Posts Tagged → state
Biden is Hamas is Iran is hate America
Lots of Americans are wringing their hands and wracking their minds over Joe Biden’s abandonment and betrayal of Israel to the corrupt and anti-America UN the other day. The UN voted to support a ceasefire in Gaza without mentioning why a war is raging there in the first place, without mentioning the Israeli hostages, without mentioning daily Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, without mentioning the hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis whose homes and businesses and schools are wrecked by Islamic terror rockets, and…. Joe Biden’s America abstained from voting.
A ceasefire without holding Hamas accountable is a reward to Hamas. It will allow Hamas to survive and continue to attack Israel. A ceasefire without the return of the Israeli hostages rewards Hamas’ bloody Islamic terrorism. Joe Biden allowing the UN to punish Israel for defending itself is rewarding Islamic terrorism, and weakens the West.
In the 76-year-long alliance between America and Israel, America has only failed to back Israel in the increasingly hostile UN twice: Once in the Obama administration, and now a second time, arguably in Obama’s third term.
Given all of the financial and material support Obama and Biden have given Iran, all of the political cover and even secret intelligence about what Israel is doing to try to stop Iran from having a nuclear bomb, it should come as no surprise that Joe Biden is now supporting Hamas. Hamas is an arm of Iran, after all, and because Biden is loyal to Iran, he is also loyal to Hamas. Joe Biden is an arm of Hamas.
This is why Joe Biden is trying to strong-arm Israel from fully defending itself in Gaza, where Hamas has created and perpetuated an artificial “humanitarian crisis” it now tries to pin on its victim, Israel. Biden’s allowing Hamas to survive keeps pressure on Israel, which must spend much more time, money, and the blood of its citizens defending itself against Hamas.
This is why Joe Biden and a great many elected Democrats are trying to force Israel’s elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from his office. Netanyahu may have overstayed his welcome in elected office, and he may have made his political career mostly about himself and holding power, but he keeps getting re-elected by Israel’s voters because there is a nationwide consensus that faulty though he may be, Netanyahu is nonetheless the best defender and unifier that Israel has. Netanyahu is also best able and willing to resist outside meddling in Israel’s national security decisions.
This is why Joe Biden, Iran, China, and Hamas want Netanyahu out of office: While Netanyahu is power hungry, his political opponents like Lapid, Gantz, Golan, and Bennett are even more so, while simultaneously bringing much less strength to the job. Lapid held the PM job for six months and managed to give away Israel’s northern natural gas field to Lebanon/Hizb’alla for zero in return; Bennet held the PM job for just a few months and managed to make every foolish decision possible, at great cost to Israel; Gantz and Golan would give away everything Israel has for brief media adulation, leaving Israel in even greater peril than it is right now. Etc. et al. So Israeli voters see these career politicians for the lame-os they are, and grudgingly vote for Netanyahu again and again, simply because they know he has their best interests and national survival at heart.
If Netanyahu is pushed out of office, Hamas will be rewarded with a so-called “palestinian” state outside of Jordan, where such a state already exists, and outside of Gaza, where such a state has existed for the past 17 years. This is what the Democrat Party wants, what Hamas wants, Iran wants, China wants, etc. Because it will leave Israel even weaker than it is now, and it removes a great block to Iran’s nuclear goal.
Now, who wins the most if Israel is greatly weakened and if bloody Islamic terrorism is rewarded and if another terror-supporting Muslim Arab nation is created? Iran.
And who has hundreds or even thousands of military age men illegally here in America, ready to die for Allahu Akhbar with an Iranian atomic bomb smuggled over the wide-open American border? Iran.
This is why a strong Israel is such an important block to the Democrat Party’s open war on America and Western Civilization. This is why even if you are an American or a Westerner who hates Jews and Israel, you still want a politically strong Israel and a guy like Netanyahu in the PM job. Like it or not, Israel is America’s best defense.
Turns out Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is much more pro America than Joe Biden and most of the elected Democrat Party.
Then again, Benjamin Netanyahu represents a nation where each voter gets only one vote; Israel can’t have the stolen elections that America has, because Israel has solid voting laws like voter ID.
Imagine living in a country where a coffee shop has this sign outside, telling its patrons they have a bomb shelter because Islamic terrorists routinely drop bombs on the area
Impeach, impeach, impeach
Impeachment is a powerful tool provided in the US Constitution as well as in every state constitution. Over the past 100 years, America and American citizens have enjoyed a historically unprecedented veritable explosion in food security, home security, financial security, and almost endless creature comforts that just a couple decades ago were considered unimaginable luxuries. And so in the past 100 years of increasingly corpulent self-satisfied hourly comfort, Americans have lost their sense of purpose, necessity, hunger, their edge. And so the use of impeachment has pretty much died, as few people saw or sensed the need to use such a drastic tool in such comfortable times.
Americans now view political corruption and official abuse of the law as a cost of doing business, a cost of having such a luxurious lifestyle available to so many of us.
