Remember…
Tag: politics
It’s all political theatre…
Get yours HERE!
The FBI’s Disturbing Treatment of Political Nominees
The FBI’s background investigation (B.I.) process for political nominees has allegedly been corrupted with “improper handling” of sensitive information, according to an investigation by America First Legal (AFL). AFL’s November 7 press release asserts that the mishandling of private information is a “critical” matter” that must be addressed because of the potential to use the B.I. process as a “weapon against future nominees.”
It also appears that select staff from the Senate Judiciary Committee “appear to have shared FBI background reports and personal financial information in a breach of Senate security protocols.” AFL rightly asserts that Americans, including administration nominees, have a right to privacy “to the greatest extent possible,” as cited in the Privacy Act of 1974.
AFL alleges that it has found “explosive new discoveries about the FBI’s flawed and unlawful background investigation process for nominees to positions that require Senate confirmation.” The investigation goes back to late June 2021, when AFL submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the DOJ.
The June 24, 2021 FOIA request included but was not limited to requests for records related to consent from nominees to be investigated by the FBI and all communications between the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee members and staff. In addition, AFL asked the DOJ to respond with “all laws, regulations, guidance and documents” that would apply to the “disclosure of judicial nominee background information files to Congress.” Those requested documents would also include any “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) between the Biden White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee and any MOU between the White House and the DOJ related to the “background investigations of potential judicial nominees.”
How to Cut $2 Trillion From the Federal Budget Without Really Trying
Donald Trump ally and probable future cabinet member Elon Musk went out on a limb during the Madison Square Garden rally, claiming he could cut $2 trillion from the budget.
“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk.
Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” could be cut. It’s a nice round number, but how realistic is it?
If we’re asking if the fat is there to achieve $2 trillion in cuts, the answer is obviously “yes.” If you’re asking if it can realistically be done, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Most of the thousands and thousands of federal programs and departments have a constituency in Congress. Each of those line items in the budget represents human beings: sick people, poor people, old people, babies, and tens of millions of other human beings that would die without federal assistance. That’s the reality for anyone who wants to cut the budget.
That doesn’t mean we can’t cut $2 trillion from the budget. It means we have to get our priorities straight and think rationally about where to cut that $2 trillion. That’s because the very first place Congress wants to cut is programs that benefit the old, the sick, and the weak.
Musk might have pulled that $2 trillion number off the top of his head, but leave it to the brilliant Veronique de Rugy, writing in Reason.com, to put flesh on the bare bones number of $2 trillion.
The best way to cut $2 trillion out of the budget is to ax everything the federal government does that it shouldn’t be doing in the first place. It’s time we rediscovered the exercise of thinking critically about government and the role it should or shouldn’t play in our lives. Questions like, “Is that the role of government?” or “Should the federal government pay for that?” haven’t been seriously considered in years. The muscle of fighting for first principles has atrophied among Republicans as it’s no longer in style to call for small government.
The fact that we’ve “forgotten” how to think critically about government spending only shows that our road to ruin has been paved with fools’ gold. It will take a generation to change the mindset that the federal government needs to do everything and make all of our lives easy.
FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs
A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.
A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.
The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”
It is unclear whether the same guidance was issued elsewhere in the country. The employees were part of a Department of Homeland Security surge capacity force team, meaning they volunteered from other DHS agencies to help an understaffed FEMA as it dealt with a second major hurricane in a span of just a few weeks.
Fascist Is as Fascist Does
Tis the season for name calling. It’s election season. Data analysis and historical analysis of policy proposals that haven’t worked in the past, but are proposed again since “we’ll do it better this time” take second place to throwing around invectives such as “Nazi,” “Hitler,” and “fascist.” Name-calling. That’s all it is. Name-calling.
As I watched, listened to, and read some of this stuff, I got to wondering if anyone doing the name-calling actually knows what they are talking about. I was reminded of the movie The Princess Bride in which Vizzini repeatedly uses the word “inconceivable” and Inigo Montoya responds, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I was also reminded of the movie, Forrest Gump. A young Forrest responds to a classmate who asked if he was stupid with, “Mama says ‘stupid is as stupid does.’” Forrest Gump’s line echoes the old adage that actions speak louder than words, but “stupid is as stupid does” kind of sticks with you.
