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The Daily Skirmish
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"If you're still alive after this post I am shocked.
Democrats will not put up with your rational thinking. You will be erased..." |
11/23/22 - Give Thanks for the Rule of Law
Let us give thanks for small favors. Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot reversed course and will once again prosecute misdemeanor thefts of necessary items between $100 and $750. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a victory over the progressive prosecutors - the Soros DAs, a group that includes Creuzot - who have been busy dismantling the criminal justice system in dozens of localities across the country.
Creuzot said he ended the policy not to prosecute these thefts because, he claimed, data shows the policy had no effect on crime, one way or the other. The nonprosecution policy, also implemented by progressive prosecutors elsewhere, is straight out of the abolitionist playbook. ‘Abolitionists’ are far-left crazies who want to abolish all police, criminal courts, and prisons. Like them, Creuzot believes in ‘decriminalizing poverty’ and ‘ending mass incarceration’, attitudes which led him to stop prosecuting misdemeanor theft. He also stopped prosecuting criminal trespass and misdemeanor marijuana cases.
In April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton sent Creuzot a letter that hit the nail on the head, making the point I’ve made many times that progressive prosecutors are not authorized or entitled to tear up criminal statutes duly passed by their state legislatures. The letter states:
Exactly, and not just in Texas. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted last week to impeach progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for, among other things, his refusal to prosecute prostitution and retail theft. He also fired 30 experienced prosecutors. The consequences of Krasner’s insane policies are a sky-high murder rate, ubiquitous shootings on public transportation and near schools and, because of increasing retail theft, numerous businesses leaving the city. The impeachment vote is a first step in a process that could remove Krasner from office.
The progressive prosecutor in Baltimore asked the court to give an armed robber first offender treatment that could result in a clean record. The robber was set free and went on to shoot and kill a sheriff’s deputy.
Another thing to be thankful for is the fact resistance to the Soros DAs is growing and getting better organized. You might remember that progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin was recalled in San Francisco earlier this year. A progressive candidate just lost her race for a district attorney’s spot in Arizona. A new group, formed to fight progressive prosecutors at the ballot box, helped defeat a number of them around the country in the recent elections.
Good. The progressive prosecutors are trying to tear down the Rule of Law, tear down the economy, tear down the criminal justice system, and sow chaos throughout the land so people will clamor for left-wing authoritarians to keep them safe.
So let us give thanks and hope the trend against them continues.
11/22/22 - Tales from the Crypto
The spectacular collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange is not just a business story. It’s a Washington swamp story and Republicans will be investigating it when they take control of the House in January. At issue is whether “Individuals within the Democrat Party accepted money with knowledge of potential criminal activity occurring at FTX.”
High-flying FTX bought Super Bowl ads and sports facility naming rights. It amassed a net worth of $32 billion to become one of the largest crypto exchanges in just three years with 28-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried at the helm. It lost half its worth in a matter of days when customers lost confidence and essentially started a run on the bank. It was reported Bankman-Fried secretly siphoned off $10 billion in customer funds and transferred it to another trading firm he also owned, run by his girlfriend. The trading firm invested in FTX’s crypto token, the financial roundtrip prompting investor concern. FTX was left without sufficient assets to pay customers pulling their money out, and bankruptcy ensued.
FTX has been called a Ponzi scheme, but it sounds more like embezzlement and fraud. News reports don’t talk about money from new investors being used to pay previous investors, as in a Ponzi scheme. Instead, $1-2 billion simply vanished. Some of it went into buying $121 million worth of property in the Bahamas, but a lot of it was going into buying influence in Washington.
FTX, Bankman-Fried, and other FTX top executives poured money into Democrat politicians and liberal causes - $28 million went to a Democrat pro-COVID lockdown PAC, and $4 million to a group called Reproductive Freedom for All. Democrat politicians who benefitted include Senators Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez. Bankman-Fried gave more than $5 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and was the second largest Democrat donor in the 2022 midterms. Money also went to Republicans, but it’s common for corporations to make contributions on both sides of the aisle to hedge their bets in the influence game. In all, an estimated $57 million went to Democrat candidates and groups and $22 million to Republican candidates and groups. [Steve Moore newsletter, 11/21/22]
Another Democrat politician who benefitted is Maxine Waters. There are pictures of her and Bankman-Fried with their arms around each other, smiling. Another picture shows her blowing kisses to him. And this is the woman who, as current chair of the House Financial Services Committee, will be holding hearings on FTX next month. Moreover, nine members of the committee — seven Democrats and two Republicans — received more than a combined $300,000 in political contributions from Bankman-Fried and others at FTX. It doesn’t take a genius to see the conflict of interest here. It’s shaping up to be a whitewash, with the chair of the committee blowing kisses at the perp.
Meanwhile, critics are asking ‘what did the SEC know and when did it know it?’ It turns out the father of the girlfriend who ran the trading firm I mentioned earlier worked with Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, when both were professors at MIT. Gensler, former campaign finance chair for Hillary Clinton, has been criticized for not seeing FTX was going off the rails. A famous short seller who spotted trouble at Enron and other places, had been publicly warning FTX looked like a scam. In addition, there are allegations Gensler was actively helping FTX find legal loopholes to escape regulation.
Bankman-Fried insists all the money he has been throwing around is completely innocent and not meant to influence lawmakers or regulators. The House Republicans will be testing that assertion come January, and we’ll see just how innocent all of this really is.
11/21/22 - Save the Planet, Kill Yourself
The United Nations warned in 2018 we only had 12 years left for global warming to be kept to a minimum of 1.5 degrees Celsius or further warming would bring catastrophic droughts, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of poor, suffering humans. Urgent changes were needed, OR ELSE! Urgent, I tell you, URGENT!
You wouldn’t know it from the results of this year’s annual U.N. climate summit which just ended with a deal for rich nations to transfer money to poor nations, but no deal to reduce emissions. So let me get this straight: We have eight years left to keep the planet from burning up, but nothing could be done at the climate summit on the urgent business of curbing emissions?
The whole thing is a joke, a psyop - we’re all being manipulated like puppets on a string. One of the countries eligible for climate reparations under the new deal is China, a rich nation which built almost a hundred new coal-fired power plants last year. The joke just got worse.
One indicia of psychological manipulation is the way they cranked up the propaganda machine for this year’s summit. The U.N. Secretary-General said nations must cooperate or perish - PERISH, I tell you. We’re on “a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” he said. Oh, my, that sounds dreadful, what will we ever do? The only thing becoming overheated is the rhetoric. Then there was another sea level scare which arrived right on time, right when the summit was set to begin. The idea the seas are rising because of climate change is bunk. A recent study showed coastal cities are sinking due to groundwater extraction, giving the illusion sea levels are rising. A human-caused problem, to be sure, but not one that can be fixed by eating bugs or buying an electric car.
Another indicia of manipulation is data tampering. I’ve told you previously how climatistas are tampering with temperature sensors and re-writing satellite data. Now comes word they’re lying about the number of 90-degree days increasing in the U.S. They conveniently start their graphs in 1960, deliberately ignoring the fact there were many more 90-degree days in the 1930s than there are now.
A third indicia we’re all being manipulated is the increasing frequency with which climatistas are revealing their true agendas. I told you before the summit Greta Thunberg’s true aim is to smash the capitalist system. She’s not the only one. John Kerry wants to create artificial demand signals in the marketplace for electric cars, renewables, fake meat, and, yes, eating bugs. By the way, it’s been reported John Kerry wants to leave his climate czar post to make more money for himself raising capital for clean energy projects. I keep telling you, these people need to put out financial disclosure statements every time they open their mouth and pontificate about the wonders of clean energy or talk up carbon trading markets. Selling soap, or selling clean energy and carbon credits - what’s the difference? Speaking of hidden agendas, the open borders crowd is rebranding illegal aliens as ‘climate migrants’ to boost acceptance for open borders policies. More manipulation.
The logical conclusion, if you let yourself be manipulated by all this, is that you must kill yourself to save the planet. You have no right to emit carbon dioxide or consume anything. This is what some climate gurus have been advocating for some time. So get the ‘Save the Planet, Kill Yourself’ t-shirt, sing the song, then it’s off to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland with you. As one climate guru put it, the earth will be so much better off when there aren’t any people on it.
11/18/22 - Taking Stock of Election Integrity Efforts
Believe what you like about the 2020 presidential election, but there’s no denying the widespread belief - even among Democrats - the election was stolen motivated a lot of people to work to tighten up future elections. The way I hear the story, donors poured $30 million dollars into election integrity efforts on the professional Right. You can add to that hundreds of citizen’s groups and thousands of individuals in the grassroots all working to secure elections like never before. So what do they have to show for all that treasure and effort?
A lot, actually. There were fewer reports of late night ballot drops and Republican poll watchers being blocked this time around. A Republican lawsuit forced Nevada and Arizona to offer poll-worker data to ensure both parties are equally represented at voting sites. Another Republican challenge struck down a New York law that would have added 900,000 noncitizens to the voter rolls. There was yet another court ruling upholding voter ID, something most Americans support. High voter turnout in Georgia put the nail in the coffin of the Democrat’s phony narrative new election integrity laws passed by Republicans in several states are voter suppression. Jim Crow 2.0? Hardly. It was all Democrat hogwash. Oh, and what happened to all that Republican violence and all those disruptive Republican election workers we were supposed to see on Election Day? It didn’t happen. It was just hogwash. You can put it right next to all the other Democrat hogwash. Now, left-wing organizations have to explain to their base why it didn’t happen and they’re saying it was because elections officials were ready for trouble. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy.
So there were some wins, but we still have miles to go before we can express confidence in our elections again. A number of suspicious things happened in the midterms. Ballots arrived after the legal deadline with no adequate explanation at the Detroit bureau of elections, reminiscent of the 2020 election. A Democrat candidate got 1,100 votes in a town in New Hampshire that only has 700 people - how does that happen?
Turning to another subject, there is now something of a split among conservatives as to how to deal with the changes Democrats have brought to the election process in the last couple of years - what should we do going forward?
One school of thought holds the Democrats are winning elections because they have succeeded in gaming the system. People on this side of the debate point to Democrat victories in states that sent out over a million absentee ballots or states with permanent absentee ballot lists - ask for an absentee ballot once and you keep getting them in future elections. Having this many ballots floating around facilitates fraud and produced Democrat wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. Republicans did better in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia where absentee voting rules are stricter. Swing states with same-day registration like Michigan and Wisconsin went blue in this election. Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia don’t have same-day registration and went red. This school of thought believes all went according to Democrat plan and that Republicans should work to reverse things like mail-in voting and drop boxes.
But a new school of thought holds Republicans should accept all these things are here to stay and should learn to adapt to the new environment. Republicans should become aggressive in ballot curing, ballot harvesting where legal, and encouraging mail-in voting to avoid Election Day glitches. Adherents to this school of thought attribute the Republicans flipping the U.S. House to aggressive Republican ballot curing and harvesting in California. Republican candidates in Arizona urged voters to make sure their ballots were counted and to cure them if they were not.
Call me old school, but I’m not convinced. I get suspicious whenever anyone tells me I should do what the Democrats want me to do. Look at Michigan - voters just approved a ballot initiative from the Democrat side that will loosen voter ID, institutionalize early voting, mandate the use of drop boxes, create a permanent absentee ballot list, narrow the ability of citizens to challenge elections, and allow private money to be used for election administration. As for the latter, it’s pretty clear the true purpose of private money is to allow Democrat election officials to engage in voter registration drives to sign up more Democrats to vote. The consequence of all these changes the Democrats wanted will be less secure elections in Michigan in the future.
That’s the Democrat plan and I, for one, am not going to go along with it. I will continue my work with other activists in my state to fight all the changes the Democrats have made to our elections process. The Democrats will not quit. They will continue to try to subvert our elections. We must continue to oppose them and keep working to right the ship.
11/17/22 - How to Cheat in the Next Election
It’s amazing how many ways Democrats have come up with to cheat in elections.
Ballot harvesters were caught on video stuffing drop boxes with stacks of ballots in Arizona, where ballot harvesting is illegal. It’s legal in Pennsylvania where Democrat election officials voted to allow harvesting of a hundred votes at a time in nursing homes. It may be legal, but I still call it cheating because Democrats have a long history of committing voter fraud in nursing homes where many residents are no longer compos mentis.
One reason ballot harvesting is a bad idea is that it allows cheaters to pay people for their votes. A Texas man admitted a Democrat nominee paid him $200 for every fraudulent absentee ballot he could deliver in the 2016 election.
A Democrat poll worker in Indiana told voters how to vote and even pressed “straight Democrat” on a machine for one of them.
A group of unidentified men in black threw an independent poll challenger out of the big voting center in Detroit in the August primary for asking why a voting machine was apparently connected to the Internet. A court subsequently ruled the Secretary of State did not have authority to issue rules to allow poll challengers to be thrown out for asking too many questions.
Elections officials in St. Louis told volunteer poll workers not to enforce the state’s new photo ID law.
So excuse me for not taking Democrat election ‘reforms’ - so-called - at face value. The only reason Democrats want mail-in voting and refuse to clean the voter rolls is so they can cheat.
Voting by mail is a mess. Some ballots end up on the ground, others are sent to vacant lots. The number returned as undeliverable can run into the tens of thousands in any given county.
Because Democrats refuse to clean the voter rolls in many areas, ballots are sent to dead voters, people are sent duplicate ballots, and ballots are mailed to people who have moved away. Pennsylvania sent 240,000 ballots to voters for the 2022 election without verifying their identity. Michigan had 26,000 dead voters on the rolls last year. Minnesota had over 500 duplicates.
Why does it matter? Because you have to have dirty voter rolls to cheat. First, you have to grab a bunch of ballots floating around from mail-in voting, for example. But then you have to match up your fraudulently cast ballots with records of voters still on the rolls who are not going to vote this time, like dead people. You can’t do that very easily if the voter rolls are cleaned up.
Among other efforts to clean up voter rolls, there is a team working to identify phantom names and incorrect addresses on the rolls in Wisconsin and about 20 other states. This team is using fractal programming technology which starts with small batches but can be scaled up to millions of records quickly and inexpensively. The team will eventually be working in all 50 states.
It’s citizen-led efforts like this that will make cheating much harder and restore confidence in our elections, once again.
11/16/22 - The Boast in the Machine
Voting machines caused chaos in Maricopa County, Arizona on Election Day:
An election judge in a Republican area in the county believes the problems were intentional. The tabulators were set up for 19-inch ballots, but the ballots were 20 inches and rejected.
I wish I could tell you these were the only problems with machines in this year’s elections, but there were lots more.
Twenty-five thousand votes for a third-party candidate for U.S. Senate in New York disappeared overnight. This has not been explained, as far as I’m aware. Also in New York, identical election results were reported across multiple counties, with Democrats winning every time. How does that happen?
Voting machines went out of service in New Jersey and Texas.
Security features were found to be turned off in several voting machines in Georgia. This was discovered when a fraudulent ballot printed on looseleaf paper turned up. The machines are supposed to detect when the paper does not meet requirements. So who turned off the security features and why?
A Democrat in Colorado was arrested for inserting a USB flash drive into a voting machine during a primary election in June. This is one way to get a machine to flip votes.
We keep hearing that voting machines don’t connect to the Internet and, thus, results can’t be tampered with from the outside, but the Colorado Secretary of State admitted in writing Dominion machines have Wi-Fi connectivity.
An audit in New Mexico last month found a 25 percent difference between machine counts and hand counts in a primary election.
In a Virginia county, it was found the number of votes recorded by scanners was different from the number of paper ballots dropping down into the box below. How does that happen?
None of this inspires confidence, especially when you hear things like Barack Obama saying in 2008 “I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines.” Or a Dominion voting system executive caught on video explaining to election officials in 2020 how to use the machines to alter election results. Or the director of an electronic voting system company admitting that an entire election in Venezuela was stolen when a million votes were flipped in 2017.
No wonder some people want to get rid of the machines entirely and count paper ballots by hand again, like in France which doesn’t seem to have any trouble getting it done the same day. Short of that, machine certification standards could be tightened, elections officials could do a better job of selecting equipment that actually meets specifications, and machines could be tested more rigorously before elections. Whatever the solution, it’s clear the present state of affairs causes distrust in our elections and is, therefore, untenable.
11/15/22 - The Elections: Using the Perfect to Spur the Good
Yesterday, I told you about a set of problems that were identified and fixed in the run-up to the elections. Unfortunately, it’s a game of whack-a-mole. Plenty more problems arose in the 2022 cycle that need to be fixed before we can have confidence in our elections again.
We start with the Arizona governor’s race, which media outlets have just called for the Democrat, Katie Hobbs. Problems with voting machines not working lead to long lines and wait times at one out of every five precincts. Critics said the best machines were sent to liberal districts, handing Republicans the short end of the stick. A judge refused to extend voting hours in Republican areas. Another problem: every mail-in ballot in Maricopa County - Arizona’s largest, near Phoenix - is sent from the post office to a printing company to be scanned before being taken to an election office. This takes 10-12 days, keeps elections officials from knowing how many ballots have been returned, and creates additional opportunities for fraud. The whole process could be taken in-house for a relatively small cost, begging the question: why all these extra hoops? All of these happenings in Maricopa County have been heavily criticized as unnecessary and not normal, things that don’t occur in other jurisdictions that manage to count their votes by Election Day.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for an investigation into malfeasance and possible criminal conduct in the Harris County elections near Houston. One of the problems cited is not enough ballots in Republican precincts. The problems in Harris County are long-standing, with the previous elections administrator resigning in March after it was discovered 10,000 ballots weren’t counted in the primary. The Texas Secretary of State has scheduled an audit of Harris County’s midterm elections results.
Funny how so many problems in our elections only affect Republicans. Do you think that’s an accident? Before you say I’m crazy, listen to this: An election worker in Philadelphia was caught on video inside a polling place telling an undercover journalist to “vote Democrat”. “I asked you to vote the ... Democrat down ballot because we’re trying to focus on, if the Democrats win, then at least they represent us,” the worker said. When the elections judge saw the video, he said, “That doesn’t look good.” Ya think?
I wish I could tell you that was the end of the problems last week, but we’re not even close:
More illegal electioneering took place in Philadelphia, with Democrat poll greeters not standing far enough away from the door at a polling place and Democrat candidate posters plastered on the building itself, all of which is illegal.
Also near Philadelphia, mail-in ballots were pre-processed without poll watchers present in violation of state law.
Republicans showed up to vote in Detroit, only to be told they already voted. This is an indication their identities were stolen and their ballots were fraudulently cast in their names.
Conservative Jewish voters in New York had to stand in line for hours, a problem not reported in liberal precincts.
All of this doesn’t even count apparent funny business with voting machines, which I’ll tell you about tomorrow.
But, for now, realize our elections process will never be perfect, there will always be holes and opportunities for fraud. The work will never be finished. All we can do is keep banging away, fix the holes we can, and go on to the next. We can strive for perfection, but we won’t ever achieve it. However, with enough effort, we can reach the point where things will be tight enough we can have confidence in our elections again, but only if enough people keep working at it.
11/14/22 - Election Problem Deniers, Take Note
Today, I start a series on problems with our election system. The election problem deniers will tell you ‘nothing to see here, move along,’ but there’s no shortage of undeniable problems.
Let’s start with stories about courts and government officials who rectified a number of problems in the days and weeks running up to the election.
The Delaware Supreme Court struck down no-fault absentee balloting and same-day voter registration because they violated the state constitution.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated the use of drop boxes which the state elections commission had instituted without authority.
Elections officials in Pennsylvania were allowing mail-in ballots returned with missing or incorrect dates on the envelope, but the state Supreme Court put a stop to it.
A Virginia judge ordered county election officials to follow state law and assign the main poll workers from different political parties in each precinct. I’m in touch with activists from all over the country and ‘party parity’, as it is called, remains a problem in many places.
Hmm... I detect a pattern here, so far. The problems I’ve mentioned came about because Democrats broke the law. They’re scofflaws.
That means they have a lot in common with people recently charged with voter fraud. Arizona indicted two people with illegal ballot harvesting last month. They collected ballots from early voters and put them in a drop box. That’s illegal in Arizona, but remains a problem in states like Virginia where the practice is legal. It’s a bad practice. Ballot harvesters have been known to pay people for votes, as in a ballot harvesting scheme just uncovered in Florida. Also, nothing prevents fraudsters from stealing mail ballots, say, from apartment building lobbies, filling them out themselves, and dropping them in a ballot box. There are too many loose ballots floating around before election day to think ballot harvesting is a good idea. Ballot harvesting is a Democrat idea. No wonder they don’t want to talk about it, or the unsecured drop boxes that enable ballot harvesting schemes. The Chester County Pennsylvania elections board settled a lawsuit by agreeing to secure their drop boxes after activist surveillance video showed people dropping multiple ballots into the boxes. Voters can only put their own ballot into the boxes, not ballots collected from others. The board agreed to put up cameras and staff the boxes.
Democrats are still trying to hang on to changes made to the electoral process because of COVID, but a state judge ruled New York can no longer use COVID as an excuse for emergency rules and knocked down absentee voting rules that had been expanded during the pandemic. Fewer loose ballots floating around - sorry, Democrats.
For the Democrats to sustain their phony election denier and voter suppression narratives, they’re going to have to prove that all the courts, law enforcement and elections officials I mentioned here today are election deniers who are trying to suppress the vote. They’re all part of a vast conspiracy trying to deny people their civil rights. Good luck with that.
The correct analysis is the Democrats caused a bunch of problems, they won’t talk about the problems they themselves created, and they won’t fix them until forced to. Fine, they’re on notice: the process of fixing our elections has begun and we won’t stop until we are confident we have free and fair elections once again. Don’t mess with OUR right to vote.
11/11/22 - The Problems with ‘Free Stuff’
South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion in Tuesday’s election, leaving just 11 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs to include middle-class able-bodied childless adults making almost $40,000 a year. I hope the remaining states hold the line because they will be in a world of hurt if they don’t.
The first problem is voters demanding free stuff with nary a thought of how to pay for it. Missouri voters previously demanded Medicaid expansion, but the state couldn’t figure out a sustainable way to pay for it. Expansion would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but nobody knew what the funding mechanism would be. The same thing happened in Idaho and Oklahoma - Medicaid expansion occurred without a stable permanent funding source. Since Medicaid is now such a huge part of state budgets, every expansion state faces fights in the legislature about raising taxes or pulling money from other priorities like education to fund more government-sponsored healthcare.
That’s just for openers. Expansion states face a raft of other problems. Enrollment always exceeds expectations and many states have hit the wall in terms of being able to afford their programs. I haven’t seen any more reports of this lately, but extra federal COVID money has postponed the day of financial reckoning. I would argue the reason we still have a federal COVID emergency, though the medical facts no longer justify it, is to keep the states - especially expansion states - from going bust over their Medicaid expenses. A world of hurt is coming because the fiction of a COVID emergency can’t be maintained forever.
Other problems with Medicaid expansion include
Speaking of special interests, they are busy agitating for Government Healthcare 2.0. It’s not enough that one in four Americans is now on Medicaid, we have to expand the range of services and the amount of government money spent on them for them to become healthy, or so the pretext goes. The theory is called Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). I call it naked redistribution, with calls growing for, and localities dabbling in, providing Medicaid recipients with free housing, transportation, food aid, education, job programs, guaranteed income, and other social services galore. The theory has been around for a while but it is gaining traction, inducing mission creep in the Medicaid program. Proponents claim the theory saves money, but their analysis fails to account for the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency. Once again, the Left points to immediate gains and fails to think systemically.
If you think the nation is too far in debt now, and states are biting off more than they can chew with Medicaid expansion, just wait. Insolvency 2.0 is the inevitable outcome of social determinants of health. Insolvency is what you get when no claim on public funds can be resisted and the government tries to put a soft pillow under absolutely everybody for absolutely everything. Ultimately, it won’t work.
11/10/22 - Baby Boy 1 Million
All eyes are on tight races around the country, the results of which are still not known. But something else momentous happened on Election Day, and it’s not good. Voters enshrined support for abortion up to birth in the law in Vermont, Michigan, and California.
In Vermont, voters approved a measure to put abortion rights into the state constitution. Critics say the measure permits “unlimited, unregulated abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy” and “would permanently block any attempt to protect the unborn — even those who can survive outside the womb.”
In Michigan, a ballot proposal put a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy into the state constitution, thereby legalizing abortion up to birth. The proposal also wipes out every pro-life law in the state, including parental consent which can no longer be required. The proposal passed after a deceitful campaign largely funded by billionaires from outside the state. Campaigners falsely claimed the proposal would not affect parental rights, allow late-term abortions, or require taxpayers to fund abortions against their conscience.
In California, voters approved a ballot measure which will allow killing babies in taxpayer-funded abortions up to birth. The state constitution now contains a “right” to taxpayer-funded “late-term abortion up until the moment of birth, even if both mother and child are healthy.” The ballot measure must be read in conjunction with a law California passed in September shielding any person from civil or criminal liability or penalty for, among other things, their actions regarding their pregnancy resulting in perinatal death for causes that occurred in utero. ‘Perinatal’ means around the time of birth including after birth, so that’s a fancy way of saying the door has been opened to infanticide in California. The language that passed was trimmed back from earlier versions and looks fairly restrictive on paper. But the Left never quits, and it’s guaranteed they will be back trying to expand the language and loosen the law. You can also expect the Left to push for infanticide in other states.
I want you to see exactly what you are supporting if you advocate abortion up to birth. In April, the iconic photograph of ‘Baby Boy 1’ appeared in the news. He was one of five babies who might have been killed in illegal partial birth abortions, killed after birth, or left to die after being born alive. The circumstances are unclear, but D.C.’s mayor refused to investigate. The photo shows Baby Boy 1 had “a fully formed face, fingers, toes, and all the primary features normally visible in a newborn.” Take a good look at what abortion up to birth really means:
Let us give thanks for small favors. Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot reversed course and will once again prosecute misdemeanor thefts of necessary items between $100 and $750. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a victory over the progressive prosecutors - the Soros DAs, a group that includes Creuzot - who have been busy dismantling the criminal justice system in dozens of localities across the country.