Why rock the boat with something like impeachment when everything is going so great? President Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment for behavior that by today’s standard was positively Girl Scout level, and President Bill Clinton was understandably impeached for having brazenly lied under oath. There have been only a small handful of state level impeachments over the decades, usually against aberrant judges whose behavior is so brazenly corrupt that people overwhelmingly agreed that removing them from office was an obvious necessity.
Then President Donald Trump was supposedly impeached in a process without any procedural integrity, without the right to call witnesses in defense, without the right to file motions or submit evidence. His first “impeachment” was a political circus, not a real court proceeding with all the seriousness the dignity of all the offices involved require.
The second so-called impeachment of President Trump was even more procedurally flawed than the first attempt, including the absence of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, whose daily presence is constitutionally required for an impeachment to go forward. Chief Justice Roberts’ absence did not hinder the lawless circus from continuing, though, so it was not really an impeachment. This process was in fact just the mis-use and mis-appropriation of the impeachment name applied to a set of theatrical political activities.
You would think with all this one-sided impeachment-lite activity that the “other side of the aisle” would be ready to apply the same medicine now that they have the power to do so. And you would be wrong. The elected eunuchs have no intention of fighting back at all.
And so we now find America in the throes of widespread lawlessness by one political party, whose judges behave like theatrical political tyrants while ignoring all legal precedent and legal process requirements of their court rooms. For example, this week Federal Judge Chuktan scolded the Trump legal team in DC that they should have spent the prior year reading through the 12,000,000 pages of discovery material in preparation for a defense they only found out about a few weeks ago, and whose access to the related documents only began a week ago. This is absolute lawlessness by Judge Chuktan, whose lawlessness makes an absolute mockery of the very idea of a legal process.
In case you are not understanding this, the judge refused to allow the Trump defense attorneys adequate time to read through and use in court over twelve million pages of material being used to falsely prosecute President Trump for his mere political speech. Nope, Trump’s team is expected to arrive in court fully prepared within a couple months. This is a grotesque and corrupt abuse of the federal judge’s powers and discretion.
Another example is the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court majority that – crazily, corruptly, partisanly – held that unilateral last-second changes to Pennsylvania election law, right before the 2020 general election, by unelected people in the executive branch, and in open defiance of the Pennsylvania constitution which places all election law only in the hands of the legislature, were just fine and would stand. These state supreme court judges were wildly abusing their authority and discretion to implement a plainly flawed election process that defied Pennsylvania’s legal process for establishing election law, and which subsequently allowed a huge amount of voting fraud to occur in the 2020 election.
Other examples of grotesque courtroom malfeasance by politicized judges can be found ad nauseum in the federal courtrooms in Washington, DC, where jurisprudence and respect for the rule of law have been thrown away in the interest of obtaining patently illegal political outcomes that benefit one political party and that are designed to hurt President Trump and anyone around him. Tainted jurors, tainted judges, conflicts of interest, abuses of courtroom decorum and legal procedural law, the list of malfeasance there is incredible.
The one answer to all of these politically active judges is impeachment. Real, honest-to-goodness impeachment that includes all the bells, whistles, and fixins of a gen-u-ine courtroom hearing. Just like the US Constitution and state constitutions have a process for fraudulent elections to be challenged, so they also provide for impeachments.
And while one political party is riding the impeachment horse all over the place, the other political party wants nothing to do with impeachment. Why that would upset the apple cart, or some such nonsense, is what we hear from elected Republicans across America. Most of the federal judges involved in the January 6th cases have abused their positions and should be impeached. More than half of the Pennsylvania state supreme court members deserved impeachment and should have been impeached. What was lacking in the political process was the political willpower from among the “other” political party to mount a response, to resist the lawlessness.
The response of impeachment that should have met every single one of these lawless judges was taken off the table before any real discussion of it began. The co-equal branch of government that is by design supposed to be able to impeach and then remove aberrant officials is completely out of this fight, and so the official lawlessness continues.
As in any fight, if one side is throwing haymaker punches and the other side is simply standing there taking all of the punishment, eventually the guy standing there taking all the punches is going to lose the fight. There is only so much abuse that any person or body can take before it breaks, and in the case of America, the abuse of lawlessness being inflicted on our body politic is beginning to crush our nation. Our political and professional institutions are collapsing under the onslaught. American citizens are beginning to lose trust in their official institutions.
The natural answer that is hard-wired into our various constitutions is impeach, impeach, impeach, and thereby hold lawless officials accountable and restore balance to our crumbling political system.
I do not know why in 2020 and 2021 former state senator and president pro tem of the Pennsylvania Senate, Jake-The-Snake Corman, and PA House leaders Kerry Benninghoff and Bryan Cutler, refused to even consider impeachment of the lawless PA state supreme court members who threw the rule of law out the window to immediately benefit one political party. It made no sense from a political perspective or from a let’s-uphold-the-basic-law perspective. Their impotence simply made no sense.
