Tag: Elections
Is America Ready for the One-Party State?

Is America Ready for the One-Party State?

By | | Comments 0 Comment

That is the question that everyone who goes to the polls or mails or drops off their ballot – unfortunately, millions of people have already voted, their minds already made up, apparently, even as vital information continues to come in – should be asking. Is America ready for the one-party state? The danger of that is more than real – it is imminent – should the Democratic Party gain control of the House, the Senate, and the White House in these elections.

How do we know? The party’s leaders, such as they are, both actual and ad hoc, have told us that is their intent. There is no room for lower categories of people, such as rural dwellers, Republicans, or <gasp> Trumpites in the elitist, “progressive” America they foresee and are planning for you.

Before we parse how this outcome might come about, let’s consider how bad an idea this is. And it is.

The one-party state: A very bad idea

One-party states aren’t a new idea, but they have proven to be a universally bad idea wherever the concept has been (and in some cases, still is) implemented. When we think of one-party states, we think of Communist countries, such as the former Soviet Union, Cuba, the PRC, North Korea, and a number of formerly Communist satellite countries in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia. Or we think of totalitarian dictatorships, such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan. But there have been plenty of lesser-known examples, especially in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The idea of the one-party state was widely touted as an embodiment of “national unity” in the initial post-Colonial stage of many former European colonies, particularly in Africa, though also elsewhere around the world. In Africa, they were based on the traditional African concept of consensus, where decisions were to be taken by universal agreement. Some were based on the power of the “strong man,” and were justified as ways of organizing otherwise disorderly societies. But wherever and whenever they have existed, what single-party states amounted to were kleptocracies where the ruling elites were able to bleed their countries dry, enriching themselves and their own tribes, families, or party powerful, impoverishing and repressing the bulk of their populations.

While far from extinct, the general trend worldwide has been away from the one-party state. For instance, a map of one-party states on the African, Asian, and South American continents reveals far fewer of them than existed just 30 or 40 years ago. There are some examples where things went the wrong way, such as Venezuela, but in general the trend has been away from them. There are good reasons for this, not the least of which is that they are dysfunctional, and eventually are either rejected by the population through political pressure or overthrown violently. In some cases – Taiwan and South Korea come to mind – the one-party dictatorship yielded to a multiparty democracy as their economies and political consciousness grew. We see similar cases in a number of formerly Communist countries in Europe, though the transition there took place much more suddenly than in Asia, where it required decades of transformation and evolution.

In the United States, we gravitated to essentially a two-party system, with a smattering of small and largely ineffectual third parties, and this has been the pattern for most of the country’s history. But there are examples of essentially single-party rule in the United States, too. There was the “Solid South” in which Democrats ruled all the Southern States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A key element of that one-party state was Jim Crow and disenfranchisement of blacks across the region.

In contemporary times, there is the one-party stranglehold exercised by the Democratic Party over most large cities in the country. Depending on machine and identity politics, there hasn’t been a Republican mayor or administration elected in these cities in anywhere from a half century to a century and a half. During this time, poverty, crime, maladministration, and corruption have all festered in most of these Democrat-controlled cities. For more on this version of the one-party state, I urge you to read my piece Back to the Plantation, which details the deleterious effects single-party rule has had and how it depends on maintaining a permanent underclass, and includes links documenting all these realities.

Whether in Africa or in Chicago, Asia or Baltimore, Latin America or Detroit, it is a kleptocracy that this kind of single-party rule creates, fosters, and entrenches, at enormous cost to the bulk of the population.

If you want to see the results of one-party rule at the state level, one need look no further than California, which has become essentially a one-party vassal state of the Democratic Party. Despite it possessing one of the largest economies in the world and being home to powerful Big Tech, it also has the distinction of possessing (according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure) the highest poverty rate in the country, six of the 10 least educated cities in the country, two of the 10 most dangerous cities in the country, a number of the worst-run cities in the nation, and the biggest homeless population of any state. So-called sanctuary cities provide protection to illegal aliens, including violent criminal offenders, while prejudicing against protecting law-abiding citizens. And to achieve these remarkable accomplishments, the state has the highest state tax rate in the nation and enormously onerous regulations. There shouldn’t be any wonder why Californians are fleeing the Golden State in droves, sadly, in too many cases, taking their stupid ideas with them.

But California is exactly the model that the Democratic Party has in mind to transform the rest of the country into. Are you ready for it? Let’s look now how they intend to accomplish this.

How the Dems plan to turn the country into a one-party state

None of this is a mystery. All of these steps have either been specifically stated by leading Dems, or – as in the case of Presidential candidate Jell-O Joe Biden and his running mate and President-apparent Kamala Harris – telegraphed by refusing to tell the American public what is planned. In their refusal to answer the question, they’re telling you what is planned. Dem Senatorial Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the real power in the House (both of New York, another near-one-party disastrous state) both have said that all options are on the table.

“It will be a decision that comes to the Senate,” Schumer has said. “We first have to win the majority before that can happen . . . but everything is on the table.”

So what is on the table and what decisions do Schumer and AOC have in mind? These:

Eliminating the Senate filibuster: For most votes to pass the Senate, it takes 60 votes due to the ability of either party to filibuster any given bill. This comes under what is known as the Cloture Rule. That is a big part of why deliberation can go in much longer and take more compromise for legislation to pass the Senate than the House. But by various means, including majority vote, the filibuster can be eliminated. Known as “the nuclear option,” this would allow Dems, even holding a narrow majority in the chamber, to take it over absolutely. If they also hold the House and the White House, anything they do is virtually guaranteed to pass and become reality.

