Posts Tagged → congress
Central PA candidates on the ballot
Because I am a “politico” actively involved in politics, friends, family, and strangers ask my opinion on candidates running for political office.
Here are the people I am voting for on next week’s Republican primary election ballot:
President: Donald J. Trump, of course. President Trump is all that stands between We, The People and chaos and the forced failure of America as the representative constitutional republic we have enjoyed since 1789.
Attorney General: Dave Sunday. He has a strong 2A background and is endorsed by Gun Owners of America, whereas his opponent has a very poor 2A record.
Congress: Scott Perry. Scott continues to reliably do what an elected official is supposed to do. He has gotten a lot quieter since the lawless Democrat Party thugs known as “FBI agents” stopped his car and stole his cell phone from him at gunpoint last year. Nonetheless, Scott continues to vote for We, The People, like voting against the FISA renewal. FISA has been used by the FBI to conduct lawless, warrantless domestic spying against everyday American citizens.
US Senator: Mickey Mouse. I literally wrote in Mickey Mouse because the GOPe endorsed and orchestrated puppet strings candidate whose name appears on the ballot spent time and money to knock off the ballot several other candidates who would have competed with him in this primary race. What a scumbag.
Auditor General: Tim DeFoor. Tim is a solid citizen and one of the very few now career politicians I can support. I have watched him work his way through the political process, and though he is not ideological, he comes to his traditional views honestly, from the way he grew up, which I can respect.
State Senator: Nick DiFrancesco. This is a newer version of the state senate district seat I ran for in 2012 and 2015, and I have a lot of familiarity with its voters. Nick is an all-around politico who has been a Dauphin County commissioner and has held other publicly visible positions of trust. Nick is presently Dauphin County treasurer, and I believe he represents the only chance normal taxpaying citizens in our region have to stop far-left radical Patty Kim from inheriting this seat in a heavily gerrymandered district made just for her. The other candidate is Ken Stambaugh, who I have had the pleasure of speaking with at length and staying in touch with. Heck of a nice man, good intentions, and not a political animal. My opinion is Ken would stand zero chance against Patty Kim. I yearn for the days when America would naturally and easily elect good people like Ken to office, but unfortunately spring 2024 is as far away from those old days as America can get. We need political warriors.
State Treasurer: Stacy Garrity. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 103rd district): Cindi Ward. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 100th district): Dave Nissley. Failed incumbent and career political hack Bryan Cutler has been a disaster for central Pennsylvania voters who care about good policy and clean politics. Cutler got into elected politics at a very young age, and he just learned bad habit after bad habit along the way. Dave Nissley is by far the better man and the better candidate, and he has been endorsed by Gun Owners of America.
Delegate to the Republican National Convention: Jeff Haste, Sue Helm, George Margetas, and Charlie Gerow. Both Jeff and Sue are well known central PA pro 2A advocates. George Margetas is a local attorney who like so many of us went along with the covid tyranny mask nonsense in 2020, but who then bucked it publicly afterwards when it was clearly evident that covid was about political control and not about public health. I like a strong man who stands up for freedom. Last but not least is well known local politico and lobbyist Charlie Gerow, who I have known for many years and who is one of the few lobbyists I actually like.
The other RNC candidates have either zero about them available online, which tells us they are hiding, fakes, RINOs, or Democrats, or they have something about being “a fiscal conservative,” which is always a red flag for social conservatives looking for strong candidates who will represent traditional values and meritocracy. So-called “fiscal conservatives” rarely are, and they are always social liberals. No thanks.
Your political action in 2024, like voting and volunteering for candidates, is as important as 1776
Mayorkas impeachment = detectable pulse in GOP
Foreign-born US Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has finally been impeached by the US House of Representatives. Surprise to me that Mayorkas is the first cabinet-level federal employee to be impeached in something like 150 years.
Why this roughly 150-year gap between cabinet impeachments exists is likely because in normal times of governance, the mere credible threat of impeachment would be sufficient to garner a resignation. But America is not now living in normal times of governance. Rather, America is living in a time of blatantly stolen elections, illegal border-jumping alien replacement of American citizen voters, and a brazenly political mainstream media that mass-lies and disinforms the roughly half of the American population still asleep at the wheel.
