Blogs For Victory

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is rock solid on most things, but like most GOP Senators he’s still fully committed to the post-WWII “rules based international order”. You know, the thing that got us to lose 58,000 men in Vietnam, as just the highlight of the military and foreign policy disasters since WWII. Today he was doing a bit of saber rattling vis Iran. I pointed out that this is foolish given that our current political and military leaders are incapable of mounting a successful military effort. Our leaders are cowards and traitors, our military is worn out, we’re not getting enough recruits, training and maintenance have been let slide. To risk a major American military force against even a second rate enemy is folly and should only be done at the most extreme need…Israel’s possible conflict with Iran is insufficient cause. Israel has subs with cruise missiles. These missiles are almost certainly nuclear tipped. Israel will be fine.

Supposedly abortion was going to put Florida in play. Well, the latest poll – taken after abortion got on the ballot – shows Trump with a 12 point lead…and that support for adding abortion rights to the Florida Constitution is at 42%. That’s not all that much. We can rely on it that Democrats will go 24/7 abortion as we head towards November and it may, indeed, affect some votes. But I suspect that the post-Dobbs effect is starting to fade. As I’ve said before, for the pro-abortion people and areas, absolutely nothing changed. Here in Nevada we put abortion rights into the State Constitution decades ago. I don’t think we should have, but we did – and the only way that is going to change is if the people of Nevada vote to remove it. Twice (each amendment requires a majority vote in two consecutive elections). That just isn’t going to happen in any time line you care to think about. Maybe in a generation of two after the Culture of Life imparts itself to the people it’ll be repealed as a sad relic like some vestigial Jim Crow laws are these days. But not right now. How can you keep people outraged over something that doesn’t matter? All Dobbs did was restore the proper Constitutional position and if you live in a pro-abortion area you got what you wanted.

That is, of course, why the Democrats keep claiming that Trump has a double secret probation plan to ban abortion after he gets back in. But, he can’t. It almost certainly wouldn’t get through Congress even if the GOP has a trifecta and, per Dobbs, such a thing would likely be struck down as unconstitutional. Abortion is immoral but Roe was just bad law – there was not the slightest warrant in the Constitution to make that ruling. The Justices just made it up because they wanted abortion legal. Democrats will try mighty hard to scare urban/suburban white women about Trump’s Secret Plan to Make You all Handmaids, but I suspect it won’t work.

The GOP is knuckling under for a renewal of FISA. Of course. Speaker Johnson says he changed his mind once he got the Super Secret Briefings about it. So now his position is “trust me, bro”. Too late for that. We can’t possibly trust the government. Our assumption is that Johnson caved because the FBI, using FISA, found something on him. We’d like very much to trust Speaker Johnson – and there is a way he can get us to do that. Tell us what FISA is finding. That’s it. Keeping everything under a veil of secrecy is the problem – we can’t possibly trust the government to operate the program as its advertised as it was used to spy on Trump. But we can agree to keep it – with modifications – if we are told what it does other than spy on Trump. Not asking for nitty gritty details…but if this program is so great, then you should be able to point out a couple things it did. Plots foiled. Terrorists caught. Things like that. Let us know; you work for us, after all.

But even then if we do keep it, I think we’ll need to have a provision in there saying that the federal government can’t use FISA information to so much as investigate an American for actions inside the USA – let alone prosecute or jail them. That is, if you find Joe Smith is talking with Terror Fanatic Abdul in Syria…kill Abdul; you can’t touch Joe Smith. Not with FISA information. Not even with information you were able to dig up because you had FISA information. If its FISA, then as far as American citizens saying and doing things in the USA, it doesn’t exist.