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  • Federal budget and “blowing holes” in it

    As I watch this new generation try to rewrite our history, one thing I’m sure of, it will be misspelled and have no punctuation. 

    George Rebane

    We have been deficit spending the federal budget for a few generations now.  And the Simple Simons of the land always lay the deficits at the feet of the current administration.  We just had an example of that (here) from local leftwing columnist George Boardman.  It really seems that these people have no idea how federal budgets are manufactured and structured.  Since all appropriation bills must start in the House, the situation becomes a bit complicated when one party doesn’t control both the House and the White House, and even more complex when Senate approval is thrown in.  (more here)

    Even thought the budget process normally starts with the President’s submittal to Congress of a recommended budget, it is usually DOA in a House controlled by the opposite party.  What really goes on then is that the House drafts a budget that it dickers with the Senate to go along, and then winds up, hopefully, as a ‘concurrent budget resolution’, which is essentially an outline for spending for the coming year enabled by a sequence of subsequent individual appropriations bills.  The concurrent budget resolution does not need the president’s signature to take effect.  If the two houses can’t agree on a concurrent budget resolution, then Congress has to pass a series of continuing resolutions to keep the government operating at current funding levels.

    So with all this going on to have the federal government finally spend through its various departments, bureaus, and agencies – each operating under their own regulatory structures – you really have to be a double dummy to think that the deficit, let alone individual expenditures, are all the president’s doing and fault.  However, in our land of the free, we also enjoy the freedom to be double dummies; there’s no law against it and you can even vote.

    At this point we haven’t even come to the major parts of the budget divided into mandatory spending and discretionary spending.  And then there’s the interest on the national debt – the part we must pay ‘the public’ and not merely government paying itself.  Take a look at the figure below.

    FedBudgetFractions2

    If we break down the components of discretionary spending, that’s where the real dickering starts.  The Dems have an advantage here because they are the champions of social programs that easily buy favorable votes during elections.  Historically, the Dems would like to push as many of their social programs into the un-sunsetted mandatory category as possible, and then continue to demand an equal share of the next year’s remaining discretionary spending (and, of course, to increase it through higher taxes).  The tension here comes with the Repubs always wanting to reduce taxes while also making sure the US doesn’t fall behind the bad guys militarily – i.e. only the Right wants America to maintain its white hat hegemon position in the world.  Both parties succumb to various forms of corporate and agricultural subsidies.  A breakdown of discretionary spending is shown below.

    FedBudgetDiscretionary

    So now we come to the special events category like Mideast Wars, ‘quantitative easing’ during the recovery from the Great Recession, and Covid Relief spending after the states variously and unnecessarily shut down their economies to create historic levels of unemployment in the land.  These boondoggles costing trillions really did lay waste to our budgets and the national debt.  Do we now stack all of these expenditures solely, or even mostly, on the backs of the presidents in office during those fiscal years?  (For example, Trump was responsible for the China virus and its impact on the country’s economy, ergo the subsequent relief spending.)

    We have always had two basic ideologies contending for money, added to the natural habit of politicians to indulge in local pork.  One side wants big government to be the end-all of control and the source of largesse, the other side wants small government and open markets, but knows that it has to play along with the spending game in order not to be swept out office by a population that grows more ignorant and dependent with each passing generation.  Anyone with a smidgen of history under their belt knows that this is the real dynamic that determines the levels and directions of federal spending.

    When all the budget dust settles, we have 535 congress critters, all jostling each other for credit on the passage of spending bills that they think will promote their re-election chances.  So out in television land, what can we make of these self-aggrandizing worthies who failed high school civics (remember when that was still taught), and are now trying to sound like they know how our government works by pointing to this or that president as having “blown a hole in the budget”?

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  • Sandbox – 1sep20

    [So here’s the drill about the riots.  According to the Big Liberal Lie Factory, up until last week there were no riots, only peaceful protests for social justice – ask anybody in the Dem leadership including Bumblebrain.  This week this position became ludicrous even for the country’s liberal contingent.  So a massive pivot was necessary and pulled off on the Sunday lamestream talk shows.  This week the riots are suddenly real, and have been so for some months, all caused by President Trump inciting white nationalists to violence from the White House.  Now that’s a more palatable version of reality for all the land's leftists.  gjr]

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  • Revolution Diary – 29aug20

    George Rebane

    How do you talk math with someone who believes 2+2=5?

