Highlighting the insufferable alignment of the two wings of the UniParty bird, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allowed, permitted, and grinned as six GOP senators concurred with leftist democrats that impeachment of a former President is constitutional… Pro Tip: it ain’t.
Republican Senators: Bill Cassidy (LA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Mitt Romney (UT), Susan Collins (ME), Ben Sasse (NE) and Pat Toomey (PA) aligned with the usurpation:
To see evidence of the constitutional quagmire one only has to look at Chief Justice John Roberts refusal to participate in the impeachment trial. Despite his own ideological progressiveness, even Roberts couldn’t bring himself to compromise the baseline of the Judicial Branch role in determining constitutional issues around impeachment.
The entire system in DC is operating outside the constitutional framework… FUBAR.
H.R.1 packs into one 791-page bill every bad idea about how to run elections and mandates that the states must adopt -- the very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess. It includes all of the greatest hits of 2020: Mandatory mail ballots, ballots without postmarks, late ballots and voting in precincts where you don't live. It includes so many bad ideas that no publication has satisfactory space to cover all of them. The Senate companion bill, S.1, might be even worse.
These bills rearrange the relationship between the states and the federal government. The Constitution presumes that states regulate their own elections, but the Constitution has a big "but" in what is called the Elections Clause. The Constitution says, "but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." For over 200 years, Congress rarely used this power. After all, the power was put in the Constitution only to prevent the states from suffocating the federal government out of existence by never holding federal elections.
Do not assume that the bills will stall and wither in the process. They are named H.R.1 and S.1 for a reason. The bills are the top priority of the newly empowered Democrats in Congress.
Dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the last federal mandate -- 1993's Motor Voter law -- H.R.1 dispenses with the idea that an American should go affirmatively register to vote.
In 2020, states such as Nevada and New Jersey sent ballots through the mail to anyone on their registration lists despite having voter rolls full of errors. The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented thousands of ineligible registrations in Nevada alone that received mail ballots. Some were sent to vacant lots, abandoned mines, casinos and even liquor stores.
States also would be blocked by H.R.1 from signature verification procedures.
H.R.1 rigs the system for any lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law. All lawsuits can only be filed in one court – federal court in the District of Columbia. And all opposition must be consolidated into one brief with only one attorney being able to argue the merits. It also grants automatic intervention to any legislators who want to join in the fight against the lone opposition.
It prohibits states from conducting list maintenance on the voter rolls. That means deadwood and obsolete registrations will stack up.
HR.1 and S.1 are omnibus bills that would change every American citizen's -- and foreigner's -- relationship to voter registration.
Universal automatic voter registration has, for years, been a top priority of the institutional left. In fact, H.R.1 would do away with actual voter registration and instead make the voter rolls merely a copy of anyone already on a government list -- such as welfare recipients and other social service beneficiaries. The bills would expand well beyond to federal entities like the Social Security Administration, Department of Defense, Customs and Immigration, and elements of Health and Human Services.
Naturally, a giant federal database would serve as the home for this list of people who must be automatically registered to vote, whether they know it or not.
Imagine the number of government databases in which your information is contained. Do your names and addresses all match? Does Social Security know you moved out of your birth state? Are your married and maiden names different? Did you get a driver's license before obtaining American citizenship?
You can see the pitfalls. One person will be "registered" to vote multiple times, with slight variation in names, and perhaps greater variation in residence addresses.
Making it "easier" to get registered to vote through automatic registration from government lists might seem attractive, until you consider the disaster of universal auto-mail voting as we saw in 2020.
H.R.1 and S.1 will force states to push ballots into the mail. It builds slack into the election system. Decentralized mail elections introduce error because of error-filled rolls. Mail-in ballots delay results, create uncertainty and push the elections into kitchens and bedrooms where election officials cannot observe the voting process and cannot protect the voter from coercion.
H.R.1 takes the absolute worst emergency rule changes of 2020 and enshrines them as federal law. Gone also are state witness and notary requirements during the mail ballot application process. Nor may states enact identification requirements of "any form" for those requesting a ballot. That means no more voter ID as a matter of federal law.
States also would be blocked by H.R.1 from signature verification procedures.
It gets worse. The 791-page bill also includes:
"Congress can reduce a state's representation in Congress when the right to vote is denied." Without qualification or definition, Congress could rely on this sentence unilaterally to cut the number of House members from any state it claims is denying the right to vote.
It criminalizes anyone who uses state challenge laws to question the eligibility of registrants wrongly. The penalty is up to one year in prison per instance.
It prohibits states from conducting list maintenance on the voter rolls. That means deadwood and obsolete registrations will stack up.
It criminalizes publishing "false statements" about qualifications to vote and "false statements" about which groups have endorsed which candidates. Information banned from being published includes false qualifications to vote and the penalties for doing so. What is a false statement will apparently be in the minds of the Justice Department lawyers who bring the charges. And if they do not act, the law provides a private right of action to individual plaintiffs to drag speakers to court. You can be sure this provision would be used as a merciless weapon against political opponents.
