Category → Government Of the People…
Fragile cry-bullies
While visiting friends the other day, one of their 20-something-year-old kids gave me and the other adults an earful on the Kavanaugh hearings.
“I am insulted that you will not believe a woman who claims she was drugged and raped by Kavanaugh,” she said.
Her mother said “Well, now wait, I do not recall hearing anything about drugs and rape.”
And I said “Ford has zero credibility, and in fact she has done more damage to women’s rights with her obviously false and politically motivated accusation than all the supposedly sexist anti-female men out there could ever do. Ford has set back real future women victims, who will now be greeted with skepticism as a result of all this crying wolf business with Kavanaugh.”
To which the kind-of-young person responded “Well, I, I, I, I don’t like this conversation,” and upstairs she went.
Backtrack a few weeks and I was listening to NPR on one of my regular road trips. On this particular NPR propaganda show, the subject being interviewed was a professor at NYU. He is writing a book about how emotionally and intellectually “fragile” the younger generation has become. How they are unable to confront dissent and disagreement with logic and reason, and how if they cannot bully an opponent into submission, and if they cannot cry an opponent into submission, then they give up and go off and suck their thumb.
This is a bit of a shortened summation, but what I write here is pretty close to what the professor said.
And he said it as a proud and politically active liberal. He is not criticizing young crybully leftists because he disagrees with them. Rather, he is afraid that they cannot persuade people in arguments, and that if they cannot shame or force people to agree with them, then they have nothing left and they then cede the field to the opponent.
My own recent experience with my dear friends’ kid reinforced the professor’s observations.
And even more to the point, when a young crybully takes a willful and wild leap from two 17-year-olds fooling around in high school or college to one being drugged and raped (no one has said that about Kavanaugh), and how dare anyone question it, then much more is at stake than the ability to argue reasonably.
What is at stake is the ability to be truthful, to be honest, and to concede when one’s own ideas are proven wrong.
What is driving a great deal of the current Democrat warmongering against poor Mister Kavanaugh is that the Democrats cannot persuade people with ideas. So they must destroy people, instead.
This ain’t the democratic way, folks.
College professors teaching kids to be crybullies who shame and punch their way into winning arguments is not going to succeed.
Are conservative voters really gullible naifs?
Yesterday I had the wonderful experience of spending most of my day with central Pennsylvanians in a remote corner of our rural region. These are salt-of-the-earth people. Hard working, religious, family-oriented, earnest. The best. My kind of people. We were conducting business together, and of course we naturally discussed current events and related subjects.
One of the things emerging from my day with these genuine people weighed on my mind as I drove home in the rain.
“Are religious conservatives really clueless and naive about politics?,” I wondered.
These are decent people, good people, and the idea that someone would seek to destroy the character of someone they simply disagree with is totally foreign to them. They seem so completely unable to grasp just how evil and conniving their political opponents are.
Once someone says something negative about someone else in their world, why then, they think there might be a smidgeon of truth. It is enough to impeach the person’s credibility. Because of a naive belief that someone would only make such an accusation if it were possibly true.
In politics this naivete results in just enough votes lost or time delayed to get the Left a win.
It is this naivete among America’s best people that Leftists play upon and exploit.
As with last year’s impossible US senate defeat of Judge Roy Moore in conservative Alabama, by a far-left Democrat, today we face a typical fake leftist attack on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US supreme court.
Despite being a good man with an old-time (and odd) interest in younger women (not illegally-aged girls), Moore was defeated in a swarm of obviously false accusations designed to destroy his character. Just enough doubt about him as a good person was cast upon him that he lost just enough votes among good people to lose the race in a state he should have won overwhelmingly.
Despite sharing Moore’s values and policy views, a narrow majority of religious, conservative Alabamians were fooled into voting for the communist Democrat who will do everything possible to undermine those same voters and their values.
Today we have an obviously lying lady who has the most bizarre, dis-believable, 11th hour claim against Judge Kavanaugh. This discredited professor lady is already every kind of long-time kook-Left activist possible. She has a long public history of outlandish claims and bizarre behavior. Her students write that she is psychologically unbalanced, and “scary.”
Zero evidence backs up her accusation, which flies in the face of every other piece of evidence and testimony about Kavanaugh.
If at all remotely true, her accusation against Kavanaugh would be decades old, having nothing to do with his judicial views. But we know she is lying, and that her last-minute accusation is false, and that it is simply designed to derail the confirmation of a judge the Left disagrees with. This lady is simply the sacrificial goat used to achieve that goal.