    As I scan the morning papers and posts, some inevitable thoughts, idle and maybe not so idle, bubble to the surface.

    The above tag line is apropos to the total breakdown in America’s public discourse, and I do mean total.  This week ‘Thousands Flood National Mall to Protest Racial Injustice’ screams a headline with photos showing the usual crowd with t-shirts and signs assembling at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.  None of them know that they are blessed to live in the world’s most racially just country.  And the overwhelming share of them, those not of cynical purpose, suffer from ignorance on steroids.  Along with world-class racial justice in our land, every metric that may have pointed to racial injustice has been trending in the right way over the last decades.  What remains of evidence for residual racial injustice has been fomented and perpetuated for decades under Democrat administrations who have established and administered the plantations of reliable voters in inner cities. (more here)

    None of the know-nothings can describe what in their minds racial justice would look like in America.  Their only insane conclusion, embedded by their corrupt thought leaders like Sharpton, is that President Trump is the underlying cause of racial injustice and must be tossed from office this November.  Then with Biden there will be happy dancing in the streets while bullets continue to fly, and the thousands of black lives that don’t matter will continue to drop like flies.  Since they have no clue about or desire to improve black lives, you can bet the ranch that socialist planners are now busy coming up with the next round of rightwing scapegoats to blame for black under-achievement that the Democrats in charge can again sidestep.

    Taking the 50Kft view, it’s hard to tell where is the boundary between ignorance and stupid.  How many of them and theirs are intellectually irredeemable?  What dialogues or training remain in the realms of the possible or even the plausible?  It would not surprise me if tomorrow’s socialist planners will lament the premature rejection of eugenics (introduced and touted by America’s socialists), as they contemplate the latest uses of technology for creating Marx’s ‘perfect man’ to inherit the Earth.

    A parallel stream of contemplation comes closer to home when we consider the sorry state and direction of California.  In ‘California Needs Ideas’, Holman Jenkins reminds us of the utter idiocy that forms the foundation of our Democrats' obsession with what they believe to be preventable manmade global warming.  “No climate policy is available that would operate on a time scale relevant to California’s hellish wildfire challenge, except throwing enough opaque particles into the atmosphere to cool the Earth. … Anything that greens might favor, such as subsidizing green energy or taxing fossil fuels out of existence, is irrelevant. The effect would only manifest itself imperceptibly over many decades. To boot, it would require the participation of the world’s major economies, including China’s and India’s, which leaders answerable to California’s voters are in no position to deliver. … I make these points to underline an absurdity. California politicians spend much of their time obsessing about a climate change problem they can’t fix. Their state accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions. There’s nothing they can do.”  In Sacramento stupid is forever, and the saddest part is that stupid is contagious in California – look around you.

    Continuing this line of thought brings us to this morning’s editorial in our beloved (29aug20) Union.  Their Saturday editorial reflects the aggregate thought of the newspaper’s editorial board – full disclosure, Jo Ann is a member.  Today they ask us to ‘Imagine if everyone voted’.  The piece begins by recounting the adoption of the 19th Amendment and the (silly?) reasons people argued against women becoming franchised to vote.  Well and good, but then they launch into a bit of perspective and philosophy to “give us a chance to reflect on where we’ve been, and remember what it took to get where we are.”  Immediately they trip over the much-disproven but still politically correct shibboleth – “The past is a chapter already written and set in stone.”  Nothing could be further from the truth today, if ever.  The past has always and many times over been rewritten by the victors.  Such wild revisionism continues to this day, and there is no sign that the practice will ever let up.  Today’s curriculum about our past is in a froth of wordsmithing that seeks to capture the most woke interpretation of our history to inculcate the current generation of young people. (more here) 

    The Union’s collected wisdom concludes with a heavy dose of hopeful fog.  “Imagine what our country would look like if everyone who could vote did, and exercised that right regularly.  Just imagine.”  Before our fevered imaginations can take wing, we do need a bit of clarity here.  Who are the “everyone who could vote”?  Are they all American citizens, or just registered American citizens, or just all legal adult residents of America, or all adult residents of America, or also our nascent middle school students, or …, who?  Our imaginations would be directed in very different directions were we to know who were the intended who.  Given the strong leftwing tilt of The Union, people of my ilk would not err much if such imagining began with some considerable trepidation.

