Posts Tagged → america
OK, call me a Whig
For those like me who are bothered by the simplistic, almost child-like identity politics of partisan political party identification, there is always the third way out: Independent.
True to its name, being an Independent means that one is much less driven by one-dimensional partisan interests, and much more broadly politically driven, by more philosophical interests.
Oh please, don’t kid yourself that the Democrats and the Republicans today represent philosophical strands of thought on government involvement in the lives of the citizenry. That is a joke.
Both main political parties, Ds and Rs, are each practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of their respective special interest groups. Because I believe in economic freedom, among other things, I am more drawn to the Rs than the Ds, who have now pretty much openly embraced socialism.
Socialism is the opposite of economic freedom, and socialism requires tremendous inroads into personal freedom to achieve its artificial “income equality” outcome. The Ds have completely thrown in with the communists, the socialists, the chaotic ANTIFA, and the 1%-ers like George Soros who fund all the anarchic, violent, anti-America street melees. If you like your doctor, you will not be able to keep your doctor, as the previous ANTIFA president demonstrated, despite his lies to the contrary. There is nothing here with this group or amalgamation of groups for the average American family trying to get by comfortably and live a simple, happy life.
However, there are plenty of Rs who are D-lite. Call them RINOs, GOPe, whatever, they are part of an established, elite political class who have elevated themselves above the broad interests of the citizen taxpayer. Their interests are narrowly economic and even more narrowly financial. Big corporations, the Koch Brothers, US senator Mitch McConnell’s big and financially rewarding ties to the Chinese government, the various guises of the Chamber of Commerce, etc.; all seeking to funnel as much financial gain into as few big pockets as possible. At the cost of Americans’ freedom now and future liberty.
Like the Ds, this GOPe group also tries to manipulate national policy for personal gain, with open borders and no checks on the el-cheapo labor force that comes with a huge cultural and school tax price tag. Obviously the GOPe has little in common with the interest of The People, either, though more economic freedom can be found here than with the Ds. Nevertheless, the GOPe RINOs are not really committed to defending citizen freedom and liberty.
Thus the demand for the Independent identity. The problem with the Independent Party is that it is frozen out of many states, where there is a bi-partisan death grip on electoral process. If there is one thing both Ds and Rs can agree on, it is that they and they two alone must control, if only occasionally share, political power and outcomes for everyone else.
This is why there is so much collusion and bi-partisan deal making in places like Pennsylvania, where our closed Primary artificially limits voter choice. Being an Independent in most places, like Pennsylvania, means one cannot really vote in a meaningful way in the primary election, arguably when votes matter most.
If the Republican Party of the 1860s was the vehicle for the great Abolitionist movement, much of that great spirit is now gone. Obviously. Oh yes, we have the congressional Freedom Caucus, a refreshing group of patriots and individualists. But they are largely outnumbered by the corporatists within their own party.
And never mind that the Ds demand their minorities aka modern-day slaves remain and vote on the Democrat Plantation, just like they did in the old days. And that everyone else fall in line with their autocratic control schemes. Or else.
I do not identify as a Democrat and probably never will again (to do so would be like gleefully standing by the road screaming “Heil Hitler” in 1930s Germany as the latest Democrat Socialist Messiah drove by), so trying to figure them out is a waste of time.
So, I am now reaching and looking farther back in time for a political identity, back to more philosophical times, to when big ideas had relevance to everyday lives. And in that past I find the old British Whig Party actually captures my current philosophical views.
The Whigs of the 1700s-1800s believed in spreading political power and decision-making to the citizenry as broadly as possible.
The Whigs believed in Abolitionism, the movement to abolish slavery. Plenty of economic and financial gain at stake there, so it was a truly principled stand in the meanest sense.
The Whigs believed in a parliamentary monarchy, which was radical at the time. Though the Magna Carta had been written and signed by the British king so many centuries before, its notions of freedom, representative government, and due process for the average citizen only took a few centuries to refine and percolate up and out to the point where the monarch’s absolute grip on power was actually, truly challenged by erstwhile representatives of The People.
That slow progress also involved a couple civil wars that were spiced nicely with religious feuding. Lots of heads rolling in the streets, families burning at the stake…what the Chinese call “exciting times.”
So given they had witnessed the great evil and cruelty carried out in the name of official religious control and power, the Whigs were naturally against the establishment of all religious tests for citizens, and against an official, established state religion. On this score they eventually lost, as Anglicanism is now the official state religion of Britain.
Similarly, Scotland has the Church of Scotland as its official place of worship. Not that either of these churches are very Christian nor pro-Western today. The Whigs correctly viewed official religions as being against the interests of the People, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Church of England’s official anti-West, anti-freedom do-gooder political meddling.
