A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)
Evan Bayh, as usual, is an idiot. Biden isn’t actually interested in this sort of thing. This is mostly a ploy to try to endear him to the unions that went for Trump.
Any rebuilding done under a Harris/Biden administration [sic] will be pretty much the same as Obama’s “shovel ready” projects, viz., borrowed money thrown in all directions with a net result of nothing to show for it, other than well-connected Democrats enriched even more with Chinese loan money.
Larry Correia, who was an actual accountant before he became a highly-successful science fiction writer, has posted
The 2020 Election: Fuckery Is Afoot
I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, that’s exactly what half the country is going to think.
People are pissed off, and rightfully so.
Kindly go and read the whole thing. Damn it.
Donald Trump is not an angel or a savior. He is simply a leader of men and women, flawed and imperfect, but with that golden vision of a shining city on a hill. Whether he has selfish motives in leading us there is immaterial. He wants America, and Americans, to be free. He believes in America. He is a true patriot.
We are taught that even Moses had his faults, yet he was G-d’s chosen instrument to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt and to the very gateways of the Promised Land. So beloved of G-d was this flawed man that He closed Moses’ eyes with His own Hand, and likewise buried him; “and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”
Are we humans, then, so perfect that we cannot accept this flawed man, Donald Trump, as our leader? I think not.
I, too, was against Trump before I was for him. I held my nose in 2016 when I entered the voting booth and cast a vote for him. I shan’t be holding my nose this time; as in 2016, the choice is clear.
“I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed.”
Trump wants us to live in freedom. The Democrats promise nothing but chains and hardship.
Therefore, choose life.
Choose Trump.
If this is the way it’s going to be, it’s clearly over, and clearly never meant a damn thing other than turning us all into dutiful little slaves of the state. (But we already knew that.)
Fuck you, Eric Holcomb. I hope the good citizens of the State of Indiana see fit to award you the Order of the Boot on November 3.
TRUMP/RAINWATER FOR INDIANA 2020!
Boston University exempts Black Lives Matter events from COVID size limits
To all my peeps who are saying Nancy Poo-losi is trying to do something unconstitutional (I mean, like what else would be new): Before making fools of yourselves, please look carefully at Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
She’s hanging her fortunes on that highlighted bit. And she’s entirely within her rights to do so.
Of course, it has to pass the House — which may not be a given, because it’s so blatant even a lot of the House Dems may not go for it. Then, she has to get it past the Senate…and either get the President to sign it, or both Houses have to override his veto. As if that’s going to happen. And even if it passes, they’d have to get the Vice President to agree with them — and Pence is not going to sucker-punch his boss. That’s not how Race Bannon operates.
So we can all take comfort — sort of: Because it’s not really about Trump. It’s about preparing the ground to get rid of Biden if the country actually rears up and elects a senile old child molester, so Kamala-lala can be president instead, and the civil war that’s heating up can really get started. (Did someone say, “Boog?”)
Wheels within wheels, folks. It’s how the Democrats operate. Just like the Communists. Because that’s what they are.
Just don’t expect the Supreme Court to come riding to our rescue. Because they’ll take one look, shrug, and say, “why should we grant cert to a case opposing something that’s clearly allowed by the Constitution, even if it’s never been acted on in the past?” And they’ll be right. Damn it.
Someone tried to make this point over on Fecesbook, on a friend’s post:
Footnote: If [the Left] truly want a total separation of church and state, we have to end tax deductions for charity donations since this is a subsidy to the church. Next, since our basic laws are a direct reflection of our basic 10 Commandments, we need to entirely re-write our system of jurisprudence to express the morals (or lack thereof) in whatever new system the left seems to want.
I think this person may have been trying to act as advocatus diaboli, but whatever; let’s address the idiocy of requiring religious institutions to pay income tax and/or no longer be able to accept tax-exempt donations. (With regard to the second half of his statement, nobody is going to rewrite the basic law because — in my opinion — it can’t be done at this late date, and frankly, without at least a nod to Deity, there is no basis for the basic law, since much of the law does in fact have a moral base — it is morally wrong to steal, to lie (perjury), cheat (defraud), commit adultery, and frankly to fornicate with animals and members of one’s own sex (although this last seems to have fallen by the wayside in our degenerate days. Without a moral component, your argument that it should be illegal to steal falls apart, because “why?” “Because I said so” is not sufficient; I don’t care what you think, but I do in fact care what G-d thinks, and they were His Commandments.)
So. Read Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists some time. He mentions a “wall of separation”, but what he means by it isn’t what the left means by it. Jefferson’s wall of separation is set in place to prohibit the federal government from interfering with the religious beliefs and practices of ALL religions, denominations, and sects, and (though Jefferson doesn’t say so in so many words) from establishing a state church or religion.*
But the concept of a “wall of separation” exists nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It simply says that Congress cannot legislate the establishment of religion, or prohibit its free exercise.
The idea that a church should be established for non-profit purposes and therefore be tax-exempt grows out of the idea that the church (or whatever you call the congregation, depending on religion/denomination/sect) gives more back to the community than it would ever pay in taxes and that it is a force for good in society that should be supported, if only indirectly, by virtue of the government leaving it alone. It’s harder to see this in our day and age of welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other social safety nets we erected starting in the 1930’s to take the place of social safety nets for which the religious community (including fraternal organizations and suchlike) was typically responsible before the Great Depression.
But never mind all that. The plain fact is, a simple reading of the First Amendment clearly states that Congress shall not legislate to prohibit the free exercise of religion. Forcing churches to pay corporate income tax on their donations and tithes and membership dues (and also ending the tax-deductible nature of such donations from individuals) would be such a prohibition, or at the very least would stifle the maintenance and growth of religion. On the other hand, this is why the IRS has such a high bar to cross in determining who is eligible for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. (I’ve applied successfully on behalf of a couple of organizations for 501(c)(4) status in the past, and that’s a pain, but it’s nothing compared to what you have to do to get and maintain 501(c)(3) status.)
And the left definitely wants to stifle traditional religion, so it bangs the drum for a supposed “wall of separation” that never existed other than in the fertile mind of Thomas Jefferson (who was NOT present at the Constitutional Convention, or at the convention where the Bill of Rights was written and adopted), who invented the term but clearly (at least in my read of his Letter to the Danbury Baptists) didn’t mean it the way the modern left has chosen to interpret it.
That being said, ALL institutions are suffering unduly under what I firmly believe are unconstitutional orders put in place ostensibly to prevent the spread of disease. It would make a great deal of sense if everyone could come together and point out that the government may not restrict the right to assemble in the first place, regardless whether such assembly occurs at a church, at a fraternal hall, in a school, in a restaurant, in a theatre, in a park, or on a beach, or in any other place where people normally congregate. The First Amendment was incorporated to apply to the states long ago, so all these state and local orders cannot be, prima facie, anything but unconstitutional.
_________________
* Note that it did not prevent the states from continuing to promote state religion. Maryland, for instance, was very Catholic, and if you weren’t a Catholic, typically you had a hard time getting ahead. Other states had similar restrictive and preferential traditions tied to religion and benefits for those who hewed to the state’s preference, if not indeed laws on the books ditto. Incorporation changed a lot of that, though the vestiges continue to hang on today in many places.
The difference between intelligent people and progressives is that intelligent people recognize institutions naturally will ebb and flow between center-left and center-right positions over time. We see this constantly in the Executive and Legislative branches (except for the 40+ year period when the Democrats held Congress after WWII, which was to my mind an anomaly), but not so much in the Judiciary because so many federal judges have lifetime appointments. So the Judiciary changes only gradually, one seat at a time if that, while Congress and the Executive oscillate wildly by comparison.
Progressives, by contrast, believe that every tilt to the left is (or should be) permanent, as a clear vindication of their slow march through the institutions. This explains things like Reid’s nuclear option in blowing up the filibuster in 2013, and the general leftist conniption fit when the House flipped in 2010, and the Senate went back to the GOP in 2014 (both as a direct result of Congress forcing Obamacare on the public in 2010). Of course progressives think they will never lose the House again after they won it two years ago on the back of lies, deceits, and vote fraud. And their absolute snit over Trump’s appointment of a conservative to replace the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court is yet another example of progressive inability to see that, like the tides, political fortunes of the two parties ebb and flow, and have done throughout history.
This may also have something to do with progressive assurances that the seas will rise if we do nothing about climate change. They simply cannot believe in anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.
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.
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.
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.
Suddenly, the NFL is in the news again, because one of its superstars couldn’t keep his mouth shut on a question he should never have agreed to answer. And the NFL is apologizing and kowtowing and being sensitive and shit all over the place.
As usual, Roger Goodell screwed the pooch by leading the chorus of apologia. He was insufficiently specific and was immediately set upon by certain black players for his vagaries of expression.
I have a different attitude about this.
I see the NFL as an entertainment monopoly. It hires the best athletes it can find to play what amounts to a boy’s game with a ball (don’t snicker, all pro sports are the same) in huge arenas with tens of thousands of people watching and cheering (and booing) them on. This is similar, to be honest, to the games played at the Colosseum in Rome, two thousand years ago. No, really, stick with me, here.
The only real differences between our modern pro sports spectacles and, say, the games played at the Colosseum in Rome two thousand years ago, are:
In order to create these spectacles, in both instances, very large, very athletic, and (usually) very smart people were encouraged to sign up to play. Back in Rome, the encouragement was often, “play or die.” These days, it’s “sign this contract for a bunchatonamoney and effectively enslave yourself to the NFL [or whatever league covers your pro sport] and your agent.” And what, you don’t think NFL players are smart? You have to have smarts to play a game that’s effectively a war game in miniature, folks. The day of the big, dumb hulk playing pro football went out the door years ago.
The only thing they’re not smart about is knowing when to keep their fat yaps shut. Like most celebrities who have too much money and too much time on their hands, they think it’s their duty to step up and speak on the social issues and ills of the day.
Sometimes they get it right — Drew Brees was NOT wrong in his initial statement — but then they break under pressure and apologizing for making a statement that was absolutely honest and non-triggering to anyone other than people who hate this country. And that’s what Brees ended up doing, apologizing for saying something as innocuous and admirable as “I would never agree with anyone disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.”
Again, remember: Only someone who hates this country and all that it stands for would raise hell over that statement. Yet Brees got pummeled by not just the usual suspects in the press, but by other athletes and MEMBERS OF HIS OWN TEAM.
And Goodell, who hasn’t made a good decision since he rescinded his own policy of no tolerance for drug fuckups in the NFL, once again blew what could have been a teachable moment and probably wouldn’t have lost him a single fan (indeed, it might have gotten some back who left over the Kaepernick lunacy) by making some vague bullshit statement about the league’s attitude about how the league had failed to listen to players in the past, and that players should have the right to protest peacefully.
Which of course earned him scorn from black players for being mealy-mouthed and not specifically addressing black players’ issues.
With all due respect (and note that means I have little), what the fuck, Felix? Black players in the NFL never had it so good. You get paid a huge amount of money to play 16 regular-season games a year in a sport at a level most Americans couldn’t hack for sixty seconds. You’ve got millions of fans and you’re considered hot stuff in your local NFL market. Even if you’re a low-level player, someone out there is a big fan and figures you’re going to be great some day.
And the bottom line is, you’re playing a GAME for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES. And you’re doing it because someone noticed you at an earlier level, high school or college, and you thereby gained admittance to a very small and very rich fraternity. All based on the fact that you have a very athletic body type and the smarts to make the right move at the right time. Granted, stipulated, not going to argue about that.
What you apparently don’t have is the smarts to know when not to blow your good thing by making statements that piss off half the people in the country. Or perhaps you do, but sometimes, like the Indian guide who is never lost, but acknowledges “sometimes the path wanders,” your brain goes off somewhere to take a break, your mouth wanders on autopilot, and you say something on camera or into a live mic that reflects what you really believe but know you dare not say publicly lest you be crucified for it.
Drew Brees found this out when he got hoist onto the cross for his patriotic statement. And then didn’t have the balls to hang there and say, yes, this I believe, this I would die to defend. What are the Saints going to do? Fire him?
The same problem infests every aspect of the entertainment world (yes, sports are entertainment, get over it). I’m not going to waste my time going through all the examples we’ve seen over the years. Laura Ingraham even wrote a book about it, Shut Up And Sing, when the music industry blew up over the Dixie Chicks stupidity over George W. Bush.
Entertainment celebrities aren’t important enough for any of us to give a shit about their opinions on issues of the day. They have been hoist onto a pedestal because of some special talent they have that the great unwashed generally don’t (although I’d argue I can sing better than a lot of people who make money at it, but that’s just my opinion and you’re free to ignore it).
The dirty little secret is, just being hoist onto that pedestal doesn’t give them special insight into anything but what they happen to be on that pedestal to do.
Thus, their opinions on the issues of the day should not be given any more weight than those of your barber or bartender.
And they need to be taught this lesson by seeing their popularity and their income dry up when their fans have finally had enough, and say, “I don’t give a shit what you think about George Floyd, shut up and do that thing you do.”
Which is why (to get back to Roger Goodell and his football league) I have not watched an NFL football game for four seasons and don’t plan to be watching any this fall, either.
Exit thought: Condoleezza Rice would have made a better NFL commissioner, hands down.