Interesting Items 04/29

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Bernie
2. Cult
3. Kate Smith
4. Felons
5. Privilege
6. Swamp
7. Romney

1. Democrat frontrunner Bernie Sanders had himself quite a week last week. Sean Hannity reported that his campaign insiders believe that he has decided he has not only won the nomination but also the presidency and is starting to act accordingly, which is why we are starting to see more than the normal amount of weirdness out of him.  Will discuss his voting felons in Item 4, Felons.  Bernie’s problem is that the democrat party will never allow him to be nominated, much less get elected president.  They are busily working in the background trying to figure out ways to defeat him.  Trump knows this and has tweeted as such to Bernie and his supporters.  Interesting discussion will be where his supporters go and what they decide to do after that happens.  How many sit home again?  How many of them vote for Trump in protest?  I bet both are non-zero and growing numbers.  Another article compares Bernie’s upending of the democrat party with what Trump is currently doing to the Republican party.  The Beltway Party no longer controls the Republican Party much to the consternation of Mitt Romney and the remaining never Trumpers.  Donald Trump does.  The article describes an identical movement going on in the democrat party, with Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib leading the change.  The leading crime families – Clintons, O’Bamas and unions no longer are in charge.  They just don’t know it yet.  Finally, Bernie supports emissions-free energy, so-called green energy, and has been calling Trump names every chance he gets about climate change and Trump’s decision not to play anymore.  Sanders supports elimination of nuclear energy, the only emissions free form of stable, robust energy other than hydroelectric in the US today.  This has led to announced closure of a large nuclear electrical generation facility in Vermont, Connecticut Yankee, before it needed to be closed.  As a result. Vermont’s CO2 emissions grew 16.3% between 1990 – 2015, twice as much as national emissions grew over that period.  Per capita emissions in Vermont rose 5% over that period while US emissions declined by 17%.  Close nuke power plants and emissions will rise.  Who would have thought?  https://freebeacon.com/columns/bernie-vs-the-democrats/

 

2. Cult. PowerLine did a fun little piece https://freebeacon.com/columns/bernie-vs-the-democrats/ last week detailing how the climate change people resemble nothing more than a full-blown religious cult.  They got it from a post at The Medium and pulled the ten signs of a cult from the piece.  Worth your time to read.  The warning signs the climate change movement is a cult are as follows:

 

1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability
2. No tolerance for questions of critical inquiry
3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement
4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions
5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil
6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances
7. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group / leader
8. Followers feel they can never be “good enough”
9. The group / leader is always right
10. The group / leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible

The article ends with the following:

“According to the established, scientific guidelines developed by cult experts, the Climate Change movement fits the bill for a potentially unsafe group.

 

3. Kate Smith. Most recent example of leftist silliness (and totalitarianism) is the unpersoning of former singer Kate Smith, whose rendition of God Bless America was used for decades at NY Yankee games.  She also had a statue, at least for a little while, outside the arena where the Philadelphia Flyers play hockey.  Apparently sometime in the 1930s, out of the over 3,000 songs she recorded, she did a couple that were racially unsensitive.  The PC mob finally figured this out and descended on her legacy like some insatiable zombie horde.  The two professional sports teams caved like proverbial cheap suits, with the Yankees instantly canceling her rendition of God Save America and the Flyers covering her statue so it looked like a burka before removing it.  One of Orwell’s observation was that “Who controls the past controls the future.  Who controls the present controls the past.”  The left continues to use 1984 as a how-to manual rather than a warning.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/philadelphia-flyers-remove-statue-singer-kate-smith-amid-allegations-racism-180972026/

 

4. Felons. Another way to expand the democrat voting base is allowing felons to vote.  Bernie Sanders strongly embraced this movement the last couple weeks, with a few of the Bernie mini-Me’s like Kamala Harris strongly on board at least initially.  Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor does not want to go back to Tallahassee, where he is facing investigations and indictments, so he is heading up an effort to register a million convicted felons to vote in Florida.  My guess is that he will not register many (any?) Republicans.  Back to Bernie, who makes a stirring case that the civil rights of felons serving their time in jail must be protected at all costs.  This ignores the very real fact that jailing someone is by definition a limit in the civil rights of the convicted, and as such a punishment.  When the Q&A got to the point where Bernie was defending restoration of voting rights to terrorists, he started looking a bit silly, though there is a better approach.  That approach would be to ask these democrats why nor simultaneously restore the right to keep and bear arms to felons in and out of jail?  After all, that is also a constitutionally protected civil right, one they are denied upon being convicted.  Given that democrats are falling all over themselves trying to take the guns out of the hands of every single American, the cognitive dissonance inherent in this discussion would be at least entertaining.  Now, I am a fan of restoring civil rights of felons, anybody, after they have paid their debt to society.  But voting is not the only civil right they have lost as punishment.  Restore one civil right?  You bet, just as long as you restore them all.  https://eligibility.com/restore-gun-rights