Adding new states to the Union: Under Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution, Congress can pass legislation admitting new states to the Union. With a majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President, the way would be open to add the District of Columbia (long a Dem issue and Dem stronghold) and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (another Dem stronghold) as the 51st and 52nd states. And there wouldn’t be anything to stop them from adding other territories, such as American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, as states, if they thought it would benefit them politically. The idea would be to add two new (ostensibly Democrat) senators from each new state.

To give you some idea how crazed some of these people are, there actually is a proposal to carve D.C. Into anywhere between 127 and 150 neighborhoods, and admit each as a separate state. This isn’t a satire in The Onion, for instance, but an idea put forth in a serious article published in the Harvard Law Review. With all these new Democrat senators, the way would be cleared to completely alter America’s electoral process, including elimination of the Electoral College, transferring the Senate’s power to a new body where all citizens have equal representation, and an alteration of the Constitutional amendment process to ensure that amendments can be made by states representing the majority of Americans. This lunacy is presented as “a modest proposal to save American democracy.” Never mind that America’s Constitution and the representational republic as a union of sovereign states it created have served the nation for 233 years. These crazy liberal law professors have a better idea. Can’t you see it? And you wonder why radicalized college kids are burning down the cities?

Elimination of the Electoral College: An adjunct to the idea of adding new states to the Union is eliminating the Electoral College. As anyone educated in Constitutional matters knows, the President of the United States is not elected directly by the people, but rather by the states, as represented by electors sent to the Electoral College. Each state decides how those electors are allotted. In some states, it’s “winner takes all” of the popular vote. In others, they’re apportioned according to the proportion of votes won by each candidate. Various restraints on the behavior of electors to vote independent of the vote of their state have been imposed by courts and legislatures, but in the end, these are the people who choose the President. While it might seem like a good idea to eliminate the Electoral College, what will result is that a few big states will wind up dominating the rest of the country, more than they do, anyway. Given the huge differences in values between residents of the various states, the end result might suppress any chance of the smaller states, and their residents, to have any real influence on the nation. The Founding Fathers were clear in their desire to avoid a “tyranny of the majority” (in the words of James Madison) through creation of a republic and a representative form of democracy. There is an expression that a democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what’s for dinner, and protection of minority rights is essential if freedom is to be preserved in the U.S.

Packing the Supreme Court: What “packing,” in this case, means, is adding additional justices to the Supreme Court. Neither the Constitution nor any law sets the number of Supreme Court justices. Since it was established in 1789 with six justices, the High Court has varied from a low of five to a high of 10 justices. It has had nine justices since Congress set that number in 1869. An odd number avoids tie votes. Now, upset with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett by President Donald Trump to fill the vacancy created by the death of long-time liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who herself opposed packing the Court), the Dems are openly talking about adding additional justices – “packing the Court” – that would be appointed by a Democratic President and confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Senate. The last time this ploy was attempted was in 1937 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, reelected by a large majority in 1936, attempted to add additional justices to counter the existing justices who had been ruling against parts of his New Deal legislation. The move proved tremendously unpopular and failed, and it was viewed as what it was: An undemocratic power grab. Make no mistake: The current Democratic talk of packing the Court, adding several new justices to it, is no less of an undemocratic power grab.

When asked whether voters deserved to know his position on packing the Court, Joe Biden’s answer was clear: “No they don’t.” It shows what Biden, and his party, thinks of voters, and anyone stupid enough to accept that attitude and answer will get what they deserve should Biden be elected.

Those four changes, by themselves, would be sufficient to create a one-party state in the U.S., with the now-radical Democratic Party ruling the country. Add the near-complete sell out of the mass media and social media in support of the Party, and we’re looking at a Chinese-style totalitarian state.

Are you ready for it?

How far off is this?

I was asked this question recently, how long might it take for the Democrats to create this one-party state. The person asked me how many years it would take to implement. He was surprised when I answered that, if the Dems win the House, Senate, and White House in the elections already under way, we are probably months, not years, away from it. I don’t envisage any delay on the part of the rabid Democrats who now hold sway over the party. Given the absolute power of holding two of the three branches of government, no Constitutional constraints to their actions, what amounts to a supportive state media, and with their left flank biting at their heels, I expect the partisan power-hungry likes of a Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC and the Squad to act very quickly and not to allow the opportunity to pass, as the opportunity was lost in the initial years of the Obama Administration when the Dems held both houses of Congress.

A lot has changed since 2008. The mass media and social media have even more clearly lined up as a partisan force, blinding much of the country to what really is going on. And the Democratic Party, both those elected to Congress as well as those pulling the strings behind the Biden-Harris candidacies, have become far more radical. Once they do away with the filibuster and exercise the nuclear option, any restraint they faced 12 years ago will be obliterated. And the rest will follow from that.

As I see it, the only thing standing between us and a one-party state is to vote against Democrats at every level, for every office, and most especially voting for Republican Senatorial and House candidates and for the re-election of the President. And that is coming from someone who has always considered himself a political independent (and still does) and someone who previously mostly voted for Democrats. Things have changed in the party, they have changed in the country, they have changed in me – and hopefully, if you voted for Democrats before, they have changed in you, too.

