Posts Tagged → federal
Putin murdered Navalny and is no saint, and you are your own leader
Political candidate, longtime Putin critic, and political prisoner Alexei Navalny (aged 47) was murdered in a Russian prison last week. Like the murder of Jeffrey Epstein in a supposedly heavily guarded and monitored prison in America, Navalny’s murder was also done to send a signal about who is in charge, this time in Russia.
The person in charge of Russia is Vladimir Putin, president for life and de facto dictator. Putin is known for poisoning his critics (Navalny was previously poisoned while abroad, and survived to bravely return home to challenge Putin in rigged elections, and was then jailed), having them thrown out of windows (too many examples to count), having them brutally murdered in the streets, and having them encounter impossible “accidents” like when the airplane they are on just mysteriously blows up in the middle of the sky without any warning.
I know that a lot of Americans are justifiably frustrated by the lack of leadership in America. While the Democrat Party is busy blowing up and setting America on fire, and illegally importing a veritable army of military-age illegal alien men, which is a dereliction of duty and outright treason, the Republican Party and almost all of its elected officials from coast to coast are spineless, flaccid, weak kneed, limp wristed, whiny, two faced girly men (first reference to GOPers as girly men was here on this blog months ago, and then used by Wayne Root, for which we are honored) who can’t do anything, not a damned single thing, to oppose or resist the Democrats.
These Republicans were elected on the basis of their campaigns, where they promised to be leaders, and lead on issues their voters care about. But they get into office and just don’t do anything. We have seen the same empty campaign promises here in Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of elected Republicans just can’t or just won’t say anything about election integrity.
In October and November 2020, the overwhelmingly Republican-dominated Pennsylvania legislature could have easily impeached and removed those PA Supreme Court justices who unconstitutionally turned PA law and constitution alike on their heads to make way for the theft of the 2020 election from President Donald Trump in favor of the non-campaigning basement dwelling zero-charisma plagiarist and serial liar Joe Biden.
But the PA GOP did nothing, absolutely nothing. Zero. And even now, asking people like state senator John Disanto to publicly say something meaningful about election integrity is like questioning the law of gravity. And as a result, elections are stolen and America is going up in flames.
So yes, there is a huge failure in leadership everywhere around us, at every level, and so yes, Americans are desperate for leadership anywhere they can find it. And so up steps Vladimir Putin to both attack the globalist swamp in Ukraine and to also stand firmly for his own country (imagine that) and for his church and history (doubly imagine that). And all of a sudden a void is filled, and Vladimir Putin becomes the embodiment of leadership to many Americans.
Stop it, people. Putin is not any kind of leader that any kind of traditional freedom-loving American can relate to or support. He is a cruel, evil, murderous tyrant who brooks zero opposition or even questioning. Yes, he has some good qualities, no, those qualities do not outweigh the terrible things he is doing to his political rivals or to Ukrainian civilians, much less to the American Dollar.
Forty-seven-year-old Alexei Navalny was just murdered in cold blood in a dark and cold jail cell, in the middle of Russia, alone without his wife or friends to hold his hand and comfort him, for the simple reason that he posed a threat to Putin’s illegal grip on absolute power.
We Americans are witnessing the same exact thing happening here in America, where absolutely innocent and peaceful protestors from January 6th 2021 are still being rounded up by gangs of federal Gestapo thugs and held in solitary confinement, without medical care, with inadequate food and water, under terribly unsanitary conditions, for the simple reason that they represent a We, The People response to the stolen election dictatorship of Joe Biden and his posse of lawless and violent federal employees.
So if you oppose what Joe Biden is doing here in America, you must oppose what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia and in Ukraine. Standing up for freedom and for The People’s political opposition like Navalny and Trump doesn’t mean you automatically have to whole-hog embrace everything about Putin, or anyone else for that matter.
And I will bet that if you ask Russians, they will have mixed opinions about Putin. I will bet they admire and appreciate his strength and passion for Russia, but also reject his lawless violence and unnatural grip on absolute power.
When dictators in Russia or America resort to jailing their opponents, and killing them, they are illegitimate, and The People can and should rise up and take back what belongs to them. We, The People are the leaders we have been longing for.
Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”
The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.
In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.
Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.
The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.
Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.
Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.
Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.
It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.
There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.
I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.
With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.
It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”
Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.
Screamers America
A real sizeable portion of the American citizenry and even the American electorate do not understand or even care what the people in the federal government are doing. So many Americans are lethargic about their freedom that they don’t bother to vote, and some of them really say “If it is all taken away from me tomorrow, OK, whatever.”
Of course we all know these same people who are so laissez- faire about their own fates will scream bloody murder when they do in fact lose everything. This is the down side of all the unbelievable material success and wealth that democratic capitalism has spread so far and wide. People are asleep, unaware and uncaring about what is happening to their fate, to their futures. To them, America just keeps chugging along on autopilot. Doesn’t matter who is in Congress, doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office, doesn’t matter who holds the local magisterial judge position in their township, doesn’t matter how political decisions are made.
A significant portion of our people are stuffing their faces full of processed junk food and living for the moment, absorbed in nonsense like “professional” sports. No country can continue successfully like this, when its people are not watching the road in front of them, but are distracted by shiny crap way off on the side somewhere. And in fact, America is not continuing successfully like this, as we see with high food prices and shortages, high gasoline prices, high mortgage rates, heavy official censorship of undesirable alternative perspectives, etc. And we also see a single political party in partnership with a real portion of the other political party doing everything possible to silence their critics and crush dissent. These political people are taking advantage of the lack of attention the American people are paying to what is being done in the name of the American people. Like how is government power and force being used and badly abused.
Is the IRS unfairly attacking opponents of the Joe Biden crime family? Is the FBI illegally targeting opponents of the Joe Biden crime family and protecting the corrupt Joe Biden crime family? Is the DOJ using official force of arms against innocent Americans to achieve political outcomes that the voters won’t grant them? The answers to these questions are a huge Hell Yes.
And yet I still encounter perfectly smart Americans who actually believe whatever the New York Times writes, whatever the MSNBC and NPR partisan political activists tell them. They are not curious about what is happening around them, what is happening under their feet. When a heavily armed FBI SWAT-type group descends on their neighbor’s home, these incurious people either say “Eh, he must have done something bad.”
Or, even worse, the neighbors say “Oh, he was a religious Republican who peacefully protested in Washington DC on January 6th 2021, so he deserves this heavy treatment.”
A 1995 movie called Screamers captures America’s current cultural landscape perfectly. Unintentionally, mind you. This is an allusion, a comparison, an allegory, intended to paint a picture using actual pictures from a movie so we can better connect dots in people’s heads and help them better understand what is happening to America. Screamers was not so much a political statement as a story about the cost of humans becoming lazy and incurious about what is happening under their feet.
In a way Screamers is probably based on the 1895 HG Wells book The Time Machine, where happy pretty Eloi people dancing in the sunshine with flowers in their hair without a care are occasionally grabbed by the evil Morlocks and dragged underground to a horrible fate. Either one of these stories, Screamers or The Time Machine, fit what is happening right now in America. And what, you ask, is happening in America right now?
America is becoming a violent, lawless police state, and it started right underneath our feet without us knowing it, or seeing it. Oh sure, it started earnestly enough, you know, the federal government staffers fighting foreign terrorism and against evil drug cartels. But then those government employees working so diligently behind the scenes, out of our view, eventually redesigned themselves, redefined their purpose, and they evolved into unrecognizable creatures preying upon us innocent citizens.
FBI, DHS, DOJ, CIA etc employees have become horror creatures drunk on raw, cruel power they derive from controlling what had been hallowed institutions set up to protect the American people. And now these government Morlocks and Screamers are coming for all of us who dare point out that they have become Frankenstein monsters intent on destroying a free America so they can control it. One by one, they pull innocent Americans down into DC dungeons where terrible tortures are happening.
A new movie is out, which I saw, that details exactly how America is becoming a violent, lawless police state run by the worst people. This movie is called … Police State. I highly recommend you see it, not because it will make you feel good, but because you and I definitely need a kick in the ass to get our attention off of the fun and shiny happy things Americans are so used to having endless supplies of. We are not living in the American reality right now, people. We are living in a very scary, dangerous un-reality. If you want to understand how this is happening, go see the movie Police State.