And in case it was not clear that H.R.1 was dismantling state power to run their own elections, the bill makes it clear: "The lack of a uniform standard for voting in Federal elections leads to an unfair disparity and unequal participation in Federal elections based solely on where a person lives." In other words, state laws which have the Constitutional authority to determine the voting eligibility of its residents, will be preempted by a federal uniform standard.
That is not all. Nationwide, states must accept mail ballots on Election Day plus 10 days later. States are allowed to add extra time to the window. No more election day. It will be election season, with a month of early voting and weeks of ballots arriving and being counted.
And of course, unlimited ballot harvesting -- having a third party "help" to fill in and gather up ballots, then drop them off at a polling station or other designated station -- is guaranteed.
Misinformation, protests, unrest, and even violence were all symptoms of the trauma of 2020. Activist groups and collusive officials in 2020 turned courts into weapons to transform state laws into election procedures that were favorable to one particular party. H.R.1 would finish the job, and federalize the policies and election procedures that made 2020 such a mess.
It is no solution to presume that federal rules, even if they were crafted the right way, would solve the problem. When Washington D.C. gets control over elections, the policy always skews in one direction.
I worked at the Justice Department, where career staff ignored federal laws they didn't like, and only enforced the ones they thought would help advance their political beliefs. Motor Voter, for example, had a federal mandate that states clean voter rolls. Guess what happened after that rule passed in 1993? No private enforcement actions were brought for two decades until I brought one against Indiana.
There is a federal mandate, passed in the 19th Century, to have one single election day. The bureaucrats in Washington in charge of enforcing that law ignore that law. Federal mandates are a one-way political ratchet. They always and only help one political party.
The nation has seen this line of thinking before. Like Obamacare earlier, H.R.1 transitions our federalist Republic to some other brave new system that purports to right generations of structural wrongs, while at the same time entrenching other wrongs. Unifying American experiences such as coming together to vote on one single Election Day, governed by rules passed by state legislators, well, to the authors of H.R.1, that is just old fashioned.
J. Christian Adams is the President and General Counsel for thePublic Interest Legal Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Commission for Election Integrity and currently is a Presidentially appointed Commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
“Unite the country” may be the three scariest words coming out of Washington, D.C. right now. Conform or be crushed is what they mean. Thankfully, Second Amendment sanctuary state efforts are drawing bold lines against federal encroachment.
Missouri is close to nullifying federal gun control within its borders. On Tuesday, the Missouri House overwhelmingly passed the “Second Amendment Preservation Act,” which prohibits public officers, state employees, and political subdivisions from enforcing federal acts, laws, executive orders, court orders, and other edicts that transgress the right to bear arms.
The Tenth Amendment Center, the premier think tank for nullification advocacy, calls this legislation “a major step” toward stopping “past, present, and future” federal gun control.
It’s also a major step toward healing, reconciliation, and unity for the whole country.
Yes, really!
Just like so many states took their own side on policy questions involving marijuana prohibition, civil asset forfeiture, and illegal immigration, many will also follow Missouri’s lead on gun control.
In addition to Missouri, other versions of the Second Amendment Preservation Act are currently under consideration in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Wyoming, to say nothing of dozens of local resolutions and ordinances. County sheriffs are doing their part as well.
Missouri’s bill would block enforcement of special taxes and fees on firearms, accessories, and ammunition. Other “infringements” listed in the legislation include registration and tracking of firearms, accessories, or ammunition.
To ensure accountability, any state employee who violates this sanctuary state law would be open to civil lawsuits and damages. Furthermore, the bill removes the possibility of a state employee claiming “sovereign, official, or qualified immunity” as a defense.
One failed amendment would have denied state employment to any federal law enforcement officer who infringed on a Missourian’s right to own and bear arms. The bill would be better with this provision, but as a whole, it’s a major step in the right direction.
Even symbolic or theatrical political gestures are better than nothing, especially at the most local level where a resolution or declaration may serve as the basis for building support for state-level action.
But what does any of this have to do with uniting the country? Aren’t we told by our betters that firearm freedom is too divisive and that we should leave it to Congress to force a “compromise” on us all?
It should be obvious that a so-called compromise would only embitter the people and deepen the divisions of the nation further. The evidence is glaring every presidential election cycle, and midterms don’t offer much of a break either.
Republican or Democrat, well-intentioned or not, any federal politician proposing new policies or laws to “unify” America either should be ignored or resisted energetically. That’s not because unity is an unworthy or unworkable goal. Quite the contrary.
The reality is, the federal government is a consolidating force, not a unifying one. An effective federal government is the consequence of unity, not the source of it.
Taking too much power from those smaller components to give to a central authority risks pitting the former against each other in competition for control over the latter.
True unity, then, begins with mutual respect among the 50 states for what’s their own and what’s held in common.
The primary political question before us today is not how to unify the peoples and states. It’s how will they earn or command each other’s respect.
The “more perfect union” envisioned by the U.S. Constitution took as essential the delimiting of powers not just between the branches of the federal government, but the states and the federal government as well. How off-balance that sharing of powers has become.
