Posts Tagged → republican
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?
24 hours after election, GOP still asleep while Democrats are at war
America is in trouble, no two ways about it.
Seems like the only person actually fighting for America is Donald Trump, his kids, and a small handful of elected senators and congressmen.
Meanwhile, the Democrat Party has not let down for one minute. They have maintained a war footing against their political enemies that is both admirable for its forcefulness and disgusting for being anti-America in every way. But the Democrats are playing for all the marbles, all the money, all the power, and so they do not let up. It helps them that they have the mainstream media on their side as their mouthpiece and running interference for them.
But the Republicans could respond. If they had any fight in them to do so.
Here’s a suggestion: US Senate leader Mitch McConnell could tell the Democrats that their un-American sham kangaroo secret court so-called “impeachment” thingy will not be honored in the US Senate. The senate will simply not consider it because it is so obviously flawed, lacking that due process thing and transparency thing and witness cross-examination thing America is known for.
But instead, McConnell says that the fake impeachment hoax will not prevail in the senate, meaning he will honor it despite its flaws. Why should he even buy in to the whole premise in the first place?
Turns out the GOP dropped the state of Virginia, didn’t bother to even field candidates in 30 of the state house and senate seats up for election yesterday. No door-to-door. NO FIGHT. So the Democrats took the governorship and both legislative houses.
Even as the Democrats reveal their party to be a giant crime syndicate that uses government to make billions of dollars and to crush people who get in their way, the Republican Party seems willing to just stand there and do nothing.
So, yes, conservatives have some happy Election Day 2019 results, but there is a cultural revolution that needs to occur within the GOP itself if winning is going to be more than haphazard. The “Flaccid GOP Syndrome” has been an issue for me personally for ten years, as I have previously run for office several times over that period, and have encountered the self-aggrandizing, self-adulating, self-protecting, non-performing RINO career officials and staffers riddling the Harrisburg Capitol building and Washington, DC. These people care about themselves, not you, not me, not Pennsylvania, not America. When they wake up in the morning, the first thing they think about is “How is today going to be good for me?”
So they don’t fight. Fighting makes waves, it’s risky. And they don’t want to risk their comfy careers!
I promise you this is the truth about the vast majority of the elected officials and their staffers here in Harrisburg and Washington. No political party can sustain wins and long term success when it is so inward looking and so self-interested. Politics in democratic societies is a substitute for war and violence. So in order to be truly successful, a political party must use the principles of war.
The Democrats have a screaming mob and lots of violence, and it could be met head-on, to the GOP’s advantage. Instead, the GOP just steps out of the way and hopes the howling mob will keep going and bother someone else along its path, not realizing that the zombies will eventually get them, too.
My “I voted Today” sticker on a Filson vest
Tuesday: Vote NO on Marsy’s Law, and YES for these fine candidates
The proposed constitutional amendment called “Marsy’s Law” is already being held up by an injunction, due to its bizarre process and wording. A Pennsylvania judge declared that none of the votes shall be tallied for this weirdly-conceived and falsely marketed change.
Why? Because the way Marsy’s Law is written, it will prevent people falsely accused from applying basic constitutional rights to their false “victims.”
That is, the falsely accused will not be able to cross examine their false accuser! And yes, believe it or not, plenty of angry people make false accusations against innocent people. Might be in a child custody case, a divorce, etc, the kind of hot legal contest that can sometimes induce the participants to grasp at any potential advantage. So in this mix, Marsy’s Law is not a good thing. In fact, it would allow criminal behavior to be hidden and the falsely accused could never directly cross-examine their accusers, a fundamental due process right guaranteed by the US Constitution as well as most state constitutions.
NOW, in terms of candidates who have impressed me, let me start with Dauphin County commissioners Jeff Haste, Mike Pries, and George Hartwick. Two are Republicans, and one is a Democrat, but it does not really matter, because they all work so well together. They have kept Dauphin County taxes set for FOURTEEN years. That achievement takes a lot of careful and responsible financial management and husbanding. Don’t fix what ain’t broken, vote for these three.
Over in Cumberland County my old friend Mike Fedor is running for county commissioner. Fedor is a Democrat who, when I knew him in a political way, was the old “Blue Dog” Democrat of Pennsylvania fame. Having spoken to him recently, I think Fedor is running a fine line between being a good Democrat and a good American. It is not so easy to do these days, as the Democrat Party base has gone socialist bonkers, pulling the party hard to the left. If Fedor gets elected, my opinion is he will serve the Cumberland County citizenry well and honestly, and if I lived there he would get one of my three votes. The other two going to Republicans.
