Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Parallel Thinking

Conservatism, Deep Thoughts

As everyone knows, I don’t have guest posts here at my back porch.  However, I recently received an email from Longtime Reader Preussenotto, and it is of such outstanding quality that I’ve decided to share it here (with just a couple of grammatical alterations).

Been noticing a theme lately with a lot of my fellow denizens of the blog.  Maybe it’s hitting you too. [it is — K.]

Not sure exactly where to start but here goes (I’m not as gifted a writer as the Divine Sarah):

I know you are not an American Football fan/follower.  I am.  My favorite rooting team happens to be the Pittsburgh Steelers.  The Steelers have been owned by the same family since the teams founding and have the reputation of a team that does it the “right” way.  There have been periods of great success, and periods of not-so-great achievements.  All teams go through this.  Lately there’s been a lot of downs.

But to listen to the sports pundits and the fans, and we all seem to be falling into the trap:  that because the uniforms haven’t changed, and the ownership hasn’t changed, that the quality of players, scouts, executives, and ownership are all still the same championship caliber it was.

Not so.

There are still those of us out there who fall into the temptation, to believe.  This belief is because of an illusion created by reputation.  Fans/pundits look at the brand name and think it’s the same thing as it was when you cheered them on as a kid.

I know you were in the retail business.  Look at that as an example.  We fall into the temptation to believe that a Whirlpool appliance, or a Craftsman tool, or an ACDelco replacement part, is the same because they had a reputation of being a quality item, and it WAS, back in the day.  But that reputation is now a complete illusion.  Modern appliances, modern Craftsman tools, modern auto parts’ replacements are complete shit in quality.  By design.  But they have been trading off our brand loyalty forever, and when you see the logo on the package, you THINK you are getting a decent thing.

The above is probably something we have all noticed but let’s transfer it to those of us with a conservative political bent.

We look at the situation facing the British Isles.  We Yanks fondly remember Churchill & Thatcher, “This was their finest hour” or “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.”  But all of that is a complete illusion.  The Brits had the reputation of being stalwarts but with the generations of Third World imports, and Welfare State layabouts… It’s just not the same Britain as it was.  The way the Tories ran Britain was an absolute crime, and not fundamentally different from the Labour party.

Its not just the Limeys.  Frogland, Krautland, all the Euros have fallen victim to this.  It seems the Poles and Hungos & maybe the Serbs still have a sense of who they are, but overall, Europe as a power is an illusion.  They are trading on a Brand-Name reputation rather than actual success.

It’s most pronounced here in the States by the Stupid Party (Team Elephant).  We all seem to think this is the Party of Ronald Reagan, but it isn’t anymore.  Apart from the charlatans and rent-seekers that infest any political activity, the party is overrun by the soft-socialist types who fled the hard-left Team Jackass people.  You can call them the Reagan Democrats or Flag Waving Union types, but they brought the soft-socialist ideology into the Stupid Party and moved it left as well.

So today you have the Uniparty.  We are all failing into the trap of the Republican Party reputation.  But it’s a complete illusion.  People say today JFK would be a Republican, that’s not just because Team Jackass went bat-shit-crazy left, but because the Stupid Party cranked left as well.  It’s not a credit to the brand.  Today’s Republican officeholder has far more in common with Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, FDR than Barry Goldwater or Calvin Coolidge.

But we all are tempted to believe that by checking “R” we are at least getting something of what we want.  Maybe we are right, more often we are switching from actual cigarettes to lite cigarettes, hoping the tumor will be smaller, or hoping we’ll get raped by those with smaller dicks.

And I don’t know where to go. The Libertarians are a mess; the Democrats are unthinkable, and I’m too old to start a revolution.

Off to the range, I guess. I still at least am armed.

Thanks again for keeping the last interesting thing alive on the internet.

No, all thanks are due to you, old buddy, for expressing what both I and my Readers are feeling right now.

Tomorrow’s post will be very much part of this same feeling.

Fitting Music

Foreign Affairs, Marxists

From Xwitter:

Actually, a more fitting musical accompaniment would be a series of drumrolls as he mounts the stairs to the scaffold.  But hey, don’t just go with my (admittedly-severe) option.

Let’s poll the parents of the tens of thousands of young girls who were tortured and raped by Muslim gangs — which Starmer knew all about, and did absolutely fuck all to prosecute.

Recorders, or drumrolls for them?  [#NoBets]

Cutting Fat & Fraud

Budgets

Over among the Big Brains at American Thinker, Rhys Read offers these ideas for cutting back government spending and getting our spending deficit under control:

First, eliminate the fraud in the system, which is estimated at between $200 billion and $500 billion per year.

Second, end the subsidies and government control regimes implemented to “combat climate change.”   Total spending on these programs total about $300 billion per year.

