid unilateral disarmament. However, Republicans should only get good at this malignant political-machine style in order to destroy it. End universal mail-in voting, make election day one day, re-enshrine the secret ballot, and secure the vote. It’s not hard, just use this bastardized system to gain power to end it.

Until we come to grips with a malignant election system that brings out the worst in all of us, anything that we do in the long run will be pointless. A government of shallow narcissists and brain-dead activists will only hasten the decline of a once mighty nation. Competing national political machines encouraging ill-considered voter behavior will guarantee it. Without correction, paste R.I.P on the once-great citizen republic called the United States of America.

See the source image

RogerG

Read or watch here for more:

* Jim Geraghty’s explanation of the midterm results: “The Magnitude of the GOP Midterm Debacle”, National Review, Nov. 14, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-magnitude-of-the-gop-midterm-debacle/

* Mollie Hemingway’s analysis of the midterm results on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show at https://youtu.be/cCyPdLtx844

November 12, 2022November 14, 2022

Can We Really Say What the People Said in This Election, Or Is It Too Horrible to Contemplate?

Arizona’s Maricopa County Starts Hand Count Audit as Numerous Ballots Remain Unprocessed — lection workers sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix on Nov. 9, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Pundits galore have pronounced on what the “people” said in this election. Clearly, it’s sometimes hard to distill what the voting results actually mean from such a broad and disparate group of millions with innumerable and conflicting notions and motives dancing in their heads. The problem is compounded when you have a new and very different kind of electorate: one with 60-70% voting early and by mail. This time around, what came out the other end of the tabulation process is, to be quite frank, quite shocking.

Are the results proof of the greater prevalence of passions not tempered by reason, having less time to weigh the stakes, issues, and candidates with ballots going out a month before the election in many states but pressured to be in the “bank” weeks before the deadline? Could be, but something else might be at work. The outcome has the earmarks, as I have stated before, of the old political machines such as Tammany Hall or Kansas City’s Prendergast machine. Current circumstances and even active campaigning matter much less. You can do it from your basement and nearly avoid any face-to-face electioneering. The base is simply directed to vote up and down the ballot for the machine’s preferences without knowing who they are or the issues at stake. Political machine voting is like that, and so, I suspect, is voting early and by mail . . . which requires a well-oiled political machine.

It takes a political machine with heavy financial and technocratic resources to identify its base, make sure that they have a ballot, and round them up in a timely manner. And make adjustments if polling indicates that they need more, and all accomplished weeks before election day. Most people’s minds don’t even turn to politics till a week or two before the election. This apparatus short-circuits thoughtful reflection. As such, this kind of voting has more of an off-the-cuff flavor to it.

No red waves here.

May be a cartoon of standing and text

The results were a surprise to most political junkies. But is it an accurate reflection of public opinion, with two-thirds of the franchise encouraged to act in a preemptory fashion? Just recount the much-ballyhooed issues in this election.

Remember, the current state of the country matters a whole lot less in political-machine electioneering. Were the people actually content with the Democrats’ despoilation of the country? Their wreckage is strewn about for all to see. Did people actually vote for urban anarchy and their streets and parks becoming open sewers? Their schools as training centers of future statue-toppers? I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical that the vote totals reflected a desire for barbarity. So, why vote for the clowns who brought it to you? Are you confused? I am.

What about other issues, like abortion? Pro-life measures were voted down in at least five instances, including in my home state of Montana. In our case, the voters of Montana couldn’t even bring themselves to protect the life of a baby who survived an abortion. Now, “my body, my choice” is a license to order the suffocation of a small, helpless person struggling to survive, whose DNA is different from the mother’s. This is Auschwitz stuff.

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faces3 — Ultrasound image of a baby at 27-34 weeks gestation

Do the people want to snuff out the future children who were developed enough to exit the birth canal? In these instances, the only difference between a fetus and a baby is one second. This time, in at least two states, maybe more, carte blanche abortion was planked into the state’s Constitution. But did the voters know of these measures’ contents, or was it simply a way to register disagreement with Dobbs and support for Roe v. Wade? High-profile hot buttons trump irritating details every time when you’re in a hurry and revved up.

