Red-Blue America – Page 6 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

June 25, 2022June 25, 2022

Dobbs vs. Corporate America

See the source image — Pro-life demonstrators at the Supreme Court in Washington, June 15, 2022. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn)

Well, the Supreme Court finally reversed the silly, convoluted jurisprudence of Roe/Bolton/Casey. The claptrap joined the ash heap of history with the Dred Scott decision, fascism, the USSR, and disco fashions. Or has it, and they? These things are the closest to vampires that reality has produced. They never really die.

And corporate America is in a fever over Dobbs. Many have instantly proclaimed their Planned Parenthood bona fides. Tucker Carlson of the Fox News commentariat puts the blame on corporate greed: corporations hate families because they get in the way of the wage slaves’ total commitment to the firm. Besides sounding like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and The Squad, he is as wrong as they are. The c-suite may be ambivalent about marriage and kids, but their wokeness has been evident for years. Remember their real and metaphorical kneeling after George Floyd, their donations to BLM Inc., their growing tendency to funnel streams of cash to the Democratic Party, Zuckerbucks, their support for woke indoctrination, and their campaigns against election integrity laws? It could be the equivalent of political ransom money pioneered by the Mob and Jesse Jackson, but I doubt it. There appears to be not a scintilla of worry over a backlash from at least half the country. Where’s the greed interest in that, unless the corporate mavens are completely unaware?

These latest unvarnished declarations on the Dobbs decision are rooted in something else. The explanation can be found in the fact the c-suite has more in common with the college faculty lounge than the lives of everyone underneath their self-declared status level. Indeed, they aren’t likely to be aware of a different and prevalent perspective because they never see anyone with one. Charles Murray has written extensively on the “super zips” and their increasing self-isolation from the rest of the country. For the denizens of the super zips (as in super-wealthy zip codes), mostly metropolitan, the ladies of The View reflect a national consensus. To put it bluntly, the c-suite is as cocooned as the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).

How else can one explain the lurch of Disney to protest laws that protect 7-year-olds from sexualized instruction in the rudiments of gay sex? The Mouse and sodomy? It’s jaw-dropping . . . unless one’s social universe is limited to conversations populated with progressive clichés.

How else to explain Delta and American Airlines, Coca-Cola, MLB, and a raft of others opposing wildly popular laws that do nothing but protect elections from fraud? What’s wrong with measures that ensure a vote of the people is actually a vote of the people? In the cloistered world of high-end gated communities, elite prep schools, the Ivy League, and business-class air travel, the air is thick in unchallenged lefty banalities.

So, Dobbs is seen in the silk-stocking enclaves as just another revolt of the rubes, people whose crudity in the eyes of their “betters” discounts their opinions. These aristocratic prejudices emanate from stupidity immersed in ignorance. Their social isolation leads the c-suite into minefields.

Thus, following the mental script of their isolated social world, ending a pregnancy isn’t much different from removing a hang nail. If their employees want to end the life of the baby within, Disney pledges to foot the employee’s bill for abortion shopping around the country.

Speaking of shopping, depending on the consumer’s choice, never before has the purchase of goods and services been so closely tied to something two-thirds of the American public finds abhorrent. A trip to Disney World now constitutes an unwitting consumer subsidy of abortion. How could a good Catholic ever again by a ticket to the Magic Kingdom for their kids? The parishioner would be compromised in taking communion.

The progressive activism doesn’t end with Disney. Paramount, Meta, Warner Bros., and Netflix announced their abortion subsidy. Uber, Lyft, and Apple are likely to follow suit.

Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier joined the “assault weapon” crusade. Now, they expressed their financial fealty to employee abortions. Think about that when shopping for Little League equipment. If they get their way, future Little Leagues would be a lot smaller. One would think that a different tack would do better to fatten the bottom line.

Amazon is fully onboard to the tune of $4,000 in travel expenses for an employee to find an abortionist or mutilate their bodies in sex-change therapies and surgeries. The progressive-industrial-complex is brought to you by the costumers of Amazon, Citibank, Uber, and the complex’s abettors in the related entertainment-industrial-complex. All of them managed by mentalities from out-of-touch secular monasteries.