So, with massive daily doses of partisan propaganda and outright lies from the mainstream establishment media (NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, ABC, Washington Post, NY Times etc) to cover up the stolen elections, people like Joe Biden are unaccountable to the voters. He literally cannot be voted out of office, because if his opponent gets a billion votes, Joe Biden will magically get a billion and one votes. So, without electoral accountability, evil villains like Alejandro Mayorkas continue to purposefully destroy America from within, like the gnawing rat that he is.
For the record, the official job that Alejandro Mayorkas has is the head of the Department of Homeland Security, in which he is allowing and facilitating the complete and completely illegal invasion of America across our open borders. Terrorists and drug dealers and military age single men are illegally pouring across our border every day, which puts Americans in direct danger. Alejandro Mayorkas has been refusing to do his sworn duty for three years now, and as a result American citizens are suffering terrible crimes of violence and fentanyl poisoning, and who knows what terrorism is coming down the pike.
Alejandro Mayorkas has blood all over his hands, and he deserves to be impeached, and removed. If anyone deserves to be impeached and removed from office, it is Alejandro Mayorkas and his boss Joe Bribem. But first things first.
But the US Senate Democrats will do everything possible to stonewall and slow-walk the senate trial of Alejandro Mayorkas.
Not all is bleak, however. Two good things have emerged from this impeachment: First, two of the three useless, spineless jellyfish RINO “Republican” congressmen who unbelievably voted against impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas have announced they will not seek re-election. Both Ken Buck and Tom McClintock have announced today that they will not seek re-election. Let’s say this one more time: Voters are incensed by the Washington DC swamp-slug behavior of their elected representatives, and voiced enough displeasure that said DC Swamp-Slugs are retiring from office. Success!
Number two is that this small step for humankind demonstrates that there is still a pulse in the Republican Party. Faint though this pulse may be, it indicates that there is some fight, some resistance to the Marxist coup d’etat happening right now. This resistance is noteworthy because maybe the GOP isn’t completely dead after all, and rather is only mostly dead.
With the promise of maybe waking up and going to war against the Democrat Party traitors who are purposefully and willfully destroying the America they were sworn to defend and protect. Best news in years!
Is the Republican Party really dead, only mostly dead, or just playing dead? Impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas shows there is still a faint pulse in the GOP
Democratic self-rule is not supposed to be easy
Up until Congressman Mike Johnson was unanimously elected as the next Speaker of the US House of Representatives last week, political watchers, news reporters, and insiders were in a state of panic, panic I tell ya.
The Epoch Times described the US House of Representatives scrum for selecting a Speaker, after China-owned RINO Kevin McCarthy was ejected by hero Congressman Matt Gaetz, as a time of “paralysis.”
The unreliable and constantly discredited New York Times called the blessed time without a Speaker of the House as “weeks of chaos.”
Conservative talk radio was filled up to puke-on-your-feet levels of “Gaetz should have had a plan,” and “You only remove the Speaker when you have a plan,” and similar Conservative Inc. mistrust of the essential democratic process and worshiping of the unnaturally smooth “normal” process that just has to be corrupt. Sean Hannity, Clay and Buck, Glenn Beck, and the rest of you radio guys, you know who you are.
The rest of the press/media/ political outlets, both establishment/legacy and new alike, were of a common mind: Washington works best when it works perfectly smoothly, efficiently, and there are no hiccups, apparently. And thus we conclude that apparently democratic processes of debating and voting and disagreeing are uncomfortable to political insiders. Isn’t that reassuring?
Thankfully, when Speaker Mike Johnson was eventually coronated, we had the Babylon Bee in the room to shed the most accurate light on the situation: Their headline “Smoke Rises Over Capitol Indicating Congress Has Resumed Setting Taxpayers’ Money On Fire” wasn’t really funny, because the truth is painful.