Nor does it make sense why US House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan refuse now to impeach the lawless federal judges and bribe-taking Joe Biden, the lying-before-Congress FBI Chris Wray, the endlessly lying and obviously lawless chief law enforcement officer US AG Merrick Garland, and a whole host of other corrupt federal employees whose job #1 is to uphold The Law.
Isn’t it curious that the people who are supposedly standing on “the other side” of the lawless people are unwilling to take a stand, to implement those impeachment processes that are spelled out in our various constitutions? By their unwillingness to fight back, every one of these politicians – Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Bryan Cutler, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan etc et al – is enabling and abetting their supposed opponents. By refusing to fight back in any meaningful way, these elected officials are actually allowing America to descend into not just lawlessness, but one party domination and the destruction of America as a political entity that naturally follows.
Only one explanation for GOP weakness makes any sense: How many pieces of silver have these elected officials taken to have their loyalties swayed away from their oath of office? How many elected Republicans across America are owned by China?
Celebrate Independence Day with A Month of Defiant Acts
Today is July 4th, America’s Independence Day, founded immediately upon the heels of the United States’ successful civil war with Great Britain, from 1775 to 1781. What we call the Revolutionary War was actually a civil war between American colonists loyal to the British monarch, King George III, and his Redcoat soldiers on the one hand, and American colonists loyal to a new idea of democracy and representative self-government, on the other hand.
As we celebrated today, individual freedom, individual liberty, and individual choice won out against and over King George’s tyranny. As a result, America has enjoyed roughly 245 years of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity for even the poorest and least educated human beings from around the planet.
In 1818, then-past-President John Adams wrote that the actual revolution had already occurred among the American citizens and frontier colonists, years before the actual fighting began in 1775. The people’s then-revolutionary views on power sharing among humans, governmental legitimacy through consent of the governed, government transparency and accountability, and a kind of loose and very broadly defined Christian brotherhood united by loyalty to ideas and shared values had already taken hold on the frontier, united more than enough individuals to stand up against what was then the greatest military power in the world.
Today there is without question a formal tyranny afoot in North America. Both Canada (Trudeau) and America (Biden) are presently run by people who are openly and aggressively at odds with the fundamental rights and freedoms the peoples here have lived by for a very long time. It is an effort to consolidate official power over The People that knows no bounds, and official malfeasance and abuse of official positions against innocent but uppity citizens are now daily occurrences in both Canada and America.
Here in America the Department of Justice and the FBI have set land speed records for false accusations and the corrupt detonation of individual due process rights, whereby the criminal prosecutorial process is in and of itself the punishment. Even if an innocent individual is eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the government will have bankrupted them, destroyed their good name, and perhaps destroyed their family, their career, and taken their home, too.
These public employees and agents are pretty much double dog daring everyone to try to hold them accountable within the realm of America’s legal system. And they have access to just enough corrupt and politically partisan activist judges to get the Crackerjack Box search and seizure warrants they need to spread fear and political retaliation under color of official law. But we citizens have a duty to resist this tyranny.
In the spirit of Independence Day, let us all engage in a month of defiant acts against this political corruption and destruction of our rights. You know, live up to those 1970s bumper stickers that said “Question Authority,” which at that time were aimed at the many traditional institutions the Left had not yet captured, corrupted, or destroyed. Of course, if we begin to question the authority of our Usurper in Chief and his minions, they will immediately recoil in horror: “No, don’t question THAT authority! OUR authority you must unquestionably obey!”
If the Left did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
Some acts of defiance and questioning authority that you should do:
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to begin assembling a significant number of armed deputies, to be able to resist illegal invasions or lawless acts in the county by federal troops or agents.
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the county, and their agents encountered in the county will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the state, and their agents encountered in the state will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your governor, asking about the possibility of re-assembling the state’s Home Guard, or some similar armed civilian force, that is capable of quickly reacting to and resisting federal troops and agents.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to issue and execute arrest warrants against individual federal agents who have clearly broken state (and federal) laws against illegal searches and seizures, illegal search warrants obtained under false statements by said agents, etc. Most state constitutions have similar limits on government action and safeguards of individual liberties as the US Constitution, so this is not just a federal issue.
- Buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and then return it to the store for a refund, because it tasted “off.” Or you can remove the pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its freezer at the store, and then kindly leave it in the chips and pretzels aisle. Yes, it will melt and be lost there. But that’s not your problem. What is your problem is a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream that is actively working overtime with its corporate influence to deprive you of your individual liberties and rights. Show them you don’t care for their anti-democracy meddling.
- Write a letter to your local school board and demand they issue a clear statement that you and other concerned taxpaying parents of school children are not domestic terrorists.
- Etc. Just stand up and be heard for the next thirty days, in the spirit of July 4th Independence Day. Be a naturally defiant American who is naturally suspicious about official authority, who sees himself or herself as part of a citizen brotherhood united against corrupt power, and resist Biden’s tyranny, even in small ways.
Happy Independence From Government Tyranny Day!
