Posts Tagged → republican
Malcom X on American Blacks who vote for the Democrat Party of slavery
Malcolm X was a complex man, a smart man, a conflicted man, an articulate and passionate man. One most admirable thing about him undeniably, he cared deeply for his fellow “negroes” and wanted them to have better lives and more rights. To that end, he excoriated them for reflexively voting for Democrat Party candidates.
Malcolm X called American Blacks who reflexively vote Democrat “chumps.” After all the Democrat Party is the party of slavery, secession, civil war, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Black violence, lynchings, and church burnings. And the Democrat Party is still all of these things today, every single one of them, and yet, unbelievably…American Blacks keep voting for more dependence upon welfare handouts, failure, and permanent underclass serving the bidding of white liberals in the Democrat Party.
Listen to this fifty-some-year-old three- minute speech by Malcolm X. Listen to his passion and ask yourself if he was wrong. Your own conscience will tell you he was right.
Dear American Blacks, what have you got to lose by voting for Donald Trump? Nothing. And I will say that the Republican Party has its warts, its failures, its corrupt members and problems, too, but in all, the GOP can’t hold a candle to the racist discrimination heaped by American white liberals upon poor American Blacks.
Malcolm X: Don’t vote for Democrats!
Illegal billions: Big tech & national media’s undeclared in-kind political donations
For twelve years at least, billions of dollars worth of undeclared in-kind political contributions to just one political party have been made by the Big Tech companies and our national media.
Owners and staff at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all of the national media (NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Patriot News and Capital Star here in Harrisburg, etc.) have gone out of their way to treat one group of people one way, and another group of people a totally different way.
Big Tech and the media go so far as to report only good things, even fake good things, and not report the negative things, about one group. Yet Big Tech and the media only report negative things, especially fake negative things, about the other group, and never report the good things. This artificial treatment of the two groups has had a hugely disproportionate effect on the flow of information to American voters, and, therefore, a hugely disproportionate effect on election outcomes.
Who are the two groups who receive such different treatment at the hands of Big Tech and the national media?
Why, they are Democrats/ liberals/ anarchists/ socialists on the one hand, the favored fair-haired child, and then Republicans/ conservatives/ patriots/ constitutionalists on the other hand, the hated red-headed stepchild. Because the treatments these groups receive are so totally over the top different from one another, you could almost swear that Big Tech and the national media are owned and run only by Democrats and liberals, to the point where they are acting like they are part-and-parcel of Democrat political campaigns.
Today, the Republican National Committee FINALLY filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about Twitter’s obviously one-sided effort to suppress damning information and news articles about the Biden Crime Family. I say finally, because this issue has been out there in the wide open for many years, and the GOPe never acted on it. It is hard to believe that it took this long for someone to file a complaint, when for years people like me, and much higher profile than I, have documented the unfair one-sided treatment conservatives and Republicans have received from Big Tech and the national media. For my own part, posts on the Josh First Facebook page were mostly shadow banned, and my paid political campaign ads had dubious reach, which appeared to be fraud by Facebook. They took my money, and then launched weak ad campaigns into which I had limited views. Facebook has been doing the same thing to the Donald Trump campaign, too, by the way. Activist Laura Loomer, now a candidate for Congress, has been completely de-platformed from all of these services, without any explanation why. But her political opponent, communista yehudia Lois Frankel, enjoys all the benefits of Facebook etc
It is just not fair. And it is not legal.
All of these one-sided activities by Big Tech and the national media amount to an enormous undeclared political campaign contribution effort that by the simple reading of the statute is blatantly illegal.
During the Obama administration, conservative political activist Dinesh D’Souza was sent to prison for a long time for giving someone money to make political contributions with. About twenty thousand bucks total, if I recall right. Here we have Big Tech and the national media donating billions of dollars worth of free political advertising and political information suppression to the Democrat Party, without ever disclosing it. If D’Souza went to jail for a couple years, then how many decades in jail do Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Dorsey, Google’s Brin, and so on for the many other Big Tech owners and content managers, now face?
All of the Big Tech and national media owners and managers deserve to pay huge fines and go to jail for long times.
