Um, I dunno…

Doesn’t this sound like incitement to insurrection?  By the Democrats’ own rules…if it sounds like insurrection, it must be insurrection.  Right?

Hey, FBI, you might want to investigate this sports journalist who thinks he’s a political pundit.

If Trump is said to “underperform” in Iowa, be sure to look at the actual numbers

From The Washington Times, via RealClearPolitics:

In case you weren’t already aware, the fix is in. Before the first ballot has been cast, the media have already written their headlines for the Iowa caucuses: “Trump underperforms in Iowa.”

According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, former President Donald Trump leads the field with over 52%, ahead of his closest rival by a whopping 36 points. FiveThirtyEight has a similar polling average, putting him at just over 51%, with a lead of 34 points.

That’s a substantial margin, with plenty of room for underperformance. But let’s look at things from a broader historical perspective.

Since 1976, the biggest “landslide” in the Iowa Republican caucuses (excluding elections with a Republican incumbent) came in 1988, when Sen. Bob Dole amassed 37% of the vote and won by 12 points over televangelist Pat Robertson. In many contested elections of that period, Iowa has been decided by 3 points or less, reflecting the intense independence of Iowa caucusgoers.

Iowans pride themselves on making up their own minds, and they take their responsibility as the first state on the election calendar very seriously. They do not just go with the flow and rubber-stamp the national mood.

Mr. Trump is poised to win Iowa, and the victory may be a historic landslide. Even if he severely underperforms his polling lead, he’s still likely to outpace Dole’s record-setting margin. In this case, underperforming should count only if Mr. Trump comes below Dole’s historic 12-point margin ahead of the next closest finisher.

But that’s not the standard to which the media will hold him.

This is what the Left gets for pissing off the American public.  As we have said for years, progressives won’t like living under their new rules.  And they’ve all but martyred Trump to the point where his landslide is going to eclipse Reagan’s.

And if it turns out I’m wrong about that, it will be because the Left has frauded yet another election just like they did 2020.

Remember: Pinochet did nothing wrong.

“Null-ABC” was not intended as an instruction manual.

Blue-State Disaster: Oregon Gov Signs Bill Allowing Students to Graduate Without Knowing How to Read or Write

Democratic Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon has signed a bill into law that allows students in the state to graduate from high school without having to prove they know how to read, write or understand math.

The Oregonian reported that Brown signed Senate Bill 744 on July 14 with no news release and without informing anyone outside of her office about her decision to sign the legislation.

The new law says that “a student may not be required to show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023 or 2023-2024 school year.”

It also requires that the state Board of Education “[r]ecommend changes in legislation or administrative rules that will reduce disparities and ensure that every student will be on track to earn one of the high school diplomas offered in this state.”

The bill equates to a multiyear suspension of current graduation requirements.

They want illiterate idiots who will be compliant because they know no other way.

Face it, if you can’t read the Declaration, or the Constitution, or any of our other founding documents, how do you know you have certain rights that the government can’t infringe or take away? Because under this new regime, your teachers will be forbidden to teach you that.

This is not about equity; this is about subjugating the upcoming generations to the control of the soi-disant elites, who are not worthy to spit-shine my patent leathers.

I’m deadly serious about the Null-ABC reference I made in the title. If you’ve never read it before, read it now while you still can.

Look — just do it, already.

Get off Facebook, now.

Zuck the Fuck is working for the Neu Stasi.

If you’re a friend of mine and you’re still subjugating yourself to the Thought Police over there, whether or not you have friends, family, or businesses on FB, the time has come to say goodbye.

Just walk away.

Because you’re not the customer — you’re the product.

And we’d be happy to have you over on MeWe, where it doesn’t work that way, at least not yet.

Joe Biden is the greatest threat to the American Republic.

Apparently Joe Biden (the illegitimate Resident [sic] of the United States) is now making mouth noises about how Republican election integrity efforts are the greatest threat in our nation’s history.

Kruiser, in his Morning Briefing at PJ Media, turns this around on Biden and says he’s the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.  I disagree.

