Every office-holder must be something of a fascist at heart, otherwise why desire a position of power over others? Especially when it’s backed up with guns and the threat of incarceration. The clothing of a little brief power is seductive.
Thursday September 24, 2020 — 10:53 AM
Six weeks out and falling fast
When your governor is too stupid to realize why his polling numbers are dropping like a stone, only six weeks out from the election:
of course he extends the useless, illegal, and unconstitutional mask mandate once again. (Chart from Wikipedia.)
I keep hearing that outside of Indianapolis, stores are removing the directional arrows, opening closed entrances, and aren’t stopping people without masks from entering. Sooner or later, everyone in Indianapolis will be ignoring the governor, too. And looking to vote for one of his two opponents.
I will not cast a vote for this clown again. He will not be missed. And who knows, we might end up with a Libertarian governor. Rainwater is trending up faster than Myers is. I think we’ve got ourselves a real three-way contest, for once, and all because our sitting governor is a statist moron.
You would think the state GOP would have warned him off doing this. But they’re morons, too.
Tuesday September 22, 2020 — 9:13 PM
The continuing attempts by actual fascists to claim fascism is a right-wing phenomenon are fascinating, particularly since actual Fascist Party leader Benito Mussolini had a major hard-on for America’s leading proto-fascist, President Woodrow Wilson.
Hubris, meet Nemesis
It’s being pointed out elsewhere, and has been ever since last Friday, but there is a plain and simple fact that the Democrats choose to ignore:
Ginsburg could have retired under Obama prior to the 2014 election, and easily been replaced by a young Progressive female jurist who could have served 30-40 years.
Her hubris was such — and so was that of the Democrats — that all she had to do was hang in till Hillary was elected in 2016, then retire, etc. Because even after the GOP took the Senate back in 2014, history suggests they would have approved an Obama appointee without a whole lot of fuss after a Democrat won in 2016. He might have had to appoint someone a little less progressive than he would have liked, and they would have had to wait until the smoke cleared from the election, but overall, he could have locked that seat in for a couple of generations at minimum. (There’s precedent to approve a presidential nomination after that president goes out of office, so his nominee could potentially have been approved under a Hillary Clinton presidency, even if actual history shows McConnell felt it was important to wait and not hold hearings on Merrick Garland until after the 2016 election because a) Obama was a lame duck, and b) his party did not hold the Senate, which two items in combination have never resulted in a Supreme Court nomination by the lame duck president being approved.)
Moreover, her hubris was such that she believed she could roll the dice one more time on her cancer and beat it until after the 2020 election, while in the meantime doing the American public a disservice by remaining in office when she was unable to fulfill her duties.
Her nemesis was Donald Trump. And even without Trump, as soon as Hillary became the nominee, there was no way in hell Mitch McConnell was going to let Obama and Hillary have their way on a Supreme Court nomination before the election. And holding the Senate majority made that possible, and not only possible, but historically inevitable.
In addition, Trump holds a position Obama did not — he’s not a lame duck, and his party controls the Senate. And because Harry Reid destroyed the filibuster in 2013 — something Mitch McConnell warned him would come back around and bite the Democrats in the ass — seven short years later, Trump is going to get another Supreme Court appointment whether he gets re-elected or not. Because if you don’t think the GOP majority in the Senate is not being kept closely apprised of the debate over who will eventually be nominated, and won’t be willing to hold perfunctory hearings and rubber-stamp whoever Trump ends up nominating, you have another think coming. Because if I were Trump (and I think he’s smarter than me when it comes to this sort of thing), I’d be on the phone to McConnell two or three times a day discussing how this is going to work.
Collusion? You bet your ass. But all-American collusion, the kind Barry and Hills don’t know how to do because they’re too busy chumming up to international socialists and plotting how to take America down a notch or twenty.
In the end, this really shouldn’t even be a question of politics. The Supreme Court has become far too important, which threatens the stability of the three-cornered government the Framers created, in which three co-equal branches did their assigned thing and cooperated in order to maintain the stability and well-being of the Republic. You could make the case that Marbury vs. Madison threw that out the window only 14 years after the Constitution was ratified, when John Marshall his own bad self decided that the Court had the power of review over what the other two branches do. In retrospect, John Marshall probably should have been taken out and hanged from the nearest convenient lamppost along with his concurring brethren, because that supposed power appears nowhere in the Constitution and was created entirely out of whole cloth by Marshall. And it turned the Court into a political wrecking ball, which has only gotten bigger and heavier and worse ever since, what with justices and even judges in inferior courts legislating from the bench in a manner that was never envisioned by the Framers.
If not for the tension between the Executive and the Legislature that has existed for more years than I like to think about, the Court would not be important, and wouldn’t be something that could be put in play as it has been at least since Reagan nominated Robert Bork — a massively-qualified legal mind beaten to death by Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and the rest of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Although it may have been just as well — some of his statements toward the end of his life suggested to me that he might have become a squish like Anthony Kennedy.)
In the end, though, it comes down to the fact that Ginsburg lacked sufficient humility to understand that in politics, nothing is either permanent or certain, and that she should have had the grace and sense to retire at a reasonable point after her first pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2009, and let Obama replace her with a Democrat while he had the ability and his party held the majority in the Senate to do that.
That she followed whence her hubris led her, well, sucks to be the Democrats, right now. As Omar Khayyám memorably put it,
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
History is history, bitches. You can’t change it. Not a moment of it. And nobody can predict the future.
Blame yourselves, commies.
Democrats, socialists, communists, and progressives (but I repeat myself repeatedly) are now screaming, in the wake of the RBG…er…RPG that’s been fired into their ranks, that the Senate must not consider any Supreme Court nomination before the election. They base this off Cocaine Mitch’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s last attempt to nominate a Supreme Court justice just prior to Obama going out of office in January 2017. But the situation is completely different.
- First of all, the obvious: Trump, not currently term-limited as Obama was, may (probably will, at this point, but don’t get cocky) be re-elected. So why wait to fill the vacancy?
- Second, we may need that vacancy filled stat, if the election is close enough — close enough for the Democrats, et al., to cheat, that is.
- Third, the Democrats, et al., don’t have the votes to stop it. They don’t (currently) control the Senate. (Of course, they might be able to flip some GOP squishes, but the GOP squishes need to consider what their situation is going to be if Trump is re-elected. Because after the election, Trump will have more flexibility (where have we heard that before?), and the squishes may find themselves out in the cold. My attitude is the GOP stalwarts need to put some spine into the squishes…and make it clear that they’re going to be considered second-class senators without any support for anything they want for the next four years if they don’t get with the program. If I were the GOP, I’d be laying plans to replace these assholes ASAP anyway.
- Finally, if you think the Democrats wouldn’t take advantage of a situation like this, you’re smoking something funky and need to lay off the THC.
Quite frankly, if Trump is re-elected and doesn’t invoke the Insurrection Act immediately after, I’m going to be sorely disappointed. But that’s another story and a post for another time.
Nineteen years now. What have we learned?
[I’ve posted this several times before. It’s still heartbreaking and still evokes what we all felt that day. Would that we were as united today as we were on 9/11/2001.]
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.
“[T]he only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky-falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame-the Falling Man-became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
“That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.”
They don’t really want to win.
Hey…wuz happenin’…it’s me. Been busy.
But I just had a thought, as I was reading the latest polling news (not that I have any faith in the polls, but it’s amusing to see what they think, because it’s likely bullshit) and thought about a couple of things:
- The singular inaptness and tone-deafness being demonstrated by the Biden-Harris campaign, which is spending more time reacting to current events than anything else, proving among other things that Trump is well inside their OODA loop and almost daily managing to knock them back on their heels.
- Something I just read suggesting Trump is winning a lot of hearts and minds in Miami-Dade County in Florida, with an interesting aside of “[d]ozens of field organizers for the Biden campaign recently accused the campaign of “suppressing the Hispanic vote.”
- Biden’s clearly-reactive visits to Pittsburgh and Kenosha in the wake of the Kenosha riots and the Kyle Rittenhouse takedown of three career criminals (2 dead, one wounded badly enough he’ll probably never be able to stroke off with his right hand again).
- The continuing blue-city riots starting to cause alarm in the Democrat camp because they’re having the opposite effect of what the Democrats hoped — the average Joe and Jane are starting to get really hot under the collar about seeing their towns and cities pillaged and raped by what they correctly identify as left-wing agitators who are being bused around the country to stage said pillaging and raping. Among those who are breaking ranks with the Democrats are the very people this summer of rioting was supposed to be about — African-Americans, who are evincing quite a lot of support for Donald Trump, these days.
- And finally, the WuFlu and the concomitant state-level tyranny that’s been going on for the past six months (when we were told “two weeks to flatten the curve”). I’ll tell you what people are starting to want to flatten — their governors and mayors and other political jerkoffs who’ve turned into little tinpot dictators, ordering arbitrary lockdowns and masking and suchlike without bothering to look at the actual science involved. My (ostensibly-Republican) governor is one of them, and he’s lucky he hasn’t been dragged out of the governor’s mansion down there at 46th and Meridian and hanged from the nearest lamppost. I know people who would not be sad to see that happen — including myself.
The smartest thing Donald Trump ever did was let the states handle their own response to the WuFlu. Oh, yeah, he’s got a couple of ancient Democrat government functionaries from the NIH and CDC going on TV trying to tell us we’re doomed if we don’t lock down and wear masks and stay away from other people — and don’t go to church, or the movies, or to restaurants — and who have absolutely scared my wife and her elderly parents nearly to death. (My mother, on the other hand, is pissed off that she can’t go anywhere and do anything, which I have to admit is probably a good thing since she’s 92.) But the bottom line is that any major fuckups along the line have really been on the state and local authorities. And the press and the Democrats in general, for things like all the screeching about hydroxychloroquine just because Trump said it might be worth trying at a point where the reports about its successful use in Italy (along with zinc and azithromycin) was like a ray of bright sunshine on a dark cloudy day.
They keep throwing mud at Trump and it keeps dripping right off. He’s not a “Teflon President” like Reagan was, but my gawd is he a fighter. And he fights for us. Yeah, he’s not perfect. He’s done plenty of dumb stuff, but shucks, folks, the Obama regime was nothing but an eight-year-long clusterfuck aimed at turning us into a socialist “paradise,” and all Hillary! promised was more of the same. Trump decided that could not stand, and lucky for us he managed to win enough votes to take the Electoral College. Hillary is probably still drinking heavily as she thinks, “All I had to do was campaign more at all in Wisconsin.”
Biden, on the other hand, can’t even keep a coherent thought in his head long enough to be another Hillary. This of course is why Harris is his VP candidate — but if you think for one moment she’ll be running things in a Biden administration, you’re wrong. That person will be Dr. Jill Biden, who will be playing Edith Wilson to her husband’s Woodrow Wilson. And we don’t need a reprise of that shit a hundred years later.
But I think — as I stated in my title line — they really don’t want to win, and that’s what all this ruckus and hooroar is about. They are more interested in starting the civil war they profess not to want, and overthrowing the current order by force because they know they can’t get away with much more socialism before the silent majority finally rises up and throws them out of office. Since they can’t afford to lose too many more elections, and since they don’t have any viable, younger candidates (as I think was proven in the primaries), they’re doing everything they can to prepare the battlespace for a continuation, and probably an escalation, of the rioting, looting, and general busting-up of the current order we’re already seeing after a Trump victory in November.
And oh, yes, if it’s close, or even if it isn’t, they’ll tie the thing up in the courts and try to get the election thrown to the House of Representatives — which seems like a mistake, because each state gets only one vote, and the states with GOP majority representation outnumber those with Dem majority representation. But again, the intent is not to win, it’s to create as much confusion and agitation as possible in the mistaken idea that the country can be split and Balkanized, and the blame can all be shoveled onto Trump and (by extension) the GOP and conservatives.
Things are going to get fucked up — more than they already are — I fear. As Sarah Hoyt says, though, “Be not afraid.” Divine Providence has gotten us this far, maybe it will get us a little farther.
We’ll see how it falls out on November 4.
The jig is up, the news is out, they finally are going to have to admit it.
Blogger who has done a shitton of research says the pandemic will be over in the United States by next Tuesday, and it was already over in Europe AND in the northern US states when he wrote this post back at the end of July.
(Via Instapundit, of course.)
We still haven’t hit 3,000 deaths in Indiana, and the death rate has cratered.
When you read the article, note how much that curve looks like the examples provided.
Time to open back up. Time to make politicians and public health officials account for their actions. Because this was going to happen no matter what. We knew that because we knew how other viral infections behave, and the fact is that hiding from one another did absolutely nothing to speed up the herd immunity that was all we needed to turn WuFlu into a nothingburger not all that different from a bad seasonal flu.
Yes, a small number of people are still going to get sick with WuFlu (people get sick all the time from the flu and the common cold, too, but we don’t call them “pandemic” until the rates get high), and yes, a small fraction of that number are going to die. That’s also covered in the blog post. When the WuFlu death rate gets lost in the average death rate, the pandemic is over — and the blogger (who cites Indiana data, among other states, by the way) says it’s already over in the US Northern states. It will be blown out by August 25 in the rest, and may in fact already be done.
Governor Holcomb, Mayor Hogsett, it’s time to tear down your unconstitutional and unlawful edicts. The legislature, the City-County Council, and the PEOPLE need to call you to account.
LET MY PEOPLE GO (out to eat)!
64
(0:48 – 1:40)
She’s imperfect, but she tries
She is good, but she lies
She is hard on herself
She is broken and won’t ask for help
She is messy, but she’s kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie
She is gone, but she used to be mine
(Not at all what this song is about, but these particular lyrics taken out of their original context are uncannily on point…)
The “feel-good” approach won’t save the USPS.
Seen on Facebook:
6 Ways to Help Save the USPS That Each Take Less Than 2 Minutes
None of these ideas are worth the electrons it took to get them to my screen.
If you haven’t already heard, the U.S. Postal Service is in trouble. It’s currently running out of government funding and there are concerns that the agency will collapse completely if the government doesn’t approve a substantial aid package to help the USPS weather the COVID-19 storm.
But the Postal Service isn’t supposed to run off of government money. It’s supposed to leverage its first-class mail monopoly and pay its own way. (See also, Amtrak.) Which is hard to do, given how it’s organized. So let’s look at the suggestions.
Why would I want to donate money to the USPS by buying stamps I won’t use? (Which is laughable since I’m secretary of an 800-member organization that has me buying stamps and going to the post office all the time.) They’re supposedly a quasi-private corporation, one of the largest in the US. Would I donate money to Amazon, or Apple, or Microsoft? No, I would expect them to clean up their act or go bankrupt. That was the POINT of creating the Postal Service out of the old Post Office Department in the first place.
The social media posting, petitioning, and making a cell phone call to some wacky number that will send an automated letter that the congresscritters will ignore are all little more than theatre. But they’re feel-good theatre.
Call your representatives….HAHAHAHAHA. Have you ever actually done that? Or sent them a letter or email about an issue you feel strongly about? COUGH COUGH Susan Brooks COUGH COUGH. Worthless.
Choose USPS shipping…well…they’re rarely any worse than UPS or FedEx, and they charge less, which is why I use them myself.
I don’t know what the fix for the USPS is (other than getting rid of their unions — there are seven of them, and nine collective bargaining agreements between them), but none of these suggestions will turn the Titanic away from the iceberg. They are literally the equivalent of rearranging the chairs on the promenade deck while the band plays “Nearer My God To Thee” and the deck starts to tilt.
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