Don’t expect Congress, the president, or even the Supreme Court to undo more than a century of federal overreach. It’s going to take serious disruption to return to the spirit and letter of the 10th Amendment, which rounds out the Bill of Rights to say: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Enforcing that cornerstone of the Constitution must be done locally. Recent history proves this most clearly in the case of nullifying federal marijuana prohibition. Persistent non-compliance ultimately renders the feds impotent.
The Second Amendment issue may be divisive in a national sense, but the beauty of America is that it doesn’t have to be a wedge in every community across the land.
More than 23 million guns were sold in the United States in 2020, with 5 million new gun owners among them. In January, more than 2 million guns were sold. According to industry reports, a large chunk of first-time gun buyers were black women. Gun culture is growing and changing, so the issue is ripe for a populist appeal that says the people should decide the level of gun control in their community, not some ATF agent.
Joe Biden called for unity in his inaugural address. He said unity would be how we would save all life on the planet from destruction and defeat white supremacy. The man is full of malarkey.
Republicans in Congress at least limit themselves to election reform in terms of how they envision uniting the country. But even in that context, unity is just another fluffy word for a feel-good soundbite.
Uniting the country will have to wait until there’s more unity in our communities and states. When states are no longer derelict in their duty to stand up to the monopolistic federal government, we will have a fighting chance.
At the Republican National Convention last August, as the TV cameras shifted to an aerial view of the dormant Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz stepped up to the microphone and delivered this noteworthy observation about the future president of the United States: “I’m speaking to you from an auditorium emptier than Joe Biden’s daily schedule.”
Little did we know at the time that the Manchurian candidate who campaigned almost exclusively from his basement, and frequently “called a lid” on his day around the time that most Americans begin their work day, now appears to be running the most powerful country in the world, mostly out of sight, from a predominantly vacant White House, with a daily schedule more open than our southern border under his new immigration policy.
Is anyone really surprised that the basement candidate has now become the basement president?
As Politico recently reported about Biden’s daily routine, “He has replaced in-person meetings with video calls. He allows only a limited number of people in the building — even staff that normally would have been in the West Wing are working from home or in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door. He doesn’t leave the White House often…. He isn’t planning any foreign or domestic trips for now. And until this week, when he invited senators of both parties to talk about Covid-19 recovery legislation, he was not asking visitors to the White House.”
Biden’s team is no doubt using COVID as an excuse to justify an administration that is cloaked in secrecy. But there has been no indication that much will change, even after COVID finally “goes away.”
The lack of transparency and restrictions that Biden has imposed on both politicians and citizens from entering “The People’s House” might make more sense if he were easing his way into the presidency, but his early tenure has been anything but slow-moving.
Biden has now signed nine Executive Actions solely on immigration. In total (at time of writing), he has implemented 45 Executive Actions and 28 Executive Orders (EOs) in barely two weeks. At this rate, he might surpass Barry Bonds single season home run record of 73 in his first month — or he might fall into a slump and set his sights on Roger Maris, the last legitimate home-run king, with 61 in a season.
This is not to suggest in any way that Biden has been an effective leader or that he is in control of the radical policy decisions that are being made on a regular basis. On the contrary, it is clear that Biden will do whatever he is told to do by his staff. Similarly to his campaign, the strategy seems to be for him to remain as invisible as possible until he is called to write his signature on a bill he likely did not write or read a speech he almost certainly did not draft.
As Team Biden protects the ever frail and gaffe-prone commander in chief, one wonders what exactly he is doing all day. According to a White House official who spoke to Politico, “Each day, Biden holds an intelligence briefing, receives a coronavirus update and reads a daily briefing book, which includes schedules, policy memos and intelligence briefs about the next day.”
During his basement campaign, Biden attempted to sell the public on the idea that a vote for him meant a “return to normalcy.” Evidently “normalcy” means usurping Congress to impose his radical agenda on the American people from behind closed doors, while having more than 5,000 National Guard troops hovering around the confines of the White House and the U.S. Capitol to protect him from “domestic terrorists.”
According to Biden, “normalcy” means biological boys who no longer identify as such and wish to take up girls’ lacrosse should be able to do so. All who disagree with that decision and are concerned about the ramifications that it will have on biological girls who still identify as such are probably transphobic.
According to Biden, “normalcy” means illegal immigrants from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras who knowingly break our laws to enter our country should immediately be given a pathway to citizenship during a global health pandemic. All who disagree with that decision or wonder how that benefits unemployed American workers are probably racist or xenophobic.
And according to Biden, “normalcy” means those who work in the oil and gas industry and wish to keep their livelihoods or pay off their mortgage should learn to build solar panels, as John Kerry recently suggested. All who disagree with Biden’s new “climate czar,” or the man who flew his gas-emitting private jet to Iceland to accept a climate award in 2019, just don’t care about saving our planet and our children’s future.
Is the picture becoming clearer now? Biden’s promised vision of “unity” never involved the 74 million Americans who voted for former President Trump, and it almost certainly does not involve any Republican members of Congress. Early Friday morning, a budget resolution making way for Biden’s $1.9 trillion “coronavirus relief” bill was passed through the Senate without the support of a single Republican vote. Vice President Kamala Harris gleefully presided over the tiebreaking vote. The resolution, which was later approved by the House, also without a single GOP vote, is leading to the bill potentially being signed into law within the next month.
Amid all these radical decrees, Biden seems to be running the White House as though he were a friendly custodian whose main job is to wander aimlessly around the mansion and catch up with his buddies. As Anita Kumar wrote in Politico,“Since he moved in two weeks ago, Joe Biden has taken to strolling around the White House. He’s popped into the press offices. He’s walked to the East Wing to visit the military office… And on the day the Senate confirmed his secretary of State, he stopped by the office of Antony Blinken’s wife, White House Cabinet Secretary Evan Ryan, to congratulate their family.” How thoughtful of him.
Access to the Oval Office is heavily restricted: only Biden’s top aides have walk-in privileges. But certain people, or creatures, are simply too important to restrict. Politico reported that “Senior adviser Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president, have Oval Office walk-in privileges. So do Biden’s dogs — one of the two German Shepherds, Major, visited him recently in the Oval Office, according to a White House official.” For the rest of us proletarians, or even for politicians who wish to negotiate legislation, good luck catching Biden anywhere.
Regardless of what one thought of Trump’s policies, no one with an ounce of intellectual honesty could argue that he was not a transparent president, who did not make himself readily available. Unlike Biden, who rarely ever answers questions from reporters, Trump took questions virtually every single day. Even the Trump-hating CNN admitted, “His accessibility is unprecedented…. Trump’s willingness to take calls and engage is so well known on Capitol Hill that one former leadership aide told CNN that when rank-and-file members go to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to complain about something Trump’s engaged in, McConnell tells them to pick up the phone and just call the President themselves.”
What a difference from our new basement president. Perhaps no song better sums up Biden’s first two weeks as commander in chief than the Beatles tune: “Nowhere Man”:
He’s a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody Doesn’t have a point of view Knows not where he’s going to.
To hear congressional Democrats and their corporate media allies tell the tale, the impeachment and conviction of former president Donald John Trump (they always use the “John” when they talk about impeachment) is vital to the health and survival of the republic. They argue that these measures are needed to send a message to future would-be despots in the Oval Office that there is accountability. Whatever you make of that, I happen to think it’s a ludicrous pile of hogwash. There is one person with no opinion, however, and that would be the current president.
Joe Biden and his White House team refuse to say whether Trump should be convicted. Every Democrat in the country, it seems, supports the impeachment, yet the self-proclaimed leader of the Democratic Party isn’t sure? The excuse given by the White House is that this is a decision for senators and Biden is no longer in the Senate. But so what? Biden wasn’t in the Senate in January of 2020, when he said Congress had “no choice” but to impeach Trump.
Suddenly, now that Biden is president he cannot weigh in on what Democrats claim is one of the most pressing political issues in the nation? As with everything Biden does or has ever done, the answer lies in politics. But even from a political perspective, this evasion seems particularly obsequious. I mean, come on, man, we all know what his actual opinion is. He’s not the sole Democrat in all the land against conviction. Is he really winning over Trump voters by refusing to profess an opinion here?
Biden would appear to be operating under his patented “do no harm” political philosophy, the one that served him so well in the basement during his campaign. When talk of impeachment first began after the Capitol riots, some Republicans and conservative pundits saw an opportunity for Biden to bring about unity by opposing the measure. That might have been pie in the sky stuff, but Biden didn’t take the bait. Instead, in classic Biden fashion, he says nothing.
This is a pattern with the president. On opening schools, he is similarly feckless. His own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers say they can open, and Biden hems and haws in awe of the teachers unions. Had Trump defied his own experts in such a way, it would have been a two-week scandal with its own CNN theme music. Now that Biden is president things are more nuanced, you see? Political considerations matter right alongside science. We could have used some of that sentiment last year.
The problem with Biden refusing to tell us what he actually thinks about these important issues is that it strongly suggests he is not the one making the decisions. Like his former boss, Barack Obama, Biden likes to lead from behind. But behind whom, exactly? Who is deciding what his positions on impeachment and schools are? Say what you will about Trump, but we always knew his opinion. And it was his opinion, not a focus-group position delivered to him by unknown lackeys in mediocre suits.
Biden was elected president of the United States. He claims it is a job he wanted. It is a leadership position, yet he refuses to lead. Is this impeachment as important and vital as Democrats not named Joe Biden claim? It’s kind of hard to take those claims seriously when the leader of the party can’t be bothered to comment.
It’s time for Sleepy Joe to take a stand on impeachment. It is an issue that deeply divides the country. One cannot create unity by simply avoiding hard or uncomfortable positions, but we have to accept that this is exactly who we elected. We elected a smiley grandpa who doesn’t want to make trouble.
One of the biggest fears that opponents of Biden had throughout his candidacy was that he would not be making the decisions, that he would be a prop, an extra in his own administration who looks nice behind the desk. Three weeks into his administration, it is starting to look like those predictions were right. Come on, Joe. Tell us what you really think, man. We’d like to know.
International
experts investigating the origins of Covid-19 have all but dismissed a
theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China.
Peter
Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) mission,
said it was "extremely unlikely" that the virus leaked from a lab in the
city of Wuhan.