In short, Britain’s Whigs were non-conformists who believed in a third way: diffuse political power, as opposed to centralized power. They promoted economic freedom and individual liberty for all, including for the lowest slave.
British history and people may appear rather blase and boring to today’s casual reader, but rest assured it was nothing of the sort. An overabundance of violent civil wars resulted in the seemingly placid society one enjoyably visits today.
As a result, the Whig party was transcendent for almost two centuries. With its enlightened philosophical views came maximum freedom and opportunity for the greatest number of Britons, ever. Many Whig views found their way into the American Constitution.
Given the anti-citizen Uni-Party political establishment here in America, the weakness of the Independent Party, and my own Constitutionalist views, I am mighty tempted to join the 1700s Whigs. At least they stand for something real and valuable.
And what does it say that in 2018 we must now reach back to the early 1700s Britain to reconnect with our greatest individual rights and needs in 21-st century America?
The real NFL stats
The other day a political website overflowing with the typical hatred for the current president published a supposedly carefully analyzed essay that boasted the NFL is doing just fine, despite the NFL’s politicization and the current president’s subsequent criticisms of that politicization.
Though supposed to be a careful numbers analysis, the essay was full of personal invective against the president. It is a hint that the numbers argument is not strong enough to stand on its own.
This essay stated that current NFL advertising payments demonstrate the NFL is in full financial health; that there is no measurable financial result from the NFL’s politicization or the public disputes and discourteous behavior many of its employees have shown toward average Americans and the US president.
In short, the NFL is doing fine with the American people and President Trump has no traction.
It was the kind of article that I had to read three times over to ensure that the writer really meant what he wrote. And in fact, he did mean it, and yet it is just another example of how just about everything has been politicized, and how anything that can be politicized to score a point will be so used. Even if it is so obviously factually wrong.
Never mind that this week’s New Yorker magazine has a front cover showing a dead, bleeding Donald Trump at the bottom of an escalator. That is obvious bias and unhinged crazy (imagine if it had been the past president so portrayed). What is more intriguing is when someone reaches into a random numbers hat and tries to make a coherent argument, as the subject essay did, and pass it off as careful logic.
The problem with arguing that the NFL is doing great! fantastic! so there! based on current advertising payments is that those payments are not directly connected to actual league performance. Those ad numbers are heavily indexed and fixed long ago to past data and calculations of expected market performance. Long before Colin Kaepernick started his anti-America kneeling thing. Long before the NFL was politicized.
The cited NFL numbers are heavily lagged, meaning they reflect past, not present or even close to present performance. Also, these ad numbers are relative to other markers/ variables that are either unrelated to NFL performance or are fixed. This means they either cannot or likely will not change due to NFL performance for a long time. This means the market-driven financial fallout from the politicized NFL’s self-inflicted damage is yet to be tallied or measured by the sectors being cited by the essay (unless you are looking at short-term sales of NFL merchandise, which has been yo-yo-ing for the past two years, or half-empty NFL stadiums and unbelievably low game ticket sales, as one would expect as a result of the NFL’s politicization and purposeful alienation of at least half of America).
Using the advertising measures in that political essay in a logical way, an actual analysis in five years would be appropriate. That would catch the standard market-based reevaluation of the NFL’s actual performance. And that probably won’t be a happy situation; certainly nothing for political writers to crow about. I am willing to bet that the NFL will be in real trouble in five years, as a result of openly disrespecting their audience and market.
I conclude this by looking at the most telling, most relevant statistics: Low ticket sales, half-filled stadiums, NFL merchandise sales way down, measurable TV-broadcast NFL game viewership down.
But by then the essay in question will be long forgotten, because almost all such essays are done for their immediate effect. That is, they are trying to create an appearance, a narrative, with the simple goal of damaging and reducing the president’s current polling numbers among his supporters. Accuracy, facts, numbers do not matter. And no one else in the legacy media will call them out on their inaccuracy, anyhow.
Essays based on numbers written by politicos who are ignorant about numbers and markets are not really, truly, meant to persuade people that the numbers are meaningful. Rather, high-churn essays like this are simply meant to score temporary political points. Just like the vast majority of the US establishment legacy media. It is just another angle, that’s all.
Did America have a Stzroke?
With his brazenly arrogant personality and his private corruption, FBI agent Peter Stzrok has now made a name for himself in so many ways.