Otherwise, I have to again pose the question: Are you ready for the one-party state?

Coming Next: In my next posting I am going to outline why the RICO statute – Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – can and should be applied to Joe Biden, the Biden family, the Democratic Party, several mass media and social media organizations, and specific individuals within them, given the organized conspiracy to commit and cover-up egregious criminal activities by Biden and the Biden family, for which clear evidence now exists. Stay tuned and watch this space.

Featured image: Blue America, University of Florida. Used under Fair Use.
A Nation of Imbeciles?

A Nation of Imbeciles?

By | | Comments 3 comments

If you’ve been paying even passing attention, you may have noticed how one side of our political dichotomy thinks this is a nation of imbeciles. And if you haven’t noticed that, or it doesn’t bother you, then maybe you’re one of the people they’re counting on.

While it’s only the latest insult to your intelligence that the Democrats have pulled this year, they figure you have no need to know lots of things, foremost among them whether they plan to pack the Supreme Court or not. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. It’s pretty obvious, if you’re not isolated on a small Caribbean island inhabited mostly by wild goats, that their intent is to pack the Court if, by chance, they manage to grab control of the levers of power in Washington .Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris confirmed that by refusing to answer the question during Wednesday night’s Vice Presidential Debate. And just to be sure there was no doubt about it, the designated hitter of the Democratic Party, Jell-O Joe Biden, laid it out to reporters the next day.

There are links at the end of this posting to a replay and a transcript of the Vice Presidential Debate.

“You’ll know my opinion on court packing when the election is over,” a masked Biden told reporters while making one of his rare trips out of his Wilmington basement, campaigning in Arizona with Harris. “I know it’s a great question and I don’t blame you for asking it, but you know the moment I answer that question, the headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than focusing on what’s happening now.”

Well, duh, yeah, it’s a great question. What would be even greater is if the American people could be given the answer to it. One would think people want to see that headline. But, reminiscent of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi telling you you’d have to wait until the Affordable Care Act was passed to find out what was in it, now the man and woman who would be President and Vice President are telling you that you need to vote for them to find out if they’ll pack the Court. You’re just not smart enough to have that information but they figure you’ll vote for them anyway.

Actually, if you’d still vote for this pair of frauds even being less-than-subtely told you are an imbecile, maybe you are one. There’s a mirror for that.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s time to stop mincing words about this stuff. The other side certainly doesn’t mince their words, and their hatred and venom is spread far and wide across the republic. It usually doesn’t take reading or listening to more than one never-Trump scree to be immersed in more hatred and ignorance than one should have to put up with in a lifetime. As Trump continues being the most transparent Chief Executive in our lifetime, laying out precisely what he intends to do on matters of public policy, he’s maligned by those who protect and promote those who believe their plans are too problematic for the American public to know. The whole Democratic nomination process this round has been a card trick put together by the party’s hidden puppet-master elites, aided and abetted by their wholly owned media apologists, so what should anyone expect?

Don’t believe your lying eyes

While a majority of Americans, by a margin of two-to-one, polled after watching the Vice Presidential Debate, thought that Vice President Mike Pence had won the debate, the mindless media parrots in thrall to the Dems focused on a fly that settled on Pence’s head during the debate, accused the VP of talking over Harris – which is rich, considering that Harris is known for badgering, bullying, and talking over witnesses appearing in the Senate – and “mansplaining” to her. Apparently that is how one belittles factual presentations over evasion and obfuscations.

Harris was good at those. For anyone counting, she spouted 24 lies or misleading statements in her portion of the hour and a half of the debate. Those prevarications, some of which were such whoppers that it was hard not to guffaw at them, were allowed by moderator Susan Page, of USA TODAY, who would chide Pence for going over his allotted time as he attempted to correct the record. Even given his calm, even-handed approach, Pence prevailed in most cases in getting out the facts. And in the end, despite what the commentators on the likes of CNN and MSNBC tried to lead you to believe, the speaking time of both candidates was exactly evenly divided, within precisely three seconds.

If you listened to the post-debate blather on the liberal networks, you heard that the fly on Pence’s head knew an ally of Satan when it saw one, that Harris showed “a joyfulness in her spirit” – if you consider grimaces and scowls and arrogant, self-serving smirks, which led most viewers to judge Harris as an unlikable figure, joyful – and that Pence showed Harris disrespect because . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . she is a woman.

So women are equal to men, except when they come face-to-face with a male opponent in a debate or negotiation, at which time they are to be treated with deference as if they’re a child or some sort of frail being. The liberal’s view of equality. And this, Harris, is a person who pretends she is capable of being Vice President of the United State – if not President, but we’ll get to that – and dealing with the likes of a Putin or a Xi or a Khameini. Right.

I’ll confess that, unlike those on the Twitterscape, for which this was the biggest take-away of the debate, I didn’t even notice the fly on my 48-inch flat screen. Maybe it’s because I was listening to what the candidates had to say and not just looking for inanities to throw at Pence.

If you want to get some idea of how moronic these people are, read this Salon piece, but be forewarned if you’re not a moron yourself it will take intestinal fortitude to make it through it.

What I did notice, though, was the inanity of two plexiglass screens set up, at the insistence of the Biden campaign, to protect the candidates, already standing more than 12 feet apart, from the hidden plague of the coronavirus emerging out of some unknown source and striking them down. This is the campaign that claims to have science on its side and, if you believe that, you’re one of the voters the Dems are counting on.

