Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Reaction
2. Campaign
3. Colorado
4. Chik-fil-a
5. Recall
6. Monument
1. Reaction. This falls out of a rolling discussion with some Valued Correspondents over what changes we think are going on beneath the surface in the US today. First, the typical weasel-worded personal caveat: One of the things I do is find patterns from time to time. The drawback to that is I recognize patterns that don’t exist as the brane attempts to create substance out of chaos. Solution to that is to propose a description and let it ride for a while, seeing how well it describes what I think I am seeing and tweak it based on new information. I also make mistakes on a regular basis but attempt to learn from them, so this will be a bumpy ride. With that in mind, let’s take a first look at a possible movement roiling the body politic today.
- First, the big assumption. The Deep State knows it is in deep kaka, in the process of being summarily rejected by the citizens of this nation, yet they are bound and determined to survive, prevail, and get even with the citizenry for our temerity to reject them. Think of Hilly’s palpable anger at getting rejected and you will be close. They blew up the election system in 2020 to stop a second Trump term. They are blowing up the legal system today in an attempt to do the same thing. They think they can pick up the pieces afterwards unopposed. They would be wrong.
- The second assumption is that the political left including the Deep State and its cheerleaders are doing their level best to trigger a violent reaction from the right that will allow them to call us terrorists and treat us with the same tender loving care they are currently treating the Jan 6 political prisoners or Janet Reno treated the Branch Davidians. So far, we have not risen to the bait. I pray we don’t. Sadly, some might. Note the tacit approval of violence by the leftist mob, almost always rent-a-mobs led by FBI and other informants.
- The left (Deep State and their apologists) crafts their argument as a dilemma – a simple heads or tails choice, our way or the highway. That dilemma is being rejected, as there are multiple other choices. They go by many names, Irish Democracy, “… the quiet dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs”, is the most famous one. Thing is, we Americans don’t usually go quietly into that good night. We are rather noisy and misbehave.
- Scott Adams is of the opinion that Americans, specifically American men are on the verge of flipping. We allow ourselves to get pushed around and put up with a lot of garbage right up to the point where we stop. And woe be unto those doing the pushing when that happens. Think of tar and feathering during the revolutionary days or the Vigilance Committees in California after top to bottom corruption finally got the attention of the general public. What does the Deep State do when the Vigilance Committees get trotted out again?
- If American men are flipping to a “We’re not playing anymore” mindset, there should be some evidence. There might be, but as usual, your mileage will vary. We don’t have to go back much farther than the TEA Party 15 years ago to see the beginnings of the current uprising. It took a concerted effort by the O’Bama IRS and tacit support by congress to slap it down. The anger didn’t go away, electing multiple congress critters, rematerializing as the Trump MAGA in 2015. The next pulse was response to the COVID lockdowns, total rejection of the vax and all things COVID. The airline wars over masking were particularly instructive. This was closely followed by public rejection of the trans cramdown and pushback over the leftist takeover of public education with the educrats and their unions pushing it for all they are worth.
- Over the last few weeks, higher education finally gave the movement an opening to address their problem, with the disastrous congressional testimony by presidents of three Ivy League universities as they tried to defend antisemitic activities on their campuses by DEI indoctrinated mobs. The testimony cost the Penn president her job. It is well on its way to costing Harvard its very existence and Barak O’Bama’s defense and their silly little $90 billion endowment isn’t going to protect them much. OTOH, the Harvard Corporation may have decided that they don’t want to be an educational institution anymore, opting instead to become a well-funded democrat activist NGO. Aside: Note O’Bama’s continuing participation and leadership in defense of the Deep State )TEA Party IRA and Harvard). PowerLine this morning suggests that O’Bama is trying to defend his DEI house of cards from complete and utter destruction. He won’t be successful as DEI goes down just as hard as ESG.
- Overseas, we have another example in Israel and Gaza, where the Israelis are just starting Phase 3 of the longest war they’ve fought since independence in 1947 – 1948. They played the international community game for a long, long time. Now they are in FIFO (f-bomb around and find out) mode. This time around, they are going to utterly destroy Hamas, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and sooner or later, the Iranian mullahs.
- In Argentina, we have the election of a libertarian small government president who is busily deconstructing the Deep State in Argentina, a Deep State that has been in charge since the fascism of the Perons was installed in 1946. What happens when Republicans start running on the identical argument democrats have been running on for over a century: “You can vote yourself out of poverty”? Technique will differ from the dems, as all we have to do is get the regulatory cruft of the Deep State out of the way. The Deep State won’t go quietly.
- None of this happens unless something is going on under the covers. If the readership has any better ideas, I would like to hear them. Take this as an opening bid on what will be an interesting journey.