 

5. Privilege. The left describes “privilege” specifically “white privilege” as “inherent advantages a white person possesses on the basis of race in a society characterized by racial inequality and injustice.”  A PJ Media post last week asks, “Why must we all bot wo transgender privilege?”  Why indeed?  Transgenderism is defined as a response to gender dysphoria, a conflict between a person’s physical sexuality and the gender they identify with.  Since the O’Bama years, the official approach to this conflict has been to celebrate it rather than treat it.  Indeed, there are at least 15 states that have passed legislation making it illegal to treat it.  Public schools have gone so far as to do their level best to recruit kids at all ages into this confusion, this conflict, introducing confused kids to the wonderful world of hormone treatments and medical mutilation, much of it without the approval, support or even knowledge of their parents.  These are the same schools that won’t allow your kid to take an aspirin without a notarized order from a doctor.  We are starting to see other dysphorias – age and race – start hitting the general public.  One of the liberal government demands is that everyone else must refer to the sufferer as whatever they want to be known as, what they identify as.  Some of this goes so far as to actually change the pronouns used in common language with punishment to swiftly and surely follow if the incorrect word(s) is (are) used.  College campuses are getting particularly good at this.  So, this confusion is being used (as usual) to control how we speak and interact, as simply another excuse to grow the power, intrusiveness and control of government in our daily lives.  https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/transgender-privilege-why-must-we-all-be-forced-to-bow-to-it/

 

6. Swamp. The Wash Free Beacon ran an article last week on the complete politicization of the intelligence establishment, now firmly in the liberal democrat political camp.  The Long March through the bureaucracy by the left sooner or later successfully got everywhere.  Limbaugh has long believed the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence failure was an intentional action designed to embarrass the Bush 43 administration, so it dates back at least 15 years.  Some of us point to algore’s Reinventing Government effort starting in 1993 as a primary vehicle to cleanse the Washington bureaucracy of all Reaganites and Bush 41 hires starting in 1993 as the beginning.  I would tend to believe the latter, as that was about the time when the bureaucracy started getting permanently turned to liberalism.  This political bias has fed mouthy idiots likes James Clapper and John Brennan and was one of the foundations of the orchestrated coup alleging Russian collusion in the 2016 election out of the intelligence community.  It was also the reason that General Flynn, a true military intelligence guy was so hated and despised.  Flynn knew – and still knows – where the bodies are buried, and has a lot of former military people who have been working behind the scenes to root out the government employees who got themselves into the business of playing in the deep end of the political pool rather than doing what they were hired to do.  It is why he was destroyed.  It is why Trump may dust him off and reappoint him a day or two after the 2020 election should he win.  https://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-intelligence-institutionally-politicized-toward-democrats/

 

7. Romney. Losing 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney got himself elected as US Senator from Utah, replacing Orin hatch in 2018.  Since taking office, he has positioned himself smartly with the never Trump world, never missing an opportunity to deliver a poorly timed cheap shot against the President.  Last week, he was shocked, simply shocked and “sickened by the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President” by what was in the Mueller Report.  For his part, Trump responded that had Romney chosen to fight as hard against O’Bama as he is currently doing against Trump, he would have won in 2012.  One cheap shot deserves another.  There is at least one blogger out there that believes Romney still has his eyes on the presidency, intending to become the next Gerald Ford after the democrats and never Trump Republicans chase Trump and Pence from office.  Given the treachery of the never Trumpers in the US Senate these days including Alaska’s very own Lisa Murkowski, it wouldn’t surprise me.  The thing Romney is missing would be the tar and feather receptions for Republican senators that vote to convict when they come home.  In a related story, the remaining McCain family channeling their dearly departed announced they would be supporting Joe Biden in 2020, demonstrating once again the unity of the Beltway Party and why Trump must continue to drain the swamp.  At least these clowns are predictable.  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/19/mitt-romney-im-sickened-by-trumps-behavior-in-mueller-report/

More later –

– AG