The federal Screamers and the government Morlocks are definitely coming to get you and your kids. Don’t let them succeed.
A pretty face don’t mean a pretty heart. Plenty of federal agents will destroy 100% innocent you just for the pleasure of it
Federal agents coming to help you find your way to a dungeon where they will deprive you of your constitutional AND your human rights
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?
Sorry citizen, that’s “classified” information
One of many signs that America is sinking and sinking more into tyranny is the constant response inquisitive citizens receive from government at every level: “We can’t show you that information, because it is ‘classified’ “.
Transparency is at the very core of a representative government that is owned and run by the citizens. Transparency is how the citizens know what the government employees are actually doing with all of that power that the people have consented the employees to have. When government employees stonewall the citizens and refuse to show what is happening in government deliberations or in arrests of citizens, or in the massive amount of surveillance that government employees are conducting on innocent citizens, or in the elections that the corrupt bureaucrats claim were clean, then the government employees are hiding what they are doing. And when the government is hiding what it is doing, it is no longer accountable to The People.
If the government is no longer accountable to The People, then it is no longer a representative government. We have the textbook definition of tyranny.
This all might seem obvious, but given the incredible volume of government stonewalling and unaccountability across most states, counties, and especially the federal government in Washington DC, somewhere the people working for us in government seem to have forgotten the limits on their power and the duties they have to all of us. There is definitely a breakdown everywhere as government at all levels has accrued tremendous power that citizens increasingly find insurmountable, even when that official power is blatantly misused.
Probably the biggest example of this right now is the treasure troves of classified documents that are being pulled out of Joe Biden’s various homes and offices in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden had no legal right to have those classified documents in his possession, he never had the legal ability to declassify them, and yet his Department of Justice and the FBI have deliberately blocked public knowledge of this criminality and treated Joe Biden like he did nothing wrong.
Contrast that with the way President Trump’s home was raided by the DOJ and the FBI last summer. As president of the USA, President Trump could and did declassify a lot of documents. No bureaucrat anywhere had or has any legal way of blocking or turning back the clock on the decisions that President Trump made to declassify documents. Whatever was in President Trump’s home at Mar-A-Lago was declassified by him and was his. And yet he was targeted by a lawless DOJ and FBI, who won’t divulge to the American people exactly what was so “classified” about the documents they say were at Mar-A-Lago. It is a ridiculous stance. No transparency, and no accountability for official malfeasance by DOJ and FBI employees. Who supposedly work for us, and yet who are using the federal government we pay for to help themselves.
“Federal Bureaucrats Gone Wild” might be the humorous title of a movie, but it’s not funny when 350 million people’s rights are at stake because a handful of federal employees think they are above the law. America is suffering from a significant destruction of the 240-year arrangement the people had with their government until just a couple years ago. If it goes on much longer, it will end up being fatal to democracy. And that is called a coup d’etats against the American People, which is patently illegal.
Flumageddon shines spotlight on failed US bureaucracy
The Wuhan Flu aka coronavirus has resulted in a Flumageddon hysteria that has damaged America’s economy and forced millions of students to stay at home, supposedly “study online,” and pester their working parents.
Flumageddon has shut down public meetings, schools, and work environments coast to coast. Almost everything that Americans take for granted has been stopped cold by it. Entire cities on both coasts are entering constitutionally questionable lockdown status, where the citizenry may have to “shelter in place” just like the ancient Hebrews did in Egypt, as God’s death plague worked its way through the first born of humans and animals alike.
Why are we here? What on earth happened to bring the freest, most technologically advanced nation to this point?
Was America really, truly unprepared for this moment?
Two things happened that got us here.
First, China has been doing everything it can, in literally every way possible, to undermine, hamper, damage, and take over America. China is a socialist tyranny, and so they have been able to direct hundreds of millions of Chinese to sit at keyboards all day every day with the goal of filing fake Trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office in DC, and to hack into credit card companies, and to hack into everyday websites, and to post antagonistic messages on websites, and to play around with ordering and then canceling American products and services, and so on. Not to mention the 500,000 Chinese fake “researchers” posted at American research institutions. They are spies, really, stealing our knowledge out from under us in the phony name of open-ness and tolerance and diversity and other meaningless nonsense.