2. Campaign. Time for a short look at the 2024 campaign from the democrat side. The most notable thing is over the last month, democrats are no longer running on policy, any policy. It is all character assassination, all the time. Their campaign rests on a three-legged stool of hoaxes, the Fine People hoax out of the Charlottesville riot (Biden’s stated reason for running for president in 2020), The Russia Collusion hoax, and the Jan 6 Insurrection hoax. Add to this the Trump = Hitler / dictator hoax and we have the makings of a loud and obnoxious campaign season. Incessant use of Trump = Hitler is starting to work a lot like Republicans = racist, in that when everything is Hitler, nothing is Hitler. They are starting to trot out other dictators, last week mentioning Mussolini and Orban. The best way to counter all this hysteria is to laugh at it. Ridicule is one of the more powerful persuasion tools.
3. Colorado. Speaking of insurrection, the Colorado Supreme Court discovered quite unexpectedly (/sarc) that President Trump while president did indeed lead an insurrection and as such disqualified him from the primary ballot in the state. In immediate response, the Colorado Republican Party suggested they would be nominating their candidate by convention. Since the LGBTQWTF-led democrat takeover of Colorado politics 15 years ago, the Colorado Supremes are today 7-0 democrat nominees. The vote to boot Trump was 4-3, with all three Ivy League graduates voting in the affirmative. They reportedly relied on the findings from Nancy Pelosi’s kangaroo Jan 6 Committee, the same committee that managed to destroy all tapes, transcripts, videos, and records of closed-door interviews. The Committee never allowed Trump to defend himself from any charges either. The court tossed its brown floater to the SCOTUS, begging them to intervene in yet another national election, a cute attempt at a twofer to damage both Trump and the reputation of the SCOTUS. In response, at least three states are pushing legislation to kick Biden off state ballots for bribery allegations. The Colorado Supreme’s opinion was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The Section was intended to keep former officers of the Confederacy out of public office following the war. The problem is that Trump was never charged, tried nor convicted as an insurrectionist in any federal court. While the second impeachment did not find him guilty after he left office, I hesitate to even bring that legal disaster up in any court. There is a SCOTUS opinion that requires a trial, conviction, and all appeals to be heard before anyone is disqualified from a ballot. I would think that the Trump legal team simply needs to take the Colorado Supreme opinion to a single federal court judge in Denver (or anywhere else in Colorado), cite the SCOTUS opinion, point out the complete lack of due process and get an immediate injunction. If the federal judge is a Clinton, O’Bama or Biden appointee, expect an appeal.
4. Chik-fil-a. Last week’s Christmas present from the NY Assembly to Chik-fil-a is legislation making its way through the process requiring companies contracted to provide food and beverage along the Thruway and Port Authority to stay open seven days a week to provide food to travelers. As Chik-fil-a is closed Sunday on religious grounds, this can be viewed little more than yet another legislative assault on Christians by the NY state government. It is particularly ironic as vast swaths of the NY state government is closed on weekends. Apparently, their services are not as important as those of restaurants and fast-food joints. Chik-fil-a could have a lot of fun with this demanding weekend hearings and court dates.
5. Recall. When is a software update, a patch, reported as a recall hitting the entire fleet of vehicles sold by a particular corporation? It happens when that company is Tesla, owned by Elon Musk. Media nationwide was in their collective Happy Place last week, reporting that Tesla announced a recall for nearly all of its vehicles sold over the last several years to fix a system linked to its autopilot. Reportage was lockstep and the joy at Musk’s incompetence was palpable. The story morphed in some places that the feds ordered the recall and you had to bring your Tesla into a shop to get it done before the vehicle killed you on the spot. Actually, the recall turned out to be a software patch delivered online while the vehicle was awake and connected to Tesla. Owners reported the update as automatic and transparent. The war on all things Musk continues.
6. Monument. Last week’s exercise in memory holing war and remembrance was a DoD ordered removal of the Reconciliation monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The excuse given by all the Right People was that it was actually a Confederate monument, and as we all know, all things Confederate today are double plus ungood and must be removed. The monument was authorized in 1906 and is listed as the Confederate Memorial in Wiki as the lefty flying monkeys rewrote the Wiki entry. DoD hid behind a Naming Commission 2022 recommendation to remove the memorial. We have been back and forth at least once with competing federal judicial orders stopping and then upholding the removal. Of course, bodies interred in and around the memorial will also be dug up. The original Poltergeist movie was based on the notion that digging up and moving bodies was a less than positive lifestyle choice. There are some things you ought not to do, even if you can.
More later –
- AG