That Babylon Bee humor was an updated version of Mark Twain’s observations of Congress: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
And his “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
But wait, there’s more of how Americans then and now really feel about Congress when it is working properly:
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.” (Will Rogers)
“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” (Will Rogers)
“I love to go to Washington, if only to be near my money.” (Bob Hope)
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” (Ronald Reagan)
“Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.” (Caroline Baum)
The truth is that self-rule by a group of citizens, by way of their elected representatives, is not supposed to be easy, or smooth, or efficient, or painless, or without occasional hiccups. To expect nothing but easy, smooth sailing when power and money are being fought over would be a childish fantasy. Or an evil wish.
Think about some of the total brawls we have witnessed in recent years from South Korea’s parliament, or Japan’s parliament. Chairs flying, punches thrown, martial arts kicks landing on unhappy faces! Likewise in a few European parliamentary democracies in recent years, where policy disagreements were settled with fist fights. Vive le human passion for truth, I say.
Well do I recall first seeing 18th and 19th century drawings and political cartoons of fisticuffs, cudglings, and canings in the US Congress, as well as accurate pictures of fatal duels among elected officials. These old drawings showed the true inner workings of representative government – members beating the snot out of each other. The other good side of these bloodlettings and drawn-out disputes is that when responsible people feel strongly about freedom vs tyranny, about slavery vs abolition, about fair taxation vs taxation without representation (which Americans are living under right now), they have strong disagreements. Government commensurately slows down and waits for the disagreements to get resolved. Good, this is natural and healthy.
You know what scares me in politics? Bipartisanship. Yep, that old let’s–reach-across-the-aisle crap means only one thing: Both political parties have reached agreement on mutually beneficial ways of wasting and pocketing our hard-earned tax money that the government coerced out of our pockets at gunpoint.
I was glad to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy ejected from the Speaker’s seat. Smoooooth McCarthy was an embarrassment in so many ways (not the least of which his evil role in covertly delaying and unnecessarily drawing out the selection process in the hopes of being re-installed as Speaker), and he smells of corruption.
I was glad to see Rep. Matt Gaetz and others (where was my US Congressman Scott Perry in all this?) demand that McCarthy be held accountable for breaking the promises he made to attain the Speaker’s seat. I was glad to see Rep. Gaetz eventually widely recognized and appreciated for having toppled the DC Swamp’s man in Congress and replacing him with Rep. Mike Johnson, who appears to be a decent person from East Succotash America and not yet familiar with greasy handshakes.
Overall, the shut down and gridlock in Congress during the struggle for the Speakership was a big gain for the US citizenry, and I would like to know what Mark Twain would have said about it. Whatever Mark Twain would have said about those glorious weeks of Congressional inaction, we just know he would have hit the nail on the head.
We The People 1, Uniparty 0
Overly preened, waxed, effete, phony pretty boy career politician and freaking corrupt as hell now former Speaker of the US House Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his brief Speakership yesterday. First time in American history, the vote on McCarthy represents a slowly turning tide in favor of We, The People as more and more of us American citizens struggle to regain control of our rogue government from an evil bipartisan Uniparty made of both Democrats and establishment Republicans.
McCarthy is the kind of flaccid, spineless, limp-wristed establishment career RINO “Republican” who does everything for his own personal gain, and for his party’s gain, and apparently zero for The American People’s gain.
Despite representing a majority in the US House, since becoming Speaker earlier this year McCarthy gave in on nearly every Democrat Party demand and Big Brother Government funding ploy. There was literally nothing the Democrat Party and the Biden White House demanded that McCarthy did not and would not cave to. An additional 87,000 heavily armed IRS agents? Sure, said McCarthy, why not have an even bigger helping of terrorized American citizens cowering from official jackbooted thugs in their homes.
Like most GOPe pukes, Kevin McCarthy is much more beholden to the politically partisan, far-left, America-hating, American-hating, Constitution hating, freedom hating establishment media like the Washington Post and the New York Times than he is to the US Constitution or even basic principles like individual freedom, small government, less intrusive government, etc. McCarthy is worried about what the partisan establishment media will say about him, and not about what his voters will think of him. His big dollar corporate donors make sure he has plenty of money to repel upstart challengers who might want more decision making put back into the hands of the American citizenry, and less in the hands of corporate lobbyists and their loyal lapdogs like McCarthy.
