Wednesday, March 31, 2021

"Stop it!"

Via NewNeo

Please don't impeach me!

That is the way Ed Driscoll introduces the jist of the story of a bill signed by Governor Cuomo legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. Read more here.

He sounds innocent to me!

How can we fight the vaccine passport?

Naomi Wolf:
"This is the end of human liberty in the West!"
"It is not about the vaccine. It is about your data!"

15 million vaccine doses ruined!

Brittainy Bernstein reports in National Review,
Johnson & Johnson has paused shipment of its COVID-19 vaccine in the United States while the Food and Drug Administration investigates a factory mixup that ruined roughly 15 million doses of the vaccine.
Workers at a Baltimore plant run by Emergent BioSolutions, a manufacturing partner to Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, reportedly mixed up the vaccines’ ingredients several weeks ago, according to the New York Times.
Read more here.

Ethical Patriarchy: Our Last Hope?

Well, here is something I did not expect to see today! In FrontPage Magazine, Jason Hill asks,
Ethical Patriarchy: Our Final Hope for Western Civilization?
Moral patriarchy is fundamentally defined by three foundational principles: (1) the capacity to provide, (2) the need to protect others, and (3) the aspirational desire to leave a legacy.
Patriarchy has lost its noble role because men have been made to feel irrelevant, disposable, and are systemically emasculated by an elite class of radicalized feminists and/or beta males who have joined forces with them because they have been socialized to think that masculinity, male leadership and male authority are synonymous with oppression. Or, perhaps, because they simply feel ambivalence about being men because they had weak fathers to begin with.
The sensibilities of our young people will need to be-reshaped. In practical terms, I recommend a set of policies that will aid a more refined republican mode of existence -- at least here in the United Sates. They include, but are not limited to: abolishing all government schools and universities; promoting Charter schools and granting tax credits to parents in order to give them greater choices in where they want their children educated; granting tax exemption for families where mothers homeschool their children; the drastic reduction of (or zero) income taxes for families in which mothers decide to remain full time at home to raise their children; applying severely punitive child abuse laws for tampering with the gender identities of children before they reach legal adulthood; repealing the Equality Act; illegalizing gang membership; extending the appellation of “terrorist organization” to groups that loot, burn and destroy property, such as Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA, and such groups that are white supremacist in nature; defunding all private schools that threaten the First Amendment; discontinuing all equity and affirmative action programs; instilling an ethos of law and order in all registers of society; teaching patriotism, civic virtues, pride in citizenship, and the concomitant responsibilities that ought to be exercised alongside certain rights; teaching students to see that moral male authority exercised in a household upheld by marriage functions with the same invariability as do the laws of nature.
Read more here.

What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die?

Dennis Prager writes in American Greatness,
When Judeo-Christian principles are abandoned, evil eventually ensues. One doesn’t have to be a believer to acknowledge this. Many secular conservatives recognize that the end of religion in the West leads to moral chaos—which is exactly what we are witnessing today and exactly what we witnessed in Europe last century. When Christianity died in Europe, we got Communism, fascism, and Nazism. What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die?
Read more here.

"The “perilous trifecta” of mental illness, addiction, and homelessness." “Treat ’em and street ’em”

Christopher Rufo writes in City Journal,
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world. Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness. If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before—and less capacity to treat and manage them
...In slaying the old monster of the state asylums, we created a new monster in its shadow: one that maintains the appearance of freedom but condemns a large population of the mentally ill to a life of misery.
I’ve spent the better part of two years looking at this invisible asylum in West Coast cities. In major metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, the scale of mass psychosis is overwhelming, and the inadequacy of the public response is self-evident. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how public officials could “solve” the problem of mental illness in these places, which are home to tens of thousands of individuals suffering from the “perilous trifecta” of mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. By contrast, the contours of the problem are much more intelligible, even manageable, in smaller cities and towns.
Read more here.

"YouTube To Remove ‘Dislike’ Feature As Biden WH Content Continues To See Likes Massively Trail Dislikes."

In the National Pulse, Natalie Winters calls our attention the fact that the Biden White House has been getting far more dislikes than likes on YouTube. So what is YouTube doing about it? They posted on Twitter yesterday,
"we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count.”
Read more here.

"Why did they stick their heads in the sand?"

Andrew Coy writes in the American Thinker,
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch wanted to hear the cases concerning presidential election integrity. They especially wanted to hear cases involving state election laws being over ridden by Democrat D.C. lawyers and Deep State operatives. An example of this was Pennsylvania. State legislatures decide state election laws; they cannot be overridden by outside lobbyists and people who intimate from the D.C. Beltway. But there must be four members of the Court who want to hear the case. Even Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett refused to hear the evidence.
President Trump and MAGA nation were shocked by Kavanaugh's and Barrett's silence. Kavanaugh and Barrett appear to have been "frozen" at the free throw line. It is noteworthy to mention that Kavanaugh and Barrett have the youngest children, and maybe they were frightened for their safety. Maybe. It is just so extremely odd that this multitude of legitimate cases from these multitude of battleground states with this multitude of evidence did not get enough Supreme Court members even to want to see what happened. They should, if for no other reason than to correct it so it will not happen again in 2022 or 2024.
History and historians will in the future write whether the Court's lack of decision-making and lack of courage were as bad as the Dred Scott and Korematsu decisions. History will decide, but only if those historians are balanced and fair-minded. Those decisions ruined the Court's credibility for a long time and even created future events that were far worse. Only time will tell if it will again be that disastrous. But over half of the 50 individual states are now rewriting state election laws so the 2020 election abuses will not happen again. The state of Georgia has already signed its own rewrite into law. States such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin are soon to follow.
Nobility and courage will shine the next time the Supreme Court gets a chance to do the right thing by at least hearing the evidence — at the very least, reviewing the evidence. If they refuse once again, things will get even worse — for half of the American population and most certainly worse for the credibility of the United States Supreme Court.
Read more here.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

"Missed me!"

Forty years ago today, John Hinkley didn't miss.

What is Blockchain?

Monday, March 29, 2021

Trump not fond of either Fauci or Birx

President Trump lets us know what he thinks of Doctors Fauci and Birx. Read his email here.

Chauvin trial began today re: the death of George Floyd

In the Last Refuge, Sundance informs us that the trial of Derek Chauvin began today.
Forensic evidence showed that George Floyd died from a “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Other significant conditions were listed as “arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease; fentanyl intoxication; recent methamphetamine use.”
A memorandum filed by the Hennepin County Attorney’s office on June 1 indicated that chief medical examiner Dr. Andrew Baker, who listed Floyd’s death as a homicide, thought the amount of fentanyl in Floyd’s blood was “pretty high” and could be “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” “[Dr. Baker] said that if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death,” the memo said.
Read more here.

