Category → Government Of the People…
Why retain lousy judges?
Pennsylvania voters will have the rare opportunity to NOT RETAIN three lousy judges in a few weeks, and how can you vote to retain these people?
Don’t!
The “PA Dems” send me their daily emails, which I dutifully read. It is fascinating material, mostly because there is no substance to it. It relies on an “Us vs. Them” version of politics, which I think most Americans are tired of in so many ways. This same tribal hate-filled scapegoating is what got Charlie Kirk murdered, and which has boiled up from the far-far-Left gutter of the Democrat Party’s base.
Just like the phony “COEXIST” bumper sticker, the old “Hate is Not a Family Value” bumper sticker also was a bold lie. Americans who sported these on their cars were neither coexisters nor peace loving non-haters. The coexist people are the meanest, angriest, least capable of co-existing with different Americans, and hate is now an out-and-proud defining characteristic of the Democrat Party base.
It all flows from the 1960s Marxist academics, like Herbert Marcuse, who told their college students that it is OK to hate and hurt people who disagree with Marxists, because those people are automatically just bad, bad people, and they deserve to be hated, and hurt. And so hate has become a fundamental part of the Democrat Party messaging, including the emails that I get.
The PA Dems say that the court is their “firewall” on policy, but this is all wrong, that is not what courts are supposed to do. Congress and state legislatures are charged with writing laws and policy, and the courts are supposed to simply interpret it all as either consistent with the constitution, or not. Not act as another legislature of just a few people. And so it is this political activist judge thing that has got so many Pennsylvanians wound up tight about this upcoming retention vote.
Says one activist I admire, “Vote “NO” to retain the PA Supreme Court Justices. Below are the current salaries of those justices along with all tiers of the judicial system including our local Common Pleas Court Judges. By choosing to run for retention instead of re-election, these Justices, if retained, will be serving another 10-year term in which their salary for that time will total $2,619,760, and the Chief Justice will receive a total of $2,695,990. I don’t believe she can serve another full term due to mandatory retirement age in another two years or so. In addition to their generous salary, they also receive an annual cost of living raise and the best benefits as far as healthcare, prescription drugs and eye care. Regardless of the justices being on the wrong side of so many issues, there is no reason to hand them another term instead of making them stand for election.”
In other words, the judges chose a simple political dodge instead of running a real campaign, to stay in their cozy taxpayer funded jobs. Even one who should automatically age out in just a couple years!
We do not need more elected officials with this rotten, selfish mindset.
Additionally, the activist policies these judges pushed were destructive nonsense that served the political interests of just one political party, at the cost of tossing our rule of law right out the window along with believable election results:
- they approved a heavily gerrymandered electoral map, which a lot of Americans say they do not like,
- they allowed the use of highly corrupt vote “drop boxes” despite Act 77 not authorizing them,
- they extended the deadline for mail-in ballots by three days, in violation of the law, among other non-legal, anti-legal decisions that damaged Pennsylvania’s election integrity
Christine Donohue, David Wecht, and Kevin Dougherty do not deserve to serve as judges any longer. They have failed at this job, badly, and they should not be retained. Time for a change, time for people with integrity to sit in those seats.
Vote NO on November 4th to not retain them on the court.
You must flip over your ballot to check the NO box.
And you can also term-out Judge Dubow and Judge Wojcik, too.
US Army Corps of Engineers: America’s Black Hole in Need of Cosmic Level Fixing
Because it is a relatively small part of our big military and kept in a dusty back room far from the shiny B-2 bombers, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been off the radar of legislators and commanders-in-chief alike since George Washington ended his presidency.
But in the intervening 250 years since its founding, the USACE has gone from building bridges for troops and cannons, to aggressively stealing private property rights and forcing a Marxist environmentalist agenda on domestic citizens under the guise of “civil works.” Of all the federal agencies I have dealt with professionally and personally, including USEPA where I worked for seven years, the USACE has had the biggest mission creep in the worst directions of all. So, for USACE’s 250th birthday this year, can we please give Americans a gift of freedom, and see this most hidebound, insular, destructive, over-reaching, and unaccountable agency finally get the keelhaul overhaul that Americans deserve?