McCarthy did zero to represent his constituents or the tens of millions of voters who have increasingly voted to stop feeding the Washington DC beast, and apparently it was his secret deal with China Joe Biden to fund Ukraine yet again with billions of US Taxpayer dollars (as our bridges and roads disintegrate) that got him in trouble with his own caucus. Well, some of the Republican caucus, because there are waaaay too many “Republican” congressmen who are perfectly happy with the decisions McCarthy made. These are the congressmen who see themselves as the moderate wing of the Democrat Party, not as an opposition party. Gotta get these traitors out of office, Mister and Missus America!
Anyhow, kudos to Rep. Matt Gaetz for having the balls to take on McCarthy and hold him to the pledges McCarthy had made in order to become Speaker earlier this year. It is telling that McCarthy increasingly broke those pledges and seemed sure that he would not be held accountable. Unlike former speaker Nancy Pelosi, McCarthy had zero interest in unifying and holding his caucus together by giving in here and there to the conservative members by whose grace he ascended the throne (and by whose grace he was removed).
This is a telling fact: McCarthy had no interest in mollifying his conservative patriot wing. He gave them nothing, and gave the communist Democrat Party everything it asked for.
And thus it became apparent that McCarthy (and so many “moderate” “Republicans” like him) has no loyalty to a constitutional America. He blows bullsh*t up everyone’s butt, and then does the opposite. He ran as an R but acted like a loyal D. Hmmmmmmm, no wonder people ask how much secret payoff money McCarthy must have received from China or some other wealthy gift giver somewhere. Anyhow, it was time for McCarthy to be challenged and hopefully removed. Thanks to Rep. Matt Gaetz, We, The People scored 1 against the evil Uniparty.
I am surely not alone in being intrigued that GOPe Republicans and the New York Times alike are horrified, HORRIFIED at the “chaos” supposedly ensuing from McCarthy’s ouster. It is also intriguing that any action that goes against the interest of the bipartisan Uniparty, and which challenges illegal and increasingly un-checked Federal government power over us supposedly free citizens, or which legally challenges blatantly stolen elections, is immediately branded by the Uniparty and its establishment media outlets as an insurrection, chaos, illegal, etc. It is also intriguing that the Uniparty looooves a smoothly running rogue government, and hates anyone who questions it or challenges it.
Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the Speakership is a really big deal. If nothing else it is a sign that there are at least a handful of patriots in the US House willing to take risks with their political careers for the benefit of We, The People. Turns out there are a few who understand that The Bigger The Government, The Smaller The Citizen. Turns out you and I are not completely alone in our dispute with our rogue federal government.
Some action items for the next Speaker: a) purge the US Capitol Police of lawless rogues who hate America, b) investigate and hold accountable all members of the US Capitol Police who committed unnecessary acts of violence against innocent protestors on January 6th, c) actually release all of the January 6th footage so that Americans can make up their own minds about what really happened, d) begin impeachment proceedings against lawless members of the Biden Administration, including FBI Chris Wray, AG Merrick Garland, DHS Alejandro Mayorkas, and others whose nonstop lying to Congress should land them in jail for the rest of their lives.
Shatter that glass ceiling
The so-called “debt ceiling” is a fantasy of a fantasy. It is the undefined, almost whimsical notion that even when the United States citizenry’s representative government has in-effect borrowed trillions more Dollars than The People can ever hope to repay, it is still yet possible to raise that ceiling even further and borrow more, and spend a hell of a lot more, than ever before.
And so we are told in the sternest of tones by DC Beltway bobbleheads like Chuck Todd at NBC, that we must raise this “debt ceiling” or risk going into default. Default! Like our creditors will demand a refund! Which we all know will never, ever happen, because the entire house of cards upon which the planet’s entire interrelated economy is based will come crashing down, to the loss of most, including the communist Chinese, who have the most to lose.
So, default on the debt ceiling is never going to happen. Invoking it is just a scare tactic by DC Beltway banditos to try to screw us citizens out of more money and power. Forget it, let the debt ceiling break. Hell, go ahead and shatter it. Nothing will happen.