US Supreme Court disgraces itself even further
In the past few weeks America’s social fabric has been deeply marred by a US Supreme Court unwilling to hear two critical lawsuits bearing directly upon the obviously fraudulent election results. One lawsuit was brought by Pennsylvanians, the other by Texans. Each suit on its face had incredibly compelling facts and merits, and yet the US Supreme Court declined to hear either of them, essentially saying that whatever bad election stuff happens in a state stays in that state (as if a state behaving illegally must be expected to go back and correct itself).
And then along comes a Kansas voting rights law, which protects the sanctity of “one-citizen-one-vote” in Kansas, and then the same exact US Supreme Court strikes it down just two days ago. So much for the Court’s prior statement that what states do with their individual elections laws is solely at the discretion of that state!
You would never know that this same Court was operating in this same universe, let alone in the same country at the same time period. Because if its decisions about the Pennsylvania and Texas cases meant one set of principles were operating, the Court’s holding in the Kansas case means the exact opposite is now true. And there is no democratic institution anywhere on Earth worth its salt that can operate as arbitrarily and capriciously as our Court is right now, and expect to be taken seriously by the governed.
Arbitrary and capricious government decisions strike at the heart of democracy and representative government, and it sure looks like the US Supreme Court is trying to run a dagger through America’s very heart.
The Court is wildly swinging here, for everyone to see in broad daylight. Refusing to even discuss unimaginably evil fraudulent voting behavior on the one hand, and then making a decision that strips Kansas voters of their rights and their expectation that Kansas elections will be free and fair on the other hand….this is a Court that is quite clearly out of control. And a Court that is out of control is a Court that has impeached its own credibility and standing, and which will lose the support of the governed.
Dear US Supreme Court members: If you will not even hear our pleas for relief, then why should we listen to anything you say? You work for The People, not the other way around.
Why does the US Supreme Court exist? Was it not established in order to address the most pressing legal issues of the nation, to preserve the sanctity of the US Constitution, so as to avoid political bottlenecks that are otherwise always resolved through bloodshed? The entire purpose of democracy is to give all citizens equal standing in every way, and equal opportunities for making their voices heard. Citizens whose voices cannot or will not be heard become alienated from the body politic, and they must choose alternative routes for resolving their grievances.
Here the Court is making it abundantly clear to all Americans that at least five of its nine members can be just as volatile, just as unprincipled, just as un-serious, just as politicized and arbitrary, just as in-your-face unaccountable to We, The People, as either of the other two branches of government. Despite the past role of the Court to always serve as a serious and somber place to resolve our thorniest differences in the deepest contemplation. Which is so obviously lacking now.
Some people say the Court is behaving this way in order to shield itself against a Democrat Party super-majority that has promised to add more seats to the Court, or to dissolve it altogether. Others say that most justices cannot help but go native when they spend too much time in Washington, DC. Which is a kind way of saying the justices lose touch with the common citizen, and begin to view us all as mere serfs, with no rights.
I don’t know if anyone else was struck by Chief Justice John Roberts’ snitty little minority dissent in the California religious freedom case a few weeks ago, but his snotty and arrogant tone was shocking to read. This is a man who is completely out of touch with the American people and without a thought in his head for the US Constitution, upon which all of his decisions are supposed to rest. Obviously he has at least four other justices who share his arrogant feelings about us little people.
In just a few short weeks, the US Supreme Court has disgraced itself, made a mockery of the law, of our system of government, of the guiding processes that are supposed to be public and fair for all to see, of itself, and thereby impeached its own credibility, its believability, its wonder and respectability. A court has no army, and all it can do is rely upon its respectability and integrity to persuade Americans that its rulings are just and fair, and must therefore be followed. The Court of Chief Justice John Roberts gets an F-minus, and why on Earth should Americans give a fig for what this Court ever holds again?
This Court is an important public institution that has just bombed out and fatally failed America right in front of all of us. So help us God, may this failure not be fatal to the Republic.
My comments to the PA Game Commission
The Pennsylvania Game Commission board of commissioners will be meeting this weekend, to set next season’s dates and bag limits. Like many other people, I submitted comments by email last week. From past experiences with this, I know that the commissioners read comments and requests from the public. Some of my comments, and those of my son, have received direct feedback from various members of the board.
A key to getting the commissioners to read and truly consider your comments is to submit them with plenty of time for the recipients to read them. If you submit comments a day or two before the meeting, it’s a very low likelihood of anyone having time to read them. Also, try to keep comments short, to the point, and sweet. Comments with prolonged bitching, whining, and playing biologist when you have no training or education or even a novice’s interest in wildlife biology, are all ways to ensure that your audience at best glances at your comments.
“Dear Commissioners,
Hunting should be fun, and therefore our small game seasons should run unbroken from their Fall opening to their February close. Whatever long gone reason for the on again-off again pattern of small game seasons, Pennsylvania must create opportunities for everyone. No biological reason exists for hiccup-style seasons. Few if any other states have this odd pattern. Let’s just let our hunters have fun and hunt.