I have written about this before, and it is worth it to write about it again. That is because America’s election rules and laws are supposed to apply to everyone equally. No one person or group in America is supposed to receive special treatment, the way Democrats and liberal socialist anarchists do when it comes to our election laws and campaign contributions. That kind of special treatment up-ends the rule of law on which America is based. One rule is supposed to apply to us all equally.
So, if Hillary Clinton is finally going to face the music for her wild crime spree, then the Big Tech and national media activists and political donors, should too.
Lock them all up. They earned it all.
“Ridgie” no more
In 1998 I joined the Governor Tom Ridge administration in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, fresh off of a solid seven years of DC Swamp. Coming from the Washington, DC, federal bureaucracy, I was considered a professional insider and policy whiz. My own view was that I was a refugee from the anti-citizen, anti-taxpayer, anti-America administrative state that was so crazily overboard that I could no longer work inside of it. My job in the Ridge Administration was as Director of Education & Information on the executive staff at the PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR).
The state civil service bureaucrats in Harrisburg had a name for people like me. We were called “Ridgies,” because we were so dedicated to the unique Tom Ridge way of doing things. And what was that unique way of doing things? What was it about being dedicated to Governor Ridge that earned us this almost mocking sobriquet?
In a word, Ridge was honest. He brought a refreshing honesty and down-home common sense to running government that had not been seen in decades. So different and refreshing was this bright light being shone on The People’s business, that it left those of us who were implementing it with almost Moses-like beams of light emanating from our faces. You could say we were bright eyed and bushy tailed, excited to do our work. We humored the staid bureaucrats, but we meant it and we persevered.
I was proud to be a Ridgie, because Tom Ridge represented almost everything that was good and necessary in government doing the taxpayer’s work.
Fast forward 25 years and holy moley, what has happened…. Governor Tom Ridge has endorsed senile, corrupt, pedophile, racist failed liberal career politician Joe Biden over President Donald Trump. Trump being the Tom Ridge of today, Biden being everything that everyone hates about corrupt career politicians.
All that Ridge’s bizarre endorsement did for me was make me realize that unlike when he was governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge now values the permanent and unaccountable administrative state over the interests of the citizenry. When Ridge was governor, he confronted Pennsylvania’s hide-bound bureaucracies and forced them to serve The People, the forgotten taxpayers who underwrite all of government. Now, Ridge is on the side of that administrative state, a complete 180 degree flip from where he was.
What can account for this change of philosophy? Probably that Ridge Global, Ridge’s lobbying and consulting firm, is so closely tied to that same big government administrative state. He certainly is not advocating for good policy, because President Trump is implementing everything that Ridge used to say that he believed in, and here Ridge is opposing it.
I feel badly that such a good man as Ridge has been flipped by filthy lucre. It is painful to see someone whose good citizen name inspired us, his staff, to be proud “Ridgies,” to now renounce and stand against all he once stood for. The person in whom I put my trust to implement citizenry-saving policies is now an open and proud tool for anti-America forces and activists.
Contrary to what Ridge claimed in his Atlantic article earlier this year, he is definitely not a conservative. Because his policy views are very liberal. And based on the things he routinely says in public, and his consistent support for an obviously corrupt Joe Biden, Ridge can in no way claim to be a Republican any longer. Yet he is using his claim as a “conservative Republican” to advance anti-conservative, anti-Republican ideas and people. This is not honest behavior.
Sadly, Ridge is just as much a part of the fake news as all the other fake news people. In turn, I must now say that I am no longer a “Ridgie.”
Unlike Governor Tom Ridge, I remain on the side of The People. I am still, however, a Trumpie, loud and proud.
USA! USA! USA!
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!
Response to PA Gov. Tom Ridge on Conservatives & the Environment
On April 22nd this year, Earth Day, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, about conservatives and the environment (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/environment-gop-out-touch/610333/). The Atlantic solicited responses to Ridge’s essay, and so I submitted one to them, but received back no indication they would publish it. They did not publish it, because liberals like those at The Atlantic accept and publish only liberals, and reject conservatives. So here it is, my response to Governor Ridge’s essay about conservatives and the environment.