I would counter-argue that Joe Biden is, in reality, the greatest threat to American democracy since Woodrow Wilson, who started the country on the path to authoritarian fascism (but I repeat myself).  If you’re not aware that Woodrow Wilson was a proto-fascist who made Benito Mussolini swoon and want to bear his children, you should probably read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (2009), which is the last thing Jonah seems to have written while he was still marginally sane and still at least nominally on WFB’s leash (WFB died in 2008).

And by the way, we’re not a democracy, we’re a democratic republic, but whatevs.  The only time this country is a democracy is on Election Day, and frankly, we blew the last one.

At any rate, and getting back to Kruiser’s allegation, IMHO the Civil War in and of itself neither challenged nor threatened democracy, despite the claims of so many folks that certain of Lincoln’s actions (like the suspension of habeas corpus) did great damage to it. What it did do was result in 600,000 casualties and millions of dollars of wasted treasure that nobody seems to want to take into consideration when the modern communist left screams about “slavery reparations” for people who have never been enslaved.

Moreover, the main problem is not Biden himself, but Biden’s handlers — “Doc” Jill, Kamalalala, Ron Klain, etc. —  who are all nothing more and nothing less than communists of the first water.  Biden has no more idea of what he’s doing than a turnip.  In fact, a turnip may have more sense of things.

So let’s call a spade a spade (if we still can, since that’s probably considered “racisssss”), and just accept the fact that the communists’ Long March has, over the last 100 years since Wilson, pretty much screwed up how we do things in this country.  The Founders and the Framers would be appalled.  In fact, we should probably hook their graves up to the power grid; I’ll bet they’d solve any power shortages caused by socialists and communists in the blue states in jig time (which is probably also “racisssss”).

For anyone who thinks this post is “racisssss”, you should read the rest of this blog.  And my fiction.  Because then maybe you’d drop dead of a conniption, commie.

Our Independence Day

(Riffing a bit on Bill Pullman’s immortal line, of course.)

My own little insurrection:

We came home from Fort Wayne last night around dinnertime, so we decided to stop at a pizza joint about a mile from home to pick up some of their delicious bread sticks to go with frozen pizza we were going to have for dinner.

Sign on door: “No Mask Needed if Vaccinated.”

Rather than say, “fuck you”, turn on my heel, and go back to the car, I just fucking walked in. Screw ’em. I wanted my bread sticks (they make the best ones around IMHO), and they can’t legally demand my vaccination status. Which as anyone around here knows, is “negative”, because I refuse to take the fucking poison jab, and if you’re vaccinated, I can’t infect you anyway. (Or so the common wisdom goes; since the jab isn’t actually a vaccine, the idea is you’re only supposed to be able to get a mild version if you do get infected. Which seems unlikely since we’ve been at herd immunity levels for months.)

We were in Fort Wayne (as noted) almost all day yesterday, and the place is reopened — no masking signs, just a few social distancing signs (more of a “Please consider” as opposed to “We order you”), most of the floor stickers indicating a six-foot separation are gone, etc. Ate in the dining room at a Wendy’s for lunch. (As far as I know, all the fast food joints around here are still closed for indoor dining.) That’s only the second time I’ve eaten in a restaurant since March 2020, because Indianapolis is still being asshole about it (plus, half the places can’t find people to work because of the continuing government incentives not to). The other restaurant I’ve eaten in since March 2020 was a place in Brownsburg, which is just west of the Marion County line and thus not under the edicts and orders of the Indianapolis Supreme Soviet, er, City-County Council, and our abysmal wanna-be-totalitarian mayor. That was a couple of weeks ago, and all they had out was a sign that said, “Please don’t come in if you have these COVID-19 symptoms” and a list of about a dozen symptoms.

It’s over. Just like the Bidet mal-administration is going to be over. People are done listening to people claiming to be their betters and experts in all things.

In a week’s time, we need to let the assholes know, loud and clear: July 4 is OUR Independence Day from bullshit rules, regulations, and idiot “experts”.