The tentacles of China are long and many, its parasitic sapping of America’s strength a long-held accepted fact.
And nothing allowed China to wreak its havoc on Americans more than people in BOTH Democrat and Republican parties allowing it to do so openly and in plain view. Because a handful of ultra wealthy wanted to be even more ultra wealthy. And they share a bit of that wealth by giving it to re-election campaign funds of careerist politicians, who hold on to power and do China’s bidding in American policy and law. Thus were American jobs and factories outsourced to China, and basically everything good America has or had was literally handed to China. All for thirty pieces of silver, on top of the thirty pieces of silver that had already been handed out a million times before to just a handful of highly placed recipients. Traitors to America, really.
So China’s Wuhan Flu is a direct product of the artificial and unhealthy economic relationship between our two nations, maintained by a billion people in China and just a few thousand people in America. Wuhan Flu spread through the world, and into America, because of an unnaturally open one-way relationship, and a criminally porous American border.
Second, Flumageddon happened because American bureaucrats are an incompetent and lazy bunch, artificially protected by artificially way-way-way over-generous personnel rules.
Career bureaucrats at Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Drug Administration have been unprepared for this moment for decades, despite plenty of warning shots from SARS and Swine Flu before. Instead of developing flu testing kits and extensive steps for combating Wuhan Flu, career bureaucrats at CDC, NIH, FDA and a host of satellite agencies and state offices, all took long lunches on the forgotten taxpayer’s dime. They posed and preened and presented themselves as dispassionate arbiters of public health interests. And in fact, when the moment of truth arrives, we see that they are simply lazy and incompetent. In China, which so many of our federal bureaucrats love because of its ruthless efficiency and all-powerful government, they would all have been shot in the back of the head by now for their failure.
Instead, we are treated to a host of foolish talking heads from CDC and NIH who are, in fact, partisan political activists using their public positions to advance a political campaign to discredit the one person who has absolutely no blame for Flumageddon: President Donald Trump, who, unlike 95% of Congress and 100% of the federal bureaucracy, has NOT been in government his entire career.
Flumageddon is not even Obama’s fault, though he did experience at least one, arguably two, fatal flu public health events, and, therefore, Obama could have directed CDC and NIH and FDA to begin making testing kits and vaccines. In anticipation of future outbreaks. Nope, the fault really lies with our open borders mentality, which carries nation-ending risks, and with our lazy, incompetent, over-protected, entitled, unaccountable bureaucrats, who then cement the open borders risks into stone.
In order to pound down Americans even more, and make us more pliable, more amenable to their supposed solutions. Which are always more and bigger and more powerful government intervention into our lives.
Interesting how this works. The symmetry was so clean and easy. Until Trump came along and challenged it. Cue the hysteria…
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.
2017 Year in Review
Looking back on 2017, it is tempting to list all of great accomplishments, and the few failures, of the new administration in DC.
One could spend a week discussing them all, but for the sake of time, here is one person’s opinion about what we have gained, and what we have yet to gain, from the new administration.
Gains
Where haven’t the citizens of America gained under the policies of the new administration?
From tax reform to ending executive policies designed to bully American citizens through the illegal use of government coercion, President Trump is daily deleting prior executive orders, and often substituting his own pro-freedom policies in their stead.
One gain has been the reining in of the US EPA, a place at which I used to work as a policy and legislative staffer, and which has long had an unprofessional staff culture of political activism substituting for careful reasoned decisions, shaped by law, in the interest of the American People. Fundamental transformation of USEPA was long overdue. The same can be said for NOAA, a huge source for fake climate change junk science, which is now getting a new chief who actually is a meteorologist and who does actually know a thing or two or three about Earth’s climate. How refreshing.