I felt compelled to respond to Governor Ridge’s essay, in part because I worked in his administration, and in part because I have met few Republicans who can articulate a truly conservative view of environmental policy, which Governor Ridge failed to do. I was also afraid of being seen as attacking someone I hold in high esteem, and I need to say that while I may disagree with Governor Ridge’s essay and some of his recent public stances, like supporting PA governor Tom Wolf’s covid19 lockdown, I remain impressed by Governor Ridge’s high character. I am proud to have served in his distinctively excellent administration.
Governor Ridge’s essay slightly opens a doorway that I am both pleased and also reluctant to push all the way open. But it needs to be opened, all the way, because for far too long establishment Republicans have claimed to be conservatives, while acting like liberals.
Governor Ridge writes his essay “as a conservative,” and despite boldly leading by example in placing highly competent gays, women, and minorities in senior government positions literally decades ago, long before most Democrats followed suit, Governor Ridge was, in fact, a true conservative. His achievements in conservative policy are legion, including Pennsylvania becoming a shall-issue concealed firearm carry state and his administration’s brownfield land recycling program.
Nonetheless, the emphasis today is on he “was.”
Governor Ridge was a conservative, and by today’s standard, he is not. This is not because Governor Ridge has changed, but because what now defines a conservative has changed so dramatically since the time he was governor. The same holds true for liberals, by the way, in their own way (we see the Democrat Party now a totally, openly, violent, racist, anti-America Marxist organization).
And like so many, if not all other political elites, especially Republicans, and most especially establishment Republicans from the hide-bound, bunker-mentality Pennsylvania GOP, Governor Ridge has not changed with the times. Governor Ridge was a conservative, and today he often speaks like a liberal, and sides with liberals on policy disputes. He is not alone in this, but each Republican who does so still causes pain to us conservatives in the political trenches. It is frustrating as hell to experience a former Republican appointee or elected official try to speak with authority as some sort of representative of conservativism, when in fact, they are simply liberals. Or RINOs for short (Republican In Name Only – not conservative).
Probably the biggest indication that Governor Ridge is out of synch with today’s conservatives is how he encourages us to adopt a laundry list of liberal environmental policies in his The Atlantic essay. This means that his solution for conservatives to succeed is for us to adopt liberalism. Even though most of the “environmental” groups are simply employment offices for Democrat Party operatives pushing Marxist, partisan policies. Very few environmental groups today are even seeking solutions, because they are busy dreaming up new problems.
Most of the policies pushed by environmental groups today are by definition Big Coercive Government, Small Defenseless Citizen, anti-Constitution, disregard for private property rights, mountains out of mole hills, and so on. These groups are not about the environment, they simply use the subject of the environment as another avenue to push Marxism and the Big Government necessary to force it down our throats. Governor Ridge should know this, of all people.
What Governor Ridge failed to address is: How can we conservatives embrace the very same failed and inferior liberal policies that drove us to becoming conservatives in the first place? If we adopt liberalism, then we are abandoning conservativism, and failing as conservatives.
Every single environmental policy recommendation that Governor Ridge lists in his essay directly contradicts core conservative principles, like small government, less intrusive government, less spendy government, less activist government, less regulatory government, accountable government and accountable taxpayer-funded government employees. Literally every single policy he lists requires the government to intervene in a big, coercive way, often over trifling differences or demonstrably false premises.
Governor Ridge’s environmental ideas are not conservativism; they are quintessential big government liberalism.
Perhaps the centerpiece of his essay is that conservatives must concede at least a bit on “climate change.” Yet, for conservatives, this particular issue, more than any other, highlights the distinction between us and liberals. For conservatives to agree with the Marxist, disproven, and notoriously phony climate change religion would be to abandon basic, solid, conservative principles altogether….like Capitalism 101, solid math and science, and transparency. Again, we are unpersuaded the climate warming-cooling-change-whatever issue even exists, let alone that a government solution consistent with America’s Constitution could be found.