And Bidet and the rest of the traitors can stuff their “no fun” plans right up their collective ass.

Another stupid federal holiday

“Juneteenth”.

Yet another excuse for a three-day weekend, this time to celebrate the end of slavery in Texas.  Note carefully:  IN TEXAS.  Not in the entire old Confederacy; the Emancipation Proclamation started that ball rolling on January 1, 1863, in all Confederate territories then held by the Union, and then followed Union troops as they reclaimed the rest of the South.  Which to me means that if we’re going to celebrate the end of slavery, New Year’s Day is perfectly fine for that.  Or if you’re a purist, September 22, 1862, was the date Lincoln issued the Proclamation.

Wikipedia (which of course should never be anyone’s go-to resource, but I’m in a hurry this morning) says of Juneteenth,

Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival.

The date is literally the date of the arrival of occupying Union troops in Galveston, Texas, and the immediate application of the Emancipation Proclamation there.  Wikipedia again:

On the morning of Monday, June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, to take command of the more than 2,000 federal troops recently landed in the department of Texas to enforce the emancipation of its slaves and oversee a peaceful transition of power, additionally nullifying all laws passed within Texas during the war by Confederate lawmakers.

So there you have it.  The only reason for this holiday’s existence is that it marks the official emancipation of slaves in the last state the Union occupied after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Well, that, and as noted above, yet another excuse for a federal three-day weekend.  I read yesterday this brings the number of paid days off for the average Federal employee to 44, which is nearly nine weeks.  I wish I had nine weeks of paid days off.  I suppose the only good thing about this is it’s nine weeks they’re not screwing around in our beknighted country’s affairs.

Face it, folks, I live in Indiana.  We never had slaves, here.  My mother’s family didn’t arrive here until long after the Civil War ended, and my father’s family never held slaves, from their arrival in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1700s through their migrations to western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, and Indiana, and I feel no obligation to hand over so-called “reparations” to my middle-class black neighbors who never were slaves.  I have trouble with this being enshrined as a national holiday.

And please note that I don’t have a problem with MLK Day, because Dr. King espoused a message of peace and harmony between the races.

Mark my words, Juneteenth will not be used for that — it will be used (and already has been, by the execrable Cori Bush, with Slow Joe’s signature fresh on the page) as yet another excuse to drive a wedge between Americans and to call for reparations for people who never were slaves from people who never held slaves.

The insanity will end when we finally decide we’ve had enough.  Have we had enough, yet?

A little cheese with your whinge, sir?

Ross K. Baker, whoever the fuck he is, is a moron.

Gun control is a lost cause. Come despair with me.

What kills such efforts in Congress, [massive hyperbole excised because it was enough to make me puke – ed.], is the recognition in the minds of politicians that there are voters in their states and districts who are Second Amendment absolutists, whether they be the kind of people who shoot at targets for practice or those who might shoot at people because of malice or derangement.

He’d be even more upset if he understood that his 1st Amendment absolutism (at least as far as his own speech is concerned, and I’m sure he believes implicitly that he has a right to say and write what he pleases) is protected in the end by all those 2nd Amendment absolutists he despises.

So strong is the constituency for firearms ownership in Congress that a law is on the books immunizing gun manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits arising out of the use of their products for mass shootings and mayhem on smaller scale. It is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that became effective in 2005.

Are knife manufacturers liable when someone, out of malice, kills someone else with one of their products?  Is someone going to sue the manufacturer of the knife the woman in Columbus was going to kill the other woman with, based on some idiotic theory of “gross misuse”?  Attempted murder and murder using knives goes back an awfully long way.

If I pick up a brick and kill someone with it, is the state going to sue the brick manufacturer?  People have been hitting other people over the head with heavy objects for a long time, too.  Think Cain and Abel.

What about auto manufacturers?  Vehicular homicide is a thing.  Gonna sue the alcoholic beverage distiller or brewer, too, because the driver was DUI?  People have also been getting drunk and killing people probably since the first time someone drank off the liquid from spoiled grain [eww -ed.] and discovered the magic of fermentation.

