Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. ANC Mayor
2. Pipelines
3. DoD
4. Inflation
5. Tickets
6. Guardian
7. Heist
1. ANC Mayor. After a miserable 6 years with democrats in charge here in Anchorage, voters took a first step last week electing a strong conservative as Mayor. It took a runoff to do the trick as the city is starkly divided not unlike many cities these days. We are still left with a veto-proof Assembly that will split 7-4 – 9-2 against what the mayor wants to do over the next 3 years. 5 of these seats are up for reelection next April. Two of the Assembly members will include the guy who lost, Forrest Dunbar, and the acting mayor, Austin Quinn – Davidson, neither of which had anything good to say about incoming Mayor Dave Bronson. This race marks the first successful mayoral election for a Republican Mayoral candidate since the first mail-in ballot election in 2018. Local media and Dunbar spent a lot of time painting Bronson as extreme, though the only extreme language and rhetoric (as usual) came out of the political left and unions. Apparently polling between the two campaigns diverged sometime before the final week of the runoff, as Dunbar and his union backers went relentlessly negative. It didn’t work. Local election expert Randy Ruedrich posted an analysis of ballots Sunday, noting several interesting things about the election. First, it was the highest turnout, participation, of any municipal election at just over 38% of eligible voters. Runoff voter participation increased by over 15,000 from the regular election. Bronson won by a relatively tight but comfortable 1,058 votes. Over 6,800 who participated in the April election did not participate in the runoff. Over 22,000 who did not vote in April did vote in the runoff. Bottom line from all this is that Republicans can participate in and win mail-in elections. But as usual, you MUST keep an eye on everything, especially the counting and manipulation of ballots during and after the election, expecting the worst and making sure that doesn’t happen. Consider it a basic lesson learned from the Nov 2020 debacle. Bronson takes office in June with an actively hostile (and nasty) Assembly, a homeless problem, ongoing public theft of CARES Act funding, and spending as high as it has ever been in Anchorage. He has a Police union that decided to sit this election out, a group of wannabe Marxists in the Anchorage Firefighters union, and an actively hostile AFL-CIO. Interestingly enough, as a commercial airline pilot, he is also a union member which should bunt union-based criticism a bit. Active anti-police hostility by the woke Assembly majority will tend to drive the police into supporting where Bronson wants to go. I think the homeless problem is going to be the easiest to solve, as all he has to do is quit doing what the last couple mayors were doing and start doing the sorts of things that similarly sized cities without homeless problems are doing.
2. Pipelines. Here’s a fun question: What happens when there is apparent collusion between a US President and Russia? Answer: Crickets. In the continuing process of undoing all things Trump by Harris – Xiden, the US withdrew sanctions aimed at companies laying pipe for the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The sanctions were passed by congress in 2019 as part of the Defense authorization Act and were intended to obstruct construction of the pipeline. Trump had offered to sell Germany US oil instead. This will give Putin a major political and economic victory, leverage over a relatively feckless German government. What did Harris – Xiden get in return for caving in on this project? Absolutely nothing, though I do expect a significant amount of laughter out of the Kremlin and Beijing. Interesting that every democrat within spitting distance of a microphone spent the last 4 years accusing Trump of being Putin’s stooge. It does set up an interesting discussion, though with Putin getting his pipeline, but the US with Xiden’s cancellation of Keystone XL cannot. Even Xiden’s cabinet secretaries can’t get their stories straight, with Energy Secretary Granholm opining on the Colonial Pipeline shutdown last week, noting that “pipe is the best way’ to transport fuel, that is unless it is the Keystone XL or the pipeline in northern Michigan that Whitmer is attempting to shut down. Different administrations come into office with different governing philosophies. Some work better than others. The third O’Bama term, AKA Harris – Xiden, appears to be based on not doing anything that Trump did, undoing everything he did, and hoping for the best. Somehow, I don’t think that is going to work as well as they think it will.
3. DoD. Swamp creature Lloyd Austin’s start as SECDEF is going nearly as well as that of the Space Force CC. Problem with both is pushback to their newly adopted BLM / CRT / inclusive worldviews.
- The Army ran an animated recruiting ad loosely based on Heather Has Two Mommies, with the career progression of a young woman with two lesbian mothers thru the ranks. This was quickly contrasted with a Russian recruiting ad showing manly men doing things that manly men do. Ridicule took place early and often. Things got so bad that the YouTube comment section for the ad was disabled. Ted Cruz got involved in the festivities and was summarily blasted by all the Usual Suspects for things the Usual Suspects usually whine about. As usual, Cruz was right.