He said more work was needed to identify the source of the virus.
The comments came at the conclusion of a joint WHO-China mission.
Wuhan,
in China's western Hubei province, is the first place in the world that
the virus was detected. Since then, more than 106 million cases and 2.3
million deaths have been reported worldwide.
Dr
Embarek told a press conference the investigation had uncovered new
information but had not dramatically changed the picture of the
outbreak.
Experts believe the virus is likely to have originated in animals before spreading to humans, but they are not sure how.
Dr
Embarek said work to identify the origins of Covid-19 pointed to a
"natural reservoir" in bats, but it was unlikely that this happened in
Wuhan.
He
said identifying the animal pathway remained a "work in progress", but
that it was "most likely" to have crossed over to humans from an
intermediary species.
The
experts also said there was "no indication" that the virus was
circulating in Wuhan before the first official cases were recorded there
in December 2019.
Liang
Wannian, an expert with China's Health Commission, said Covid-19 could
have been in other regions before it was detected in Wuhan.
The
team called for further investigation into the possibility of "cold
chain" transmission, referring to the transport and trade of frozen
food.
The
WHO mission began in January, following months of negotiations with
Beijing. The experts' visit was closely-monitored by the Chinese
authorities.
Title: Biden's Military Transgender Policy Will Inflict Massive Damage on Our Military
Joe Biden's order rescinding President Trump's ban on transgender servicemen will quickly impact the military, propelling it into a downward recruiting and retention spiral not seen since the era of the hapless Jimmy Carter.
Let's start with a tale of two soldiers. First, let's consider eighteen-year-old Daniel, who is a male but believes he is female. Daniel has decided to join the military because the military is committed to providing the new recruit with full medical care and support so he can transition from Private Daniel to Private Danielle. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Sergeant (or Chief Petty Officer) Rock. Sergeant Rock is at the E-6/E-7 level, a smart and experienced NCO of twelve years' service who has undergone several combat and war deployments. To attain his rank, Sergeant Rock had to complete an NCO academy and pass many tough courses on a wide array of military and technical subjects. NCO promotions do not come easy. Sergeant Rock is not only a highly trained specialist, but also an experienced troop leader.
The U.S. military is completely dependent upon the thousands of Sergeant Rocks. No ship can sail, no aircraft can fly, no tank can move without a large corps of Sergeant Rocks to operate and maintain complex weapons systems and train the personnel in those systems.
Unlike young Private Daniel/Danielle, Sergeant Rock is a family man. The NCO, warrant officer, and officer ranks of the military are overwhelmingly filled with married people. Approximately 58% of the 2.2 million members serving on active duty and the National Guard and Reserve have families, and 40% have at least two children. Let's say Sergeant Rock has a child with a disability or chronic illness. Approximately 220,000 active-duty and reserve military personnel have a family member with special needs. Sergeant Rock's family is a top priority, at least to him, and military families constitute a special community and culture. If the resources are not there to support military families, Sergeant Rock's family will be unhappy, and Sergeant Rock will likely leave the service when his enlistment expires.
Back to Private Daniel/Danielle. The 2018 Defense Department study of transgender soldiers noted that those soldiers admitted after President Obama ended the transgender ban in 2016 not only used far more medical resources than were readily available, but required active units to dip into their Operations, Training, and Maintenance (OTM) funds to pay for the costs for Private Daniel to become Private Danielle.
In 2019, the Pentagon looked to cut 18,000 medical personnel from an already understaffed military medical corps. President Trump fought the military leaders on this issue, but with Trump gone, look for these cuts to come back. Private Daniel/Danielle, being on active duty, will have a higher priority in the military medical system than Sergeant Rock's sick child when it comes to allocating scarce medical resources. The medical costs for one Private Daniel/Danielle will soak up the treatment costs of ten children like Sergeant Rock's, forcing those families to pay a lot out of pocket and pushing them to seek treatment in the civilian community, perhaps far from their on base home. Faced with taking care of their soldiers and families versus pleasing the politicians in Washington, it's not hard to guess which way the Pentagon leaders will jump.
Military life can be awfully hard, but the military community and culture do much to make it worthwhile. Sergeant Rock joined up with the promise that the military would ensure quality medical care for his family, decent housing, recreation facilities, and all the amenities of a middle-class American life. But when the military is ordered to cut the budget, the top ranks always look to cutting things like housing, medical care, base facilities, and the like to preserve the hugely expensive weapons systems. Defense firms have vast funds an army of highly paid lobbyists, who make sure their interests are well represented to the Beltway politicians. In contrast, military families do not have the big money or lobbyist clout that big business has. In the battle for military community resources, they will lose.
Expect the top military leadership to undermine Sergeant Rock's family life in other ways. Last year, the Navy in San Diego canceled the contracts of Catholic priests who serve the Navy's on base Catholic community. The Navy told the Catholic service families they could shop around outside the base for a church to go to. But a civilian parish would be full of strangers and manned by a priest with no military experience or understanding of the life and needs of military parishioners. There are a lot of devout Christians in the military, and this was a cheap blow to military community life to save a minuscule amount of money.