That gun manufacturers had to be specifically exempted in law from this sort of thing suggests there are major legal issues that had to be enunciated in law before idiot lawyers (but I repeat myself) would stop trying to wrongly apply liability law in the hopes of a big payday and a black eye for the firearms industry.

The response of the gun industry has been, from a business standpoint, quite rational: Sellers give the consumers what they demand. The only limit is that they cannot manufacture or sell fully automatic machine guns.

This is a gross simplification of the issue, and it’s wrong anyway.  Certain classes of fully-automatic firearms and firearm accessories (suppressors, for instance) prohibited MAY be manufactured and sold to the public, but require an onerous permitting process via BATFE *spit* and typically require a fee of $200 for a federal tax stamp to validate the permit.  In other words, you don’t walk into your friendly neighborhood Class 3 firearms dealer, slap your credit card on the counter, and walk out the same day with your machine gun and suppressor.  That’s because the permitting process for such weapons and accessories can take months.  Moreover, attorneys familiar with this sort of thing advise their clients to put all such special weapons into a not-for-profit family corporation rather than own the weapons personally, since it would be next to impossible to transfer them either by gift or by last will and testament to one’s own children.  (Otherwise, new fees and permits would be required for such transfers, one supposes; I’m not able to afford such things, so I have no idea.  Ask Mad Mike.)

In addition, sellers who hold Federal Firearms Licenses (FFL) must require a Form 4473 and run an instant background check on anyone who wants to purchase a firearm from them.  Such instant background checks can fail for any number of reasons, including that you moved recently and the database hasn’t caught up yet.  The last time I bought a handgun, a woman who was there to pick up a firearm via FFL transfer had that very problem; she’d moved two weeks before and a hold was put on her background check.  “Give us a call in about a week,” was all the counterman could tell her.

The problem with the “red flag” laws he moans about is that they don’t work because the alleged behaviors under which they can be invoked rarely show up on a background check.

Besides which, the dude who shot up FedEx in Indy a week or so ago WAS QUESTIONED BY THE POLICE A YEAR AGO.  In other words, he was a “known wolf,” as many of these recent shooters have been.

The bottom line is that any gun control law is going to succeed only in controlling the law-abiding.  Anyone who would go on a mass-shooting tear by definition doesn’t give a flying fuck about your gun control laws.

The once plausible argument that gun ownership was somehow connected to membership in state militias was cast aside by a Supreme Court dominated by “originalists” who developed historical amnesia about the Founding Fathers’ dread of standing armies and preference for “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” and declared that the only operative phrase in the Second Amendment was “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.

No, you dumb fuck, it was put in there because the Framers KNEW citizens needed to be able to defend themselves from their government.  We talk about “taxation without representation” as being a root cause of the American Revolution, but when it came down to cases, the war started because the British tried to take our guns.  That’s what the Battle of Concord was all about.  See again the above where I ask if Mr. Baker understands that his freedoms were and remain secured by force of arms, and the only thing protecting his freedom to disparage gun ownership and bemoan the inability of the government to control arms is an armed citizenry.

Yeah, “The Second Protects The First” is a tired and hackneyed phrase.  But it’s no less true for it being tired and hackneyed.

Moreover, the idea that gun manufacturers are in reality a bunch of evil mercantilists who wink and nod while piously protesting that their products are intended for sportsmen and personal defense is no different from every Jew in the world being blamed for the soi-disant depredations of a few rich Jewish families or the (false) claims of blood libel that have littered the world since the Middle Ages.

And this is where things stand: Daily, weekly, monthly massacres of sizable numbers of victims enabled by a patchwork of ineffective, indifferently enforced state laws, and the awesomely destructive firepower of many of the weapons used in these assaults.

Unbalanced, vengeful or politically motivated assailants armed, in many cases, with charismatic weapons patterned on those used by the military will continue to inflict death and grievous injury on innocent people. There is, effectively, no way to stop it.