"I just think the vaccine passport is a big mistake!"

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis calls for checks on local officials imposing lockdowns. He also says no vaccine passports and no mandates.

Border Cruelty

In his blog, Don Surber writes about the crisis at our southern border.
Upon his installation in the Oval Office, Chairman Xiden illegally stopped construction of the wall, unilaterally ended agreements with Mexico and other Latin American countries to curb illegal migration, and otherwise aided and abetted this human trafficking.
Read more here.

What is the proper role of elites in a complex modern democracy?

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball quotes from Christopher Lasch,
"We have become too proficient in making excuses for ourselves—worse, in making excuses for the ‘disadvantaged.’ We are so busy defending our rights (rights conferred, for the most part, by judicial decree) that we give little thought to our responsibilities. We seldom say what we think, for fear of giving offense. We are determined to respect everyone, but we have forgotten that respect has to be earned. Respect is not another word for tolerance or the appreciation of ‘alternative lifestyles and communities.’ This is a tourist’s approach to morality. Respect is what we experience in the presence of admirable achievements, admirably formed characters, natural gifts put to good use. It entails the exercise of discriminating judgment, not indiscriminate acceptance."
Kimball continues,
Lasch takes great pains to encourage us to abandon both pessimism and optimism for the more modest virtue of hope. There is much to recommend this. In any robust sense of the word, optimism involves turning a blind eye to the “odious facts” of the world around us just as pessimism involves a monstrous ingratitude in the face of the unearned blessings we receive. Both involve a culpable distortion of reality.
But what is perhaps most noteworthy is the way Lasch attempts to salvage some margin of religious commitment from the stern diagnosis he offers. Traditionally, of course, religion has functioned in part as a source of existential consolation. Lasch would have us downplay that aspect of religious teaching, eager, as always, to combat the tendency to “make people feel good about themselves.” For Lasch “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” A person with “a proper understanding of religion,” he says, would see it not as “a source of intellectual and emotional security,” but as “a challenge to complacency and pride.” There is of course something to this. For pride is assuredly the enemy of religious life. But how touching, how sad, really, that even here, even when it was a matter of life’s ultimate mysteries, we find Lasch arguing against the possibility of consolation or solace.
Read more here.

Did he go full-jihad?

In FrontPage Magazine, Don Feder shares with us his theory about the Boulder shooter's motivations.
Alissa is a refugee from Syria, one of the most anti-Semitic countries in a region notorious for Jew-hatred. Online, he described himself as a faithful Muslim. He believed Islamophobia is ubiquitous. He thought America was a racist, Islamophobic country. If only we treated religion-of-peaceniks as well as Christians are treated in Muslim countries. LOL. He despised Donald Trump. He drove 32 miles from his home in Arvada to a supermarket in Boulder for his shooting spree. The market where the murders took place (King Soopers) is part of a chain that advertises a large selection of kosher food. This particular market is favored by Boulder’s Jewish community. It happened five days before the beginning of Passover. Be assured that any anti-Semitic rants have been purged from his Face Book and Twitter accounts, which were taken down immediately after the murders.
Still, other than a synagogue (which, in many cases, are well-guarded, given the culture we’re in) what better place to go full-jihad than in a market with a wide array of kosher food, favored by local Jews, less than a week before Passover?
Read more here.

"What is driving this new antiracism racism?"

Victor Davis Hanson asks in American Greatness,
Why have we given up on the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr, that content of character rather than the color of our skins will arbitrate how we treat other individual Americans in a multiracial United States? And is the rejection of that vision the foundation of the new racism?
...There are inequalities in the United States. Many of them dovetail with racial differences. But 21st-century cause-and-effect remains unclear. And the chief dividing line in the age of bicoastal globalism is now class—the new-old word we dare not speak.
In truth, the Mexican American tractor driver in Gilroy has more in common with the white auto-mechanic, and both with the black truck driver, than any of the three has with the woke Jorge Ramos, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Antifa and Black Lives Matter hierarchy.
America is not a sinful racist mess, but a great experiment as the only multiracial, self-reflecting, and self-critical democracy in history that did not—yet—descend into tribal chaos and violence.
Read more here.

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Silence of the Court Eunuchs

Are masks a solution, or one of the problems?

Bookworm writes about masks here.

Beware!

In Hot Air, Jazz Shaw reminds us to think twice about legislation proposing changes to Section 230.
While Congress was grilling some Big Tech CEOs this week, Democratic leaders were busy in the background, working on proposals to change how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is written. Sadly, there are plenty of people on both sides of the ideological divide who have become so angered by the actions of Twitter and Facebook, along with the other social media heavyweights, that support for this sort of action seems to be growing. But what House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and his cronies are planning to do won’t stop some of the worst abuses of Jack Dorsey and company. Instead, it will open the door to unofficial censorship of anyone with insufficiently woke views and could lead to endless lawsuits, not just against the social media platforms, but all publishers of online content. (Axios)
Read more here.

Beautiful!

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Organizing locally against the greatest evil of our time

Read more here.

Paying terrorists

Adam Kredo writes in the Free Beacon about the Biden Administration's plans to resume payments to the Palestinians. The Trump administration had halted the funding after determining that the PLO had used the millions of dollars to fund terrorists. Read Kredo's report here.

Following the science

Follow the science?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,
...In truth, leftists and Democrats have become the purveyors of superstition. Their creation of a fantasy world is not because they do not believe in science per se, but because they believe more in the primacy of ideology that should shape and warp science in the proper fashion for the greater good. What prompted Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, or Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hysterically and wrongly to forecast widespread demographic or climatological catastrophe in just a few years was not ignorance of science per se, but a desire to massage science for our own good.
And, what about Andrew Cuomo?
Little need be said of Cuomo other than the applicable Roman dictum he created a desert and called it peace. When the federal government delivered a tent-hospital and a huge hospital ship, they went unused. When it sent ventilators, Cuomo raged that they were too little, too late.
When his own record in New York of COVID mismanagement became public (currently over 2,500 deaths per million population, the second highest state in the nation and about 35-40 percent higher than the open, but hated Texas and Florida), he lied about his own redirection of COVID patients into pristine long-term care facilities that resulted in a proverbial bloodbath.
In his adherence to science, Cuomo received an Emmy for his narcissistic press conferences and adeptness at blame-gaming. That he was brought low not by his lethal politicking, but by serial allegations of being rude and handsy with female staffers suggests that his unscientific approaches to the pandemic were of little concern to his “scientific” supporters.
...millions decided why stay indoors when millions of others hit the streets to protest, loot, burn, destroy, and injure—with the sanction of our experts.
“Science” is used to denigrate a perceived enemy of the people, and ignored to enhance a guardian of the flock.
As a general rule, the next time an official, a politician, or an expert lectures us on the “science,” make sure that he is not projecting his own unscientific biases onto others.
Read more here.

