Open Thread

Open Thread

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Mike Fragoso gets it:

That is all “muh precious norms!” is about – simply trying to hamstring the GOP with rules the Democrats will ignore if they get into the majority. And the Never Trump guys are all on board with this – because they are now paid by the Democrats and their audience is almost exclusively Democrats. This particular bit is in relation to calls for the GOP Senate to ease rules so that Trump’s nominees can get confirmed – we are in September here and the Executive Branch still isn’t fully staffed with Trump’s people…meaning Deep State holdovers are still in charge of various things and are diligently working to undermine Trump. And that is why the Democrats and RINOs want to slow-walk the process…

Someone started calling them “paperwork Americans” and I think that is spot on – that is, people who do have all the documents for being Americans, but ain’t all that American. You know what I’m talking about: foreign born or born to foreigners people who are up there on the public stage calling America an evil nation. Sorry, not seeing a lot of connection here. Not a lot of love, that is.

No sane nation would allow inside it those who hate it. It is just literal lunacy. Heck, even the barbarians the Romans imported towards the end at least wanted to partake in the Roman world – we’ve got people who want to torch the whole project. They aren’t just dissenting. Not just pointing out this or that flaw or injustice we need to fix – they hate the whole thing and want it gone, replaced with something else. They are quite open about it – some saying that their purpose in the USA is to defend their foreign homeland. We do need to start working on a complete reform of citizenship in the USA, including Constitutional Amendments. My basics are:

  1. Only natural born citizens can hold office in the USA – elective or appointed: from dog catcher to President.
  2. Only those born to an American citizen in US territory or connected to a diplomatic or military foreign posting are natural born citizens.
  3. No more than 100,000 immigrants may arrive in any calendar year. They must be 18 to 30 years old, physically fit, unmarried, no children, fluent in English, not related to any foreign government official and have at least $10,000 on them when they arrive.
  4. A review of everyone naturalized over the past 25 years with careful attention paid to all documents, the slightest flaw in which results in denaturalization and deportation.
  5. Concentrations of foreign born are to be broken up – that is, if a city has within it 10% or more of people originating in one foreign nation, half of them must move elsewhere or back to their country of origin. No more take-overs of American cities by foreigners.

Pete Hegseth is working to have the Confederate Memorial returned to Arlington – there was a short moment when I was thinking it was ok to move Confederate memorials but it so quickly became a first step in removing all American memorials that I switched sides on the issue. And now the thought really kicks in: sure post-Civil War a lot of ex-Confederates erected the shameful Jim Crow system…but a memorial to Confederate soldiers isn’t a memorial to Jim Crow, even if some of them were erected by proponents of Jim Crow. The bottom line is that the major Confederate memorials – like that at Arlington – were erected with the cooperation and blessing of Grand Army of the Republic veterans. The war was over, enemies had forgiven each other…as they aged out and erected their last memorials to each other, their memories of the war were fond…remembering how young and brave they all were, not how much they hated each other at the time. They left us their memorials – North and South – as expressions of love…and we should leave them alone. We weren’t involved. They aren’t ours to judge…merely to learn from.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Flag burning and a 14 year old Scottish girl fighting off a migrant with an axe. Kinda says it all, in my opinion.

Now, do keep in mind that Trump didn’t ban flag burning – the hair on fire comments about his Executive Order were made by people who hadn’t read it. In line with the absurd Supreme Court ruling that flag burning is speech, Trump doesn’t propose to arrest anyone for burning a flag. But if that burning is an incitement to riot, then you’re going to be in trouble. Trump is, as usual, the most law-abiding of Presidents. Probably the most law-abiding since Coolidge. Certainly far better at it than the utterly lawless Biden and Obama Administrations.

So, why do I tie it in with the Scottish girl? Because she’s not free – that’s her problem. She had to take an axe to defend herself because the UK is a lawless nation. Oh, sure: the authorities will arrest you and charge you and put you in jail…but only very selectively (for instance, the girl is being charged with assault…not the man who was trying to assault the girl’s 12 year old sister). Selective application of law is no law at all. It is merest whim of whomever has the power to do a thing.