Yes, there is.  AN ARMED CITIZENRY, unhindered by infringing possession and carry laws, or “gun-free zones” which are, in reality, killing zones for cowards who can’t control their urge to kill.  One armed citizen could have put a stop to most if not all of the “massacres” that have happened since Columbine.  If an unhinged person understands that they’re likely to get dead if they try something like that, they’re probably going to be less likely to try — even in their unhinged state.

But you can kill in mass with a knife, too.  Ask the Chinese.

33 Dead, 130 Injured in China Knife-Wielding Spree

Rampaging Chinese man kills 7 in ‘random’ knife attacks

Chinese man attacks 22 children, 1 adult with knife outside primary school (same year as Sandy Hook, FWIW)

Knife-wielding attackers kill 29, injure 130 at China train station

Those were all first-page Duck Duck Go search hits on “chinese man kills with knife”.

In sum:  Mr. Baker is an idiot.  I see now that he is employed by Rutgers University, so somehow that doesn’t surprise me.

The new Intolerable Acts

Government by E.O. is not government.

And I say that as one who applauded most of Trump’s Executive Orders.  Because most of Trump’s E.O.s fixed actual problems (OK, OK, the bump stock E.O. was an own goal) while not attempting to go around Congress to make new law.  You’ll notice he didn’t issue an E.O. repealing the ACA after John McCain traitorously blindsided him.  That’s because he knew he couldn’t do that.

Creepy Uncle Pedo Joe, on the other hand…

The new Executive Order signed on April 15 (what a great day to sign anything that takes Americans’ rights away) is entitled Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian FederationBut as the American Thinker points out,

Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of their rights and property by arbitrarily linking those persons to real, imagined, or vaguely defined activities of the Russian government.

The Biden administration unilaterally makes the determination and requires neither criminal acts nor intent. The punishment is blocking assets and a prohibition on any dealing with the accused person. Spouses and adult children of individuals found guilty by accusation under this EO are punished, too.

Yeah, spit on the Constitution some more, Creepy Uncle Pedo Joe.

And it wouldn’t be a Joe Biden E.O. without added new plagiarism:

Some of the language in this EO borrows from another: EO-13224 – Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism. George W. Bush signed EO-13224 on September 23, 2001, in response to 9/11.

However, Biden’s EO is as similar to Bush’s EO as an atomic bomb is to a sniper rifle. Bush’s EO targeted financing terrorism. It defined terrorism clearly and narrowly. It minimized legal jeopardy to US persons. It did not strip away the standard for criminal liability requirements of action and intent. It did not target spouses or children of accused individuals. Additionally, Bush made a legally meaningful promise to use it with due regard to culpability and the Bush administration used it with restraint. Even so, Democrats criticized it harshly, opposed it, and fought it in courts.

In contrast, Biden’s new EO is directed mostly at US persons. It criminalizes speech and political activities, based on whimsical and arbitrary definitions. The Biden administration can define “malicious activities,” “democratic processes or institutions,” and the activities that undermine them as it wants.

I encourage you to click the link above and go read the whole thing.

But the fact is, these E.O.’s are unconstitutional on their face.  They set out penalties for actions that are Constitutionally-permissible and rest under the wide banner of free speech.

Moreover, they create penalties in law without the consent of the Congress (though I’m sure that consent would be forthcoming, given the razor-thin majorities held by the traitor progressives in both houses).  The fact is, Congresscritters don’t want to touch this sort of thing with a ten-foot pole, or a six-foot Russian, either.  If they can’t guarantee a win for their party in a given district, they run too much risk of losing enough seats in 2022 to not just overturn those razor-thin majorities, but to possibly create veto-proof majorities as well.  (Though I suspect the latter is pie in the sky; after all, Dominion still dominates.)

We revolted against George III for less, and we wrote protections into the Bill of Rights to prevent precisely this sort of governmental tyranny.

So I have to say, I’m wondering when the next Shot Heard Round the World will be fired.  And when the Boog will officially start.

The Biden E.O.s are the new Intolerable Acts.  And once upon a time, we proved we wouldn’t tolerate them.

If not now, when?