Governor Ridge writes “The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues.” To which I and a host of other conservatives would respond, No, but many Republicans have abandoned the citizen voters and the forgotten taxpayers of America. Many careerist Republicans have embraced popular culture and its feel-good-now bubblegum policies. For Republicans to respect openly partisan “environmental” groups and embrace liberal nonsense like so-called ‘climate change’ and similar policies would only be one more betrayal in a long line of policy and political betrayals committed by the Republican establishment. Conservatives have perfectly sound environmental policies based on perfectly sound, all-American principles. If you but ask us, we will explain them. We conservatives didn’t abandon environmental issues, nor did we leave the Republican Party. The Republican establishment abandoned us.
Josh First is president of Appalachian Land & Conservation Services, LLC. He has worked at the US EPA in Washington, DC, The Conservation Fund, the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy, and was Director of Environmental Education and Information at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources in the Governor Tom Ridge administration.
Good cop, bad cop
Most of America’s large urban areas are and have been firmly dominated by one political party for at least fifty years, and yet these same urban areas remain a seething mass of angry people who feel preyed upon by their own police forces.
Isn’t it fascinating that fifty whole years of liberal domination of urban politics has not brought the “change” that urbanites are now saying they want by burning new landscapes into their skylines? In fact, after fifty years urban conditions are worse now in so many ways than they were back then.
And yet, urbanites continue to vote for just one political party that is dominated by white liberals, whose policies have obviously failed by every measure.
One area that is now being purposefully failed is urban policing.
In some cities the police are being neutered by their political bosses, told not to enforce the law, not to make arrests. The police are actually prevented from upholding the law, applying the law, and at the worst times. Like when violent thugs attack peaceful protesters, or when those violent thugs become violent arsonists and go on vandalism rampages. No police response. No protection of innocent bystanders, peaceful protesters, or private property.
But those same police were heavily mobilized by their mayors to confront and often arrest normal everyday people who simply went outside their homes during the fake Wuhan Flu sham-demic. They were also heavily mobilized to confront peaceful protestors whom the various mayors disagreed with politically in Seattle, Portand, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, and many other cities.
This selective use or non-use of the local policing power is patently illegal. It was used during the 1950s and 1960s by southern Democrats to attack and suppress peaceful protesters who wanted voting rights and de-segregated bathrooms, restaurants, buses, and schools. And when this selective use of the police was used to protect murderers of young black men and black church arsonists, the Federal Bureau of Investigation moved in.
Back then, the FBI aggressively arrested police and elected officials who had deprived American citizens of their civil rights. Those bad police and elected officials deprived people of the equal protection of the law for simply belonging to the “wrong” political party, or having the “wrong” skin color or religion. That deprivation often included severe violence, either by the police or by their aligned street thugs, and included murder and torture.
So, in addition to the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice aggressively brought lawsuits against municipalities, corrupt police, and their elected bosses. As a result, the South changed, because segregation laws were struck down, schools were de-segregated, black people’s voting rights were protected, and the bad people went to jail.
So how does today’s liberal version of good cop, bad cop stack up to what happened in the 1950s and 1960s?
Well, today’s Black Lives Matter violence and racial attacks sure look at least as bad or a lot worse than the Southern anti-black racist riots and arson attacks back then. The roles are completely reversed today, and the DOJ is MIA.
So why isn’t the U.S. Department of Justice acting swiftly to bring equal justice and equal protection of the law to the current spate of BLM insanity? You and I are not alone in asking this question. It is a huge, important question.
I will take a shot at it and simply re-state the oft mentioned point that Republicans and conservatives believe they are debating ideas with their opponents, while their opponents are arming up for seditious revolution and organizing voter fraud and street violence. So a guy like U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is uncertain how to act now. He keeps expecting the Democrat Party folks to weigh in like pro-America adults and urge people to stop rioting and looting, and they won’t. Barr expects his political opponents to engage him in a gentlemanly duel, may the loser buy drinks afterwards. But as a career-long Washington, DC, guy, Bill Barr is not wired to resolve these kinds of conflicts the way they need to be resolved…the way the Democrat Party resolves them ….. with overwhelming policing and legal force. Instead, Barr is firmly resolved to having stern interviews with the mainstream media political activists.