Here’s now the Ruling Class works – and they’ve done this since the USSR and Nazi Germany – create lawlessness and then impose rules allegedly designed to suppress the lawlessness but which actually work out to tying the people hand and foot. Lenin ordered the Russians to “loot the looters” and they did…and then Lenin’s successor imposed a criminal code to ostensibly to get a handle on this but what you found in practice is that it allowed the looting to continue unabated (except, of course, against those who were specially protected) while the slightest deviation from Stalinist ideology got you ten years in Gulag. The British Ruling Class imported a huge class of aliens with no connection to or love for Britain, allowed them to run rampant with crime, and has now enacted laws allegedly to control crime but which actually control the British people…various speech codes for social media, and such. The migrants are still out there committing crime with impunity…their victim is facing criminal charges for not allowing herself to be attacked…oh, and that censorship is still in place…from what I understand, hardly anyone in the UK has even heard of the incident…it is completely suppressed on social media while the MSM won’t talk about it. And if they do, rely on it the girl will be called a racist in all reporting.

What Trump is trying to do with the EO on flag burning and by sending the Guard into DC is to end the lawlessness. It has to be done. If it isn’t done, then the next time the Democrats get back in, they’ll enact laws allegedly to stop the the chaos they created but which will have the practical effect of making MAGA illegal. Now, I personally believe that burning the American flag is not speech and I’d be perfectly happy sending a flag burner to jail for a few years, and then disenfranchising and deporting him. But, Trump won’t do that – but he’s doing the next best thing: making the Left think twice…and if they don’t think twice and decide to go on a rampage of flag burnings, that just goes into the 2026 campaign ads.

Trump fired Fed Governor Cook – she’s being charged with signing for two different mortgages that listed each separate property as her primary residence. This, by the way, is illegal. Under US law, you only have one primary residence – it is why it is called “primary”. Now, you might ask: why would she do something as stupid as sign loan documents like that when its all easily accessible records which nobody can possibly misunderstand? Because she thought she’d never be caught – none of them do. The entire Ruling Class thinks it is invincible…because until January 20th of this year, it was. The only people who got caught were those the Ruling Class wanted to dispose of for whatever reason. The sooner everyone starts thinking of the Ruling Class like a Mafia, the better – because that is what it is: and as the movie Goodfellas pointed out, the primary purpose was to provide protection. The Mafia, as such, didn’t commit the crimes…they just took a percentage of the proceeds in order to provide cover (that was the genius idea of Lansky and Luciano). So, too, with our Ruling Class…with the percentage being extracted in various ways – some times it is just straight up money, but it is also things like lowering interest rates to help Biden and then keeping them high to harm Trump. That’s Cook’s job – and she was sure something as trivial as a mortgage document would never come back to haunt her.

Our Ruling Class is shot through with such corruption – it is part of the reason we really gotta work for GOP victory in 2026 and 2028 because we’re going to need years to really get after these people. They’re all giving and taking bribes, falsifying documents, producing bogus reports and studies…anything and everything they need to make sure that everything works out to them staying in power and on the gravy train.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Saw another clip of a Tucker Carlson interview where the interviewee is suggesting that a case can be made for a US alliance with Hitler against Stalin. Naturally he does point out the horrific nature of the Stalinist regime and also notes that FDR was a relentlessly dishonest man (MacArthur, on hearing of his death, was alleged to have remarked words to the effect of, “he was a man who never let the truth get in the way of a good lie”). Of course, this does leave out the crucial fact that Hitler was horrifically evil – sure, Stalin was, too, but Stalin wasn’t combining homicide with global conquest (Hitler did have a genuine dream of conquering the USA). Our problem here is twofold:

  1. We don’t teach history any longer.
  2. The overall global Establishment has lied so much that it is easy to make anything that disputes the Establishment seem plausible.