One of the favorite slanders to try to gain votes is to attach an opposing candidate to Adolf Hitler. “This guy wants to have the military only be responsible to him, just like Hitler.” “This person is a fascist waiting to take over the country and take your freedoms away.” Seldom does anyone actually define terms.
It’s much easier to just yell an emotional insult that hopefully can be repeated as an emotional tagline to discredit a candidate. Emotion tags memory, so if the emotion can be strong enough, especially negative emotion, then the memory pops into your conscious mind quickly. The memory and the negative emotion ride into consciousness together, so it’s a valuable tool in the non-data, non-analytical world of politics.
Since the name-calling term of the season is “fascist,” it seems like maybe we could modify young Forrest’s comment into “Fascist is as fascist does.” That led to me trying to reconcile the name-calling with what we’ve been through in the past couple of years: lockdowns. I thought we should see if anyone other than a presidential candidate might fit the title, “fascist;” but fit it in actions versus having someone from the opposing party name-call.
Early in the year of 2020, the governor of the state of Washington locked down the state. By mandate, without input from the public, but certainly lots of input from “experts” and a relatively small cadre of advisors, including advisors on a national scale such as Dr. Fauci, Governor Jay Inslee doomed many small businesses, fired long-serving first responders, stole up to two years of schooling from the state’s children, possibly negatively affected child neurological development, probably caused discomfort for those suffering from Alzheimer’s as ability to see facial detail was impaired by demanded masking, and may have contributed to the epidemic of myopia.
German Government Collapses As Mass Strikes Grind Economy To A Halt
It’s not a good day for the establishment. Just hours after Kamala Harris – and the Democrats – staggering loss which ushered in Trump as president for the third time and gave Republicans a sweep of Congress, Germany’s three-party ruling coalition which had been on the verge of collapse for months, imploded on Wednesday evening after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he will fire Finance Minister Christian Lindner over persistent rifts on spending and economic reforms, a move that paves the way for a snap election at the end of March.
The firing ejects Lindner’s fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) from the troubled coalition, forcing Scholz to call for a confidence vote that he said would take place on January 15. If Scholz loses that vote, which is virtually certain, a snap election is set to take place by March.
The collapse of Germany’s government came just hours after Donald Trump’s clear win in the U.S. election, a result that stunned German political leaders, who depend on American military might for their country’s defense and fear Trump’s tariff policies will hobble German industry.
“Dear fellow citizens, I would have liked to have spared you this difficult decision, especially in times like these, when uncertainty is growing,” said Scholz – viewed as the weakest German chancellor in decades – in a statement at the chancellery.
But the rifts inside the coalition proved too great to overcome. Caught in the middle of an impossible battle, Lindner and his conservative FDP insisted that the German government stick to strict spending rules and cut taxes, even as his left-wing coalition partners wanted to maintain social spending and boost German industry through economic stimulus.
“All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner,” said Scholz in a statement. “Too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics. Too often he has broken my trust.”
Scholz said he had offered Lindner a deal to create an emergency fund to aid Ukraine that would exist outside Germany’s regular budget, but Lindner refused to participate in such fiscal gimmicks that saw the UK recently redefine the nature of “debt.”
“Olaf Scholz has long failed to recognize the need for a new economic awakening in our country,” said Lindner. “He has long played down the economic concerns of our citizens.”
As Politico reports, the FDP is the smallest party in the coalition and is now polling at only four percent — below the threshold needed to make it into the German parliament — meaning its leaders have been mulling a coalition break in order to save their political futures.
Crisis talks in the coalition of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and Lindner’s Free Democratic Party had come to a head after the FDP issued a paper with demands for liberal economic reforms that were difficult for the other two parties to accept.
Lindner’s recent policy paper, leaked to the media last week, called for tax cuts and a scaling back of climate policies in order to stimulate economic growth — both positions that put the party at odds with his coalition partners.