Creuzot said he ended the policy not to prosecute these thefts because, he claimed, data shows the policy had no effect on crime, one way or the other. The nonprosecution policy, also implemented by progressive prosecutors elsewhere, is straight out of the abolitionist playbook. ‘Abolitionists’ are far-left crazies who want to abolish all police, criminal courts, and prisons. Like them, Creuzot believes in ‘decriminalizing poverty’ and ‘ending mass incarceration’, attitudes which led him to stop prosecuting misdemeanor theft. He also stopped prosecuting criminal trespass and misdemeanor marijuana cases.
In April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton sent Creuzot a letter that hit the nail on the head, making the point I’ve made many times that progressive prosecutors are not authorized or entitled to tear up criminal statutes duly passed by their state legislatures. The letter states:
- Reform is one thing. Actions that abandon the rule of law and that could promote lawlessness are altogether different. Texas law gives criminal district attorneys the duty to enforce the laws the Legislature writes... It grants no power to criminal district attorneys to categorically rewrite the law. Constitutionally, ‘reforming’ state law is the province of the Legislature.
Exactly, and not just in Texas. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted last week to impeach progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for, among other things, his refusal to prosecute prostitution and retail theft. He also fired 30 experienced prosecutors. The consequences of Krasner’s insane policies are a sky-high murder rate, ubiquitous shootings on public transportation and near schools and, because of increasing retail theft, numerous businesses leaving the city. The impeachment vote is a first step in a process that could remove Krasner from office.
The progressive prosecutor in Baltimore asked the court to give an armed robber first offender treatment that could result in a clean record. The robber was set free and went on to shoot and kill a sheriff’s deputy.
Another thing to be thankful for is the fact resistance to the Soros DAs is growing and getting better organized. You might remember that progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin was recalled in San Francisco earlier this year. A progressive candidate just lost her race for a district attorney’s spot in Arizona. A new group, formed to fight progressive prosecutors at the ballot box, helped defeat a number of them around the country in the recent elections.
Good. The progressive prosecutors are trying to tear down the Rule of Law, tear down the economy, tear down the criminal justice system, and sow chaos throughout the land so people will clamor for left-wing authoritarians to keep them safe.
So let us give thanks and hope the trend against them continues.
11/22/22 - Tales from the Crypto
The spectacular collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange is not just a business story. It’s a Washington swamp story and Republicans will be investigating it when they take control of the House in January. At issue is whether “Individuals within the Democrat Party accepted money with knowledge of potential criminal activity occurring at FTX.”
High-flying FTX bought Super Bowl ads and sports facility naming rights. It amassed a net worth of $32 billion to become one of the largest crypto exchanges in just three years with 28-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried at the helm. It lost half its worth in a matter of days when customers lost confidence and essentially started a run on the bank. It was reported Bankman-Fried secretly siphoned off $10 billion in customer funds and transferred it to another trading firm he also owned, run by his girlfriend. The trading firm invested in FTX’s crypto token, the financial roundtrip prompting investor concern. FTX was left without sufficient assets to pay customers pulling their money out, and bankruptcy ensued.
FTX has been called a Ponzi scheme, but it sounds more like embezzlement and fraud. News reports don’t talk about money from new investors being used to pay previous investors, as in a Ponzi scheme. Instead, $1-2 billion simply vanished. Some of it went into buying $121 million worth of property in the Bahamas, but a lot of it was going into buying influence in Washington.
FTX, Bankman-Fried, and other FTX top executives poured money into Democrat politicians and liberal causes - $28 million went to a Democrat pro-COVID lockdown PAC, and $4 million to a group called Reproductive Freedom for All. Democrat politicians who benefitted include Senators Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez. Bankman-Fried gave more than $5 million to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and was the second largest Democrat donor in the 2022 midterms. Money also went to Republicans, but it’s common for corporations to make contributions on both sides of the aisle to hedge their bets in the influence game. In all, an estimated $57 million went to Democrat candidates and groups and $22 million to Republican candidates and groups. [Steve Moore newsletter, 11/21/22]
Another Democrat politician who benefitted is Maxine Waters. There are pictures of her and Bankman-Fried with their arms around each other, smiling. Another picture shows her blowing kisses to him. And this is the woman who, as current chair of the House Financial Services Committee, will be holding hearings on FTX next month. Moreover, nine members of the committee — seven Democrats and two Republicans — received more than a combined $300,000 in political contributions from Bankman-Fried and others at FTX. It doesn’t take a genius to see the conflict of interest here. It’s shaping up to be a whitewash, with the chair of the committee blowing kisses at the perp.
Meanwhile, critics are asking ‘what did the SEC know and when did it know it?’ It turns out the father of the girlfriend who ran the trading firm I mentioned earlier worked with Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, when both were professors at MIT. Gensler, former campaign finance chair for Hillary Clinton, has been criticized for not seeing FTX was going off the rails. A famous short seller who spotted trouble at Enron and other places, had been publicly warning FTX looked like a scam. In addition, there are allegations Gensler was actively helping FTX find legal loopholes to escape regulation.
Bankman-Fried insists all the money he has been throwing around is completely innocent and not meant to influence lawmakers or regulators. The House Republicans will be testing that assertion come January, and we’ll see just how innocent all of this really is.
11/21/22 - Save the Planet, Kill Yourself
The United Nations warned in 2018 we only had 12 years left for global warming to be kept to a minimum of 1.5 degrees Celsius or further warming would bring catastrophic droughts, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of poor, suffering humans. Urgent changes were needed, OR ELSE! Urgent, I tell you, URGENT!
You wouldn’t know it from the results of this year’s annual U.N. climate summit which just ended with a deal for rich nations to transfer money to poor nations, but no deal to reduce emissions. So let me get this straight: We have eight years left to keep the planet from burning up, but nothing could be done at the climate summit on the urgent business of curbing emissions?
The whole thing is a joke, a psyop - we’re all being manipulated like puppets on a string. One of the countries eligible for climate reparations under the new deal is China, a rich nation which built almost a hundred new coal-fired power plants last year. The joke just got worse.
One indicia of psychological manipulation is the way they cranked up the propaganda machine for this year’s summit. The U.N. Secretary-General said nations must cooperate or perish - PERISH, I tell you. We’re on “a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” he said. Oh, my, that sounds dreadful, what will we ever do? The only thing becoming overheated is the rhetoric. Then there was another sea level scare which arrived right on time, right when the summit was set to begin. The idea the seas are rising because of climate change is bunk. A recent study showed coastal cities are sinking due to groundwater extraction, giving the illusion sea levels are rising. A human-caused problem, to be sure, but not one that can be fixed by eating bugs or buying an electric car.
Another indicia of manipulation is data tampering. I’ve told you previously how climatistas are tampering with temperature sensors and re-writing satellite data. Now comes word they’re lying about the number of 90-degree days increasing in the U.S. They conveniently start their graphs in 1960, deliberately ignoring the fact there were many more 90-degree days in the 1930s than there are now.
A third indicia we’re all being manipulated is the increasing frequency with which climatistas are revealing their true agendas. I told you before the summit Greta Thunberg’s true aim is to smash the capitalist system. She’s not the only one. John Kerry wants to create artificial demand signals in the marketplace for electric cars, renewables, fake meat, and, yes, eating bugs. By the way, it’s been reported John Kerry wants to leave his climate czar post to make more money for himself raising capital for clean energy projects. I keep telling you, these people need to put out financial disclosure statements every time they open their mouth and pontificate about the wonders of clean energy or talk up carbon trading markets. Selling soap, or selling clean energy and carbon credits - what’s the difference? Speaking of hidden agendas, the open borders crowd is rebranding illegal aliens as ‘climate migrants’ to boost acceptance for open borders policies. More manipulation.
The logical conclusion, if you let yourself be manipulated by all this, is that you must kill yourself to save the planet. You have no right to emit carbon dioxide or consume anything. This is what some climate gurus have been advocating for some time. So get the ‘Save the Planet, Kill Yourself’ t-shirt, sing the song, then it’s off to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland with you. As one climate guru put it, the earth will be so much better off when there aren’t any people on it.
11/18/22 - Taking Stock of Election Integrity Efforts
Believe what you like about the 2020 presidential election, but there’s no denying the widespread belief - even among Democrats - the election was stolen motivated a lot of people to work to tighten up future elections. The way I hear the story, donors poured $30 million dollars into election integrity efforts on the professional Right. You can add to that hundreds of citizen’s groups and thousands of individuals in the grassroots all working to secure elections like never before. So what do they have to show for all that treasure and effort?
A lot, actually. There were fewer reports of late night ballot drops and Republican poll watchers being blocked this time around. A Republican lawsuit forced Nevada and Arizona to offer poll-worker data to ensure both parties are equally represented at voting sites. Another Republican challenge struck down a New York law that would have added 900,000 noncitizens to the voter rolls. There was yet another court ruling upholding voter ID, something most Americans support. High voter turnout in Georgia put the nail in the coffin of the Democrat’s phony narrative new election integrity laws passed by Republicans in several states are voter suppression. Jim Crow 2.0? Hardly. It was all Democrat hogwash. Oh, and what happened to all that Republican violence and all those disruptive Republican election workers we were supposed to see on Election Day? It didn’t happen. It was just hogwash. You can put it right next to all the other Democrat hogwash. Now, left-wing organizations have to explain to their base why it didn’t happen and they’re saying it was because elections officials were ready for trouble. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy.
So there were some wins, but we still have miles to go before we can express confidence in our elections again. A number of suspicious things happened in the midterms. Ballots arrived after the legal deadline with no adequate explanation at the Detroit bureau of elections, reminiscent of the 2020 election. A Democrat candidate got 1,100 votes in a town in New Hampshire that only has 700 people - how does that happen?
Turning to another subject, there is now something of a split among conservatives as to how to deal with the changes Democrats have brought to the election process in the last couple of years - what should we do going forward?
One school of thought holds the Democrats are winning elections because they have succeeded in gaming the system. People on this side of the debate point to Democrat victories in states that sent out over a million absentee ballots or states with permanent absentee ballot lists - ask for an absentee ballot once and you keep getting them in future elections. Having this many ballots floating around facilitates fraud and produced Democrat wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. Republicans did better in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia where absentee voting rules are stricter. Swing states with same-day registration like Michigan and Wisconsin went blue in this election. Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia don’t have same-day registration and went red. This school of thought believes all went according to Democrat plan and that Republicans should work to reverse things like mail-in voting and drop boxes.
But a new school of thought holds Republicans should accept all these things are here to stay and should learn to adapt to the new environment. Republicans should become aggressive in ballot curing, ballot harvesting where legal, and encouraging mail-in voting to avoid Election Day glitches. Adherents to this school of thought attribute the Republicans flipping the U.S. House to aggressive Republican ballot curing and harvesting in California. Republican candidates in Arizona urged voters to make sure their ballots were counted and to cure them if they were not.
Call me old school, but I’m not convinced. I get suspicious whenever anyone tells me I should do what the Democrats want me to do. Look at Michigan - voters just approved a ballot initiative from the Democrat side that will loosen voter ID, institutionalize early voting, mandate the use of drop boxes, create a permanent absentee ballot list, narrow the ability of citizens to challenge elections, and allow private money to be used for election administration. As for the latter, it’s pretty clear the true purpose of private money is to allow Democrat election officials to engage in voter registration drives to sign up more Democrats to vote. The consequence of all these changes the Democrats wanted will be less secure elections in Michigan in the future.
That’s the Democrat plan and I, for one, am not going to go along with it. I will continue my work with other activists in my state to fight all the changes the Democrats have made to our elections process. The Democrats will not quit. They will continue to try to subvert our elections. We must continue to oppose them and keep working to right the ship.
11/17/22 - How to Cheat in the Next Election
It’s amazing how many ways Democrats have come up with to cheat in elections.
Ballot harvesters were caught on video stuffing drop boxes with stacks of ballots in Arizona, where ballot harvesting is illegal. It’s legal in Pennsylvania where Democrat election officials voted to allow harvesting of a hundred votes at a time in nursing homes. It may be legal, but I still call it cheating because Democrats have a long history of committing voter fraud in nursing homes where many residents are no longer compos mentis.
One reason ballot harvesting is a bad idea is that it allows cheaters to pay people for their votes. A Texas man admitted a Democrat nominee paid him $200 for every fraudulent absentee ballot he could deliver in the 2016 election.
A Democrat poll worker in Indiana told voters how to vote and even pressed “straight Democrat” on a machine for one of them.
A group of unidentified men in black threw an independent poll challenger out of the big voting center in Detroit in the August primary for asking why a voting machine was apparently connected to the Internet. A court subsequently ruled the Secretary of State did not have authority to issue rules to allow poll challengers to be thrown out for asking too many questions.
Elections officials in St. Louis told volunteer poll workers not to enforce the state’s new photo ID law.
So excuse me for not taking Democrat election ‘reforms’ - so-called - at face value. The only reason Democrats want mail-in voting and refuse to clean the voter rolls is so they can cheat.
Voting by mail is a mess. Some ballots end up on the ground, others are sent to vacant lots. The number returned as undeliverable can run into the tens of thousands in any given county.
Because Democrats refuse to clean the voter rolls in many areas, ballots are sent to dead voters, people are sent duplicate ballots, and ballots are mailed to people who have moved away. Pennsylvania sent 240,000 ballots to voters for the 2022 election without verifying their identity. Michigan had 26,000 dead voters on the rolls last year. Minnesota had over 500 duplicates.
Why does it matter? Because you have to have dirty voter rolls to cheat. First, you have to grab a bunch of ballots floating around from mail-in voting, for example. But then you have to match up your fraudulently cast ballots with records of voters still on the rolls who are not going to vote this time, like dead people. You can’t do that very easily if the voter rolls are cleaned up.
Among other efforts to clean up voter rolls, there is a team working to identify phantom names and incorrect addresses on the rolls in Wisconsin and about 20 other states. This team is using fractal programming technology which starts with small batches but can be scaled up to millions of records quickly and inexpensively. The team will eventually be working in all 50 states.
It’s citizen-led efforts like this that will make cheating much harder and restore confidence in our elections, once again.
11/16/22 - The Boast in the Machine
Voting machines caused chaos in Maricopa County, Arizona on Election Day:
- "Maricopa County was absolutely insane," [a voter] said. "I mean, I woke up to messages everywhere about, you know, this polling location is closed, people are in line, they're kicking them out, this polling location is closed, whatever."
We "got in line, I got my ballot, filled it out, went to the machines, and it was rejected," she continued. "Then they said, 'Go over to the other machine,' it was rejected.... And finally, after about 10 times, we spoiled it.... And finally, my third ballot and about, you know, five or six times they finally accepted it.... And that was happening all around me.
An election judge in a Republican area in the county believes the problems were intentional. The tabulators were set up for 19-inch ballots, but the ballots were 20 inches and rejected.
I wish I could tell you these were the only problems with machines in this year’s elections, but there were lots more.
Twenty-five thousand votes for a third-party candidate for U.S. Senate in New York disappeared overnight. This has not been explained, as far as I’m aware. Also in New York, identical election results were reported across multiple counties, with Democrats winning every time. How does that happen?
Voting machines went out of service in New Jersey and Texas.
Security features were found to be turned off in several voting machines in Georgia. This was discovered when a fraudulent ballot printed on looseleaf paper turned up. The machines are supposed to detect when the paper does not meet requirements. So who turned off the security features and why?
A Democrat in Colorado was arrested for inserting a USB flash drive into a voting machine during a primary election in June. This is one way to get a machine to flip votes.
We keep hearing that voting machines don’t connect to the Internet and, thus, results can’t be tampered with from the outside, but the Colorado Secretary of State admitted in writing Dominion machines have Wi-Fi connectivity.
An audit in New Mexico last month found a 25 percent difference between machine counts and hand counts in a primary election.
In a Virginia county, it was found the number of votes recorded by scanners was different from the number of paper ballots dropping down into the box below. How does that happen?
None of this inspires confidence, especially when you hear things like Barack Obama saying in 2008 “I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines.” Or a Dominion voting system executive caught on video explaining to election officials in 2020 how to use the machines to alter election results. Or the director of an electronic voting system company admitting that an entire election in Venezuela was stolen when a million votes were flipped in 2017.
No wonder some people want to get rid of the machines entirely and count paper ballots by hand again, like in France which doesn’t seem to have any trouble getting it done the same day. Short of that, machine certification standards could be tightened, elections officials could do a better job of selecting equipment that actually meets specifications, and machines could be tested more rigorously before elections. Whatever the solution, it’s clear the present state of affairs causes distrust in our elections and is, therefore, untenable.
11/15/22 - The Elections: Using the Perfect to Spur the Good
Yesterday, I told you about a set of problems that were identified and fixed in the run-up to the elections. Unfortunately, it’s a game of whack-a-mole. Plenty more problems arose in the 2022 cycle that need to be fixed before we can have confidence in our elections again.
We start with the Arizona governor’s race, which media outlets have just called for the Democrat, Katie Hobbs. Problems with voting machines not working lead to long lines and wait times at one out of every five precincts. Critics said the best machines were sent to liberal districts, handing Republicans the short end of the stick. A judge refused to extend voting hours in Republican areas. Another problem: every mail-in ballot in Maricopa County - Arizona’s largest, near Phoenix - is sent from the post office to a printing company to be scanned before being taken to an election office. This takes 10-12 days, keeps elections officials from knowing how many ballots have been returned, and creates additional opportunities for fraud. The whole process could be taken in-house for a relatively small cost, begging the question: why all these extra hoops? All of these happenings in Maricopa County have been heavily criticized as unnecessary and not normal, things that don’t occur in other jurisdictions that manage to count their votes by Election Day.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for an investigation into malfeasance and possible criminal conduct in the Harris County elections near Houston. One of the problems cited is not enough ballots in Republican precincts. The problems in Harris County are long-standing, with the previous elections administrator resigning in March after it was discovered 10,000 ballots weren’t counted in the primary. The Texas Secretary of State has scheduled an audit of Harris County’s midterm elections results.
Funny how so many problems in our elections only affect Republicans. Do you think that’s an accident? Before you say I’m crazy, listen to this: An election worker in Philadelphia was caught on video inside a polling place telling an undercover journalist to “vote Democrat”. “I asked you to vote the ... Democrat down ballot because we’re trying to focus on, if the Democrats win, then at least they represent us,” the worker said. When the elections judge saw the video, he said, “That doesn’t look good.” Ya think?
I wish I could tell you that was the end of the problems last week, but we’re not even close:
More illegal electioneering took place in Philadelphia, with Democrat poll greeters not standing far enough away from the door at a polling place and Democrat candidate posters plastered on the building itself, all of which is illegal.
Also near Philadelphia, mail-in ballots were pre-processed without poll watchers present in violation of state law.
Republicans showed up to vote in Detroit, only to be told they already voted. This is an indication their identities were stolen and their ballots were fraudulently cast in their names.
Conservative Jewish voters in New York had to stand in line for hours, a problem not reported in liberal precincts.
All of this doesn’t even count apparent funny business with voting machines, which I’ll tell you about tomorrow.
But, for now, realize our elections process will never be perfect, there will always be holes and opportunities for fraud. The work will never be finished. All we can do is keep banging away, fix the holes we can, and go on to the next. We can strive for perfection, but we won’t ever achieve it. However, with enough effort, we can reach the point where things will be tight enough we can have confidence in our elections again, but only if enough people keep working at it.
11/14/22 - Election Problem Deniers, Take Note
Today, I start a series on problems with our election system. The election problem deniers will tell you ‘nothing to see here, move along,’ but there’s no shortage of undeniable problems.
Let’s start with stories about courts and government officials who rectified a number of problems in the days and weeks running up to the election.
The Delaware Supreme Court struck down no-fault absentee balloting and same-day voter registration because they violated the state constitution.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated the use of drop boxes which the state elections commission had instituted without authority.
Elections officials in Pennsylvania were allowing mail-in ballots returned with missing or incorrect dates on the envelope, but the state Supreme Court put a stop to it.
A Virginia judge ordered county election officials to follow state law and assign the main poll workers from different political parties in each precinct. I’m in touch with activists from all over the country and ‘party parity’, as it is called, remains a problem in many places.
Hmm... I detect a pattern here, so far. The problems I’ve mentioned came about because Democrats broke the law. They’re scofflaws.
That means they have a lot in common with people recently charged with voter fraud. Arizona indicted two people with illegal ballot harvesting last month. They collected ballots from early voters and put them in a drop box. That’s illegal in Arizona, but remains a problem in states like Virginia where the practice is legal. It’s a bad practice. Ballot harvesters have been known to pay people for votes, as in a ballot harvesting scheme just uncovered in Florida. Also, nothing prevents fraudsters from stealing mail ballots, say, from apartment building lobbies, filling them out themselves, and dropping them in a ballot box. There are too many loose ballots floating around before election day to think ballot harvesting is a good idea. Ballot harvesting is a Democrat idea. No wonder they don’t want to talk about it, or the unsecured drop boxes that enable ballot harvesting schemes. The Chester County Pennsylvania elections board settled a lawsuit by agreeing to secure their drop boxes after activist surveillance video showed people dropping multiple ballots into the boxes. Voters can only put their own ballot into the boxes, not ballots collected from others. The board agreed to put up cameras and staff the boxes.
Democrats are still trying to hang on to changes made to the electoral process because of COVID, but a state judge ruled New York can no longer use COVID as an excuse for emergency rules and knocked down absentee voting rules that had been expanded during the pandemic. Fewer loose ballots floating around - sorry, Democrats.
For the Democrats to sustain their phony election denier and voter suppression narratives, they’re going to have to prove that all the courts, law enforcement and elections officials I mentioned here today are election deniers who are trying to suppress the vote. They’re all part of a vast conspiracy trying to deny people their civil rights. Good luck with that.
The correct analysis is the Democrats caused a bunch of problems, they won’t talk about the problems they themselves created, and they won’t fix them until forced to. Fine, they’re on notice: the process of fixing our elections has begun and we won’t stop until we are confident we have free and fair elections once again. Don’t mess with OUR right to vote.
11/11/22 - The Problems with ‘Free Stuff’
South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion in Tuesday’s election, leaving just 11 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs to include middle-class able-bodied childless adults making almost $40,000 a year. I hope the remaining states hold the line because they will be in a world of hurt if they don’t.
The first problem is voters demanding free stuff with nary a thought of how to pay for it. Missouri voters previously demanded Medicaid expansion, but the state couldn’t figure out a sustainable way to pay for it. Expansion would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but nobody knew what the funding mechanism would be. The same thing happened in Idaho and Oklahoma - Medicaid expansion occurred without a stable permanent funding source. Since Medicaid is now such a huge part of state budgets, every expansion state faces fights in the legislature about raising taxes or pulling money from other priorities like education to fund more government-sponsored healthcare.
That’s just for openers. Expansion states face a raft of other problems. Enrollment always exceeds expectations and many states have hit the wall in terms of being able to afford their programs. I haven’t seen any more reports of this lately, but extra federal COVID money has postponed the day of financial reckoning. I would argue the reason we still have a federal COVID emergency, though the medical facts no longer justify it, is to keep the states - especially expansion states - from going bust over their Medicaid expenses. A world of hurt is coming because the fiction of a COVID emergency can’t be maintained forever.
Other problems with Medicaid expansion include
- middle class dependency on government - a tragedy, not a triumph as the Left would have you believe, and completely unsustainable
- billions of dollars spent on people who aren’t eligible
- new inequities like traditional enrollees - low-income children, pregnant women, and the disabled - getting sent to the back of the line as childless able-bodied adults enter the system
- substandard care - women already on Medicaid account for the majority of pregnancy-related deaths
- longer wait times for ambulances and medical services
- worse health outcomes than private insurance as more doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients because of the low pay and paperwork burdens
- more drug overdoses and lower life expectancy in expansion states
- lower labor force participation, and
- special interests like large hospitals and managed care companies benefitting more than enrollees
Speaking of special interests, they are busy agitating for Government Healthcare 2.0. It’s not enough that one in four Americans is now on Medicaid, we have to expand the range of services and the amount of government money spent on them for them to become healthy, or so the pretext goes. The theory is called Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). I call it naked redistribution, with calls growing for, and localities dabbling in, providing Medicaid recipients with free housing, transportation, food aid, education, job programs, guaranteed income, and other social services galore. The theory has been around for a while but it is gaining traction, inducing mission creep in the Medicaid program. Proponents claim the theory saves money, but their analysis fails to account for the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency. Once again, the Left points to immediate gains and fails to think systemically.
If you think the nation is too far in debt now, and states are biting off more than they can chew with Medicaid expansion, just wait. Insolvency 2.0 is the inevitable outcome of social determinants of health. Insolvency is what you get when no claim on public funds can be resisted and the government tries to put a soft pillow under absolutely everybody for absolutely everything. Ultimately, it won’t work.
11/10/22 - Baby Boy 1 Million
All eyes are on tight races around the country, the results of which are still not known. But something else momentous happened on Election Day, and it’s not good. Voters enshrined support for abortion up to birth in the law in Vermont, Michigan, and California.
In Vermont, voters approved a measure to put abortion rights into the state constitution. Critics say the measure permits “unlimited, unregulated abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy” and “would permanently block any attempt to protect the unborn — even those who can survive outside the womb.”
In Michigan, a ballot proposal put a right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy into the state constitution, thereby legalizing abortion up to birth. The proposal also wipes out every pro-life law in the state, including parental consent which can no longer be required. The proposal passed after a deceitful campaign largely funded by billionaires from outside the state. Campaigners falsely claimed the proposal would not affect parental rights, allow late-term abortions, or require taxpayers to fund abortions against their conscience.
In California, voters approved a ballot measure which will allow killing babies in taxpayer-funded abortions up to birth. The state constitution now contains a “right” to taxpayer-funded “late-term abortion up until the moment of birth, even if both mother and child are healthy.” The ballot measure must be read in conjunction with a law California passed in September shielding any person from civil or criminal liability or penalty for, among other things, their actions regarding their pregnancy resulting in perinatal death for causes that occurred in utero. ‘Perinatal’ means around the time of birth including after birth, so that’s a fancy way of saying the door has been opened to infanticide in California. The language that passed was trimmed back from earlier versions and looks fairly restrictive on paper. But the Left never quits, and it’s guaranteed they will be back trying to expand the language and loosen the law. You can also expect the Left to push for infanticide in other states.