It's not just the medical care, or the chapel, or the NCO club; it's all the other things that add up to a supportive and family-friendly military. President Trump stopped this thoughtless action by the Navy and insisted that the contract priests be reinstated. But with Biden now president and Bernie Sanders chair of the Senate Budget Committee, expect a full-scale assault on military communities and benefits.
Remember, Sergeant Rock has a lot of training in operating and maintaining complex equipment. He has years of experience in leading enlisted personnel. He is certified in skills in demand in the civilian community. When his military community is underfunded, and his family health care takes a hit because of command policies, Sergeant Rock has plenty of options to get out of the military for a better life. Any large company, or manufacturer, or logistics supplier, would be happy to get Sergeant Rock's skills and experience. The red-state economies are doing nicely, and, even in a tight economy, a smart company will be ready to pay well for Sergeant Rock and make sure that he gets a much better medical plan than what the military will give him. When Sergeant Rock leaves the service, the military is obligated to move him and his family to their chosen final home. He will find a warm welcome in the towns and smaller cities of the red states.
Military people put up with a lot of "chickens---" (common military technical term) from the top ranks. But most soldiers put up with it because they are patriotic and committed and believe that defending the country has more personal value than making the big bucks elsewhere. But lay it on too thick and mess with their families, and even the most dedicated soldiers will consider leaving.
Any sane defense policy would happily cut ten Private Daniel/Danielles to keep one Sergeant Rock in the service. Instead, our political leaders, with the backing of the Pentagon, is ready to cut ten Sergeant Rocks to enlist one Private Daniel/Danielle (who will likely make a poor soldier in the end). Watch for a crisis in military retention and recruitment to come soon.
James S. Corum, Ph.D. is a military historian, author and co-author of 14 books, and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Why the Left Must Destroy a Patriotic American Ethos
During
the past year, we have witnessed an assault on our cultural heritage
and history; the anti-American iconoclasm that gripped the activist
economy throughout the United States is now a force of absolute
desecration that will erase our entire history and heritage if given the
chance. First, they came for the Confederate monuments under the
bullhorn of racism. Quietly supported by mainstream conservatism, these same anti-American iconoclasts just as quickly turned against Lincoln, Grant, and other Union war heroes,
much to the consternation of mainstream conservatives too blind,
willfully or ignorantly, to see what the war against our art is about.
How
did it come to this? As many know, there has been a "long march"
through our institutions by anti-American and anti-Western liberals who
see themselves as the vanguard elect eradicating the sins of white
Western Christian civilization. These are their own words. Following
the radical deconstructionist theories of the neo-Marxist left in
Europe, these iconoclastic fanatics embraced the new theory of narrative
power and oppression rather than economic power and oppression. Rather
than a working-class uprising, a new nihilistic middle class would
seize the reins of revolution and radicalism to destroy the bourgeois
middle class they sprang from and, simultaneously, loathed.
Humans
are story-making creatures. We love stories. And stories communicate
ideals and morals to the next generation. Plato knew this reality well,
which is why he held the poets in low regard; since the poets promoted
falsity and immorality, they needed to be kept in check. Ever since
Plato, we have been wrestling with the story of art, statues, and our
public landscape.
The
1619 Project should be seen as a blessing in disguise for all
patriots. It reveals, unambiguously, the ideology of the anti-American
movement within America. America, per the 1619 Project, is irredeemably
racist. It was founded on racism and became powerful because of racism
and White supremacy. Every aspect of American life, the 1619 Project
proclaims, has been untouched by our racist sin. Racism is, as has
become ubiquitous, our "original sin" and "birth defect."
The assault against our public memorials and statues, especially those commemorating Lincoln, Grant, the 54th Massachusetts, and the Founding Fathers,
shouldn't be surprising. Those desecrating barbarians loathe our
public landscape, especially those places adorned with the Founding
Fathers and Union heroes because those statues challenge their acidic
fundamentalism. The iconography of American independence, abolition,
unionism, and reconciliation stands as an enduring testimony to the
goodness of America.
America
is a land of freedom, progress, and opportunity. Nothing declares
those realities better than our public statues and symbols. The story
that these immortal and eternal statues tell is an America that is
antithetical to the 1619 Project and its street barbarians and thugs.
Washington
stands as a testament to the beacon of liberty to which we all
aspire. Lincoln stands as a testament to true political courage, unlike
the cowardice of Antifa and their ilk, in fighting for freedom,
progress, and reconciliation. Grant stands as a testament to the virtue
of military fortitude and determination, not to mention genius: Grant
is the only commander of the war to have captured three armies (Fort
Donelson, Vicksburg, and Appomattox). Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th
Massachusetts, immortalized in Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stands as a testimony to American courage
and greatness, a monument to heroism and unity that revealed the courage
of the American spirit.
So
long as statues of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Grant, and the Union
dot our public landscape, they tell the story of American progress,
freedom, and the triumph of the better angels of our nature. Precisely
because they communicate this story, it is necessary for the
anti-American left to destroy the symbols of that story because they
counter the false narrative that gives them their demonic inspiration
and power. If America is, in fact, a land of freedom, progress, and
opportunity — becoming freer and better as time goes on — then the
narrative sway of the new vandals loses its grip. It is, therefore,
imperative to destroy all statues and monuments telling the story of the
America we know to be true: an imperfect union becoming more perfect as
time goes on.