Unsurprisingly, massive RINO US House Speaker Kevin “Sweetcheeks” McCarthy has done ye olde reach across the aisle bipartisan BS and agreed to most of what the America-detonating Biden Anarcho-Administration has demanded, in the name of the sacred debt ceiling. Including funding for 87,000 new gun-wielding corrupt IRS agents who will be crawling up my butt and yours looking for loose pennies, and jailing us en masse for penny ante mistakes. And no cutting of the lawless FBI or the rogue DOJ budgets.
The problem with “Republicans” like Kevin McCarthy (and Tom Ridge, Tom Corbett, and 99.9% of the PA GOP here in PA) is that they believe in government first and foremost. They have no problem growing government or in ceding its unaccountable bureaucrats more and ever more power and centralized control over all us citizens. So long as they get a seat at the table and grow their own power and influence, they don’t give a darn about anything else. Shame on all of them. Shame shame shame on all of you fake conservatives.
No, I am wrong. Let me rephrase this. Shame on all of you fake Republican Americans, because you are directly empowering communists destroying America.
Congressman Scott Perry, if you are reading this, please remove Sweetcheeks McCarthy from the Speakership. Cut 80% of the FBI and DOJ budgets. Put your foot down and give these America destroying lowlifes a severe brake check. If they veer off the road and smash the debt ceiling and leave the budget talks a smoking ruin as a result, good; you get extra points. Because American citizens will benefit the most.
Wow, the Democrat Party really hates Jews!
Watching the screeching and yelling freak-out among the United States House of Representatives Democrat Party members yesterday, it was impossible not be reminded of the same sort of deliberately over-the-top theatrical denunciations by the German Nazi politicians in the 1930s.
Why were the Democrat Party members of Congress universally screeching and caterwauling and turning cartwheels for the cameras? Because Jew hater supremo congresswoman Ilhan Omar was ejected from the Foreign Relations Committee, because she is a cheerful and public Jew hater.
Never mind that Ilhan Omar spends 98% of her time in elected office attacking America, which gave her shelter and a new home out of war-torn Somalia. Never mind that Ilhan Omar is openly corrupt and lawbreaking (like marrying her brother to qualify for certain American benefits). She is also and very much devoted to ragging on Jews. All Jews, not just some subset of “The Jews.”
And true to form, Ilhan Omar’s fellow Democrat congresspeople rallied around her in their best melodramatics, wildly denouncing the Republican Party leaders for having the temerity to finally inflict some civilization onto the august body. The Democrat Party must believe that hating Jews is good business practice.
Do you know who cares most about this grotesque display of solidarity with one of America’s leading Jew haters? Well we can see it’s not Jeremy Raskin, or Jerry Nadler, or Debbie Schultz, or any other Jewish Democrat member of Congress. They stand in solidarity with Ilhan Omar. Christians care; that’s who cares about ending Ilhan Omar’s public displays of antisemitism on the soapbox of the Foreign Relations Committee. America-loving, patriotic Christians are the ones most disgusted by Ilhan Omar’s bigotry, not liberal Jews, which is to say probably 70% of American Jews. America’s liberal Jews are devoted to Ilhan Omar and her political party above and beyond their own survival.
And now beyond any doubt so is the entire Democrat Party, which has openly and officially thrown in totally with an openly America-hating, Jew-hating immigrant from Somalia.
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC swamp thing
Congressman Kevin McCarthy is a corrupt career politician from the Marxist state of California. To be a Republican from California in 2023, you would by necessity have to be really slimy and corrupt. McCarthy has been in Washington DC for a long time, and his ties to the evil DC Swamp run long and deep. Heck, just look at his shielded face, his hooded eyes. You can easily read McCarthy’s crookedness by his outward facial appearance and body language. In fact, he has a lot of Justin Trudeau’s same body language going on (Canada). And Gavin Newsom’s for that matter (California governor).
These people above all share a common lust for power and control that overrides elementary human decency and empathy. Anyone who wants that much control should never be allowed to have it, and yet, if McCarthy becomes the next Speaker of the US House, then he will have it.
