Tuesday, October 24, 2023

In 1973, There Was an Oil Crisis. In 2023, There Is a Climate Crisis. What Changed? What Has Not?

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

Fifty years ago, the nation was in the throes of what was then known as the Energy Crisis. This was not a crisis of supply; it was a crisis of government interference in markets. Today, the governments of the world are still meddling in markets; today, our own federal government is still guddling about in our energy supply infrastructure and markets while draining our country's reserves dry to try to cut a dime a gallon off skyrocketing gasoline prices. 

What has gone wrong is very clear to anyone who understands how markets work.

Take a look at these words:

“The oil industry is being destroyed by a bombardment of paper–of governmental rules, regulations, directives, edicts, commands. But that bombardment is more effective than other kinds of air raids: it blasts your power stations, extinguishes your lights, freezes your homes, stops your motors, locks your factories, wipes out your jobs, and leaves a barren land on which nothing will grow again for generations.”  

“The result of our present economic system is that the men who do the work – in this case, the oil industry – know the state of their production at a given moment, but do not know what edict will shatter them next month or next year. The government officials do not know the state of the industry they are controlling – nor what edict they will feel like issuing next week.”

Sound familiar? Like the state of affairs even today? These words are from Ayn Rand's 1973 essay, The Energy Crisis. Rand rightly called out the actual cause of the "oil crisis" of the 70s at that time, and she would no doubt look at today's energy markets and say the same thing. 

In other words, we haven't learned. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

Ayn Rand spent a good part of that decade castigating pols of all stripes on issues other than energy. 

Rand’s commentary about Richard Nixon’s wage and price control program of August 1971 (the public acceptance of which represented a “moratorium on brains”), remains biting. And from Nixon’s beginning, she diagnosed the “energy crisis” in terms of the failed mixed economy where distortive regulation expands from its own shortcomings. 

If only Ayn Rand were here to write about the global warming/climate crusade. And the energy industry’s back-pedaling and “greenwashing” of the issue, trying to placate its enemies. (It did not work, and signs of change are in the air.)

Over the years, I've read most of Rand's work. Early on, when I was about twenty, I first read "Atlas Shrugged," although I really didn't understand a lot of the messages of that book until years later, after having read a lot of Rand's non-fiction. "Atlas Shrugged" isn't great fiction; fiction writing clearly wasn't Ayn Rand's primary talent. It is long-winded and tedious in places. 

But Rand's message was prescient, and you can see why in today's energy and climate change discussions. The energy markets are anything but free; energy producers are weighted down with taxes, subsidies, and regulations, while snake oil salesmen promising the latest "green" energy schemes are gifted with generous subsidies. Oil and gas companies are faced with road-blocking protests and lawfare attacks. Gas prices skyrocket while the Biden administration fiddles around the edges of the market by draining the Strategic Reserve. Rand's observations from the "Energy Crisis" of the 70s still hold true today, and much of her work, day by day, proves more and more prophetic. But then, Rand was born and raised in the Soviet Union; she had seen it all before.

It's not funny anymore.

It all starts to make a little more sense, though, when you consider the obvious motivations of the legislators and regulators — Rand called them "looters." She made another statement, this a fictional one, that goes a long way toward helping us understand the motivations of too many people in government:

Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.

Again: Sound familiar?

The energy sector has suffered under this for long enough. In the 70s, the energy sector suffered under the burden of government. Today, that suffering has only grown more onerous. It's time to let markets work.



Gag Order Against Trump Is the Real Threat to Democracy, not plea agreements.

Deep State is attacking our right to elect 
the President of our choosing


The reason you have not heard of a gag order on par with the one imposed on former President Trump is that it is highly unusual. Normally, in a criminal proceeding, there are no gag orders. To the extent they exist, they typically only bind the lawyers, who are admonished to adhere to the rules of professional conduct. Rarely—as in almost never—are criminal defendants forced into a gag order on such spurious grounds as they might “vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants who are simply doing their jobs.”

In fact, precedent almost uniformly emphasizes familiar First Amendment principles, which limit the court’s authority, including disfavor towards “prior restraints” and “content-based restrictions” on speech.

In a case involving the prosecution of a congressman, the Sixth Circuit federal court of appeals noted that “such broadly based restrictions on speech in connection with litigation are seldom, if ever, justified. Trial judges, the government, the lawyers and the public must tolerate robust and at times acrimonious or even silly public debate about litigation.”

The Sixth Circuit emphasized that criminal defendants are already very much disadvantaged vis a vis the government, and that any court restrictions must accommodate this asymmetry. “A criminal defendant awaiting trial in a controversial case has the full power of the government arrayed against him and the full spotlight of media attention focused upon him. The defendant’s interest in replying to the charges and to the associated adverse publicity, thus, is at a peak. So is the public’s interest in the proper functioning of the judicial machinery.”