In that vein, please consider allowing bodygrip traps on running pole sets in our most rural WMUs. The idea that a loose domestic dog is going to get caught in a trap in the middle of a state forest wilderness is preposterous. Same is true on private land. Same goes for allowing snares. We need all the tools we can get to manage coyotes. With now three years of crazy freeze-thaw-rain winter weather cycles, it’s impossible to rely on footholds. Cable restraints should be allowed throughout the whole season, and snares should be allowed on private land and or on public land in the Big Woods WMUs.
Finally, please put one of our Sundays on the day after the Saturday bear rifle opener, and another Sunday on the day after the Saturday deer rifle opener. This will create the most energy and excitement for our hunters. Even better, make bear and deer rifle concurrent!
Thank you for considering my thoughts,
–Josh”
SB 619 captures tug of war between big government and the citizenry
SB 619 is PA state senator Gene Yaw’s fix to a problem that should not even exist. And yet, this bill is being greeted by so-called environmental advocates as some sort of “attack” on environmental quality and environmental protection.
Senate Bill 619 is about one simple thing: Making Pennsylvania state government regulators spell out exactly what is, and what is not, an environmental spill that is so bad that it contaminates waterways and is a violation of our state “clean streams” law.
You would think that in late 2019, 243 years after the founding of America, all state governments would be run by responsible adults who are committed to the wellbeing of their fellow citizens first and foremost. A commitment like that would first and foremost be to the rule of law and the due process rights that undergird and frame everything that is American representative government. Simply put, the government cannot willy nilly decide for itself, based on ambiguous, general, opaque, undefined, arbitrary standards, what is an environmental contamination, and what is not an environmental contamination.
In representative government, We, The People are entitled to know our boundaries, where the borders are to our behavior, and where the government gets to step in and correct us. This understanding keeps us from making decisions in good faith that end up getting us entangled with government enforcers who hit us with fines and penalties for making an incorrect decision.
Presently, and unbelievably, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has no clearly defined standards for what qualifies as a reportable spill and contamination into a waterway. PA DEP’s entire standard is, get this, for real: “We will know it when we see it.”
Folks, I am not exaggerating, I am not making this up. This is how much infinite latitude the state government has now and wants to maintain. This means that literally every time something – a cup of coffee, a can of paint, a bucket of mine sludge, or any miniscule part thereof – falls from its original container into the environment, and into or next to a waterway, it must be reported to PA DEP. And PA DEP reserves the right to fine whoever is responsible, irrespective of whether or not that spill involved anything dangerous, toxic, or at such a small dilution that it is de minimus in its effect.
In practice, this means that PA DEP both chases its tail going after ridiculously unimportant “spills” that pose no threat to anything, which underserves the citizenry who underwrite PA DEP’s budget, and that the agency also holds a huge arbitrary hammer over the head of every single citizen, contractor, and industrial or commercial operator in or passing through the Commonwealth. While being arbitrary is bad enough, reports from the field – you know, the little people who actually work outside getting stuff done for the rest of us consumers – is that plenty of PA DEP staff use that arbitrary standard in capricious ways. These PA DEP staff are, simply put, empowered to be vindictive and petty little tyrants whenever they want to be.
To their shame, the opponents of SB 619 are acting as if the bill is some sort of assault on environmental quality, when it is not, not even close. The PA Fish & Boat Commission is actually on record opposing SB 619 because it allows for “interpretation” in the law. This is embarrassingly bad government to say things like this. Needless to say, the private sector opponents of SB 619 say even worse and less accurate things than the PFBC has written.
Can you imagine something so horrid as there being two sides to a story, some “interpretation” about what happened, and not having just one omnipotent government agency position, take it or take it, because you can’t leave it, because the government agency has 100% of the say in what happened, and you can’t figure it out until some government employee tells you? Is it really so terrible to rein in our government agencies and require them to live by defined standards like the rest of us have to live? Like our Federal and State Constitutions require? Like a whole bunch of other states already have?
SB 619 simply asks PA DEP to establish criteria and standards so that the citizenry and the industries they work in can know when they are following the law, and when they are not. It asks government employees to live by the rules everyone else must live by. It asks government to not engage in arbitrary and capricious behavior, which undermines everything our Republic and our Commonwealth are about. You know, that liberty and freedom stuff that seems so insignificant to the self-appointed guardians of environmental quality. One thing is clear: My fellow environmental professionals may care about the environment, but they do not care about democracy or good government.
This bill is not about environmental quality, it is about democracy, the role of government, good government, government transparency and accountability, and limits on government power. It represents the tug of war going on nationwide between people who want unfettered big government power, and those of us who want government to live within the Constitutional boundaries everyone else lives in.
SB 619 needs to be implemented now.