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  • ‘Critical Ethnic Studies’, say whaat??!!

    George Rebane

    CAseal_SNAFUCalifornia’s public education system has been dysfunctional for years, and now in the age of riots and the growing socialist revolution, it is ready to take its final turns around the drain.  You will not read any of this in the lamestream, because the new curriculum to be adopted by Sacramento next spring will put a nice bow on finally acknowledging that unionized state-run public schools will become literally nothing more than finishing schools in Marxist propaganda.  However, our Left considers that the country’s remnants of traditional American thought still number enough to require the adoption of this new brainwashing initiative not be publicized.

    Former US Asst SecEd and Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers lays the whole thing out in the 28aug20 WSJ – ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California.  His report goes a long way to answer the perennial question of how our younger generation has turned out in the aggregate to be so uncritical, compliant, and just plain dumb.  And for the country’s hardworking Orwellians, the adoption of this new mandatory curriculum into our high schools promises that for them the best is yet to come.  No student will graduate without having passed this course.  Dr Evers makes the case that “the state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.”

    Critical ethnic studies is actually making its second appearance at California’s Board of Education.  The “radical and jargon-laced” 2019 version was sent back for a more “toned down” draft.  Well, it didn’t work.  The new and improved 2020 version not only didn’t correct any of the 2019’s “conceptual problems”, but has now been told by our state’s Dept of Education “to resuscitate” the really bad parts cut from the 2019 version.

    Among the litany of dreadful stuff that our students will have rammed down their cognitive craws are the newly focused victim “groups that dominate the curriculum … African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.”  However, “excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth)”.  The course will actually “boil down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics, and victimology.”  Among the identified bad people in the world will be America’s Irish and Jews; why? because they have “secured white racial privilege.”

    As you might expect from such bilge water, “the revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics.”  These critics are portrayed as ideologically correct and pure, without a tinge of bad parts like racism or discrimination.  Yet, as Evers reminds us, “history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?”  Other horrific examples are easily obtained from Nazi Germany, Red China, Yugoslavia, Turkey, … .

    All this history is omitted, and will neither pollute nor divert our high schoolers.  For our young minds the world out there will be exquisitely formed so that what they are carefully taught will stick when they hit the streets to look for a job, vote, and demonstrate.  They will have all the correct answers they need to understand and interpret what they see and experience.

    Dr Evers concludes his essay with –

    The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

    All this, coming to a California high school near you.  And some still wonder why SNAFU continues so perfectly to describe the state of our state.  Now you need wonder no more.

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  • Ruminations – 27aug20 (updated 29aug20)

    George Rebane

    Not only can you have your own opinions, but today you can also have your own facts, history, science, logic, and language.  Rebane Doctrine

    Orwellian Inclusivity.  Only a progressive works to achieve inclusivity by first rooting out all wrong-thinkers.  (See all the ongoing firings of leftist academics and journalists for even putting a lexicographic toe over the line in the narrowing narrative of the ongoing revolution.)

    The lamestream is still providing scant, if any coverage, of the destructive and murderous riots in our cities, instead characterizing them as peaceful protests by “frustrated” young people.  This has the effect of making their audiences sound somewhere between silly and foolishly naïve when they enter into conversations about current events.

    Kansas Mask Graphic is latest Big Lie that illustrates how Dems present their ‘science’ with methods already perfected in fashioning their climate change narrative.  “The state’s health secretary fudged the data to make the governor’s mask mandate look successful.”  (more here)

    ‘A Batscat Challenge’ reminder.  Back on 9 August  2020 I once more countered our leftwingers’ deficient debating attempts, making the case, and concluding with So here’s a thesis to debate – ‘It is proposed that dedicated Democrats, following in the footsteps of their political leaders and notable academics, are in various forms intellectually disabled or delinquent (aka batshit crazy).’  No one should hold their breath that this challenge will be answered.