It is way too early to say that America is lost or headed into severe civil war, but we are facing a major leadership crisis that is being exploited by violent people. The Republican establishment is not used to fighting, ever, unless it is against a conservative running for a Republican seat somewhere. Last week in the Pennsylvania State House a bunch of aggressive, violent rioters took over the House floor, and the entire Pennsylvania House GOP caucus just stood there and watched. That good ol’ Republican culture encouraged all the elected Republicans to …just…do…nothing…just as they are almost all (not all) doing nothing for America right now.
Right now across America, only one person in an official capacity, and a few people around him, is providing any leadership and guiding light. That is President Donald Trump. Hopefully some of the high officials in his administration get on board with this fight for equality and justice. We all deserve to be treated equally by the police, regardless of where we live and regardless of our political views.
No more liberal good cop, bad cop, while bad people burn and loot our cities, attack peaceful citizens, and get good people fired from their jobs or frightened from their homes. This must end, now.
This photo of bad cops in a bad judge’s court room may be from 1967 Mississippi, but it could just as easily be from today in any major liberal city, with ANTIFA members and the local Democrat mayor snickering in the background
Why having your own philosophy of government is American
It is American nature for each individual citizen to have a philosophy of government. That is, to have a firm idea of how you want and expect all levels of government to relate to you, to serve you, to represent you, and to respect you.
Maybe there are too many syllables in this, so let’s just say that every American citizen should have a belief in how they want to relate to their own government, at every level – local, state, and federal.
From America’s founding until right now, our entire nation is still predicated upon the expectation of direct citizen involvement in every aspect of what makes America work: Voting in every election, staying updated and informed on the political and cultural issues of the day, participating in jury selection when called upon, serving on school boards, local zoning and planning boards, etc.
America is a citizen-run nation. That is how we were founded. Consent of the governed. Right now, a surfeit of material success has put many Americans almost to sleep. They are too busy taking care of their own individual desires to look up and participate in the larger happenings around them. They are almost believing that American government is on autopilot, and that their participation is unnecessary. Once American citizens stop participating in how government is run, then automatically people will step in who use government for their own benefit. Self-enrichment, long undeserved careers paid for by the taxpayers, funneling limited taxpayer money to interest groups who then work hard to get career politicians re-elected, selling American interests and secrets to foreign governments, these are just a few examples of the problem.
No longer are career politicians “public servants.” Now career politicians are self-servants who use government to enrich themselves and their friends and family. Examples include politicians from both political parties at all levels. Joe Biden (D) and Richard Burr (R) are just two easy low-hanging examples. Biden used his public vice president office to get undeserved contract work for his sons in Ukraine. Burr used his position as US senator to sell his stocks before they lost value, an act on private information about potential stock losses, which is insider trading.
Across government entrenched bureaucrats make decisions every day that determine or influence the paths of our life. Somehow these “public servants” have also aggregated huge power, with little to no accountability. Many of these bureaucrats quite clearly demonstrate their own philosophy of government. They believe in the overwhelming coercive force of government intruding directly into individual lives. They believe in the diminution of the Bill of Rights that protects our individual freedoms, rights, and liberties. They believe in death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulations that render a great deal of American life almost meaningless and almost illegal. They believe in all kinds of specific policies that are totally at odds with the rights, freedoms, and liberties that Americans have always enjoyed, and which are spelled out in our founding documents.
The “Waters of the United States” regulation emitted by US EPA in the last administration is a classic example. People’s private property rights were trampled beneath the coercive weight of government control, with very small benefits.
While the establishments of both political parties, nationally, are not terribly far apart on some key aspects of governance, it is fair to say that the Democrats believe in crushingly big government and unlimited coercive force to achieve their policy goals, while Republicans believe in free markets and free choice.
Party responses to the Wuhan Chinese Flu (coronavirus, covid19) are instructive. The Democrats have tried to use the virus to achieve policy goals they could not otherwise gain through the political process or from the voters. Things like enormous amounts of regulation on individuals and business sectors, and enormous amounts of taxpayer cash paid to their private sector supporters. This Democrat attempt at extortion of sick Americans held up passage of a covid19 relief package last week, which hurt people. Democrats are using the Wuhan Chinese Flu crisis to gain political power and control over Americans, and to artificially damage the American economy and President Trump. Democrats will destroy America to try to wrest control of it. Sick Americans who die from this are simply collateral damage to them.