I’m not quite sure how we get out of this – the only way out might be by limiting the franchise to people who can pass some basic literacy and history tests. The liars lie because lies work (as I’ve said!). But we can’t have people saying lies like that and allow them to have a say in how we’re governed.

British police recently arrested a man for shouting “we love bacon”. I can’t imagine on what actual charge – and how do you prosecute someone like that without laughing? The Brits are in a bad way – I do admire their “show the colors” campaign where regular folks are hanging out the Union Jack and St George’s banner…but it all comes down to the fact that the Brits gave up their guns but forgot to make sure the government gave up theirs.

The 9th Circuit has cleared the way for Trump to deport 60,000 people who had been under temporary protected status. Temporary. You know: for a little while. Of course, some of these people have been here for decades. It really is a matter nobody enforcing our immigration laws – not for decades. Perhaps not since the 1960’s. Some people might get deported here and there but the basic fact has been to let them all come in and only kick them out when something egregious happens…and under Biden even the egregious were allowed to stay. I keep thinking about how the American Establishment in the late 1800’s decided to import millions…because American labor costs have always been higher than the rest of the world’s and I guess Big Corporation decided to stop that. So, too, the wave since the 1960’s…mostly just a way to place downward pressure on American wages. Its morphed into other things since then, but that was and remains the prime motivator.

I’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel which wasn’t packed with people – and I have eaten there and it has been good, solid food…but now they’ve got some new Corporate Clone boss who took a look at success and decided to kill it. Step by step, going woke. Why? Because these sorts of people hate those who go to Cracker Barrel. You think the CEO wants to go to the Hamptons and tell her friends about how happy MAGAts are with her product? Nope. She wants to go and show them social media posts about how mad the MAGA people are.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Still much to do and many rocks and shoals to navigate around, but it does look at this time like Trump will be able to arrange some peace between Russia and Ukraine. The sticking points will be how much territory Ukraine has to give up and how much of a security guarantee for Ukraine Russia is willing to tolerate. Make no mistake about it, Putin likely isn’t giving up the dream – token US or NATO forces in western Ukraine won’t bother him…a brigade or two near the new eastern border would. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy has the fear that peace will bring an election he’s likely to lose – and then face the music for how the war was conducted – while plenty of Ukrainian power players will be willing to stoke anti-Russian fires for domestic political purposes. It is a tricky situation!

But the pragmatic facts of life are that neither side can afford to continue – last I heard the Ukrainians were drafting kids and old men while Russia seems to increasingly rely upon mercenaries to fill the ranks. Keep in mind that Total Fertility Rate for Ukraine is 1 and for Russia 1.47 (and a lot of that is probably non-Russian ethnic minorities): these countries aren’t producing a lot of fit, young men year by year. Nobody knows how many people have died in the war – both sides lie egregiously about casualties – but its probably some hundreds of thousands dead: and whatever the number of dead the best way to estimate wounded is times two of the dead figure. It is probably in the neighborhood of a million dead and wounded between the sides…this is being bled white. And ultimately for nothing. Putin and Zelenskyy must get out.

This was the image of the day – and maybe an image for the ages:

They’re all waiting on Trump – each and every last one of them totally irrelevant to how this will come out. Trump will decide – and he’ll ultimately decide for Putin and Zelenskyy. The may buck and they may kick and scream and perhaps even derail this particular effort…but eventually they all will have to knuckle under. There is no power like the USA elsewhere in the world. It has been thus since 1945…and the only foreign policy problem we’ve had since then is our refusal to act like we are the most powerful. We’ve been playing this weird game where we let second and third rate powers talk to us like they matter…that we have to get them to agree with us, rather than ultimately just issuing them orders on how to behave. Trump instinctively understands that even in our currently weakened State, we still hold all the cards.