Unbeknownst to the American people, Stzrok started out making a power-abusing political insider name for himself at least in 2015 by disabling a serious criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton. He then went on to try to frame candidate Trump and his political allies, and bury evidence of incredibly illegal activity by staff and leaders at the FBI and DOJ.
Stzrok’s damning emails, text messages and memos leave no question that the man is a corrupt partisan political warrior, using his awesome official law enforcement position to advance a partisan political cause that is contrary to how the American people voted in 2016.
Everything Stzrok has done has been illegal and totally un-American, from the fake search warrants to the wiretaps and domestic spying, to the use of federal law enforcement powers to re-write interview notes that bear no resemblance to what really took place, to colluding with Fusion GPS and the Perkins, Coie law firm, and the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
This past week Stzrok testified before Congress and provided a view into how distant the Washington, DC insiders have become from the American people. Stzrok’s arrogant, contemptuous, smug lying and dismissive attitude struck everyone as the essence of what has gone wrong in Washington, DC.
Stzrok’s damning testimony increasingly revealed how out of touch he and his FBI and DOJ colleagues are, how insulated and unaccountable to the rule of law they are, and how corrupt the past administration was.
So we must ask, Did America just have a Stzroke?
Is America now paralyzed or disabled by this one criminal FBI agent?
We ask, because everything that American has ever stood for is hanging in mid-air. The rule of law is hanging suspended. If Stzrok gets away with his criminality, then what?
Elected Democrats were actually applauding Stzrok’s testimony real-time, because they are so deeply opposed to those holding the elected majority that they will side with anyone who has done anything, like Stzrok, so long as their own party’s narrow political interests are advanced or protected.
To those who recall their seventh grade civics classes, this is not how America works. The good of the nation always comes first, before political party or person.
It is now unclear if America is still a nation of laws, or if official lawlessness and political willpower are the new standard for running government.
Stzrok is not acting alone. He has many known criminal compatriots in the FBI and DOJ; despite his and their known crimes, he and they still work there; and no legal accountability has been brought to bear on any of them, many of whom actually brazenly continue to act in political ways in what are supposed to be purely professional jobs.
It is as if there are two sets of rules, two legal standards in America now: A lenient standard for one political party allied with the mainstream media, and then another impossible standard for the other party and its political allies. Stzrok is clearly being protected from being held accountable, as was Clinton, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and many others in the past administration.
On the other hand, American military personnel are serving jail time right now for having done a smidgeon of what Stzrok et al did. Trump and everyone around him are being falsely investigated for fake reasons.
So what happens now?
Does Stzrok get the last word in, and thereby pound a stake into America’s heart?
When I left the US EPA in DC in 1998, several of my colleagues asked me in disbelief “Josh, are you really willing to give up all this power you have as a federal bureaucrat?”
Folks, public service has never been about amassing personal power. It is supposed to be service to our fellow citizens, who pay all those federal paychecks. Personal politics and private values have no place in those federal jobs (or any other government job, be it township, county, or state level), where decision making must be about the good of the nation.
Unfortunately, like the FBI, the EPA also developed an insular and unaccountable staff culture, where personal politics override science and everything else. I hated it, and I could not in good conscience be a part of that corruption. So I removed myself from it.
I hope America has not just had a Stzroke, and that we are not paralyzed. If the rule of law has been suspended, and there is no accountability, and political willpower to amass political i.e. coercive power overrides everything, then our nation is over. The great experiment has ended, and now it is merely a political slugfest that inevitably becomes an armed slugfest that will eventually determine who ends up holding power.
Independence & Liberty through Secure Borders
Would you willingly leave your house doors open and unlocked, day after day, night after night, and trust that the people looking to walk in would treat you right?
No, you would not leave your own home open and vulnerable to unauthorized entry, and neither will any country worthy of being a place you want to live. Too many bad people can exploit the open border that otherwise protects you. God knows what they can do once they gain entry.
Just 242 years ago today, America established its new borders, and eventually secured them through a young military filled with brave and patriotic volunteers.
Independence and liberty were established for all Americans through secure borders that kept enemies at bay from that time on, through many wars at home and then abroad, to keep our enemies from fighting us at home.
And lest you think the American Indians had no borders amongst themselves, you are wrong, and you know nothing about their history.
From their own beginning here, American Indians from coast to coast waged brutal war and axe murdered one another over their borders and boundaries, over control of those borders, and they cruelly punished people who crossed them unbidden.
Today America has one political party that has decided our borders should be open to anyone who can walk across them. These Americans and their illegal invader allies they’ve already let in believe the American house should be left unlocked so that more can come in. Anyone. Once they have a critical mass of illegal voters, that political party will convert them into an unbeatable voting force, and force their un-American, anti-Constitution views on all Americans.