(c) 2006 Bonnie Jacobs
PA wildlife: damned if we do, damned if we don’t
Like every other state in the Union, Pennsylvania protects, conserves, and manages its wildlife through a combination of user-pays fees like hunting and fishing licenses on the one hand, and a helping of federal funding collected from user-self-imposed federal taxes on hunting and fishing equipment like boats, guns, ammunition, fishing rods etc on the other hand (the same people who buy the hunting and fishing licenses).
Yes, 100% of the nation’s citizenry benefits from the self-imposed taxes and fees paid by just 1% of the population: the hunters, trappers, and fishermen. Yes, you read that right: just 1% of the population is carrying 100% of the public burden.
And yes, as you are correctly about to say out loud, you and I will not see this bizarre and totally unsustainable arrangement in any other area of public policy. Not in roads, not in schools, not in airports, not in museums, not in anything else official and run for public benefit. And so, yes, it is a fact that wildlife agencies across America are perennially underfunded, and have been for so long that it’s now accepted as the way America does its wildlife business. Here in Pennsylvania, despite endless rising costs and endlessly more expensive public pensions, both houses of the PA legislature have long blocked the PA Game Commission from getting a hunting license increase in decades. So the PGC is even more behind the financial Eight Ball than most other state wildlife agencies. Hunters and wildlife managers in other states look at Pennsylvania and shake their heads. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is.
Despite the obvious imbalance and weakness inherent in such a unique and faulty funding arrangement, for fifty years this approach worked pretty well, nationally and in Pennsylvania, with some states occasionally putting new money into holes that opened up in the regular wildlife funding support. Those states with significantly increasing human populations tend to be forced into dealing with inevitable wildlife-human conflicts more than other states, and when Mr. and Mrs. America are increasingly hitting deer with their cars, you can bet that they will demand their home state do something about it. So more money is found.
So along comes the Pennsylvania Auditor General, to investigate the management and expenditure of money at the PGC. And why not, right? The PGC is a public agency, and hunting license revenue is a public trust. So sure, go ahead, look into it, audit the agency. And so it was done, and some interesting things emerged just a bit over a week ago.
In the “Atta boy” column is the fact that there appears to be no corruption, graft, or misuse of scarce sportsmen’s dollars at the PGC. By all accounts, PGC is transparent and well run. Given how much the sportsmen are always scrutinizing the agency, we all figured as much. But it is nice to have our beliefs and trust confirmed like this. We love the PGC even more today than before the audit.
In the “Aww shucks” column is the revelation that PGC staff do not immediately deposit oil and gas royalty checks when they are received, nor does the PGC ascertain for itself if those royalty payments are accurate in the first place, instead trusting the oil and gas companies to do what is right on their own. Hmmmm….This is a potential problem area, and we are all glad the auditors found it. Anyone who knows the PGC can bet money on the fact that PGC staff are right now doing all of this payment followup with a vengeance. Look out, oil and gas companies!
But then there is the big weird issue, the biggest issue of all, where the auditors “discover” that the PGC is sitting on $72 million in the bank. And accordingly, the auditors immediately and erroneously ascribe this to bad money management. After all, they say, public money is meant to be spent. “If you got ’em, smoke ’em,” goes the ancient and totally irresponsible government approach to managing public dollars. After all, under normal budgeting culture, agencies that do not spend the money budgeted to them risk losing those dollars in the next budget cycle. Failure to spend money is correlated with a failure to implement an agency’s mission, and for senior agency managers, there is the usual ego factor; the bigger the budget, the bigger the…you know. This is the old approach to managing government funds, and it is wrong, and it certainly does not fit the PGC’s reality or targeted way of doing business.
Let’s ask you a question: If you knew your family was going to be receiving less and less money going forward, and yet your family costs would be held steady, wouldn’t you begin to bank any extra money you had, in preparation for lean times ahead? If your family is responsible, then yes, this is what you do, it is what we all do. And it is what the PGC has done, thankfully.
But as a result of the audit, this single fact is being used to beat on the agency, to coerce the PGC to adopt unsustainable policies and irresponsible money management, despite the agency sailing through ever less sustainable funding waters every day. Seems like now every elected official and every Monday morning quarterback sportsman has some variation on the foolish theme that PGC has more money than it knows what to do with. Wrong!
So the real outcome of the audit is that Pennsylvania wildlife are damned either way, because the PGC is the useful straw man whipping boy for every aspiring demagogue in Pennsylvania politics. No matter what the PGC does, our wildlife resources are going to suffer. If PGC carefully, frugally husbands its limited resources, preparing for rainy days and needy wildlife, then the agency’s critics say the agency is miserly and hoarding, and they seek to punish the agency. And on the other hand, if the PGC immediately spends every dime it has, and has no money left over to deal with yet more unfunded mandates like Chronic Wasting Disease, then critics say the agency is wasteful and ineffective, and they seek to punish the agency.
And either way, the net result is the PGC’s critics damn and condemn our wildlife. Because that is the true result of all this second-guessing and monkeying about with the PGC budget and funding streams. Plenty of elected officials use their criticism of the PGC to artificially burnish their “good government” credentials, when in fact they are demanding the worst sort of government, and a total disservice to the sportsmen and wildlife everyone enjoys.