This
brings us back to 1619 instead of 1776 or 1865. Seventeen seventy-six
was a watershed moment in human history. Until recently, everyone knew
this. Even Europeans long modeled their aspirations after
America. (Now we seem to model ourselves after the
Europeans.) Europeans flocked to the United States for the chance to
participate in the growing movement to freedom and equality. The failed
revolutions of 1848 and 1849 brought a new wave of Europeans to
America's shores as their last best hope to escape persecution. Many of
the Forty-Eighters, like Carl Schulz, became important leaders of the new Republican Party.
The
story of our cherished iconography and symbols, from the freedom
promised and manifested in men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison
to the new freedom and equality advanced by Lincoln and the Union, had
to be "re-evaluated" (a favorite buzzword among the barbarous left) as
racist and, therefore, their endurance over our public square and space a
legacy of that original sin of racism and white supremacy.
Our
Founding Fathers began the great story of American freedom, progress,
and hope. That story continued after they died, and their spirit
remained with us. Lincoln said our founding was "a rebuke and a
stumbling block to ... tyranny and oppression." If Lincoln was right,
then the 1619 Project is wrong — and the 1619 Project can't be wrong, so
Lincoln has to go. (Not to mention Washington and the heroic bunch who
founded the country whom Lincoln identified as having served as that
rebuke and stumbling block to tyranny and oppression.) That's the logic
of the new vandals desecrating our streets and parks, whether from the
streets or in public office.
According
to the demonic spirit of destruction running rampant across America,
insofar that any icons and symbols of our history and heritage remain,
we must view them negatively, with hatred and disgust. Why?
Their
goal is to have us renounce our noble history and heritage of freedom,
equality, and progress. By surrendering our noble history and heritage,
we prostrate ourselves to the anti-American forces who would see us
exterminated as the only solution for our supposed sins. Theirs is a
world without grace and forgiveness. Ours is a world of grace,
reconciliation, and heavenly redemption, celebrated and memorialized in
our sculptures and paintings reminding us of that reality. This world,
antithetical to the acidic ideology of our opponents, cannot exist, so
it must be destroyed.
This
is why leftists hate the men who fought for greater freedom, equality,
and justice. Washington and Lincoln must go because their presence
terrifies the new left in America. If they are right, then the leftists
are wrong. We must cherish our artistic and cultural patrimony because
it tells a story. In cherishing our sculptures of freedom and
progress, we have the superior story to tell — superior because it is
also the true story. Ours is the real story of American progress and
inclusion, freedom and equality. Veritas liberabit vos.
The number of republican senators not running for reelection just gained another name today. Senators Richard Burr (NC), Ron Johnson (WI), Pat Toomey (PA), and Rob Portman (OH) previously stated they were not going to seek reelection; now Senator Richard Shelby (AL) makes the same announcement.
They know the American electorate can see both wings of the UniParty vulture now.
WASHINGTON DC – Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said on Monday that he would not run for reelection in 2022.
“Today I announce that I will not seek a seventh term in the United State Senate in 2022. For everything, there is a season,” Shelby said in a statement.
“Although I plan to retire, I am not leaving today. I have two good years remaining to continue my work in Washington. I have the vision and the energy to give it my all,” the 86-year-old senator added. (read more)
In the 2022 Senate races there are 34 seats up for grabs. 14 are held by Democrats and 20 are held by tenuous Republicans. [Breakdown Here] Due to vulnerability, their lack of support amid the republican base, and their insufferable 2020 behavior outing them as DeceptiCons it is almost guaranteed the GOP will lose seats in the 2022 mid-term election.
Things amid the DeceptiCon caucus are getting interesting. With five GOP senators having announced they’re not running (Burr, Johnson, Toomey, Portman, Shelby) there’s essentially zero chance of the GOP retaking control of the Senate in 2022. [20 R seats up & only 14 D seats that are in solid D strongholds] it is far more likely the Democrats will gain seats, so keep this in mind….
…When we think about forming a third party, the “you will split the vote” crew always peddles their vote split narrative. However, the GOP doesn’t have a chance in hell to win 2022 given what the base of the Republicans think about these senate DeceptiCons now.
There has never been a better time for a New Party to launch and capture three or four seats from the retiring GOPe crew. It would be great to see true MAGA representatives that can caucus with Republicans but hold ground on America First principles.
Oh, and someone needs to primary Lisa Murkowski again.
Article by Sally Zelikovsky in The American Thinker
Destroying Democracy in Order to Save It
Time magazine’s “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election”
by Molly Ball is supposed to come off as an epic tale of left-wing
institutions swooping in to save democracy from untold chaos in the
aftermath of the election but reads more like a confessional where the
storyteller and her informants unwittingly reveal that the election was
indeed rigged.
Ball
stresses that the “shadow effort [was] dedicated not to winning the
vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and
uncorrupted.” In other words, they were not attempting to defeat Trump,
but were focused on ensuring free and fair elections to prevent chaos
if Trump were elected or refused to concede. This required a
coordinated effort among a staggering number of left-wing organizations,
the media and tech, titans of industry, an army of activists,
#NeverTrumpers, and a whole lotta Benjamins, baby.