Dobbs vs. corporate America is essentially flyover country vs. corporate America.

RogerG

April 16, 2022April 16, 2022

Republicans Dodging a Bullet

Macomb County Republican Party Convention from August of 2020.

Reporter Salena Zito, co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” of 2018, has long been sensitive to the views of those in Red America and accurately diagnosed the problem of an America dominated by an out-of-touch bi-coastal elite that set the stage for Trump’s amazing win in 2016. We have moved on, but Trump hasn’t. The Trump of 2016 is now the Trump of “I was cheated”, constantly regaling his followers at rallies with his complaints about 2020. In this column, she reports that the Macomb County, Michigan, Republican Party has had enough. At their county party convention, important for choosing county party leaders and candidates, county delegates threw out the party leadership that was obsessed with re-litigating 2020. We’ll have to wait and see if the party across the nation is willing to dodge the bullets that Trump is firing at it.

I have long maintained that Trump is principally responsible for the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats to neo-Bolsheviks, of all people, in Georgia of all places! A dispirited post-election Republican electorate was further dispirited by Trump’s post-election grandiose and unsupportable charges. If there ever was a time for “Move On”, this is it.

Macomb County Republican delegate Jamie Roe described the scene: “Last night [April 14], everyone who was focused on winning the election in 2022 had been pushed over the edge.” He added, “Fed-up activists and elected officials joined together to remove the Executive Committee and officers from office and replace them with a new group focused solely on winning in 2022 and not on the past.”

The Trumpers have long called disloyal Republicans – disloyal to Trump, that is – RHINOs. Yet, expressing fealty to a person is much more reminiscent of “in name only” than loyalty to a party. The pot calling the kettle black? Projection?

Macomb County may be a healthy bellwether for this year’s elections. It was your typical blue-collar Democrat bastion but was shifting red as the Democratic Party became a reflection of our brain-dead college faculty lounges. A blue-collar Republican Party doesn’t have to be equally as brain dead. At last, the party may be in the process of shaking off the personality cult just in time for the Democrats’ march into cultural Marxism.

Please read the article.

See the source image

RogerG

Also on Facebook (Roger Graf | Facebook) and Substack (rogerlgraf.substack.com)

April 1, 2022April 2, 2022

More Bad News If You’re Woke

The Great Skedaddle once referred to the flight of the Union Army from the battlefield in First Bull Run in 1861. No longer. Many cities and states have opted into the woke revolution . . . and people are fleeing, a Great Skedaddle II. What’s more, if we shifted the census from a mid-2020 counting to mid-2021, California would come close to losing 3 seats in the House of Representatives instead of the one. It’s the same in nearly all jurisdictions where Antifa and BLM appeasers reign supreme.

The official census is a centennial affair, but the bureau does annual estimates based on a continuing stream of data. And as a result, it gets worse for blue America. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, 10 states grew by 1% or more; eight are essentially red states. The other two (Delaware and Nevada) have maintained mostly friendly tax regimes in spite of, not because of, Dem dominance, when compared with their high-profile political cousins who routinely vote Democrat by double digits from their bi-coastal, metropolitan enclaves.

Some of the biggest losers are what you’d expect: California (-.76%), New York (-1.81%), Illinois (-1.1%), and Washington, D.C. (-2.83%). Some lost because of the continuing trend of the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt, which is slowing. Where it is accelerating can be pinpointed by county numbers. Manhattan (New York County) lost 6.9% over the one-year period; San Francisco down 6.7%; San Mateo dropped 3.5%. King County, Washington State, the home of Seattle, et al, and the mother lode of lefty votes, took the biggest step backwards in the state. With few exceptions, the county metro areas that grew the most are found in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Utah, and South/North Carolina.

One more interesting aspect to the story: states bordering California are magnets, with the exception of Oregon, thanks to the radical-Left dominance of the Portland/Willamette Valley urban corridor. Nevada did well, but the flight pattern’s sphere of influence extends to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and my own western Montana. Most of these states would come close to gaining an additional House seat if the count was held just one year later.