What does the support for Roe v. Wade actually mean when few people know its contents, and don’t wait around to find out? Now there’s an indictment of our schools, media, and the broadcasting of ballots through the postal service a month before. Yet, even so, opinion polls have consistently shown broad bipartisan disgust for late-term abortion. But did the voter in the machine’s data base wait around to discover that Roe’s “health of the mother” standard and Casey’s “undue burden” paved a path to destroying a fully formed baby? Did they give themselves the chance to consider that their state’s measure actually codifies something that could be dispassionately viewed as infanticide? Once again, I’m skeptical. Broad ignorance surrounds the issue which is less likely to be corrected by political machine tactics. So much for the voice of the people.

Did the people actually vote for unaffordable fuel, 40-year record high inflation, further destruction of the work ethic, crippling national debt for their children, and the childish tax-the-rich antics? Surely not, but what then?

Did they vote for blackouts, forests of mammoth wind turbines and solar panels marring and blanketing the landscape, sky-high utility bills, and an end to Amazon Prime’s free delivery because diesel prices and shortages hit the fan? You vote for California-style politicians and you’ll get California-style chaos. How much did people know to establish a preference? Or is it the mesmerizing attraction of eco-utopian fairy tales and unicorns?

A Shell station displays gas prices of more than $7 per gallon on Sept. 29. — A Shell station on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles displays gas prices of more than $7 per gallon on Sept. 29. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Have people thought through the madness? What will electrified transportation be like with an unstable grid? Wind and sun don’t produce at your whim. When our demagogues place blame on the “rapacious” energy companies, how much do the people know of the demagogues’ hostility to more refineries, drilling, pipelines, indeed anything that’ll increase supply? At Democrats’ insistence, we’re closing down refineries, pipelines, and drilling. Do people grasp the idea that the suppression of supply has an effect on prices? They’re all open questions not answerable by political machine voting.

Do people actually believe that a man can become a woman (and vice versa) given all the biology, DNA, and bio-chemistry from blastocyst to adult? On the mere claim that he/she is one? He/she might be made to look like one, but are they one? Did people vote as if they believe it? Or what about the sanctity of their daughters’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms? Did people vote for an invasion of these spaces? Beats me. All we know is that many people romped who brought it to you.

None of these considerations can be addressed by the mere counting of ballots. But they can, and did, result in bringing to power those who will do what the people don’t understand. Today’s voting doesn’t measure popular sentiment. It’s not meant to. Election season isn’t about informing the public or convincing anyone. It’s about votes to stay in power. Public events, speeches, debates, rigorous press exposure, and responding to your critics aren’t necessary. Biden (2020), John Fetterman, Katie Hobbs, and the rest of the donkey party lineup showed that you can do just fine not facing hostile questioning, not debating, staying cooped up in your safe space, and sitting back as your campaign operatives harvest the votes and reap hordes of techie bucks to swamp the airwaves. That’s how the mentally impaired and provably incompetent can become president, senator, congressman, governor, or what have you.

The numbers have been trickling in. Here’s a taste. According to Fox News, 42 million people voted early as of Sunday, Oct. 30. Over half arrived weeks before election day. 43% were from Democrats and 34% from Republicans. In selected battleground states like Pennsylvania, 70% of early votes were from Democrats. It’s the well-oiled political machine at work, and out goes reason and contemplation.

May be a cartoon of 1 person and text

The results should make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. This is much more than Trump’s repugnancy. Many people may not know it but they voted for barbarity. Now that’s something too horrible to imagine. Are we that far gone as a civilization?

RogerG

Read more here:

* “More Democrats Have Voted Early—But Election-Day GOP Votes Could Sway The Midterms”, Forbes, Sara Dorn, Nov. 7, 2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2022/11/07/more-democrats-have-voted-early-but-election-day-gop-votes-could-sway-the-midterms/?sh=14bbed6272ac

* “More than 20 million pre-election ballots cast in voting ahead of the 2022 midterms”, Ethan Cohen, CNN, Oct. 30, 2022, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/more-than-20-million-pre-election-ballots-cast-in-voting-ahead-of-the-2022-midterms/ar-AA13ycmJ

* “2022 early voting outpaces 2018 midterms by roughly 1 million votes”, Ron Blitzer, Fox News, Nov. 7, 2022, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2022-early-voting-outpaces-2018-midterms-roughly-1-million-votes

November 10, 2022November 11, 2022

Additional Takeaways from the 2022 Midterms: Democracy Is on Life Support and the Fox News Heavyweights Are Specious

After more time to ruminate on the midterms, I’ve drawn to two conclusions: democracy is in critical condition and the Fox News commentariat and much of the punditry on the right, clouded by “populism” (aka Trumpism), provided a distorted view of the political landscape. As such, the red wave didn’t materialize, and, for that matter, wave elections may now be a thing of the past. Elections no longer reflect the deliberations of an informed citizenry thus making a mockery of popular sovereignty. 2022 brought it into clear focus.