Other circuits follow a less restrictive rule, but even those emphasize the need for any such orders to be narrowly tailored to accomplish a substantial government interest.

Courts typically have broad powers to enforce discipline in their courtrooms and over lawyers, but preemptively stifling a defendant from “making statements targeting prosecutors, possible witnesses and court staff” has a very broad reach. After all, isn’t every member of Congress, every January 6 defendant, and every single person Trump spoke to about the 2020 election a potential witness?

Since part of Trump’s presidential campaign rests on the view that the 2020 election was rigged, how can he effectively run for president in 2024 under this type of restriction?

The D.C. Jury Pool Starts Off Very Biased

The gag order also is very unlikely to be effective in achieving its stated purpose. The judge suggests a fair trial is possible, but that, without the gag order, Trump will influence the process and potentially poison the views of the jury pool.

A bit of a reality check is in order.

Trump is the former American president, who lived in the White House for four years. Everyone in Washington D.C. has an opinion about the former president, as he is a controversial and larger-than-life character. That said, he is more unpopular in D.C. than in any voting district in the country; in 2020, the District achieved an election result worthy of Stalin: 93% for Joe Biden. The only likely impact of Trump’s intemperate speech would be to further prejudice Washington D.C. jurors against him, as his “mean tweets” and general tone seem to be part of why the government class hates him so.

The special prosecutor picked this jurisdiction for a reason. It is practically a “rotten borough” when it comes to politically charged prosecutions of Republicans. This is why the small number of January 6 defendants who went to trial in Washington D.C. have gone down hard.

This all reminds us why the Declaration of Independence mentioned, among its catalog of complaints against King George, that he was “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

Then, as now, such procedural artifices ensured hostile “peers” would serve on a jury, rigging the outcome of a criminal trial.

The Gag Order Affects the Right of Voters to Hear Trump’s Point of View

In addition to Trump being deprived of a jury of his peers, he is being deprived of his essential First Amendment freedoms. This does not merely affect Trump; voters have an independent right to hear the unfettered political speech of a presidential candidate.

The real reason the D.C. managerial class cabal wants to impose a chilling effect on Trump’s free speech is the 2024 election. Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, and it increasingly appears he may have a lead over Joe Biden.

One of Trump’s main complaints has been that this prosecution is unfair, politicized, and constitutes a severe form of election interference. In defense of the process, many have suggested that Judge Chutkan’s failure to give the Special Counsel everything he asked for shows that she is fair and that this order is appropriately limited. But, even in its current form, the order is extreme and unconstitutional.    It restricts, among other things, discussing witnesses and certain officials, which may include people running for office or working for the Biden administration.

It is one thing to say the court must be respected during proceedings. But restricting a criminal defendant’s discussion of witnesses, which presumably includes every member of Congress that was involved in the 2020 electoral college count, is extreme. How would Trump know who is included or not as a witness at this early date? How could he be sure his conduct did not veer into dangerous territory by criticizing, say, Merrick Garland or Jack Smith’s left-wing, filmmaker wife? Everything Trump says, from this point forward, risks imprisonment for contempt during the pendency of the trial.

The gag order implicates the rights of parties not before the court; namely, the voters. Some of us agree this is an unjust and highly politicized prosecution and the act of a biased judge. We have a right to hear what the defendant has to say about it. And we are now being deprived of that right in ways that are visible—such as Trump’s use of a spokesman for his comments on the order—and ways that are invisible, such as whatever things he is not saying on account of the order.

The Deep State is Attacking Our Right to Elect the President of Our Choosing

Trump has been harassed and persecuted since his original run in 2016. Some of the highest figures in government, the head of the FBI and senior intelligence officials, acting with the blessing of President Obama, made up lies about Trump and his ties to Russia in order to defeat his campaign.

He still won, and they continued the charade for two years through special prosecutor Robert Mueller, even after the participants admitted in private that the “Steele Dossier” had no merit.

Shortly after this cloud lifted, congressional Democrats impeached him the first time for looking into Hunter and Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine. Like so many other Trump scandals, it now appears Trump’s instincts were correct, as Hunter Biden was the central node of an elaborate pay-to-play scam involving a corrupt seven-figure job for Hunter at a Ukrainian natural gas company, which chiefly compensated him for access to Joe Biden. In the end, Trump escaped conviction for exercising this core foreign policy authority.

The media and Congressional Democrats would then blame Trump for the events of January 6, even though he had a right to challenge election results and have a rally, and even though he urged protesters to be nonviolent. The second impeachment proceedings continued after the formal transfer of power on January 20, but he escaped conviction there as well.