Not that I am rooting for Navy here, but our sacred Army has no business getting its good hands dirty with the USACE’s lawlessness. Big change must happen there, and with fresh new appointees from the Trump Administration, hope should be on the horizon. I hope these appointees are tough as nails, because they are facing a deeply entrenched bureaucracy as jealous of its ill-gotten power as any other federal agency has been, and they have the arrogant, dismissive staff culture to show for it.
USACE “manages” 12.5 million acres of formerly private land, much of it associated with water projects for hydropower, flood control, and public recreation. Sounds useful and wholesome enough: Waterskiing, fishing, hiking, families picnicking, with downstream communities protected from heavy rains up in the watersheds. Problem is, most of USACE’s flood control lakes are heavily silted in and barely functioning as advertised or designed. And probably 95% of this enormous land collection was obtained at gunpoint, through eminent domain against private American landowners, including the Seneca Nation, who still have a formal land treaty with the US government that was reached with George Washington himself, and which the USACE violated.
Absolutely nothing and no one is sacred to the USACE; not the US Constitution, not us citizens, not our property rights.
Anyone familiar with federal eminent domain knows it is rife with abuse and below-market values forced on private landowners for the most frivolous purposes. And while some federal agencies will attempt to reach willing-seller-willing-buyer agreements before going nuclear, the USACE just used legal sledgehammers against American landowners right from the get-go, because screwdrivers have never been in their toolbox.
But the situation is worse than just USACE’s rampant takings of privately owned lands that could have easily served the USACE’s goals while remaining in private ownership. Back in the 1950s-1970s good ol’ days of “Big Government Knows Best,” when the agency was most active, the USACE also stripped many of its condemned properties of their valuable subsurface oil, gas and or mineral rights, too, without paying for them. Not content with taking the surface rights for managing surface water, the agency simply took what it wanted and dared the beaten-down landowners to try to beat them in government courts. Today, millions of Americans are deprived of substantial and highly valuable subsurface private property rights at nearly every single USACE water resource project. These oil, gas, and mineral rights should be in their families’ private ownership, but are wasting away under USACE theft and neglect.
A group of military engineers and their civilian hangers-on have no business running public recreation facilities on American soil. The USACE’s job started as support of military combat troops in 1775, and it is incredible that we are having this discussion in 2025. The marrying of USACE hydroelectric dams and flood control facilities to public service recreation has not worked, because the agency’s staff developed a culture of untouchable bullies. The US military is not supposed to operate on American soil, for damned good reasons, but the USACE does so, with predictably bad results.
USACE is over-ripe for huge change. At the very least USACE needs the deep cleaning treatment of staff and structure that chief administrator Lee Zeldin is doing over at USEPA. USACE’s “civil works” must be spun off to actual civilian oversight and management in the agencies that have historically done this kind of public service and natural resource management. Nearly all of USACE’s physical assets should be moved to the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the US Forest Service, all of which have much better track records dealing with public service than the USACE. Which is saying a lot, because all of these federal agencies have had real rough patches in their public land management history and public service interface cultures, too.
Josh First wrote his 1991 master’s thesis on the USACE’s nationwide water resource projects, and, ironically, has randomly ended up owning substantial acreages adjoining two USACE water resource projects in Pennsylvania as an entrepreneur. He will write about his own related experiences with USACE in future essays.
This essay originally appeared at American Thinker.
Memes
Labor: To work for something of value
Today is Labor Day in the USA, and while it might have some bad Marxist roots with the early unions, the fact is that it has also evolved into the uglier side of capitalism, which is an orgy of shallow consumerism. Big retail sales of everything from underpants to mattresses to cars, America today is awash in carnival tents and men in top hats and coat tails, barking loudly at the masses to step right up and buy the latest greatest gadget or whatever.
Not too long ago, labor unions played such an important role in American politics (and in British politics, for that matter), that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet knew precisely what Labor Day was about. That most Americans, especially our youth, make little or no mental connection between Labor Day and the people who labor away with their hands and bodies to make things of value for us, for them, is the real take-away meaning of today’s national holiday.