It isn’t as odd as you think – from 1815 to 1914, the world waited on decisions from Whitehall in London. The British government essentially had veto power over everyone else – their sea power gave them this and nobody could really argue with them. And the British didn’t fuss with the concerns of second raters – they were just told what to do and if they tried to fight it they’d swiftly find a British fleet off their coast. The power vacuum we allowed to exist since 1945 is now being filled. By Trump.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Democrats are trying to tell us that there isn’t a crime problem in DC. Or that if there is a crime problem, its normal. You know: it ain’t that bad! But the homicide rate in DC is about 23 per 100,000 people. So, we can expect in 2025 about 160 murders. Meanwhile, over in Austin, TX it is about 3 per 100,000 people. If DC dropped to Austin’s level, 21 murders. Still bad, but its 139 people alive on December 31st who otherwise would be dead.

And, of course, the murder rate is just the jagged edge of crime – in order to have a city where there are 3 or so murders per week, you have to have a lot of other crime going on. You know, like 5,200 violent crimes per year in DC. A hundred per week. Fourteen a day. A level of crime that is starting to overwhelm the city. And keep in mind that DC was just caught faking its violent crime stats – that is, massively under reporting the true number to make it look like crime is getting under control. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t normal.

To be sure, the Democrats have crafted a Narrative which makes out that this is normal – that living in a big city simply means you must put up with crime. But it isn’t so: murder should be in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 per 100,000. Other violent crime in proportion. Our streets should be quiet, clean and safe – sure, there are always going to be rougher neighborhoods, but even the roughest shouldn’t be havens of murder and other violent crime. Human beings are Fallen – we know this: but controlling crime is not some impossible task. It just takes treating crime the right way – that it is wrong. That you don’t have an excuse. That you must pay the appropriate price for it. We did that for a very long time and, once upon a time, America’s cities were quiet, clean and safe. They can be that way again.

Trump is also trying to tackle homelessness – not by subsidizing it, but by stopping it. Good to remember that homelessness became a “crisis” in the 1980’s – when the Democrats started to blame Reagan for it. Of course, it was actually caused by Democrats. When they demanded that lunatics be left to wander the streets and they made the conscious decision to not deter street crime. But, they blamed Reagan…and because of the way the GOP used to be, we went along with it and the spigot was turned on. Untold billions (probably trillions by now) have been poured into it…with absolutely no effect because the last thing the homeless “advocates” want is an end to homelessness…they’d be out of a job if we did that. And, of course, stopping it doesn’t require zillions of dollars…it just requires enforcing the standard laws against vagrancy, petty street crime and public intoxication. We have a huge population of homeless people…camped out on the sidewalks and making cities unlivable…but only in those cities where they tolerate it. Pay for it. Make it happen. Trump’s plan is to stop the cities from allowing it – they’ll have to round up the insane, the addicted and the shiftless and place them into some facility where they can get help…and jail, ultimately, if they don’t respond.

How is Trump doing? His approval rating right now is higher than both Obama and Bush’s during their second terms. Oh, and this is with the averages cluttered with obviously fake polls designed to keep Trump’s overall approval rating down. My guess is that a solid majority is still behind Trump…with an even money chance it is growing as people get a look at what he’s actually doing. First President since Reagan to actually try to carry out the campaign promises…and doing that even better than Reagan did. Meanwhile, Democrats can’t raise money – officially this is because the big money donors are holding back to see how the Democrats craft their 2026 message. Actually its because Trump cut off the NGO money…Liberals are never actually generous. Even Soros tends to use government money laundered through his NGO’s to fund Leftwing causes. The GOP – and Trump – already have buckets of money saved up for 2026.