    VP Pence's commencement speech cancelled. (here)  More of the same applications of 'inclusivity' by Wisconsin Lutheran College, a timid private college folding to the demands of its woke student body contingent.

    ‘Majority of Americans Report Self-Censoring Their Political Views’ reports a Cato national poll -  “self‐​censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”  The beat toward radical-Left autocracy goes on.

    [28aug20 update]

    Ramirez_200828

    Erratum??  A reader took issue with a statement in my 5aug20 KVMR commentary on voting by mail.  Specifically, it involves whether/how the USPS timestamps postage-paid bulk mail.  I have addressed this (here) with more links to references that extensively report on and discuss the historical tsunami of ballots the USPS will attempt to handle in a timely manner this fall.

    Gov Nuisance has spoken.  We now know the updated C19 rules for gatherings and businesses that give us our new 'Blueprint for a Safer Economy' – something we've all been waiting for since only Sacramento knows all that stuff.  H/T to the reader who dug out and sent this very informative site that covers all California counties.  Reade 'em and weep.

    [29aug20 update]  Another view (here) on voting by mail is provided by Sen Chuck Grassley (R-IA).  It appears that the USPS is not in a cash crunch as hyper-ventilated in yet another Big Lie by Team Pelosi, and at least Iowa (along with Florida) is ready to handle November's mail-in ballots.  (H/T to reader)

     

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  • California’s Blackout Blight

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 August 2020.]

    California’s irregular power blackouts remind us of visits to third world countries.  As with our state’s recent and still ongoing water shortages, these power blackouts are totally manmade.  We are needlessly doing it to ourselves to achieve political objectives neither known nor shared by most Californians.  Our electrical grid is operated by the California Independent Systems Operator or CAISO, the organization that determines the amount of electricity available to the utilities and allocates it across the state.  For years we have known that the politically proposed schedule of switching the state to renewables was untenable.  Last September, CAISO warned that electricity shortages were possible during a normal heat wave in the near term due to our rapid shift to renewable and less reliable power sources like solar and wind.

    The blackouts we’re talking about here are Power Shortage blackouts and not the Public Safety Power Shutoffs to prevent the start of disastrous wildfires by tree branches blown against power lines.  The power shortage blackouts are due only to our premature removal of natural gas and nuclear generating stations, and their replacement by sometime wind and solar power.  Gov Newsom responded to the increasing public outcry against blackouts by admitting, “We failed to predict and plan for these shortages”, and then followed that with a tautology and a sanguine conclusion – “Our capacity for storage in particular substantially needs to be improved, but I am confident in our capacity to deal with that”, since the state “cannot sacrifice reliability” going forward.  And with those pronouncements delivered, we continue with business as usual.

    Even Loretta Lynch, former US Attorney General and California Public Utilities Commission president, states that “CAISO doesn’t know how to manage the grid.”  Such assessments from Democrat leaders further support that because government has been the incompetent and unreliable watchdog of the power industry, all kinds of games are being played by utilities, middle-men, and generators, as politicians have come up with poorly thought out policies for our state.

    The bottom line here is that if we’re to continue progressing toward 100% renewables while providing reliable power to consumers and industry, then we must have fossil or nuclear back-up generating capacity of years, perhaps decades, to come.  Pursuing any other policy today is to guarantee increasing power shortage blackouts and their collateral damage indefinitely.

    Looking at today’s big picture for California adds power shortages to water shortages to highest fuel costs to regulatory overburdens, housing shortages, ever higher taxes, homeless encampments everywhere, and on and on.  The result today is that only the large corporatist enterprises and the very rich are the benefactors of California’s still growing economy, as they are immune to the nation’s top tax and regulatory burdens that are visited primarily on the backs of the remaining middle class.  The result is the great California exodus – we export productive workers and businesses, and import the indigent and illegals seeking the loudly promised government handouts that are the common currency for vote buying.  The poor, sheltered from the heavy hand of government for all the obvious reasons, are the recipients of ever-increasing redistribution of largesse.