Her attack on Kavanaugh is just one more attempted character assassination on someone the Left does not like because of his Constitutional views.
And all these false attacks are enabled by good Americans who think “Well, no one would really deliberately lie like this. No one would really be that indecent, that corrupt. There might be some shred of truth to it…” and so good people like Moore and Kavanaugh get damaged, and the Left advances its anti-democratic agenda to control government the voters would not ever cede to it.
Folks, if you are a religious person, a kind person, a good person, a decent, law-abiding, honest and fair-minded person, then that is great. You are my kind of person. You are all-American, and I hope you never change your values. But do not make the mistake of assuming that everyone else is like you. Do not make the mistake of listening to the lies of Big Media. The media is not news, or truth; it is the propaganda arm of one political party, and not the political party you would usually vote for.
Don’t be naive. Don’t be gullible. Don’t let yourself be manipulated by your political enemies so that your vote or your voice are wasted. Stay strong, be skeptical, and stay focused on what you know is good for your community and your country.
John Arway gone away, but not forgotten
Beyond nailing down and putting the finishing touches on some epic large land conservation transactions, my summer and Fall of 2003 were spent politicking and angling for the executive director position at the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission. After ten years, the last ED had recently left as most EDs leave these posts – everyone involved all too happy to not see one another again.
The door was wide open for a fresh newcomer, someone not from within the agency, for the first time in as long as anyone could recall. I knew I had a shot, and so did my supporters. I was excited.
As I met with elected officials and conservation leaders, presenting my own “impressive” credentials and qualifications for the job, and trying to amass my support from people who mattered, a single name kept coming up: John Arway.
Who was this faceless John Arway guy, who so many of the active conservationists mentioned? I had never seen him at a meeting, or at a land dedication ceremony, nor had we testified at the same legislative hearing. But many in-the-know conservationists knew him, or of him, and they were quietly supporting him for the ED job, increasingly so as we got closer to the interview process in December.
Many other ED candidates were emerging, some really impressive, and some less so. My own self-promotion continued up to the beginning of deer season, and then I sat back for the following couple of weeks to see how it would all play out.
I was granted an interview with the PFBC board of commissioners, and in fact I ended up being the very last one interviewed out of six candidates. But as soon as the interview process began the back channel scuttlebutt was that the real contest was already well under way, the board split evenly between wanting Arway, or the agency’s long-time legal counsel, Dennis Guise, as the alternative.
Raging through and beneath the calm surface of the rote, officially procedural, professional interview process, the two main candidates fought each other tooth and nail, each calling up bigger, better, more powerful allies. In the end, it was not a question of qualifications, but of ….well, one of those simple things guys fall back on when measuring up an opponent. “Size.”
So to say. Because both guys were equally competent, just each differently endowed with important skills the agency needed. It was an impossible choice between the two of them.
This battle royale ended the day before I was interviewed, with the board hopelessly deadlocked between the policy weenie Arway, and lawyer Guise. With the two accomplished men set aside, the board was now looking for a “dark horse” candidate without war baggage, who could salvage the situation and bring peace and unity unto the bruised agency’s divided ranks and leadership factions.
In the end, Doug Austen, PhD, was selected over me to run the agency. The chairman and several of my advocates on the board took me aside and explained that Doug had beaten me by 3/100’s of a point, and that the ED decision had come down to that: How many points did the next best candidate have. It was a very close decision, as close as any decision could ever be.
Austen went on to run PFBC for about four years, and as he has a PhD in fisheries biology, he eventually begged off for less political drama and more biology and went on to his next neat job with the US Fish & Widlife Service. Today Doug happily runs the American Fisheries Society, I happily run my own small conservation-driven small business, and boy, did John Arway end up running PFBC.
When Austen left PFBC, Arway was better positioned to take the helm, and immediately take it by storm did he ever. From deep within the agency’s rubber-meets-the-road programs, Arway brought to light and into implementation long simmering policy addressing natural gas fracking, combined sewage overflows from too much rain overrunning sewage plants, trout stocking, non-native invasive plants and fish, the sustainable economics of fishing, and many many more big and important policy questions that had sat dormant for way too long.
Arway’s personal style is easy, smiling, genuine, with a natural affability that helps him slide the medicine in. The medicine being those long-put-off policies that no one had the balls to deal with, and which John knew to be too important to ignore any longer.
Fact is, the Pennsylvania legislature is full of career politicians who refuse to make difficult decisions, for fear of upsetting the voters and possibly losing their artificially cushy jobs. And so Arway made those tough and necessary decisions for them.