So, if you have not yet developed your own philosophy of government, now is a very good time to do it. Events happening right around you demand that you participate in some way.
Determine your philosophy of government based on your own principles and values.
Do you believe in the pre-eminence of the free citizen, and the innate smallness of government, as defined by the Bill of Rights? Or do you believe in a Marxism-inspired vision of forced wealth redistribution, open borders, endless streams of illegal aliens into America, and endless amounts of taxpayer money given freely to these aliens, even while it is tightly withheld from the very American citizens who paid it in the first place?
My own philosophy of government is based on America’s founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights) and their promise of free and equal opportunity for all citizens. This means I work for a government that is a big safety net, with arms and legs sticking out of it, and not the over-reaching nanny state that micromanages and dictates every breath we take.
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…
on Mayor Steve Reed
Steve Reed was the long-time Democrat mayor of Harrisburg City, and he died last week. I knew Mayor Reed and I feel compelled to say some things about him.
My uber-Republican grandparents Ed and Jane introduced me to Steve back in the early 1990s, when he was first running for mayor of Harrisburg. When I queried how such ardent partisans as they could support a Democrat, the response they gave was a life-changing truism that is worth everyone remembering:
“Support the best candidate who will do the best for The People, regardless of political party.”
And besides, the Republican Party had long since abandoned Harrisburg City, as the GOPe has chicken-out abandoned all other urban areas across America. So there was no real Republican to challenge Reed.
The truth is that Steve Reed really did have the best interest of The People, the citizens of Harrisburg City, at heart. Like a lot of gay men his age, he felt that his opportunity for personal companionship was self-limited, and so he had nothing else to live for than his citizens, the people he viewed as being under his care. And he did dutifully care for all of us to his best ability.
When a bad vehicle accident would occur in the city in the very dead of night, or a homicide, Steve would show up in coat and tie, maybe fuzzy slippers on his feet, to find out exactly what happened so that he could try to fix the cause. Or at least communicate to the city’s citizens what had happened, so that there was the least mystery possible. He was always on the job. The guy cared about his job in a way that hardly anyone ever cares about public service jobs any more. Reed was truly a public servant in every good sense of the phrase.
Long ago I joked with Mayor Reed that when he died, I was going to embalm his body, dress him up in one of his dowdy suits, put a cigarette in his hand, and prop him up in the window in his old office, so that the citizens below could look up and see Steve, The Mayor, still on the job, still doing his best for us, and that knowing all was well, they would all be consoled of all concerns and go on with their lives, happier and more confident. A perpetually stable Harrisburg.
He always smiled at that joke.
His attempt to build the nation’s premier cowboy / Western museum was a great idea, like his successful idea to build an incredible civil war museum. But that Wild West Museum did not happen only because it lost momentum, despite having a veritable mountain of wonderful bona fide Western frontier artifacts to show. When the museum lost momentum, questions began to arise about how all those wonderful artifacts had been obtained with scarce public funds, and where were they kept, etc. And once those questions were asked, it was the beginning of the end of Steve’s reign. Such was the public’s trust in Mayor Reed that he could really do no wrong, and when he demonstrated that even great people have weaknesses, the public mostly abandoned him.
The last I saw Steve was at a home in Uptown Harrisburg, down the street from where we live. It was a gathering of a political who-is-who in the area that I rudely barged into uninvited, and the hostess, Peggy, cheerfully greeted me with hugs and a hot drink nonetheless. The three of us, Peggy, myself, and Mayor Reed, were all back in a corner chatting while eating fresh fruit. Steve looked happy, and Peggy was her usual 100 MPH self. Until Steve asked me “Josh, you don’t support Trump, right?”
“Of course I do, mayor, I absolutely do support President Trump. He is doing a great job for America, and I think you of all people should appreciate how hard that is to do,” I responded.