My congressman, Scott Perry, has been wonderfully vocal about McCarthy’s cozy relationship with the DC Swamp, and how McCarthy refuses to make commitments to transparency and accountability that would change the way Washington DC spends our taxpayer money. Thank you, Congressman Perry.
What is really amazing is how weak willed and sycophantic most elected congresspeople are. They each want power and control so badly that they fall all over themselves to elect someone dirty like McCarthy. The people supporting McCarthy for Speaker are not conservatives, they are career politicians in search of wealth and power through a public service job. And this list of lame-os now includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman congresswoman who has raised hell with Washington DC criminality since the day she arrived.
How did fake Republican Liz Cheney go to Congress for just six years at an annual $175,000 salary, and emerge as a multimillionaire? What kinds of illegal, unethical, anti-citizen, anti-America back-room deals did she make to earn that kind of wealth? And it’s not just Liz Cheney, it is the vast majority of the elected officials in Washington that use their official office for personal gain.
Yuck!
So here we are today with RINO Rep. Kevin McCarthy trying to gain the speakership at all costs and with no commitments to advancing Republican values like good government, limited government, accountable government and public employees. I wonder if USA arch enemy China has purchased McCarthy like a sack of potatoes, too.
Like a lot of Americans, I am fed up with the political parties. They do not interest me, because it’s like watching two criminal gangs fight each other. The citizens lose no matter which gang is in charge. What does interest me is limited government, transparent government, accountable government.
Like: Why the hell is the IRS now empowered to track our $600.00 (six hundred Dollar) purchases and incomes, along with enormous destruction of our individual constitutional rights, but We The People have zero control or information over how the federal government, like its IRS, spends OUR money?
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC Swamp Thing. He cannot be Speaker, and if he does become Speaker through the weakness of most GOP congresscritters, then America is done for, because he will protect the DC Swamp from being changed or challenged or held accountable. And America will never have another opportunity after this Congress to hold DC accountable.
SBF arrest timed to block his testimony
How many high crimes can one political party commit before people say “Enough already!”?
As if it wasn’t enough to have Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”) create, run, and crash FTX, thereby losing billions of dollars of Americans’ personal savings and retirements funds, now we see the evidence that FTX was actually a Democrat Party fundraising machine from the very beginning. Its entire purpose seems to have been to funnel enormous illegal donations to Democrat Party candidates and their allies.
But SBF was arrested the other day, just one day before he was scheduled to appear before the US Congress to answer questions about FTX. Now that he is arrested and in jail, conveniently charged by the Biden Administration with all kinds of financial crimes (that he did because the same exact people (like SEC chairman Gary Gensler) now charging him enabled him to do it in the first place), SBF cannot and won’t answer any questions. We will never know what he was thinking when he set up FTX with all kinds of help from people now running the Biden Administration.
Kind of interesting how this works, don’t you think?
And I think it’s rotten, too. America is being utterly raped in every way – financially, culturally, economically – right in front of our faces. And nobody does anything about it. The same perpetrators just keep on perpetrating.
Eugene DePasquale vs. PA Sportsmen
Until a few years ago, Eugene DePasquale was to me just another career politician who was making the rounds of political seats in Pennsylvania, with his eye on the eventual governorship. There are people in both the Republican Party and Democrat Party (I used to be a Democrat) who do this, so I am not going to hang this boring and nettlesome practice around the neck of one particular political party.
Political careerism in a republic like America is inevitable, and while it bothers most voters, those same voters also overwhelmingly re-send their own elected representatives back to office repeatedly. So the idea of term limits is only as good as the voters are willing to make them, themselves.
Don’t like career politicians, most of whom make a hundred promises and say one thing and then do another thing altogether? Then stop voting for the same damned people over and over and over again. This power to inflict term limits is held in the hands of the voters in every election. But like old married couples who argue with one another and poke at each other with their canes, voters eventually become comfortable with the career politicians in their own lives, and repeatedly send them back to office, even while finding their voting record or behavior disagreeable. For whatever reason, this is especially true with registered Democrat Party voters. Senator Bob Casey , Jr. is probably Exhibit A in this phenomenon, because you cannot find anywhere a more do-nothing guy career politician than Bob Casey, Jr., who nevertheless keeps getting re-elected, despite having zero to show for his time on the taxpayer dime.