The Democrats in California are saying they are going to redistrict the GOP out of existence in CA – which they technically can do but they’ll have to violate the California constitution to do it. Of course, the law never deters a Democrat. But even if they whack all 9 GOP House seats in CA, it still won’t make up for what the GOP is going to do in the Red States. And even though Democrats ignore any law that gets in their way, the people of California aren’t too enthusiastic about this. Democrats have a massive voter registration edge but the combination of GOPers and Independents is a larger bloc than the Democrats. This move might backfire – especially as to get those 9 GOP seats to be D+ seats, they’ll have to dilute Democrat voters in other districts…and this at a time when Latinos and other minorities are starting to shift to the GOP. Oh, and voter registration trends continue to favor the GOP – even in California.

Schiff is in deep trouble – and his Biden “pardon” only covers his J6 Committee work…not the stuff he did with Russia Russia Russia. Of all the malevolent toads that went after Trump, him going down would be the most satisfying.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Invoking the Home Rule Act, Trump has decided to take over law enforcement in Washington, DC. This will cause shrieks from the Democrats and probably a raft of lawsuits…but Trump is totally within his power to do this. Good to keep in mind that in DC, like in all major Blue cities, the reason crime is rampant stems from two things:

  1. The Leninist conviction that all crime is a result of social injustice (ie, the real criminals are those who sustain the system – that is, you and me).
  2. If you’re a Blue city mayor, DA or what have you, the last thing you want to do is arrest a lot of POC. They are who are doing most of the crime in the Blue cities, but there is no electoral upside here – and not just with POC voters, but with the upper class whites who tend to be the decisive vote in electing governments in Blue cities. Basically, you have to pretend the problem is anything but POC – and so you’ll come up with “alternatives to policing” and a host of other eyewash programs to pretend you’re doing something about it when you aren’t because you can’t.

But people don’t like that – they might not be able to totally articulate it, but nobody likes a lot of street crime. And not just out of concern for personal property and safety…nobody likes to see streets filled with litter and zombie-like drug addicts with criminals prowling around looking for the next victim. The people like to see clean, safe streets. Trump is going to try to give it to the people of DC.

Can’t emphasize enough how important it is that this work – because all of our crime-ridden cities are crime-ridden by choice. The leadership of the cities, like that in DC, made the political choice to allow crime to be rampant. If Trump can clean up DC then it’ll show that every city can be cleaned up…you just have to arrest the people committing crimes. It is like border security – Trump has shown that every President could have just done it. Closed it of. Stopped the flow. It just had be ordered done. It wasn’t – and for the same reason the government of DC doesn’t order the crime stopped…the political and social desires of those in charge are best served by business as usual.

The WNBA is going to install “anti foreign object netting” around the basketball court…if you don’t know why, then just Google … heck, don’t know how to write that on a family website! Anyways, just look around social media for the latest WNBA memes and you’ll quickly see which foreign object the WNBA is trying to stop. This is becoming ground zero in the culture war. The WNBA was created as a payoff, in my view: feminist groups were given this league by the NBA in order to take the heat of NBA players who were…not always total gentlemen with the ladies. Basically it is the #MeToo fine the NBA is paying. A whole infrastructure was built up to make it seem like it was an organic sport…something that people wanted. But it was mostly just ignored…and then Caitlin Clark became a thing and the WNBA had their first organic star…whom the other players proceeded to treat like garbage. It has all been so clearly mere jealousy…people who simply aren’t as good as Clark fouling her for being good. People saw this and now the previously-ignored WNBA is the currently-despised WNBA.

The league loses on average $10 million a year – chump change for an NBA with $10 billion in annual revenue. The pragmatic facts of life are that even someone as good as Clark probably isn’t good enough to sit on an NBA bench. As playing spreads among young girls there will grow an ever stronger group of female players and we will probably see some ladies being just good enough to in theory play for the NBA. But the play will never be NBA level – it can’t be because of those inherent physical differences between men and women (you know, that we’re supposed to pretend don’t exist). How much are people going to pay for something that doesn’t even work out to a AAA for the NBA? Not much. Sure, if you just love basketball as a thing and like to see a game, you’ll go watch WNBA…if nothing else is available. And in this it is sort of like AAA ball…which does get some people in the stands but, let’s face it, not that much…and certainly not a MLB prices.