Peggy exploded, poor thing. She was standing elbow to elbow with me, and her unhappy response was broadcast in bits and pieces across the side of my sweater and cheek. She was nearly foaming at the mouth with anger, indignation, her eyes were crossed, and a garble of unintelligible words poured forth from her mouth that I did not have to actually understand in their particular to understand in their overall gist.
Peggy disliked (still does) President Trump, and was ummm…frustrated that I would support him.
“Ignore him, Peggy,” said Mayor Reed. “He is just saying that to get a rise out of you.”
Mayor Reed looked at me, smiled, popped a grape in his mouth and walked off into the bigger party. He was politic to the end.
In our hunting camp there hangs a large moose head above the living room. It is named “Stephen” after Mayor Steve Reed, because it was purchased from the eventual auction of the Harrisburg Wild West Museum contents. When I picked up the enormous wooden crate with the moose head inside, I couldn’t wait, and I opened it up right away in the bed of the pick up truck. Inside was all the original documentation going back to the original purchase of the moose by Steve Reed, years before. He had acquired it from an old frontier saloon in southwest Minnesota, and apparently many cowboys had hung their hats on it over the decades. It was a real, bona fide emblem of the wild west; at least as the Western frontier was known in Minnesota.
Steve the Moose now looms over all our comings and goings at camp, provoking small children to squeal with delight and with fright, and grown men to pose all manly-like. No question the moose head is a symbol of the Big Woods and all that is wild in America, a proper companion to other real cabin furnishings like beaver pelts and traps. But to me, Steve the Moose symbolizes Steve Reed the mayor, the all-knowing bull moose, watching over his sanctuary, his people, his charges.
It is comforting to me.
Bye, Steve, you are gone but not forgotten. Here, let me dust off your ears for you. And have a light.
Mayor Steve Reed looks at one of the Remington bronzes he purchased for his Wild West Museum. The bronze was among the gazillion other real wild west artifacts sold at auction. Denver Post photo credit
Ammin Perry cartoon symbolizing about $7 million city dollars up in smoke, and Mayor Reed did like to smoke
Steve Reed the moose still oversees all
Put Joe Biden on trial in the senate
Yes, we know, the Republican Party has little fight in it, and that is the reason why the ridiculous kangaroo show trial in the senate has been allowed to go on for more than the first five minutes. I mean, compare the hidden way the Democrat Party handled the due process-less “impeachment” in the US House to the hands-off way the GOPe handles the Senate side.
The entire impeachment hoax has been nothing but a non-stop anti -Trump political activity that began before Trump was even sworn in.
So now that we have listened to months of lies about Trump, it is time to set the record straight. Oh, I know, the GOPe doesn’t have the stomach for drawing this out, for letting this go on and on. They just want it to end and go away.
Except, it won’t go away. The Democrat Party Press will never allow this to go away. They will have panels discussing it every day until Election Day, and never in Trump’s favor. Every Democrat Party anchor – George Stephenapolous, Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, you name it – will be talking about it until Election Day, and never in Trump’s favor.
So, let’s get the cause of this up on the stand, under oath. Get corrupt Joe Biden and his son Hunter, the cocaine addict dishonorably discharged from the US military, up on the stand, under oath, to explain what the hell they were doing in Ukraine that lead to this whole cover-up and fake impeachment effort to stop the criminal investigations into the Bidens in the first place.
If Joe Biden is put on the witness stand under oath, then the American people will finally get to find out, one way or another, what exactly happened in the Obama administration that channeled so many inexperienced young Democrats from high level families into high paying jobs in Ukraine.
So, irony of ironies, if there is one possible silver lining and hidden purpose to the whole fake impeachment, it is the possibility to get the criminals who started this whole thing under oath on the witness stand. Answer some questions.
Of course it would require not only the Senate republicans to want to actually do something, but then the US Dept. of Justice would have to, too. And as we have seen, the US DOJ is just as corrupt now as it was four years ago, when a previous administration ran it. Sorry to say, because AG Barr does give some great talking head. He sounds freakin awesome, but he then allows corrupt and partisan holdovers in the DOJ to have their way politically, with no consequences. Which means Barr is not in this fight, either.