Now that he is running again, the Department of Justice has unleashed a fanatical war crimes prosecutor to pursue unorthodox charges arising from Trump’s contest of the 2020 election. What the Deep State could not accomplish in two impeachments, they are now trying to accomplish with a rigged process before an irredeemably partisan D.C. jury.

You do not have to be a Trump voter to be concerned about these developments. For all the talk of Our Democracy™, one of its essential features is supposed to be majority rule. The people pick the President through the electoral college, and he accrues significant authority therefrom because he is the only nationwide elected official.

We do not have a system, such as in Iran or the Soviet Union, where candidates and parties must get pre-approval for their conformity to regime priorities. But for the Deep State and the entrenched elected officials, democracy consists chiefly of ratifying the substantive outcomes they want. Changing our foreign policy on Russia or Israel, changing our immigration rules, or changing how much the federal government spends are all affronts to this understanding of democracy as consisting of a particular set of substantive outcomes.

This is why, even though he was improbably elected in 2016, Trump’s critics referred so frequently to him as a threat to Our Democracy™.  In this upside-down world, arresting the nominee of one of the two major parties and preventing him from becoming president through a rigged legal process is somehow protecting democracy, even though the whole purpose of these actions is to deprive voters of their preferred choice.

The oligarchy that runs our country is rigging another election because Trump is the most significant threat to their power. The gag order is just another facet of this program.




X22, On the Fringe, and more- Oct 24

 




German Police Arrest Suspected Terrorist, ‘Osama the German,’ for Plotting Truck Attack on Pro-Israel Rally: Report

 The Duisburg native reportedly wanted to die a martyr in an attack on a rally at North Rhine-Westphalia.

Armed federal agents in Germany raided the home of a Hamas sympathizer at Duisburg who was allegedly planning to attack a pro-Israel demonstration in the coming days, according to a report in the German press.

Berlin’s Bild newspaper reports Tuesday that authorities arrested a terrorist that goes by the name Tarik S. after foreign intelligence agencies alerted them to online chatter by the Duisburg native suggesting that he wanted to die a martyr in an attack on a rally in North Rhine-Westphalia. The intent was to drive a truck through the rally and injure and kill as many as possible, according to the report.

Bild quotes German intelligence officials as saying that the suspect was inspired by an Islamist attack at Brussels last week that left two Swedish football fans dead. Police in France charged two men in connection with that attack, during which the 45-year-old Tunisian man was killed, Tuesday. 

German officials believe Tarik S. was radicalized by jihadist cells in the German city of Herford. He traveled to Syria via Turkey in 2013 to join ISIS and took on the nom-de-guerre “Osama the German” and appeared in one video beside a decapitated victim. He was arrested upon his return to Germany in 2016 and sentenced to five years in prison in 2017.

Germany has seen a significant increase in the number of reported antisemitic incidents since the war in Israel began October 7. Police there have responded by banning most rallies expressing support for Hamas and the Palestinians, and schools in Berlin have banned students from wearing Palestinian flags, kufiyas, and “Free Palestine” stickers.

After assailants threw two Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in central Berlin and vandals attached Stars of David to the facades of several buildings, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, vowed a “zero tolerance” approach to antisemitism.  


https://www.nysun.com/article/german-police-arrest-suspected-terrorist-osama-the-german-for-plotting-truck-attack-on-pro-israel-rally-report   





The Sickness of Our Universities—and the Cure ~ VDH

Before graduating, students should demonstrate a minimum competence in math, science, and general knowledge


The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world, and will have grave repercussions for higher education in the next few years.

The Nazis once desecrated the tombstones of dead Jews. Our campuses have updated that hatred. Students now tear down pictures of Jewish captives kidnapped or murdered by Hamas. University presidents do not condemn the hate-filled rallies supporting the killing of Jews in Israel, even though, according to their own safety-first ideology and prior proclamations about systemic hatred, these rallies instill a “climate of fear” in some students.

An instructor at Stanford separated Jewish students from their belongings, ordered them to stand in the corner, boasted about denying the Holocaust, and singled them out for unhinged rantings. Screaming campus activists and professors openly support Hamas even after its brutal killing of hundreds of Israeli women, children, and infants. That for more than two weeks thousands of rockets—barrages initially designed to enhance the surprise mass murdering of October 7—daily continue to shower down upon Israeli cities is of zero concern to loud campus activists.

An even bolder Cornell history faculty member bragged that he was “exhilarated” on news that Jews were butchered on October 7. A UC Davis professor threatened to go after the children of “Zionist journalists.” “Savages”, “excrement” and “pigs” are the adjective and nouns one professor at the Art Institute of Chicago posted to describe Israelis.