I don’t care about the league at all – not a basketball fan. But the attempt to force it into a major league has been silly from the start. And now that people are really looking at it for the first time, they don’t see what they like. So, anti-foreign object netting…

Trump has apparently given the order to have our military go after the Cartels. The Mexican government objects. On the other hand, there really is no Mexican government. Sure, the go through the motions but the bottom line is that the Cartels totally control Mexico. You’d probably be better off thinking that the government is another Cartel…and probably the junior partner. Mexico has always been hopelessly corrupt…the only difference is how much corruption is going on at any given time. Keep in mind that there wasn’t a popular uprising to bring an end to Spanish rule in Mexico…it was upper class people who just wanted their own country to play with and they took advantage of a Spain gravely weakened by the Napoleonic Wars. Since that time, it has been one sort of oppression after another to keep the contraption together (lost in the records is the fact that as Zachary Taylor’s army moved deeper into Mexico during the Mexican-American War province after province asked him to get them into the American Union). The PRI for decades held it together via a mix of bribery and mild political repression…and the sort of political leader they developed was a coward merely looking for the next payoff. These people had no chance against the Cartels. The Mexican people might want to fight the Cartels but the Mexican government won’t arm the people…because they know that as soon as the Cartels are knocked off, those guns would be turned against the government.

This is still going to be a very tricky business. Make no mistake about it! Mexican’s do have a very prickly pride especially when we gringos are involved. But it has to be done – we can’t have Cartels dominating our southern neighbor. They have to go.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Trump has ordered a new census…keeping in mind that the Constitution requires a decennial census but it doesn’t prohibit a census at other times. Only hurdle here, legally, is to get the funding for it…which might be within Presidential budget authority on already-appropriated money (the census bureau isn’t only funded every ten years – it works all the time). Trump’s demand is an accurate account (everyone agrees that the 2020 census was deliberately miscounted in order to keep House seats and Electoral Votes in Blue States) and that it not include illegals…which is going to get the lawsuit as the Constitution does say all persons.

But is a person illegally in country a person per the Constitution? That is, can you illegally enter our country and then have an effect on the governance of our nation? Providing representation based upon illegal immigrants does dilute the power of citizens and legal residents, after all…there are seats which should be representing the peoples of Texas and Florida which are now representing California due to the counting of illegals in the 2020 census. If there are 3 million illegals in California (this is probably a low ball guess) then that’s 4 House seats which belong elsewhere. And, of course, the census also helps determine the flow of federal aid funds…welfare, medicare/medicaid, education…the number of persons determines how much money a State gets…and illegals aren’t supposed to be getting these funds.

Anyways, this will be lots of fun! And continue to make Trump’s point while also locking the Democrats into the 20 in another 80/20 issue…because if you point blank ask the question, “should illegal immigrants have representation in Congress?”, its going to be an overwhelming “no”.

Anita Dunn is saying Biden remained sharp as a tack – so, she’s lying. Now, that was just in a press release…under oath might be different. Biden’s people are lashed to the mast on this – if one of them goes down, they all go down in a conspiracy indictment. Key to getting to the bottom of this is to catch one of them in a lie (not hard) and then leverage that to get them to turn State’s evidence.

Jennifer Newsom runs a “non-profit” which seems to have funneled money to her “for-profit”. From what I’ve read, the Newsom family may have profited to the tune of millions. It might all be perfectly legal – this is the way NGO’s work and why the Establishment was so massively opposed to cutting off USAID. It is very much a club – and you very much ain’t in it. But if you are connected – and do as you’re told – untold millions will be handed to you by various means. And what does Newsom do to “earn” this money? Runs a “gender equity” organization…aside from agitating for overall Leftwing causes, there is no metric to judge the organization by. In other words, we can’t say they aren’t doing their job – there is no product, other than a new car for the Newsom’s and increased Leftwing agitation. I’ve been saying it for years: defund the Left = the end of the Left. They aren’t popular. They never have been. They’ve just been heavily subsidized since the New Deal. Time to end that subsidy.