The sad thing is, with a few notable exceptions, the Republicans just do not have any fighting spirit in them. None. And they are facing a very determined enemy, who will say and do anything, no matter how untruthful, how damaging to America, to achieve their goals and to protect their criminal history.
It may be that in the end there is no political solution to this mess, and that instead of the politicians, the American people are going to have to sort it out themselves.
As if Liberals couldn’t look worse…congrats
Liberals in recent years have staked out strange policy positions totally the opposite of where their political party (Democrat) held even ten or twenty years ago. Many of their policy positions seemed so odd as to be almost eccentric or naively cute, like the ever-evolving global cooling\ global warming\ climate change business, or opposing voter identification requirements, or elevating once-private sexual practices into cult status complete with public displays of religious fealty (like obviously cross dressing in order to be noticed).
Then the party embraced hatred of Jews, policy positions calling for the end of Israel, mass civilian disarmament, socialism and wealth redistribution, post-birth infanticide posing as “abortion,” and an almost giddy and unembarrassed claim on American blacks as de facto slaves forever to the Democrat Party.
As a result, a whole movement (#walkaway) has begun an exit out of the Democrat Party, not because it is no longer the party of JFK, who today would be one of the most outspoken and conservative Republicans in politics. Rather, many Americans are now becoming former Democrats because the party today is not even close to the party of Bill Clinton. Someone who has been a Democrat for thirty, forty, even fifty years cannot possibly recognize the current political party as the one she or he started with. The differences between now and then are night-and-day stark.
So if one wondered if the Democrat Party and its liberal political allies could achieve even greater outlier status, more bizarre policy positions against the basic interests of Americans, even greater distance from where the party was just a year or two ago, well, your curiosity has been answered by the very immediate events surrounding the demise of terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani and his sponsor, Iran.
As of this morning, every single Democrat politician is taking the side of Iran and the deceased Soleimani, and criticizing the side of American safety and security. It demonstrates that if President Donald J. Trump does something, anything, the entire Democrat Party immediately has a hysteric meltdown with false outrage and Looney Tunes accusations about it, even if it greatly damages America. They are so opposed to President Trump that they are now openly embracing America’s sworn enemy, Iran, and in their own defense Iranian officials are literally re-stating the exact words spoken by Democrats in America.
America’s enemies take heart from this, because they can use the Democrats to undermine America from the inside, and weaken us.
Former president Barack Hussein Obama bragged that he was “pretty good at killing people,” after he began using American drones to target anti-America terrorists. Including the most revered austere religious leader Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old born-in-Denver American citizen son, who were having lunch together when Obama’s Hellfire missile made a mess of their food and everything else. Nobody anywhere on the Left criticized this act, nor any others Obama did; certainly not Democrats, and very few Republicans, except a couple concerned about US citizens being deliberately bombed by American bombs.
Americans see this dichotomy. They know that Soleimani was an arch terrorist who had killed hundreds of American soldiers, as well as thousands of American allies, thousands of Iranian demonstrators, and plenty of non-combatants from the Middle East to Africa to South America. Soleimani was not a good human being, Iran’s government is the embodiment of evil, and yet the Democrat Party has openly taken their side.
The Democrat Party has thrown all Americans under the bus and tossed a few Iranian IED bombs in for good measure. It is as if our lives simply do not matter, and criticizing the president, at great cost to American safety and security, is all that does matter.
At some point, normal Americans have to say “This is not my political party any longer. The Democrats no longer represent me or my beliefs.”
And those people who do continue to embrace the Democrat Party, despite the party’s latest act of treason and anti-America lunacy, are making a bold statement that they just do not care what other Americans and the rest of the civilized world think, that they have a greater loyalty to a political party going over a cliff than to the good nation that employs them, protects them, feeds them. This is a big achievement, because Liberals have been slowly drifting away from an American identity for years, and in just one week Liberals have gone into warp speed and into a distant galaxy where no normal person can see or recognize them.
US President John F. Kennedy: 1962, Democrat Party leader…2020, Far-right-wing Republican and pro-America patriot. What happened?