At rallies and protests, hundreds shout about eliminating Israel altogether; students, faculty, and throngs in general occasionally wear masks or wrap their faces in keffiyehs, as if conceding that most would find anyone identifiably mouthing such advocacy despicable. In some sense, such campus haters have become the equivalent of anti-Semitic sheet-wearing Klansmen.

There was plenty of prior evidence to predict the hate-filled, bigoted, campus reaction to the mass murder of hundreds of Jews inside Israel. The ideology of “decolonization” that today condemns Israel, and the West generally, has had many equally rancid predecessors.

Racially segregated housing reappeared years ago as “theme houses.” Effectively segregated, no-go areas are euphemistically known as “multi-cultural rooms.” Any critics who have objected to such institutionalized racism, in Orwellian fashion, have been smeared as racists.

Events that are off-limits to particular races on campus—like separate but equal graduation ceremonies or campus activities—are heralded as “celebrating diversity.”

Joseph-McCarthy-era “loyalty oaths” have returned to campus under the woke veneer of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statements.” Refuse to issue such a personal manifesto—and one will suffer career consequences.

Unpopular or unwelcome questioning of left-wing university orthodoxy is libeled as “hate speech.” Dissenting views are officially censored, slandered and suppressed as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Face unproven allegations of “inappropriate behavior” and one can expect to lose one’s 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights in any star-chamber university inquiry.

Admissions to universities, along with faculty hiring, retention, and tenure, are predicated on racial preferences and de facto quotas.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, universities had already galvanized to implement ways to ignore its anticipated ruling—in good Confederate nullification style.

The old notion of “disparate impact” and “proportional representation” that set hiring and admission quota on the basis of racial demographics have given way to a sort of “reparatory” admissions—in which whites, regardless of grades and test scores, are collectively to be admitted and hired in far smaller numbers than found in the general population, and certain non-white groups, particularly East and South Asians, are actively discriminated against.

The old Enlightenment notion of not stereotyping entire groups as a faceless collective, and instead seeing persons as diverse and unique individuals, has given way to sloppy sloganeering like “white privilege,” “white supremacy” and “white rage.” Campuses apparently believe that a working class mechanic in Fresno County or a minimum wage tractor driver in Dayton, Ohio enjoys more power and privilege than Oprah Winfrey or Ibrahim Kendi.

For the last few decades, the public has been willing to put up with all this madness in higher education—even as political correctness squashed free speech on campus and affirmative action descended into woke racial essentialism.

Why?

One: universities assured America that their preeminent math, science, technology, and engineering departments—along with their professional medical and business schools—remained largely apolitical, research-orientated, and meritocratic.

Those departmental commitments to excellence without political interference had in the past always ensured American dominance in global research and development.

Two: the bachelor’s degree was once acknowledged as solid proof of a general education.

Graduation from college once supposedly certified that a citizen entered the work force with historical literacy, as well as enriched by philosophy, literature, and art.

Graduates also then purportedly understood our Constitution and civic life. They were assumed to have basic computational skills, as well as being versed in inductive reasoning and in analytical reading, writing, and speaking ability.

In other words, millions of college graduates were to share common skill sets— and that reality would help to ensure a complex and moral American democracy.

Unfortunately, neither of these two arguments for widespread college enrollment is any longer true. It is unnecessary to rehearse the sad decline of the humanities and the associated general civic education courses at today’s universities. Everyone is by now familiar with the multitude of “grievance studies” courses, therapeutic studies classes, and social activist degrees that have largely replaced conventional history and literature programs. Tragically, the rot has also spread to the sciences.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was systemic, campus-led censorship of dissenting scientific views, witch hunts of distinguished health care professionals, and de facto suppression of open scientific debate over the safety and efficacy of vaccines and the cost-benefit value of the lockdowns.

Medical-school doctors were demonized if they argued that there was scientific support for augmenting COVID-19 treatment with existing cheap, off-label pharmaceuticals, and even vitamin and supplement regimens. Authors of scientifically-based arguments that the origins of the COVID-19 virus was to be found at the Wuhan virology lab in China were demonized and their conclusions smeared rather than refuted.

In addition, any university-related scientific dialogue over the degree of and remedy for man-made, fossil-fuel-induced climate change must adhere to strict orthodoxies. Any apostates will risk having their careers curtailed and endangered.

It is also perilous for researchers, doctors, and public-health experts on campuses to question the recent dogma that sex is entirely socially constructed rather than biologically determined.

The university-trained computer minds that fuel Silicon Valley’s high tech industry have weaponized their Internet search results to prioritize links deemed socially and politically preferable.