This one political party is using democracy to achieve non-democratic ends, to establish complete political control and to end democracy in favor of a laundry list of politically correct policies. Their open borders end result is pure sedition and treason. Their goal is the complete overthrow of America as we were founded and as we have known it.
On this Independence Day, commit yourself to defending America as she was founded, with liberty for all. That means defending our borders, keeping them secure, and deciding who can enter and who cannot, for the good of all the nation, like all other nations do.
For those readers who read this blog because they are intrigued by what other people think, join the #walkaway movement. The Democrat Party of today is not the Democrat Party of your youth. It has become a force for evil, run by people who would destroy the best nation on earth. Everything good you take for granted now as the American lifestyle will be gone if today’s Democrat Party is successful.
On this July 4th, commit yourself to liberty and justice for all, and to secure American borders.
Happy Independence Day, America!
Santa Fe School Shooting: Liberal Democrats Sacrifice More Kids on Altar of Gun Control
Another school shooting today, in Santa Fe, Texas.
Yes, a good guy with a gun stopped the shooter, and he could have been stopped sooner.
But stopping that shooter (and the next one) would require taking the kinds of concrete, proactive steps necessary to actually protect the students from harm. It is as easy as having police stationed in the school, or armed guards (including armed volunteers), or arming the staff and teachers who want to be armed.
And these options are all too pragmatic, too simple, too real for liberal Democrats, who reject them all. They would rather use this latest blood in the streets to promote their nation-wide civilian disarmament schemes, because what they really want is political domination over every American citizen.
In fact, sacrificing a few school students on the false altar of gun control is one of those unfortunate but necessary “breaking a few eggs to make an omelette” things that liberal Democrats desire, to achieve their political goal.
The more blood, the more emotion, the more fear, the more crisis, the more they can take advantage of people’s emotions and ram through laws that will do nothing to solve the problem, but which will advance liberal Democrat goals of civilian disarmament.
When the ten-year Clinton gun ban sunsetted in 2004, liberal Democrats admitted openly that it had done nothing to lower crime. But they wanted it reinstituted, nonetheless. The high cost of disarming law-abiding Americans won’t do anything to make schools safer, either. So why demand this?
Liberal Democrats want absolute control over you and me, folks, and that is all. They do not want solutions. An armed citizenry is the ultimate block against the Democrat Party’s goal of full control of America; this is the “problem” they are really trying to solve.
If you doubt this, look at this phony, illegal “Russia collusion” thing: It is just “resistance” against the Trump administration by any means necessary – legal, illegal, unethical, immoral. Liberal Democrats reject results of elections they lose. They reject laws they don’t like or don’t write. They enable an unsustainable illegal immigration invasion and illegal sanctuary cities to recruit illegal aliens who they want to convert into loyal voters and artificial political dominion. They use the democratic process to achieve non-democratic results.
After the Parkland shooting, liberal Democrats had meetings, marches, protests. Lots of demands. Lots of brutal demonization of the NRA, of law-abiding gun owners, of gun manufacturers, even of the US Constitution. In all of that activity, they would not address how their liberal Obama-era PROMISE program had caught and released the violent criminal Nikolas Cruz half a dozen times, so that he could finally follow through on his public promises to commit mass murder in his own school.
I am sorry for the parents of the children hurt and killed in Santa Fe, Texas. I am sorry for their parents, and for their teachers and school administrators, and friends. I feel very badly for them, and if they are angry about this, they need only direct their focus on the liberal Democrats and their henchmen (teachers unions) who have blocked all natural, logical, and effective means to preventing these shootings from happening.
Liberal Democrats love political power and gun control more than they love school students. Remember that the next time you vote.
ACLU: America’s Public Enemy #1
If you love America, and if you are concerned about serious damage done to Americans by individual groups, then there is one organization that really deserves your hatred: The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU.
The ACLU was never really about civil liberties, but it has done enough related legal work over the decades to earn a modicum of credibility. Enough to perhaps justify its name. OK.
But what the ACLU is really and most truly focused on is destroying America’s legal and cultural fabric from the inside.
There is not one bizarre, weird, contradictory, contrarian, way-out-there case the ACLU has not taken in order to further damage America. The ACLU has no inherent right to its subversive anti-America activities; the absence of law enforcement oversight of the ACLU simply reflects Americans’ big-hearted if misplaced tolerance for all kinds of behavior. Even treason. This derives from most Americans’ overconfident sense that America is too big to fail, that we can allow ourselves to be subjected to all kinds of destructive forces, even illegal forces, as part of our open-minded democratic process.