Indeed, the pandemic is a contributing factor, but not the sole cause of this trend. COVID ripped off the scab of a festering wound. The population hemorrhagers were more commonly the most zealous in their regulatory suffocation of lives and livelihoods. Then, they go off into climate-change hysteria, transgenderism, slashing police budgets, and a racist Anti-racism crusade. Their schools and urban spaces became open sewers riddled with crime. What’s there to like?

Let this be a warning to woke corporate boardrooms: you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Boycotting states over election laws and protections for girls’ sports, and ads showing your fidelity to the cultural Left, is not a winning strategy. People who vote with their feet are also more inclined to vote with their dollars. Disney, rethink your opposition to parental rights. Your stand may sound glorious in your corporate boardroom, gated community, or lunchroom, but the commoners have a profoundly different take.

Please read the source article for this post here.

RogerG

March 5, 2022March 5, 2022

A Middle-Class Betrayal

In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.

We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.

Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).

The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.

Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.

Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.

The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.

Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).

Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.

For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.

This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.

Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.

Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.

Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.

The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.

We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.

See the source image

RogerG

February 20, 2022February 20, 2022

Breakup D.C.

The French poet Alain de Lille wrote in 1175 AD, “. . . a thousand roads lead a man forever toward Rome.” In modern usage, “All roads lead to Rome” is meant to convey the center of something. Rome was the center of gravity for the classical Mediterranean world. Washington, D.C., has arisen as our Rome, for good or ill.

Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussman, Perkins Coie law partner and DNC lawyer, brought to mind the trope. If one cares to look closely at it, Sussman’s world is DC, a socio-politically incestuous pit of vipers that resists accountability. Don’t be surprised if Sussman and the DC network of Democratic Party swamp denizens never face justice for fabricating the Trump-Russia humbug. The swamp can get a Nixon (Watergate) but try and make them answer for their behavior? I’m skeptical. The Gordian Knot of intertwining relationships protects them.

John Durham, Special Counsel, and Michael Sussman

We’d be better served if all roads didn’t lead to DC. How? Breakup DC, scatter its federal departments, agencies, and the bulk of its employees to the far corners of the country. If any political chicanery were to take place, investigation and judgment would take place outside the shield of this cripplingly I-got-your-back web.

The Sussman case illustrates the outlines of this tightly knit socio-political hive. All the principal parties in the story, with the exception of Durham, are cozy with each other. According to Durham, Sussman is the man who peddled Trump-Russia collusion to his pals in the Obama administration. Enlisting the preexisting army of federal government operatives to cripple your political opponent is the queen on the political chessboard. It’s exactly what Sussman did in meeting with his old pal James Baker, FBI general counsel, to enroll the DOJ in placing a politically useful moral cloud on the Trump campaign. Trump was hounded throughout 2016 and into most of his presidency.

Don’t forget, later, Mueller and his cadre of Democrat henchmen spent two years (2017-2019) and $32 million to probe Trump-Russia and found . . . nothing!

The connections extend beyond Sussman and Baker. The trial court judge overseeing the case is Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper, Obama appointee and long protégé of Democrat power-broking legal eagles in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Cooper, Baker, and Sussman were veterans of the Clinton DOJ – and many would later move into the Obama regime – and frequently interacted socially and professionally.

See the source image

Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper

It doesn’t end there. Remember Lisa Page of “smelly Walmart shopper” fame? Her lawyer is Judge Cooper’s wife, Amy Jeffress, who was previously employed as national security adviser to Eric Holder, Obama’s AG. No accusation of conspiracy here, but instead there exists the network of friendships and mutually beneficial relationships that can last a lifetime.

Quite logically, conflicts of interest abound. If this was an honest world, recusals would be the most common feature surrounding the Sussman case, or any case with a partisan in the dock in the snake pit of DC, up to the city’s totality. This rabidly anti-Republican population (Republicans are 6% of registered voters) screams change of venue for any defendant who’ll be helped or harmed by a partisan reputation.