In Perry County, the chances of a Democrat upset are about as slim as snowballs in Hell, so there is not much to say except that the county has both a long-standing Republican establishment and also a healthy citizen-led kick-in-the-ass reminder culture that brings most career politicians hard around to reality. I have a couple friends running for office in Perry County, and so Brian Allen, I hope you set a record for how many votes you garner tomorrow. Businessman Brian will be an excellent county commissioner.
In terms of state-wide court, it is Peck and King who deserve your vote, and yes, I still wish Rebecca Warren were the candidate tomorrow.
No matter what political party you identify with, what you think about politics, value, or do for a living — VOTE. Voting is the core of our Republic, and America cannot survive if its citizens do not vote.
PA senate floor scrap is microcosm of GOP vs Dems nationwide
If you pay attention to politics, and why else would you be one of the three readers here on this blog than you are a political junkie, then you know that one hoax after another has been trotted out against the president since he took office, in an effort to blunt his presidency.
If one hoax doesn’t work, like the “Russia collusion” thing that the chief “investigator” himself (Mueller) torpedoed in public, then another one is tried. Latest and greatest hoax is this Ukraine thing where one political party tries to cover up their corruption in the Ukraine by accusing the president of doing something wrong when he literally calls for an investigation into the corruption.
As ridiculous as this is, there is an arrangement that has taken shape in Washington, DC, and across America. Basically one political party is at war and uses anything available to them to advance that war, at any cost, and the other political party is kind of dumbfounded like a deer in the headlights.
One political party is throwing dust up in the air and running around screaming, or allowing ANTIFA Brownshirts to attack peaceful protesters while the city police are illegally told to not protect the peaceful protesters, while the other political party stands there slack-jawed, incredulous that anyone would abuse our governmental system so badly. That the DOJ is AWOL on ANTIFA and anti-civil rights mayors who enable their violence does not help.
If you want to watch all of what is happening in Washington, DC, and Seattle and Portland and Minneapolis and Charlotte, in a nutshell, then watch a fascinating fight on the Pennsylvania senate floor (below) where the Democrats throw the law and senate rules right out the window, and in response the Republicans mill around like a bunch of confused and rattled little school girls while one of them barks repetitively for a very long time about how the Democrats WILL follow the rules and hand over that microphone right now.
Which the Democrats do not do, of course. Instead, they do exactly what they want to do, which is to take control of the senate through lawless chaos and anarchy. They have zero respect or use for the law, or the rules, because at the moment neither suits their purpose. Wait until the rules and the law finally DO suit their purpose, and then watch out! They will bring a hammer and a sickle down on anyone standing up to them.
So, like what happens in DC, the Pennsylvania senate Republicans here are basically standing there flat-footed, dazed, confused, addled, with Jake Corman barking “Point of order! Point of order!” like a worn out old dog whose angry bark is all it has. He has no bite.
Sad thing to me is that Jake is not a small guy, physically. He should have some confidence to stand up to his political opponents. I wanted to fist fight him a few years ago, but he wouldn’t stoop to it, and now here he is facing off with a real live Democrat insurrection, and he can’t even muster the courage to storm the podium and wrestle back the microphone and control of the senate floor. What a loser!
Jake, you are a weak kneed little girl, because all your career you have had everything handed to you. When you are needed most, you don’t have the strength of character to stand up and fight.
Lawless Democrats, confused, spineless Republicans, just like across America and in DC.
By the way, this lawlessness is exactly how the Communists took control of eastern Europe, because the good guys/better guys were too proper, followed ‘the rules’ even when there were no rules, and thereby failed to assert themselves when their leadership was most needed. The good guys lost.
Here is the amazing video.
[Screen grab] Pathetic and weak career politician Jake Corman barking like an annoying little lap dog at the mean Democrats who have stolen control of his precious senate floor process. Corman is surrounded by a bunch of little school girls dressed like men, who mill about confusedly. This is a snapshot of what is happening Across America as lawless Democrats take control while mystified Republicans stand around and ineffectively say “Hey, you can’t do that, you’re not allowed to do that.”
Somebody Primary RINO US Sen. Pat Toomey
Few personality types bother guys more than weak, weasely, whiny men, and US Senator Pat Toomey is all that in spades, and much more, or less. It stinks to have an elected “leader” like Toomey demonstrate so little leadership quality, and even worse, to publicly flout his less-than-manly characteristics. Always appearing in public with some kind of fakey senatorial bearing, Toomey’s speech is similarly a fake serious tone, a kind of deeply thoughtful grasshopper. What a show. He reminds us very much of another phony RINO, congressman Charlie Dent, now thankfully gone from public life where he also did so much damage to the American people.
Pat Toomey is one of the great RINOs of today’s Republican Party. For the uninitiated, RINO means “Republican In Name Only,” which really translates into a liberal. Not a conservative. In it for the money. Not committed to freedom or liberty or the US Constitution.
Toomey exhibits weak-kneed indecision and back-stabbing liberalism traits pretty much every day on the job. He does not have the president’s back, but much like another RINO senator, Mittens Romney, Toomey seeks to falsely burnish his credentials by actually blocking, damaging, or criticizing the one person who is trying to right the American ship, President Trump. As if Toomey is so, so thoughtful and carefully considerate.
Toomey has been a real go-getter on disarming law abiding citizens, hatching one gun-grabbing scheme after another, always punishing the law-abiding and never, ever being tough on actual crime and real criminals. The other day he was one of a few US Senate RINOs to vote with the anti-America Democrats against the president’s border emergency wall, as if there is no border crisis, no illegal invasion crisis. Toomey might as well join AOC down at the border handing out taxpayer-funded sombreros and bottled water to illegals on their way into the taxpayer funded haven of America.
And on this new Trump-Ukraine phone call fake scandal, where a rogue spy within the American defense system filed a fake “whistleblower complaint,” Toomey says the President’s phone call may have been “inappropriate,” but not impeachable. Since when was the effort by the US President to bring to justice a treasonous and corrupt American, Joe Biden, inappropriate? America and Ukraine have an anti-corruption treaty that the president was implementing, as is his job. Toomey should have pointed to admittedly corrupt Joe Biden as the subject of this scandal. Biden used his previous Vice President position to blackmail Ukraine and to enrich his family.
Is Toomey against bringing Biden to justice?
Even worse, several US senators from the Democrat Party actually visited the Ukraine and wrote a letter, directly threatening Ukraine leaders, saying they would vote to withhold promised US defense funds if the Ukraine actually DID investigate Joe Biden’s son. How is that for hypocritical and bald-faced lying irony?
And yet, where is Pat Toomey on all of this? He says nothing about his senate colleagues blackmailing Ukraine and is ho-hum about the US President just doing his duty as president.
Like just about every other Washington, DC political hack, spineless career politician Pat Toomey remains purposefully and deeply insulated from reality, and yet he has so much negative impact on the real lives the rest of us lead. If there is one solid RINO candidate for a strong primary opponent, it is Pat Toomey. The guy has no fight in him, not for us, and it would be easy for a good primary opponent to simply tick off the laundry list of assaults Toomey has led against citizen rights and needs over the years he has inhabited this seat. Someone please primary this bad guy. You will get a lot of support from real Republicans. That is, patriots and conservatives.
Chief Weasel and RINO king, Pat Toomey, begging for a primary opponent
Happy Economy: Consumers & Local Banks vs. The World
The US economy is strong, and it has been strong since a flood of consumer confidence swept in behind a new president who ushered in to a miserable bipartisan vacuum a refreshing cleansing confidence.
Added to that confidence was –and very much is– a renewed pride in America, in being American, and in American-made products. By mid-2017 a sense of 1950s community once lost and now found again birthed a strong antidote to Obama’s “new normal” of slow American decline.
And we can’t just blame Obama. Yes, Obama hates America and did everything he could to destroy our nation from inside and outside. But he was helped significantly by ye olde typical career Republicans who saw money to be made in America’s decline, just as there was money to be made in its growth. But growth is harder, and why work hard if you don’t really have to, they reasoned. Either way, growth or defeat, the big money Republicans bought their many pet congressmen to safeguard their investments and stood by watching as they hit big on a global economy shifting from their American home turf to China, India, the EU, and other undeserving recipients of America’s health.
In fact, America’s veins were opened up and flowing out. Our life force was draining away, and a host of hungry nations were perched around us, like vultures, picking away at the juicy scraps that fell from our Rust Belt homes and boarded up churches. Both Democrats and Republicans were pumping away, pushing our citizens’ energy force, our very national being, into the waiting mouths of so many other nations. And so our American economy had sputtered, dying
That is, until Trump inspired US consumers, and the local banks they work with and rely upon to take what are big steps in their quality of life.
And so like a thing alive, the American economy has powered forward like it has not moved in decades. And why would the economy not be alive? Our collective economy is us, of us, an organic part of us and an extension of us. America has a sense of good health again, and so it follows that our economy is healthy again, too. And it is getting stronger, despite transparent and treasonous attempts to destroy our economy by the Democrat Party and everyone else allied with them, including the governments and industries of China and Russia.
It is sickening that an entire American political party will do everything it can to badmouth, damage or destroy America’s economy simply in order to artificially malign a president they oppose. The cost to America is enormous! Then again, this is the same political party that advocates for illegal invaders over American citizens, for law-breakers and against law-followers, that claims Social Security will be tossed overboard by the other political party and then does everything in its power to give all of our Social Security money to their new chums, the illegal invaders.
So yes, I guess destroying America’s economy and hurting the American citizens standing in the way is to be expected from the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the Mainstream Media.
One discrete sector of the national economy that is changing is the timber industry. When four hundred million (400,000,000 !) middle-income Chinese aspire to own the nice kitchens and hardwood floors that define comfortable life in America, a huge sucking sound can be heard ’round the world as unquantifiable amounts of natural resources are pulled in to that huge nation. And when the Chinese economy began to falter in early 2018, even before the tariff battle, the Chinese domestic demand for American timber dried up. We then learned in late 2018 that the red oak, residual ash, and black walnut that had been bringing us huge export revenue but which were then beginning to stack up in East Coast log yards were not once destined for Chinese factories re-exporting their finished goods back to America. No, those logs and lumber were being used up domestically in China, as China grew its own middle-income population. A population that is now up against the ropes and cannot buy American hardwoods that make pretty kitchens and flooring.
Accordingly the American timber industry is going through a shake-up due to the way timber buyers invested and spent. The fact is that even as they close in China, new cabinet and flooring factories are opening up in several other Asian countries.
And so now on the battlefield it is the confident American consumer and her local bank officers standing strong against the evil political tide that seeks to reverse what has been accomplished, just begun really, since November 2016. It is happy healthy family and local community versus a global colossus hungry for endless cash, endless money, endless wealth, at any cost, and a domestic political party hungry for power at any cost, even the cost of individual liberties and American success.
In this fight I put my money on the American consumer, not just because I think she is a tough and hard working bunch, but because I am an American. I want her– you, me, us — to win this fight.
“Red flag” laws are just legalized “swatting” of neighbors we hate
All this talk about “red flag” laws is simple nonsense, addressed months ago in-depth here in an essay that was borrowed from by people who care. I put a lot of effort into researching the subject and then wrote extensively about it. But it won’t matter to the anti-gun prohibitionists, who are on a single-minded jihad against legal gun ownership.
Red flag laws don’t solve crime, they actually create crime, in particular official violence against innocent Americans. In the form of uninformed, misinformed, hyped up SWAT police kicking in the doors of innocent, unsuspecting citizens who then get shot while reaching to put down the book they were reading. To gun haters, this is all fine and dandy; anything they can do to hurt and intimidate law abiding gun owners is good. The more bloody bodies, the better.
“See, if he hadn’t had those old guns in the first place, he would not have been shot by the police,” they say, gleefully chuckling over the well-deserved misfortune of one of the many innocent law abiding gun owners to fall victim to red flag laws. This is called “swatting,” where someone calls the police and makes an anonymous complaint or warning about a supposedly violent or dangerous neighbor. Innocent people die, and that is OK to the anti gun jihadis.
Anti gun advocates do not care about solving crime. If they did, they would look at all of the failed gun control nonsense across America, particularly in the big urban areas, and reach for a different approach, a different set of policies. But dead black kids don’t mean anything to anti gun activists, if those kids were shot by other black kids. In fact, the perverse reverse is true: Dead black kids are welcomed and cultivated by anti gun advocates, because those bleeding bodies in the street give them more ammunition to complain about “guns” and how evil they are blah blah blah.
So here we go again. The careerist Republicans in congress appear to be ready to capitulate on this, just to get the Democrat press off their backs for a minute, even though they know that as soon as they give in on red flag laws, the anti-freedom crusaders will be right back with even more demands for our rights. Just look at how US Senate Democrats today threatened the US Supreme Court! ‘You had better stop voting for individual rights, or we are going to take you over.’
Which is really what the red flag junk is about: Political control, control of individuals, the desire to make American citizens just get in the damned PC line and stay there until we smart people tell you to take your next step.