For one, it’s the return to the old practices of political machines, brought to you by the Democratic Party’s current fixation with mail-in balloting and its cousin early voting. Leave it to the Democratic Party to bring machine politics back into vogue since they pioneered the urban political machine in the late 19th century. Harry Truman began his political career in the Kansas City Prendergast machine and would spend the rest of it trying to break away (read David McCullough’s “Truman”). FDR adopted machine tactics on a national scale, using the federal New Deal purse and expanded regulatory power to steamroll the country into four straight terms and Congressional dominance for half a century (read Amity Schlaes’s “The Forgotten Man”). Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by their latest edition since it is, after all, in their DNA.

Machine politics is back thanks to the absentee ballot. Hugh Hewitt in his post-election review yesterday (11/9) cut short any discussion of the wisdom of mail-in voting by saying it is “here to stay”. Regardless of its longevity, it’s corrosive to democracy. Fact! How? Democracy requires deliberation, information, debate, and attempts to make a convincing case. That means speeches, ad buys, and exhaustive travels to convince voters. Now, no longer. Get the political machine up and running, identify the party’s voters long before they’re any the wiser, put an absentee ballot in their hands, and collect it long before election day. It’s like the gambling house fronting the approved player with a mountain of chips before a single hand has been played. Campaigns are reduced to ginning up the base with fear, reducing public appearances, and eschewing the risk of exposure to the equivalent of cross examination in something called a debate. We’re back to the days of machine politics with the power to elect a cocker spaniel.

The Democrats got away with it throughout 2022. Heck, Biden got away with it in 2020. 2022 Democratic candidates avoided debates and rigorous interviews like the plague. If that isn’t enough, contrary views are censored in a cabal of Biden lackeys and Big Tech oligarchs.

COVID was the excuse to bring back machine politics. Not only did it result in stunting the education of our kids; it introduced “emergency mitigations” like the broadcasting of absentee ballots from dirty registration rolls and an election day stretching over a month, and sometimes after, with collection boxes scattered all over the landscape. With so many votes in the bank, the messiness of retail politics is avoided, especially important during times when you’re in power and royally screwed things up.

And we got a senescent president, an impaired stroke victim of Bolshevik sympathies in the Senate from Pennsylvania, a millennial-uptalking airhead/valley girl in a neck-and-neck race for Arizona governor, and other assorted nincompoops and wastrels potentially filling the seats of power – so long as they have a “D” after their name. Where’s the democracy, particularly if you think that it includes a voter weighing the candidates and issues? Frankly, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter. It’s been reduced to the mechanical act of punching a ballot. It’s shameful.

Thus, the polls may accurately pick up a red wave approaching election day but it doesn’t matter since so many votes have already been collected before anyone has a chance to change their mind. Polls may be accurate but much of what they’re registering is buyers’ remorse; their votes having long since been locked. The Machine invalidated the polls. A candidate’s high negatives and “wrong track” numbers were made irrelevant.

The Fox News blockbuster lineup looked gobsmacked the day after. Red-wave dreams in a mist of pixie dust were shattered. I watched Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham stumble around groping for an explanation. Of course, they highlighted the GOP’s bright spots: DeSantis, Kemp, Vance, Johnson, a likely GOP takeover of the House, and the sending out to pasture of Beto and Stacey; however, at no time did “Trump” cross their lips. It could be that they are as scared of the mythological Trump Leviathan as current GOP officeholders since Trump boosters comprise a good portion of their ratings. Trump may be a Nielsen winner but he’s a turnoff to voters. He’s more than kryptonite to the GOP. He’s a bug light. Candidates attracted to his glow get zapped. In battle ground states, his endorsement acted as the light as these candidates flew into the electrified screen.

Laura came closest to admitting the baleful Trump influence. Listing as one of her lessons from the election, she mentioned that future GOP campaigns should have no room for “revenge and ego”, or some such. It’s a vague swipe at Trump. Good for her, but she goes on to miscast the results. Factors such as coattails evaded her gaze, and her ritual misuse of “establishment” soiled her commentary. And there’s more.