    The most plausible and visible reason for this dismal state of affairs is our long-reigning political monopoly.  Single party management of public affairs has allowed state regulatory agencies to become both indifferent and incompetent.  In all spheres of human activity, competition is the only cure for incompetence, and that applies to single party control of a state’s politics, policies, and administrative oversight.  Dominant socialist and communist regimes have demonstrated this truth for over a century now.  For decades voters in California have succumbed to the siren song of ever more socialist policies promised and delivered by the Democratic Party.  In the final analysis, what we have today we have done to ourselves by ensconcing single-party state and local governments that have effectively shut down all opposing political and policy alternatives.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

    [Addendum]  The major impediment to the availability of affordable renewable electrical power is the lack of affordable storage of excess power that cannot be ‘banked’ either in storage devices like batteries or heated fluids or pumped water, or sold to current users who would be reliable sources of power when California’s generating system cannot meet the state’s needs. The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent. That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.  (more here)

    Today more people, including productive black families, are moving out of California than moving in.  In recent years this net exodus phenomenon has occurred occasionally.  For example “From 2015 to 2017, California saw a net loss of between 129,000 and 143,000 residents to domestic migration each year, according to census estimates. … California has lost more people to other states than it has gained for much of the last two decades, census figures show.” And this year’s census is expected to show a net loss of at least 40K residents.  Such losses will be an historical first, since California’s population annual growth rate has averaged a bit under 3% for generations.  Nevertheless, the state’s population dynamics remain a subject of debate and disagreement that all depend on how one counts the immigrant and emigrant cohorts.  But there is no reasonable debate about where on the productivity scale lie the aggregate of workers and businesses. (more here and here)

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  • Wingman Riot Response Tactic

    George Rebane

    [I found this little bagatelle buried in my RR WIP folder where I had stashed it a couple of weeks ago after being inspired by some serious news videos from our inner cities reporting on a particularly egregious evening of riotous celebrations during our summer of love.  Anyway, since such observances continue unabated, I thought I’d just throw it out there for what it’s worth.]

    It is clear that the police assigned to man the line during street demonstrations and riots are not very organized in the way they encounter rioters who need to be addressed – constrained, pushed back, arrested, defended against – as individuals.  Today police appear to act either as loners without dependable support, or as members of an ad hoc squad that suddenly decides to form and descend on a rioter while other officers either join the engaged squad, thereby contributing to the disorganized appearance of piling on, or they individually just mill around while obviously not addressing the remainder of the rioters.

    The problem is that individual officers know that it is dangerous to go one-on-one with a rioter, because other rioters will come to the aid of one of their own and attack the lone officer trying to do his duty.  The result is that the overall response of the massed police operating in this manner turns out to be much less effective that what is possible with a different command structure on the ground.

    A workable solution to this problem is that EVERY officer on the street is first and foremost a member of a two-man team, every officer has an assigned partner or ‘wingman’ (a la fighter aircraft).  They operate as a team in constant communication with each other.  They are never more than, say, ten feet apart, always with an eye on each other.  They go after a rioter together in a tactic where one can address the rioter, while the other defends the encounter.

    Such two-man teams can also call for other such teams to support them as the need arises.  The fundamental point here is that no line officer feels alone and uncertain of what kind of support he may depend on or receive, when either attacked or in response to a decision taken to inhibit or arrest a rioter.  Everyone always has a wingman, everyone operates in pairs.

    This principle is already adopted and in practice with regular patrol officers up to the level of detectives who work with an assigned partner in relationships that endure anywhere from many months to many years.  This format needs to be replicated on the streets when responding to demonstrations and riots.  Every demonstrator should know that police operate in pairs, and that they will quickly be reinforced by other paired teams.  In short, no officer should feel like the Lone Ranger when it all hits the fan.

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  • Scattershots – 24aug20 (updated 26aug20)

    George Rebane

    Only Trump can defeat Trump.