I want you to see exactly what you are supporting if you advocate abortion up to birth. In April, the iconic photograph of ‘Baby Boy 1’ appeared in the news. He was one of five babies who might have been killed in illegal partial birth abortions, killed after birth, or left to die after being born alive. The circumstances are unclear, but D.C.’s mayor refused to investigate. The photo shows Baby Boy 1 had “a fully formed face, fingers, toes, and all the primary features normally visible in a newborn.” Take a good look at what abortion up to birth really means:
Once again, I defy anyone to tell me this is not a human being. But you can expect more such pictures by the millions now that abortion up to birth is frozen into law in Vermont, Michigan, and California. Such proposals have also been made in Colorado and New Jersey, and on the federal level. It won’t take long for the bodies to start piling up. Glad I’m not on the Left - I wouldn’t want this on my conscience. And most Americans agree with me.
11/8/22 - Locking Up the Violence Vote
Today is Election Day and I will show you what the Democrats are really like. The stories I’m about to tell you didn’t get much publicity but, taken together, they tell the tale about how the Democrats trade in political violence.
A canvasser for Marco Rubio was brutally beaten to the point of needing surgery and was told ‘Republicans aren’t allowed in this neighborhood.’
The Republican senate candidate in New Hampshire was hit by an attacker right before his debate with the incumbent Democrat senator was set to begin.
A suspect fired shots into the home of the parents of a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, just feet away from where the candidate’s children were sleeping.
A Texas man was arrested for throwing a beer can at Senator Ted Cruz during the World Series parade.
A journalist was choked and slammed to the ground after asking Beto O’Rourke if he would disavow transgender surgery for minors.
A Lee Zeldin supporter needed medical attention after being punched and choked at a Kathy Hochul rally. You might recall Zeldin himself was attacked with a weapon on stage in July.
When Democrats aren’t being violent, they’re threatening violence.
A Chicago man was charged with threatening to kill the Republican candidate for governor. “I’m going to skin Darren Bailey alive, making sure he is still alive, and I’m going to feed his f*****g family to him as he is alive and screaming in f*****g pain,” the threat said.
Two threatening letters containing a white powder were sent to Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters in Arizona. Threatening messages were received around the same time.
Last, but not least, Ohio Democrat Congressman Tim Ryan earlier this year called on supporters to “kill and confront” MAGA Republicans. Ryan is now running for Senate and just last month expanded the list of targets to include his Republican opponent J.D. Vance, whom Ryan called an ‘extremist’. Ryan said this in a debate with Vance with the whole world watching.
None of these attacks or threats was condemned by Democrat Party leaders, giving the green light for more attacks and threats. What else would you expect from the party of Antifa and the KKK - the party that can’t do without political violence, paramilitaries, and street thugs? The Party’s answer to all that is to bail the offenders out of jail so they can riot and maim again. Don’t forget: Kamala Harris is hip-deep in that effort.
Far be it from me to suppress the violence vote. If, after listening to all this, you still want to vote Democrat, go for it. I’m content to know you heard me today, you will never succeed in forcing your utopia on the rest of us through violent means, and you can never be happy about voting Democrat again, knowing as you do, your party is violent to the core. If your party had any real arguments left to make, it wouldn’t be resorting to violence, now would it?
11/7/22 - Lions, Tigers, and Polar Bears - Oh, My!
The 27th annual U.N. climate change conference (COP27) got underway in Egypt today. This time, they promise to get down to business, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the climate. It has to do with poor nations shaking down rich nations for money.
More on that in a moment, but we start with the fact the United Nations, which organized the conference, has a very bad track record on climate predictions. It predicted in 1989 entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth if global warming was not stopped by the year 2000. It said global warming would be irreversible after that year. Last week - 33 years later - it said we are very close to irreversible changes in the climate. Ah yes, climate change is the fake religion of the future - and always will be.
But a bad track record of predictions didn’t stop the climate change crowd from cranking up the propaganda machine for this year’s conference. The past eight years were the hottest on record, the U.N. screamed. Except there was a 20-year pause in the rise of the global mean surface temperature of the earth ending in 2019 that the climate change crowd can’t explain. Now we’re in a New Pause. They don’t want to talk about that, either. They also don’t want to talk about another one of their great deceptions - rising temperatures killing more older people than ever before. The fact of the matter is that heat deaths among the elderly are not up significantly after you adjust for population growth.
But the glaciers are disappearing, we were told in the run-up to the conference. They say the glaciers will all be gone by 2050, but in 1923 it was predicted the glaciers in Glacier National Park would be gone by 1950. It didn’t happen. So they changed their prediction to 1961, then to 2000, then to 2020. Still didn’t happen. In fact, the glaciers in the park have actually gotten bigger in the last 30 years. You can put the disappearing glaciers right next to the disappearing coral reefs and polar bears. They didn’t happen, either. You know, the climate liars really should give it a rest, especially after NPR let the mask slip last month and revealed recycling is a huge fraud on a gullible public.
But let’s get down to business - there’s money to be made. Despite repeated failures by many nations to live up to past promises, this year’s conference will extract new promises from rich nations to redistribute wealth to poor nations in the name of climate change. ‘Loss and damage funding’, they call it. Rich nations must pay their fair share for causing the climate change that didn’t happen or wasn’t caused by human activity, you see. How much money are we talking about? As much as ten times the amount rich nations are forking over now. Poor nations will need half a trillion dollars by 2050, the U.N. says. But why be so miserly, and why wait? Developing countries are demanding a trillion dollars a year right now. We feel so guilty - how can we not give it to them?
Germany is knocking down wind turbines to make way for coal mining, and the leftist finance minister there now supports fracking to boost natural gas supplies. Climate whiz kid Greta Thunberg won’t be happy until the entire capitalist system is overthrown. Well, that puts the true agenda right out there, doesn’t it? The whole phony climate agenda is continually being shown as unsustainable and for the fraud it really is.
But I’ll make you a deal: I’ll agree to a new carbon tax on fossil fuels IF you’ll agree to child and slave labor taxes on the minerals in your electric car batteries, AND a tax on Chinese influence and Russian funding of American green groups, AND a data tampering tax. Let’s call the last one the ‘hockey stick’ tax. It should bring in a lot of money because the climate crowd keeps cooking the books. I’d propose a failed predictions tax, but the U.N. couldn’t afford it.
11/4/22 - Serious as a Heart Attack: The U.S. Military Is Weak
The 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength from the Heritage Foundation is alarming. For the first time, overall U.S. military strength is rated as ‘weak’ and declining. We are at risk of not being able to fight a war, things are that bad. The Army is considered ‘marginal’ and only two-thirds the size it needs to be. The Navy is rated ‘weak’ because the number of ships is going down and the investment has not been made to keep our adversaries from closing the technology gap. Technology is also a factor in rating the Air Force and our Space Force as ‘weak’. Fighter planes are aging and counter-space capabilities are not being developed, while our adversaries are bounding ahead. The Marines and our nuclear deterrent are rated as bright spots but, overall, the U.S. military suffers from a lack of funding and, most disturbingly, a lack of seriousness. Anyone observing the Woke Pentagon’s descent into critical race theory and transgenderism can see that.
The report recommends, among other things, increased defense funding, more shipbuilding, more stealth F-35 multi-purpose aircraft, and addressing the military’s growing recruitment crisis. I don’t see how you can address recruitment unless you stop teaching the troops America is a horrible, rotten, racist place not worth fighting or dying for.
Let’s see what else the lack of seriousness about national security has pointed up recently, shall we? The Biden administration changed U.S. nuclear doctrine to rely less on nuclear weapons as a hedge against future threats and breakouts by nuclear rivals. In practical terms, the new policy signals the elimination of hundreds of nuclear weapons at a time when China and Russia are beefing up their own nuclear forces. Decreased American nuclear strength will have all kinds of ramifications on the battlefield, in diplomacy, and at the negotiating table.
The administration also stopped the development of nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles, despite the recommendations of senior military officials the program continue.
The lack of seriousness is also shown by the depletion of U.S. stocks of key weapons sent to Ukraine including Stingers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, howitzers, and ammunition. It is feared the U.S. has only a week’s worth of missiles left for its own use. The problem has been ignored for years and experts worry we may not have the industrial base left to meet our needs.
In the meantime, Russia is threatening commercial satellites over the West’s stance in Ukraine, North Korea is building underwater nuclear weapons silos, and China is positioning the ports it owns in Latin America for military and geopolitical advantage. Moreover, the decidedly un-serious Biden administration still refers to the U.S. as being in friendly “competition” with China when knowledgeable observers say World War III has already begun. No surprise there. Chinese communist leaders all the way back to Mao Zedong have declared their goal is world domination and the end of the United States.
We have a President more concerned about his ice cream cones than our national defense, and a Woke Pentagon too busy putting on drag shows to entertain the troops to prepare them for possible conflicts ahead. It’s time to get serious, folks. You can start by throwing the chucklehead Democrats out of office next Tuesday.
11/3/22 - The Biden Administration’s Proxy War on Free Speech
Hold on to your hats. We’re going to be learning a lot more about the Biden administration’s efforts to silence free expression through its proxy stooges in Big Tech.
A federal judge just rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to stop depositions of government officials in a lawsuit alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy by the administration and Big Tech to censor free speech. Anthony Fauci’s deposition is set for November 23rd. House Republicans sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling him out for his agency’s role in censoring free speech.
More details about that role have come to light. You might remember the agency’s Disinformation Governance Board that got shut down pretty quickly. But DHS continues its efforts to curb free speech to this day. Records from the conspiracy lawsuit, leaked emails and memos, and public documents show DHS pivoted to monitoring social media for the purpose of suppressing ‘misinformation’ the government doesn’t like about a wide range of topics, including the origins of COVID-19, COVID vaccine safety, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Facebook created a portal for DHS and other government agencies to flag posts they don’t like, for quick action. The portal is still in operation. Facebook and the FBI won’t comment. A previous report showed social media companies remove or post warnings on over a third of posts government agencies flag as objectionable.
Other agencies are also involved. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on its own motion formed a misinformation team and expanded the agency’s mission beyond infrastructure to ‘building resilience to misinformation’. The agency wants social media platforms to be more responsive to its directives. An FBI official was criticized last year after falsely telling Congress the FBI does not monitor Americans’ social media posts. The fact of the matter is the FBI has spent millions on social media tracking software.
Hunter Biden’s laptop shows you clearly why we do not want the government in the business of deciding what is true and what is false. According to polls, many people would not have voted for Joe Biden if they had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop. But government officials called it ‘Russian disinformation’ and social media companies at the FBI’s urging dutifully suppressed the story before the 2020 election, a decision they now say they regret. Thanks a bunch.
There’s really no difference between the government suppressing free speech and government officials getting private actors to violate the First Amendment for them. That’s called the state actor theory and it’s at the heart of the Missouri Attorney General’s ongoing conspiracy case against the Biden administration and Big Tech where depositions are going forward and will soon give us a lot more information about all these bad actors violating your rights.
But there’s more. The federal government paid four private companies to flag so-called ‘misinformation’ on social media during the 2020 election, resulting in the censorship of election coverage from conservative news outlets. The CDC told Facebook COVID vaccines for young children are safe and effective when there was no evidence of that, all so the CDC could suppress contrary information through Facebook in a campaign to overcome ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Twitter has a portal for CDC officials to flag COVID-related posts it deems ‘misinformation’. Documents from inside Twitter show the White House pressured Twitter to ban a New York Times writer who was raising questions about phony government COVID narratives. Facebook spies on private messages and reports users to the FBI for expressing ‘anti-government sentiments’, whatever that means.
The Biden administration is waging a proxy war on our free speech. The social media giants are only too happy to play along. But with 47 more government defendants recently added to the conspiracy lawsuit, the day of reckoning is drawing closer and I, for one, can’t wait to see these overbearing authoritarian government officials and their fascist buddies in Big Tech get hammered for messing with the First Amendment.
11/2/22 - The Cancerous Pustules of Evil Growing from Joe Biden’s Open Borders Policies
I noticed in my time as a criminal defense attorney that the problem wasn’t just the drugs or the guns, it never stayed just one thing. Once you let evil into the equation, it grows like a cancer. I’ll never forget one case I had, where my client was on trial for drug distribution. The trial was halted when the prosecution’s lead witness was found dead. When this was announced in court, my client looked at me and smirked. A chill ran down my spine, as I realized he just might have had something to do with it.
And so it is with Joe Biden’s open borders policies. Yesterday, the Justice Department announced a guilty verdict against an illegal alien who murdered a whistleblower, a witness, who exposed a multi-million dollar scheme to employ illegal aliens in Georgia. So, you see, it’s not just border jumpers breaking our law, or the fentanyl pouring in. It’s the evil, which like a cancer grows - in this case, into labor trafficking and murder.
Fentanyl is not just illicit drug use. It’s overdoses. People are dying from the record amounts of fentanyl now present in the country because of Joe Biden’s open borders policies, some 75,000 in 2022 alone.
Migrants are also dying at the border from the dangerous trip. Joe Biden’s open borders policies don’t just empower the criminal cartels and human smugglers. The policies result in deaths that otherwise would not have occurred - a record 856 of them in the last 12 months. This evil has produced bloated bodies pulled from the Rio Grande, another torn to bits when hit by a train, and corpses found in open fields with skin and organs nibbled away by animals. Joe Biden’s open borders policies are to blame for this festering problem and growing evil.
Another evil, not getting the attention it used to, is the corruption of border agents and other government officials paid to facilitate illicit activity or look the other way. A human smuggler pled guilty a few days ago to bribing a border agent who had set up a little side business sneaking aliens across the border. The smuggler would tell the agent where to pick the aliens up. The agent got the aliens through border checkpoints without a hitch and delivered them to their destinations in Phoenix. The agent has pled not guilty and goes on trial next year. A newspaper investigation in 2016 found 140 corrupt border officials who were arrested or convicted for acts that compromised their mission of keeping the border secure. I am sure that all of those agents were not compromised when they were first hired, and did not realize they could lose their souls after some time on the job seeing how much money was sloshing around. They were tempted and turned. That’s how evil works. Not a sermon, just an observation based on my almost seven decades on the planet. And now the money is bigger and the temptations are greater, thanks to Joe Biden’s open borders policies.
Some years ago, a person in a position to know told me the corruption even reaches all the way to Washington, D.C. Federal government officials have been paid off, and this is one reason illicit activity at the border has been allowed to continue, my source told me. Given what I know about the D.C. swamp, I wouldn’t doubt it.
So, you see, it’s not just letting too many illegal aliens into the country or the disrespect for law that engenders. It’s the evils that compound from the first evil of opening the border and going outside the nation’s immigration laws. The criminal cartels, the overdose and migrant deaths, the labor trafficking, the corruption of government officials, and other evils are all growing out of Joe Biden’s open borders policies. Nice work, Joe. You traffic in evil and evil spreads like a cancer. Evil begets evil. Eventually, you find there is hell to pay.
11/1/22 - Red Wave Follows Democrat Crime Wave
Crime is now the third top issue in the elections, according to a new Gallup poll. No wonder, with people being pushed onto subway tracks for no reason in New York and flash mobs looting stores in California. Fourteen people, including children, were injured in Chicago on Halloween night after two shooters started firing randomly into a crowd.
Sorry, Chicago, but elections have consequences. You elected Democrat Lori Lightfoot as mayor, the same Lori Lightfoot who defunded the police and refused to call out the National Guard to put down the riots in 2020. She has admitted she has no idea how to stop the crime wave and has called on the feds to bail her out. Democrats in Illinois also just passed a new law that will end cash bail after the 1st of the year for aggravated assault, second-degree murder, and other serious crimes. This will free hundreds of defendants awaiting trial, so don’t expect the crime problem in Chicago to get any better any time soon.
You elect Democrats again this go-around and it is guaranteed the situation won’t get any better. In addition to defunding the police and ending cash bail, the Democrat Party has brought you the Soros progressive prosecutors who are a problem in so many parts of the country. Things are so bad in Philadelphia with progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner in charge of the District Attorney’s office there that state Republican lawmakers have moved to impeach him. A murderer, whom Krasner freed from a life sentence last year, is back in custody on another murder charge. “[W]e have heard devastating stories from victims of crime, businesses who are closing because they do not feel safe, and victims who have been revictimized by a district attorney’s office unwilling to help them when they would rather help criminals," one Republican said. Krasner called the Republicans fascists and a threat to democracy. Gee, I’ve never heard that before. I wonder where he got that line.
When confronted on TV with the obvious failure of his policies, Krasner claimed the murder rate is 40 percent higher in states Trump won than in states Biden won. The claim comes from a progressive think tank and progressive authors, so you can take it with a grain of salt, maybe two. But what cannot be denied is the fact that Democrats run all but one of the most dangerous cities in America and they have, in most cases, for decades. The top 16 cities in the country for homicides are all run by Democrats.
Progressive prosecutors have wreaked havoc elsewhere. One in Virginia freed a felon who went on to murder two men. Another in Virginia freed a man from jail twice in a month who later killed a man. A Democrat D.A. in Los Angeles failed to prosecute an illegal alien for domestic violence in 2019. The man went on a stabbing spree in Las Vegas last month, killing two of his eight victims with a knife.
The tone for all this was set in 2020 when the rioters who burned down cities and injured 2,000 police officers got a free pass, for the most part. There were only a relative handful of prosecutions in progressive and Democrat strongholds like Portland and Minneapolis. This invited further criminality and the nation is now reaping the whirlwind. Wrong direction - unless, of course, you like chaos and things spinning out of control. If you do, be sure to vote Democrat in this election because the Democrat Party - by defunding the police, ending cash bail, and installing progressive prosecutors - will surely give you what you want.
11/8/22 - Locking Up the Violence Vote
Today is Election Day and I will show you what the Democrats are really like. The stories I’m about to tell you didn’t get much publicity but, taken together, they tell the tale about how the Democrats trade in political violence.
A canvasser for Marco Rubio was brutally beaten to the point of needing surgery and was told ‘Republicans aren’t allowed in this neighborhood.’
The Republican senate candidate in New Hampshire was hit by an attacker right before his debate with the incumbent Democrat senator was set to begin.
A suspect fired shots into the home of the parents of a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, just feet away from where the candidate’s children were sleeping.
A Texas man was arrested for throwing a beer can at Senator Ted Cruz during the World Series parade.
A journalist was choked and slammed to the ground after asking Beto O’Rourke if he would disavow transgender surgery for minors.
A Lee Zeldin supporter needed medical attention after being punched and choked at a Kathy Hochul rally. You might recall Zeldin himself was attacked with a weapon on stage in July.
When Democrats aren’t being violent, they’re threatening violence.
A Chicago man was charged with threatening to kill the Republican candidate for governor. “I’m going to skin Darren Bailey alive, making sure he is still alive, and I’m going to feed his f*****g family to him as he is alive and screaming in f*****g pain,” the threat said.
Two threatening letters containing a white powder were sent to Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters in Arizona. Threatening messages were received around the same time.
Last, but not least, Ohio Democrat Congressman Tim Ryan earlier this year called on supporters to “kill and confront” MAGA Republicans. Ryan is now running for Senate and just last month expanded the list of targets to include his Republican opponent J.D. Vance, whom Ryan called an ‘extremist’. Ryan said this in a debate with Vance with the whole world watching.
None of these attacks or threats was condemned by Democrat Party leaders, giving the green light for more attacks and threats. What else would you expect from the party of Antifa and the KKK - the party that can’t do without political violence, paramilitaries, and street thugs? The Party’s answer to all that is to bail the offenders out of jail so they can riot and maim again. Don’t forget: Kamala Harris is hip-deep in that effort.
Far be it from me to suppress the violence vote. If, after listening to all this, you still want to vote Democrat, go for it. I’m content to know you heard me today, you will never succeed in forcing your utopia on the rest of us through violent means, and you can never be happy about voting Democrat again, knowing as you do, your party is violent to the core. If your party had any real arguments left to make, it wouldn’t be resorting to violence, now would it?
11/7/22 - Lions, Tigers, and Polar Bears - Oh, My!
The 27th annual U.N. climate change conference (COP27) got underway in Egypt today. This time, they promise to get down to business, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the climate. It has to do with poor nations shaking down rich nations for money.
More on that in a moment, but we start with the fact the United Nations, which organized the conference, has a very bad track record on climate predictions. It predicted in 1989 entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth if global warming was not stopped by the year 2000. It said global warming would be irreversible after that year. Last week - 33 years later - it said we are very close to irreversible changes in the climate. Ah yes, climate change is the fake religion of the future - and always will be.
But a bad track record of predictions didn’t stop the climate change crowd from cranking up the propaganda machine for this year’s conference. The past eight years were the hottest on record, the U.N. screamed. Except there was a 20-year pause in the rise of the global mean surface temperature of the earth ending in 2019 that the climate change crowd can’t explain. Now we’re in a New Pause. They don’t want to talk about that, either. They also don’t want to talk about another one of their great deceptions - rising temperatures killing more older people than ever before. The fact of the matter is that heat deaths among the elderly are not up significantly after you adjust for population growth.
But the glaciers are disappearing, we were told in the run-up to the conference. They say the glaciers will all be gone by 2050, but in 1923 it was predicted the glaciers in Glacier National Park would be gone by 1950. It didn’t happen. So they changed their prediction to 1961, then to 2000, then to 2020. Still didn’t happen. In fact, the glaciers in the park have actually gotten bigger in the last 30 years. You can put the disappearing glaciers right next to the disappearing coral reefs and polar bears. They didn’t happen, either. You know, the climate liars really should give it a rest, especially after NPR let the mask slip last month and revealed recycling is a huge fraud on a gullible public.
But let’s get down to business - there’s money to be made. Despite repeated failures by many nations to live up to past promises, this year’s conference will extract new promises from rich nations to redistribute wealth to poor nations in the name of climate change. ‘Loss and damage funding’, they call it. Rich nations must pay their fair share for causing the climate change that didn’t happen or wasn’t caused by human activity, you see. How much money are we talking about? As much as ten times the amount rich nations are forking over now. Poor nations will need half a trillion dollars by 2050, the U.N. says. But why be so miserly, and why wait? Developing countries are demanding a trillion dollars a year right now. We feel so guilty - how can we not give it to them?
Germany is knocking down wind turbines to make way for coal mining, and the leftist finance minister there now supports fracking to boost natural gas supplies. Climate whiz kid Greta Thunberg won’t be happy until the entire capitalist system is overthrown. Well, that puts the true agenda right out there, doesn’t it? The whole phony climate agenda is continually being shown as unsustainable and for the fraud it really is.
But I’ll make you a deal: I’ll agree to a new carbon tax on fossil fuels IF you’ll agree to child and slave labor taxes on the minerals in your electric car batteries, AND a tax on Chinese influence and Russian funding of American green groups, AND a data tampering tax. Let’s call the last one the ‘hockey stick’ tax. It should bring in a lot of money because the climate crowd keeps cooking the books. I’d propose a failed predictions tax, but the U.N. couldn’t afford it.
11/4/22 - Serious as a Heart Attack: The U.S. Military Is Weak
The 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength from the Heritage Foundation is alarming. For the first time, overall U.S. military strength is rated as ‘weak’ and declining. We are at risk of not being able to fight a war, things are that bad. The Army is considered ‘marginal’ and only two-thirds the size it needs to be. The Navy is rated ‘weak’ because the number of ships is going down and the investment has not been made to keep our adversaries from closing the technology gap. Technology is also a factor in rating the Air Force and our Space Force as ‘weak’. Fighter planes are aging and counter-space capabilities are not being developed, while our adversaries are bounding ahead. The Marines and our nuclear deterrent are rated as bright spots but, overall, the U.S. military suffers from a lack of funding and, most disturbingly, a lack of seriousness. Anyone observing the Woke Pentagon’s descent into critical race theory and transgenderism can see that.
The report recommends, among other things, increased defense funding, more shipbuilding, more stealth F-35 multi-purpose aircraft, and addressing the military’s growing recruitment crisis. I don’t see how you can address recruitment unless you stop teaching the troops America is a horrible, rotten, racist place not worth fighting or dying for.
Let’s see what else the lack of seriousness about national security has pointed up recently, shall we? The Biden administration changed U.S. nuclear doctrine to rely less on nuclear weapons as a hedge against future threats and breakouts by nuclear rivals. In practical terms, the new policy signals the elimination of hundreds of nuclear weapons at a time when China and Russia are beefing up their own nuclear forces. Decreased American nuclear strength will have all kinds of ramifications on the battlefield, in diplomacy, and at the negotiating table.
The administration also stopped the development of nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles, despite the recommendations of senior military officials the program continue.
The lack of seriousness is also shown by the depletion of U.S. stocks of key weapons sent to Ukraine including Stingers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, howitzers, and ammunition. It is feared the U.S. has only a week’s worth of missiles left for its own use. The problem has been ignored for years and experts worry we may not have the industrial base left to meet our needs.
In the meantime, Russia is threatening commercial satellites over the West’s stance in Ukraine, North Korea is building underwater nuclear weapons silos, and China is positioning the ports it owns in Latin America for military and geopolitical advantage. Moreover, the decidedly un-serious Biden administration still refers to the U.S. as being in friendly “competition” with China when knowledgeable observers say World War III has already begun. No surprise there. Chinese communist leaders all the way back to Mao Zedong have declared their goal is world domination and the end of the United States.
We have a President more concerned about his ice cream cones than our national defense, and a Woke Pentagon too busy putting on drag shows to entertain the troops to prepare them for possible conflicts ahead. It’s time to get serious, folks. You can start by throwing the chucklehead Democrats out of office next Tuesday.
11/3/22 - The Biden Administration’s Proxy War on Free Speech
Hold on to your hats. We’re going to be learning a lot more about the Biden administration’s efforts to silence free expression through its proxy stooges in Big Tech.
A federal judge just rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to stop depositions of government officials in a lawsuit alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy by the administration and Big Tech to censor free speech. Anthony Fauci’s deposition is set for November 23rd. House Republicans sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling him out for his agency’s role in censoring free speech.
More details about that role have come to light. You might remember the agency’s Disinformation Governance Board that got shut down pretty quickly. But DHS continues its efforts to curb free speech to this day. Records from the conspiracy lawsuit, leaked emails and memos, and public documents show DHS pivoted to monitoring social media for the purpose of suppressing ‘misinformation’ the government doesn’t like about a wide range of topics, including the origins of COVID-19, COVID vaccine safety, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Facebook created a portal for DHS and other government agencies to flag posts they don’t like, for quick action. The portal is still in operation. Facebook and the FBI won’t comment. A previous report showed social media companies remove or post warnings on over a third of posts government agencies flag as objectionable.