University graduates are also past masters at Internet shadow-banning, doxxing, blacklisting, and canceling any person, institution, or idea that is felt to be detrimental to or at odds with the progressive agenda.

As for business, law, and medical schools–they now transfer much of their finite resources away from honing professional skills to ideological indoctrination in supposed diversity, equity, and inclusion.

As a result, universities have lost their century-long credibility as guardians of free and open scientific inquiry. Any contemporary university scientist who followed a renegade devotion to disinterested science–as embodied by Democritus, Galileo, or Copernicus–would encounter the same premodern character assassination, groupthink opposition, and efforts to destroy his career.

In sum, if exorbitantly priced higher education can no longer produce either a class of broadly educated citizens, or an empirically-trained and elite scientific, professional, and technological class, then why would Americans any longer put up with universities’ unapologetic indoctrination—a sort of interference with the university’s mission so reminiscent of the disastrous Russian commissar system that had nearly destroyed the Red Army at the outset of World War II?

Reform will only come through curtailing the government handouts that fuel multibillion dollar university endowments. Such unprecedented affluence ensures lavish campus budgets that in turn subsidize racist, anti-Semitic, and McCarthyite policies and institutions.

Just tax the income from the roughly $1 trillion of America’s tax exempt university endowments and perhaps there would not be quite enough money for courses on cartoons, cross-dressing, and BLM, much less for thousands of DEI commissars and censors.

Stop federal funds to any university that refuses to ensure Bill-of-Rights protections for its students.

If the SAT and ACT are increasingly dropped for admissions to universities, then an exit version of them should be required to ensure that all BA and BS degrees certify at least a minimum competence in math, science, and general knowledge.

Get the government out of the $1.8 trillion student loan business—and perhaps campuses would understand the concept of moral hazard. Only then would they monitor carefully extraneous expenditures and begin graduating students in four years—with the skills that employers so desperately need and the knowledge that a democracy relies upon.

If thousands of big donors who give billions of dollars to Ivy League and other tony universities were to “just say no,” then perhaps grasping deans, provosts, and presidents would begin to wonder whether they could fund any more rock climbing walls, latte bars, DEI czars, drag shows—and hate-Israel courses and student organizations.

In short, colleges are now a bad deal—far too costly, too political, and too incompetent in fulfilling their mission to the country. They no longer can deliver on what they were created for, and they simply will not stop fueling things that are not just unnecessary, but downright injurious to the country, scary, and destructive.

Who wishes to continue with all that?



We Don't Have 2 Major Parties Anymore - We Have 4


One of the great strengths of the United States’ political system has been its domination by two massive parties.

Wise in the ways of human nature, the Founding Fathers were suspicious of political parties, fearing, accurately as it turned out, that each would come to invest more effort in protecting itself than reflecting the collective desires and needs of its adherents.

Until recently, however, each was wise enough and broad enough to encompass a wide array of interests on its side of the political spectrum. At election times, this enabled one of them to cobble together a cooperating coalition to win and then enact a policy program for the next term.

The minority party objected, often strenuously, as opposition parties are supposed to do. But its members generally went along in the larger interests of the nation, until their next chance to compete for voter support.

In the 1964 election, the liberal Democrat ticket of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey crushed the conservative Republican offering of Barry Goldwater and William Miller, earning 61 percent of the popular vote, 44 states, and 486 of 538 Electoral Votes.

People worried that the GOP was dead. Only four years later, however, the Republican ticket won the first of two consecutive four-year terms. Then, Democrat Jimmy Carter wrote closure to the Watergate era in 1976.

The delayed conservative triumph brought Ronald Reagan in 1980, increased with the 1984 landslide and, in effect, a third Reagan term with George H.W. Bush in 1988. 

However, what happened in 2016 changed everything. An adopted Republican, Donald Trump, narrowly won despite disaffected Republicans.

Patience, tradition, and protocol went out the window. So stunning was Trump’s upset over Hillary Clinton that she, her party, and conniving supporters embedded within the government and dishonest media launched an enduring guerrilla campaign of hoaxes, leaks, and impeachments to destroy Trump, his reputation, and governing effectiveness. More recently, followed by legal indictments.

Trump, being Trump, fought back, often unnecessarily and carelessly. That redirected the 2020 reelection campaign away from an impressive array of fulfilled Trump promises, including tax cuts, surging job and economic growth, actual energy independence, conservative judges and justices, and an assertive foreign policy with no new military involvements abroad.

Campaign themes centered instead on the incessant bipartisan tumult that Trump and Democrats enthusiastically joined. 