What a performance!

Thanks to Maggie's Farm and Ace of Spades

Friday, March 26, 2021

Google, Amazon and Apple's anticompetitive conspiracy against Parler

In PJ Media, Tyler O'Neill writes about how monopolists Google, Amazon, and Apple tried to destroy startup company Parler.
“The stated reason for Google, Amazon, and Apple’s anticompetitive conspiracy was that Parler promoted the violence at the January 6th protests at the Capitol. But we’ve learned today that was a bogus, pretextual excuse by three trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists (Google, Apple, and Amazon) to kill a competitor of Twitter (another Big Tech monopolist),” Davis declared. “Indeed, we now know that in the days and weeks leading up to January 6e's anticompetitive, Parler made over 50 referrals of violent content to the FBI, including specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.
“Now we know the truth, which is Big Tech used Parler as a scapegoat to destroy a startup company that was a viable threat to their social media dominance,” the IAP president concluded.
Read more here.

Who is the most unpopular?

Writing in the American Thinker, Charles Sullivan alleges that Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Governor of New Mexico, is
the most disliked woman in the state.
Despite no statistical correlation between the severity of a state’s lockdown and Wuhan virus deaths per million, Ms. Grisham has imposed some of the most severe restrictions in the country on New Mexicans including: state university sports teams not even being permitted to practice in state; state university sports teams not permitted to play any games in state; all high school sports shut down; New Mexicans traveling outside the state were supposed to self-quarantine for two weeks upon return; the same for travelers coming into New Mexico (which devastated the tourism industry); bars have been closed since March of 2020; in-person learning shut down for K-12 schools, and a total indoor restaurant dining ban for months.
Despite the brutal conditions imposed on the hoi polloi, Grisham, like some other blue-state governors, has a different standard for herself. In April of 2020 when all nonessential businesses were shut down, she was somehow able to purchase and get delivered expensive jewelry. A review of her discretionary fund found many questionable charges billed to the state, including a bill for construction of a doggie door; cleaning expenses for dog urine on rugs and large expenditures for alcohol and expensive food when the state had severe limits on group gatherings. When questioned about these matters the governor directed a representative to respond on her behalf.
Read more here.

Why is mental health given short shrift?

Brian Joondeph, M.D. writes in the American Thinker about the latest Colorado mass shooting, which
happened under the FBI’s noses. Perhaps they were busy with other important cases. Like the 50 plus agents investigating Trump-Russia collusion, spying on the Trump campaign and administration. Or the dozen plus agents sent urgently to investigate a NASCAR garage door handle with a loop that someone thought might resemble a noose.
The medical and mental health community doesn’t want “mental illness” blamed for mass shootings. Yet mental illness isn’t a single entity but a broad category. While people with brain diseases like schizophrenia “may be no more prone to violence than other people,” other conditions like paranoia may be. The Boulder shooter’s family noted his paranoia.
Mental health is given short shrift in the medical community, especially in Colorado. The University of Colorado closed its inpatient psych unit. Colorado has 12 inpatient psych beds for every 100,000 people compared to the national average of 30. How many shootings could have been prevented if those needing mental health care actually received it?
Marijuana is another issue, legal in Colorado since 2013. As reported in the journal Psychological Medicine, “Continued cannabis use is associated with a 7-fold greater odds for subsequent commission of violent crimes.”
Did marijuana play a role in the Boulder shooting or others? Crime and driving fatalities are up significantly in Colorado since legalization. Over 15 percent of adult reported using marijuana in a past 30-day period.
It’s the “white guy” that the media and the left are worried about while mental health and cannabis are conveniently ignored.
Read more here.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

The brutal shafting of Woody Allen

In FrontPage Magazine Bruce Bawer writes,
One thing is clear. This cancellation process is accelerating, the nets spreading ever wider. More and more, our very freedom to speak our minds is drowning in ever broadening waves of destructiveness masquerading as sensitivity and justice. While the Hollywood Blacklist endured for just over a decade and affected only about 150 people (most of them very privileged traitors and supporters of totalitarianism), the Woke Blacklist has affected thousands (most of them classical liberals, more or less) and has long since outstripped its 1940s-50s predecessor in both scale and seriousness.
Bawer writes about Woody Allen,
Of all the victims of the cancel culture, it’s he, I think, who’s been shafted the most brutally – and for, as far as I can see, doing absolutely nothing wrong. He may well have been put through more than anyone who was ever targeted by the Hollywood Blacklist. Will he not be recognized as a martyr until after he’s gone? And how many more undeserving victims will the Woke Blacklist claim before this barbaric Reign of Terror ends?
Read more here.

Consequences of marijuana legalization

The editorial board of the New York Post explains here how
Lawmakers have discussed legalization for three years, but they clearly spent too much time bickering about how to divide the tax proceeds and not enough grappling with the consequences for the general public.

Get off his property!

John Stossel writes in PJ Media,
Before dawn, dozens of union activists invaded a strawberry farm, shouting through bullhorns. This frightened workers and infuriated the farm’s owner, Mike Fahner, who thought that in America, owning property means you have a right to control access to that property — your home is your castle, and all that.
Not in California, where politicians allow union organizers to raid farms.
Read more here.

"China seeks sympathetic world opinion—at least until it has achieved unquestioned superior military and economic power."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,
China is in a race to achieve global hegemony. For a while longer, it seeks sympathetic world opinion—at least until it has achieved unquestioned superior military and economic power.
So for now, China feigns victimhood. And it seeks solidarity with others inside the United States and abroad who claim to be fellow victims of American racism.
Such naked artifice and hypocrisy may seem crazy, given China’s atrocious human rights record. But China views our own exploding budget deficits, staggering national debt, open borders, disingenuous “1619 Project,” the violence of the summer riots, and the epidemic of race-based reeducation workshops as all far crazier—and most welcome supplements to their efforts.
Read more here.

Today is the anniversary of the New York government order which resulted in the murder of over 15,000 elderly

Via Ace of Spades

"the rampant abuse of wiretapping to go on fishing expeditions to see which Trump voters can be charged with some contrived crime"

Ace wants to know
Has a single elected official pointed out that it's unconstitutional to criminalize a political belief?
Read more here.

"I have never called my dad for anything!"

Sure...and the Secret Service knows nothing about your gun.

A tale of gun control

Ace of Spades has a story here about gun control. It involves the son of a politician, two men who were "prolly illegals," some Secret Service agents, and more guns in that garbage bin across from a school than at the Capitol Hill "insurrection."