DC’s deeply embedded partisan hostility is just one reason for moving things out of the city. More threateningly, our government no longer represents us, the “us” being anyone whose experience with the country doesn’t emanate from an Ivy League campus, or from 35,000 feet, or passing through on the Acela. If we are to have rule by expertocracy, let’s move them closer to the plebes. For instance, pick any small-to-medium sized city in Kansas to headquarter the Agricultural Department. Say, move the Department of Justice to Lubbock – or any town with a strong commitment to the Second Amendment – if the town will have them. Commerce could head to Tampa or Mobile, since California is out of the running because it is determined to destroy its ports. Move the Pentagon to Camp Lejeune. Dynamite the five-sided edifice in Arlington for more breakwaters on the Chesapeake. HHS could benefit from small town values so place it in any small census tract away from a college campus and between the Rockies and Appalachians. DHS, the homeland security Borg, would benefit from a location like El Paso, Tx., to be closer to a porous border. The same is true for the rest of the cabinet.

Don’t worry, they don’t need to be within spitting distance of each other to fulfill their job descriptions. After all, if it was such a great idea to Zoom our kids’ education, they ought to phone it in too – or more accurately broadband it in – from a long way away.

As for the entangled web of regulatory agencies, find the most aesthetically unpleasant locations in this transcontinental nation. No coastal views or beautiful mountain vistas. We’ve got close to 4 million square miles to work with. The idea is to make these people want to cut short their stays in jobs telling us what to do. Brown and barren hills, blistering cold winters, and 110-degree summers would work wonders. They might want to get real jobs.

But herein lies a danger: scattering the hive to the winds might infect more locations with their socio-political-cultural decrepitude. An answer might be found in treating federal government employment as a form of minimum-security imprisonment. Workplaces and housing ought to be separated from the surrounding area behind secure fencing with ingress and egress carefully monitored. It might contribute to the impetus to end their incarceration and join the real world.

The above has zero chance of enactment but establishes a preferable end state to work toward. The idea is to avoid the nomenklatura-problem. No doubt, we have made great strides over the past 90 years in Sovietizing our existence. A large and overweening class of apparatchiks, insulated and living a world apart, must be brought to heel before they sabotage our civilization.

All roads should lead to Akron, Peoria, Lubbock, Wichita, Duluth, . . . .

RogerG

*Read Andrew C. McCarthy’s article, “Welcome to the Swamp, Mr. Durham”, National Review Online, February 19, 2022.

February 17, 2022February 19, 2022

A Visit to the Blue Bubble: Hugh Hewitt’s Interview with Scott Lehigh of the Boston Globe

See the source image

This (above) caught my ear. Hugh Hewitt’s conversation with Scott Lehigh, Boston Globe columnist, brought to light the habits of mind that help define what it means to live in a blue bubble. The bubble exists as an insular group of like-minded individuals in metropolitan centers – the “chattering classes” in the words of Auberon Waugh – who rarely have exposure to anyone outside their tightly-knit claque of people with the same mutually reinforcing opinions. It leans left and exudes arrogance, and tries to act as gatekeeper of “truth”.

Hewitt initiated the interview because he was rankled by Lehigh’s mischaracterization of a previous Hewitt statement about the January 6 Committee and invited Lehigh to explain. The interchange about the particulars of January 6 mattered less than Lehigh’s mode of thinking. The lack of detail and rigorous thought was clearly evident, probably a product of exclusive interaction with those of a similar mind. A person can get away with generalities and shallow thinking in this environment of no pushback. As such, the muscles of mental agility atrophy. It showed in the interview.

For example, Lehigh had trouble grasping the legal principle of due process, probably because he hadn’t confronted it in his social circle. Hewitt tried to pry out of him some recognition of the necessity of the idea in government procedures, but Lehigh was having none of it.

He kept falling back on what amounts to ends-justify-means. The simple idea that the congressional minority should have effective representation on a House committee escaped him. He even refused to accept the truth of the one-sided nature of Pelosi’s January 6 Committee and kept falling back on the vileness of Trump. In his mind, and probably in the mind of everyone around him, the ends of getting Trump justified trampling the rights of the other side in public proceedings. Hugh’s parallel of mutual representation for plaintiff and defendant in court proceedings was ignored by Lehigh without any explanation.