Eugene DePasquale is another example of this phenomenon, an Exhibit B of revolving door careerism, hunting down one political seat and then moving on to the next. I am unaware of DePasquale actually having a real world job. Ballotpedia lists his biography as:
“DePasquale received a B.A. in political science from the College of Wooster, an M.P.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a J.D. from Widener University School of Law. He worked as an attorney and for the City of York as director of economic development. DePasquale then worked as deputy secretary for the Department of Environmental Protection. He also served as chair of the York County Democratic Party from 1998 to 2002.”
In other words, DePasquale’s actual real-world, hands-on life and work experience is about zero, or it may be zero. Candidates from either political party like DePasquale sicken me, because they are power-hungry and their policy lens is shaped entirely by what others (donors, political bosses) tell them to think, or worse, by what they believe will sell to the most voters. This is how we get such polarized political contests; candidates whose entire adult lives and professional careers have been in an insulated, unaccountable womb, where they are being groomed for the next step.
Yuck yuck yuck.
I met DePasquale once, a couple years ago, at a sportsmen’s round table he held in Lewisburg, PA. He was there at the urging of a lobbyist close to him, and to his credit he sat down with about ten of us from around the state, to discuss two things. First subject was his audit of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, focusing on the deer program, including chronic wasting disease, and the collection and use of royalties from oil, gas, minerals, and timber removed from State Game Lands. Second was his openly anti-gun public policy position, which he had found creative ways to implement or promote through his role as Auditor General.
In our discussion with him that day, DePasquale struck a severely cagey disposition. You could just so easily tell that our comments on his various positions and doings were passing right in one ear and out the other. He did not care. This was a perfunctory meeting set up to give the appearance of a career politician listening to constituents, when in fact the politician was probably thinking about dinner out with his wife or mistress or drinking buddies.
DePasquale evinced little concern that his obviously political investigation, designed to burnish his own credentials at the cost of whatever happened to get damaged in the process, could really hurt the PGC. And especially damage both its science-based deer management and its erstwhile political independence. Erstwhile, because as DePasquale’s Grand Inquisition into the PGC books showed, no public agency is bulletproof against meddling politicians. Had PGC officials or staff mis-spent public money, then by gosh fry ’em.
But of course, DePasquale found nothing that the PGC’s own regular annual audits had not found. And thus, the PGC did not have to change course on a damned thing it was doing. But DePasquale benefited politically from making it seem that he had possibly found something. And that is where I come out on this election he is in.
Here we have a candidate who has almost zero private work experience, who is 99.5% a political party construct and product, who has been sucking at the taxpayer teat for his entire career in one role or another, who tried to damage Pennsylvania sportsmen’s interests for his own political gain, running against incumbent congressman Scott Perry. To me, there is little to nothing compelling or exciting about Eugene DePasquale. He is another career politician drone who could be from either political party, except that he hates guns, used his elected position to beat on gun owners, and tried to hurt Pennsylvania sportsmen by hurting the PGC.
In great contrast to DePasquale, his opponent, Scott Perry, has been a complete champion for gun rights, AKA our Constitutional rights. He does not blame law-abiding citizens or manufacturers for other people’s criminal acts. And he has had a whole career in the private sector, including as a small business owner, prior to becoming a politician. I admire these two things about Scott Perry. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know, he also served in the military, as a chopper pilot, at a high rank.
I am one of those voters who only gets excited about a candidate’s military duty when it shows real gumption and leadership, and I guess Scott Perry has that. But it is his real-life business experience, his willingness to work hard, take risks, and make sacrifices that impresses me the most.
In contrast to Eugene DePasquale, whose biggest risks were wondering which pressed suit to wear to whatever fundraiser, and whether it was worth it to burn the Sportsmen enough to impress his gun-grabbing supporters to a degree that they would really, really write him bigger campaign checks.
In this election for Congress, it is not even close. It is Scott Perry who is the best candidate. That is who I am voting for. The other guy DQ’d himself a long time ago.