    Our liberal readers really don’t understand what real ‘fake news’ is, and they throw that notion around as they do with terms like ‘racist’, which they also don’t understand.  Since they are a class-oriented people, liberals don’t look at the message, only the class membership of the messenger.  If it’s of the wrong type, they immediately disregard what the messenger brings, and vice-versa.  As demonstrated here for years, the NYT and WaPo are prime purveyors of fake news to the nation’s light readers, as always cited by the falsity of their messages.  Here is another example of fake news they manufactured regarding the Russian collusion imbroglio.  Read Daily Caller’s ‘Russian Oligarch’s Ties To Manafort, Steele Posed Intel Risks, Senate Report Says’, and note what critical parts of the Senate’s report these newspapers left out, altering the message to support their ongoing progressive narrative – all of it invisible to their blindered true believers.

    Bumblebrain bumbles again – “If the scientists say shut it down, I’ll shut it down.  I go with science.”  The manchild has no clue how science or the government works.  His concept of science is what mommy tells an 8-year-old about science.  There is only one science and the good scientist tells us what it is.  Young children are not exposed to the wide diversity of scientific interpretations of literally every phenomenon – science is simply what mommy says it is.  The executive listens to scientists of all hues and then decides – it’s not easy and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.  And shutting down the country’s social and commercial activities – the President has no constitutional authority to do that under our federal system; all he can do is jawbone the states.  And after 40 years in the Senate, Biden is still such a naïf, and getting more addled by the day, that he knows none of this.

    [25aug20 update]  America will suffer its greatest assault on religious institutions after a Biden victory according to the policy platform laid out by the Democrats.  The Big Lie that’s supposed to make us somnolent on the matter is bead-carrying Biden’s touted devotion to Catholicism.  As Bill McGurn points out here, nothing could be further from truth.  The Dems have never liked religion and its non-profit agencies and enterprises as a competitor that provide succoring services which always outshine similar government efforts in performance and cost.  Their solution, always practiced by socialists, is to constrain and reduce religious liberties.  The current approach by Team Biden and Democrats will be up the ante on licensing requirements and tax exemptions for non-profit, religious agencies offering everything from foster child care to parochial education.  According to their platform, these strictures will “reject” the “broad religious exemptions” that “allow businesses, medical providers, social service agencies and others to discriminate.” In other words, religious liberty.

    ‘The US Admits Too Few Refugees’ argues Reid Ribble, former Republican congress critter from Wisconsin.  His makes the point that “America should open its doors to those fleeing communism and religious persecution”, and goes on to cite our country’s core values in welcoming the oppressed as the basis for increasing our allotment of such refugees back to the almost 100K/yr level.  (more here)  I wish that he would have included some other criteria than just political or religious persecution to qualify the literally millions of so-oppressed people worldwide for US entry.  My own druthers would be the addition of some aspect of merit, say, academic, artistic, trade skill, STEM qualified, … .  But setting up a more comprehensive set of criteria becomes highly political as each side tries to size up who will wind up with more voters.

    [26aug20 update]  The first-rate, marquee-quality Democrat Big Lies are now coming in way too fast to count.  Today’s highlighter was delivered by Kamala Harris who pointed out that the insignificant Ebola and H1N1 deaths during the Obama/Biden administration demonstrated what proper pandemic leadership could deliver.  The sleazebag slut didn’t blink an eye in omitting to tell her debilitated devotees that Ebola’s transmission was restricted to exchange of bodily fluids, and that the H1N1 mortality rate was extremely low.  Added to that, the medical experts in charge of managing both diseases today freely admit that it was NOTHING that they did that choked the outbreaks, but only a couple of extremely lucky turns of events.  Yet that broad continues to spread the Big Lie that it was the Obama/Biden administration’s astute policies that scotched the spread of the diseases, and contrasts it with Trump’s equivalent task that he has mishandled.  Covid-19 is a couple leagues above the easy money maladies of Ebola and H1N1, but that no lamestream consumer will ever know.  (BTW, H1N1 is still among us with its insignificant death rate.)

    As a Lucky Strike Extra, the Dems have not been able to describe what else they would have done or promise to do in controlling C19, other than plagiarizing what Trump has already done and is doing.  Compared to the present administration, their prescriptions contribute a nothing burger.  Notice the leftwing crickets’ replies to these.

