Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Keystone
2. States
3. Terrorism
4. Undo
5. No Fly
6. National Guard
7. Impeachment
8. Amazon
1. Keystone. On day one in office Chairman Xiden signed a series of Executive Orders all apparently aimed in sending all of Donald Trump’s achievements down the memory (or rat) hole. His energy (climate) efforts are particularly damning, bordering on treason, as he invited the Chicoms back into the US power grid. He also paid off his supporters in Russia by cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline currently under construction through the central US. This pipeline has long been a target of green and Native American protests. Biden signed an EO revoking its permit. No legal grounds for that revocation was given, giving the state governments the pipeline travels through legal grounds to take the Xiden administration to federal court and possibly win. The Canadian government got wind of the cancellation a few days before the EO was signed and was not happy. Keystone was one of the few things that Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and Trump agreed upon. It took Xiden and his merry band of O’bamaoids less than a day to royally irritate and insult the governments of both Canada and Mexico. Keystone will transport Canadian oil sands oil from Canada to US refineries for processing. Total jobs lost due to this are in the 70,000 range so far. Expect that number to increase. That number also includes no small number of pipefitters, whose union endorsed and supported Xiden for president. Treasury Secretary nominee Pete Buttigieg was asked about the cancellation during his confirmation hearings and mumbled his best Marie Antionette “let them eat cake” excuse noting that the union members could get new union jobs. Note that cancellation of a pipeline will force this oil to be transported by the more expensive and environmentally dangerous railroad and truck techniques, forms of transportation that are far more likely to suffer spills than pipelines are. Xiden is busily trying to reverse energy independence and return the US to dependence on Middle Eastern oil. As the pipeline travels through multiple states, expect those states to take the EO to court and ask for a national injunction, using one of the left’s favorite lawfare tactics over the last five years against them. Will it work? Normally, my guess is likely not. However, with 300 Trump appointed judges now on the federal bench, why not give it a try?
2. States. I have been watching a new approach to Big Tech censorship of conservatives. While Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects Big Tech from lawsuits at the federal level, there is no such protection at the state level. There is no constitutional protection against censorship from what is ostensibly a private corporation. PowerLine has run a series of articles on an approach to solving this problem at the state level. Part One is here. Part two is here. And a short follow-up is here. Essentially the approach is for states to pass legislation prohibiting Big Tech (and anyone else) from discriminating against state residents based on lawful political statements or affiliations. Such laws would allow Big Tech to continue deleting what they deem as dangerous materials as long as those standards were applied equally. They aren’t today. This allows anyone to sue for ideological discrimination and if they present a similar “problematic” account, post, tweet, etc in state court, they would prevail. Legislation is being introduced in multiple states to bring this online. This sort of anti-discrimination language can (and should) also be introduced at any of the multiple expansions of existing hate crime / discrimination laws that periodically bubble up in the legislatures from the fever swamp political left. Adding prohibitions against political, ideological and religious discrimination would be a brilliant approach. In a way, this approach is an application of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a way to kneecap the cancel culture by forcing it to live up to its own rules that would be used against ALL the corporate mischief masquerading as online safety from competing thought today. It would summarily halt the ongoing purge of conservatives and Trump supporters from the public square. It would open everyone so inclined to very, very expensive lawsuits, for discrimination and hate crimes usually carry multiple damages. It introduces the political left, whose mal-educated cadre now infest corporate HR and legal worlds, to actual consequences for their actions. And it couldn’t come soon enough.
3. Terrorism. Not being content with controlling all three branches of the federal government however tenuously, democrats in congress are doing their level best to emulate the Roman Army in Carthage, sowing salt on the fields, making sure there will be no return of Trump or anyone like him. One vehicle for doing this is the lawless and unconstitutional impeachment trial in the US Senate scheduled for next week. The other is legislation that calls everyone who disagrees a domestic terrorist. Glenn Greenwald predicted that “The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming” in his web site last week. The vehicle for this will be a radical expansion of “incitement to violence.” It will include the active support of the corrupt FIB, Intel community, and require lots and lots of military. The accusations of treason, sedition, terrorism by democrats against anyone who dares protest them or their actions helps set the stage for the coming crackdown. This will all be done with the gleeful participation and support of Big Tech who learned all the new surveillance and control techniques as they put those systems in place for the CCP over the last couple decades. And note that it will entirely be focused against conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters, with AntiFa and BLM getting a pass. For their part, Dick Durbin in the senate and Bradley Schneider in the House introduced two versions of what they blithely refer to as The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, both of which takes the tools and techniques used against the Islamists home to the US to those of us who will refuse to get in the boxcars quietly. The legislation empowers DHS, the FIB, and DoJ to act against terrorist acts committed by what they call white supremacists and other far-right actors. No references are made to any other threats. This is little more than cementing a partisan bias into domestic law enforcement, propagandizing a dangerous narrative, and treating local law enforcement as biased political actors when they arrest more of one race than another. In other words, it is the ultimate democrat wet dream.