Many years ago, sportsmen were organized enough to react strongly to political demagogues who threatened our wildlife resource (and PA’s $1.6 billion annual hunting economy) with their petty politics. This latest iteration of the politics of wildlife management indicates that we need to get back to the old days, where sportsmen were unified and forceful, even vengeful, in their expectation that their elected officials would not politicize or hurt our commonly held wildlife resource.
The importance of Sunday hunting – come join us
Hunting is more than recreation. It is more than even “making meat,” so your family can survive.
Hunting is one of the few authentically human of activities left to us, we modern humans, shells of our former paleolithic selves that we are.
Today, in America, we hunt to be fully human, to demonstrate that we are still engaged with our ecosystems as the predator we became so many thousands of years ago.
Wild animals are still the cleanest, healthiest source of protein available. Getting your own meat through hunting is the most honest way to get food.
Sunday hunting here in Pennsylvania is nearly verboten. Somewhere in the 1860s a wave of religious commitment (a good thing) swept through America, and with it came “Blue Laws,” a very bad thing. Blue Laws are artificial contrivances to more or less force people to stay away from commercial activity on Sunday.
Here in PA we still cannot buy a car on Sunday, nor can we hunt for anything more than coyote, crow or fox.
Using the force of law to deprive the citizenry of choice on something like hunting, when it is really a private property rights issue, is simply wrong. Blocking private landowners from hunting on their own land on Sunday is bad law, bad government, and it must be changed, for so many reasons.
Providing more Sunday hunting opportunities will open up about 50% more hunting time for Pennsylvanians, who typically can only hunt on Saturday, if they even have Saturday off from work. We are losing hunters, we need to recruit more hunters, and this is the biggest step we can take toward getting hunters back into the numbers where we are a measurable force for conservation and gun rights.
At 2:00 PM on March 11th at the PA Game Commission headquarters here in Harrisburg, a meeting is being held about how to get the Sunday hunting effort moving forward again. Some may recall I served as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit several years ago. So much effort was put into that, and then RINO Yvette Kane struck. Kane, now a federal judge who openly accepts valuable gifts of jewelry and cars from law firms doing business before her bench, said that Sunday hunting was not a federal religious freedom issue, and sent us to state court, which said it was a federal issue.
We cannot get justice anywhere.
And this is the conundrum we face. Pennsylvania is one of the very last hold-outs on Sunday hunting in America. All but a few states allow full Sunday hunting, during hunting seasons, which are typically during the Fall and winter. Every state surrounding us is a commie state, and yet they allow meaningful Sunday hunting. Only PA is stopping a million of its citizens from fully realizing their recreational dreams and best family time.
Please come join us on March 11th at the PGC HQ, at 2:00 PM, to work on the political solution to this silly problem. Your grandchildren will thank you.
Is it time for civil disobedience and ignoring kook judicial holdings?
Civil disobedience, non-resistance obstructionism, and peaceful protests against clearly unfair laws and violent government agents is time-honored in America.
Civil disobedience works because it appeals to the higher mind, it appeals to the best, highest conscience in Western Civilization. You have to have an open mind to have civil disobedience work on your political views so that you vote for change from the status quo.
It won’t work in a Muslim country, where civil disobedience will just get you locked up and tortured, or summarily killed.
It did work for Ghandi in India because the 1940s British empire valued democracy and voting rights, and the public cry at home over images of British soldiers shooting peaceful protestors in Delhi’s public streets threatened to up-end political control at home.
Americans have successfully employed civil disobedience since the 1920s: Segregation laws, no voting rights for women, a lack of equal rights or opportunity across so many sectors of society… the causes were real and political changes were needed for America to live up to its promise.
And ain’t America an amazing place that it is designed to change and heal old wounds, to become a better place?
Because the original use of civil disobedience was so righteous, because so many of the laws being protested in the 1920s through the 1960s were so outrageously unjust, the behavior eventually took on a connotation of being above the law and always justified. In fact, over time even violence became justified in the name of Marxist versions of “justice,” and pro-violence slogans like “No Justice, No Peace” evolved.
Today, violent, fake civil disobedience has been employed by the “Occupy Wall Street” thugs, and by the violent criminals in Ferguson, Missouri. These events always start off as a routine, rote, formula civil disobedience act, and then they quickly devolve into destruction, arson, violence, beatings, attacks on bystanders….all in the name of some Marxist version of “justice.”
Inevitably, politically allied elected officials have begun to implement their jobs in a similar fashion. No matter what the law says, they ignore it, and make a big public deal about subverting the law. As if they are justified. They actually take pride in failing to implement the law as they are supposed to.
Examples of elected officials ignoring and subverting the law are a county clerk of courts issuing same-sex marriage licenses, despite Pennsylvania law saying it is illegal. Or Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane refusing to defend state laws, because she personally disagrees with them. Or California banning state judges from belonging to the Boy Scouts. Or the Obama administration willfully failing to implement immigration law. Or Harrisburg City mayor Eric Papenfuse refusing to rescind city ordinances that are plainly illegal under state preemption law, because Papenfuse holds certain personal views about guns.