Similarly, the concept of legitimacy blew over his head. Legitimacy is a product of due process and has much to do with broad public acceptance of any findings. Violate the widely-accepted basics of fair play (due process) and watch rejection and turmoil intensify. Whatever “facts” are uncovered will be quickly dismissed. The possibility escaped Lehigh.

It was clear that Lehigh wasn’t prepared when he wrote his column and when he faced Hewitt. Running the column past someone who disagrees would work wonders, if such a person could be found in his regular circle of friends and acquaintances. My guess is that there are none.

Listen for yourself. The episode can be found here.

RogerG

February 1, 2022February 1, 2022

Trump’s Disgraceful Attacks on Pence

May be an image of 3 people and people standing — Former President Donald Trump gestures during a rally in Conroe, Texas, January 29, 2022. (photo: Go Nakamura/Reuters)

To say that we are a divided country down to our most fundamental beliefs is an understatement. Blue bubbles exist in a sea of red – the crimson color referring to people more well-grounded in our civilization’s norms of common sense. As the Left becomes more provocative, some on the right have responded in kind, almost to the point of laying themselves open to demagogues. For me, the repulsiveness of the Left is not an excuse to hitch my “wagon” to a narcissistic and hubristic “horse”, giving a special meaning to a horse’s a**.

Trump’s comments at a January 29 rally in Texas brings me to this point. He’s still peddling the line that he’s a victim of a cabal depriving him of an election that he constantly professes to have won. He goes as far to say that Vice President Pence had the power to throw out the electors of selected states to give the election back to him. He yelped, “Unfortunately, he [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” That’s poppycock.

Why poppycock? There’s nothing in law or legal scholarship to support such a claim. Law professor and Trump lawyer John Eastman tried to establish the assertion but on later clarification said that he raised the theory for internal discussions only and called the idea “crazy” and not “viable”.

When it comes down to it, the silliness lies in a logical fallacy and affront to long-established principles of law that are written down in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Eastman’s theory (for “internal discussions” only) is based on proposals to reform the aged Electoral Count Act of 1887. Suggestions by some of Trump’s critics in the Congressional debate to clarify the vice president’s role in the law are assumed by Trump to be evidence that Pence had the power. It’s a real head-scratcher. As legal counsel, you couldn’t get this line of argument past a judge in a trial. If you persisted, you might be spending a night or two in the hoosegow.

And this is the thin reed that Trump uses to lambast Pence. This doesn’t mean that we should ever again conduct elections like we did in 2020. The panic of COVID was used to conduct a host of dubious election ploys: shot-gunning ballots through the mail, legalizing previously illegal practices like ballot harvesting, fungible ballot verification procedures, the repeal of the precinct system in anywhere-voting, unsupervised drop boxes, voting deadlines that varied with the conscience of a judge, etc. But that’s how some states decided to conduct their elections, something that’ll be hard to overturn in a federal court.

Shame on states for allowing this to happen. Shame on the hubristic and narcissistic Trump for peddling lies to his followers. Shame on his followers for allowing themselves to be manipulated so Trump can avoid the moniker of “loser”. The country deserves better.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'RAWIRS NVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 2016 CREATORS COM BUT WE'RE NOT FLYING. WE'RE FALLING! OF COURSE YOU'RE FALLING for ME. I'M AMAZING!! WV9 AWAA @Ramireztoons www.investors.com/cartoons'

RogerG

*Thanks to the work of Andrew C. McCarthy and Philip Klein in National Review Online.

January 14, 2022January 15, 2022

The Pariah State

California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.

Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).

The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.

What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.

Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.

The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.

Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)

Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.

The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.

A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.

Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.

RogerG

October 11, 2021October 12, 2021

What has happened to USC? Is Something Deeper at Play?

Utah quarterback, Cameron Rising, from Ventura, Ca., via Texas, celebrates a touchdown in Utah’s 42-26 win over USC in the LA Coliseum Saturday night, 10/9.