Through
extensive interviews and access to documents, Ball lays out in earnest
the game plan with absolutely no awareness that this nonadmission of
wrongdoing is actually an admission that bolsters what the President has
been saying all along (and is vital to his defense against this second
impeachment):
They
got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds
of millions in public and private funding. They fended off
voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got
millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully
pressured social media companies to take a harder line against
disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans
understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks,
preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from
getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure
point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.
None
of this could have happened organically. Democracy, you see, has to be
manipulated in order for the good work of democracy to happen:
“Every
attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was
defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a
nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important
for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The
system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s
why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told,
even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream -- a well-funded
cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies,
working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change
rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of
information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And
they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in
order to ensure that democracy in America endures. [Emphasis added.]
In
late 2019, senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO and
mastermind of the shadow campaign Mike Podhorzer, was gobsmacked when he
realized that the data and analytics strongly pointed to a Trump win.
That was the moment the shadow campaign was born. During a frantic 11
p.m. Zoom meeting on election night, Podhorzer had to remind his
co-conspirators that they knew Trump would pull ahead but would
ultimately lose “as long as all the votes were counted.”
[Italics added.] “Count all votes” was critical to the syndicate’s PR
campaign and violated the norm, touted by conservatives, that all legal votes should be counted.
If
it was foreordained that Trump would prevail, the Democrat Cabal had to
protect the people from themselves -- subverting Democracy in order to
save Democracy. So, they manipulated the election in their favor and
called it “fortifying” even though they were really “rigging” it. They
claimed the system was on the verge of collapse because Trump
was going to be elected. And, because they couldn’t admit to rigging
the election, they disguised their efforts with a massive PR campaign
demanding all votes be counted to prevent chaos.
Massive PR campaign, indeed.
They
had the good fortune of COVID-19 giving them cover for mail-in voting
propaganda. BLM leadership was able to “harness [the momentum behind
the George Floyd riots] for the election.” In other words, the riots were orchestrated to benefit Democrat candidates.
Corporate
benefactors shoveled out gobs of money (i.e., $300 million dollars from
the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) to fund a massive reworking of state
voting systems and procedures that bolstered mail-in voting in 37 states
and D.C.:
The
[National Vote at Home] Institute gave secretaries of state from both
parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how
to locate drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted sources of
election information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the
institute distributed communications tool kits.
Organizations
tracked disinformation online and provided it to campaigns and the
media so they could “out” the liars. Rather than pushing back against
“toxic content” which invited more attention, they pressured platforms
like Twitter and Facebook to police and remove content or suspend
accounts.
Podhorzer
enlisted the help of former military officials, cabinet members, and
elected officials to convince the public, governors, AGs, and
secretaries of state, that mail-in voting was safe. Former Democrat
congressman Dick Gephardt raised $20 million dollars to fund these
efforts. Now we understand why Kemp and Raffensberger in Georgia, and
Wolf and Boockvar in Pennsylvania, behaved as they did.
They refocused election security on self-policing versus reliance on law enforcement and
created
a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers,
were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on
Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy
to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a
street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers
to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.
In
other words, they recruited a partisan army of poll workers who were
backed by partisan “election defenders” to monitor voting and ballot
counting. This is how Republicans ended up with poll watchers who were
ousted, blocked, and situated light-years away from the count, and piles
of ballots -- almost exclusively for Joe Biden -- coming out of the
woodworks in the wee hours.
As
150 left-wing organizations prepped for violent nationwide
demonstrations against a Trump steal, the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and churches formed a powerful alliance with a carefully
crafted message of preventing “violence, intimidation or any other
tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.” Meanwhile, everything the
shadow campaign did was violence, intimidation and other tactics that
undermined our free elections -- classic projection.
All
of this is boldly asserted in Ball’s article. It’s not unusual for
victors to brag about some feat to the astonishment of onlookers. They
become so obsessed with the righteousness of their cause, they proudly
articulate what they did with seemingly no regard for the potential for
any blowback.
The
Nazis documented everything in the mistaken belief that their national
obsession with world domination and cleansing the world of impure races
was not only in Germany’s best interests, but those of the entire
world. They honestly believed history would judge them kindly. But
they were blind to the reality that, in recording their atrocities, they
wrote the script for world condemnation of their crimes against
humanity.
Similarly,
in their sanctimonious fervor to boast about their role in “fortifying”
the election and its aftermath, Ball’s informants actually outed
themselves as the crooks, cabalists, and conspirators they really are.
And poor Ms. Ball appears the useful idiot.
She quotes someone from the Democracy Defense Coalition as saying:
“There’s
an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a
mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for
democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”
While
this can be read to mean democracy was in jeopardy until Democrats
organized the shadow campaign to save democracy from a Trump second
term, it’s really just a slick way of confessing to rigging the 2020
election and stealing it from Trump. Let’s hope Trump’s attorneys
feature these admissions in his impeachment defense.