And voters settled on a limp, seemingly benign elderly man who was very familiar and promised a return to normalcy. Disregarded in the Trump antipathy were ominous signs of Joe Biden’s fading mental and physical condition that now dominate his presence.

But what happened at the same time was a disturbing decay in both parties. Republicans sharply split over Trump and his raucous populism. And the growing number of safe House districts permits congressional behaviors once considered threatening to reelection.

I wrote about this developing chasm more than two years ago when it was growing:

These Republicans and Democrats have become two of history’s longest-lived political parties by sharing one common dominant trait, the ability or proclivity like snakes to regularly shed their ideological skins to match the changing needs and desires of voters. Nineteenth-century politicians would easily recognize today’s partisan media, but not their own parties.

At this moment as a puzzled and polarized nation, we’re witnessing both parties coincidentally struggling to inhabit their new skins. It’s a tedious, tenuous, and even tumultuous process. 

Eventually, this pained process hopefully will produce updated models of parties to vie for the ballots of inattentive voters, more than 40 percent of whom do not bother to participate. 

Not for the first time, Joe Biden discarded a promise — the return to normalcy — and fanatically embraced a radically progressive spending agenda in excess of $5 trillion that launched a crippling inflation still sapping Americans’ financial resources.

When you combine this with a worsening coarseness in society, a stubbornly firm belief in absolutes, an unusually strong unwillingness to listen and compromise, and chronic disregard for anything resembling the truth, you have the kind of political paralysis we’re witnessing in the House of Representatives' leadership struggles, among other places.

Reportedly followed by threats to some on the other side, all carefully chronicled in minute detail by media relishing each petty squabble and petty retort, as if they matter.

I suspect most of us have seen these fights in our lives, rhetorical and physical. No one gives in.

And what gets lost in the fisticuffs and bloody noses is any sight of a greater good, the original reason the Founding Fathers envisioned public service. Win some. Lose some. Everyone gets part of what they want. And we’ll compete again down the road.

There are no leaders today. And no patience among them or us. Only fighting followers seeking personal wins. That cripples families and sports teams. That cripples elected bodies and governments.

Our elected leader turns 81 in a few weeks but acts 91. He can’t read notes, remember names, or even where he is. The Big Guy is in it for the Big Guy. 

The country sees that. The world sees that. Frailty leads to appeasement. It screams weakness and invites trouble, whether in the schoolyard or the Middle East. 

Joe Biden wants to keep this job until he’s 86. He can’t do it now, let alone five years from now. 

You can see worried Biden aides trying to stop him. But at the moment, there’s no one in sight to say out loud, “Stop!” Because they don’t have the courage and the country’s good in mind, let alone the Democrat Party’s.

Because the party bigs are paralyzed by devotion to their own self-interests, they seem prepared to drive off the cliff next year with an incumbent president who gets lost reading notes and exiting a stage, and a vice president handpicked for reasons other than smarts.

Polls currently indicate members of both Republican parties, the Trump chorus and the many who would prefer someone else, are slowly drifting toward an acceptance that, for better or worse, at least he looks like the inevitable nominee now, barring some dramatic change. 

While deep appreciation lingers for his numerous achievements and appointments, fear also lingers over Trump’s pending legal cases. And there is broad concern over his propensity for harsh rhetoric and confrontations, many unnecessary and self-defeating unless gaining media attention is the goal.

All of which begs the question, in these perilous times, what would be best for the United States and its people? Turns out, until now, no one even thought to ask that question.



Media: ‘Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere’ — Except Where It Counts

When it comes to Biden’s approval, all the arguments are losing ones.



Sunday night, I hated myself for spending $6.99 plus tax on a blasted can of ReddiWhip (What can I say? The weekend wrought a homemade pumpkin pie situation and thus whipped cream desperation). Needless to say, that fresh sticker shock made it easy Monday morning to hate The Washington Post for running an article titled “Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls.”

In it, Matthew Yglesias treats readers to 800 words of Biden slobbery, lamenting poll results showing a majority of swing-state voters preferred Donald Trump’s economy over Joe Biden’s and that only 35 percent trust the incumbent on the issue. (Independents trust Biden even less, with only 25 percent.)

“As the US economy continues to improve, President Joe Biden continues to not get credit for it,” Yglesias whines.

When your job is to run public relations for Democrats, your strategy becomes spin over self-reflection. That’s why, to comfort himself and other Democrats, Yglesias instantly looks outward, comparing Biden to other leaders of the free world. “[T]he trend is clear,” he says. “Incumbents of all ideological flavors are losing everywhere and are almost universally unpopular.”

Those comparisons would only really work, though, if Japan were no different than Germany, and Germany were no different than the United States. And since when can approval ratings be boiled down strictly to the value of the dollar? Maybe that’s why Yglesias doesn’t dwell on that losing argument too long.