She couldn’t resist extolling the “populist” cause. She obviously attributes it to Trump, and she’s correct, to some degree. The party has broadened its appeal. Trump, though, isn’t the only one to credit. The Democrats contributed the most. They traded blue-collars of all demographics for the utopian visions of the faculty lounge. Anyone, regardless of race or gender, with a family must grapple with closed schools and stunted educations for their kids, bankrupting gas prices, unsafe neighborhoods, urban war zones, XY “girls” in the locker room and on the team with their daughters, abortion-infanticide, a national debt piling on the backs of their children, humiliations abroad, a steady influx of the “undocumented” to undercut their wages and overrun their towns, blackouts and sky-high utility bills, shortages, and a trip to the grocery store eating up what’s left of the paycheck. Blacks and Hispanics have eyes like anyone else and are noticing the consequences of Democrat rule. Trump just happened to be around when the Democrats went full-bore into Lefty ravaging mode.

Sadly, all this occurred when the Democrats turned democracy into machine governance. Many of the unwitting were roped into the charade before their attention could be drawn to the Democrats’ complicity in the realities about them. Trumpist pundits refused to admit that Trump’s influence in the GOP assisted the Democrats in their distraction campaign. In the end, democracy may not be dead, but it is certainly comatose.

Now, as per Laura Ingraham in her commentary, the Republicans must imitate or die. They will, and soon we’ll be off into escalation and the land of electoral mutually assured destruction. Republicans will have to follow suit or face unilateral disarmament. But somebody has to put a stop to this devolution and return us to a real election day and 90% of the electorate voting in-person. If not, everything from candidate quality to stump speeches will be made into antiquated notions in a fading memory.

Democracy has been defined down to the near-animal act of marking a ballot. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about what happens when standards decline in his essay “Defining Deviancy Down”. He stated, “By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards.” Substitute “democracy” for “deviant” and you might begin to understand what happens when democracy as a standard is defined down to the equivalent of a psycho-motor tic.

RogerG

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Our Politics Are a Mess. Shame on the Culprits.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.

Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.

The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.

And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.

As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.

Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.

The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.

The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.

But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.

You’re the Lifeguard?

Terrifier

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .

* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Can I Sue?

Really, can I sue California’s STRS, the state’s teacher pension system? I would think that I have standing. After all, I am receiving a CalSTRS pension. Why would I sue? They are imperiling my pension. Simple.

How are they harming the integrity of my pension? It comes in three letters – ESG – and, to no great surprise, California is all into it. The initials stand for “environment, social, governance” and the plan is to impose these political abstractions on the entire business sector including finance, which also includes pension investing. In practical terms, ESG means the grab bag of leftwing causes from transgender ideology to the crusade against “systemic racism” to climate-change apocalyptics. The purpose is to strongarm businesses into leftwing causes with the use of the mother’s milk of business – capital – capital even from pension members.

The State of Utah is suing – that is, suing Standard and Poor’s (S&P) for assessing the state’s financial stability and credit worthiness according to leftwing metrics (ESG), or how diligent the state is in furthering leftwing causes such as hostility to the firearms industry and energy companies. Since the electorate of Utah doesn’t have the political sensibilities of gun controllers, BLM, the progressive ladies of The View, or the Sierra Club, the state’s financial status and bonds get downgraded by S&P acting in the role of the Left’s hatchet man. If the state’s electorate doesn’t pay heed to the fascinations of a college Sociology faculty, their bonds get branded “B” (junk). The purpose is to jeopardize the state’s financial health if they don’t come to heel.

Public-employee pension funds are particularly prone to the sway of the zealots, especially CalPers and CalSTRS in California, already under the direct thumb of an off-the-charts progressive one-party state. Out goes the standard fiduciary rule of working in the best interests of the client, in comes a redefinition of “best interests” to involve the political inclinations of those like Gavin Newsom wanting to risk the pensioners’ contributions and ultimate payout on Solyndra-type ventures and away from investments that until yesterday were pro forma.

In the case of a public-employee pension system, “best interest” can’t be limited to managers taking dictates from powerful and ideologically pretentious politicos. Contributions come from everyone from Marxists to NRA members in general funds like CalSTRS. The only real requirement is to be a teacher of the requisite number of years. The one thing that they all have in common is being retired and spoiling their grandkids. If any of them want to fund the antics of The Squad, they can do it from their pre- or post-retirement income, not beforehand after a deterioration of potential payouts to every beneficiary by Gavin Newsom’s preferences.