The legislature did not like that.
True to form, the careerist politicians wanted to both hinder Arway and second-guess him, without ever providing alternative decisions that would save or protect our state’s incredible natural resources. At the end of all this bad government on full display to we taxpayers who underwrite it, Arway was ironically held up by the dithering careerist politicians as an example of a careerist bureaucrat long past his own use-by date. And so the legislature began to ever increasingly squeeze PFBC, financially, politically.
John Arway fought as only the honestly passionate can fight, with everything he had, without regard for his own personal longevity. Like Neo, the hero in The Matrix movie, John magically dodged every bullet fired at him, every knife stabbed at his back, and every rug pulled out from under his feet. And through it all he maintained that affable personality and firm determination to “do the right thing.”
If you didn’t know John Arway before he became PFBC ED, you knew soon after that he was one of the last of the conservation warriors cut from an old die that has long corroded and may now be broken and long lost. It is tough to imagine that any Pennsylvania resource agency will find and also choose again a tough leader and fearless resource advocate like Arway.
John recently retired from PFBC. Though he had every right to do so, he did not whine, he did not take shots at his enemies or opponents, he did not complain. Rather, ever the real pro, he listed the many natural resource conservation achievements he wished he had time to win and which he hopes the next generation will pick up and carry over the goal line.
The board was loathe to let him go. His many, many supporters are sad to see him step down. If you like to fish or drink clean water, you are sad to see John go. Both Austen and I talk about what might have happened had Arway simply been selected as ED back in 2003 and gotten his conservation agenda under way earlier. I do not always agree with John Arway on policy, but I will always agree that John Arway should be in the policy driver’s seat.
We will miss you, John. Thank you for your service and for being the champion for the voiceless fish and the splashing mountain streams whose language we hear but do not understand.
Who has the national Democrat Party NOT declared war on?
Is there any thing or anyone in America whom the national Democrat Party has not declared war on?
Nationally (not to be construed with what always happens at the local or state level, which is often less radical), the Democrat Party has gone after the First Amendment free speech rights of everyone who does not agree with their politically correct radical base voters.
The Democrat Party has gone after the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, while opposing prosecutions of actual criminals who illegally use guns.
The Democrat Party has aggressively championed the elimination of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of the US president and everyone around him, which means they will try to strip you, too, of your presumption of innocence and due process rights if you, too, oppose them politically.
The Democrat Party openly sides with people illegally invading America, who break our long established laws on their way over our borders, and who then commit outrageous crimes against and impose tremendous costs on our citizen taxpayers, all the while demanding taxpayer-funded (your money, my money) welfare, universal education and health care. The Democrat Party calls these criminals “victims,” and has abandoned the citizen, the taxpayer, the people who pay for America to run and work every day.
The Democrat Party has declared war on the rule of law by creating “sanctuary cities” that are so obviously contrary to our laws for such obviously necessary reasons. But the Democrat Party wants a huge wave of illegal aliens as new voters to put the Democrat Party into permanent political power. The Democrat Party is even now extending voting rights to illegal aliens, even though they are obviously not entitled to vote for dog catcher or anyone else running for office.
Naturally in all of this Democrat Party warmongering, police officers everywhere are targeted for demonization and vilification at the very least, and usually police officers are targets of violence and deadly ambush justified by totally fake complaints of widespread racist police brutality. Failed NFL Democrat icon activist Colin Kaepernick and his endorser Nike Shoes have done more to damage the standing and safety of police officers and the rule of law they safeguard than any other individual or company. Think long and hard about how this junk impacts your own personal safety before voting for a Democrat in a national election.
If you are enjoying the shared prosperity of a powerfully productive economy, record low unemployment (especially among Blacks), and an American president pushing back against the unfair trade war waged against America over the past fifty years, then do not count on the Democrat Party to join you. I cannot tell you how many Democrats I know personally, beyond those prominent elected Democrat officials saying things in public, who are wringing their hands over how good the economy is, how well it is doing, how much more money American taxpayers are putting in their pockets. When I point out that the economy is doing GREAT!, they respond that either it is not nearly as good as I think, or that it will come to end any minute now, or that it is the result of the previous administration’s policies. The Democrat Party would rather see the American economy destroyed and poor-mouthed into failure than to give credit to the current president.
The Democrat Party is literally making war against the American economy.
The Democrat Party is openly, brazenly, laying siege to America, coming at us from dozens of directions, trying to destroy and tear our nation down from the top and at the foundation.
The last time the Democrat Party did this, they controlled the South and started “the war between the states” in 1861.