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Enjoy!

Photo via Misanthropic Humanitarian

Is it time to bring back hospitals for the mentally ill?

I have been thinking about the shootings in Boulder. Here are some comments from a commenter named Ausonius in the Last Refuge blog.
Ausonius March 23, 2021 5:03 pm “Motive”! AGAIN, idiotic media types do not know that a paranoid schizophrenic’s “motives” are IRRATIONAL! The mental illness is the motive! And why are paranoid schizophrenics allowed to be loose on the streets? Because DEMS and RINOS suddenly decided in the 1980’s that “THE MENTALLY ILL HAVE RIGHTS!!!” (They do, of course, but the kind of rights which the DEMS and RINOS have given them should be taken away from them.) And so, “non-violent” mentally ill people were let loose from the state hospitals, told to visit clinics to get the new psychiatric drugs, and the hospitals were closed down, because the idiotic politicians had just seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and mistook it for a documentary! 😉 (Okay, I exaggerate, but the hyperbole is close enough to reality.) PROBLEM: Mental illness is unpredictable ipso facto. Therefore, today’s non-violent fantasist can become tomorrow’s mass shooter. I have seen estimates that nearly 1 million mentally ill people should be hospitalized, i.e. the homeless situation would be nearly solved, if the mental hospitals were re-opened.

"Our cities are far from perfect. But a post-urban future could be even worse."

Joel Kotkin writes in Unherd,
today, the old saying that “the city air makes one free” all too often means freedom to be poor, to experience endemic homelessness, collapsing public infrastructure and rising crime.
And that was before Covid hit. Already many poor urban residents subsisted on transfer payments or worked in service industries. They were paid, usually poorly, to clean now-empty offices or work in restaurants and hotels. The lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have since pummelled these low-income workers; roughly 40% of Americans earning under $40,000 a year lost their jobs last March.
Unlike workers who occupy “the commanding heights” of finance, tech, marketing, and media , these people did not have the option of working from their kitchen tables or moving to suburban locations or smaller cities. Nor could they count on education systems to work their magic; most schools in American inner-city districts, in contrast to many suburbs and smaller cities, remained closed.
...In many cities — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York — “progressive” district attorneys have worked assiduously to restrain law enforcement. In California, where it is no longer considered a felony to steal anything worth less than $1,000, there has been a surge in property crime, including a huge rise in car thefts. San Francisco, for example, has seen the drug store Walgreens close ten outlets since 2019, citing elevated levels of theft and weak law enforcement. Meanwhile New York’s bodegas, small markets in ethnic neighbourhoods, experienced a 222% increase in burglaries last year.
Read more here

"The more you are willing to say what you think, the less willing they are to attack you!"

Is the residue accumulating?

The Victimhood Pecking Order

Stephen Green writes in Insanity Wrap,
Insanity Wrap wishes we could keep track of the Progressive Victimhood Pecking Order, but it changes too quickly and too randomly for anyone to say anything about with authority aside from “It fits the needs of the Party at the moment.”
If you want some hardcore honesty, Jews haven’t even been near the official list since Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967. That’s when Jews stopped being victims — giving the Left no further place for them on the Victimhood Pecking Order.
Read more here.

Ticking time bombs

Nikki Goeser asks in Town Hall,
If someone is a real danger to themself or others, should they not be taken out of society in order to protect that society?
...Evil people bent on harming or killing others will not be deterred by a waiting period. They will simply find a way. They will either wait it out and obtain a gun legally or buy a gun on the street in the black market, the same way people get illegal drugs in this country. They can also kill without a gun. Again, we are dealing with evil here, folks.
Read more here.

Monday, March 22, 2021

"Outcomes of an ideological doctrine sprinkled with financial graft."

In the Last Refuge, Sundance reminds us,
The Obama foreign policy doctrine was fraught with ideological hypocrisy as a feature not a flaw. Claim a desire for mid-east peace, set the middle-east on fire with the Arab Spring (Obama Cairo speech). Claim a desire for middle-class workers, yet facilitate corporate offshoring. Claim a desire for Israeli security yet attack Egyptian President Fattah al-Sisi for creating Israeli security. Accept a Nobel Peace Prize, set Libya on fire and kill thousands. Accept a Nobel Peace Prize, then attack Syria. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy.
Champion women’s’ causes on stage, yet embrace Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood who devalue women. Claim to support democratic elections, then undermine the majority election outcome of the British vote in Brexit. Everything, every – single – thing, about the Obama foreign policy was an exercise in hypocrisy. There were ZERO foreign policy successes, NONE. What we are seeing now is the same thing with Biden, because it is an extension of Obama’s third term. Hence, JoeBama.
Obama entered into a political agreement with Hillary Clinton to appoint her as Secretary of State. That appointment was purposefully made so that Clinton could graft for the Clinton Foundation and enrich themselves beyond imagining… that was the Clinton carrot. The agreement also contained guard rails, Clinton could graft to her hearts desire but she must maintain an ideological alignment with Obama’s team mission of diminishing the U.S. on the global scale.
Barack Obama undermined the U.S with his two year long apology tour, while Secretary Clinton enriched herself (and family), kept her mouth shut, followed orders and maintained the ideological undermining. Eventually the hypocrisy blew up in their faces and we saw outcomes like the rise of ISIS and the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi. Outcomes of an ideological doctrine sprinkled with financial graft.
Obama stood in Cairo, Egypt, and told the Islamic extremists the U.S. had a new policy and would not interfere if they turned violent; the Arab Spring started – Islamic extremists took over. The same type of messaging was done domestically in Ferguson, Missouri, and Black Lives Matter “burn this place down” started.
Eventually in Ferguson the head of local law enforcement, District Attorney Robert McCulloch, refused to bring a prosecution for a fraudulent narrative. Black Lives Matter was angry. • Eventually in Egypt the head of the military, General al-Sisi, drove his tanks into Tahir square and took over, restoring peace. The White House was angry. There is a commonality amid the anger games initiated by Barack Obama and his ideological tribe.
Fast forward to President Trump and you can see how he was able to cut through the ideology by focusing on the economics underneath governmental policy.
North Korea was stabilized by confronting China. Afghanistan was stabilized by confronting Pakistan. The mid-east, writ large, was stabilized by confronting the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria was stabilized by confronting Turkey.
Everything in the Trump Doctrine was focused on the economic root-causes of destabilization. NATO was stabilized by focusing on accountability for financing.
By stabilizing the economic incentives, the underlying extremism and/or threat was removed by peer pressure from the support network of the bad behavior. Trump avoided conflict by focusing on the right adversary, the true root of the problem.
One of the reasons President Trump was able to take this approach is specifically because he was beholden to no outside influence himself.
Read more here.