Other agencies are also involved. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on its own motion formed a misinformation team and expanded the agency’s mission beyond infrastructure to ‘building resilience to misinformation’. The agency wants social media platforms to be more responsive to its directives. An FBI official was criticized last year after falsely telling Congress the FBI does not monitor Americans’ social media posts. The fact of the matter is the FBI has spent millions on social media tracking software.
Hunter Biden’s laptop shows you clearly why we do not want the government in the business of deciding what is true and what is false. According to polls, many people would not have voted for Joe Biden if they had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop. But government officials called it ‘Russian disinformation’ and social media companies at the FBI’s urging dutifully suppressed the story before the 2020 election, a decision they now say they regret. Thanks a bunch.
There’s really no difference between the government suppressing free speech and government officials getting private actors to violate the First Amendment for them. That’s called the state actor theory and it’s at the heart of the Missouri Attorney General’s ongoing conspiracy case against the Biden administration and Big Tech where depositions are going forward and will soon give us a lot more information about all these bad actors violating your rights.
But there’s more. The federal government paid four private companies to flag so-called ‘misinformation’ on social media during the 2020 election, resulting in the censorship of election coverage from conservative news outlets. The CDC told Facebook COVID vaccines for young children are safe and effective when there was no evidence of that, all so the CDC could suppress contrary information through Facebook in a campaign to overcome ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Twitter has a portal for CDC officials to flag COVID-related posts it deems ‘misinformation’. Documents from inside Twitter show the White House pressured Twitter to ban a New York Times writer who was raising questions about phony government COVID narratives. Facebook spies on private messages and reports users to the FBI for expressing ‘anti-government sentiments’, whatever that means.
The Biden administration is waging a proxy war on our free speech. The social media giants are only too happy to play along. But with 47 more government defendants recently added to the conspiracy lawsuit, the day of reckoning is drawing closer and I, for one, can’t wait to see these overbearing authoritarian government officials and their fascist buddies in Big Tech get hammered for messing with the First Amendment.
11/2/22 - The Cancerous Pustules of Evil Growing from Joe Biden’s Open Borders Policies
I noticed in my time as a criminal defense attorney that the problem wasn’t just the drugs or the guns, it never stayed just one thing. Once you let evil into the equation, it grows like a cancer. I’ll never forget one case I had, where my client was on trial for drug distribution. The trial was halted when the prosecution’s lead witness was found dead. When this was announced in court, my client looked at me and smirked. A chill ran down my spine, as I realized he just might have had something to do with it.
And so it is with Joe Biden’s open borders policies. Yesterday, the Justice Department announced a guilty verdict against an illegal alien who murdered a whistleblower, a witness, who exposed a multi-million dollar scheme to employ illegal aliens in Georgia. So, you see, it’s not just border jumpers breaking our law, or the fentanyl pouring in. It’s the evil, which like a cancer grows - in this case, into labor trafficking and murder.
Fentanyl is not just illicit drug use. It’s overdoses. People are dying from the record amounts of fentanyl now present in the country because of Joe Biden’s open borders policies, some 75,000 in 2022 alone.
Migrants are also dying at the border from the dangerous trip. Joe Biden’s open borders policies don’t just empower the criminal cartels and human smugglers. The policies result in deaths that otherwise would not have occurred - a record 856 of them in the last 12 months. This evil has produced bloated bodies pulled from the Rio Grande, another torn to bits when hit by a train, and corpses found in open fields with skin and organs nibbled away by animals. Joe Biden’s open borders policies are to blame for this festering problem and growing evil.
Another evil, not getting the attention it used to, is the corruption of border agents and other government officials paid to facilitate illicit activity or look the other way. A human smuggler pled guilty a few days ago to bribing a border agent who had set up a little side business sneaking aliens across the border. The smuggler would tell the agent where to pick the aliens up. The agent got the aliens through border checkpoints without a hitch and delivered them to their destinations in Phoenix. The agent has pled not guilty and goes on trial next year. A newspaper investigation in 2016 found 140 corrupt border officials who were arrested or convicted for acts that compromised their mission of keeping the border secure. I am sure that all of those agents were not compromised when they were first hired, and did not realize they could lose their souls after some time on the job seeing how much money was sloshing around. They were tempted and turned. That’s how evil works. Not a sermon, just an observation based on my almost seven decades on the planet. And now the money is bigger and the temptations are greater, thanks to Joe Biden’s open borders policies.
Some years ago, a person in a position to know told me the corruption even reaches all the way to Washington, D.C. Federal government officials have been paid off, and this is one reason illicit activity at the border has been allowed to continue, my source told me. Given what I know about the D.C. swamp, I wouldn’t doubt it.
So, you see, it’s not just letting too many illegal aliens into the country or the disrespect for law that engenders. It’s the evils that compound from the first evil of opening the border and going outside the nation’s immigration laws. The criminal cartels, the overdose and migrant deaths, the labor trafficking, the corruption of government officials, and other evils are all growing out of Joe Biden’s open borders policies. Nice work, Joe. You traffic in evil and evil spreads like a cancer. Evil begets evil. Eventually, you find there is hell to pay.
11/1/22 - Red Wave Follows Democrat Crime Wave
Crime is now the third top issue in the elections, according to a new Gallup poll. No wonder, with people being pushed onto subway tracks for no reason in New York and flash mobs looting stores in California. Fourteen people, including children, were injured in Chicago on Halloween night after two shooters started firing randomly into a crowd.
Sorry, Chicago, but elections have consequences. You elected Democrat Lori Lightfoot as mayor, the same Lori Lightfoot who defunded the police and refused to call out the National Guard to put down the riots in 2020. She has admitted she has no idea how to stop the crime wave and has called on the feds to bail her out. Democrats in Illinois also just passed a new law that will end cash bail after the 1st of the year for aggravated assault, second-degree murder, and other serious crimes. This will free hundreds of defendants awaiting trial, so don’t expect the crime problem in Chicago to get any better any time soon.
You elect Democrats again this go-around and it is guaranteed the situation won’t get any better. In addition to defunding the police and ending cash bail, the Democrat Party has brought you the Soros progressive prosecutors who are a problem in so many parts of the country. Things are so bad in Philadelphia with progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner in charge of the District Attorney’s office there that state Republican lawmakers have moved to impeach him. A murderer, whom Krasner freed from a life sentence last year, is back in custody on another murder charge. “[W]e have heard devastating stories from victims of crime, businesses who are closing because they do not feel safe, and victims who have been revictimized by a district attorney’s office unwilling to help them when they would rather help criminals," one Republican said. Krasner called the Republicans fascists and a threat to democracy. Gee, I’ve never heard that before. I wonder where he got that line.
When confronted on TV with the obvious failure of his policies, Krasner claimed the murder rate is 40 percent higher in states Trump won than in states Biden won. The claim comes from a progressive think tank and progressive authors, so you can take it with a grain of salt, maybe two. But what cannot be denied is the fact that Democrats run all but one of the most dangerous cities in America and they have, in most cases, for decades. The top 16 cities in the country for homicides are all run by Democrats.
Progressive prosecutors have wreaked havoc elsewhere. One in Virginia freed a felon who went on to murder two men. Another in Virginia freed a man from jail twice in a month who later killed a man. A Democrat D.A. in Los Angeles failed to prosecute an illegal alien for domestic violence in 2019. The man went on a stabbing spree in Las Vegas last month, killing two of his eight victims with a knife.
The tone for all this was set in 2020 when the rioters who burned down cities and injured 2,000 police officers got a free pass, for the most part. There were only a relative handful of prosecutions in progressive and Democrat strongholds like Portland and Minneapolis. This invited further criminality and the nation is now reaping the whirlwind. Wrong direction - unless, of course, you like chaos and things spinning out of control. If you do, be sure to vote Democrat in this election because the Democrat Party - by defunding the police, ending cash bail, and installing progressive prosecutors - will surely give you what you want.
10/31/22 - The Fall of the House of Twitter
Twitter employees are calling it ‘Black Monday’. Elon Musk is expected to fire many of them today, having already shown four top executives the door. Estimates vary, but 10 to 50 percent of Twitter’s employees will lose their jobs today. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for them. Twitter censored me, then Facebook censored me. Pride goeth before the fall. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for these minor minions of the authoritarian Left who think they know the first thing about governance and try to silence anyone who disagrees with their stupid little opinions. It makes me smile to see them thrown out on their ear.
I’m not sorry in the least, not when I see the scope of the Left’s attempt to shut people like me up. The Missouri Attorney General and others brought a lawsuit against Big Tech and the Biden administration for what the lawsuit calls a “massive, sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise'." The case is ongoing. Anthony Fauci, Jen Psaki, and other officials from the Biden administration now face depositions where they will have to explain how and why they colluded with Twitter and other social media platforms to shut people up about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the 2020 presidential election, COVID, and other topics.
As vast as that effort was, it only scratches the surface of what the authoritarian Left and their Democrat friends are doing to suppress speech in this country.
Democrat-controlled California just passed a law prohibiting doctors from disagreeing with the government about COVID treatments. Which is really funny because I’ve given you story after story in previous commentaries, about public health authorities being completely wrong about COVID - so many stories, I’ve lost count.
The Republican National Committee just sued Google for suppressing 22 million get-out-the-vote and fundraising emails. Google sent the mailings to users’ spam folders. Right before the election. Tell me that’s an accident.
A coffee shop in Virginia was forced to close after the owner celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade online. Left-wing nasties bombarded the shop with negative reviews.
The comic strip ‘Dilbert’ was recently canceled in 80 newspapers without explanation. The creator believes it is because the strip has been poking fun at corporations that are pursuing Woke agendas.
Canceling ‘Dilbert’ shows you just how weak the authoritarian Left really is. It is so weak it can’t even stand a little ribbing from a comic strip. That reminds me of Xi Jinping kicking Winnie the Pooh out of China because he didn’t like people saying he looks like Winnie the Pooh.
The Left is afraid of comic strips. The Left is afraid of nobodies like me telling the truth - so afraid, we get kicked off of Facebook and Twitter. The Left is afraid of coffee shop owners who think for themselves, doctors who exercise their independent professional judgment, parents speaking their minds at school board meetings, and FBI agents blowing the whistle on agency wrong-doing. Trying to shut us all up - that’s weakness, not strength. So to all you Jack Dorsey-booted left-wing authoritarian thugs out there, don’t think for a minute you have succeeded in getting rid of us. You are too weak to succeed. And we’re just getting started.
10/27/22 - Parents Mobilize as Culture War Rages
A flood of recent field reports shows the nationwide attempted hijacking of the nation’s school children by the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex has kicked into in high gear.
It’s been reported in recent weeks a book turned up in an Oklahoma middle school instructing kids in the fine arts of anilingus, cunnilingus, and sexual intercourse. Except it didn’t use those terms. It used the vulgar vernacular that can’t be repeated here, instead. Excuse me?
Democrat lawmakers want to make it felony child abuse for parents to stand in the way of sex change drugs and surgery for their minor children. Excuse me?
The CDC - your federal government all hepped up on Democrat control - handed out $85 million in grants requiring schools to start LGBT support groups. Excuse me?
That’s just a small sample of what’s going on out there. But today I want to focus on the most recent developments in how parents are fighting back.
Twenty parents spoke out at a school board meeting against the “Queerest Free Halloween Party for Youth & Families” planned at an elementary school near San Diego. A hundred more cheered them on. The party is sponsored by a sex-change surgery center and a gay bar - the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex in action. The party is to feature a ‘family-friendly’ drag show, as if there is such a thing. One mother called school board members “groomers and activist pimps”. She’s a domestic terrorist, according to our esteemed Democrat Attorney General. I’ll tell you who the real domestic terrorists are: the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex who are attempting to destroy children and break down the country into nothingness, using sex to do it in true communist fashion. They are the subversive ones. It’s no accident communist theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich ushered in the sexual revolution. It’s no accident another communist theorist Georgi Lukacs called the use of sex for these purposes “cultural terrorism”. And it’s no accident transgender activists openly talk about using transgenderism to usher in communism.
Hundreds of parents also protested against a transgender teacher wearing gigantic fake breasts with protruding nipples at a high school in Canada. A hundred and fifty more protested against an American Academy of Pediatrics convention in California. That doctor’s trade association proudly stands up for “gender-affirming care” to transition minors. That’s a euphemism for life-altering irreversible sex-change drugs and surgery for kids too young to consent to a car loan.
Some parents, not willing to stop at protesting, have pulled their kids out of schools that harp on sex, gender, and race. Standing up for parents, 19 Republican state Attorneys General sued the Biden administration for violating state laws and exceeding its authority for acting against schools that refuse to allow transgenders into girls sports or the restrooms of their choice. In Virginia, Governor Youngkin stayed true to the parental rights stance that got him elected and issued new model policies requiring public schools to defer to parental decision-making and to align school facilities and sports by biological sex, not gender identity. The new policies reverse the actions of a previous Democrat-controlled legislature and are scheduled to go into effect soon.
There’s something you can do. Moms for Liberty has created a candidate pledge affirming that “parents have that fundamental right to direct the education, the medical care, the moral and religious upbringing of their children in their character development." Bring the pledge to candidates in your area and ask them to sign it. Publicize it if they won’t. That’s one way to get involved in the fight against the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex that plenty of gay and transgender adults want no part of. Make no mistake: this is a fight to the death and it’s time to choose what side you’re on.
10/26/22 - Democrats Ask: Have You Hugged a Criminal Today?
In a debate last night, Lee Zeldin accused Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul of being soft on crime. He pointed out she bragged about her support for cashless bail and he called for the state’s cashless bail law to be suspended. “I don’t think that if you are Mexican cartel drug smugglers busted with $1.2 million worth of crystal meth that you should just be instantly released on cashless bail,” he said. When Hochul tried to pivot to gun control, Zeldin said plenty of serious crimes are being committed without guns. “You have people who are afraid of being pushed in front of oncoming subway cars. They’re being stabbed, beaten to death on the street with hammers,” he said. Zeldin then pledged, if elected governor, to fire Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Soros Progressive prosecutor who has been criticized for not prosecuting violent crimes.
Polls show crime is a campaign issue, as well it should be. The Democrats’ insane criminal justice policies - from cashless bail to defunding the police to allowing the homeless to camp out in your front yard without penalty - should be on trial in this election.
Need more proof the Democrats are out of their ever-lovin’ minds when it comes to criminal justice reform? Consider these recent stories:
Senate candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania thinks murderers serving time in prison are just like your grandfather and grandmother. That’s insane. This from a guy who wants to let one-third of all criminals in prison out because it will make everyone safer. The man is a certified lunatic.
Cashless bail has produced stories like the New York man, previously arrested 12 times, released without bail attacking two women in broad daylight. One was pushing a baby stroller. Before he grabbed her neck, he shouted, “ F*** you, B***! Go ahead and call the cops, I don’t care.” That’s insane.
But not as insane as what goes on now in Minneapolis, where police have been constrained from pursuing suspects in vehicles. Car thieves race around neighborhoods and wave at the police while roaring by them in stolen cars. But here’s what’s really insane: The same kind of limited vehicle pursuit law was recently passed in Washington state. Officers are supposed to wait for clearance from headquarters before initiating pursuit. Suspects are now calling 9-1-1 to report officers who pursue them. “I have a cop chasing me in violation of House Bill 1047,” they tell the operators. Things have truly gone upside down.
All this insanity has real-world consequences. Businesses are closing in San Francisco and Philadelphia because of rampant crime. The number of police officers injured or killed in surprise ambushes has soared since rioters were given a free pass for burning down cities and attacking law enforcement in the summer of 2020. The Democrats cause a soaring crime problem, then go on TV and call anyone who brings attention to it a racist for pointing it out.
But the Democrats know their policies have been ruinous. That’s why they’re trying to run away from them in this election. They say the stupidest things like they were never for defunding the police when they obviously were. Kamala Harris now claims she never supported an organization that bailed out murderers and rapists, but her tweet asking people to donate to the organization is still up.
Democrats have also shown by their actions they know they went down the wrong road. The Governor of New Mexico pushed cashless bail and defunding the police, but is now begging the feds to send more law enforcement to her state because the crime is so bad there. And I’ve lost count of the number of cities that have scrambled to re-fund the police after defunding the police caused crime to spiral out of control.
The Democrats have shown you by word and deed they admit their criminal justice reforms were disastrous. But, unfortunately, their policies caused all kinds of real-world insanity and ruinous consequences. If you listen to all this and say to yourself, ‘I’m still going to vote Democrat,’ then YOU are the one who is insane.
10/25/22 - The Great Recycling Fraud
NPR accidentally told the truth, yesterday, and it’s a doozy:
But it was no surprise to me. Years ago, I watched a local TV news report showing a recycling truck taking everything from recycling bins straight to the dump. I’ve known recycling is all phony-baloney since then and now the NPR report confirms nothing’s changed.
The whole recycling thing is a fraud on the public, perpetrated by left-wing advocacy groups and politicians, designed to make you feel good about saving the planet. How does it feel to know you’ve been manipulated by the Left every step of the way? To know they’ve made you feel guilty - about destroying the planet with your plastic - for no good reason. To know they’ve manipulated you into falling into line with their rules and directives that have no basis in reality. It’s all been a complete charade. How does it feel to know you’ve set these people up as authority figures in your life when they are really just charlatans behind the curtain pulling the levers of their pathetic little schemes and con jobs, just like the Wizard of Oz? How does it feel to know you’ve been manipulated into supporting a useless exercise when the money could have been spent on something truly useful, instead? To know you haven’t been saving the planet all this time - you’ve been serving the petty little personal purposes of your so-called leaders, purposes which come down to wealth and power for themselves. How does it feel to know you’ve been dutifully recycling your plastic and they’ve been laughing all the way to the bank? To know all you really did was hand power to scumbags and liars? To know you took them at their word and they betrayed you? They betrayed your trust just like a lover who cheats on you.
Now that your eyes have been opened - you gotta ask yourself: what else are they lying to me about? How else have they betrayed my trust? They’ve told you the polar bears are dying and that’s not true. They’ve told you Arctic ice is disappearing when it’s actually increasing. They’ve told you the planet is burning up when there’s been a 20-year pause in global warming and the planet was warmer centuries ago. They lie, they fake their data, and they deliberately try to scare you to death. The whole thing is make-believe, and you fell for it.
Why am I being so hard on you? Because you’re screwing up the country, that’s why. You’ve handed power to the worst possible scoundrels who will ride any horse they can find that will give them complete power over us and let them control every aspect of everybody’s life. The Green New Deal is just the start. They’re scheming to limit your travel to nothing, shut down most of the country, cut your food rations, make you eat bugs, and tell you how many pounds of clothing you can buy a year, or we will all burn in earthly hell. From all of us who still love our freedom, thanks a bunch. And it will all have been for nothing, except wealth and power for a tiny authoritarian elite.
So I urge you: think for yourself and come back to reality. Look past the slogans and the demonization of anyone who opposes their schemes. Leave the climate change cult and take back your life from the high priests of Big Green who want to turn off your brain and control you. Dump this fake religion. Don’t recycle it. Just put it on a truck and take it straight to the landfill, where it belongs.
10/24/22 - Impeachable Offenses at the Border
It’s been widely reported border agents have apprehended a record 2.3 million illegal aliens at the southern border in the last 12 months. What has not received nearly as much attention is the fact that 20 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border last month, bringing the total for the fiscal year to 98. This is four times the number for the last five years COMBINED. Houston, we have a problem. In addition, over 25,000 special interest aliens with possible ties to terrorism were encountered at the border this fiscal year, more than half of them from the Islamic Republic of Turkey. What’s up with that?
Recent stories in the news also confirm the familiar litany of other problems with Joe Biden’s open border policies, starting with fentanyl pouring into the United States. Enough fentanyl to kill 36 million Americans was confiscated around the country from May to September. Some 12,000 fentanyl pills were seized at the Los Angeles airport last week. Not only do the Democrats not care, they blocked a bill last month that would have upgraded the penalties for selling fentanyl. Another reason not to vote Democrat in the election.
Meanwhile, dead bodies are piling up at the border, literally. Texas sheriffs are having to use mobile makeshift morgues to handle the record number of illegal aliens dropping dead at the border. The situation is so bad in one Texas town, the funeral homes and local mortuaries are no longer taking in dead bodies. They’re simply being buried in the local cemetery without being identified. I guess that’s what Biden immigration officials mean by prioritizing ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’. If you come here illegally and die, we’ll still include you in our cemeteries.
Just as cynical is the administration’s handling of unaccompanied alien children. A record 130,000 entered the government shelter system this fiscal year. But an Inspector General report last month blasted the administration for improper care and for releasing children to sponsors who have not been properly screened for child sex offenses. Democrats must not care if children are released to unsafe sponsors and are put at risk for sex trafficking, because no Democrat has spoken out against it.
Another consequence of Joe Biden’s border policies is the empowerment of the cartels. Migrant smuggling is now a $20 billion enterprise. Twenty billion will buy a lot of weaponry and bureaucrats.
The Biden administration isn’t defending any of this. Instead, they’re trying to hide it from the American public. But why hide it? If you’re proud of your policies, you should want to tell the world. Tell the world how you pressured the mayor of El Paso not to declare a state of emergency over the border crisis because it would make you look bad. Tell the world how you are sending military personnel to the border to cook, sweep floors, and fill out paperwork. Like the ad says, be all you can be.
And tell the world how you continue to change policies to promote more illegal immigration. I’ve already documented dozens of policy changes in previous commentaries. Here are the latest: It is now policy to open gates locked by the Texas National Guard so more illegal aliens can enter. It is policy to tell border states that put up their own barriers to illegal entry they are guilty of “trespass against the United States” and pressure states to remove them. And it is now policy to spend tens of millions of dollars on legal services to help illegal aliens avoid deportation and stay in the U.S. permanently.
The border has become an issue in the elections. People don’t trust the Democrats on border issues and wish Republicans were in charge. The nation has immigration laws, but Democrat Joe Biden and his open borders cronies have thrown them in the trash. Joe Biden is running a criminal enterprise, as far as I’m concerned, and he and his border officials really should be impeached for failing to faithfully execute the nation’s immigration laws as they have sworn to do. Shame on Kevin McCarthy for taking impeachment of Biden off the table. Now McCarthy can’t even use the threat of impeachment as a bargaining chip to get something else. What a dummy. Like they say, Republicans never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
10/21/22 - The Utter Cynicism and Confusion of the Hate America Crowd
I love this country. It’s the best country on earth and I am fortunate to live here. It amazes me that the Left has managed to convince so many people America is the worst country on earth and they should hate it. Here are some recent examples:
A man was triggered by a woman wearing an American flag shirt in Minnesota. He grabbed her by the neck, beat her, and threatened to kill her with a towel rack. Also allergic to the American flag is a Reuters reporter who was so upset by a crowd of people waving the American flag near the U.S. Capitol, she tweeted about it. But the colors of the flag are symbolic. Red is for hardiness and valor. White stands for purity and innocence, and the blue symbolizes vigilance, perseverance, and justice. What would the Reuters reporter prefer? A flag honoring depravity, timidity, and malevolence? I doubt the reporter has thought this through.
The Fargo school board voted to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings because, according to them, America does not have ‘liberty and justice for all’ and the phrase ‘under God’ excludes atheists and Buddhists. Well, that’s interesting. The Pledge of Allegiance swears fealty to our Republic. Our Constitution guarantees a republican form of government in the states (Article IV, Section 4). Representative government is part of what a republic means. So does this mean the school board members don’t want to be elected to office again? I don’t get it.
An elementary school in New Jersey changed its name, getting rid of Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. I guess the school doesn’t want its pupils to have life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Apparently, NPR doesn’t want people to have those things, either. This year, it ended a 33-year tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July. Instead, it had a discussion of the importance of equal outcomes - ‘equity’ - and how the Republican Party is pushing the country into authoritarian rule. Hmm... Didn’t the Declaration of Independence rail against a “long train of abuses” and object to authoritarians shutting down colonial legislatures, preventing the people from making their own laws? NPR’s reasoning is a little confused, here.
Not to be outdone, Cornell University removed a bust of Abraham Lincoln after getting one complaint. They removed a plaque with the Gettysburg Address, too. The University didn’t explain its reasoning, but it didn’t matter that Lincoln called slavery immoral, freed the slaves, and bound up the nation’s wounds after successfully seeing it through the Civil War. It must be that Cornell wants to see government “of the people, by the people, for the people” perish from the earth.
Which brings us to Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes who said the founding of America was “awful” and we need to repair the damage of colonialism and slavery. Mandela Barnes, meet Maurice Barboza, a mixed-race individual who is working to get a memorial built on the National Mall dedicated to the memory of the forgotten black patriots who fought on the side of the colonists in the Revolutionary War. Maurice wrote a brilliant article which appears on my Potomac Tea Party website in which he describes how generations of blacks in America worked to “complete the Founders’ vision.” The vision is outstanding, Maurice wrote. But it took time for the country to extend the inescapable logic of the vision to all people, starting as it did from a position of allowing slavery. Those generations of blacks “grasped the quintessential meaning of the Revolutionary War: ‘Those principles apply to me, too’,” Maurice wrote. “The Confederacy strenuously fought this inexorable logic and perished.”
So anyone who is stuck on the sins of the founding - and hates the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence - is willfully blind to the progress that has been made since America’s founding. Which begs the question: Woke leaders know there’s been progress, so why are they playing this game? Because it pays. They’ll keep beating us up with this club as long as they think it’s working, as long as we let them. Show them the guilt trip is over, and they’ll have to move on.
Liberty - as expressed in the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence - is a grand philosophical tradition and, no matter how Woke you are, I guarantee you would not like life without it.
10/20/22 - Deconstructing the ‘Election Denier’ Smear
The ‘election denier’ drumbeat is getting louder and more persistent. I’m seeing lots of scare stories now, three weeks out from Election Day - ‘don’t elect election deniers; they’re a threat to democracy.’ The Democrats must think their smear job and fearmongering are working, but I assure you, they’re not. Republicans are ready, and they have the better arguments.