But how could young people know, or older Americans recall, what Labor Day is about if nearly all of our labor has been curiously shipped overseas, and to our enemies, no less? A factory job was the family and church and community- sustaining source of income from the 1930s until about 2000, when the last of our American factories were carefully packaged up and sent to China. Now we have 25 years of no no labor and no factories, just Rust Belt husks of buildings, churches, and communities across the Eastern and Mid-Western USA. No wonder our kids are clueless about Labor Day.
However, our snickering elected officials know precisely what Labor Day is about, because it is still directly relevant to them. These self-anointed elites who seek to dominate all of us use our labor to enrich themselves, through the mis-appropriation and mis-spending of our tax monies. This self-destructive activity happens most and worst in liberal “blue” states run by the Democrat Party, where voters enable single-party rule without the checks and balances of multi-party competition. That this repetitive voting pattern is self-defeating seems not to matter to leftist messianic utopians, whose Big Government god requires nonstop sacrifice and endless cash invested in friendly “businesses”.
Where does this endless cash come from, which enables the extravagant “public servant” aristocracy? YOU.
You labor, pay high taxes on your income, and that tax money is taken for messianic utopian policies, like disproven climate change nonsense, that enriches other blue aristocrats who are invested in these schemes.
Ideally, you, the citizen, pay taxes to the government so the government can pay for services to you, the citizen: Firemen, policemen, public education in math, history, and spelling, public roads, trash pickup, etc. This is the social compact of democratic representative government; you get concrete services in return for relinquishing your own money to the Tax Man.
But when government becomes detached from the symbiotic relationship, and begins doing things for itself, and ignoring the citizen, you have tyranny. This is becoming brutally apparent in Britain, France, and liberal states in America. California is an especially scary place because of how far out of alignment the state government is with the citizenry. No services, but instead illegal migrants, homeless encamped in private front yards, general lawlessness, and the highest of high taxes to boot. Complete breakdown of the social compact between citizen and government, and don’t you dare step out of line.
This failure continues because most of the citizenry continues to vote for a single dominant political party that hates the citizenry. In liberal venues, hating yourself is the greatest of virtue signals, and is highly rewarded with public acclamation. I myself could not live in such an unsustainable and bizarre place. The people there are living off of the banked fumes of once-great capitalist endeavors there, now either departed or departing for Texas, Tennessee, or Florida.
Last week Britain’s highest court ruled that the illegal migrants overwhelming British society – built with citizen labor taxes – have higher value and more rights than the citizens themselves. Such brazen detachment from the long established democratic social compact means the British citizens are now mere money sources, slaves, really, infested by and under the boot heel of a parasitic government and its new stakeholders, the illegals, who contribute nothing and demand everything.
Even the British Union Jack flag is being outlawed on the streets of Britain, because it “offends” the illegal border invaders! Say the “wrong” thing about this, do the “wrong” thing about this, and you actually go to jail. True tyranny, not freedom, not democracy.
Britain is headed to civil war, as any nation would be where the government has turned against the people it is supposed to serve, and upon whose tax-paying largesse the government depends. The same thing is happening here in American blue states, where entrenched single party rule, based on a taxpaying slave-political elite slave owner relationship, is about to be confronted by a fed-up federal government trying to hold the Union together. Something of value worth laboring for, again, as it was in 1861.
This is the meaning of Labor Day today.
Memes, memes, memes
The drowning men of Europe
Most of Europe is drowning.
Drowning in debt they cannot afford, drowning in socialist economics like climate alarmism, drowning in power-mad authoritarianism that backwardly pits governments against the citizenry, drowning in cultural dissolution from uncontrolled mass migration by foreign people from failed nations who have zero interest in becoming European, but who simply want whatever quality of life goodies Europe can offer them for free.
Everyone around the world is watching this slow motion train wreck happen, and the worse it gets, the more the drowning governments refuse to change their policies to save themselves. This is the price of worshiping power and holding onto it at all costs. Drowning is the eventual cost.