My answers are, I can’t say for sure and I can’t say for sure. But hints are scattered about. My principal guess is that the breeding ground for football success lies in . . . wait for it . . . the regional culture. This is not the southern California of USC’s John McKay or the entire PAC-8 of Washington’s Warren Moon any longer. The whole west coast shifted deep blue which might prove to be the catalyst for a deemphasis of the manly arts (as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield would put it), like the manliest of all sports, football. Trump might have had a better chance to win California’s 52 electoral votes if the electorate was limited to the LA Coliseum’s attendance, but that isn’t the case. There’s more Bernie Bros in the state than college football fans. Socialism and love of the nanny state undermines fan and program support and player development. Again, my guess.

Hugh Hewitt last week raised an interesting point. He observed that college football is a “red” sport. The top 25 has only two slots for teams from “blue” states: Oregon (#9) and San Diego State (#24). The rest is a monotonous rendition of “red” to “purple” states, mostly “red”. In the last decade, only one “blue” team by the end of the season with any regularity has been in the running for the college football playoffs – Oregon.

Take a look at something as simple as stadium capacity. The top three are in the Big Ten – Michigan (purple, red part of the state, 107,601), Penn State (purple, red part of the state, 106,572), and The Ohio State (red, 102,780). Eleven of the top 25 are in the SEC – which should change its initials to RSC, the Red State Conference. We won’t find a blue state facility till UCLA’s Rose Bowl at #10 (91,136) and USC’s Coliseum at #20 (77,500) – both very ancient and for the most part half empty on Saturday.

Interesting anecdote: Iowa’s quarterback, Spencer Petras from Greenbrae, Ca., chose the Iowa corn fields because he wanted to play in the electric atmosphere of a Big Ten stadium, according to yesterday’s broadcast team for the Penn State/Iowa game.

Iowa’s quarterback Spencer Petras in Iowa’s 23-20 win against Penn State.

Fans swarm the field after Iowa’s victory against Penn State.

Helicopter-parent government of the blue states nurture Pajama Boys (Remember the ads for Obamacare?), not football players. The attitude spills over into athletic policy. Arizona State’s punter, Michael Turk, one of the top punters in the country, transferred to Oklahoma due to ASU’s vaccine mandate for away games. Washington State’s head coach, Nick Rolovich, is reported to have a date with the guillotine for refusing to take the vaccine.

No surprise there, college bubbles everywhere are replete with “safe spaces” and triggering hyper-sensitivities. Blue states are nothing but the college bubbles writ large. However, if the surrounding culture won’t play by the campus’s snowflake rules, COVID paranoia will play second fiddle to the gate. MSNBC anchors may go bonkers with the Chicken Little hysteria of “super-spreader events”, but many folks prefer to live in the real world of risk and are voting with their tickets to have a good time. Damn the mommy spoil-sports. Welcome to the “red” states.

Now 3-3, in USC’s losses, their opponents scored 42+ points. Swiss cheese comes to mind when talking about the team’s defense, whether in the run box or the defensive backfield. As a consequence, Utah, like Oregon State and Stanford before them, looked like Alabama when lining up across the USC defensive line. USC attracts some flashy offensive skills players but the rest of the roster looks mediocre. Since the defense can’t hold the more physical offenses, those stars get fewer opportunities to shine. By the third quarter, the team is down 24 points, the game’s tenor has been set, and the LA media darling in cardinal and gold watches his star fade.

Lapses like USC’s have been a concern up and down the west coast. The occasional good team can still be found, something unavoidable in the eight teams from LA to Puget Sound. Beyond the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the picture might look a bit different. Arizona prohibits vaccine mandates in schools, a far cry from California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee – cultural socialists all. The off-putting social milieu of those states might be a huge drag on recruitment for Utah, the Arizona schools, and Colorado as they are corralled with the nanny staters. Flying from liberty zones to the lands of COVID fascism in inter-conference play creates difficulties for scheduling and compliance. A five-star recruit, young and healthy with a greater chance of serious medical problems from a frat party than COVID, has a choice between a Chernobyl-like college life or a normal experience in the SEC’s Mississippi or the Big-10’s Iowa. This might be the reason for more California talent showing up in the big schools of flyover country.