Kari Lake got a question on the campaign trail about being an election denier. She whipped out a stack of pages listing all the Democrats who have denied election results since 2000. That would include Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton. One thinks she’s the Governor of Georgia and the other thinks she’s President. That’s just for starters. The Republican Party put together a list of 150 Democrat election deniers. The list includes Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Maxine Waters, and many, many more. You can watch a video that goes on for 12 minutes full of Democrats refusing to accept the results of elections they lost.
Another Republican candidate was ready for the smear. Democrat Senator Patty Murray of Washington state slammed her Republican opponent Tiffany Smiley for questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. But Smiley came right back, calling Murray a hypocrite who shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about democracy because Murray herself questioned the results of the 2004 presidential election. Murray had no response.
But the best answer to the election denier smear came from a congressional candidate in Virginia who was asked, “Do you believe the 2020 election was free, fair and untainted, and Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States?” Hung Cao responded: “Sir, Joe Biden is the president of the United States. If you don’t believe me, go to your gas pumps, or go to your grocery stores, and that’ll tell you who is.” Master stroke. Put the stupid Democrats in their place.
The Democrats huff and puff about Republicans pursuing the idea of alternative electors to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. We now even have the spectacle of the FBI and Justice Department attempting to criminalize the effort and issuing grand jury subpoenas to the people involved. But let’s not forget challenges to presidential electors go all the way back to 1876 and it was the Democrats who challenged electors in 1960, 2000, and 2004. Nobody issued grand jury subpoenas then, nor should they have.
My own response to this election denier business is that just because they’re election deniers doesn’t mean they’re not right about needed reforms. Starting with cleaning the voter rolls, which is just common sense. I love to hear Democrats twist themselves all into knots defending the idea of leaving dead people on the rolls. Another common sense reform is voter ID, which is supported by most Americans of all stripes and has been upheld by just about every court that has looked at it, including one in Missouri just last week. The Democrat argument on voter ID is completely racist - that black people are too stupid to get a photo ID. I just heard about a state, I forget where, that sends out mobile vans to anyone who asks and gives them a photo ID on the spot, free of charge. The Democrats can jump up and down and scream all they want, but they really have no argument left. So, tell me how putting people in office who care about free and fair elections is a bad thing. You’re going to have to explain that one to me, because it doesn’t make any sense.
But a New York Times reporter and book author - Robert Draper - just called people like me ‘insincere’ in advocating reforms for future elections. People like me are just giving cover to the 2020 election deniers, because we won’t denounce them. Following this to its logical conclusion, we can never take steps to secure our elections ever again because that would always affirm the people who challenged the election results in 2020. Let’s see how well that logic holds up in the year 2120. Hey, whatever sells books.
Here’s what I denounce: Hypocritical Democrats who get hysterical about Republican election deniers but not those in their own party. Partisan government officials who attempt to criminalize alternate electors following the constitutional process for challenging presidential election results. And, most of all, anyone with phony narratives and smear tactics who stands between me and my vote counting just as much as anyone else’s in free and fair elections.
10/19/22 - The True Craziness of the Phony Climate Change Narrative
Climate change activists have pulled all kinds of crazy stunts, recently. Two activists were arrested for throwing tomato soup at van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ painting in London. They wore t-shirts that said “Just Stop Oil”. It turns out that’s the name of a radical green group whose members are also gluing themselves to the road in Britain to stop traffic. More green activists pulled the same stunt in France. Back in Britain, another climate activist defaced an Aston Martin showroom with paint to protest oil production. Another group there, Animal Rebellion, is damaging milk trucks and pouring milk out on grocery store floors to protest climate change. They’ve also been occupying milk distribution facilities. Turn on the TV and the craziness continues. CBS Mornings blames the increasing number of overweight kids on climate change, saying rising temperatures keep them from playing outdoors. Pretty crazy stuff, all around.
But here’s what’s really crazy:
It’s really crazy that people still believe polar bears are disappearing because of climate change when, in fact, they are thriving.
It’s really crazy that people still believe Arctic ice is melting down to nothing when, in truth, Arctic ice is at the highest level in a decade.
It’s really crazy people go right on believing in the phony climate change narrative when the entire thing is built on data tampering. In 2019, a court dismissed Michael Mann’s defamation suit against a scientist who said Mann belonged in jail for falsifying his famous 1998 ‘hockey stick’ graph purportedly showing an alarming spike in global average temperatures. The scientist defended against Mann’s defamation claim by saying his own position was true and attempted to put Mann to his proof. But Mann wouldn’t produce his underlying research in court, so the court dismissed his case. The scientist was not the first to show Mann’s hockey stick graph is a hoax. The flaws were well-known by 2003.
The latest instance of data tampering has to do with Arctic sea ice. U.N. and NASA hide the data from before 1979 to make it look on charts like Arctic sea ice is disappearing. But 1979 was a peak year. There may be less ice now than in 1979, but there is more than there was 15 years ago - Arctic ice is at a decade high, as I mentioned earlier. Also, there was very little ice in the Arctic 6,000 years ago BEFORE the burning of fossil fuels, which puts the nail in the coffin of the entire phony climate change narrative.
It’s really crazy to keep believing in the climate change narrative when green groups pushing the narrative have deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Russia, both of which would be only too happy to watch the U.S. commit energy suicide. Why is it climate czar John Kerry isn’t being transparent about his ties to China and radical green groups here at home? House Republicans have told Kerry to preserve his records, because there will be investigations if the Republicans take over the House.
It’s really crazy to take the climate change narrative at face value when the true agenda - Marxist redistribution of wealth at home and abroad - is plain for all to see. Joe Biden just pledged $11 billion a year to send to poor countries supposedly to fight climate change. His EPA just launched an ‘Environmental Justice’ office to dispense $3 billion in federal grants created by the recent climate legislation. The money is going to poor and minority communities. Plus we had a fresh reminder the climate change narrative is green on the outside but communist red on the inside from the Democrat Senate candidate in Wisconsin who repeated the sentiment the world needs to “stymie capitalism” to fight climate change. Free enterprise is the “path to destruction”, he said. So there you have it. Climate change is just the fig leaf to justify giving all our money away and making sure the world never accumulates its current level of wealth ever again.
Finally, it’s utterly delusional for the Democrat Biden administration to force a green energy ‘transition’ on the country when solar and wind power are not reliable, cheap, or even environmentally-friendly. The administration’s entire vision is at the whim of commodity prices for minerals like lithium which are rising, as I’ve pointed out in previous commentary. It also makes us completely dependent on China, which has declared itself our enemy.
A forced green energy transition is a pipedream. We need to stop this madness now and recognize fossil fuels are both necessary and here to stay, or we will be the ones crying over spilled milk.
10/18/22 - Pay-to-Play in the China Swamp
Finally, people are catching on to how our corrupt elites are beholden to China, starting with the first family.
The Biden family received a $5 million interest-free, forgivable loan from a Chinese energy company five years ago, according to FBI evidence. Senator Chuck Grassley called for a pay-to-play corruption investigation. Joe Biden was out of the White House at the time, but a witness said the money was compensation - deliberately deferred - for work Hunter and James Biden did while Joe Biden, who benefitted from the deal, was vice president. A whistleblower who was part of the deal confirmed Joe Biden was personally involved and said the Bidens eventually expected to make billions from the Chinese. The $5 million was eventually sent to entities tied to Hunter and James Biden. Lawyers for those two have declined to answer questions about the deal. Senator Grassley, in calling for an investigation, said the evidence points to potential criminality. Pay-to-play - an investigation would uncover exactly what the Chinese received in exchange for the $5 million forgivable loan. Enquiring minds want to know.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to appoint China sympathizers to the State Department. His latest appointment once told Americans to “embrace China” and worked with Chinese front groups to advance Chinese interests in Washington. Get this - this person is being appointed to a position supposedly created to counter China’s growing influence. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. This fox joins the other China-sympathizing foxes Biden has appointed to State Department positions.
Currying influence in Washington has paid off for China. U.S. government agencies gave $29 million in joint research grants to Chinese entities in a recent six-year period. The grants came from the CDC, NIH, and Pentagon and went for research into vaccines, drones, and drugs. Sounds pretty benign until you realize the communist Chinese do not distinguish between civilian and military research. All research is military research in China. Talk about giving them the rope to hang us with. We wouldn’t know about this if Republicans hadn’t asked GAO for the information. GAO said in its report there are ways around reporting requirements, so the true extent of U.S. taxpayer money going to China for research is unknown.
But money doesn’t have to go to China for China to get its hands on U.S. research. A new Pentagon study shows China seeks out U.S. companies that get federal research funding and recruits them to perform work for Chinese entities tied to the Chinese military. The U.S. companies betray their own country by selling out to the Chinese, at which point their research is transferred to Chinese subsidiaries. The kinds of research ending up in China this way involve drugs, drones, spacecraft, bio-sensors, solar energy, and a catch-all category ‘military devices’. The Pentagon study concluded China benefits more from our research than we do. People say China can’t innovate, but this is pretty darn clever. Legislation is needed to disqualify U.S. firms that have ties to China and pose this kind of national security risk from U.S. funding.
One final note: the CEOs of Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup told Congress last month they would follow U.S. government guidance to refrain from doing business in China if China were to invade Taiwan. But given the forgivable loans, expectations to make billions, and ‘10 percent for the Big Guy’, can you really see Joe Biden giving the CEOs the order to pull out of China? I can’t. That’s just one possible consequence of allowing China to capture our elites. There are others.
Twitter employees are calling it ‘Black Monday’. Elon Musk is expected to fire many of them today, having already shown four top executives the door. Estimates vary, but 10 to 50 percent of Twitter’s employees will lose their jobs today. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for them. Twitter censored me, then Facebook censored me. Pride goeth before the fall. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for these minor minions of the authoritarian Left who think they know the first thing about governance and try to silence anyone who disagrees with their stupid little opinions. It makes me smile to see them thrown out on their ear.
I’m not sorry in the least, not when I see the scope of the Left’s attempt to shut people like me up. The Missouri Attorney General and others brought a lawsuit against Big Tech and the Biden administration for what the lawsuit calls a “massive, sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise'." The case is ongoing. Anthony Fauci, Jen Psaki, and other officials from the Biden administration now face depositions where they will have to explain how and why they colluded with Twitter and other social media platforms to shut people up about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the 2020 presidential election, COVID, and other topics.
As vast as that effort was, it only scratches the surface of what the authoritarian Left and their Democrat friends are doing to suppress speech in this country.
Democrat-controlled California just passed a law prohibiting doctors from disagreeing with the government about COVID treatments. Which is really funny because I’ve given you story after story in previous commentaries, about public health authorities being completely wrong about COVID - so many stories, I’ve lost count.
The Republican National Committee just sued Google for suppressing 22 million get-out-the-vote and fundraising emails. Google sent the mailings to users’ spam folders. Right before the election. Tell me that’s an accident.
A coffee shop in Virginia was forced to close after the owner celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade online. Left-wing nasties bombarded the shop with negative reviews.
The comic strip ‘Dilbert’ was recently canceled in 80 newspapers without explanation. The creator believes it is because the strip has been poking fun at corporations that are pursuing Woke agendas.
Canceling ‘Dilbert’ shows you just how weak the authoritarian Left really is. It is so weak it can’t even stand a little ribbing from a comic strip. That reminds me of Xi Jinping kicking Winnie the Pooh out of China because he didn’t like people saying he looks like Winnie the Pooh.
The Left is afraid of comic strips. The Left is afraid of nobodies like me telling the truth - so afraid, we get kicked off of Facebook and Twitter. The Left is afraid of coffee shop owners who think for themselves, doctors who exercise their independent professional judgment, parents speaking their minds at school board meetings, and FBI agents blowing the whistle on agency wrong-doing. Trying to shut us all up - that’s weakness, not strength. So to all you Jack Dorsey-booted left-wing authoritarian thugs out there, don’t think for a minute you have succeeded in getting rid of us. You are too weak to succeed. And we’re just getting started.
10/27/22 - Parents Mobilize as Culture War Rages
A flood of recent field reports shows the nationwide attempted hijacking of the nation’s school children by the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex has kicked into in high gear.
It’s been reported in recent weeks a book turned up in an Oklahoma middle school instructing kids in the fine arts of anilingus, cunnilingus, and sexual intercourse. Except it didn’t use those terms. It used the vulgar vernacular that can’t be repeated here, instead. Excuse me?
Democrat lawmakers want to make it felony child abuse for parents to stand in the way of sex change drugs and surgery for their minor children. Excuse me?
The CDC - your federal government all hepped up on Democrat control - handed out $85 million in grants requiring schools to start LGBT support groups. Excuse me?
That’s just a small sample of what’s going on out there. But today I want to focus on the most recent developments in how parents are fighting back.
Twenty parents spoke out at a school board meeting against the “Queerest Free Halloween Party for Youth & Families” planned at an elementary school near San Diego. A hundred more cheered them on. The party is sponsored by a sex-change surgery center and a gay bar - the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex in action. The party is to feature a ‘family-friendly’ drag show, as if there is such a thing. One mother called school board members “groomers and activist pimps”. She’s a domestic terrorist, according to our esteemed Democrat Attorney General. I’ll tell you who the real domestic terrorists are: the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex who are attempting to destroy children and break down the country into nothingness, using sex to do it in true communist fashion. They are the subversive ones. It’s no accident communist theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich ushered in the sexual revolution. It’s no accident another communist theorist Georgi Lukacs called the use of sex for these purposes “cultural terrorism”. And it’s no accident transgender activists openly talk about using transgenderism to usher in communism.
Hundreds of parents also protested against a transgender teacher wearing gigantic fake breasts with protruding nipples at a high school in Canada. A hundred and fifty more protested against an American Academy of Pediatrics convention in California. That doctor’s trade association proudly stands up for “gender-affirming care” to transition minors. That’s a euphemism for life-altering irreversible sex-change drugs and surgery for kids too young to consent to a car loan.
Some parents, not willing to stop at protesting, have pulled their kids out of schools that harp on sex, gender, and race. Standing up for parents, 19 Republican state Attorneys General sued the Biden administration for violating state laws and exceeding its authority for acting against schools that refuse to allow transgenders into girls sports or the restrooms of their choice. In Virginia, Governor Youngkin stayed true to the parental rights stance that got him elected and issued new model policies requiring public schools to defer to parental decision-making and to align school facilities and sports by biological sex, not gender identity. The new policies reverse the actions of a previous Democrat-controlled legislature and are scheduled to go into effect soon.
There’s something you can do. Moms for Liberty has created a candidate pledge affirming that “parents have that fundamental right to direct the education, the medical care, the moral and religious upbringing of their children in their character development." Bring the pledge to candidates in your area and ask them to sign it. Publicize it if they won’t. That’s one way to get involved in the fight against the Gay Gestapo and Transgender-Industrial Complex that plenty of gay and transgender adults want no part of. Make no mistake: this is a fight to the death and it’s time to choose what side you’re on.
10/26/22 - Democrats Ask: Have You Hugged a Criminal Today?
In a debate last night, Lee Zeldin accused Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul of being soft on crime. He pointed out she bragged about her support for cashless bail and he called for the state’s cashless bail law to be suspended. “I don’t think that if you are Mexican cartel drug smugglers busted with $1.2 million worth of crystal meth that you should just be instantly released on cashless bail,” he said. When Hochul tried to pivot to gun control, Zeldin said plenty of serious crimes are being committed without guns. “You have people who are afraid of being pushed in front of oncoming subway cars. They’re being stabbed, beaten to death on the street with hammers,” he said. Zeldin then pledged, if elected governor, to fire Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Soros Progressive prosecutor who has been criticized for not prosecuting violent crimes.
Polls show crime is a campaign issue, as well it should be. The Democrats’ insane criminal justice policies - from cashless bail to defunding the police to allowing the homeless to camp out in your front yard without penalty - should be on trial in this election.
Need more proof the Democrats are out of their ever-lovin’ minds when it comes to criminal justice reform? Consider these recent stories:
Senate candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania thinks murderers serving time in prison are just like your grandfather and grandmother. That’s insane. This from a guy who wants to let one-third of all criminals in prison out because it will make everyone safer. The man is a certified lunatic.
Cashless bail has produced stories like the New York man, previously arrested 12 times, released without bail attacking two women in broad daylight. One was pushing a baby stroller. Before he grabbed her neck, he shouted, “ F*** you, B***! Go ahead and call the cops, I don’t care.” That’s insane.
But not as insane as what goes on now in Minneapolis, where police have been constrained from pursuing suspects in vehicles. Car thieves race around neighborhoods and wave at the police while roaring by them in stolen cars. But here’s what’s really insane: The same kind of limited vehicle pursuit law was recently passed in Washington state. Officers are supposed to wait for clearance from headquarters before initiating pursuit. Suspects are now calling 9-1-1 to report officers who pursue them. “I have a cop chasing me in violation of House Bill 1047,” they tell the operators. Things have truly gone upside down.
All this insanity has real-world consequences. Businesses are closing in San Francisco and Philadelphia because of rampant crime. The number of police officers injured or killed in surprise ambushes has soared since rioters were given a free pass for burning down cities and attacking law enforcement in the summer of 2020. The Democrats cause a soaring crime problem, then go on TV and call anyone who brings attention to it a racist for pointing it out.
But the Democrats know their policies have been ruinous. That’s why they’re trying to run away from them in this election. They say the stupidest things like they were never for defunding the police when they obviously were. Kamala Harris now claims she never supported an organization that bailed out murderers and rapists, but her tweet asking people to donate to the organization is still up.
Democrats have also shown by their actions they know they went down the wrong road. The Governor of New Mexico pushed cashless bail and defunding the police, but is now begging the feds to send more law enforcement to her state because the crime is so bad there. And I’ve lost count of the number of cities that have scrambled to re-fund the police after defunding the police caused crime to spiral out of control.
The Democrats have shown you by word and deed they admit their criminal justice reforms were disastrous. But, unfortunately, their policies caused all kinds of real-world insanity and ruinous consequences. If you listen to all this and say to yourself, ‘I’m still going to vote Democrat,’ then YOU are the one who is insane.
10/25/22 - The Great Recycling Fraud
NPR accidentally told the truth, yesterday, and it’s a doozy:
- The vast majority of plastic that people put into recycling bins is headed to landfills, or worse.... the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%..... Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together.... plastic trash has few markets — a reality the public has not wanted to hear.... "It's not going to a recycling facility and being recycled. It's going to a recycling facility and being landfilled someplace else because [you] can't do anything with that material...." That message has been difficult for the public to absorb with so many different bins in public spaces, and their own communities telling them to put their plastic in recycling containers.... "Politically it's easier....'
But it was no surprise to me. Years ago, I watched a local TV news report showing a recycling truck taking everything from recycling bins straight to the dump. I’ve known recycling is all phony-baloney since then and now the NPR report confirms nothing’s changed.
The whole recycling thing is a fraud on the public, perpetrated by left-wing advocacy groups and politicians, designed to make you feel good about saving the planet. How does it feel to know you’ve been manipulated by the Left every step of the way? To know they’ve made you feel guilty - about destroying the planet with your plastic - for no good reason. To know they’ve manipulated you into falling into line with their rules and directives that have no basis in reality. It’s all been a complete charade. How does it feel to know you’ve set these people up as authority figures in your life when they are really just charlatans behind the curtain pulling the levers of their pathetic little schemes and con jobs, just like the Wizard of Oz? How does it feel to know you’ve been manipulated into supporting a useless exercise when the money could have been spent on something truly useful, instead? To know you haven’t been saving the planet all this time - you’ve been serving the petty little personal purposes of your so-called leaders, purposes which come down to wealth and power for themselves. How does it feel to know you’ve been dutifully recycling your plastic and they’ve been laughing all the way to the bank? To know all you really did was hand power to scumbags and liars? To know you took them at their word and they betrayed you? They betrayed your trust just like a lover who cheats on you.
Now that your eyes have been opened - you gotta ask yourself: what else are they lying to me about? How else have they betrayed my trust? They’ve told you the polar bears are dying and that’s not true. They’ve told you Arctic ice is disappearing when it’s actually increasing. They’ve told you the planet is burning up when there’s been a 20-year pause in global warming and the planet was warmer centuries ago. They lie, they fake their data, and they deliberately try to scare you to death. The whole thing is make-believe, and you fell for it.
Why am I being so hard on you? Because you’re screwing up the country, that’s why. You’ve handed power to the worst possible scoundrels who will ride any horse they can find that will give them complete power over us and let them control every aspect of everybody’s life. The Green New Deal is just the start. They’re scheming to limit your travel to nothing, shut down most of the country, cut your food rations, make you eat bugs, and tell you how many pounds of clothing you can buy a year, or we will all burn in earthly hell. From all of us who still love our freedom, thanks a bunch. And it will all have been for nothing, except wealth and power for a tiny authoritarian elite.
So I urge you: think for yourself and come back to reality. Look past the slogans and the demonization of anyone who opposes their schemes. Leave the climate change cult and take back your life from the high priests of Big Green who want to turn off your brain and control you. Dump this fake religion. Don’t recycle it. Just put it on a truck and take it straight to the landfill, where it belongs.
10/24/22 - Impeachable Offenses at the Border
It’s been widely reported border agents have apprehended a record 2.3 million illegal aliens at the southern border in the last 12 months. What has not received nearly as much attention is the fact that 20 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border last month, bringing the total for the fiscal year to 98. This is four times the number for the last five years COMBINED. Houston, we have a problem. In addition, over 25,000 special interest aliens with possible ties to terrorism were encountered at the border this fiscal year, more than half of them from the Islamic Republic of Turkey. What’s up with that?
Recent stories in the news also confirm the familiar litany of other problems with Joe Biden’s open border policies, starting with fentanyl pouring into the United States. Enough fentanyl to kill 36 million Americans was confiscated around the country from May to September. Some 12,000 fentanyl pills were seized at the Los Angeles airport last week. Not only do the Democrats not care, they blocked a bill last month that would have upgraded the penalties for selling fentanyl. Another reason not to vote Democrat in the election.
Meanwhile, dead bodies are piling up at the border, literally. Texas sheriffs are having to use mobile makeshift morgues to handle the record number of illegal aliens dropping dead at the border. The situation is so bad in one Texas town, the funeral homes and local mortuaries are no longer taking in dead bodies. They’re simply being buried in the local cemetery without being identified. I guess that’s what Biden immigration officials mean by prioritizing ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’. If you come here illegally and die, we’ll still include you in our cemeteries.
Just as cynical is the administration’s handling of unaccompanied alien children. A record 130,000 entered the government shelter system this fiscal year. But an Inspector General report last month blasted the administration for improper care and for releasing children to sponsors who have not been properly screened for child sex offenses. Democrats must not care if children are released to unsafe sponsors and are put at risk for sex trafficking, because no Democrat has spoken out against it.
Another consequence of Joe Biden’s border policies is the empowerment of the cartels. Migrant smuggling is now a $20 billion enterprise. Twenty billion will buy a lot of weaponry and bureaucrats.
The Biden administration isn’t defending any of this. Instead, they’re trying to hide it from the American public. But why hide it? If you’re proud of your policies, you should want to tell the world. Tell the world how you pressured the mayor of El Paso not to declare a state of emergency over the border crisis because it would make you look bad. Tell the world how you are sending military personnel to the border to cook, sweep floors, and fill out paperwork. Like the ad says, be all you can be.
And tell the world how you continue to change policies to promote more illegal immigration. I’ve already documented dozens of policy changes in previous commentaries. Here are the latest: It is now policy to open gates locked by the Texas National Guard so more illegal aliens can enter. It is policy to tell border states that put up their own barriers to illegal entry they are guilty of “trespass against the United States” and pressure states to remove them. And it is now policy to spend tens of millions of dollars on legal services to help illegal aliens avoid deportation and stay in the U.S. permanently.
The border has become an issue in the elections. People don’t trust the Democrats on border issues and wish Republicans were in charge. The nation has immigration laws, but Democrat Joe Biden and his open borders cronies have thrown them in the trash. Joe Biden is running a criminal enterprise, as far as I’m concerned, and he and his border officials really should be impeached for failing to faithfully execute the nation’s immigration laws as they have sworn to do. Shame on Kevin McCarthy for taking impeachment of Biden off the table. Now McCarthy can’t even use the threat of impeachment as a bargaining chip to get something else. What a dummy. Like they say, Republicans never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
10/21/22 - The Utter Cynicism and Confusion of the Hate America Crowd
I love this country. It’s the best country on earth and I am fortunate to live here. It amazes me that the Left has managed to convince so many people America is the worst country on earth and they should hate it. Here are some recent examples:
A man was triggered by a woman wearing an American flag shirt in Minnesota. He grabbed her by the neck, beat her, and threatened to kill her with a towel rack. Also allergic to the American flag is a Reuters reporter who was so upset by a crowd of people waving the American flag near the U.S. Capitol, she tweeted about it. But the colors of the flag are symbolic. Red is for hardiness and valor. White stands for purity and innocence, and the blue symbolizes vigilance, perseverance, and justice. What would the Reuters reporter prefer? A flag honoring depravity, timidity, and malevolence? I doubt the reporter has thought this through.
The Fargo school board voted to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings because, according to them, America does not have ‘liberty and justice for all’ and the phrase ‘under God’ excludes atheists and Buddhists. Well, that’s interesting. The Pledge of Allegiance swears fealty to our Republic. Our Constitution guarantees a republican form of government in the states (Article IV, Section 4). Representative government is part of what a republic means. So does this mean the school board members don’t want to be elected to office again? I don’t get it.
An elementary school in New Jersey changed its name, getting rid of Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. I guess the school doesn’t want its pupils to have life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Apparently, NPR doesn’t want people to have those things, either. This year, it ended a 33-year tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July. Instead, it had a discussion of the importance of equal outcomes - ‘equity’ - and how the Republican Party is pushing the country into authoritarian rule. Hmm... Didn’t the Declaration of Independence rail against a “long train of abuses” and object to authoritarians shutting down colonial legislatures, preventing the people from making their own laws? NPR’s reasoning is a little confused, here.
Not to be outdone, Cornell University removed a bust of Abraham Lincoln after getting one complaint. They removed a plaque with the Gettysburg Address, too. The University didn’t explain its reasoning, but it didn’t matter that Lincoln called slavery immoral, freed the slaves, and bound up the nation’s wounds after successfully seeing it through the Civil War. It must be that Cornell wants to see government “of the people, by the people, for the people” perish from the earth.