Only a handful of European countries have resisted this drowning, namely Poland, Hungary, Russia. Border enforcement is the first and best method to ensure that Poland, Hungary, Russia remain themselves, and control their expenditures and streets. Russia obviously is a separate subject due to its invasion of Ukraine, but the fact is, Russia is still Russian, one of the greatest cultures in world history, in terms of art, literature, music, dance. There are no bongo drums at the Bolshei, yet, nor likely ever.
Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany are especially fraught, the water lapping at their lips, with their native citizens starting to engage in open street warfare with the invaders. But these same governments have strangely taken the side of the invaders, who do not pay taxes, commit endless violence, and are an unbearable financial burden. Censorship and repression of the native citizens for merely speaking about the lawless invasion is now common policy, so the governments can artificially, not legitimately, hold onto power. Everyone can see that confrontations between fed-up, repressed citizens and their corrupt governments are inevitable. And yet, the repression only tightens.
Governments in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France, especially, seem to be laser focused on Must…Hold…On…To… Power. At any cost. And so they continue to drown, going under from the weight of their increasing mistakes.
What do drowning people do, but grab onto anything or anybody around to keep from going under for the last time. A drowning person will pull down every rescuer with them, due to mindless panic and a primitive attempt at self preservation.
When I was young, I was a Water Safety Instructor. WSIs taught Red Cross lifesaving, and we certified lifeguards. I signed only those Red Cross lifeguard certification cards that I believed were truly earned. At any waterfront or pool, we WSIs were automatically the senior pro in charge, and I conducted many drills to prepare and train active duty lifeguards at many different lakes, pools, and beach fronts.
And I did rescue drowning people, many. Almost every time the drowning person would scratch me, claw at me, try to stand on me, in an attempt to climb on top of me so their lungs could reach the air. It is a dangerous moment trying to rescue a drowning person. Both the swimmer and the life saver can go down together, locked in a fatal embrace driven by panic.
The drowning men of Europe are doing the same thing right now as does a dying swimmer. They are all wildly splashing away at their own people, while trying to find something, anything, anyone, to prop themselves up onto. Here are some of the public policies the drowning men of Europe are doing that will in fact only hasten their death:
A) More unlimited mass migration, censoring and even jailing critics
B) More climate alarmism nonsense, censoring and even jailing critics
C) Siding with Islamic jihadis, the worst enemies of Western democracy, and thus pledging to “recognize” a new state of “palestine” in boundaries no one knows, under undefined conditions, with inevitably violent results. France, Britain, Spain, Ireland, and Germany are the leading proponents of rewarding jihadi terrorism by giving it another official place to call home. Just like they did with the new jihadi rulers of Syria.
That this new country would be created in the middle of an active war zone, not after the conclusion of a war as has been done in the past, does not daunt these drowning men. That it would be run by the avowed opponents of everything the drowning men used to stand on, does not daunt them. They are simply willing to sacrifice Israel and Middle East peace if it just buys them a few more minutes of life above the water closing over their heads.
I think Americans are going to end up riding in and saving Europe a third time, because the inevitable results of all of these self destructive policies by the drowning men is going to be that Europe goes under. And when Europe goes fully under water, all hell will break loose between the native Europeans and their would-be replacement invaders.
America is not going to stand by and let nuclear-armed England, France, and Germany become run by jihadis. Just ain’t gonna happen. We didn’t let Hitler drown Europe, and we sure won’t let the Mega Hitler jihadis do it, either.
Proving once again that Europe was always the rough prototype, and that America was the perfected implement, God’s gift to humankind.
Trump & Obama weird symmetries
Watching this strange symmetry unfold, again, where Barack Hussein Obama and his senior law enforcement and national security staff illegally concocted a hoax about Donald Trump and Russia in 2017, and where these same people, including Obama, have now been referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution, because no one is above the law …. but, liberals tell me, this holding big name law breakers accountable “is just as wrong as what they did to Trump.”
This morally relativistic approach to the rule of law, which is really no approach at all, is repeated by US senator Adam Schiff and NY AG Letitia James, both of whom apparently committed mortgage fraud. Both James and Schiff say that them being prosecuted for breaking the law is just political warfare, the exact UNFAIR lawfare they themselves inflicted on President Trump.