These many disgraceful actions make the Democrat Party a seditious criminal enterprise that is illegally and openly at war with the American people, your laws, and our form of government.
Is it time to outlaw the outlaw Democrat Party?
A culture of protest, a culture of animosity
If you desire to see the raw underbelly of an overly tolerant democracy, then watch or listen to today’s US Senate hearings on Judge Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is a smart, friendly, humble, kind of nerdy, bookish federal judge who had the audacity to be nominated to the US Supreme Court.
Why audacity? Because he is not super liberal. Because he does not walk in lock-step with the media arm of the Democrat Party. Because he has a judicial philosophy that is directly connected to how America was founded. He does not run around making legal judgments that are contrary to the US Constitution.
All this makes him audacious in the eyes of people who would use the US Supreme Court to achieve de facto legislative results they cannot get in the US Congress. Kavanaugh is audacious in some people’s eyes because he dares to fill a vacant seat on the Court, and play a constructive role in administering US law and jurisprudence.
To me, it looks like the most boring job in the world. Though at one time, in the heat of my youth, I aspired to be a constitutional scholar and actually studied a lot of constitutional law at Penn State and in graduate school (Vanderbilt) in preparation for it. My uncle has argued twice in front of the US Supreme Court, and on his second trip I was honored to help draft an Amicus brief and sit in the audience while the justices grilled both sides.
But now, look at how even Kavanaugh, The Most Boring Man In The World, is attacked and dragged through the mud by opponents of a lawful society. A shameless howling mob greeted him and the entire world today in one of the world’s most hallowed democratic chambers, the US Senate. To watch and listen to Kavanaugh’s opponents today in The People’s chamber, you would not know that we live in the most civilized nation.
From the 1960s to present, a culture of protest has developed to the point where the ends justify the means. That is, if someone opposes a political issue or a political person, they can go batshit crazy in front of everyone and put on the most foolish antics, with the craziest accusations, and the most violent and destructive behavior, because they are simply protesting.
And because they are protesting, they must be correct, is how they think. And if people oppose them, or have a majority in a legislative chamber or on a court, then every possible brick must be thrown in order to stop them…is how they think.
Where protest has its healthy roots in the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceable assembly and petitioning the government, today’s protests are anything but constitutional. They are violent and hate filled, lawless and vile, cruel and destructive of people and property.
A very real culture of animosity has resulted out of the 1960s, and it is a bad thing, a toxic thing, corrosive and uncivilized. Its practitioners do not wish to live and let live; they desire control above all, and the use of angry mobs and threats to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hungary fell the same way. Slowly but surely the Communists there used a combination of violent mobs and corrupted police and courts to eliminate their political opponents. The Hungarian Communists used democratic processes and institutions to achieve non-democratic, tyrannical ends. Hungary went from one of Europe’s great nations to completely oppressed under the Communist boot. Only through uprising and great sacrifice were the Hungarian people freed once again, long after many horrible repressive crimes had been committed.
That same thing is now happening today with the national Democrat Party, whose hatred for the common person, the working person, the taxpayer and citizen, America’s “normal” and boring people, like Judge Kavanaugh, is so overwhelming that it can no longer be controlled.
If you love America, if you enjoy your simple pleasures and the basic freedoms we have here, then tell your US senators you support Kavanaugh, and do not vote for Democrats. The national Democrats do not have your interests at heart. Democrats care much more for illegal aliens (purported “victims”) who murder and rape our children than they care for you or me, taxpaying citizens who have worked hard to build this nation.
A good, decent man, a Justice Kavanaugh will restore some semblance of lawful and constitutional behavior to America, and the howling mob opposes that. Don’t let them win. They are not “protestors,” they are angry, lawless destroyers who pretend they are under the protection of the First Amendment.
You are damn right I still support President Trump
Despite a howling mob’s best effort to obfuscate, harangue, punish, slow down and hamstring the president of the United States, I still strongly support him.
What broken third-world country do we live in where otherwise normal everyday Americans boast about being in “the resistance” against their own president?! Are they running a guerilla civil war against the country?
Can you imagine if these were conservative militia members saying this about a president in the other political party? The uproar that would follow!
This shameful notion that liberal activists as well as average Democrats have about “resisting” a legally elected president of their own nation is incredibly harmful to our nation. All the foolish talk about our electoral system being compromised by “Russia” hurts the integrity of our electoral system, because it undermines people’s trust in it.
And yet none of these liberals wants voter ID, none want the local voter rolls to be purged and verified. Oh no no no, that would remove too many fake voters from the rolls!