The problem is that when it comes to Biden’s approval, all the arguments are losing ones. Thus the media resort to doing what they always do: telling you to stop believing your lying eyes.

According to Yglesias — and, if you’ve been paying attention, the rest of the “inflation-is-cooling” media — the inflation situation is “greatly improved,” “Americans’ inflation-adjusted net worth surged between 2019 and 2022, and real incomes are up as well,” the bounceback from government-mandated Covid lockdowns were “rapid” and “robust,” and Americans are definitely better off than they were before.

See, the real problem is those incredulous voters whose memories serve them better than the commander-in-chief’s. If only they would just “forgive and forget.”

But it’s hard to “forget” your present reality. Just ask the dad slapping another layer of duct tape on the minivan bumper because outlandish used-car prices mean even a modest upgrade isn’t feasible. Or any coupon-clipping mother in the grocery store, who’s likely paying some 70 percent more to feed her family than just a few years ago, a number not reflected in the consumer price index. Americans priced out of air travel can’t expect to find road trip-friendly prices at the pump. And forget graduating from renter to homeowner. In this competitive market, rapidly rising interest rates just add insult to injury with each rejected offer.

Contrary to claims from the media and economic “experts,” Americans are emphatically far worse off than they were a few years ago. According to the same Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll Yglesias cites, “Roughly 3 in 4 swing-state voters said the country’s economy is headed down the wrong track and they are more likely than not to say their personal financial situation was better off under Trump than it is under Biden.”

With these unfortunate circumstances rightly coloring voters’ perception of Biden, Yglesias says his best bet at winning again in 2024 is the likelihood of Trump being his opponent. “Republicans aren’t planning to run a fresh-faced outsider onto whom the public can project its hopes and dreams,” he writes. “Donald Trump is a known and disliked quantity who is more plagued with scandals and legal problems than he was at any time during his presidency.”

Never mind that most voters can discern from whence these “scandals and legal problems” stem (ahem, Biden’s Justice Department and Yglesias-boosting media), but beyond that, the problem with this conclusion is two-fold — and simple.

First, poll numbers showing voters’ major dissatisfaction with “Bidenomics” fail to capture the other major categories where he’s bombed. These would include the wide-open southern border. Customs and Border Protection just released September’s numbers showing the highest single-month arrest total of all time: a whopping 269,735 (this despite the corrupt media’s assurances that the border is “more fortified than it’s ever been“). It would also include Biden’s foreign policy record, which involves sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine against Americans’ wishes, causing the deaths of 13 servicemembers by botching the Afghanistan withdrawal, and sending billions of dollars to sponsors of terrorism that funded the massacre of Israeli civilians.

Second, this conclusion ignores that Trump’s strengths shine in Biden’s biggest weaknesses. Not only did he help broker the peace-giving Abraham Accords in the Middle East and signal strength to Israel’s adversaries, but he also made border security a hallmark of his administration. Just look at the arrest numbers from 2020 through January 2021 compared to after Biden took office.

Trump also facilitated a booming economy focused on domestic production. Voters haven’t forgotten Trump-era gas and grocery prices before state and federal Covid responses torpedoed the boom, and those probably carry a bit more electoral weight than mean tweets and whatever other personality blemishes critics find distasteful.

Since Yglesias is so interested in talking about polls, maybe he should look at how much they show voters care about the economy — it’s a top (and, for many, the top) issue.

But when it comes to getting a bumbling Biden over the finish line once again, polls and facts and inflation don’t actually matter to the corrupt media. Everything is great everywhere all the time — except by every real measure.



The ATF Is a Rogue Agency That Needs to Be Abolished


Matt Funicello reporting for RedState 

In July of 2022, the Supreme Court, in a landmark 6-3 decision, ruled that the EPA overstepped its authority by creating rules and regulations regarding forcing power plants to transition to clean or renewable energy sources. SCOTUS ruled that the EPA, in effect, created rules that carry the same weight as laws passed by Congress, thus violating Article I of the Constitution, which states that all legislative powers shall be granted to Congress only. Thus making Congress the only body that can introduce and pass legislation, not a state or federal agency. 

The court says it [the EPA] is protecting lawmakers’ power from agency overreach, she said, but Congress routinely delegates its power to agencies that have substantive expertise in an area. Congress is also deadlocked over climate legislation and has not passed any significant laws on the issue, forcing agencies to rely on existing law.