Which brings us to Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes who said the founding of America was “awful” and we need to repair the damage of colonialism and slavery. Mandela Barnes, meet Maurice Barboza, a mixed-race individual who is working to get a memorial built on the National Mall dedicated to the memory of the forgotten black patriots who fought on the side of the colonists in the Revolutionary War. Maurice wrote a brilliant article which appears on my Potomac Tea Party website in which he describes how generations of blacks in America worked to “complete the Founders’ vision.” The vision is outstanding, Maurice wrote. But it took time for the country to extend the inescapable logic of the vision to all people, starting as it did from a position of allowing slavery. Those generations of blacks “grasped the quintessential meaning of the Revolutionary War: ‘Those principles apply to me, too’,” Maurice wrote. “The Confederacy strenuously fought this inexorable logic and perished.”
So anyone who is stuck on the sins of the founding - and hates the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence - is willfully blind to the progress that has been made since America’s founding. Which begs the question: Woke leaders know there’s been progress, so why are they playing this game? Because it pays. They’ll keep beating us up with this club as long as they think it’s working, as long as we let them. Show them the guilt trip is over, and they’ll have to move on.
Liberty - as expressed in the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence - is a grand philosophical tradition and, no matter how Woke you are, I guarantee you would not like life without it.
10/20/22 - Deconstructing the ‘Election Denier’ Smear
The ‘election denier’ drumbeat is getting louder and more persistent. I’m seeing lots of scare stories now, three weeks out from Election Day - ‘don’t elect election deniers; they’re a threat to democracy.’ The Democrats must think their smear job and fearmongering are working, but I assure you, they’re not. Republicans are ready, and they have the better arguments.
Kari Lake got a question on the campaign trail about being an election denier. She whipped out a stack of pages listing all the Democrats who have denied election results since 2000. That would include Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton. One thinks she’s the Governor of Georgia and the other thinks she’s President. That’s just for starters. The Republican Party put together a list of 150 Democrat election deniers. The list includes Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Maxine Waters, and many, many more. You can watch a video that goes on for 12 minutes full of Democrats refusing to accept the results of elections they lost.
Another Republican candidate was ready for the smear. Democrat Senator Patty Murray of Washington state slammed her Republican opponent Tiffany Smiley for questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. But Smiley came right back, calling Murray a hypocrite who shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about democracy because Murray herself questioned the results of the 2004 presidential election. Murray had no response.
But the best answer to the election denier smear came from a congressional candidate in Virginia who was asked, “Do you believe the 2020 election was free, fair and untainted, and Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States?” Hung Cao responded: “Sir, Joe Biden is the president of the United States. If you don’t believe me, go to your gas pumps, or go to your grocery stores, and that’ll tell you who is.” Master stroke. Put the stupid Democrats in their place.
The Democrats huff and puff about Republicans pursuing the idea of alternative electors to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. We now even have the spectacle of the FBI and Justice Department attempting to criminalize the effort and issuing grand jury subpoenas to the people involved. But let’s not forget challenges to presidential electors go all the way back to 1876 and it was the Democrats who challenged electors in 1960, 2000, and 2004. Nobody issued grand jury subpoenas then, nor should they have.
My own response to this election denier business is that just because they’re election deniers doesn’t mean they’re not right about needed reforms. Starting with cleaning the voter rolls, which is just common sense. I love to hear Democrats twist themselves all into knots defending the idea of leaving dead people on the rolls. Another common sense reform is voter ID, which is supported by most Americans of all stripes and has been upheld by just about every court that has looked at it, including one in Missouri just last week. The Democrat argument on voter ID is completely racist - that black people are too stupid to get a photo ID. I just heard about a state, I forget where, that sends out mobile vans to anyone who asks and gives them a photo ID on the spot, free of charge. The Democrats can jump up and down and scream all they want, but they really have no argument left. So, tell me how putting people in office who care about free and fair elections is a bad thing. You’re going to have to explain that one to me, because it doesn’t make any sense.
But a New York Times reporter and book author - Robert Draper - just called people like me ‘insincere’ in advocating reforms for future elections. People like me are just giving cover to the 2020 election deniers, because we won’t denounce them. Following this to its logical conclusion, we can never take steps to secure our elections ever again because that would always affirm the people who challenged the election results in 2020. Let’s see how well that logic holds up in the year 2120. Hey, whatever sells books.
Here’s what I denounce: Hypocritical Democrats who get hysterical about Republican election deniers but not those in their own party. Partisan government officials who attempt to criminalize alternate electors following the constitutional process for challenging presidential election results. And, most of all, anyone with phony narratives and smear tactics who stands between me and my vote counting just as much as anyone else’s in free and fair elections.
10/19/22 - The True Craziness of the Phony Climate Change Narrative
Climate change activists have pulled all kinds of crazy stunts, recently. Two activists were arrested for throwing tomato soup at van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ painting in London. They wore t-shirts that said “Just Stop Oil”. It turns out that’s the name of a radical green group whose members are also gluing themselves to the road in Britain to stop traffic. More green activists pulled the same stunt in France. Back in Britain, another climate activist defaced an Aston Martin showroom with paint to protest oil production. Another group there, Animal Rebellion, is damaging milk trucks and pouring milk out on grocery store floors to protest climate change. They’ve also been occupying milk distribution facilities. Turn on the TV and the craziness continues. CBS Mornings blames the increasing number of overweight kids on climate change, saying rising temperatures keep them from playing outdoors. Pretty crazy stuff, all around.
But here’s what’s really crazy:
It’s really crazy that people still believe polar bears are disappearing because of climate change when, in fact, they are thriving.
It’s really crazy that people still believe Arctic ice is melting down to nothing when, in truth, Arctic ice is at the highest level in a decade.
It’s really crazy people go right on believing in the phony climate change narrative when the entire thing is built on data tampering. In 2019, a court dismissed Michael Mann’s defamation suit against a scientist who said Mann belonged in jail for falsifying his famous 1998 ‘hockey stick’ graph purportedly showing an alarming spike in global average temperatures. The scientist defended against Mann’s defamation claim by saying his own position was true and attempted to put Mann to his proof. But Mann wouldn’t produce his underlying research in court, so the court dismissed his case. The scientist was not the first to show Mann’s hockey stick graph is a hoax. The flaws were well-known by 2003.
The latest instance of data tampering has to do with Arctic sea ice. U.N. and NASA hide the data from before 1979 to make it look on charts like Arctic sea ice is disappearing. But 1979 was a peak year. There may be less ice now than in 1979, but there is more than there was 15 years ago - Arctic ice is at a decade high, as I mentioned earlier. Also, there was very little ice in the Arctic 6,000 years ago BEFORE the burning of fossil fuels, which puts the nail in the coffin of the entire phony climate change narrative.
It’s really crazy to keep believing in the climate change narrative when green groups pushing the narrative have deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Russia, both of which would be only too happy to watch the U.S. commit energy suicide. Why is it climate czar John Kerry isn’t being transparent about his ties to China and radical green groups here at home? House Republicans have told Kerry to preserve his records, because there will be investigations if the Republicans take over the House.
It’s really crazy to take the climate change narrative at face value when the true agenda - Marxist redistribution of wealth at home and abroad - is plain for all to see. Joe Biden just pledged $11 billion a year to send to poor countries supposedly to fight climate change. His EPA just launched an ‘Environmental Justice’ office to dispense $3 billion in federal grants created by the recent climate legislation. The money is going to poor and minority communities. Plus we had a fresh reminder the climate change narrative is green on the outside but communist red on the inside from the Democrat Senate candidate in Wisconsin who repeated the sentiment the world needs to “stymie capitalism” to fight climate change. Free enterprise is the “path to destruction”, he said. So there you have it. Climate change is just the fig leaf to justify giving all our money away and making sure the world never accumulates its current level of wealth ever again.
Finally, it’s utterly delusional for the Democrat Biden administration to force a green energy ‘transition’ on the country when solar and wind power are not reliable, cheap, or even environmentally-friendly. The administration’s entire vision is at the whim of commodity prices for minerals like lithium which are rising, as I’ve pointed out in previous commentary. It also makes us completely dependent on China, which has declared itself our enemy.
A forced green energy transition is a pipedream. We need to stop this madness now and recognize fossil fuels are both necessary and here to stay, or we will be the ones crying over spilled milk.
10/18/22 - Pay-to-Play in the China Swamp
Finally, people are catching on to how our corrupt elites are beholden to China, starting with the first family.
The Biden family received a $5 million interest-free, forgivable loan from a Chinese energy company five years ago, according to FBI evidence. Senator Chuck Grassley called for a pay-to-play corruption investigation. Joe Biden was out of the White House at the time, but a witness said the money was compensation - deliberately deferred - for work Hunter and James Biden did while Joe Biden, who benefitted from the deal, was vice president. A whistleblower who was part of the deal confirmed Joe Biden was personally involved and said the Bidens eventually expected to make billions from the Chinese. The $5 million was eventually sent to entities tied to Hunter and James Biden. Lawyers for those two have declined to answer questions about the deal. Senator Grassley, in calling for an investigation, said the evidence points to potential criminality. Pay-to-play - an investigation would uncover exactly what the Chinese received in exchange for the $5 million forgivable loan. Enquiring minds want to know.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to appoint China sympathizers to the State Department. His latest appointment once told Americans to “embrace China” and worked with Chinese front groups to advance Chinese interests in Washington. Get this - this person is being appointed to a position supposedly created to counter China’s growing influence. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. This fox joins the other China-sympathizing foxes Biden has appointed to State Department positions.
Currying influence in Washington has paid off for China. U.S. government agencies gave $29 million in joint research grants to Chinese entities in a recent six-year period. The grants came from the CDC, NIH, and Pentagon and went for research into vaccines, drones, and drugs. Sounds pretty benign until you realize the communist Chinese do not distinguish between civilian and military research. All research is military research in China. Talk about giving them the rope to hang us with. We wouldn’t know about this if Republicans hadn’t asked GAO for the information. GAO said in its report there are ways around reporting requirements, so the true extent of U.S. taxpayer money going to China for research is unknown.
But money doesn’t have to go to China for China to get its hands on U.S. research. A new Pentagon study shows China seeks out U.S. companies that get federal research funding and recruits them to perform work for Chinese entities tied to the Chinese military. The U.S. companies betray their own country by selling out to the Chinese, at which point their research is transferred to Chinese subsidiaries. The kinds of research ending up in China this way involve drugs, drones, spacecraft, bio-sensors, solar energy, and a catch-all category ‘military devices’. The Pentagon study concluded China benefits more from our research than we do. People say China can’t innovate, but this is pretty darn clever. Legislation is needed to disqualify U.S. firms that have ties to China and pose this kind of national security risk from U.S. funding.
One final note: the CEOs of Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup told Congress last month they would follow U.S. government guidance to refrain from doing business in China if China were to invade Taiwan. But given the forgivable loans, expectations to make billions, and ‘10 percent for the Big Guy’, can you really see Joe Biden giving the CEOs the order to pull out of China? I can’t. That’s just one possible consequence of allowing China to capture our elites. There are others.
10/17/22 - Ivermectin Still Getting a Bum Rap
COVID may be old news, but I can’t let this one pass. I heard an NPR host claim on Saturday ivermectin does not work as a treatment for COVID. I couldn’t find the show when I looked online, and it may be that it was a re-airing of an old show. But here are the facts about ivermectin, according to a study aggregator site:
Out of 92 studies of 134,000 patients in 27 countries comparing treatment and control groups, the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID resulted in statistically significant improvement in mortality, ventilation, ICU, hospitalization, recovery, cases, and viral clearance. Ivermectin is effective in preventing COVID on average 83 percent of the time, early treatment 62 percent of the time, and late treatment 43 percent of the time. Improvement was shown in 53 percent of randomized controlled trials. 51 percent lower mortality was shown in 47 studies. “Ivermectin was adopted for early treatment in all or part of 22 countries,” the site says.
So, ivermectin is not a wonder drug. It doesn’t work perfectly or all the time. Nothing does. But ivermectin cuts mortality in half and has been proven beneficial in a variety of circumstances. So anyone, like the NPR host, who claims ivermectin doesn’t work, is just plain wrong. Yet, the government recommended against the use of ivermectin, and its willing accomplices in social media companies and the press piled on, refusing to follow the science. Major medical journals refused to publish positive study results. They ignored the evidence and published designed-to-fail studies with negative results, instead. Lesser journals were pressured to retract favorable articles they ran.
But all these conspirators couldn’t suppress the truth entirely. A doctors group sued the FDA in June for disparaging the use of ivermectin for COVID and for interfering with doctors’ ability to treat the disease according to their own professional judgment. They warned the FDA will go right on overriding the professional judgment of doctors unless the FDA is stopped in its tracks now.
Missouri passed a law preventing state licensing boards from punishing doctors who prescribe ivermectin for COVID. The same result was obtained in Oklahoma through an order of the state’s Attorney General. Legislators in New Hampshire passed a bill to allow over-the-counter use of ivermectin, but the Governor successfully vetoed it.
You can add to all this the fact that the government spent a billion dollars to have media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post spread the government’s phony COVID narratives. So all we got with ivermectin, as with all the other things I told you about last week, is government by phony narrative. Maybe there’s just too much money in more expensive COVID treatments to expect government agencies to do the right thing and resist being captured by the drug companies. I’ll leave the speculation to others. But one thing is clear: the government is lying to you about ivermectin, and its lapdogs at NPR and elsewhere in the press are helping them do it. As has been said many times, government is not the solution; it’s the problem.
10/14/22 - Obamacare a Self-Inflicted Wound
The dictatorial Biden administration just made five million more Americans eligible for Obamacare with the stroke of a pen. Workers who are offered family coverage by their employers that is deemed unaffordable can now get subsidies to purchase Obamacare family policies, instead. This decision, done by administrative rule-making, should have been left to Congress. How do we know? Because the Obama administration said it didn’t have the authority to change the law on its own. Plowing straight ahead, the Biden administration has just obligated taxpayers to tens of billions of dollars in new spending in a constitutional system where the House is supposed to have the power of the purse.
Still rescuing Obamacare after all these years. This thing’s a turkey. Another recent change - extending jumbo subsidies for three years - was an attempt to shore up Obamacare and buy votes. But this turkey still won’t fly. Enrollment is still nowhere near what they promised ten years ago. CBO estimated the jumbo subsidies would goose enrollment to 16 million, and changing the family rule would net another one million, leaving enrollment ten years on still far short of the 21 million they promised. So the administration can spend $100 million on navigators to dragoon people into signing up for Obamacare but - face it, folks - Obamacare just isn’t all that popular.
They also promised Obamacare would save people $2,500 a year on insurance. That never happened. Prices never went down. They went up in a straight line after Obamacare was passed. Stands to reason - subsidize something like college tuition or health insurance and, sure enough, the price goes up. The jumbo subsidies guarantee the price of Obamacare will keep going up, too.
Obamacare prices will be higher next year - 6.6 percent higher in Maryland and 7.2 percent in Wisconsin. They’re the lucky ones. Obamacare prices will go up 10 percent overall next year, more than inflation. Increases in Florida will be as high as 12 percent and - get this - as much as 46 percent higher in New York. Good grief!
Meanwhile, Obamacare continues to cause other problems. Expensive Obamacare continues to squeeze private insurance out of the market, leaving more people dependent on government-run health care programs. From 2020 to 2021, the number of private plans decreased 1.5 million while the number of people on Medicare and Medicaid went up nearly 5 million. [Steve Moore newsletter - 9/15/22]
Nancy Pelosi promised Obamacare would let people retire so they could play the violin. The opposite happened. Letting children stay on their parents’ Obamacare policies to age 26 caused ‘job lock’. People with children are more likely to stay in their current job, not less likely, because of Obamacare.
The Obamacare Healthcare.gov enrollment site has now cost $2.1 billion. You might remember this thing was called a ‘train wreck’ by a prominent Democrat when it first rolled out.
Thanks to Joe Biden’s inflation, your Thanksgiving turkey will cost more this year - 20 percent more, to be exact. But that’s still a bargain compared to the price of Obamacare, which has more than doubled since it began. Think about that - what actually happened with the Democrats’ last crazy idea - before you fall for their next crazy idea.
10/13/22 - Government by Phony Narrative Blows Up In Their Face (Again)
Wright’s Rule: Live by the narrative, die by the narrative.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was told there was no evidence Border Patrol agents on horseback had whipped Haitians at the border before Mayorkas hyped the whipping allegations at a Biden press conference. So he knew there was nothing to the story, but went out and told the story to the nation, anyway, and in the most inflammatory terms. These “horrifying” images “conjured up ... what has occurred in the past,” Mayorkas said, referring to slavery. But Mayorkas had been warned the photographer who took the pictures did not witness any whipping. An internal investigation later cleared the agents, finding the agents were using long reins to control their horses and no Haitians were harmed in the process.
But now we have a government that never lets the facts get in the way of a good narrative. The better to rule you with. I don’t recall a time when the government has told us so many big fat lies. All we get now is government by phony narrative. Here’s what I mean. We are told:
‘The Hunter Biden laptop is just Russian disinformation.’ What a joke. Even the New York Times stopped telling that whopper.
‘Domestic terrorism is a huge threat because January 6th,’ except we now we know the FBI has been cooking up phony domestic terrorism cases to make the numbers look bad.
‘Republicans are violent and will disrupt the November election,’ except there’s no evidence of that and it’s Democrats and their fellow travelers who like burning cities and firebombing pro-life centers.
‘Election integrity laws suppress the vote,’ except voter turnout has a funny way of going UP - not down - after election integrity laws are passed.
‘Gun control laws work, we need more gun control laws,’ except mass shootings keep happening and gun control doesn’t stop them.
‘COVID vaccines are safe and effective,’ except they may have killed more than 30,000 people in the U.S. and many vaccinated people suffer breatkthrough cases.
‘Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan,’ until we found out they weren’t, the failures leading to Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal.
‘Women can be men and men can get pregnant,’ except for the fact those assertions are completely contrary to science and common sense.
‘Green energy is better and the entire nation has to transition to it,’ except that green energy is unreliable, more expensive, has toxic environmental consequences, and is deliberately meant to impoverish people, as is happening now in England and Germany.
‘Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election,’ except we now know the FBI knew the Steele dossier was unverified, offered $1 million for corroboration, and proceeded with the Trump/Russia collusion hoax anyway, despite never getting any.
Live by the narrative, die by the narrative. To our would-be masters, I say: You people are colossal liars, and don’t expect us to believe a word you say when you are the ones out there telling fish stories. And you have the nerve to want to shut us up. The sooner you are swept out of office, the better. Government by phony narrative is hardly a sustainable theory of governance. The truth always wins out and you are going down.
10/12/22 - The National Security Implications of Electric Vehicle Fires
PERMALINK
I’ve commented many times on the problems with the Biden administration’s push to ‘transition’ the nation to electric vehicles come hell or high water. Still more problems have become apparent in recent weeks and they have national security implications.
Lots of electric cars caught fire during Hurricane Ian in Florida. The batteries corroded, causing the vehicles to burst into flame, presenting a new type of problem for firefighters who can’t always put the fires out, not even with 1,500 gallons of water. Lithium-ion batteries are composed of highly flammable materials and, if any part of the battery fails or short-circuits, flames quickly cascade through the rest of the battery in a process called “thermal runaway”. Did you know there have been scores of electric scooter fires in New York City in the past two years and three resulting deaths? How come the unicorns-and-rainbows Biden administration isn’t telling us about that?
Government reports show the Biden administration is aware EV production depends on the use of child labor in cobalt mines in Africa. “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo labor under harsh and dangerous conditions to mine cobalt ore,” one report said. Another said, “40,000 children, some as young as 6 years old, work in cobalt mines. Often working in tight spaces underground without proper safety equipment or procedures, child laborers face serious risks of injury or death.” Given these reports, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and the other moral monsters in the Biden administration pushing EVs have been made fully aware of the child exploitation problem with EVs, but they don’t care and they don’t let it interfere with their agenda.
Rural states are telling the feds that current plans for requiring EV charging stations every 50 miles along lonely stretches of highway are wildly impractical. The electrical infrastructure just doesn’t exist. Moreover, the feds want high-capacity charging stations, which Wyoming says, could not possibly be profitable until the 2040s.
More information has come in about the weight of electric vehicles adding a ‘fatality factor’ to car crashes. Simply put, more people will die because of momentum and rotational inertia, the inability to change the direction of heavy electric vehicles headed to a collision. Pete Buttigieg never told us about that. Like the rest of the Biden administration, he never changes direction, either.
Another problem with EVs that’s come to light is the fact that their economic viability depends on one crucial factor: the price of lithium. As I told you previously, Indigenous peoples and governments in Latin America are moving to clamp down on lithium mining because of the environmental damage it is causing. Lithium prices are already at a record high. This situation reminds me of how the economic assumptions of the nuclear power industry went haywire in the 1970s when the price of yellowcake uranium rose 700 percent. Why hasn’t the Biden administration stress-tested the economics of the electric vehicle industry for potential increases in lithium prices, or told us the results if they have?
Now for the national security implications. The military is rushing into electric vehicles. What would happen to the defense budget if the price of lithium increases 700 percent? What is the Pentagon’s plan for putting out battery fires at military bases under attack? What are the implications of the military’s own report heavier electric vehicles are not as maneuverable? Where will the massive amounts of electricity needed to recharge electric vehicles come from on the battlefield? Why is the military pursuing EVs that don’t meet the military’s own range requirements? What will it take to obtain high-capacity charging stations that will enable the military to charge EVs in the same amount of time it takes to refuel current vehicles?
Call me a cynic, but I’m not taking the Biden administration or the Pentagon’s fervor for EVs at face value, not when it’s been reported many Biden officials personally own green energy investments that rise in value proportionally to how much green energy policy they can foist on the country. None dare call it fascism. [Daily Skirmish - 7/27/22] And not when it’s just been reported a Pentagon official participated in discussions about blacklisting a Chinese company in which he personally owned stock. A lot of electric vehicle batteries come from China. It’s also just been reported that thousands of government officials own stock in the companies their agencies regulate. So don’t tell me the Biden administration and Pentagon push to electric vehicles is totally on the up-and-up. I don’t believe you. They have to know about all the problems with EVs I’ve been telling you about, but they’re pushing EVs on us, anyway. Every one of their press releases should come with a financial disclosure statement, as far as I’m concerned. Rush into EVs? - Where’s the fire?
10/11/22 - It’s Time to Talk Turkey About Race (Part 2)
Today, I continue deconstructing the Left’s phony diversity narrative. But first, two bits of astounding news about things I told you yesterday.
Democrat Nury Martinez apologized for racist remarks and resigned her post as president of the Los Angeles City Council, but retained her council seat. Martinez, who is Hispanic, was recorded referring to a black kid as a ‘monkey’ and making other racist comments. But if, as we’re told, black and brown people can’t be racist, why did she apologize and resign? Why didn’t she defend herself and tell us she can’t be racist because she’s brown? Because the diversity narrative is as phony as a three-dollar bill and everybody knows it, that’s why.
I also told you yesterday about Kamala Harris saying hurricane relief should be made on the basis of skin color, not need, a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Well, it turns out, FEMA was doing exactly that after Hurricane Ian devastated parts of Florida. FEMA apportions relief money partly on the basis of “social vulnerability” on the theory that minorities suffer more from natural disasters. Including crazy rich Asians, according to FEMA. Racial discrimination is baked into FEMA policy. It’s part of the Biden administration’s requirement that every federal agency come up with a redistribution - oops, ‘equity’ - plan. The justification? The historical denial of opportunity for minorities to participate in the economic life of the nation. Tell it to Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, billionaires both. The bottom line: “big chunks of federal money” are flowing out of the Treasury based on skin color. This is not some sideshow - “At FEMA, we strive to place equity at the center of our efforts...,” a FEMA official said. A Treasury Department official said the same thing, recently - put race at the center. All of this is blatantly unconstitutional, offending as it does the Equal Protection Clause that has served our nation well. If you’re a thinking person, let me know when you think redistribution and the historical guilt trip are supposed to end.
Here are some other things that are wrong with the Left’s phony diversity narrative:
It relies on distortions of history. The latest example is Don Lemon asking a British guest if the crown should pay reparations for colonialism and slavery. But the guest pointed out the inconvenient facts slavery existed on the African continent carried on by Africans and the British were an early force in shutting down the slave trade, being the first nation to outlaw slavery on its soil. If reparations are to be paid, they should come from the descendants of the African slave-traders who rounded up their own people, handcuffed them in cages, and brought them to the beach to be sold and put on ships. People looking for black pride need to look elsewhere, not distorted and fictionalized accounts of history.
The diversity narrative is thinly disguised revenge and leads to race hatred. An arts festival in Portland let blacks in for free and charged everybody else $80. The Institute putting on the event gets government grants. So I object. This is enough state action to invoke the Equal Protection Clause. As for race hatred, Democrat South Carolina State Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate Krystle Matthews, who is black, was caught on video trashing white people and saying she keeps them “under her thumb” or they “get out of control like kids.” We keep going like this and we’ll end up like South Africa where the country’s leaders sing about killing white people and black people kill white farmers to get them off the land. This way lies barbarism.
Finally, the diversity narrative is a crutch that holds people back. First, it holds back the people who don’t get hired because of affirmative action policies. The Supreme Court is hearing a case on October 31st brought by Asians who allege Harvard’s race-based admissions policies are holding them back. Also, a class action suit has been brought against Texas A&M for reserving faculty posts based on race and giving six-figure bonuses only to minorities. Affirmative action also hurts the minorities by putting them in schools and jobs they can’t handle and inducing learned helplessness in large numbers of people. It’s racist to say minorities can’t excel and make it on their own merit. When affirmative action started in the 1970s, it was supposed to be temporary. At some point, the guilt trip and the favoritism were supposed to stop. We’re headed to India, where advantages are doled out by caste and the system is permanent. Not the best outcome for us, the country that became the best country on earth by making opportunity available to all.
The Left’s phony diversity narrative is garbage, but will remain wildly successful for a while longer. It sucks people in. It gets them to turn off their brain and ignore all the costs the narrative imposes. Identity politics is poisonous and destroys what unified us as a country - a belief in self-rule and rights for the most important minority, the individual. But the costs become more apparent with every passing day. Eventually, clear thinking will win out and the diversity narrative will get thrown into the dustbin of history. It happened with ‘defund the police’ and it will happen with the rest of the diversity narrative, as well. We will be much better off when we return to being a nation of sovereign individuals who are captains of their own fate not looking to government for favoritism or advantages others are not allowed to enjoy.