Government funded transgender surgery for kids

Stairs can be weapons!

Via Oregon Muse

Sunday, March 21, 2021

"God did leave one small backdoor into his universal code, prayer."

Have you been thinking about God? So has Gerard Vanderleun, who thinks he knows why some prayers are answered but most are not.
As I was saying, prayer — with or without God — makes us stronger and our desires and abilities more focussed just by happening. As a result, things you pray for tend to happen to you more often than things you don’t pray for simply because your abilities are more concentrated on the outcome. Pretty clever wiring for a God who does not exist.
It is only recently that I’ve come, in my dotage, to see that prayer — even unheard or unanswered — can be a powerful intellectual force in one’s life. And by this, I mean prayer in its most personally humiliating and elevating form: down on the knees and speaking out loud. Daily. Very abasing and very uplifting at one and the same time.
Read it all here.

"Why would they be eager to give up any of their newfound power?"

NewNeo writes in her blog about the anxiety many people feel related to precautions we've been following regarding Covid19.
...if they’ve weathered the storm safely, many people tend to have a gut feeling that it was all those precautions that kept them safe, and as a consequence they feel a sense of vague danger at dropping them. And yet it’s necessary to drop them (I’ve always washed my hands when coming home, and I plan to keep doing that). And our health mentors and blue state governors, as well as the Biden administration, aren’t saying much to guide people in the direction of normalcy. Why would they be eager to give up any of their newfound power?
Read more here.

"Dr. Fauci is very blasè and unconcerned about liberty!"

Democratic Party Trumpets

In PJ Media Tyler O'Neil covers a lawsuit in which a judge has this to say about the media in America:
“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions,” Silberman warned. “Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas. It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.”
“Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s. (I do not mean to defend or criticize the behavior of any particular politician). Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” Silberman noted. He added that these papers set the “orientation” of coverage for the Associated Press and most large papers across the country.
“Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet,” the judge added. “Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.”
Silberman also noted the tremendous influence “Silicon Valley” enjoys over “the distribution of news. And it similarly filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party.” He cited Facebook’s and Twitter’s actions to suppress The New York Post‘s bombshell story about Joe Biden’s involvement with Hunter Biden’s notorious foreign deals.
Read more here.

"Illegal aliens are resorting to home robberies and car thefts"

In Western Journal, Samantha Chang writes a comprehensive report on the catastrophe that is happening on our southwestern border.
A Texas mayor said the Biden administration’s border crisis has metastasized to such an alarming level that it’s unleashing a tsunami of criminal activity, including home robberies and car thefts.
Read it all here.

Friday, March 19, 2021

What officials like Fauci have accomplished

In his New York Post column, Glenn Reynolds writes,
When you manipulate people, they notice, and they trust you less. Do better.
Read more here.

Maybe just take it easy next time!

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1372935931204927491?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1372935931204927491%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2021%2F03%2Fbreaking-joe-biden-falls-several-times-boarding-air-force-one-video%2F

Thursday, March 18, 2021

"The border is gone! We've erased it! Come join us!"

California and Portland are doing great!

"Back to their old tricks!"

Sundance reports in the Last Refuge,
The same thing happened in 2014 when Obama blocked the media from reporting on the escalating border crisis. Breitbart news then came under attack for independently talking to border patrol and documenting the crisis. In the 2021 version the JoeBama administration is back to their old tricks.
Journalists are not being allowed to review or document the escalating crisis at the southern U.S. border. No pictures are allowed, and the Biden crew has instructed all government officials not to talk to reporters or journalists. They are hiding their motives behind the justification of COVID. NBC carefully attempts to call them out.
Read more here.

"Hopefully someone will pay attention!"

"China is eating our lunch. In an hour, they'll be hungry again!"

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Why not Mark Steyn?

Kane reports in Citizen Free Press that Dan Bongino will be the replacement of Rush Limbaugh. Read more here.

When Joe Biden told migrants to "surge to the border!"

Thanks to Citizen Free Press, we have video here.

Is your state one of 21 who are suing Joe Biden over his Executive Order stopping funding for the Keystone Pipeline?

Read more here.

ROGER KIMBALL ON THE BIDEN/PELOSI/SCHUMER ERA: For US, Gradual Ruin Is About to Become Sudden.

Instapundit quotes Roger Kimball,
Joe Biden has set us on a collision course with tyranny at home and armed conflict abroad.
Read more here.

13,000+ Unaccompanied kids detained at border

In PJ Media, Bryan Preston writes,
CBS Reports DHS Has Detained 13,000+ Unaccompanied Kids at the Border, Calls It a 'Crisis'
Read more here.

When will the Lambs become Lions?

In American Greatness. Max Morton writes,
Right now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with.
Our federal security services were weaponized and converted into secret police enforcers for the Democratic Party. If you are a 60 or 70 year-old Trump political supporter with no criminal record, you get a televised, dawn FBI SWAT raid and a de facto life sentence for a contrived process crime. If you are a ruling class criminal, on the other hand, the Justice Department looks the other way and you get sweet book deals, million-dollar GoFundMe accounts, and high-paying gigs on establishment media news shows.
Read it all here.

Trump vindicated in Michigan

Ed Driscoll headline in Instapundit:
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Trump Vindicated as Judge Rules Michigan Secretary of State Violated Election Laws.

Monday, March 15, 2021

Were the lockdowns the worst public health decisions ever?

The New Neo writes about the lockdowns.
...In the US – the country I know best – I believe that initially it really was a public health decision, borne of fear, the unknown, and the desire to be as safe as possible and buy time to prepare. But not long after, the lockdown took on another life and was propelled by much more than the public health considerations, as people in charge saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to accomplish a host of things they might otherwise have difficulty achieving.
First and foremost was to harm Donald Trump’s presidency and chances of re-election. Mission accomplished. Next was the sheer exercise of power over the little people. That can be very intoxicating, particularly for the left, and they learned a lot from it. One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! Not only is power intoxicating and even contagious for those in charge, but fear is apparently contagious to much of the public, and the habit of fear is hard to break
Read more here.

How you can tell

"Since when has the Pentagon declared war on a domestic news agency?"