This lawlessness by the very people entrusted with safeguarding and implementing the law is dangerous. These wayward officials stand on quicksand, because the basis of our republican form of democracy is the rule of law – equal application of the law, irrespective of what one personally believes.
If government officials begin ignoring laws they disagree with, and implementing law that was not voted into being by the consent of the voters, then the rule of law is over, it has ended. The glue that holds America together is corroded, and the whole edifice can come down.
But let’s ask why only one side of the political debate does this. We know they get away with this because the mainstream media protects them, but the MSM veil has been pierced by the Internet, so the flow of information is no longer completely bottled up by fellow travelers.
Put another way, why don’t other people, say people like American traditionalists, “conservatives,” engage in the same behavior?
Here is an example of what could be done: Last week a federal judge ruled that Arizona must issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Never mind that these people are in America ILLEGALLY, the claims they make for their applications could be and often are fraudulent, and the cost of these services is unfairly covered by taxpayers.
Why don’t the good officials of Arizona simply ignore that judge’s insane ruling? That judge has no ability to actually make Arizona issue drivers licenses, and if I worked in Arizona government, or if I still worked in federal government and had something to do with allowing illegal immigrants in, I would simply ignore that judge’s crazy ruling, or the illegal commands of the occupant of the White House.
There, folks, how do you like the taste of that medicine now?
Think of the many kook, nakedly political judicial decisions that are handed down, contrary to law and policy. Why reward these dictatorial jurists by following their dictates? Why not simply ignore them? God knows, they are earning it.
Civil disobedience and official lawlessness is a game that everyone can play, and at some point the people who have been acting like adults will recognize they only stand to lose by following the rule of law while their opponents exploit their fidelity, and only by fighting fire with fire will they make it clear that everyone must follow and implement the law, no matter what their personal views are, or everyone loses.
Or, people can do it the old fashioned way, and work to get the law changed one vote at a time.
An open letter to Patrick Henderson
Dear Patrick,
Years ago, you were a sweet kid from Western Pennsylvania, beginning your career in the state legislature. Working for state senator Mary Jo White and the senate environmental resources committee gave you lots of opportunity and exposure to political issues, outside issue groups, and the overall political process, including the executive branch. You were smart, interested, thoughtful, and principled, and although we occasionally disagreed I really enjoyed working with you….. way back then.
But something changed. You changed. You seem angry, hateful, even. Even towards people who have done nothing to you, at least that they are aware of; although I write this for myself, I write knowing that many other individuals have experienced the same unfair, undeserved treatment from you.
Your role in the Governor’s Office the past few years seems to have been largely dedicated to using state government to settle old scores with real or imagined “enemies” of yours (they were not Tom Corbett’s enemies, that’s for sure, although after you alienated them they aren’t up for helping Tom now), or to create new vendettas as you demonstrate that you have influence over government functions. For now.
At Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural back in early 2011, you treated my wife Vivian rudely, to her face, despite her sweet nature and she having never met you before. She did not deserve that. Was it your way of getting at me, trying to hurt me, one more time? Whatever your purpose, it was petty behavior unbecoming someone in your senior, public role.
It is difficult to accept that you have become this way, but it has become a universal truth in Harrisburg that you are, in fact, angry at the world and determined to get even with everyone in it, whether they are guilty (of what?!) or innocent.
I suspect a lot of this negative change is a result of your cocoon-like experience inside the Republican Party, where you have been sheltered from the real world for your entire career. Like all of the other professional staff on the Hill, in both parties, you merely must meet a technical standard, not a performance standard.
Meeting a technical standard means that you, and other professional party people paid by the taxpayers, must merely show up for work and stay out of trouble with your elected boss. If you were held to a performance standard, then you’d be in a world of trouble. Other than using your public position to hammer away at “enemies,” what performance for the public have you achieved on the taxpayer’s dime these past three and a half years?
Taking risks, making sacrifices, meeting real deadlines, making personally uncomfortable decisions — none of these are part of the professional life on the Hill, although I am confident that you or others in those roles (even friends of mine) would disagree. We taxpayers who underwrite your salary see it differently.
As a public servant, Patrick, you are subject to writing like this. You may hire an attorney to try to get this off the web, and I sarcastically wish you good luck with that. I stand behind everything written here, as you well know, and if I am pushed to do so, I can certainly provide any necessary evidence to support it.
Good luck with your career, Patrick. Unless you are recycled back into the Republican Party, and God knows I really hope you are not, because I think you are a huge liability to our party, you are destined to work in the private sector. Here is some valuable advice: Don’t treat people in the private sector the way you treated them when you were in the public sector. You won’t last five minutes. Other than that, I hope you enjoy your family and show humble appreciation for all of the good things that God has bestowed upon you.
–Josh