10/10/22 - It’s Time to Talk Turkey About Race (Part 1)
The diversity narrative may be the most successful fish story the Left tells America, but that doesn’t make it right.
One part of the narrative says black and brown people can’t be racist. That’s crazy. Listen to this: Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez was caught saying a white man was showing off his black son like a trophy and, further, the black son is like a “monkey”. “They’re raising him like a little White kid.... this kid needs a beatdown,” because he was misbehaving, this ‘wise Latina’ went on to say. Wow! Didn’t we just go through a whole thing about renaming monkeypox because any reference to monkeys at all is offensive to blacks?
The diversity narrative also says Democrats can’t be racist, only Republicans are racist. Hate to break it to you, but Nury Martinez is a Democrat. It figures - Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation. If Nancy Pelosi saying last week we need immigrants to stay in Florida to pick our fruit isn’t racist, I don’t know what is. Her remark reminds me of Hitler’s master plan for all the races. The German Volk were going to rule and everybody else was going to clean toilets, figuratively and literally speaking.
Another problem with the diversity narrative is that it’s segregationist. This whole thing about racially exclusive ‘safe spaces’ and segregated dorms is still going on. A self-described students-of-color group just demanded a safe space at a high school in Charlottesville. Not exactly Martin Luther King’s dream. Things have taken a poisonous turn. I’m all for the First Amendment right of free association, but the answer is to start your own group, not demand that the government adopt segregation as its official policy.
Another time-honored value the diversity narrative tramples on is equal protection of the laws. Kamala Harris said a couple weeks ago hurricane relief should be based on race, not need. This reflects the poisonous concept of ‘equity’ that has taken over civil rights thinking. People didn’t all start out in the same place so we need to misuse the government to make sure they all end up in the same place. That might sound good to you, but if the government actually tried to hand out hurricane relief to minorities while telling similarly situated white people ‘tough luck’, it would be flatly unconstitutional, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. ‘Equity’ is not equality. It’s the opposite of equality. It’s favoring one group over another and, I humbly submit to you, we’ve had enough of that. You can’t cure racism with more racism.
The diversity narrative also makes people say and do the craziest things. Someone on TikTok claimed the reason she’s obese and can’t lose weight is because of white people, something they did on the Indian subcontinent a century ago. Well, that’s a stretch, to say the least. A government-funded report concluded that the study of “physics was racist, in part because it rewards students for getting the right answer....” The absurdity of this is easy to see. Would you rather have the airplane you’re flying in be designed by people who know how to get the correct answers to physics problems or people who don’t? Why on earth would you want to make excuses for people who don’t know their stuff and turn them loose in the world to design airplanes and other things with life and death consequences?
As for doing crazy things, we were treated to another hate hoax, recently. Rachel Richardson is a black volleyball player at Duke who claimed she was the victim of racial taunts and threats from a spectator while playing a game at Brigham Young University in August. However, the police investigated and reviewed surveillance video, but found no evidence to corroborate her story. Predictably, the media and the NAACP had all piled on, but they went silent after the police findings came out.
Here’s my question: If the diversity narrative is so good and racial prejudice in America is so bad, why do people keep having to make stuff up to make their case? Isn’t there something wrong with a narrative that promotes segregation, violates equal protection, and makes people tell big fat lies?
There are lots of other things wrong with the diversity narrative. I’ll tell you about some more of them tomorrow.
10/7/22 - Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Washington Edition
Federal prosecutors are considering charges against Hunter Biden for failing to report income and lying about his drug use when purchasing a firearm. We were warned weeks ago the investigation was narrowing to these two topics and leaving behind all the corruption involving Burisma, violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and all the rest of the questions about Hunter Biden’s international business dealings and his father’s involvement therein.
Hunter Biden is not the only Washington figure raising eyebrows. Anthony Fauci is another. Senator Rand Paul set the stage in June when he asked Fauci during a hearing about royalty payments received by NIH scientists. From 2010 to 2016, Paul said, 1,800 NIH employees received $193 million in royalties, but NIH refused to reveal their names. This makes it impossible to determine whether there are any conflicts of interests. For example, did scientists on vaccine review committees receive payments from vaccine manufacturers? We don’t know, because NIH won’t divulge the information. Fauci said during the hearing NIH employees are not required to disclose such information, not even on their financial statements. That’s a problem - public servants possibly on the take while making important public policy decisions and we don’t even get to know about it? I feel better already, don’t you?
As for Fauci himself, his net worth nearly doubled during the pandemic, to over $12 million dollars. He is the federal government’s most highly paid employee - making more than the President - but what’s troubling is that part of his wealth came from prizes outside groups award to bureaucrats. Bureaucrat prizes? Who knew that was going on? Fauci received a prize worth almost a million dollars from an Israeli foundation for “speaking truth to power” and “defending science” during the Trump administration. The ins-and-outs of this have not been reported, but it raises the possibility Dr. Fauci was not following the science but was chasing the money when he contradicted himself on numerous occasions and gave the Trump administration fits. Should public servants win awards from outside groups for policy decisions the bureaucrats are supposed to be making in the public interest? That spells trouble, it seems to me. Congress should take a close look at that one and either put guardrails around the practice or eliminate it all together.
Other swamp creatures have been in the news, recently.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was slapped with a Hatch Act violation for urging readers to vote Democrat in a magazine interview. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from participating in political campaigns.
The wife of the White House Chief of Staff just got a U.S. Special Envoy position at the State Department - nice work if you can get it. Another White House adviser has a brother who is a lobbyist. General Motors paid the lobbyist $350,000 to go after federal electric vehicle subsidies. The Energy Department is now lending General Motors $2.5 billion dollars for lithium battery production. See how this works? Pretty incestuous.
Speaking of incestuous and high net worth, how did Chelsea Clinton come to be worth $30 million? The daughter of a former president brought in $9 million for serving on the board of an Internet investment company. She earned over $600,000 as a special correspondent for NBC News eight years ago and more from another board membership. No doubt part of her wealth comes from appreciation of her ‘luxury fortress’ apartment in Manhattan, now worth $10 million. And she got all this just because she is the daughter of a former president.
No wonder Donald Trump wanted to drain the swamp. And no wonder he was run out of town for trying it.
10/6/22 - Election Integrity Whack-a-Mole
Our elections are a mess and they won’t be fixed any time soon. Some recent stories will show you what I mean.
The use of private money to enable government election workers to conduct get-out-the-vote drives for the Democrats was heavily criticized in the 2020 election. The use of Zuckerbucks, as they are known, has been outlawed in some states, as a result. But elections officials in Milwaukee are back at it, using money tied to new Democrat donors and partnering with a Democrat activist group to get out the vote for Democrats this time around. The Wisconsin Republican Party has sued.
Then there’s the perennial problem of dirty voter rolls, which the Democrats resist fixing at every turn. Federal law requires states to maintain accurate lists, but many do not. Several counties in Minnesota have just been sued for failing to remove duplicate registrations from their rolls. In New York, more than 3 million voters - almost one out of four - lack a driver’s license or Social Security number to prove their identity. This results in duplicate registrations which can facilitate fraud. Cheaters need actual extra voter records of people who don’t vote in order to cast phony ballots in their name. So who the heck are these unidentified people and should they really be on the rolls?
The Wisconsin Elections Commission told election workers they can fill in missing information to complete absentee ballots, then count them, even though state law requires the voter be contacted to cure the ballot. This prompted a lawsuit which the Democratic National Committee is seeking to join to have the law declared voter suppression. That’s a head scratcher. Why would the Democrats want to count incomplete absentee ballots that could well be fraudulent?
More Democrat funny business with absentee ballots took place in New Hampshire where the state Democratic Party was mailing out absentee ballot applications to 39 towns. The applications inaccurately claimed the voters had requested them and the return addresses were either wrong or were for entities that didn’t even exist. Voters were being disenfranchised and the state Attorney General ordered the Democratic Party to cease and desist.
Then there’s outright fraud. A former Democrat congressman in Pennsylvania was sentenced to 30 months for orchestrating schemes to stuff ballot boxes for Democrat candidates for several years. He admitted to bribing a Democrat elections official to add votes to Democrat candidate totals. Four people in North Carolina pled guilty for their role in absentee ballot fraud in the 2016 and 2018 elections. The scheme involved collecting blank or incomplete absentee ballots, filling in candidate choices, and forging the voter’s signature. More cases are pending.
A federal judge upheld Georgia’s new election integrity laws, including voter ID and citizenship checks. Stacey Abrams had been going around for years claiming Georgia’s laws are voter suppression. The judge disagreed. The case is also notable because here we have yet another court upholding voter ID, which is only common sense and another head-scratcher as to why the Democrats would oppose it. You gotta ask yourself why the Democrats keep trying to do away with voter ID. They used to say they want everyone to vote, but that’s so absurd you haven’t heard that line out of them for awhile.
A citizens group in Michigan sent the Democrat City Clerk in Flint a letter demanding she comply with a state law requiring party parity in the number of election inspectors. Flint has 92 percent Democrat inspectors and only 6 percent Republican. The City Clerk resigned rather than comply with the law. The same group filed a complaint to get the state out of ERIC, a supposed multistate voter roll maintenance operation which is actually a thinly disguised get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats. The state turns over confidential voter information to ERIC, which may not even be legal, thus outsourcing a core government function - maintaining the voter rolls - to a black box that won’t answer questions or file annual reports which is funded by Democrat-aligned money. Something’s wrong with this picture.
There are a thousand holes to be plugged before we can say with confidence our elections are secure. It’s a never-ending process of whack-a-mole, especially with the Democrats hell-bent on poking new holes at every opportunity. But we have no choice; we have to keep banging away at it. So don’t get mad at the Democrats’ election shenanigans, get involved.
10/5/22 - Would You Like Transgender Surgery with That?
The crass commercialism of the transgender lobby is on full display this week with revelations three medical trade associations, including the AMA, are asking the Justice Department to “investigate and prosecute” anyone who threatens violence against doctors and hospitals for providing transgender drugs and surgery to minors. These commercial associations claim doctors and hospitals are receiving harassing emails and threats of personal violence from a vast conspiracy of individuals and entities who object to mutilation of children for profit. News to me. But I have heard of firebombings and dozens of other actual attacks against pregnancy centers and pro-life groups that the Justice Department refuses to investigate. Maybe when the vast anti-transgender conspiracy produces actual attacks on the same scale the Justice Department might get interested.
These trade groups can’t stand the fact truthful information contrary to their financial interest is being presented to the public. “The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information...,” the associations claim in their letter. Translation: these merchants wish people like me would just shut up so they can make more money.
Some 300 highly profitable pediatric gender clinics have opened around the country in the last few years. There’s gold in them thar gender confusions. “Like most professionals, physicians and surgeons also seek to maximize their income,” a California psychologist said. Demand is up, but you have to ask yourself what’s driving it. The answer is social contagion and an aggressive political Left manipulating confused young people every step of the way. Now the Left is putting the pedal to the metal. Just a few weeks ago, it was hateful to suggest that hospitals were performing transgender surgery on minors. But now, the New York Times proclaims hundreds of such surgeries are being performed and it’s glorious.
If it really is all that grand, why are sellers taking steps to hide it? Vanderbilt University Medical Center took down the webpages for its adult and pediatric gender clinics after doctors at the hospital were caught on video talking about how lucrative breast and genital removals are, calling them a “big moneymaker”. They also threatened hospital employees who wouldn’t get with the program.
That’s not all the transgender lobby is hiding. A detransitioner recently said his doctors didn’t warn him transgender drugs and surgery could have serious side effects. Now he’s living with numbness in his chest, genital atrophy, and tremors. Why would doctors make full disclosure? There’s money to be made by hiding any potential complication.
Proponents of all this also don’t want you to know some of the money ends up benefitting Democrat Party affinity groups and causes. A group that promotes transgenderism for 2-year-olds received over $250 million in federal funds for, among other things, training 90,000 educators about such topics as the emergence of transgender identity in toddlers. The group has spent almost $2 million on lobbying efforts since 2018, making contributions to such Democrat/Left-aligned groups as the NAACP, Human Rights Campaign, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. So, you see, in the Left/Democrat world, one hand washes the other. It’s one of their insidious machines.
But there’s no arguing with success. Three weeks ago, I told you that the California legislature passed a bill to have the state take legal custody of minors who travel from other states seeking transgender drugs and surgery. That bill is now law and takes effect January 1st. None dare call it the new California Gold Rush. Oklahoma, on the other hand, hit the transgender-industrial complex right in the pocketbook, passing a law prohibiting Oklahoma University Children’s Hospital from receiving federal COVID relief funds until it stops providing transgender services to minors.
It’s time to move in Oklahoma’s direction. What we have here is a manipulative political Left ginning up false demand and a greedy transgender-industrial complex only too happy to meet it. It’s time to protect children from these financial predators.
10/4/22 - National Security Round-Up
While the Biden administration is busy chasing imaginary “semi-fascist” unicorns, national security concerns continue to grow.
The Secretary of the Air Force warned China is investing in military capabilities to knock out U.S. defenses, specifically, our satellites, aircraft carriers, airfields, and communications systems. The nominee to lead the Space Force told Congress China has weapons that can disrupt or destroy our satellites in all orbits. There are reports China has restarted mass production of destroyers to counter the U.S. Navy. China is also spending heavily on intelligence-gathering efforts, including buying farmland near U.S. military bases to watch what goes on there.
There are fresh warnings China continues to expand its nuclear arsenal with, among other things, a new nuclear test site in Xinjiang province. China’s nuclear build-up is a familiar story to anyone paying attention to national security news. Less well-known are China’s build-up of conventional armed missiles and its advances in quantum computing.
China is not the only emerging threat to our security. A Republican congressional report criticized Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago for emboldening America’s enemies and for once again making Afghanistan a “safe haven for terrorists who want to attack the United States.”
National security experts fear the U.S. is not moving quickly enough to meet these threats. One expert warned U.S. military aid to Ukraine is depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles with no clear plan in place to replenish the weapons or the personnel to use them, now that the Pentagon’s ‘Woke’ policies have caused recruiting to fall 25 percent short of its goal.
Other warnings have come in recently about a pilot shortage in the Air Force, rust and other indicia of inadequate maintenance of our naval fleet, a lack of repairs taking submarines out of commission, and a lack of resources and mission focus hampering our ability to deal with expanding espionage threats.
One bright spot in all this is the Air Force’s new B-21 Raider stealth bomber that is giving Russia and China pause. A hundred or more will roll out in the next 20 years or so, eventually replacing the B-52 which has been serving our strategic fleet since the 1950s and the previous stealth bomber which was developed in the 1990s. The first flight of the Raider is expected in 2023.
This bright spot aside, the national security picture remains dismal. But you can help by talking to your elected representatives about national security concerns. Show them these concerns are important to you and should have more mindshare in what your representatives do. Insist that they work to change the focus of the federal government, which is busy going after ordinary parents who speak up at school board meetings and cooking up phony domestic terrorism cases, just so FBI supervisors can get promotions and raises. Work with your representatives to bring the focus back to things that are truly important, like our declining national security posture. It’s your country. Republics don’t maintain themselves. Time to step up.
10/3/22 - The Democrats Have Lost Their Minds on Criminal Justice Reform
The Sunday talk shows say crime is becoming a campaign issue in the upcoming elections. It’s easy to see why. People don’t feel safe wherever Democrats are in control. If crime isn’t an issue for you yet, let me ask you some questions:
Why would anyone visit New York City? A tourist from Maryland was slashed in the face and robbed in Times Square. That’s what happens when you get rid of cash bail laws, as I’ve mentioned in previous commentaries. There are countless stories about criminals being let go without having to post bail in New York, only to reoffend, sometimes within hours of being released. New York also recently made it easier to get out on parole and stay out even if there are parole violations. Crime is way up, especially in wealthier neighborhoods - by as much as 60 to 80 percent this year. Bail reform has emboldened the criminals and city residents and tourists alike are paying the price.
Speaking of parole, the parole board in Democrat-controlled Wisconsin has run amok, freeing hundreds of convicted killers early.
But here’s my next question: Why would anyone buy a house in Illinois? Under a new state law, your front lawn will soon in effect become public property and the homeless can camp there any time they feel like it. The police will not arrest them for trespass or even ask them to move. The police will only write a ticket and leave. My sisters live in Illinois. They both own houses. They’re both leaving the state. The same new law ends cash bail after the 1st of the year for aggravated assault, second-degree murder, and other crimes. Hundreds of defendants awaiting trial will be released. The definition of insanity would be expecting any different result than what’s happening in New York City, but that’s the Democrats for you.
Next question: Why would anyone own a shop in California? Theft under $950 has been reclassified from a felony to a misdemeanor. Critics say theft and shoplifting has increased all over the state as a result. They also say the police won’t even show up any more for shoplifting under $950 or, if they do, the shoplifters simply fail to appear in court without any consequences. Not only that, the shoplifters can sue the store if the staff tries to stop a shoplifting-in-progress.
Why would anyone in Pennsylvania vote for John Fetterman - the guy who had a stroke and is still running for Senate. He was caught on video saying he wants to let one-third of the criminals in prison out on the streets because, he says, everyone will be safer or better off that way. That’s delusional. But he put his money where his mouth is when he was on the state’s Board of Pardons where he voted to put lots of murderers back out on the streets. Then, as Lieutenant Governor, he appointed a woman as secretary of the board who wants to “disarm the police”. Delusions have consequences.
I also want to know when the Democrats will run out of crazy ideas for criminal justice reform. Defund the police - remember that one? Several cities found it completely unworkable and moved to re-fund the police as I’ve noted in previous commentaries. In fact, the track record of this crazy idea is so bad, Democrats in Virginia and elsewhere are trying to run away from their previous support for it. Too bad they’re all caught on video saying what they said. Now the Democrats want to give free crack pipes to drug addicts. The idea didn’t die when it was found out the Biden administration was supporting it and denied it. But why do you think the Democrats’ next crazy idea is going to work out any better than their last crazy idea?
Here’s my last question: Why would anybody vote for the Democrats? They’ve put some very bad ideas into practice, lately, where they are in power. Defund the police, throw out half the criminal code, praise prosecutors who won’t prosecute, let everybody out of prison - how crazy can you get?
There is always criminal justice reform. The tinkering never stops. I know, because I was a criminal defense attorney in the 1980s. Reform was ongoing then and has never stopped since. The pendulum is always swinging between leniency and public safety. The problem now is that the Democrats have gone off the deep end, and instituted the wildest reforms imaginable. The pendulum will inevitably swing back in the other direction to public safety and common sense. It always does in criminal justice reform, and the upcoming election is not too soon to start.
COVID may be old news, but I can’t let this one pass. I heard an NPR host claim on Saturday ivermectin does not work as a treatment for COVID. I couldn’t find the show when I looked online, and it may be that it was a re-airing of an old show. But here are the facts about ivermectin, according to a study aggregator site:
Out of 92 studies of 134,000 patients in 27 countries comparing treatment and control groups, the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID resulted in statistically significant improvement in mortality, ventilation, ICU, hospitalization, recovery, cases, and viral clearance. Ivermectin is effective in preventing COVID on average 83 percent of the time, early treatment 62 percent of the time, and late treatment 43 percent of the time. Improvement was shown in 53 percent of randomized controlled trials. 51 percent lower mortality was shown in 47 studies. “Ivermectin was adopted for early treatment in all or part of 22 countries,” the site says.
So, ivermectin is not a wonder drug. It doesn’t work perfectly or all the time. Nothing does. But ivermectin cuts mortality in half and has been proven beneficial in a variety of circumstances. So anyone, like the NPR host, who claims ivermectin doesn’t work, is just plain wrong. Yet, the government recommended against the use of ivermectin, and its willing accomplices in social media companies and the press piled on, refusing to follow the science. Major medical journals refused to publish positive study results. They ignored the evidence and published designed-to-fail studies with negative results, instead. Lesser journals were pressured to retract favorable articles they ran.
But all these conspirators couldn’t suppress the truth entirely. A doctors group sued the FDA in June for disparaging the use of ivermectin for COVID and for interfering with doctors’ ability to treat the disease according to their own professional judgment. They warned the FDA will go right on overriding the professional judgment of doctors unless the FDA is stopped in its tracks now.
Missouri passed a law preventing state licensing boards from punishing doctors who prescribe ivermectin for COVID. The same result was obtained in Oklahoma through an order of the state’s Attorney General. Legislators in New Hampshire passed a bill to allow over-the-counter use of ivermectin, but the Governor successfully vetoed it.
You can add to all this the fact that the government spent a billion dollars to have media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post spread the government’s phony COVID narratives. So all we got with ivermectin, as with all the other things I told you about last week, is government by phony narrative. Maybe there’s just too much money in more expensive COVID treatments to expect government agencies to do the right thing and resist being captured by the drug companies. I’ll leave the speculation to others. But one thing is clear: the government is lying to you about ivermectin, and its lapdogs at NPR and elsewhere in the press are helping them do it. As has been said many times, government is not the solution; it’s the problem.
10/14/22 - Obamacare a Self-Inflicted Wound
The dictatorial Biden administration just made five million more Americans eligible for Obamacare with the stroke of a pen. Workers who are offered family coverage by their employers that is deemed unaffordable can now get subsidies to purchase Obamacare family policies, instead. This decision, done by administrative rule-making, should have been left to Congress. How do we know? Because the Obama administration said it didn’t have the authority to change the law on its own. Plowing straight ahead, the Biden administration has just obligated taxpayers to tens of billions of dollars in new spending in a constitutional system where the House is supposed to have the power of the purse.
Still rescuing Obamacare after all these years. This thing’s a turkey. Another recent change - extending jumbo subsidies for three years - was an attempt to shore up Obamacare and buy votes. But this turkey still won’t fly. Enrollment is still nowhere near what they promised ten years ago. CBO estimated the jumbo subsidies would goose enrollment to 16 million, and changing the family rule would net another one million, leaving enrollment ten years on still far short of the 21 million they promised. So the administration can spend $100 million on navigators to dragoon people into signing up for Obamacare but - face it, folks - Obamacare just isn’t all that popular.
They also promised Obamacare would save people $2,500 a year on insurance. That never happened. Prices never went down. They went up in a straight line after Obamacare was passed. Stands to reason - subsidize something like college tuition or health insurance and, sure enough, the price goes up. The jumbo subsidies guarantee the price of Obamacare will keep going up, too.
Obamacare prices will be higher next year - 6.6 percent higher in Maryland and 7.2 percent in Wisconsin. They’re the lucky ones. Obamacare prices will go up 10 percent overall next year, more than inflation. Increases in Florida will be as high as 12 percent and - get this - as much as 46 percent higher in New York. Good grief!
Meanwhile, Obamacare continues to cause other problems. Expensive Obamacare continues to squeeze private insurance out of the market, leaving more people dependent on government-run health care programs. From 2020 to 2021, the number of private plans decreased 1.5 million while the number of people on Medicare and Medicaid went up nearly 5 million. [Steve Moore newsletter - 9/15/22]
Nancy Pelosi promised Obamacare would let people retire so they could play the violin. The opposite happened. Letting children stay on their parents’ Obamacare policies to age 26 caused ‘job lock’. People with children are more likely to stay in their current job, not less likely, because of Obamacare.
The Obamacare Healthcare.gov enrollment site has now cost $2.1 billion. You might remember this thing was called a ‘train wreck’ by a prominent Democrat when it first rolled out.
Thanks to Joe Biden’s inflation, your Thanksgiving turkey will cost more this year - 20 percent more, to be exact. But that’s still a bargain compared to the price of Obamacare, which has more than doubled since it began. Think about that - what actually happened with the Democrats’ last crazy idea - before you fall for their next crazy idea.
10/13/22 - Government by Phony Narrative Blows Up In Their Face (Again)
Wright’s Rule: Live by the narrative, die by the narrative.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was told there was no evidence Border Patrol agents on horseback had whipped Haitians at the border before Mayorkas hyped the whipping allegations at a Biden press conference. So he knew there was nothing to the story, but went out and told the story to the nation, anyway, and in the most inflammatory terms. These “horrifying” images “conjured up ... what has occurred in the past,” Mayorkas said, referring to slavery. But Mayorkas had been warned the photographer who took the pictures did not witness any whipping. An internal investigation later cleared the agents, finding the agents were using long reins to control their horses and no Haitians were harmed in the process.
But now we have a government that never lets the facts get in the way of a good narrative. The better to rule you with. I don’t recall a time when the government has told us so many big fat lies. All we get now is government by phony narrative. Here’s what I mean. We are told:
‘The Hunter Biden laptop is just Russian disinformation.’ What a joke. Even the New York Times stopped telling that whopper.
‘Domestic terrorism is a huge threat because January 6th,’ except we now we know the FBI has been cooking up phony domestic terrorism cases to make the numbers look bad.
‘Republicans are violent and will disrupt the November election,’ except there’s no evidence of that and it’s Democrats and their fellow travelers who like burning cities and firebombing pro-life centers.
‘Election integrity laws suppress the vote,’ except voter turnout has a funny way of going UP - not down - after election integrity laws are passed.
‘Gun control laws work, we need more gun control laws,’ except mass shootings keep happening and gun control doesn’t stop them.
‘COVID vaccines are safe and effective,’ except they may have killed more than 30,000 people in the U.S. and many vaccinated people suffer breatkthrough cases.
‘Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan,’ until we found out they weren’t, the failures leading to Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal.
‘Women can be men and men can get pregnant,’ except for the fact those assertions are completely contrary to science and common sense.
‘Green energy is better and the entire nation has to transition to it,’ except that green energy is unreliable, more expensive, has toxic environmental consequences, and is deliberately meant to impoverish people, as is happening now in England and Germany.
‘Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election,’ except we now know the FBI knew the Steele dossier was unverified, offered $1 million for corroboration, and proceeded with the Trump/Russia collusion hoax anyway, despite never getting any.
Live by the narrative, die by the narrative. To our would-be masters, I say: You people are colossal liars, and don’t expect us to believe a word you say when you are the ones out there telling fish stories. And you have the nerve to want to shut us up. The sooner you are swept out of office, the better. Government by phony narrative is hardly a sustainable theory of governance. The truth always wins out and you are going down.