This is the same party whose celebrity elites are now stripping naked on screen (I am not making this up) as a way of convincing Biden supporters to actually vote. Imbeciles, anyone?

The Nancy Sideshow

The entertainment never stops. While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, otherwise known as AOC, the co-chair of the Biden campaign’s climate change task force, railed at Harris for not denouncing fracking during the debate (Pennsylvania and Ohio voters, take note of what the real plan is), and Bernie Sanders was promising he’d be in charge of America’s healthcare (voters everywhere should take note of that), Nancy Pelosi was running her own sideshow. While the nation’s business in a time of crisis is the least of Ice Cream Nancy’s concerns, she was busy furthering her political agenda. As promised, repeatedly, on Thursday, on Friday she announced her plans to set up a process through which Congress could intervene under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove a president from office. Pelosi – whose own fitness to hold office might reasonably be questioned – insisted her proposal was not to do with President Trump.

“This is not about President Donald Trump,” Pelosi told the media. “He will face the judgment of the voters.”

Well, it might not be about Trump now, but Pelosi has to be looking ahead for her coup attempt, part II, should Trump be re-elected. But wait. There may well be more to this than meets the eye.

By now, you might already have heard this theory, but rest assured it occurred to me first, before anyone else mentioned it on the air: What Pelosi very possibly has in mind is using this process of hers to remove not Trump, but Jell-O Joe, from office. If you consider this to be the Dem plan all along, that the radical Harris is the real candidate and Biden is just a placeholder, it’s not much of a stretch to see how a case can be built that Biden is cognitively incompetent to hold office and he’ll be pushed out so Harris can take over the position with some (however sketchy) semblance of legitimacy.

As I have called it before, what the Dems are planning is the biggest fraud in American political history, and they’re counting on a sufficient number of imbeciles among the electorate to allow them to carry it out.

Smarten up, and don’t let them do it. The country will never recover from the consequences should they succeed.

Watch a replay of the Vice Presidential Debate here.

Read a full transcript of the Vice Presidential Debate here.

Featured image, Imbecile, historic photo, veryhangry.com, used under Fair Use.

Cambrige, Iowa, Milwaukee Road wreck
The Train Wreck Around the Bend

The Train Wreck Around the Bend

By | | Comments 1 comment

On July 31, 1909, the Milwaukee Road’s westbound Overland Limited went off the tracks and wrecked at Cambridge, Iowa. I’m inclined to see this as an allegory for what lies around the bend for the Democratic Party if things continue to shape up as they are.

It’s not just me saying this. The predictions are coming from both sides of the political aisle, with observers ranging from long-time Dem strategist James Carville to a ménage of commentators on the liberal cable networks, to none other than Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the right, echoing similar views.

“I’m scared to death,” Carville ranted on MSNBC following the Iowa Democratic caucuses, something of a train wreck of their own. In a subsequent interview, Carville went on to say, “I don’t know. We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about, and we won. And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here.”

What has Carville and others so petrified is the rise of Socialist Bernie Sanders as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nominee to challenge President Donald Trump in November, and the overall lurch of the party – and seemingly all couple dozen of its presidential wannabes – toward the far left.

“We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.”

Right. Think about it. Plan to do it. Just don’t talk about it. You’d be excused for thinking that’s how politicians usually run their games. But that’s not the only cow, maybe not even the biggest one, lying across the tracks. It’s the ascendancy of the far left of the party, represented by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her left-wing corterie, known as The Squad, in Congress. And it’s the failure of the Democratic establishment’s self-styled savior, former Vice President Joe Biden, to light anything other than a small and flickering flame among Dem voters. More than the chickens coming home to roost, it’s the cows that are coming home to ruminate, right across the tracks.

Old Bernie, backed with a good chunk of the younger vote and others with a weak grasp on the meaning of Socialism or Bernie’s questionable past, eked out a 26.2% of delegate equivalents versus Pete Buttigieg’s 26.13% in the Iowa caucuses (if you can believe the results). And in New Hampshire he came out with 25.8% of the vote versus Mayor Pete’s 24.5%. Not exactly a rousing victory, especially since in 2016 he came away with 60.4% versus Hillary Clinton’s 38% (admittedly in a less crowded primary field). Meanwhile Trump, in the little-heralded Republican primary in New Hampshire, came away with more votes, by far, than any candidate of either party in the history of the state, even doubling the number generated by former President Ronald Reagan when New Hampshire was a far more conservative state than it is today.

The real story of both Iowa and New Hampshire has less to do with Bernie’s numbers as with the crashing and burning of two other candidates, previously considered “front runners” in the contest. In Iowa, both Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden sank respectively to third and fourth place, with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar hot on their heels. And then in New Hampshire Klobuchar jumped to third place, with 19.9% of the vote, exceeding the combined totals of Warren (from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, from which many New Hampshire residents have relocated) and Biden. Biden didn’t even wait around for the results before bailing on the Granite State and his supporters there and heading off to the Palmetto State, South Carolina, which he has called his “fire wall.” Underscoring Biden’s fall from grace, Sanders’ New Hampshire showing was enough to push him within just a day to the top of the polls nationwide, displacing Biden, the previous choice of the Dem establishment.

Are you beginning to see why this situation could be shaping up as a train wreck for the Democratic Party?