One of the reasons I support President Trump is that, by and large, I agree with his choices and policies. Certainly not all of them, but definitely the preponderance. There are some policies and actions I think his administration could do better, like in the environmental and resource conservation fields. More nuance, more refined distinctions, more sophisticated analysis. But like with any other elected official, you learn to take the good with the bad, and with this particular elected official I believe we have much more good than bad. This president is running a net Positive. America is booming!
Another reason I support President Trump is that he is standing strong amid a withering personal crusade against him, his children, his grandchildren, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his business associates, his business partners, his employees, his friends, his neighbors, and everyone else who has any sort of association with him. It is meant to punish him and everyone he cares about. Just for him being him.
This ridiculous attack is way outside the normal scope of American politics. It is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is evil and disgusting. If it were Obama, or Clinton getting this same treatment, you couldn’t get away with it for ten seconds.
For me and I think a lot of Americans like me, this very personal and destructive assault on President Trump is an attack on basic American decency and on our system of government. No one in public service should be subjected to this. Certainly that is what some people argued about president Bill Clinton, when he was caught having sex with women in the White House and then lying to cover it up.
People who win elections should get to carry on with their work. That is the way our system works. Is supposed to work.
That the media have been corrupted into this crusade only cements my view that this treatment of our American President is simply unjustified and wrong, enabled by the corruption of the First Amendment.
That Hollywood actors feel free to use the most vulgar language against the person who was elected to represent our country means that they, the Hollywood people, are that low vulgar quality. It does not mean anything about the person they are aiming at. Hollywood and its actors are really in the smelly gutter. Makes you wonder why you went to see their stupid movies in the past. Why should we enable such infantile jerks?
All of this mistreatment has only hardened my resolve for President Trump to stay in office and succeed.
So when people ask me “Josh, do you still support President Trump?,” I say “You are damned right I support President Trump!”
To Hell and back.
Mafia Mueller’s Illegal Inquisition
Newly made Mafia “don” Robert Mueller continues his Grand Inquisition into innocent Americans in his quest to deflect attention from his own crimes.
Robert Mueller has zero credibility, zero integrity. He belongs in jail.
Mueller is documented to have used his official positions to steer enormous Lockheed-Martin contracts to his friends (James Comey) and himself.
A raft of FBI agent whistleblowers are poised to testify against Mueller. One of their chief complaints is that as FBI chief, he threatened to actually arrest FBI agents who objected to his self-enrichment behavior.
Mueller is one of the biggest criminals in America. And his role as an appointed special prosecutor was made by one of his fellow criminals.
His entire Inquisition is designed to deflect attention from his crimes and the criminal enterprise of his enablers, like the Clintons.
His prosecution of Manafort was political, not legal. The warrant enabling Mueller to investigate people is based on some fake Russia collusion thing, and has nothing to do with any other crimes people may have committed. The US Constitution is clear, as is case law, that a person cannot be convicted with illegal evidence. The government cannot breaak the law to enforce the law; that is official lawlessness. And yet that is all Mueller has against Manafort.
Making predictions is risky, but I am confident that Manafort’s legal appeal will be successful, and he will go free. For the simple reason that the evidence arrayed against him for crimes unrelated to Russia collusion was illegally obtained.
The same stands for Flynn, and Cohen and a bunch of other people who were coerced by arch Mafia criminal Robert Mueller into confessing to things they did not do. So that Mueller can move forward with his political persecution.
The historic Grand Inquisition was famous for torturing people into making false confessions. There is no real difference between what Mueller is doing and what the Inquisitors did to their victims five hundred years ago.
One would like to think that humans have evolved past such naked power grabs, but the Mueller witch hunt disproves that. Greed, ambition, and a lust for power and control over other humans has always driven people to do terrible things, and we are witnessing this happen right before our eyes right now.
Folks, if you like you democracy, then you will have to fight for your democracy. And do not make the mistake of pooh-poohing this, you are indeed in a fight. You did not pick this fight, you do not want this fight, you would rather be peaceful and not fight. But if you do not fight (vote, march, protest, write letters to the editor, post news reports on social media, attend political rallies, and go door-to-door for good candidates), then everything you take for granted is up in the air, up for grabs. Your good economy, your cheap food, your freedoms, your free speech. Everything is in play.
And behind it all is Mafia don Robert Mueller and his friends. If you want America to be run by criminals like Robert Mueller, then sit back, grill hotdogs, drink beer, go to your job, go out to dinner and watch movies, and pretend that you can’t make a difference.