4. Undo. Observation from Scott Adams a couple weeks ago seemed applicable after last week: Anyone else notice that Xiden’s EOs are more about undoing everything Trump than doing anything good for the nation? Back to the future looks a lot more like back to 2016 than anything else. Anyone else remember how well that worked out for the democrats? Not that they care.
5. No Fly. One of the forms of tyranny we endure is the ever present and burgeoning no-fly list. It originally started out with 16 members; people deemed too dangerous to fly before 9-11. After the attack, it ballooned, with over 47,000 members by 2013. I have not yet found a more recent estimate but expect the numbers have grown substantially over the last 8 years. The problem is that once on the list, the traveler has little recourse to getting themselves off it. DHS has a Redress Inquiry Program, a procedure that requires a traveler to fill out another application, submit a number of identification forms / proof, and wait while DHS adjudicates membership on the list. Nowhere in the process is the traveler ever told why they were added. Today, with the rolling cancel culture, the political left is using the no-fly list like a righteous sword, singling out Trump supporters for banning from the airways right and left. The FIB is actively looking at putting capitol attackers on the no-fly list. Yes, this is the same FIB that lied at least four times to the FISA Court about the Trump campaign connection to some sort of mythical Russian interference in the 2016 election. I’m sure they will do their jobs in the same professional manner they’ve conducted themselves over the last decade. Delta placed customers who confronted Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham on its no-fly list. The confrontation took place in a terminal at Reagan National Airport. There were a couple other disruptions onboard United Airlines by passengers singing the National Anthem and chanting USA on a flight to the Jan 6 protest. This made the crew very grumpy and triggered a warning from the FAA Administrator that unruly behavior on an airplane may violate federal law, get you on the magic list, and make you eligible for a fine and jail time if convicted. No word from the FAA Administrator about protests inside terminals getting in the faces of US Senators. Apparently, only the political left can do that sort of stuff these days. Alaska Airlines kicked 14 passengers off a DC to Seattle flight for refusing to mask up. Alaska Airlines has been particularly obnoxious over masking and kicking passengers off for failure to comply. When you are based in Seattle, you tend to adopt a Seattle view of the world. Somebody is going to have to do something about the high-handeness of airlines these days, and that somebody would be congress.
6. National Guard. Nothing says 81 million voters for an incoming regime like 12’ high fences topped with concertina barbed wire. Nothing says legal election like 25,000 National Guard troops with weapons in hand wandering around Washington DC before, during and after the inauguration. Nothing says respect for the deployed soldiers like doing social media background checks to ensure they are not overly supportive of outgoing President Trump. Nothing says respect for the military like kicking the troops out of their bivouac location and sending them to an unheated parking garage with little to no toileting facilities. And as a final extra added attraction, we have a Wuhan Flu outbreak among the deployed troops. Pelosi and the democrats are wanting to keep the troops around through March, which is a long time to be deployed without a substantive logistics tail.
7. Impeachment. Looks like the democrats’ second impeachment trial against Donald Trump will begin next week. Chief Justice John Roberts demonstrated his view of the entire event by refusing to preside over it. That task falls to Pat Leahy, one of the most partisan democrats in the senate. Early on, it appeared that democrats had multiple Republicans ready to vote to convict Trump this time around. Each day since the impeachment has seen that number decrease with at most Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski thought to still be possible votes to convict. Romney, the only Republican to support conviction the first time around, would be a good guess. What Lisa will do is anyone’s guess. The conviction is intended to make sure Trump does not run for reelection in 2024. Unfortunately, it is also patently unconstitutional, as congress has no power over a private citizen.
8. Amazon. Final story comes out of Amazon, which made an offer to the Xiden administration to distribute COVID inoculations for them. Amazon had this ability for years but made no similar public offer to the Trump administration. Apparently helping out an incoming democrat administration is far more important than saving the lives of their customers. Try not to forget this little point.
More later –
- AG