Shades of 1968

Police in Lincoln Park, Chicago
Sihouetted view of a group of police officers as they advance through clouds of tear gas in Lincoln Park in an effort to remove protestors during the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, late August 1968. (Photo by Art Shay/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images); used under Fair Use.

To be clear, let me say that, for a number of reasons, I don’t see what happens in June at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee likely to be equivalent to what happened in August 1968 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Well, probably not quite. The country isn’t as worked into as much of a frenzy over the political divide as it was over the Vietnam War going full bore at that time. And probably more people, especially young people, have other things to concern themselves with today than they did in 1968. But it doesn’t mean that something along those lines might not lie ahead for the party.

Looking at the lay of the land going into the Nevada caususes, the South Carolina primary, and then Super Tuesday on March 3, when 16 states and terrirories hold their primaries, caucuses, and conventions, we have Bernie on the left and set to pick up most of the support on that side of the political spectrum. That’s even more likely given the lack of a viable way forward for Warren. Among the more ” centrist” (though not really) candidates, we have Buttigieg, the mayor of a small city in Indiana and a gay man also seen as beholden to Wall Street; Klobuchar, a lesser known senator from Minnesota with a history of abusing her staff; and Biden, an aging former Vice President who has a hard time putting two sentences together, who thinks it’s okay to refer to voters in terms of a 1952 movie on the Canadian Mounties, and whose credibility and integrity has been cast into serious doubt as a result of the Dems’ ill-fated impeachment fiasco targeting Donald Trump. Oh, and then we have another billionaire besides the President, former New York City Mayor (and ex-Republican) Mike “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg, who thinks he can buy his way into the nomination by pumping hundreds of millions of his own funds into the race. Speak of a field of poor choices. Now are you starting to see more of the problem?

Through the use of super delegates, the Dem establishment stole the nomination away from Sanders in 2016. Will they do it again this year? If you think the party poobahs in Washington and on Wall Street and out in the bastions of Dem power across the land (such as they are) aren’t thinking about it, I have a railroad to sell you. They have seen the writing on the wall about the virtually inevitable demise of Joe Biden. And so, seeking another alternative, they’ve already bent the rules to let Bloomberg onto the debate stage, even though he doesn’t have one actual donor other than himself, donor numbers being one of the previous standards for deciding who gets on the stage and who doesn’t. But any port in a storm, and somehow these people (who have had nothing good to say about the 2010 Citizens United decision) apparently think pitting one billionaire against another is a good idea and good for America. Or maybe it’s just good for them? Am I being too cynical here?

Let’s say the Dem establishment manages to once more steal the nomination away from Bernie. What then? Undoubtedly a significant number of his supporters will either stay home on Nov, 3, or they’ll vote for Trump, just as they did in 2016. But some of his supporters are talking about a third option.

As stated by Kyle Jurek, Sanders Field Organizer in Iowa, “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC Convention. Fucking Milwaukee will burn. The billionaire class. The fucking media, pundits. Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those motherfuckers out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.”

This inflammatory rhetoric, videotaped and presented online by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, must have touched a nerve somewhere out amid Sanders’ supporters. The Washington Post incorrectly reported that Jurek was a mere volunteer, not a paid staffer, and when O’Keede challenged that report as false Twitter blocked his account. Lest you think Jurek is an outlyer, remember that it was largely Sanders supporters who, in true Brown Shirt form, turned out en masse on the streets of Chicago on March 11, 2016, to force Trump to cancel a rally he had planned there that night. Do you remember that scene of political obsctruction by mob? I do.

I also remember, if vaguely, the events of August 1968. If you don’t remember them or were too young to have lived through them, you really should update yourself. If nothing else, you’ll learn there are precedents for today’s political divide, and the divide within the Democratic Party, and you might learn something about the power of the disenfranchised (self-styled or real) to disrupt and make their presence known. [Disclaimer: Following a little 1972 imbroglio with the Rutgers University Campus Police on the Rutgers-Newark campus, I was successfully represented by one Stu Ball, who had been part of the Chicago Seven defense team. Life’s little claims to fame.] One way or another, the chances for a schism within the party is almost fore-ordained. Whether it will lead to the kinds of dramatic events that gripped Chicago in 1968 remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, amid the current churn on the Democratic side, the President is at the highest levels of his popularity since taking office and has every reason to be optimistic about his reelection chances, regardless who the Dems wind up putting up against him.

Who put this cow on the tracks?

While it might take a village to raise a child, it took Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of unruly House Dems to help set up the crisis of identity facing the Democratic Party and the chess board likely to lead to the reelection of the President. As I’ve called it in a previous posting, the Dems’ unremitting rage against Trump and their repeated unsuccessful attempts to unseat him and undo the results of the 2016 election is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Cow on the tracks
Cow on the tracks, The Jack Finn Collection; used under Fair Use.

What the ill-fated impeachment did, besides bolstering Trump’s support, was put a spotlight on the possible corruption of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Hunter’s business affairs in Ukraine and China. In the process, Pelosi managed to take the shine off her party establishment’s front runner and throw the whole process into even more disarray than it already was. All of Pelosi’s antics, like tearing up the President’s State of the Union address – seen by many as tasteless and lacking in decorum – can’t stop the impending train wreck she may have engineered.

After what will seem like an eternity of sound-alike debates, charges and counter-charges, and jockeying (or pony soldiering, if you’re Joe Biden) for position among the candidates, June is likely to roll around in, say, a mere four months, and then we’ll all get to see if the Dem train stays on the rails or runs off into a ravine. If nothing else, it should be entertaining to watch.

Featured image: Cambridge, Iowa, train wreck, unknown, presumed public domain.

 

Nancy and Donald
Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

By | | Comments 4 comments

“I  don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV. If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction.”

– Barack Obama

That might be a warning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be advised to heed as the Democrats in Congress push relentlessly ahead in their quest to undo the election of President Donald Trump. On the flimsiest of charges, they appear intent to proceed with impeaching the President, a move born of their hatred for Trump and doomed to fail. As they waltz merrily over the cliff, they are bolstering Trump’s approval ratings and almost certainly aiding his reelection chances.

Depending on what media you pay attention to, you might either, a) think the case against Trump is ironclad and he is nothing short of a tyrant and reprobate, or b) that he’s been railroaded by political animus and blind prejudice. There is plenty of agida stirred up on both sides, largely fostered by selective picking and choosing of what to focus on by various media sources, not to mention plenty of outright lying (I say that having heard it with my own ears) and obfuscation by more than a few supposed journalists.

For instance, as just one example, if your source for news (I use the term advisedly) is CNN, you never would have heard the opening statement of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican, at the committee’s Dec. 11 session with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, nor would you have heard Horowitz’s mention of the 17 clear errors and omissions committed by the FBI in seeking the FISA court order that began the whole Russia affair that was scurrilously pinned on Trump. All you would have heard were statements by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein eliciting responses from Horowitz that seemed to indicate all was done properly, which – if you somehow heard the rest of what Horowitz had to say — it decidedly wasn’t. You also would have gotten the full opening statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat and one of the leaders of the anti-Trump mob, in the impeachment hearings his committee was conducting.

I’ll be doing a separate analysis of Horowitz’s findings and report in a future posting. For now, let’s just quote what Horowitz had to say about the claim by former FBI Director James Comey – who now has passed from unbridled arrogance to perhaps certifiable narcissism – that the IG’s report vindicates him in his role in initiating the investigations of Trump.

“The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said.

Another Big Swing, A Bigger Miss

At the risk of sounding redundant, the current episode is just the latest in the Dems’ ineffectual attempts to take out Trump. I laid out the basic game plan in my three-part series, “Another Swing, Another Miss.” In Part I I detailed how the Dems’ repeated efforts to unseat Trump amounted to one strike after another. In Part II I detailed how there is indeed a Ukraine scandal, being used as the pretext for the impeachment effort, but the scandal lies not with Trump but with former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter. And in Part III I described the much bigger, but little reported on, scandal involving the Bidens and China. Now we’re going to see how three strikes aren’t enough for the Dems’ to give it up and how they are following their anti-Trump obsession right over the political cliff.

The process took a step closer to the cliff’s edge earlier on the day I am drafting this as the committee headed by Nadler, the Wiffer-in-Chief, voted entirely along party lines to move two articles of impeachment to the full House for a final vote, ostensibly in the coming week. This followed a contentious 14-hour committee debate that ended suddenly at Nadler’s order at 11 p.m. last night, prompting Republican members to call the process a “kangaroo court” and Nadler’s order “Stalinesque.”

After ridiculous Democrat charges of “bribery” and even “treason” as hearings were under way in the House Intelligence Committee, headed by the shifty Rep. Adam Shiff, the final two articles are nothing less than anti-climatic. The best they could come up with is “abuse of power” – based on the allegations that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to seek an investigation of his presumed political rival, Joe Biden – and “obstruction of Congress” – based on the President’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, which he has termed a “witch hunt.” While the Constitution says a President can be removed for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” there is no federal or state statute against either charge.

Given further that the White House released the full transcript of the July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which there was no indication of the quid pro quo Dems’ have insisted was present, and the right of a President to demand an investigation of suspected corruption in conduct of foreign affairs, the first article appears DOA. As for the second article, disputes between an Administration and Congress over executive privilege are legion throughout the life of the republic. This Administration’s refusal to turn over documents or permit members of the Administration to testify would not be the first stand-off between the two co-equal branches of government. Ultimately, the courts could rule on the matter, though the Supreme Court, the third co-equal branch, has been reluctant to wade into such matters.

Let’s not forget that former Attorney General Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress, too, and the total penalty for him, under the Obama Administration, was a big zero.

Speaker Pelosi, not known for coherent statements, was even more incoherent than usual in trying to defend the articles the committee came up with.

“I myself am not a lawyer,” babbled Pelosi. “Sometimes I act like one. Not as often as I act as a doctor. I practice medicine on the side without benefit of diploma, too.” Huh? But wait, she wasn’t done. “This is a decision that was recommended by our working together with our committee chairs, our attorneys and the rest.” Not done yet. “And they (the articles) are … uh … a continuation of a pattern of misbehavior on the part of the President. People are realizing, when they see what that was, they think, the public thinks, that they should be determining who the President of the United States is, not some foreign power.” Well, yeah, and that “public” is who elected Trump as President, isn’t it? The same “public” whose vote you’re trying to undo because you don’t like how it turned out? And finally, “It’s no use having the discussion here. This is a discussion we will take to the floor of the Senate.”