If there is one area where the ACLU has done the most damage to the average American citizen, it is on illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is a health issue for American citizens. Illegal aliens have stabbed, raped, shot, driven over, and tortured countless innocent American citizens, not to mention the billions of tax dollars illegal aliens take from taxpayers every year through their use of schools, hospitals, police services, and other public and semi-public resources. All without paying the same taxes we pay.
It is all take, take, take, and no give.
Illegal aliens are illegal by law. This is not some philosophical jousting match. Illegal entry to any nation is a huge deal. Just look at how Mexico deals with illegal entry from both its south and north: Jail time in the worst conditions. Or worse. There are many illegal immigrants who enter Mexico from southern countries like El Salvador and Colombia who are summarily executed by Mexican police.
But here in America, a free-for-all is under way, where one political party wants as many illegal aliens as possible, in order to then make them legal so they can vote, or give them voting rights even if they do not eventually become legal citizens. This is treasonous behavior, and the ACLU is fighting every day for this to occur.
Dreamers? Are they kidding? What about my own kids, born here in America to law-abiding tax-paying citizen parents? Do they not have their own dreams? Why do the “dreams” of illegal aliens matter more than the dreams and hopes of my own children? And why does the ACLU put the interests of all these illegal invaders above and beyond the rights and interests of American law and of my own family?
Now that so many Americans are angry at the NRA, for what reason I cannot tell, all I can say is fine. If you are going to vilify and seek to destroy a group of gun owners who stand with and for the basic written meaning of the American Constitution, then I am going to seek to destroy a truly evil organization that enjoys seeing average good Americans hurt and killed every day by illegal invaders: The ACLU.
The ACLU has no right to behave the way it does. No American law anywhere says the ACLU can behave as a seditious, treasonous foreign agent. Every ACLU office should be raided by law enforcement looking for the obvious evidence of crimes against the American people. Every ACLU lawyer should be disbarred and jailed for obstruction of justice. Every ACLU bank account must be frozen and liquidated for damages against the American taxpayer.
We Americans can start this process with a good old-fashioned boycott of all ACLU allies and funders. Let’s picket their offices, pelt their staff with rotten eggs, and disrupt their meetings. Let’s call them publicly what they are, murderers, lawless enemies of a law-based nation, using our legal system to artificially advance an unjust cause of government destruction and actual physical warfare against America’s citizens from within.
My letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions
April 12, 2018
Honorable Jeff Sessions, Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Attorney General Sessions,
When you recused yourself from a potential 2016 Russia collusion investigation, you did so out of a sense of respect for the American justice system. It was an honorable thing to do. Good for you.
Now, however, the American people see that the entire premise of the Russia collusion investigation is false. It is based on lies and deceit, law breaking and deep corruption at the highest levels of the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This investigation has become an open-ended fishing expedition, a political witch hunt, a farce. Nothing about it is justified. In fact, the actual criminals are walking free, and apparently their known crimes are not being investigated. America hangs on a precipice.
That an illegal warrant to wiretap a political candidate and then president-elect was obtained through the fake “dossier,” which was created by the Hillary Clinton campaign in collusion with Obama administration appointees at DOJ and FBI, is unthinkable. It is an enormous crime. It is the biggest political corruption scandal in America’s history.
Text messages show that FBI Agent Peter Strzrok is a corrupt public servant. Why is he still employed at the FBI? Why isn’t he being investigated for his obvious corruption?
The FBI will not cooperate with Congress. FBI staff will not release documents to Congress that the FBI Inspector General already has. A huge cover-up is under way, right in front of us, the American people. Why is FBI Director Wray allowed to remain in his position and behave this way, in complete defiance of everything that America stands for – transparency, the rule of law, and official accountability?
Knowing all this, why are you still recused? You are needed in this fight.
This is not the same “investigation” that you thought it was in early 2017. It is clearly wrong, unjust, un-American. Mr. Mueller is a rogue and illegal force, covering up evidence of crimes from the previous administration and attacking people who are trying to shed light on those crimes. His work is purely political retribution, disconnected from any legal justification. If anything, Mr. Mueller must be investigated for his role.
I am asking you to un-recuse yourself and get directly involved in this situation. America needs your strong and aggressive leadership, your firm hand, passionately seeking actual justice based on facts. Every day that this blatant injustice is allowed to continue America gets weaker. If you cannot get back in the fight for America’s life, then I beg of you to resign and allow someone with strength and courage to take your place. I feel like you are dithering away our nation’s most precious moments, our last breaths as a free republic.
Thank you for considering my request,
Josh First
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania