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Portents of Harris-Biden Nation

22 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Politics

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#MeToo, Anthony Weiner, Antifa, Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Court Packing, Critical Race Theory, Donald Trump, Green New Deal, Harvey Weinstein, Hunter Biden, Jeffrey Toobin, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Lockdowns, Marxism, Nancy Pelosi, Public Health, Scientism

Joe Biden is a weak figurehead, a one-time moderate faltering over a coalition of leftists. If you wonder why Nancy Pelosi floated legislation to establish a committee on “presidential capacity,” don’t think so much about her loathing for Donald Trump; think about poor Joe Biden. He might be shunted aside just as soon as the power grab isn’t too obvious. They know well how Barack Obama famously said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.” But whether Joe Biden is in control of anything, think about who he stands with:

The Violent Left: Marxist Antifa and Marxist BLM; opposed to law and order; burning cities; spewing eliminationist rhetoric; hissing n*g**r at black cops;

Police Defunders: won’t acknowledge good policing is needed more than ever, especially in minority communities;

“Ministers of Truth”: social media platforms exerting control over what we say and what we see;

Re-Educators: democrats push for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to address the “issue” of Trump supporters;

Critical Race Theorists: a Marxist front whereby every word and action is viewed in the context of racial bias and victimization; they want reparations; on your knees.

The Scientistic: who labor under the delusion that “science” should guide all administrative and political decisions. Or someone’s version of science. The very idea is antithetical to the scientific domain, which deals only with falsifiable hypotheses. Few matters of value can be addressed using the tools of science exclusively, nor can they address matters of ethics.

Fear Mongers: would rule by precaution; risks are always worth exaggerating to existential proportions;

Lockdown Tyrants: refuse to acknowledge the steep public health costs of lockdowns; stripping individual liberties indefinitely, including the right to contract, free practice of religion, and assembly;

Insurrectionists: who fabricated a Russian collusion hoax to subvert the 2016 election, and later to overthrow a sitting president;

Gun Confiscators: they will if we let them;

Abortionists: would use federal tax dollars to fund the murder of millions of babies late into pregnancy, primarily black babies;

Fluid-Genderists: insist that children should be encouraged to explore transgenderism;

Taxers: won’t stop with punitive taxes on the wealthy and employers; it’s just not easy to milk high earners in a way that’s sufficient to pay for the fiscal debauchery demanded by the Biden-Harris constituency. Joe says he will raise taxes by $3.4 trillion.

Spenders: $2 trillion of new federal education outlays, including universal pre-K and free community college; the Green New Deal (see below). After all, the democrats are the party that can’t tell the difference between a cut in spending and a reduction in spending growth. If you think Trump is a big spender, their plans are astonishing;

Green New Dealers: would spend trillions to restrict energy choices, transfer U.S. wealth overseas in the name of international carbon reduction, and reduce our standard of living;

Redistributionists: would tax job creators not simply for the benefit of supporting the needy, but for anyone regardless of need (see UBI); this extends to plans to bail out blue states and cities with insolvent public employee pension funds;

Interventionists: would regulate all phases of life, including straws, sugary drinks, and your fireplace; they will burden private initiative; create artificial, politically-favored winners skilled at manipulating regulatory rules for competitive reasons; and create losers who are typically too small to handle the burden;

Medical Socialists: will strip your private health insurance, dictate the care you may receive, fix prices, and regulate physicians and other providers. You’ll love the care abroad, if you can afford to get out when your sick.

Public School Monopolists: poorly performing, beholden to teachers’ unions, unresponsive to taxpayers and often parents; they would happily revoke school choice;

Federal Suburb Rezoners: demanding low-income housing in every community;

Court Packers: to destroy the independent judiciary;

Iran Apologists: give them cash on the tarmac, let them develop their “peaceful” nuclear program; alienate the rest of the Middle East;

Grifters: marketing their influence as public servants for private gain; never exclusive to one side of the aisle, but the Biden family has certainly traded on Joe to enrich themselves;

Smear Merchants: fabricated allegations against Brett Kavanaugh; impugned Amy Coney Barrett’s religious faith;

Perverts: Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner, Jeffrey Toobin, Hunter Biden, and Bill Clinton, to name just a few; even Joe has his #MeToo accusers;

I could go on and on, but Harris-Biden voters should get a strong taste of their compatriots from the list above. It reflects the overriding prescriptive, bullying, and sometimes violent nature of the Left. They’d have you think all material goods can be free. Presto! They presume to have the knowledge and wisdom to plan the economy and your life better than you, Better than free markets and free people. What they’ll need is a lot of magic, or it won’t go well. You’ll get poverty and tears. I’m not sure Joe has the desire or the wherewithal to rein in his coalition of idiots.

You think he was pissed off?

01 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Politics

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Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Burisma, Chris Christie, Chris Wallace, Court Packing, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Impeachment, Joe Biden, Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Michael Flynn, Proud Boys, Sean Trende

Many were put-off and even offended by President Trump’s aggressive approach to the first debate with Joe Biden on Tuesday. I’m not bothered except that he didn’t give Biden enough time to lose his way. This debate was tame compared to the standards set at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were full of insults, crude language, and racial epithets.

It was Joe Biden who began the unending series of interruptions on Tuesday. Biden interrupted Trump three times at that point, after which the moderator, Chris Wallace, declared “open discussion”. Go back and watch! So if you care, Biden started it. And Biden became rather abusive in his language as the debate wore on.

As to Trump’s pugilistic style, here is Sean Trende:

“… debates are usually staid affairs, pitched to politically knowledgeable elites who like to evaluate things on the merits. Trump’s debates are pitched to someone completely different. His behavior toward Clinton seemed bizarre and juvenile, and made for classic “SNL” fodder. It also apparently worked reasonably well; the townhall-style debate was one of his best received performances. So the interrupting and refusal to answer questions was off-putting for me, but I recognize that I’m not the target audience.”

Okay, fair enough, but Trump’s debate performance was more visceral than calculated. In fact, even members of his debate team were surprised: Chris Christie said it was “too hot”. Trump’s guns blaze because he’s pissed off, and he should be! Just to regard the countenance of the man across the stage was probably enough to infuriate Trump: Biden helped instigate the fraudulent investigation of General Michael Flynn (James Comey’s denial notwithstanding), Trump’s first national security advisor. Biden has repeatedly stooped to the same unfounded accusations of racism against the President that have been made by Democrats since Trump announced his first candidacy in 2015. This despite Biden’s own racial gaffes and affiliations with racists over the years. Biden was involved in a Ukrainian shakedown, admitting that he threatened the country’s President to have U.S. aid withheld if a Ukrainian prosecutor was not fired. That prosecutor was investigating the energy company Burisma, which just so happened to be paying a handsome retainer to Biden’s son, Hunter. Yet Trump was falsely accused of a similar transgression! Talk about the self-projections of Democrats! Trump has every reason to be pissed off, and to let it flow.

Biden represents the same Democrat party that has conspired to have Trump thrown out of office since before he was inaugurated. The same party has spread disinformation about collusion with Russians since before the 2016 election. The same party voted to impeach Trump in the House of Representatives on that fallacious basis. The same party promotes the idiotic suggestion that Trump “killed 200,000 people” with coronavirus; blames Trump for the economic malaise due to coronavirus lockdowns, then insists the economy must be shut down to end the pandemic; refuses to cooperate in passing a targeted coronavirus aid package; supports the violence perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (“mostly peaceful protests”), with prominent democrats contributing to the payment of bail for arrested rioters; calls Trump a dictator for offering to help state and local leaders end the violent civil disorder; refuses to call-out the racism promoted by Antifa and BLM; promotes the Marxism and racism of critical race theory; and attacks his latest Supreme Court nominee on religious grounds. The Democrats also threaten to instigate one-party rule by packing the Supreme Court, ending the legislative filibuster, and admitting new states to the union and dividing old ones in order to create a permanent Democrat majority in Congress (but the Constitution prohibits DC from statehood). A one-party nation! And, of course, Democrats have pushed for universal mail-in ballots, with all the bedlam and challenges that is likely to bring to the electoral process.

Then we have the debate moderator, Chris Wallace. There was little doubt about Wallace’s sympathies. He interrupted Trump much more frequently than he interrupted Biden. He asked Trump whether he denounces white supremacist organizations, and Trump immediately said, “Of course.” Trump has denounced them, but Wallace thought it necessary to relitigate the matter. Wallace’s follow-up regarding the “Proud Boys” was misplaced, as the group might be nationalist, but it is not a white supremacist organization (their president is Afro-Cuban). Meanwhile, Wallace failed to ask Biden to denounce Antifa and BLM. Wallace failed to ask Biden about his son’s dealings with the mayor of Moscow and his Chinese clients. He also let Biden off the hook quite readily when he refused to give his opinion on court packing and eliminating the filibuster. Biden refused to answer… Wallace was like, “okay”!

If anything, my biggest frustration with Trump on Tuesday was his typical sloppy articulation of his policies and views. He seldom makes his best and most obvious supporting arguments. Whiff! Instead, what I hear often seems off-point and semi-coherent. Of course, I understand most of what he’s trying to get across, and so do many others when they’re not too busy self-projecting. So maybe Trump is a great communicator after all, despite his seeming lack of clarity.

Biden says he “is” the Democrat Party. Then he has a lot to answer for. I’m glad Trump lit into him. No reasonable person can blame Trump for being pissed off. Hey, I’m pissed off, and you should be pissed off too, because Joe Biden and the Democrat Party is ready to subjugate you!

Nominate and Confirm

23 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Supreme Court

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Absentee Ballots, Amy Coney Barrett, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, Bush vs. Gore, Check Schumer, Contested Election, Court Packing, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Judicial Activism, Lindsey Graham, Living Constitution, Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, Originalism, Phil Murphy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court, Ted Cruz, Tom Wolf, Voter Fraud

Many on the left practically cheered the passing of Antonin Scalia in 2016, a reaction I witnessed with disgust on my own social media feeds. Now, we should all mourn the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but some of the same people seem almost comically furious with her for “choosing such a bad time to die”, just 46 days before the presidential election! Or, for refusing to step down during the Obama administration, when she could have been replaced with a much more youthful lefty jurist.

Of course, the Left is also furious that President Trump plans to nominate a candidate for Ginsburg’s vacancy on the Court, and that Republican leadership in the Senate plans to bring the nomination to a vote, perhaps before November 3rd.

Trump and the GOP majority are entitled to do that under the Constitution, and they should. Senator Ted Cruz explained the primary reason:

“Democrats and Joe Biden have made clear they intend to challenge this election. They intend to fight the legitimacy of the election. As you you know Hillary Clinton has told Joe Biden ‘under no circumstances should you concede, you should challenge this election.’ and we cannot have election day come and go with a 4-4 court. A 4-4 court that is equally divided cannot decide anything. And I think we risk a constitutional crisis if we do not have a nine-justice Supreme Court, particularly when there is such a risk of … a contested election.” 

This presidential election might be fraught with more procedural controversy than any before. The coronavirus, or its promoters in the media and the Democrat party, has spooked many voters into the belief that going to a polling place in-person on Election Day is too dangerous. This despite the fact that distancing and masks will be required, and the time it takes to complete a ballot does not require “prolonged exposure” to anyone. So now we face the prospect of mail-in balloting on an unprecedented scale, which is an invitation to manipulation and fraud. A couple of examples:

“… consider some of the suspect decisions already being made in various states that deliberately weaken ballot security. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, voted last week along party lines (the judges are elected) that county drop boxes, including unattended ones, could be used to collect votes. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his party supported the measure, which reached the court by lawsuits, thus avoiding GOP control of both legislative chambers. The decision obviously opens the door to potential fraud because ballots in unsecured drop boxes could be tampered with or stolen. 