Going Over the Cliff

And that’s where the whole process goes over the cliff. Given that it takes 67 senators to vote in favor of removing the President from office, that there are 53 Republican, 45 Democratic, and 2 independent members of the Senate, and a vote will be almost entirely along party lines, there is no chance the President will be removed from office.

There has been some backing and forthing between Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over whether it will be a long trial with lots of the witnesses, like Hunter Biden and Adam Schiff, that Trump has said he’d like to call, or a quick process, that McConnell seemed to favor. In reality, it is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who would actually preside over the trial and will have a lot to say about its conduct. Regardless, the end result is fait accompli. As McConnell has said, “The case is so darn weak, coming over from the House, we all know how it’s going to end. There is no chance the President is gonna be removed from office.”

Meanwhile, polls have been showing that a majority, albeit a slight majority, of Americans now are opposed to impeachment, and even more opposed to removing him from office, and Trump’s favorability ratings have been rising through all this. At least one major poll, Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll, as of Dec. 13 puts Trump’s approval at 49% (it recently was up to 51%), three points above where President Obama was at the same point in his first term.

None of this can inspire confidence among Dems given that the outlook for 2020 becomes ever more problematic for them. Some major polls are now showing Trump beating all or most of the Democrat presidential front runners in key battle ground states. Throw in the massive Conservative victory in the UK on Dec. 12, and there is plenty of grounds for Pelosi and the left-leaning Dems, to whom she seems to have capitulated, to take heed of Obama’s warning on what to do when they’re headed for a cliff.

Photo Credits: Nancy Pelosi: Unknown; Donald Trump: Reuters. Both used under Fair Use.

Image by Hasan Almasi Unsplash
The Pretense Is Over

The Pretense Is Over

By | | Comments 0 Comment

We had an election this week but it would be hard to recognize that. Whether in the media or in the streets, in the halls of Congress or even in the counting rooms of electoral officials, one side seems unable to swallow the results of the voting, which didn’t turn out as it had hoped and been promised. And now, in the aftermath, the pretense of civility, as thin as it might have been, has been cast aside and the true colors of the left are out in the open for all to see.

The left had been expecting a blue wave, a massive Democratic renunciation of the current administration and all that it stands for, and instead the voters returned what, at best, might be termed a blue ripple. While the Dems took control of the House of Representatives – which the party out of the White House does more often than not in off-year elections – it was by a much thinner margin than they had been expecting. Meanwhile, the Republicans deepened their control of the Senate, something that historically has happened only a handful of times in off-year elections, and which in real political terms is far more significant than control of the House.

Even more galling to the Dems was that Republican candidates who had embraced and been embraced by the President did better than the ones who didn’t, to the point where voters cast out such Democratic stalwarts as Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Joe Donnelly in Indiana in favor of Trump-backed candidates. While it wasn’t a big surprise that Heidi Heitkamp, who had angered North Dakota voters by her vote against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, was soundly defeated – just as fellow Democrat Joe Manchin, who had voted in favor of Kavanaugh, was returned to the Senate in West Virginia – the loss of Missouri and Indiana came as a bigger shock.

Apparently, though, it wasn’t enough to simply respect the will of the people and lick one’s wounds and wait for the next election year. Instead, Dems are resorting to some of their old, tried-and-true ways, in places as diverse as Florida, Arizona, and Georgia. The idea, unspoken but obvious by the tactics being employed, is if you can’t win an election you do your best to steal it. We’ll get to that a little later in this piece, but there are more egregious assaults on our democracy under way at present I think need to be discussed first.

Antifa, that group of anarchists that bills itself as anti-fascist but actually embodies and practices fascist tactics, has escalated its violent and confrontational actions to target commentators and journalists it doesn’t approve of. On Wednesday night, an Antifa mob descended on the Washington home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. They threatened Carlson and his wife – fortunately their four children were not in the house at the time – vandalized their home and car, blocked off streets, and yelled about pipe bombs.

“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night!” the mob chanted.

The group’s Twitter feed – which Twitter has yet to take down – carries the same threat in a sticky post, and the group used a practice known as “doxxing” to publish the addresses of conservative commentators Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and others. Meanwhile, left-wing commentators refuse to concede that the attack on Carlson’s home was staged by a “mob,” calling it instead a “protest.” Some protest. Meanwhile, this kind of threatening behavior has become a commonplace as so-called “protesters” drive public figures from restaurants and other public places, egged on by no less than members of Congress, most notably California Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

Building on the neo-fascist theme, if you weren’t locked in a bank vault all day today, you heard the phrase, “This was a glass-breaking moment,” or some version thereof, repeated over and over, ad nauseum, by the parrots of the mainstream media, as well as by some politicians. Ostensibly what they were referring to was the President’s decision to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General with Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’ chief of staff, who will be filling the post on an acting basis. Never mind that the ones using this expression are the same people who criticized Sessions and his initial appointment as AG. Apparently consistency has nothing to do with it when politics are concerned (I already discussed the whole issue of hypocrisy among the Dems, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it).