Looks like Bibi might have ordered the IDF into Gaza to finish off Hamas. I believe that Israel’s campaign had been strategically unsound from the start – they should have laid a regular siege and starved them into submission. But I’m not in charge of the IDF and the Israelis want to fight the war this way. Hope it works.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan5 Comments

DOJ has opened a Grand Jury for the Russiagate affair. We’ll see how far we can take this – but at the very least the process is the punishment.

But in my view, everyone involved – including Hillary and Obama – are in deep legal jeopardy. And if we start to get indictments rolling in then if I were Trump I’d call both of them and say they can get pardons in return for full, public confessions of what they did.

It looked like Rep. Ramirez (D-IL) said in Mexico City that she’s a proud Guatemalan before American. I guarantee you that if a foreigner moved to Guatemala and somehow managed to get elected to office – almost impossible as most nations simply won’t elect foreign-born people to office – then if that person said they were prouder to be foreign than Guatemalan, they’d be forced out of office in minutes…and probably arrested into the bargain.

The United States is not a mere Free Trade Zone. We are a nation. We are a people. We are welcoming, but if you come here, become American or get out. It is ok to be proud of where you’re from – or where your family is from. But if you want to live in America, then America must come first. It is not a big ask: it is mere basic decency.

Side note: I want us to enact into law a new definition of Native: in my view, if three of your four grandparents were born in the USA, then you are a Native American. No more of this “settler” stuff – I am not a settler. The most recent part of my bloodline got here in the late 19th century, the oldest part in the early 17th. I have no loyalty to any foreign nation – I don’t care about them. My only nation is the United States. I know no other as home. I am Native.

Texas Democrats fled the State to avoid a quorum that would vote on redistricting. This is the merest political stunt and it won’t work – the new districts will become law…and very likely other Red States are now more willing to redistrict, and do it very hard. The Democrats tell the MSM that the Resistance is working and so Democrats keep doing Resistance stuff because the MSM says its working. But it ain’t. People don’t like political stunts.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner…and the Democrats/NeverTrump people are sure this is the very end of Our Democracy.

In the specific, they are claiming that Trump is merely mad that the latest job numbers had massive downward revisions. And, hey, maybe Trump is mad about that…but the bottom line is that if you’re getting it that wrong, then why the heck are you even putting out numbers? This is the same BLS which month after month after month massively overstated the job gains under Biden. Is the data worth anything? Major financial decisions are taken based on what BLS is saying…and they can’t even nail down accurately the number of jobs gained or lost?

Some say that there is a declining response rate from those surveyed. Ok. Is anyone looking into an alternate method? Seems to me that they’re really just kinda guessing and then revising based on more solid data…so, why not make the monthly report out of the most recent, solid data we’ve got? Sure, it means the July jobs report might be about April or May, but if its accurate then its at least useful and we’d still have long term trend data. If BLS is just throwing numbers at the wall, though, then it is useless…and the Commissioner is either stupid (and so should be fired) or corruptly massaging the data to favor Democrats and harm Republicans (and so should be fired). And do keep in mind: all this statistics stuff was first put together during the New Deal when a bunch of Leftwing pinheads thought they could decide economic policy based on statistics. This is why, today, we buy our consumer goods from China, guys: the stats say it is the way to go.

You know: it doesn’t matter in the long term if in any particular month jobs are gained or lost overall…what matters is how much we, as a people, are making, mining and growing. Bottom line on that is that the more we make, mine and grow here at home the more job openings there will be…and the more national wealth which, stored, can provide aid for those who lose their jobs because of fluctuating economic conditions. Production is the measure…not the household jobs survey.