Kentucky’s AG, Daniel Cameron, senses the chicanery as well. He hit the mark with a letter to the state’s pension fund managers when he warned them about ESG investing because it would “violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.” He continued, “There is an increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans — that is, other people’s money — to push their own political agendas and force social change.” Those fiduciary duties might apply to California as well.

A favorite tactic to make ESG seem legitimate is to label the opinions of the Left a matter of “science” and a product of a “consensus”, therefore irrefutable, therefore “misinformation” if challenged, therefore above and beyond the standard rules of fiduciary responsibility. This new “science” – the scientific truth (?) of Leftist opinion – is actually a “science” without the scientific method. Think about it: What scientist comes from an experimental test of his/her hypothesis with the observation that the results are wrong because they violate a “consensus”? The whole exercise is as nonsensical as handing over my pension’s investment portfolio to the screeching ministrations of Greta Thunberg or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But here we are at a place where we can’t challenge the destruction of a pension because anyone who disagrees is censored as a “denier”. So, the Left gets carte blanche with the money for my old age. I don’t think so. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Oh, drop the “guns” part and let’s sue.

I identify with Warren Zevon’s predicament in his song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”. The lyics:

“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha

I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck, yes I’m down on my luck
Well, I’m down on my luck

And I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money
Huh, yeah
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Uh
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Hey
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Oo, yeah
Yeah
Yeah”

Zevon’s performance of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”:

RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Follow Daniel Cameron’s lead, purge every hint of ESG from your state’s finances”, Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/follow-daniel-camerons-lead-purge-every-hint-of-esg-from-your-states-finances .

* “Utah pushes back against pro-Putin ESG financial analysis”, Washington Examiner, May 2, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/utah-pushes-back-against-pro-putin-esg-financial-analysis .

October 26, 2022October 26, 2022

Ukraine and the Bursting of Bubbles

Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent. I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right. There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”. Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America. It’s incoherent, but there it is. Bubble #1.

That’s not all. Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites. The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life. This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.

Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles. In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out. One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors. In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not. Sorry Tulsi and Tucker. One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders. Is this carte blanche for intervention? No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned. When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th. Weakness invites horrors.

Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth. A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light. As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity. The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.

Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep. For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya. The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR. Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour. Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign. Done deal. Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass. After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.

In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps. And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves. But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades? I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country. Odd. It’s perplexing. Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?

Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined. Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR. Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.

No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail. The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance. Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Not even diplomacy works without it. That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit. The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety. Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind. State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out. Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.

The formula applies to us as well. To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it. The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits. Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too? Say goodbye to Taiwan. Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license. No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.

Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2. Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia. Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio. The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures. The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following. Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.

Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine. Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal. Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.

Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels. But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover. And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks. When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed). Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.

In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland. For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters. Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right. Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear. Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place. At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.

This resembles a mid-winter scene after the second day of snow in Chisinau, Moldova — Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.

RogerG

October 23, 2022October 23, 2022

We Did It to Ourselves

In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.

It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.

The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.

Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.

Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.

Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.

It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,

“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)

True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.

The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.

See the source image

RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third

* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/

* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/

* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382

October 1, 2022October 2, 2022

Democrats Are Revolutionaries, Not Politicians

See the source image

Today, the word “politician” is considered foul language in political discourse. Well, what about “revolutionary”? If you are repelled by politicians, what do you get when uncompromising ideological activists are swept into power? These people are defined by a radical vision to transform your life. We’ve seen this before, and it isn’t pretty. And the Democratic Party is in the grip of it. Biden lied in Philadelphia, September 1, for the threat isn’t coming from “MAGA Republicans”. He needs to look at himself and those running the show in his party.

2022 is starting to resemble 1793 in more ways than one. France, in a maelstrom of revolution since 1789, was divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy in the mode of Britain, those who wanted to rip the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) of divine right and aristocracy, root and branch, out of the country, and a mushy middle that shifted between the two. It’s the beginning of our commonplace political jargon of right/center/left.

Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror

Today’s Democratic Party has evolved into 1793’s The Montagnard (The Mountain) of the legislative National Convention in Paris. The Left of the revolution clustered in the seats high up in the chamber and used the Jacobin Club to gather and plot. Quickly, they succeeded in gaining control of the Convention and set the country on the path to the Reign of Terror. The similarity between the Democratic Party of today and the Montagnards isn’t in the advocacy of a bloodbath but in their radical dream of a refashioned society. The people of our modern Left, like the protégés of Robespierre, aren’t content with tinkering and adjustments – no “politicians” need apply – but in radical transformations in everything from the definition of male and female to the meaning of infanticide. Traditional institutions are to be steamrolled and constitutional checks-and-balances obliterated. Make no mistake about it. They’re advocating a revolution.

See the source image

This is a political party, if given unitary control of our federal government, that would make our country unrecognizable. Rattle off their agenda: out goes the filibuster and in comes the rule of momentary majorities to rock the country between extremes; in comes court packing and a Supreme Court to rubber stamp the revolution; the Equality Act which would pit the federal government against Bible-based Christianity and anyone who would seek its guidance on matters of marriage, faith, morals, and family; the requisition and creation of huge sums of money to fund the revolution (Build Back Better), inflation be damned; a pseudo-ecotopia to destroy our way of life; say goodbye to a border; say hello to easy to vote and easy to cheat (For the People Act); the equity crusade to indoctrinate our kids and dole out rewards by race and other politically favored identities; the unleashing of crime under “restorative justice” and equity schemes; the passage of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” to green light all abortions up to birth and force conscientious objectors out of the medical profession; the single-minded pursuit of “gender affirming care” to practice chemical infertility and sex-change surgeries on our children — without parental consent; a general disarming of the public and demonization of the firearms industry; . . . . And this is what they’ve publicly announced.

How could a suburban soccer mom endorse this kind of thing? If truth be told, she probably doesn’t, but they hear something about the Dobbs decision ending all abortions and unknowingly end up voting for our modern Montagnards’ agenda. They don’t know any better because our mainstream, legacy media is complicit in hiding the agenda’s dark side.

Take for instance the Washington Post’s fact-checking guru, Glenn Kessler. He felt compelled to correct Marco Rubio’s legitimate contention that the Democrats’ “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) would authorize abortion up to birth. In truth, Kessler doesn’t correct Rubio. The woman’s “health” provision in the Act would encompass “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” (Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton) to sanction abortion throughout the pregnancy. Late-term abortion would be codified. Instead, the WaPo’s intrepid reporter tried to undercut Rubio’s statement by mentioning something that Rubio never said. Kessler goes on a tangent about the rarity of such abortions. That’s not Rubio’s point! The Act grants carte blanche to any “health care provider”, whether it be a midwife, nurse, or doctor, to approve the ending of the life of a fully formed baby if they judge it to be a threat to the broadly defined “health” of the mother. The number of such abortions is irrelevant. The WHPA sanctions an act that should shock the conscience of any normal human being.

See the source image

But when you’re in a fevered pitch for revolution, “normal” is an enemy to the desired ends. Revolutionaries don’t want normal. The Montagnard of the Democratic Party want a radical change in everything about us: our self-perception, social and economic arrangements, and political institutions. This is a thoroughgoing revolution, totalitarian in scope. This is what is on the November ballot. Punching a ballot next to a Democrat candidate is an endorsement of much more than the person.

“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.” Whoever first coined the quip was onto something.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “The GOP claim that Democrats support abortion ‘up to moment of birth’”, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/ .

* “Questions for Glenn Kessler on Late-Term Abortion”, John McCormack, National Reivew, Sept, 22, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/questions-for-glenn-kessler-on-late-term-abortion/ .

* “If the Dems Win It All”, John McCormack, National Review, Sept. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/03/if-the-dems-win-it-all/

September 29, 2022September 29, 2022

The Tomfoolery of “Transition”, Social That Is

Watch buffoons in the national media and the upper rungs of the government sound technocratic, which means that they claim to be the inheritors of the “science”, the “experts”, and the “best and brightest” from our academic bubbles in the grip of, truth be told, cultural extremism. And watch our life get measurably worse.

Politics corrupts judgment, and no more fevered environment exists than one just before an election. Today, the word “transition” is employed to hide many sins. Just a week ago, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, announced, “. . . what we are seeing . . . is a transition to a more steady and stable growth.” Transition frequently crosses her lips on nearly everything that could foretell troubled times ahead. Biden, the donkey party powerful, and blue-state potentates are also especially fond of the word. It’s their current favorite to sound wise.