New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy also made some curious decisions. A Jersey friend sent me a mailer he received that was addressed only to ‘Residential Customer.’ Inside, a pamphlet from the county clerk in Bergen County said that a Murphy order ‘requires’ every county to mail a ballot to ‘every active registered voter.’ That raises the chances of thousands of unmarked ballots being stolen from the post office or front porches, practices not exactly unheard of in New Jersey.”

Already a number of lawsuits have been filed in various states over absentee ballots. There have been missed deadlines, disputes over whether certain candidates should appear on those ballots, invalidated pre-filled applications for ballots, and an incorrect mailer sent by the U.S. Postal Service to voters nationwide regarding absentee ballots. Let’s face it: for all the earlier denials by Democrats that the mail-in ballot process was not subject to gaming or fraud, neither side trusts the other. There will be many more disputes as ballots are counted before and after Election Day.

It’s reasonable to expect that a few cases might rise to the level of the U.S. Supreme Count before election tallies are final in some states, as in the Florida recount in the Bush vs. Gore election of 2000. A 4 – 4 tie on the Court would leave lower, state-court rulings in place that could decide the outcome of a federal election. That’s not how the process is intended to work. Needless to say, that’s another reason why Democrats oppose a Trump nominee prior to the election. There’s no doubt they’d push forward with their own nominee were the shoe on the other foot, however, just as Republicans opposed the confirmation of Merrick Garland in 2016.

So who’s a hypocrite? Republicans who said that they wouldn’t confirm or even conduct a confirmation process in an election year, as in 2016, certainly qualify (Lindsey Graham, among others). It must have seemed expedient to stay so at the time, but it was foolish. And Democrats who now protest after insisting in 2016 (and before) that a Supreme Court vacancy should be filled by the sitting president, even in an election year, also qualify (Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, among others). Here’s what some top progressive legal minds were saying in 2016: It’s a duty and obligation for the president to nominate and for the Senate to undertake a confirmation process!!

Here’s the key issue: The president has the authority to nominate Supreme Court justices any time during his term. If the Senate confirms, then a new justice is seated. If the Senate chooses not to confirm, the vacancy remains. That’s how it works. There have been 29 vacancies on the Court in election years, and in 22 of those cases the sitting president sent a nomination to the Senate. As Justice Ginsburg said in 2016:

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being the president in his last year.”

Her purported wish on her death bed, that her replacement would be chosen by a new president, was not hypocritical. It was a wish, not a legal opinion. It was just as “political” as the contradictory statements made by the politicians, however.

Ginsburg also said it’s the Senate’s job to take up a vote, which the Republicans refused to do in 2016. That was their prerogative, however, and the decision does not bind anyone in the current circumstance.

Mitch McConnell is right:

“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise. President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”  

Democrats have promised to “pack the Court” by adding seats to the bench for new, ideologically-preferred justices if a Trump nominee is confirmed, among other threats. They should heed the caution of moderates who know how dangerous that may be. The mere threat gives Republicans reason to pack the Court themselves, when they can, which might be as soon as January. Moreover, nothing could do more to undermine confidence in the Court. RBG herself had the following to say about Court packing:

“Well, if anything, it would make the court appear partisan. It would be that one side saying, ‘when we’re in power, it was only to enlarge the number of judges so we will have more people who will vote the way we want them to…’ So I am not at all in favor of that solution to what I see as a temporary situation.”

Well, of course the Court is divided along certain ideological lines, and to some extent those differences break along dimensions of legal philosophy, such as originalism vs. a “living Constitution”, or judicial activism. That’s not to say that the Court is always partisan, however. The process of nominating and confirming justices should not be as partisan as it has become in the last 25 years (see the last link). Let’s not make it worse.

Trump will nominate an able jurist. Senators should meet and independently assess that individual’s legal qualifications and temperament. My expectation is they will vote to confirm, and I hope that vote takes place without rancor.

Note: Thanks to the Washington Free Beacon for the wonderful meme at the top of this post.

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