A worker at Lumen Field holds a sign stating the stadium’s mask requirement before an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)

I hear that the Big-12 is shopping for some replacements for the defections of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Hear that, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado? Maybe a move to the Mountain West might be an improvement.

I am prepared for a long run of mediocrity for my much-loved PAC-12 teams. Once the rot of cultural Marxism gets fully established, the malaise infects everything from the economy to the practice field.

RogerG

September 27, 2021September 28, 2021

Left-Wing Glamour at War with Physics and Economics

Remember Biden behind the wheel of Ford’s F150 Lightning, a propaganda stunt to make EV’s appealing to rednecks (like me)? Anyone, though, with a smidgen of brain function will notice the silliness of the whole exercise. Ford’s newest addition to its truck lineup is a Rube Goldberg contraption whose purpose is a political one, not a practical one that can only emerge from the many confrontations with reality over time, like the iconic F150. It’s what happens when greenie fantasies declare war on physics and economics.

The saga begins with greenie dreams of heaven on earth and hatred for those not so enthralled with the dreamscape. When the dream captures the imagination of people similarly cocooned, people removed from the hoi polloi and rustics, but powerfully influential, it is shoved onto everyone else. So, if hair-on-fire congresswomen from gerrymandered, gentrified districts scream the climate-change apocalypse, out comes the snooty vilification and pressure on the corporate bigs to play along if they want to remain in the cool persons’ club.

Our excitable hair-on-fire congresswomen from NY’s 14th Congressional District.

Of course, the way is greased with other people’s money in tax credits and subsidies. To get on board the money train, the bigs conjure something that . . . works . . . but . . . . Thus, we get the Ford F150 Lightning with its 1,800 pound battery that takes 12.5 hours to recharge. The problem with EV’s has always been the battery. For the Lightning, a longer range and heavier battery is an option; the behemoth becomes a real behemoth. The problem is still the battery.

Now, imagine yourself the kind of person who actually likes, and needs, trucks. By the way, they aren’t the kind who reside in Greenwich Village flats, shop at Whole Foods, and whose personal transportation needs are satisfied by an electric golf cart masquerading as an EV car and Uber and Lyft. I’m talking about the type of people producing the grain that goes into our Boston University graduate’s plant-based Awesome Burger. An EV is as practical as a Gucci suit at a barn raising.

In such locales in the fruited plains, distance means distance, as in many, many miles. What happens when the twenty-something offspring took the sleek thing on a beer run the night before but forgot to plug it in? On your monthly trip to Costco the next day – 300 miles round trip – the contraption stops dead on the interstate. What do you do? The thing is heavy, takes 12.5 hours to charge, and nothing as simple as a five-gallon gas can offers a solution. If you are on the interstate, call for a heavy-lift, flat-bed tow truck. If you are stuck on a dirt road in a sea of rolling hills on the northern plains in the middle of winter, you die.

The northern Great Plains of the United States.

For our congresswoman from her gerrymandered, gentrified perch in the megalopolis, the answer is The Green New Deal. Capital meant for better devices and more energy will now go into upending the grid and bribing people with other people’s money to buy the contrivances, by force of law. We’ll end up with a mountain of the impractical and a lot less of the stuff that works. The state will simply step in to command the laws of economics and physics to disappear.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Welcome to 21st century America. It’s a world that Salvador Dali made famous in his paintings. No, it’s not a real world, but it is to our hair-on-fire congresswoman from the Bronx/Queens. She actually believes in “her truth”, a “truth” at war with the laws of physics and economics. Biden also believes in her truth. This style of “reality” may be appealing as art in a Dali exhibit at the Met but is not so agreeable as policy to a South Dakota farmer stuck as the snow begins to fall with no cell reception.

A Russian teen found frozen to death in a car in 2020.

Left-wing glamour confronts the plain facts of existence and the results aren’t pretty.

RogerG