How legends, not facts, are dominating American life

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,
From the health of FDR late in his third term, to “family man” JFK, to the moral “lion of the Senate” Teddy Kennedy, our media printed legends when facts were considered too heretical or injurious to themselves and their icons.
Yet when an ideological media decides to print legends, then we all descend into a nation buttressed by lies.
Take the “Russian collusion” lie. For three years, everyone from Hillary Clinton and the New York Times to John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and the newsrooms of CNN and MSNBC, assured the nation that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election through “collusion.” Indeed, Trump was declared an active Russian “asset.” That was pure legend from its beginning with no proof, and none of its purveyors have yet apologized.
The special counsel Mueller, while under oath no less, could not recall any real knowledge of the Steele dossier, or indeed Fusion GPS, its progenitor—the two foundational catalysts for his entire investigation. James Comey on 245 occasions swore to the House Intelligence Committee that “he could not remember” when asked about the basic details of his own FBI investigations.
No modern era has changed American life more than three events in the 12 months between February 2020 and February 2021—the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd, and the January 6 Capitol assault and riot. Yet in all three cases, legends, not facts still dominate.
In sum, the left-wing postmodern idea of “truth” as a mere pick-and-choose official narrative is now normal. The relativist idea that everyone has a legitimate “truth” of his own broke out of its incubator—in this case the university—and is now a scourge upon the land. Legends become fact, and lies become truth on the basis of their service to a cause.
In our upside-down world, the smeared “liar” is the revealer of such fraud. And sadly the deified “truth-teller” is in truth the abettor of falsity.
And all this is the work of amoral “moralists.”
Read more here.

"We are not just political pawns!"

A Hispanic man stands up to Biden and other politicians who do not care that cartels are selling kids at the border. Watch video here.

The overwhelming power of big tech

Instead of the government doing it, we have allowed big tech to censor free speech in America!

Homogenous and predictably sycophantic

Matt Taibbi writes about the Sovietization of the American media here.

#CanceltheCancelers, #CancelWoke Corporations, CanceltheCowards

Story here.

Saturday, March 13, 2021

JP Sears brings us excellent satire of the news

Is it time for red states to start using their power to nullify federal laws?

In the Last Refuge, Sundance explains why he believes it is time for red states to use the nullification process.
My personal opinion is yes, it is far beyond time. Factually, I have supported a total 50 state nullification process since 2005 when I realized Wall Street was in full operational control over Washington DC. Once you accept that Globalists are writing U.S. legislation and laws; and once you accept they are paying DC politicians for the passage of those laws; then they are supporting politicians who will advance those laws by changing the judicial branch; then you begin to follow events to their logical conclusion, and the necessary cleaving of a freedom loving electorate becomes clear.
Read more here.

No longer able to freely abuse anyone he wants

In New York Magazine, Rebecca Traisterwrites,
what we are witnessing, after a year of meteoric rise, is the extraordinary, crashing two-month fall of a man whose power, for a decade, has been almost total.
The brutality that Andrew Cuomo has brought to politics — connected as it has long been to his authority and his ability to take whatever he wants from his staff and his state — has, like his sexualized advances, been drained of a lot of its appeal.
We didn’t know we had an alternative. Now, it seems, we might have many.
Read much more here.

Which is it: de-fund the police or re-fund the police?

20 homicides this year so far in Portland, where $16 million was slashed from the police budget. At this time last year they had only one homocide. Read more here.

Maybe it is time to fly somewhere!

Kelly Yamanouchi reports in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN Airport Network will shut down after a 30-year run, as airport traffic remains stunted by the coronavirus pandemic and more people turn to their own mobile devices for entertainment.
CNN’s president Jeff Zucker announced to staff that the airport TV network will end operations March 31, according to a memo posted on Twitter by CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.
Read more here.

Thursday, March 11, 2021

How to deal with woke tyrants

In the New York Post, Glenn Reynolds has some advice for how to deal with woke tyrants.
If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful, people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.
Read more here.

Taxpayers on the hook to pay for it

Are you wishing you could afford transgender surgery? Join the military! The surgery is free! Read more here.

The numbers are daunting!

Michael Barone writes in the Examiner,
...President Biden’s administration seems determined to let in as many illegal immigrants as want to come.
The numbers are daunting. About 80,000 people tried to cross the southern border this January — about twice as many as in January 2020. That number could easily balloon this spring, traditionally the peak migration season, with fewer COVID-19 restrictions in place and with less cooperation with Mexico.
Already, more than 100 of those released tested positive for COVID-19, and Greyhound is now demanding negative test results before migrants board its buses.
Read more here.

You get $1400, but you pay $17,000!

Are you excited about getting a new $1400 stimulus check from the government? Would you be excited if I told you that the check is actually going to cost you $17,000? Paul Bedard reports in the Washington Examiner,
Smith, the top Republican on the budget committee, told NPR today, “If this bill was about direct payments to people and putting shots in the arms and vaccines, you would have strong bipartisan support across this Congress and across this country, but less than 9% of the entire spending in this bill actually goes to crushing the virus and helping distribute vaccines and putting shots in arms.”
Read more here.

"How grandpa and grandma got tossed aside for money"

Six females have now come forward with allegations of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conducting himself sexually inappropriate toward them. The latest is reported in the New York Post. Willis L. Krumholz and Robert Delahunty report in the Federalist,
The real scandal is what lay behind the high nursing home deaths in New York and a handful of other states led by leftist governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. It is the story of how grandpa and grandma got tossed aside for money.
What you don’t hear is that hospitals didn’t want to keep Medicare and Medicaid patients (especially Medicaid patients) in hospitals for too long, because longer stays with such patients are less profitable.
Sexual harassment by powerful men is bad. So is the falsification or concealment of information relating to a deadly infectious disease and government wrongdoing. But far, far worse is using political and legal authority to cause the agonizing deaths of a large number of elderly and other vulnerable people confined to nursing homes, and to do that as a cynical favor to monied corporate donors.
Read more here. Elric Blade comments in the Ace of Spades blog,
It's more than just the hospitals wanting to keep out poor-paying old people. It's also about the hospital workers unions. They are a potent political force. The hospital workers didn't want to do their jobs and treat these old, sick people. Better to turn them away and let someone else deal with them.
FenolenSpoke comments in the Ace of Spades blog,
if Cuomo is taken down it will be over harassment-not about murders. They have to protect the other murderous Democrat Governors.
Washington "Der Stuermer" Post commented in Ace of Spades blog
15,000 dead people - *yawn* 6 lefty women made to feel uncomfortable - HANG HIM HIGH!!!!!

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Meteor explodes in the sky above Vermont

It was the size of a bowling ball but exploded like 440 pounds of TNT!
Rafi Letzer reports in livescience,
A meteor streaked through the night sky over Vermont on Sunday (March 7), creating a spectacular light show and causing Earth-shaking booms as it burned through the atmosphere.
The meteor's explosive passage through the atmosphere released the equivalent of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT, suggesting that the meteor was likely 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and 6 inches (15 centimeters) in diameter, according to NASA Meteor Watch.
The space rock smacked into the atmosphere at about 42,000 mph (68,000 kph), according to NASA. It appeared over the northern part of the state as a bright fireball at 5:38 p.m. EST, just before sunset.
Read more here.