License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars
At 8:22 am on December 4 last year, a car traveling down a small residential road in Alabama used its license-plate-reading cameras to take photos of vehicles it passed. One image, which does not contain a vehicle or a license plate, shows a bright red “Trump” campaign sign placed in front of someone’s garage. In the background is a banner referencing Israel, a holly wreath, and a festive inflatable snowman.
Another image taken on a different day by a different vehicle shows a “Steelworkers for Harris-Walz” sign stuck in the lawn in front of someone’s home. A construction worker, with his face unblurred, is pictured near another Harris sign. Other photos show Trump and Biden (including “Fuck Biden”) bumper stickers on the back of trucks and cars across America. One photo, taken in November 2023, shows a partially torn bumper sticker supporting the Obama-Biden lineup.
These images were generated by AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers—all while recording the precise locations of these observations. Newly obtained data reviewed by WIRED shows how a tool originally intended for traffic enforcement has evolved into a system capable of monitoring speech protected by the US Constitution.
When Government Becomes The Enemy Of Liberty, Principles Are The Antidote to Politics
Only four percent “of US adults say the political system is working extremely or very well.” Sixty-five percent say we “always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” Yet, we keep doubling down, thinking that more attention on politics will somehow fix what ails society.
In 2020, candidates spent over $14 billion seeking the presidency. This was double the amount spent in 2016. The 2024 presidential campaign is far from over. How much will candidates spend this time to fix our attention on politics?
If you are one of those who find politics dispiriting, C. S. Lewis would understand. In his essay “Membership,” contained in his collection The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis wrote, “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.” Politics, Lewis explained, is not “the natural food of the mind” but a “necessary evil.” However, too much emphasis on politics has become “a new and deadly disease.”
Lewis compared fresh fruit to canned fruit. The latter can be necessary for storage, but Lewis observed he had met people who learned to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh.
Similarly, among us are those who prefer to weigh the promises of candidates as a pathway to societal advancement rather than shore up the foundations of a free society.
If candidates still fix your mind on their empty promises, Ralph Waldo Emerson has an instant mindset cure. In his essay “Experience,” he wrote, “A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveler, but soon became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree.”
Running ourselves up trees has consequences. Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom warned, “The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society.”
Friedman continued, “Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together.”
Gitmo and Politics
It is always dangerous to human freedom and due process when politics interferes with criminal prosecutions. Yet, present-day America is replete with tawdry examples of this.
The recent exposures of the political machinations of the Chief Justice of the United States in the presidential immunity case is just one sad example of the highest judge in the land determined to change the law, even at the cost of sacrificing good jurisprudence; and this from a jurist who once promised the Senate that he envisioned himself as a mere baseball umpire – just calling balls and strikes. Now, he is a historical revisionist, ruling that the Framers actually wanted an imperial presidency.
His rationale was his understanding of history – not the laws, not precedent, not the Constitution, not morality; a first in modern Supreme Court history.
But this awkward behavior, in which he also engaged when he changed his mind at the last minute and saved Obamacare from constitutional extinction because he was convinced that Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in 2012, sends messages to those who enforce the law and those who interpret it that due process can take a back seat to politics.
That is happening at the prosecution of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Here is the backstory.
After the dust settled from the attacks on 9/11 and the federal government responded by assaulting the Bill of Rights at home and innocent Afghani peasants abroad, it declared that the mastermind of the attacks was Osama bin Laden. It never charged bin Laden with any crime, but it dispatched a team of killers to assassinate him in his home, which they did. Then the feds decided that bin Laden was not the mastermind; Mohammed was.
By the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had been captured and had undergone years of torture at the hands of the CIA, and he was incarcerated at the prison camp at Gitmo. He was eventually charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder and was put into the hands of a military tribunal, which Congress had established at the insistence of the George W. Bush administration believing that military men on a military court would administer swift and rough justice.
Then, his lawyers argued successfully to the Supreme Court that conspiracy is not a war crime and thus not triable before a military tribunal. In so ruling, the Court overruled an appellate court decision written by the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice back when he was an appellate judge – another Supreme Court first.
Then Congress changed the format of the tribunals so that they’d follow the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and effectively turned them into federal courts in Cuba with military trappings.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.