10/12/22 - The National Security Implications of Electric Vehicle Fires
PERMALINK
I’ve commented many times on the problems with the Biden administration’s push to ‘transition’ the nation to electric vehicles come hell or high water. Still more problems have become apparent in recent weeks and they have national security implications.
Lots of electric cars caught fire during Hurricane Ian in Florida. The batteries corroded, causing the vehicles to burst into flame, presenting a new type of problem for firefighters who can’t always put the fires out, not even with 1,500 gallons of water. Lithium-ion batteries are composed of highly flammable materials and, if any part of the battery fails or short-circuits, flames quickly cascade through the rest of the battery in a process called “thermal runaway”. Did you know there have been scores of electric scooter fires in New York City in the past two years and three resulting deaths? How come the unicorns-and-rainbows Biden administration isn’t telling us about that?
Government reports show the Biden administration is aware EV production depends on the use of child labor in cobalt mines in Africa. “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo labor under harsh and dangerous conditions to mine cobalt ore,” one report said. Another said, “40,000 children, some as young as 6 years old, work in cobalt mines. Often working in tight spaces underground without proper safety equipment or procedures, child laborers face serious risks of injury or death.” Given these reports, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and the other moral monsters in the Biden administration pushing EVs have been made fully aware of the child exploitation problem with EVs, but they don’t care and they don’t let it interfere with their agenda.
Rural states are telling the feds that current plans for requiring EV charging stations every 50 miles along lonely stretches of highway are wildly impractical. The electrical infrastructure just doesn’t exist. Moreover, the feds want high-capacity charging stations, which Wyoming says, could not possibly be profitable until the 2040s.
More information has come in about the weight of electric vehicles adding a ‘fatality factor’ to car crashes. Simply put, more people will die because of momentum and rotational inertia, the inability to change the direction of heavy electric vehicles headed to a collision. Pete Buttigieg never told us about that. Like the rest of the Biden administration, he never changes direction, either.
Another problem with EVs that’s come to light is the fact that their economic viability depends on one crucial factor: the price of lithium. As I told you previously, Indigenous peoples and governments in Latin America are moving to clamp down on lithium mining because of the environmental damage it is causing. Lithium prices are already at a record high. This situation reminds me of how the economic assumptions of the nuclear power industry went haywire in the 1970s when the price of yellowcake uranium rose 700 percent. Why hasn’t the Biden administration stress-tested the economics of the electric vehicle industry for potential increases in lithium prices, or told us the results if they have?
Now for the national security implications. The military is rushing into electric vehicles. What would happen to the defense budget if the price of lithium increases 700 percent? What is the Pentagon’s plan for putting out battery fires at military bases under attack? What are the implications of the military’s own report heavier electric vehicles are not as maneuverable? Where will the massive amounts of electricity needed to recharge electric vehicles come from on the battlefield? Why is the military pursuing EVs that don’t meet the military’s own range requirements? What will it take to obtain high-capacity charging stations that will enable the military to charge EVs in the same amount of time it takes to refuel current vehicles?
Call me a cynic, but I’m not taking the Biden administration or the Pentagon’s fervor for EVs at face value, not when it’s been reported many Biden officials personally own green energy investments that rise in value proportionally to how much green energy policy they can foist on the country. None dare call it fascism. [Daily Skirmish - 7/27/22] And not when it’s just been reported a Pentagon official participated in discussions about blacklisting a Chinese company in which he personally owned stock. A lot of electric vehicle batteries come from China. It’s also just been reported that thousands of government officials own stock in the companies their agencies regulate. So don’t tell me the Biden administration and Pentagon push to electric vehicles is totally on the up-and-up. I don’t believe you. They have to know about all the problems with EVs I’ve been telling you about, but they’re pushing EVs on us, anyway. Every one of their press releases should come with a financial disclosure statement, as far as I’m concerned. Rush into EVs? - Where’s the fire?
10/11/22 - It’s Time to Talk Turkey About Race (Part 2)
Today, I continue deconstructing the Left’s phony diversity narrative. But first, two bits of astounding news about things I told you yesterday.
Democrat Nury Martinez apologized for racist remarks and resigned her post as president of the Los Angeles City Council, but retained her council seat. Martinez, who is Hispanic, was recorded referring to a black kid as a ‘monkey’ and making other racist comments. But if, as we’re told, black and brown people can’t be racist, why did she apologize and resign? Why didn’t she defend herself and tell us she can’t be racist because she’s brown? Because the diversity narrative is as phony as a three-dollar bill and everybody knows it, that’s why.
I also told you yesterday about Kamala Harris saying hurricane relief should be made on the basis of skin color, not need, a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Well, it turns out, FEMA was doing exactly that after Hurricane Ian devastated parts of Florida. FEMA apportions relief money partly on the basis of “social vulnerability” on the theory that minorities suffer more from natural disasters. Including crazy rich Asians, according to FEMA. Racial discrimination is baked into FEMA policy. It’s part of the Biden administration’s requirement that every federal agency come up with a redistribution - oops, ‘equity’ - plan. The justification? The historical denial of opportunity for minorities to participate in the economic life of the nation. Tell it to Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, billionaires both. The bottom line: “big chunks of federal money” are flowing out of the Treasury based on skin color. This is not some sideshow - “At FEMA, we strive to place equity at the center of our efforts...,” a FEMA official said. A Treasury Department official said the same thing, recently - put race at the center. All of this is blatantly unconstitutional, offending as it does the Equal Protection Clause that has served our nation well. If you’re a thinking person, let me know when you think redistribution and the historical guilt trip are supposed to end.
Here are some other things that are wrong with the Left’s phony diversity narrative:
It relies on distortions of history. The latest example is Don Lemon asking a British guest if the crown should pay reparations for colonialism and slavery. But the guest pointed out the inconvenient facts slavery existed on the African continent carried on by Africans and the British were an early force in shutting down the slave trade, being the first nation to outlaw slavery on its soil. If reparations are to be paid, they should come from the descendants of the African slave-traders who rounded up their own people, handcuffed them in cages, and brought them to the beach to be sold and put on ships. People looking for black pride need to look elsewhere, not distorted and fictionalized accounts of history.
The diversity narrative is thinly disguised revenge and leads to race hatred. An arts festival in Portland let blacks in for free and charged everybody else $80. The Institute putting on the event gets government grants. So I object. This is enough state action to invoke the Equal Protection Clause. As for race hatred, Democrat South Carolina State Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate Krystle Matthews, who is black, was caught on video trashing white people and saying she keeps them “under her thumb” or they “get out of control like kids.” We keep going like this and we’ll end up like South Africa where the country’s leaders sing about killing white people and black people kill white farmers to get them off the land. This way lies barbarism.
Finally, the diversity narrative is a crutch that holds people back. First, it holds back the people who don’t get hired because of affirmative action policies. The Supreme Court is hearing a case on October 31st brought by Asians who allege Harvard’s race-based admissions policies are holding them back. Also, a class action suit has been brought against Texas A&M for reserving faculty posts based on race and giving six-figure bonuses only to minorities. Affirmative action also hurts the minorities by putting them in schools and jobs they can’t handle and inducing learned helplessness in large numbers of people. It’s racist to say minorities can’t excel and make it on their own merit. When affirmative action started in the 1970s, it was supposed to be temporary. At some point, the guilt trip and the favoritism were supposed to stop. We’re headed to India, where advantages are doled out by caste and the system is permanent. Not the best outcome for us, the country that became the best country on earth by making opportunity available to all.
The Left’s phony diversity narrative is garbage, but will remain wildly successful for a while longer. It sucks people in. It gets them to turn off their brain and ignore all the costs the narrative imposes. Identity politics is poisonous and destroys what unified us as a country - a belief in self-rule and rights for the most important minority, the individual. But the costs become more apparent with every passing day. Eventually, clear thinking will win out and the diversity narrative will get thrown into the dustbin of history. It happened with ‘defund the police’ and it will happen with the rest of the diversity narrative, as well. We will be much better off when we return to being a nation of sovereign individuals who are captains of their own fate not looking to government for favoritism or advantages others are not allowed to enjoy.
10/10/22 - It’s Time to Talk Turkey About Race (Part 1)
The diversity narrative may be the most successful fish story the Left tells America, but that doesn’t make it right.
One part of the narrative says black and brown people can’t be racist. That’s crazy. Listen to this: Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez was caught saying a white man was showing off his black son like a trophy and, further, the black son is like a “monkey”. “They’re raising him like a little White kid.... this kid needs a beatdown,” because he was misbehaving, this ‘wise Latina’ went on to say. Wow! Didn’t we just go through a whole thing about renaming monkeypox because any reference to monkeys at all is offensive to blacks?
The diversity narrative also says Democrats can’t be racist, only Republicans are racist. Hate to break it to you, but Nury Martinez is a Democrat. It figures - Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation. If Nancy Pelosi saying last week we need immigrants to stay in Florida to pick our fruit isn’t racist, I don’t know what is. Her remark reminds me of Hitler’s master plan for all the races. The German Volk were going to rule and everybody else was going to clean toilets, figuratively and literally speaking.
Another problem with the diversity narrative is that it’s segregationist. This whole thing about racially exclusive ‘safe spaces’ and segregated dorms is still going on. A self-described students-of-color group just demanded a safe space at a high school in Charlottesville. Not exactly Martin Luther King’s dream. Things have taken a poisonous turn. I’m all for the First Amendment right of free association, but the answer is to start your own group, not demand that the government adopt segregation as its official policy.
Another time-honored value the diversity narrative tramples on is equal protection of the laws. Kamala Harris said a couple weeks ago hurricane relief should be based on race, not need. This reflects the poisonous concept of ‘equity’ that has taken over civil rights thinking. People didn’t all start out in the same place so we need to misuse the government to make sure they all end up in the same place. That might sound good to you, but if the government actually tried to hand out hurricane relief to minorities while telling similarly situated white people ‘tough luck’, it would be flatly unconstitutional, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. ‘Equity’ is not equality. It’s the opposite of equality. It’s favoring one group over another and, I humbly submit to you, we’ve had enough of that. You can’t cure racism with more racism.
The diversity narrative also makes people say and do the craziest things. Someone on TikTok claimed the reason she’s obese and can’t lose weight is because of white people, something they did on the Indian subcontinent a century ago. Well, that’s a stretch, to say the least. A government-funded report concluded that the study of “physics was racist, in part because it rewards students for getting the right answer....” The absurdity of this is easy to see. Would you rather have the airplane you’re flying in be designed by people who know how to get the correct answers to physics problems or people who don’t? Why on earth would you want to make excuses for people who don’t know their stuff and turn them loose in the world to design airplanes and other things with life and death consequences?
As for doing crazy things, we were treated to another hate hoax, recently. Rachel Richardson is a black volleyball player at Duke who claimed she was the victim of racial taunts and threats from a spectator while playing a game at Brigham Young University in August. However, the police investigated and reviewed surveillance video, but found no evidence to corroborate her story. Predictably, the media and the NAACP had all piled on, but they went silent after the police findings came out.
Here’s my question: If the diversity narrative is so good and racial prejudice in America is so bad, why do people keep having to make stuff up to make their case? Isn’t there something wrong with a narrative that promotes segregation, violates equal protection, and makes people tell big fat lies?
There are lots of other things wrong with the diversity narrative. I’ll tell you about some more of them tomorrow.
10/7/22 - Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Washington Edition
Federal prosecutors are considering charges against Hunter Biden for failing to report income and lying about his drug use when purchasing a firearm. We were warned weeks ago the investigation was narrowing to these two topics and leaving behind all the corruption involving Burisma, violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and all the rest of the questions about Hunter Biden’s international business dealings and his father’s involvement therein.
Hunter Biden is not the only Washington figure raising eyebrows. Anthony Fauci is another. Senator Rand Paul set the stage in June when he asked Fauci during a hearing about royalty payments received by NIH scientists. From 2010 to 2016, Paul said, 1,800 NIH employees received $193 million in royalties, but NIH refused to reveal their names. This makes it impossible to determine whether there are any conflicts of interests. For example, did scientists on vaccine review committees receive payments from vaccine manufacturers? We don’t know, because NIH won’t divulge the information. Fauci said during the hearing NIH employees are not required to disclose such information, not even on their financial statements. That’s a problem - public servants possibly on the take while making important public policy decisions and we don’t even get to know about it? I feel better already, don’t you?
As for Fauci himself, his net worth nearly doubled during the pandemic, to over $12 million dollars. He is the federal government’s most highly paid employee - making more than the President - but what’s troubling is that part of his wealth came from prizes outside groups award to bureaucrats. Bureaucrat prizes? Who knew that was going on? Fauci received a prize worth almost a million dollars from an Israeli foundation for “speaking truth to power” and “defending science” during the Trump administration. The ins-and-outs of this have not been reported, but it raises the possibility Dr. Fauci was not following the science but was chasing the money when he contradicted himself on numerous occasions and gave the Trump administration fits. Should public servants win awards from outside groups for policy decisions the bureaucrats are supposed to be making in the public interest? That spells trouble, it seems to me. Congress should take a close look at that one and either put guardrails around the practice or eliminate it all together.
Other swamp creatures have been in the news, recently.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was slapped with a Hatch Act violation for urging readers to vote Democrat in a magazine interview. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from participating in political campaigns.
The wife of the White House Chief of Staff just got a U.S. Special Envoy position at the State Department - nice work if you can get it. Another White House adviser has a brother who is a lobbyist. General Motors paid the lobbyist $350,000 to go after federal electric vehicle subsidies. The Energy Department is now lending General Motors $2.5 billion dollars for lithium battery production. See how this works? Pretty incestuous.
Speaking of incestuous and high net worth, how did Chelsea Clinton come to be worth $30 million? The daughter of a former president brought in $9 million for serving on the board of an Internet investment company. She earned over $600,000 as a special correspondent for NBC News eight years ago and more from another board membership. No doubt part of her wealth comes from appreciation of her ‘luxury fortress’ apartment in Manhattan, now worth $10 million. And she got all this just because she is the daughter of a former president.
No wonder Donald Trump wanted to drain the swamp. And no wonder he was run out of town for trying it.
10/6/22 - Election Integrity Whack-a-Mole
Our elections are a mess and they won’t be fixed any time soon. Some recent stories will show you what I mean.
The use of private money to enable government election workers to conduct get-out-the-vote drives for the Democrats was heavily criticized in the 2020 election. The use of Zuckerbucks, as they are known, has been outlawed in some states, as a result. But elections officials in Milwaukee are back at it, using money tied to new Democrat donors and partnering with a Democrat activist group to get out the vote for Democrats this time around. The Wisconsin Republican Party has sued.
Then there’s the perennial problem of dirty voter rolls, which the Democrats resist fixing at every turn. Federal law requires states to maintain accurate lists, but many do not. Several counties in Minnesota have just been sued for failing to remove duplicate registrations from their rolls. In New York, more than 3 million voters - almost one out of four - lack a driver’s license or Social Security number to prove their identity. This results in duplicate registrations which can facilitate fraud. Cheaters need actual extra voter records of people who don’t vote in order to cast phony ballots in their name. So who the heck are these unidentified people and should they really be on the rolls?
The Wisconsin Elections Commission told election workers they can fill in missing information to complete absentee ballots, then count them, even though state law requires the voter be contacted to cure the ballot. This prompted a lawsuit which the Democratic National Committee is seeking to join to have the law declared voter suppression. That’s a head scratcher. Why would the Democrats want to count incomplete absentee ballots that could well be fraudulent?
More Democrat funny business with absentee ballots took place in New Hampshire where the state Democratic Party was mailing out absentee ballot applications to 39 towns. The applications inaccurately claimed the voters had requested them and the return addresses were either wrong or were for entities that didn’t even exist. Voters were being disenfranchised and the state Attorney General ordered the Democratic Party to cease and desist.
Then there’s outright fraud. A former Democrat congressman in Pennsylvania was sentenced to 30 months for orchestrating schemes to stuff ballot boxes for Democrat candidates for several years. He admitted to bribing a Democrat elections official to add votes to Democrat candidate totals. Four people in North Carolina pled guilty for their role in absentee ballot fraud in the 2016 and 2018 elections. The scheme involved collecting blank or incomplete absentee ballots, filling in candidate choices, and forging the voter’s signature. More cases are pending.
A federal judge upheld Georgia’s new election integrity laws, including voter ID and citizenship checks. Stacey Abrams had been going around for years claiming Georgia’s laws are voter suppression. The judge disagreed. The case is also notable because here we have yet another court upholding voter ID, which is only common sense and another head-scratcher as to why the Democrats would oppose it. You gotta ask yourself why the Democrats keep trying to do away with voter ID. They used to say they want everyone to vote, but that’s so absurd you haven’t heard that line out of them for awhile.
A citizens group in Michigan sent the Democrat City Clerk in Flint a letter demanding she comply with a state law requiring party parity in the number of election inspectors. Flint has 92 percent Democrat inspectors and only 6 percent Republican. The City Clerk resigned rather than comply with the law. The same group filed a complaint to get the state out of ERIC, a supposed multistate voter roll maintenance operation which is actually a thinly disguised get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats. The state turns over confidential voter information to ERIC, which may not even be legal, thus outsourcing a core government function - maintaining the voter rolls - to a black box that won’t answer questions or file annual reports which is funded by Democrat-aligned money. Something’s wrong with this picture.
There are a thousand holes to be plugged before we can say with confidence our elections are secure. It’s a never-ending process of whack-a-mole, especially with the Democrats hell-bent on poking new holes at every opportunity. But we have no choice; we have to keep banging away at it. So don’t get mad at the Democrats’ election shenanigans, get involved.
10/5/22 - Would You Like Transgender Surgery with That?
The crass commercialism of the transgender lobby is on full display this week with revelations three medical trade associations, including the AMA, are asking the Justice Department to “investigate and prosecute” anyone who threatens violence against doctors and hospitals for providing transgender drugs and surgery to minors. These commercial associations claim doctors and hospitals are receiving harassing emails and threats of personal violence from a vast conspiracy of individuals and entities who object to mutilation of children for profit. News to me. But I have heard of firebombings and dozens of other actual attacks against pregnancy centers and pro-life groups that the Justice Department refuses to investigate. Maybe when the vast anti-transgender conspiracy produces actual attacks on the same scale the Justice Department might get interested.
These trade groups can’t stand the fact truthful information contrary to their financial interest is being presented to the public. “The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information...,” the associations claim in their letter. Translation: these merchants wish people like me would just shut up so they can make more money.
Some 300 highly profitable pediatric gender clinics have opened around the country in the last few years. There’s gold in them thar gender confusions. “Like most professionals, physicians and surgeons also seek to maximize their income,” a California psychologist said. Demand is up, but you have to ask yourself what’s driving it. The answer is social contagion and an aggressive political Left manipulating confused young people every step of the way. Now the Left is putting the pedal to the metal. Just a few weeks ago, it was hateful to suggest that hospitals were performing transgender surgery on minors. But now, the New York Times proclaims hundreds of such surgeries are being performed and it’s glorious.
If it really is all that grand, why are sellers taking steps to hide it? Vanderbilt University Medical Center took down the webpages for its adult and pediatric gender clinics after doctors at the hospital were caught on video talking about how lucrative breast and genital removals are, calling them a “big moneymaker”. They also threatened hospital employees who wouldn’t get with the program.
That’s not all the transgender lobby is hiding. A detransitioner recently said his doctors didn’t warn him transgender drugs and surgery could have serious side effects. Now he’s living with numbness in his chest, genital atrophy, and tremors. Why would doctors make full disclosure? There’s money to be made by hiding any potential complication.
Proponents of all this also don’t want you to know some of the money ends up benefitting Democrat Party affinity groups and causes. A group that promotes transgenderism for 2-year-olds received over $250 million in federal funds for, among other things, training 90,000 educators about such topics as the emergence of transgender identity in toddlers. The group has spent almost $2 million on lobbying efforts since 2018, making contributions to such Democrat/Left-aligned groups as the NAACP, Human Rights Campaign, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. So, you see, in the Left/Democrat world, one hand washes the other. It’s one of their insidious machines.
But there’s no arguing with success. Three weeks ago, I told you that the California legislature passed a bill to have the state take legal custody of minors who travel from other states seeking transgender drugs and surgery. That bill is now law and takes effect January 1st. None dare call it the new California Gold Rush. Oklahoma, on the other hand, hit the transgender-industrial complex right in the pocketbook, passing a law prohibiting Oklahoma University Children’s Hospital from receiving federal COVID relief funds until it stops providing transgender services to minors.
It’s time to move in Oklahoma’s direction. What we have here is a manipulative political Left ginning up false demand and a greedy transgender-industrial complex only too happy to meet it. It’s time to protect children from these financial predators.
10/4/22 - National Security Round-Up
While the Biden administration is busy chasing imaginary “semi-fascist” unicorns, national security concerns continue to grow.
The Secretary of the Air Force warned China is investing in military capabilities to knock out U.S. defenses, specifically, our satellites, aircraft carriers, airfields, and communications systems. The nominee to lead the Space Force told Congress China has weapons that can disrupt or destroy our satellites in all orbits. There are reports China has restarted mass production of destroyers to counter the U.S. Navy. China is also spending heavily on intelligence-gathering efforts, including buying farmland near U.S. military bases to watch what goes on there.
There are fresh warnings China continues to expand its nuclear arsenal with, among other things, a new nuclear test site in Xinjiang province. China’s nuclear build-up is a familiar story to anyone paying attention to national security news. Less well-known are China’s build-up of conventional armed missiles and its advances in quantum computing.
China is not the only emerging threat to our security. A Republican congressional report criticized Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago for emboldening America’s enemies and for once again making Afghanistan a “safe haven for terrorists who want to attack the United States.”
National security experts fear the U.S. is not moving quickly enough to meet these threats. One expert warned U.S. military aid to Ukraine is depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles with no clear plan in place to replenish the weapons or the personnel to use them, now that the Pentagon’s ‘Woke’ policies have caused recruiting to fall 25 percent short of its goal.
Other warnings have come in recently about a pilot shortage in the Air Force, rust and other indicia of inadequate maintenance of our naval fleet, a lack of repairs taking submarines out of commission, and a lack of resources and mission focus hampering our ability to deal with expanding espionage threats.
One bright spot in all this is the Air Force’s new B-21 Raider stealth bomber that is giving Russia and China pause. A hundred or more will roll out in the next 20 years or so, eventually replacing the B-52 which has been serving our strategic fleet since the 1950s and the previous stealth bomber which was developed in the 1990s. The first flight of the Raider is expected in 2023.
This bright spot aside, the national security picture remains dismal. But you can help by talking to your elected representatives about national security concerns. Show them these concerns are important to you and should have more mindshare in what your representatives do. Insist that they work to change the focus of the federal government, which is busy going after ordinary parents who speak up at school board meetings and cooking up phony domestic terrorism cases, just so FBI supervisors can get promotions and raises. Work with your representatives to bring the focus back to things that are truly important, like our declining national security posture. It’s your country. Republics don’t maintain themselves. Time to step up.
10/3/22 - The Democrats Have Lost Their Minds on Criminal Justice Reform
The Sunday talk shows say crime is becoming a campaign issue in the upcoming elections. It’s easy to see why. People don’t feel safe wherever Democrats are in control. If crime isn’t an issue for you yet, let me ask you some questions:
Why would anyone visit New York City? A tourist from Maryland was slashed in the face and robbed in Times Square. That’s what happens when you get rid of cash bail laws, as I’ve mentioned in previous commentaries. There are countless stories about criminals being let go without having to post bail in New York, only to reoffend, sometimes within hours of being released. New York also recently made it easier to get out on parole and stay out even if there are parole violations. Crime is way up, especially in wealthier neighborhoods - by as much as 60 to 80 percent this year. Bail reform has emboldened the criminals and city residents and tourists alike are paying the price.
Speaking of parole, the parole board in Democrat-controlled Wisconsin has run amok, freeing hundreds of convicted killers early.
But here’s my next question: Why would anyone buy a house in Illinois? Under a new state law, your front lawn will soon in effect become public property and the homeless can camp there any time they feel like it. The police will not arrest them for trespass or even ask them to move. The police will only write a ticket and leave. My sisters live in Illinois. They both own houses. They’re both leaving the state. The same new law ends cash bail after the 1st of the year for aggravated assault, second-degree murder, and other crimes. Hundreds of defendants awaiting trial will be released. The definition of insanity would be expecting any different result than what’s happening in New York City, but that’s the Democrats for you.
Next question: Why would anyone own a shop in California? Theft under $950 has been reclassified from a felony to a misdemeanor. Critics say theft and shoplifting has increased all over the state as a result. They also say the police won’t even show up any more for shoplifting under $950 or, if they do, the shoplifters simply fail to appear in court without any consequences. Not only that, the shoplifters can sue the store if the staff tries to stop a shoplifting-in-progress.
Why would anyone in Pennsylvania vote for John Fetterman - the guy who had a stroke and is still running for Senate. He was caught on video saying he wants to let one-third of the criminals in prison out on the streets because, he says, everyone will be safer or better off that way. That’s delusional. But he put his money where his mouth is when he was on the state’s Board of Pardons where he voted to put lots of murderers back out on the streets. Then, as Lieutenant Governor, he appointed a woman as secretary of the board who wants to “disarm the police”. Delusions have consequences.
I also want to know when the Democrats will run out of crazy ideas for criminal justice reform. Defund the police - remember that one? Several cities found it completely unworkable and moved to re-fund the police as I’ve noted in previous commentaries. In fact, the track record of this crazy idea is so bad, Democrats in Virginia and elsewhere are trying to run away from their previous support for it. Too bad they’re all caught on video saying what they said. Now the Democrats want to give free crack pipes to drug addicts. The idea didn’t die when it was found out the Biden administration was supporting it and denied it. But why do you think the Democrats’ next crazy idea is going to work out any better than their last crazy idea?
Here’s my last question: Why would anybody vote for the Democrats? They’ve put some very bad ideas into practice, lately, where they are in power. Defund the police, throw out half the criminal code, praise prosecutors who won’t prosecute, let everybody out of prison - how crazy can you get?
There is always criminal justice reform. The tinkering never stops. I know, because I was a criminal defense attorney in the 1980s. Reform was ongoing then and has never stopped since. The pendulum is always swinging between leniency and public safety. The problem now is that the Democrats have gone off the deep end, and instituted the wildest reforms imaginable. The pendulum will inevitably swing back in the other direction to public safety and common sense. It always does in criminal justice reform, and the upcoming election is not too soon to start.