“Battered Conservative Syndrome.”

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance writes,
When you finally accept that the RNC wing of the UniParty hates you, literally hates their base of voters, only then can you begin to break the cycle known as “Battered Conservative Syndrome.”
Read more here.

Do you want more daylight year-around?

Kylee Zempel writes in the Federalist that now is the time we should be saving daylight all year long. Read more here.

"A blatant violation of the First Amendment!"

Under proposed new legislation sponsored by a Colorado Democrat,
communications-oriented online businesses, including social media platforms and media-sharing platforms with services offered to Colorado residents, would be forced to register with the new government ministry of truth. Failure to do so would classify as a class-two misdemeanor with up to a $5,000 fine each day until they comply.
Read more here.

Tuesday, March 09, 2021

"There will be war in the Middle East, and the horror of that conflict will shock the entire planet."

In the most important news, Michael Snyder lists nine events that indicate "That Chess Pieces Are Being Moved Into Place For A Major War In The Middle East."
#1 Literally one day after Biden was inaugurated, a massive U.S. military convoy rolled into Syria…
#2 Just a few weeks later, Joe Biden conducted his first airstrike against Iranian-backed forces inside Syria…
#3 Of course it was inevitable that Iranian-backed forces would respond, and they retaliated by launching rockets at a military base in Iraq where U.S. forces are stationed. Just a couple days ago, new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that there will be a U.S. military response “at a time and place of our own choosing”
#4 More U.S. airstrikes may come sooner rather than later. In fact, it is being reported that the U.S. has just sent six B-52 bombers to Diego Garcia…
#5 The Biden administration is also sending approximately 10,000 more U.S. troops to the Middle East…
#6 Russia has been busy making moves in the region as well. On Friday, Russia conducted an air strike on an oil-loading facility in Syria that is used by opposition forces that are backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Biden administration…
#7 Meanwhile, Israel continues to hit strategically important targets inside Syria on a regular basis.
#8 Israel is particularly interested in keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In an interview with Fox News, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz just stated that Israel is ready to attack Iran without any U.S. help…
#9 During a phone call last Thursday between Kamala Harris and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister made it exceedingly clear that his nation is ready to do whatever it takes to prevent the Iranians from developing their own nukes…
Read more here.

He gave them what they wanted, but they have had enough!

Michael Filozoph writes in American Thinker,
Conservatives may feel a bit of schadenfreude at seeing Cuomo in dire straits. But they should be sobered by the fact that if Cuomo is finally brought down for good, it will not be by a conservative resurgence in New York, but by committed leftists, equally if not further to the left than he is.
Read it all here.

Monday, March 08, 2021

Corrupt elections forever!

Joy Pullman writes in the Federalist,
Here are just some of the unconstitutional, absurd, nakedly partisan, and crime-indulging provisions in HR 1 that 220 House Democrats voted for.
The bill mandates universal mail-in balloting and requires states to wait ten days after election day for any outstanding tranches of ballots to be suddenly discovered in Democrat-run strongholds -- oops, I mean, allow all ballots to arrive. The Heritage report notes that "no-fault absentee ballots" "are the tool of choice for vote thieves."
Eliminate Voter ID Election Security
Register Millions Of Criminally Present Foreign Citizens to Vote
Prevent Cleaning Up Voter Rolls
Unleash Mobs on Political Donors
Gerrymander Districts to Favor Democrats
Mandates Ballot Drop Boxes
Read more here

The F.B.I. ain't what it used to be!

Anonymous wrote in American Greatness,
Christopher Wray, the director of FBI, testified to Congress on Tuesday that his agency has not found “any evidence” that Antifa or other anti-Trump agitators may have infiltrated the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C., and helped to instigate the riot in the Capitol. None!
This, despite a widely circulated video (to cite just one example) of BLM activist John Sullivan inside the Capitol telling a journalist, “We did this!” At one point he is heard saying, “We gotta get this shit burned.” If the FBI needs some other leads, it could check with the national security expert who provided a detailed account of the many suspicious activities he directly witnessed.
Read more here.

Wokism

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,
Melodramatic? Perhaps. But 280 former generals, admirals, and national security officials signed a letter warning that if Trump were to bring in any federal troops to keep the peace after the capital violence of late May and early June, riots that saw systematic attacks on police, vandalism, arson, injuries, and looting, and neared the White House grounds, he should be considered a dictatorial threat. “There is no role for the U.S. military in dealing with American citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech, however uncomfortable that speech may be for some,” they insisted.
The same group remained mute when nearly 30,000 troops flooded the streets of the capital in the aftermath of the January 6 riot inside the Capitol building. They maintain their silence as barbed wire and fencing now cordon off the city, and thousands of troops remain without a terrorist or insurrectionist enemy in sight—a militarization of the capital not seen since the Civil War. Tolerable and intolerable violence is predicated on ideology, not its nature or magnitude.
...Like the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyite hysteria, when wokism fades, we are likely to see its real catalysts revealed. And they will not be found to be misplaced idealism, nor heartfelt desire for a more ecumenical society, but mostly the age-old, narcissistic destructive road to career enhancement, fueled by customary ancient fears, envies, and hatreds.
Read it all here.

Armed

Sunday, March 07, 2021

Keeping score in the culture wars

via MOTUS

Totalitarianism

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball writes,
...Lenin once said that Communism meant “keeping track of everything.” We don’t call it “totalitarianism” for nothing. What they seek is total control of every aspect of our lives. Last week it was a book by Ryan Anderson and a speech by Donald Trump. This week it is some books by Dr. Seuss.
Have we come, finally, to the end of the insanity? I wouldn’t count on it. As Meghan Cox Gurdon put it in a column about the canceling of those books by Dr. Seuss, “If you’re being chased by wolves, throwing out a few chunks of meat may slow their pursuit, but it won’t put them off. Why would it? You’ve shown that you’re willing to feed them.”
Read more here.

Blue Anon

Saturday, March 06, 2021

Crisis on the border

The good ole days!

On second thought...

Who are you going to take down today?

Amazon Man Can Ban Your Books!

Joe Biden's ugly betrayal of the Iranian people

Mabariam Memarsadeghi is a leading advocate for a democratic Iran. She writes in Tablet about Biden's horrendous appeasement of the Iranian dictators. Read more here.

Math is hard!