    Another Big Lie we pick up today is the Dems’ screams that the First Lady and SecState Pompeo violated the Hatch Act with their respective speeches yesterday.  To begin, the Hatch Act gives wide latitude and exemptions to the Executive Branch, and the WH South Lawn and Rose Garden are specifically omitted from the parts of the executive mansion in which it is inappropriate to conduct partisan events.  And, of course, Team Biden provided no evidence to counter Pompeo carefully circumventing using State Department offices for his privately arranged and funded canned speech from Israel.  But all that don’t make no never mind to the Dems.  All they hope to do from now until November is to continue diverting attention from their ‘Party Without A Platform’.

    Biden finally had to say he “won’t stand for violence in the streets” during his leftwing constituents' peaceful demonstrations across the land (actually, he referred only to Kenosha, but I’ll give him the rest of the country’s rioting cities which he has yet to acknowledge).  So my question to him is, ‘OK Bumblebrain, what would it look like to the rest of us when you won’t stand for the violence?’

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  • Sandbox – 24aug20

    [The Democrats' damage and destruction to America's black population reaches back to ante-bellum years.  In recent decades they have turned their tender mercies for our African-American neighbors onto cynical avenues that have laid waste to black families and the communities in which they live.  Under decades of Democrat rule we can echo the question asked by an enlightened black candidate for Congress – name any city in which life for blacks has improved over the last, say, forty years.  About all this our leftwingers respond with crickets.  Here is a campaign video that spells it out. (H/T to reader)  gjr]

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  • Biden’s Big Lies – 22aug20 edition

    George Rebane

    Bumblebrain read little that's new off his teleprompter last Thursday night.  The only policy statement he made was what he’d do to end the C19 epidemic in the US.  His Big Lie was the enumeration of everything that Trump has already done or has under way, save for a federal mandate to impose wearing of masks countrywide.  And the tragedy of the matter is that we have manufactured so many millions of double dummies with our public education system so that most of them out there in television land believe that Bumblebrain actually has some new initiatives that will work.  Now that’s another Big Lie.

    Also, did you notice that Bumblebrain, along with his lamestream lackies, never once during the Dem convention brought up the California power blackouts that their Green New Deal policies will impose on the rest of the country once they’re elected and control Congress.  That is a Big Lie that must not be made public, not even telling the country in their news programs that California is suffering blackouts because the Dems’ green policies have eliminated the state’s ability to provide base load capacity when the demand is high, and the wind and sun no longer cooperate.

    Biden’s biggest bamboozle is not telling the country what he stands for, and instead letting Kasich give one message while Bernie gives the one that’s 180 out.  RINO Kasich’s message attempted to tell everyone that ol’ Joe isn’t that far left after all, he’s just a moderate with good character traits.  While Comrade Bernie declared total victory on national television telling all that Bumblebrain has signed up for the Full Marxist Monty spelled out in the Green New Deal.  (And notice the complete silence on both the lamestream and during convention about the riots, lootings, burnings, murders, … going on across the country under Democrat leaders.  There’s a real whopper of a Big Lie.)

    Finally, we see that Russia and the EU are betting that Biden will win in November.  They are doing nothing to support America in its correct policy to impose UN authorized ‘snap back’ sanctions that were originally contained in the JCPA (the infamous Obama nuclear deal).  The mullahs have violated almost every provision in the horribly drafted agreement that still gives the UN Security Council ample grounds to stop Iran from acquiring and reselling advanced weapon systems and military gear.  But money talks.  Angela and her cronies, along with Vladimir, have some serious bucks at stake here in their sales of guns and grenades to the ragheads.  Iran remains the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism, and our allies don’t give a crap (Vladimir’s position is understood).  This again says that Biden continues clueless on foreign policy, and President Trump is the only one with the courage to call the shots and sanctions on the international stage.

    Now these are the real Big Lies told Americans by our country’s anti-American political party.  And no one, not even the local leftwing lackies, will dare address any of these issues for the simple reason that they have no leg to stand on.  On these issues crickets continue as the only working alternative during these election year debates.

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