The jargon is a reflex of progressivism. Progressivism built its reputation on replacing the compromises, clashing interests, “smoke-filled rooms”, and bargaining of messy democracy with the credentialed “expert”. They actually believed that society can be managed by fine-tuning, like a technician adjusting an old-style carburetor. A little turn of the fiscal and regulatory screw here and there and bliss will be upon us. So, if fighting climate change and pursuing social justice (ergo blatant racial favoritism) are your goals, an agency of degreed “experts” and appropriate decrees from on high will seamlessly float the people in the right direction without pain. It’s all a bunch of hooey.

Hundreds of millions of free souls will not be rigidly controlled by a claque of government employees who lack the humility of admitting that they don’t know half as much as they claim, and a good portion of what they do know is wrong. The economist Friedrich Hayek warned of the inherent “knowledge problem” in government. It’s playing out before our eyes.

See the source image

“Transition” conceals a troubling winter. Fuel prices normally experience seasonal gyrations, but the Biden people raised the water level of those fluctuations by over half. Prices undulate at a rate of 50% to 100% over a year or two ago. Be prepared for a jump in electricity rates this winter on the east coast, Northeast, and other blue bubbles, which is not surprising given that they are most enthusiastic about rule by “expert” – all according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, an agency that is limited to measuring reality, and not to be confused with the “experts” of the climate change and equity freakouts.

“Transition” is often coupled with “soft landing”. President Clinton caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, once parsed on the meaning of “is” in his perjury before a federal grand jury. The same is true for the treatment of “transition” and “soft landing” by the gaggle of progressives dominating the regime. The words are rhetorical cosmetic surgery for probable layoffs and business retrenchment. You don’t have to look far for proof. The economy only recently reached its pre-pandemic total employment numbers, which doesn’t take into account population growth. The laggard pace of employment screws up the unemployment rate. Vigorous job growth coming out of a shutdown by government fiat isn’t surprising. But a 3.7% unemployment rate out of a pool of adults shrunk by huge numbers opting out of the workforce makes the unemployment number almost superfluous.

Retrenchment is in the winds. Big Tech and others are beginning to trim some fat. Meta, Twilio, and Snap are jettisoning workers. Gap, Boeing, and Walmart are lopping administrative overhead. Real estate is taking a big hit as Wells Fargo, RE/MAX, and Redfin cut employees and agents as the Fed raises interest rates to combat another Fed-induced problem: inflation. And Biden and company still want to fight inflation – too much money chasing too few goods – by amazingly throwing more money at it. Never has a fire been successfully fought by pouring jet fuel on it.

Local businesses are hard it. The 2020 summer of riots didn’t help. Downtowns resemble ghost towns. Cities can’t proclaim a welcome mat for business when the sidewalks are open sewers and wanton theft, even serial assault, are ho-hum to district attorneys. Now we get to the cultural dimensions of “transition” and “soft landing”.

“Transition” to an “equity” society entails racial discrimination (against Asians and white males), lawlessness, crime victims, property destruction, XY-chromosome girls in XX-chromosome girls sports, and extremist indoctrination (eco-cultism, CRT, transgenderism, socialism) in the schools. No place is safe from the transitioners, not the home, not parenthood. Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones – a symbol of the intersectionality of Black, female, and extremist cultural revolutionary – expounding on the danger of parents having a say in their children’s education (see below). It encapsulates the foolishness of “transition” and “soft landing” by “experts”.

Dropping the pretense of deceptive verbiage would be a great start. The so-called reformers are revolutionaries and should be forced to lay out their vision of how to create the new person for their new world. It’s totalitarian in scope. They need to lay their cards on the table so we are aware that the “soft landing” will be hard and brutal, as all such movements have proven to be. It won’t end well.

RogerG

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* The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s electricity rate forecast of Sept. 7, 2022 can be found at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php .

* Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote an excellent piece on the subject in “The Economy Is Starting to Buckle”, National Review Online, Sept, 26, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-economy-is-starting-to-buckle/ .

* The normally suspect Bloomberg News announced the achievement of the employment milestone In “Employment in US Has Finally Exceeded Its Pre-Pandemic Level” at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/employment-in-us-has-finally-exceeded-its-pre-pandemic-level?leadSource=uverify%20wall .