In Just the News, John Solomon reports,
Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) is one step closer to overseeing the federal agency that manages about a half-billion acres of public lands and national parks, a $12 billion-plus budget, 70,000 employees and the leases for more than 96,000 oil and gas wells that produce nearly 10% of the nation's energy and generate billions of dollars per year in federal revenues.
In other words, the Department of the Interior wrestles routinely with budgeting and bookkeeping challenges and complex financial transactions and analysis on daunting scales. And that has some senators reviewing Haaland's nomination to be Interior Secretary feeling a bit uneasy.
...Depending on which version of Haaland's federal ethics reports and amended disclosures you pick, she made as much as $46,000 in income or as little as $2,250 in 2018, even as she crisscrossed New Mexico campaigning for Congress. Her lowest estimate puts her annual income at one-fifth the poverty level.
Read more here.

How did it get there?

Via pbird in MOTUS

From a guy who matters

Via Neal in Israel and KT at Ace of Spades

Friday, March 05, 2021

When governors have courage

Alana Mastrangelo reports in Breitbart Tech,
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced on Friday that he plans to sign a bill into law that would prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans’ viewpoints online, adding that censorship is “not going to be tolerated in Texas.”
Read more here.

The hidden hand of the Obama control agents at work

In the Last Refuge, Sundance gives us his perspective on what is happening.
Kamala Harris is the key to seeing the hidden hand of the Obama control agents at work. Harris’s associations are Obama’s associations. Harris’s crew is Obama’s crew. Anyone who is not Harris; and who carries a perspective of potential political influence; is now a thorn in the agenda.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was rising in influence, as a result he must be eliminated in order to retain the exclusive position of Kamala Harris as heir to the radical agenda.
Watch over the next several weeks, months and years and you will see prominent Democrats left with a decision…. Support Harris (meaning those behind her) and the RevCom agenda, OR be targeted for removal by the new radical system that includes a willing media taking targeting orders from the club.
Read more here.

2,339 lies from the media about the capitol riot

In the Washngton Examiner, Byron York is developing some perspective about the January 6 capitol riot. Was it an "armed insurrection?"
A search of the Nexis database of newspapers, websites, and cable news transcripts finds 2,339 times since January 6 in which the riot was described as an "armed insurrection." On many other occasions, the rioters were described simply as "armed." But the description requires an asterisk that is rarely, if ever, applied. A small number of the rioters did indeed have baseball bats or bear spray, and a few used flagsticks or even, in one case, a crutch as weapons to assault Capitol police. But the armed insurrectionists did not use any firearms. Before January 6, if anyone heard the phrase "armed insurrection," he or she might have assumed guns were involved. At the Capitol riot, they weren't.
Read more here.

Faster please!

Stephen Green links to this article in the Miami Herald about a start-up which is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors. In my own case I would ask, "Faster please!"

Thank you, Glenn!

As a daily reader of the Instapundit blog, I have wondered if the blog's affiliation with Amazon's affiliate advertising program would cause a conflict of interest for Instapundit's founder, Glenn Reynolds. It hasn't. Here are two stories Glenn links to today. One concerns Justice Thomas, and the other a Federalist journalist who decided the family's moral best interests would be to cut back on Amazon orders. Here is one more that is linked at Instapundit.

Mike Pompeo interviewed by Hugh Hewitt

At Hugh Hewitt's website, Hugh has an interview with Mike Pompeo that is worth reading here.

Making life tough for the working class

Glenn Reynolds writes in the New York Post,
...class war rages, even if people don’t want to talk about it. It’s not the Soviet-style class war, with “capitalists” on one side and “workers and peasants” on the other, but rather the educated “gentry class” (as demographer Joel Kotkin calls it) making life tough for the working class.
The gentry class is in firm control of most of the institutions in America, from big corporations, to media organizations, to, most especially, colleges and universities. The Democrats are the gentry class’ party, as the GOP increasingly becomes a diverse coalition of working-class and small-business people. And the gentry class is letting the working class have it.
Read more here.

"Hard-working, respectful, kind, patriotic, and in prison"

In American Greatness, Julie Kelly brings us the story of 18-year-old Bruno Cua, who was the youngest person arrested in the January 6 capitol breach. Read it here.

Camouflouge

Via Oregon Muse

Thursday, March 04, 2021

An Armed Insurrection?

In the American Thinker, Monica Showalter reports,
An FBI official had some bad news for Democrats at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Here's the Daily Caller: "How many firearms were confiscated in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds during that day?" Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson asked Jill Sanborn, the FBI official, during a Senate Homeland Security hearing. "To my knowledge, we have not recovered any on that day from any other arrests at the scene at this point," replied Sanborn, who serves as FBI assistant director for counterterrorism.
...Now there were no guns confiscated, according to a top FBI official, who spoke under oath. As Sen. Ron Johnson notes, this doesn't sound like any armed insurrection he knows of.
Read more here.

The Dictatorship of Woke Capital

Rupert Darwall writes in American Greatness,
Wokeness is directed at transforming America, using Wall Street and corporate America to help bring it about.
The culture wars are in reality a class war waged against the working class and all those whose livelihoods depend on their work—in manufacturing, transportation, and farming and, most of all, in the energy sector.
This war will come to an end only when one side or another is beaten and knows it. The presidential election of last November 3 did not produce that outcome. Despite President Biden’s calls for unity in his Inaugural address, his actions since indicate the start of a new, aggressive phase in this class war. For that effort, the Biden administration will have enthusiastic allies on Wall Street and among woke CEOs in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. For those looking to understand how we got here, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital is the best place to start. Along the way, Soukup brutally eviscerates many of the ESG and stakeholder myths deployed to justify woke capital. This is a book for our times.
Read more here.

Seven easy steps to become a beta male!

JP Sears is unstoppable!

It is March 4 in the U.S. Capital

Expect more volatility ahead!

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,
Getting kicked off social media by Silicon Valley moguls ironically turned out to be a plus for Trump. His once-controversial tweets and posts no longer distract from Joe Biden’s frequent displays of ineptitude. And in the lull, attention has turned to Trump’s fiercest critics—especially Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California. Both are now mired in scandal and Newsom is likely facing a recall election.
Ever so slowly, the image of the now muted ex-president is transforming from former bad-boy bully to current bullied private citizen.
In addition, the 74-year-old ex-President Trump acted like he was just 60 at the CPAC event. Seventy-eight-year-old Joe Biden increasingly appears bewildered—and more like he is in his eighties.
Insiders think impressive possible 2024 presidential candidates, like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a host of others, might better advance the popular MAGA cause—with the endorsement of Trump himself. The new standard-bearer then supposedly would lack Trump’s off-putting manner that alienated swing voters.
Events have radically turned political realities upside down in just six weeks. We should expect far more volatility in the next four years.
Read more here.