The real issue, though, isn’t consistency or its lack. The real issue concerns the utterly and irretrievably disgusting use of that phrase, “glass-breaking moment,” on the exact 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht – Crystal Night or, as it is otherwise known, the Night of Broken Glass, one of the darkest times in all of recorded human history. It was the night of November 9-10, 1938, when German paramilitary forces and civilians launched a massive pogrom against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The exact number killed is not known, though it is estimated in the hundreds, and 267 synagogues were destroyed along with 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses that were damaged or destroyed. Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht, that Night of Broken Glass, is marked as the beginning of the Holocaust. And it is to this monumental atrocity that these despicable excuses for human beings compare the firing of Jeff Sessions. Given the lockstep lack of originality among most in the media, one has to assume that this choice of phrase was carefully chosen on this specific day. The inescapable question is, now, who are the real anti-Semites?

And just when we thought it was impossible to stoop any lower, Senator Richard Blumenthal, that notorious liar from Connecticut, himself said that this was a glass-breaking moment, this action that is every bit the right of any President, to change members of his cabinet. Let’s not for even the scintilla of a second forget that Blumenthal is Jewish, and Blumenthal’s father fled Nazi Germany for the United States when he was 17 to protect his very life from the evil that had taken over Germany. And now his son was reducing all that to a glib political sound bite. Again, do we have to ask who the real anti-Semites are?

It’s hard to swallow my disgust over all this, but I will hold it down so we can get back to the electoral shenanigans I mentioned higher up in the piece. I saved these for last since, as bad as they are, I think the other things mentioned are even more serious and, as newer developments, pose an even bigger threat to our democratic institutions and way of life. Not that the integrity of our elections isn’t important, since it is, but the threat to electoral integrity is part of our history, considering how many dead Democrats have come out of their graves to vote over the years in various parts of the realm.

Anyway, in my own state of Florida, Congressman Ron DeSantis came out on top Tuesday over his radical opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, in what can only be described as a squeaker of a vote tally in the governor’s race, with less than 1 percent separating them. And Governor Rick Scott defeated long-time Democratic incumbent Senator Bill Nelson by an even more narrow margin in the senatorial contest, within the half a percent needed to trigger a machine recount in the Sunshine State. While Scott declared victory late on election night, even without Nelson’s concession, Gillum later actually conceded to DeSantis. Well, that was until those trusty stalwarts of Democratic electoral shenanigans, the Broward and Palm Beach county elections supervisors, took over. And their actions have thrown both key races into turmoil.

Most people in the country above the age of 21 remember the hanging-chad controversy of Palm Beach County that held up results of the 2000 presidential election for weeks. While those events predated the current elections supervisor, Susan Bucher, Bucher seems to be prepared to continue the tradition. And not to be outdone, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes has a long history of issues going back through her 14 years in the position. Delayed counts, misplaced and missent ballots, and misprinted and destroyed ballots have been chronic issues and have led to several law suits filed against her over the years.

The most recent law suit, filed by Scott against Snipes since Tuesday’s election, has in just the past couple of hours gone against Snipes. Broward Circuit Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips found in Scott’s favor, saying in her ruling, “This court finds once again Broward County is under the microscope and being viewed by the entire nation. Hearing argument, this court finds that there has been a violation of the Florida Constitution, the Florida statute public records act and pursuant to the applicable case law.”

The question is whether the problems afflicting the count in Broward and Palm Beach are the result of corruption or incompetence. As the other Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, noted, the kindest judgment would be to say they are the result of incompetence. But after years of repetitive issues, that judgment might be far more kind than is justified. Even incompetents can show some sign of a learning curve.

Meanwhile, counting issues persist in the U.S. senatorial contest in Arizona between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. You might recall that Sinema was telling people it was okay to join the Taliban while McSally was fighting combat missions over, among other places, Afghanistan, and also successfully suing the Defense Department over its policy requiring U.S. servicewomen while stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the abaya when off-duty. In any case, three days after the polls closed Tuesday, some 600,000 ballots remain to be counted, mainly in Maricopa and Pima counties, home of Phoenix and Tuscon, respectively, both Democratic strongholds. And ballots continue to turn up in unlikely places. How can this be, one asks? Incompetence, or corruption? There is that great choice again.

In yet another hotly contested race, the Georgia governor’s race — you will remember this as the race that Oprah weighed in on, in support of Democrat Stacy Abrams — votes continue to be counted, too (are we seeing a repetitive common thread here?), and those pesky missing votes continue to show up. So far Republican Brian Kemp holds a narrow lead over Abrams, and if Kemp’s tally stays above 50% he will avoid a run-off election as called for by Georgia law. But days after polls closed, the counting (and vote finding) goes on. And now CNN has come out with a piece by Van Jones (now there‘s an impartial observer) urging Abrams not to let Kemp steal the election. So much for journalistic balance. But that’s a whole other subject.

We keep hearing from the Dems how they want every vote to count, but it seems the votes they want to count are those favoring their candidates. Disenfranchisement through extralegal and illegal means doesn’t seem to matter to them, except when its their candidates affected. As Nelson’s chosen attorney, Marc Elias – the attorney who retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign to produce the infamous and largely bogus “dossier” that had Trump peeing on a bed in Moscow – said, he didn’t come to Florida for a recount but rather to see Nelson elected.

With all this going on, one has to ask who needs Russians to meddle in our elections when Americans are doing a perfectly respectable job of mucking things up on their own?

I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but all this continues to leave me deeply troubled, and things stay on course in a very negative direction. Negative, and scary.

Historical Footnote and Disclaimer: I know Bill Nelson personally from when I was a reporter in Brevard County, Fla., in the 1980s and he was a congressman, and I can’t imagine how anyone in their right mind could vote for this guy. There, I said it.