- For a newly created branch of the service, Space Force is not distinguishing itself with commitment to mission, that is unless their mission is being woke. Perhaps they will improve over time, as they seem to be spending a lot of time concentrating on the wrong things. They started with public comments by its Senior Enlisted officer aimed at Tucker Carlson in full snark talking about maternity flight suits a couple months ago. The guy was in uniform on YouTube and a Marine (who should have known better) to boot. But Tucker committed Truth in public and must be summarily destroyed, which Austin’s newly woke and submissive command structure fell all over themselves to do. Last week, a Space Force LtCol Squadron Commander was fired for comments in a podcast promoting his new book claiming that Marxist ideologies were spreading in the US military, and that was a Bad Thing. He was relieved over “… loss of confidence in his ability to lead” a not uncommon description of a reason for firing. Commanders get fired all the time. Sometimes there are even good reasons. Sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes people who desperately deserve to be fired don’t get fired, especially in increasingly political times like today. The 3-Star who fired him also initiated an investigation into whether or not his comments “…constituted prohibited partisan political activity.” Expect the purge to continue until morale improves.
- Austin’s point man for the ongoing purge of Trump supporters is a guy named Bishop Garrison, a West Point grad and former vet. He is the Director of National Security Outreach at Human Rights First. He is now in charge of Austin’s Countering Extremism working group. Zampolit has finally shown up in the US military in the form of unending racialists. They should remember that Zampolit were completely despised in the Soviet military. I don’t think they will be any better loved on this side of the Atlantic. One of the things he and his working group are going to do is monitor social media accounts of military people. While it will start with active duty, I do expect it to be quickly be extended to accounts of retirees and contractors and anyone else with any military stink on them which means it will shortly show up in the VA. Guys, they are coming for all of us. Sucks to be them.
4. Inflation. I pointed out the possible new inflation rate as a vehicle to introduce readers to Kartik Gada and the ATOM last week. As it turns out, he already covered what is going on, and claims to have predicted it. Bottom line? Expected. Normal. And we are not at risk of reconstituting the massive inflation of either the Weimar Republic or Venezuela here in the US any time soon. What is going on today is a temporary blip that will stop just as quickly as it started. His YouTube channel is a pretty good one to subscribe to.
5. Tickets. Yet another example that traffic tickets are viewed by local governments as little more than taxation rather than a law enforcement tool comes from Washington DC which tried to gouge an elderly couple out of $2,000 worth of tickets racked up following a carjacking. DC is laced with traffic cameras that rack up the free money into the local coffers. Several attempts by the couple to get the tickets and fines waived by local government were ignored and slapped aside until public pressure on the city to relent, which it did nearly 6 months following the first notice of fines was sent to the couple. They didn’t relent until a local TV station took up the case. FEE had a pretty good article on the story that is worth you time.
6. Guardian. The Missouri Family Courts system has been running an incredibly corrupt guardian ad litem system for years. The scam involves court-appointed guardians who collude with judges, therapists, medical professionals, and other lawyers to gouge parents involved in custody disputes of their life savings. They figure your net worth, and keep ordering therapy, testing and analysis until all that money is gone. Needless and expensive evaluations are ordered, generally from professionals who are in on the scam. Abuse allegations are routinely ignored. Results of investigations are redone time after time until they agree with what the guardian ad litem wants for their pre-assumed results. The system as practiced in Missouri is thoroughly corrupt. Happily, the truth is finally starting to come out.
7. Heist. And it is not just the Missouri family courts system that appears thoroughly corrupt, so too is the FBI. A Tom Knighton piece in Tilting at Windmills last week described a March 22 federal raid on US Private Vaults. They had a warrant allowing them to seize property belonging to the company as part of a criminal investigation. Safe deposit boxes in the vaults were specifically exempted. Too bad, for the box owners, as the FIB seized more than 800. The FIB made no attempt to contact any of the owners of the safe deposit boxes and as of this writing have not returned any of the property to the owners. Legal attempts to force the FIB to return the stolen goods have been so far unsuccessful. There are at least 5 lawsuits pending in federal court to force the return.
More later –
- AG