The Democrat Party has become a lawless mafia, always trying to change the rules of the game if they lose by the old rules we all agreed to over the past two hundred and some odd years: Get rid of the Electoral College, get rid of the Supreme Court, get rid of guns, get rid of free speech, get rid of the US House of Representatives rules, give away your Social Security benefits to illegal aliens and make us taxpayers wait until we are 72 to start collecting what we put in, and so on…it boggles my mind that any intelligent adult can vote for this nonsense.
But then again, I am always amazed at how sadistic and cruel people can be, and now I recognize and accept that there is an American political party dedicated to just that kind of person. To paraphrase another former Democrat, I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, they left me.
But as I walk out the door, I am throwing the red flag at the Democrat Party – You are out of bounds and out of the game! Get out!
UPDATE! Even as I wrote this post last night, a long-time Philadelphia criminal, Maurice Hill, was engaged in a shoot-out that injured six police officers. Hill has been arrested at least a dozen times, most often for serious violent firearm laws violations. Hill had served jail time. The question is why was he out of jail at all, and why was he repeatedly allowed to get out of serious criminal situations that would end the career of any otherwise law-abiding citizen?
America has developed a two-tiered law enforcement system: Typical law-abiding citizens who make a mistake or a single bad decision and run afoul of some law get the whole book thrown at them; their lives and professional careers are over for all intents and purposes. But on the other hand, ultra violent career criminals like Hill are caught and released time and time again, despite violating all kinds of gun laws any one of which should have put him behind bars for decades.
No gun laws anywhere will stop dangerous people like Hill from committing bad crimes, and we see that gun control laws are not designed to end or stop crime. Gun control laws are only designed to remove guns from private ownership, especially from the hands of law abiding citizens. These laws are aimed at taking away guns from good people like you and me, and leaving them in the hands of hardened criminals like Maurice Hill.
Think about that.
Pennsylvanians deserve an open primary
“I don’t want some unaffiliated voter determining the nominee in my political party,” goes the overused and unpersuading assertion for why closed primaries, where voters can only vote for who is in their particular political party, and not across party lines. Independents cannot vote for Republicans or Democrats, only for Independents and so on etc.
Pennsylvania has a closed primary election.
If there is one thing that the two main political parties can agree on, it’s that they do not want to share power with anyone else; certainly not the voters! So many cozy deals between the Democrats and Republicans – dividing up the spoils of elected office – have been revealed over the years (the biggest most recent is the PA Turnpike Commission scandal) that is it any wonder why this happy and very lucrative lovefest between the two political parties is being protected at all costs…
The thing is, both the Republican and the Democrat parties are private organizations. I found this out first hand in 2009 when I ran for congress, against the wishes of the PA Republican Party. I was one of those first-in “Tea Party” candidates who declared after just six months of Obama’s treasonous communism and the GOP’s complacency. Except that neither I nor the other similar grass roots candidates knew that we were in the “Tea Party.” We were just mad as hell at both political parties, neither of which seemed interested in helping us, the working people of America, and were rather devoted to the constellations of money-sucking special interest leeches circling about each of them. Elected officials, party hacks, and party functionaries in both political parties did just fine in that scenario, even if the rest of America was falling apart.
And when we began to push our own GOP, we learned that they were accountable to no one, because they were and remain a private entity.
A couple years ago another independent-minded candidate ran in a Dauphin County Democrat primary, and learned the same lesson from his own party. Nope, no transparency for you, you little peon citizen!
Both political parties answer to absolutely no one in the public, because they are private corporations. They can play all kinds of money games, and rumor whispering games, and endorsement games, and information hiding games, because they can; and no one can do anything about it.
So why are we taxpaying voters footing the enormous annual election bills for these two private entities, so that they can hold on to power and keep us citizens at bay, fending off change and accountability?
Why do the Democrats and the Republicans alone get to determine so many important outcomes in our government, when we taxpayers are the ones who are paying for how these two political parties are elected in the first place, let alone all of the expenditures they feed to themselves and their chums? In other words, we voters pay for everything and are told no, we can get only a small portion of what we should get in return, in terms of determining the political outcomes that affect us.
If the two parties want to remain private, and also want to have closed primaries, then let them pay for all of the election expenses in Pennsylvania. We taxpaying voters owe these two private entities nothing, as they owe us nothing (they tell us).
It is well past time to open up our primaries. That flexibility is the true representation of freedom, the freedom to choose, which is the core of representative government. And in Pennsylvania’s particular case, that freedom to choose is about political parties sharing something with the taxpayers who pay for all of the elections of which the two parties are, so far, the sole beneficiaries. It is not right, it is not good, it is not fair.
Open up and let us in!
Awesome fist courtesy of Lee Vanden Brink