Another gain has been the moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. No, this decision is not about Israel, it is about Western Civilization, of which tiny outpost Israel is the canary in the coal mine. Trump made this decision in the face of United Nations opposition, the same corrupt UN that is run by the biggest tyrannies in the world. He made this decision in the face of violence and threats of violence pouring forth from literally every single Muslim nation. The embassy move draws a stark contrast between a Christendom determined to survive, and everyone else. Sorry, the Jews are just the foil here, not the cause celebre.
Failures
If there is one friction point of real consequence in Washington, DC, it is that surface where the federal judiciary meets the executive branch.
Populated with political radicals, the federal judiciary has rogue judges who routinely use their positions to legislate from the bench, not adjudicate within the constitutional confines of their actual duties. They try to implement specific policies, instead of determining whether or not the question before them is simply constitutional, or not. They continually usurp powers from the executive branch, to the point where these judges have set themselves up as the actual bureaucrats running America.
Got a grievance? Bring it before the right federal judge, and you could get a very detailed, specific holding directing the executive branch of government to implement a certain policy in a certain way under a certain time frame.
The first problem here is that the judiciary rarely has actual jurisdiction in these subjects, because they are wholly functions of the executive branch. Immigration is one such area. Immigration and borders are clearly left to the executive branch to run. And yet America has federal judges who routinely issue holdings they believe will block the implementation of the executive branch’s functions. And these same federal judges will do the same things repeatedly, defiantly, even after the US Supreme Court has struck down their previous decision. These rogue judges are using their official positions to advance social justice causes.
A similar policy subject is gun regulation.
Despite the US Supreme Court’s Heller decision and others like it, lower courts routinely issue holdings on gun regulation that are in direct, clear conflict with US Supreme Court decisions.
A third policy subject is transgenders in the military. Recently a federal judge held that the US military must accept transgenders, ignoring the clear separation of constitutional powers between the executive branch and the judiciary. The executive branch has sole discretion over who it allows into the warfighting military, and civilian courts have zero jurisdiction. For a federal judge to insert himself into military matters is a clear violation of the US Constitution.
The second problem with this is, this is not the way the court system works.
Lower courts are always bound by the holdings of higher courts and by the duties and roles clearly spelled out in the US Constitution. Judges who disregard the higher courts and the Constitution, and instead issue their own politically motivated holdings, are destroying the rule of law in America. They are far overstepping their boundaries, and trying to make law and policy instead of deciding law or remanding a decision back to the political process. In essence setting themselves up as dictators who make all legislative, policy, and legal decisions.
If these rogue judges are successful, America’s court system will become meaningless. It will be a random assortment of competing political decisions governing hundreds of millions of citizens, made by a small handful of unelected people in black robes. These are decisions that are supposed to be hashed out through the political process by elected officials, accountable to the American People through elections and votes.
So, the failure here for the Trump Administration has been an unwillingness to simply disregard these rogue judges, and then move ahead with the administration’s immigration policy, foreign policy, and military decisions. Moreover, Trump’s administration should be openly calling for the impeachment and removal of these rogue judges. Official abuse of power is the most serious threat to American representative government, it must be confronted head-on, and that is not happening. Why is a mystery, because if there is one hallmark of this presidency, it is this president’s willingness to and enjoyment of directly communicating with the American People in the clearest terms.
Conclusion
The rogue judges issue highlights a scary fact that most establishment Republicans are loathe to address, and that is how liberals will do absolutely anything to impose their will on the American People.
The liberal lust for power and control, as marketed through “social justice” causes, means that their ends always justify their methods. It means that all officials with liberal opinions have to do is claim a higher moral ground, higher than existing law, and implement their views through their official role, no matter if it clearly contradicts established law, procedure, and policy.
This of course is not how any democracy or republic works. It is politically unsustainable (it is patently illegal), but it is evidence that liberals will burn down America in order to wrest control of it from the American People, or to prevent their political opponents from running it as the result of elections that liberals are unhappy with. It is also evidence that establishment Republicans have zero fight in them, because they do not believe in anything more than making more money than a person has use for.
If there is a need for a new political group in America, it is one that is focused on documenting official abuses by federal judges, and then working to hold them accountable. Impeachment and removal from the bench is what is needed.
So, in conclusion, 2017 was a very good year, an exciting year, and we can hope for more of the same in 2018.