Third, moving to individual health accounts would reduce much of the middle-man expenses and regulatory expenses imbedded in the Affordable Care Act.  Eliminating these unnecessary bureaucratic expense and bloated health care costs would save about $300 billion per year.

Then we need to tackle the big expense: the cost of the bloated bureaucracy.  A one-third reduction in staffing plus a one-third reduction in average total compensation would save about $600 billion per year.

As for getting additional moolah into the system:

I propose increasing the Medicare tax from 1.45 percent to 2 percent and the Social Security tax from 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent. In addition, I propose tripling the FICA maximum, currently at $184,750, with a new 7.5-percent crediting rate to preserve the defined benefit nature of the payouts. Implementing these increases would generate about $300 billion per year.

And so on.  As the man once said (adjusted for inflation):  a (hundred) billion here, a (hundred) billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.

How much of this has any chance of ever happening?

Yeah, right.

Proportionate Response

Foreign Affairs, Law and Order

See, here’s the kind of statement that makes me want to reach for the old nail-studded cluebat.  (I know I know, it’s a Brit ergo a fucking dumbass / ideologue, but I’ve heard the same drivel being spouted by our Lefty assholes Over Here.)

British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said that not all ethnic groups should be treated the same by police in the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died in police handcuffs after officers refused to believe he had been stabbed by a Sikh man.

Wait, it gets better:

Lammy, who also serves as the left-wing Labour Party government’s Justice Secretary, said that while the “starting point” should be equality before the law, it is not always appropriate to be treated “the same”, noting the disproportionate arrest rates of certain ethnic minority groups, such as Roma travellers [Gypsies] and black Britons.

…and as we all know, the reason that gypsies and Black Britons get disproportionately arrested is — wait for it — because they commit a disproportionate number of the crimes.

It stands to reason (except to people like this twerp) that if you go fishing in a pond where 80% of the fish are yellow-colored, you’re going to catch a disproportionate number of yellow fish.

I’d like to give tits like this Lammy the benefit of the doubt — i.e. that they’re just statistically ignorant — but the truth of the matter is that for them, everything is viewed through the RAAAYYYYYCISM! lens.

Which is what led to the horrible outcome for the Nowak kid, above.  (For those who don’t know what that story was all about, go here.)

No Authority

Immigration, Legal Stuff

I’m getting really sick of the judiciary usurping the Constitutional power of the POTUS.  Here’s the latest little tick on the hide of our republic:

A federal judge, appointed by former President Barack Obama, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from halting legal immigration and asylum applications from nearly 40 countries deemed “high-risk” by officials.

“Each of the Challenged Policies — the Global Asylum Hold Policy, the Benefits Hold Policy, the Comprehensive Re-Review Policy, and the Country-Specific Factors Policy — are declared unlawful and are hereby VACATED and SET ASIDE,” McConnell wrote in his ruling.

See, I thought that we Americans — and most especially the President — could absolutely decide who and who not to allow into the country.

Needless to say, the aforementioned judge is not only an Obama pustule, but also resident in Rhode Island (as if we needed any more proof of his Leftism).

I’m curious as to what grounds this creep used to classify all those policies as “illegal” — I’m hoping that one of my Powdered Wig Readers will be sufficiently interested to cast an eye on the actual ruling and decipher it for us.

Also just out of curiosity:  how many federal judges has Trump appointed in the past eighteen months?  Because that seems to be the only (legal) way we can overwhelm assholes like this from subverting the Executive.

Note that I’m not advocating this:

… although some might.

Excellent — Or Funny?

Budgets, Politics, Trumpism

I see that the U.S. is finally going to get serious about our energy infrastructure:

One announcement Trump is set to make is the allocation of $425 million in Defense Production Act (DPA) funds to aid 13 coal plants in Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, per the official. Funding will also support coal mines in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The official noted that funding will enable coal plants to extend their operational life through investment in upgrades, strengthen grid reliability, and prevent electricity prices from surging with demand.

So because it’s being funded by the DPA (as it should be), there’s no haggling with Congress required.  But the very next little addendum is what got me giggling:

The president is also expected to tell reporters that $75 million in DPA funding will help construct a coal-export terminal in Oakland, California, the official said.

One wonders what the Watermelons in California will think of their beloved Golden Shower State becoming a conduit for the EEEEVIL COLE to be sent out to pollute other nations’ air.  Maybe their feelings will be assuaged by this:

The West Gateway project is anticipated to create 1,400 on-site jobs and support thousands more in the western states.

…not that California ever cared about those icky blue-collar jobs, though.

There’s a lot more good news, but read the rest of the thing to get it all.

I personally think that the coal-mining industry would be far better served by the elimination of most if not all of the tiresome Obama/Biden-era EPA restrictions, but that would involve Congress and we all know what horrors, foot-dragging and tantrums that would cause.