This case is important because it applies directly to another government agency, one that routinely and consistently creates or proposes new rules and regulations that restrict or eliminate our Second Amendment Rights: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The ATF was officially established in 1968, with the passage of the Gun Control Act, and its principle and primary function is to enforce the nation's laws that regulate those products. The agency has existed, albeit with different names and parent agencies, since 1886 when it was an organic unit of the Department of the Treasury called the "Revenue Laboratory" within the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue. Historically, since the official formation of the ATF, it has often opined to Congress on issues relating to the introduction or drafting of legislation regarding firearms. This is where the ATF transitions from an "enforcement agency" to a lobbying and regulatory agency. 

There are a few problems with this, with the obvious one being the ATF continues to thumb its nose at the Supreme Court by continuing to enact its own rules and regulations regarding firearms without any congressional oversight. A perfect example of this would be the most recent rule proposed by the ATF, in cooperation with the Justice Department, when it comes to so-called "ghost guns." The ATF finalized their "Frame and Reciever" rule, which went into effect last August and changed the ATF's definition of what a firearm receiver is, along with requiring background checks and the application for serial numbers on all self-made firearms. The receiver rule essentially made it illegal for somebody to own what are known as "80 Percent lowers" for AR-style firearms without first applying for a serial number and submitting to a background check. 


Another famous rule change was done in coordination with former President Donald Trump when he signed an executive order banning the manufacture, sale, and possession of what are known as "bump stocks." With the swipe of a pen, the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, coordinating with the ATF, enacted a rule change that changed the definition of a machine gun to include the classification of the stock as a machine gun. One man and one agency literally enacted a rule that defined a piece of plastic with only one moving part as a machine gun. Not one piece of legislation concerning the stocks or receivers was ever introduced, let alone passed by either the House or Senate. 


However, when it comes to liaising with Congress about gun control laws, they do not come with any sense of neutrality or an unbiased mind. Even worse, they come with a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to tactics and the functionality of some firearms, and with an all-around lack of knowledge when it comes to firearms in general. When the Director of The ATF testified during his confirmation hearings, Steven M. Dettelbach repeatedly displayed his lack of knowledge when it came to firearms when he admitted that not only has he never owned a gun, but he has never been issued a firearm in any professional capacity either. Do all ATF agents who deal with firearms have expertise when it comes to all things firearm-related?  I do not know the answer to that, but I could rightly assume that they do not. In a shining example of my theory, a former ATF agent turned policy consulting and analyst attempted to give his "expert" opinion in a lawsuit that is challenging Colorado's "assault weapons" ban. In this document, James E. Yurgealitis attempts to give his voir dire or expert credentials as a witness to testify in support of the law.

Yurgealitis thinks that an "assault weapon," like the AR 15, is just too complicated to use in a defensive capacity because you have to manipulate the safety and, hold your breath on this one, rack the charging handle to load a round, or Heaven forbid you have to load a magazine. As a hoplophobe would typically say, they are just too heavy, and they need two hands to operate. Not to be outdone, Yurgealitis tries to say that because the 5.56mm round fired by a typical AR-15 platform rifle is more deadly than a typical handgun round, they should not be available to civilians for defensive purposes. I hate to break it to Mr. Yurgealitis, but that is the exact reason why I should be able to own, carry, and use that rifle for defensive uses. And, as you can see, compared to a standard 9mm pistol round fired into ballistics gel, the 5.56mm cartridge used in many modern rifles does cause more damage. Not only do we have the right to own such weapons, we require the capability to own a firearm platform that can deliver the maximum amount of damage possible to a target in order to stop that threat in its tracks. It would be absolute lunacy to argue that I, or anyone else for that matter, should only be able to own and carry weapons that do not cause a lot of damage and have less overall power and effectiveness on a target.


I have passionately defended our right and need to own these weapons. The ability to own and carry these firearms for the preservation of our lives, liberty, and property is without question. However, the ATF and the agents assigned to enforce the firearms component of the agency are in disagreement. 

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.

Jefferson, along with his fellow Founding Fathers, knew that in the spirit of our God-given rights to bear arms and defend ourselves from tyranny, as free people, we needed to be able to own and even carry weapons that were used in war. To reinforce the need to be able to carry a firearm, one needs to look no further than the text of the Second Amendment. 

To abolish the ATF would be to secure our God-given rights to self-preservation and individual liberty. Using the aforementioned SCOTUS case regarding the EPA, we must combat the ATF in their blatant and misguided attempts to illegally strip away our rights and eliminate that agency from existence. The agency has no right to exist in the first place, as it is not enumerated in Article One Section Eight of the Constitution. That applies to all of the three-letter agencies of the federal government. It is long overdue to reduce the size of the federal government, and there is no better time than the present to do just that. We, as conservatives, do not want to abolish the federal government. We want to reduce it in size to better reflect the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Let's start by eliminating the ATF.