Somehow this shallow claim and admission of their own former wrongdoing supposedly exonerates their actual lawbreaking. And for partisan Democrats, it is sufficient. People operating in sound bites don’t need anything more than sound bites.
As I was just told by a liberal who expressed his own opinion to me in person, “… but I don’t want to talk about it.” Apparently my own opinion was not desired
Looks less like what liberals want, and more like liberals can’t talk about politics with people who differ with them, because liberals are unable to engage in the critical thinking and analysis that is the core of any debate. If it is not gently spoon-fed, and concurred with, all liberal systems shut down and go into the fetal position.
And so, the same people who said nothing about the endless lawless lawfare attacks on Trump are now saying, in effect, “Some people are in fact above the law.”
In the past, Republicans melted at the first hint of liberal resistance. Republicans would say “It’s not worth fighting about. We will get them next time. We can’t have these fights getting in the way of getting things done in Washington,” and other similar spineless cop-outs.
However, there is a rage among the GOP base at the endless Democrat lawlessness and the endless lack of accountability for it. That rage is forcing the GOPe to at least make noises about holding liberal law breakers accountable. It is possible that the old asymmetry that for fifty years has marked the difference between Democrat and Republican accountability is about to break, and boomerang back onto the Democrats’ favorite sound bite, “No one is above the law.”
If the DOJ does bring charges against Comey, Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, Obama, Stzrok, Schiff, and James et al, it will mark a turn for the better, where parity, symmetry, and the rule of law are actually equally applied to all Americans. If America is about anything, it is about the equal application of the law to all of us. No one is above the law.
Re NPR & PBS
Looking like far-left wing opposition research and partisan propaganda outlets NPR, PBS, and CPB are finally going to stop having American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars supporting them. Good! I mean, why not give taxpayer money to the National Rifle Association, too? The NRA has been around since 1857, making it America’s oldest civil rights organization. The NRA certainly qualifies for getting lots of American taxpayer money, if NPR and PBS do.
Fact is, the entire world has changed since the 1970s, and public funding of radio and television programs goes back decades before that. By the time of Sesame Street and its band of cute fuzzy monsters talking about racial harmony, correct English spelling, and counting numbers correctly, the tide of technology was already turning in other directions. More TV and radio channels were becoming available every year. By the 1990s, the Internet was born, access to all sorts of programming and information became 24/7, and NPR, PBS, and CPB had gone hard left and become fully an arm of just one political party (not the GOP).
The marketplace of ideas and information had changed as radically as the industrial revolution had changed hand labor and home crafts, demand for government funded programming had greatly diminished, and yet NPR, PBS, and CPB were fully addicted to big wads of free taxpayer money. They insisted they were still relevant, and also wanted to be independent of taxpayers, but still getting our money. Which seems like a strange asymmetry. Usually if you get money from someone, you are accountable to them.
Now, bills are passing in Congress to withdraw all taxpayer money from NPR, PBS, and CPB, and it appears this will actually come to pass. This is a just and good outcome. However, we cannot forget the intellectual property of NPR, PBS, and CPB that was also created with public funding. Things like trademarks, logos, copyrights are all intellectual property that belongs to We, The People American citizens.
It is not as if NPR, PBS and CPB can get scads of private cash and continue on with their far left attacks on American culture and politics. No. They will have to relinquish the use of all of their identifying logos and trademarks. They have no claim on this public property. Oh, NPR can go ahead and do it is whatever they want to do, but they are going to have to come up with new names and new logos. It’s not my problem if they are undistinguished and unidentifiable in the marketplace.
It is almost as if they really did need that public funding after all, despite telling Americans for the past thirty years that our tax money was only a small amount of their overall budget. I think they were most aware that removing the public money also meant removing all of the other public taxpayer investments made there over the years, too.
It is almost as if without all the taxpayer money, NPR and PBS will really in effect cease to exist…Welp, too bad, NPR. So long Screwy, see ya in Saint Louie!
Sorry, that won’t work either, because that’s a Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny line, already taken, and you NPR people are going to have to use something else. Good luck, don’t take a wrong turn at Albequerque!