Some reforms being pushed by Team Trump do look like a back door method to eventually privatize Social Security. They are going slow and careful here because this is a dangerous issue…but everyone with sense knows that eventually the Social Security system is going to need deep reforms to survive. For us older people, it won’t matter: nobody is going to change it for us and we will get what we were promised (nobody is going to vote to cut benefits and then have everyone on or about to be on benefits vote against them next election). Probably for people fifty and older no significant changes are forthcoming. But for the youngsters, I think there will be – and likely with their eventual enthusiastic support. There is much wrong with youth but they do have knowledge about markets…a lot of these kids have been playing around with various investment items since they were little. It will be easier to sell to them the notion that their Social Security is theirs – a government guaranteed investment account that they own, that follows them around wherever they work and which they can start to access by some fixed date in their lives and which will have some guaranteed minimum payout no matter what happens…but which they could also grow to be quite significant, perhaps combining it with their personal savings and their employer 401k’s.

Ultimately, America is Made Great Again by the total dissolution of the New Deal.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan15 Comments

Texas, Ohio and Florida Republicans – and perhaps some other Red States – are planning on mid-decade redistricting. This has caused our Democrats to shriek about how we’re destroying Democracy. Yeah, whatever. This is actually just retaliation: the Democrats have mercilessly gerrymandered their deep Blue States so that the GOP is only getting a fraction of the seats their total House vote merits…now that is being turned about, and that is fair play. The real reason the Democrats are shrieking is because if this goes forward it will make it nearly impossible for the Democrats to win the House in 2026.

In 2024, the GOP won the House vote 50 to 47 percent but ended up losing 2 seats. That is how powerful the Democrat gerrymander has been. Back in 2016 we got 48 percent to the Democrats 47 and won 241 seats…a 23 seat majority. Had the Democrats not done their gerrymanders we probably would be sitting on 250+ seats right now. If all goes well, the net gain for the GOP in 2026 will be in the neighborhood of 12 to 15 seats, thus putting us in line with our actual vote share. And that means that the last two years of Trump will be even more productive than the first two years (it is almost certain the GOP will retain the Senate in 2026 – absent a political meltdown, it stays GOP. Bottom line, the only Senate seat that is a possible flip to the Dems is North Carolina while the GOP has prospects in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan and Georgia).

Democrats have decided that their next target in the Culture War is Sidney Sweeny. Honestly, I don’t know much about her – can’t say that I’ve ever even seen a show she’s been in. But she’s young, blonde and very pretty and she’s doing blue jeans ads…you know, a pretty girl rather than some overweight, blue haired weirdo. It has driven the Democrats nuts – they are saying it is a Nazi dog whistle to be a pretty blonde. I don’t know where they hope to go with this but if their goal is to win back young men (latest polling shows them swinging by more than 40 points to the GOP in the past couple years), then I don’t think attacking the hot blonde is the way to do it.

Some of the documents we’re seeing in the Trump-Russia case indicate the conspiracy continued right on through the Biden years…which means the statute of limitations is ongoing. That’s the thing about a conspiracy – the statute of limitations only kicks in when it ends. If the players were still doing it until 2024 (and it looks like they were) then everyone involved in the conspiracy from Day One (even if that day is more than seven years ago) is still on the hook…and the raid on Mar a Lago means it can be tried in Florida (Trump +13).

Sam Brown ran for Senate out here in Nevada last year and ended up losing by merely 24,000 votes out of 1.3+ million cast…which was a disappointment especially given how tardy the GOP was in giving him financial support (the Democrat incumbent had months to nuke Brown from orbit via TV ads…and she still barely pulled it off). But, he’s now been Senate confirmed to a VA position and among those congratulating him is the Cherokee Nation…which Brown is a member of. Didn’t know that. He didn’t play it up in his campaign ads like a Democrat would…but that’s because Brown wasn’t trying to get elected to check a box but to serve Nevada. Now he gets to serve America – again, as he was quite horrifically wounded in combat serving us before.

UPDATE: I know, poor taste – but LOL!