Open Thread

New Mexico’s Democrat governor Grisham yesterday announced that the Second Amendment was null and void in Albuquerque for 30 days. The alleged justification for the action are the recent murders of some children, including an 11 year old. As far as that goes, this was just par for the course from Democrats – cynically exploiting the death of a child to advance their Leftist agenda; in this case, disarming the population. It was ridiculous in practical terms (the only possible people who would obey the order are those who would never murder anyone) but also an outrage against the Constitution. You really can’t just willy-nilly set aside its provisions.

What surprised everyone a bit was the number of prominent Democrats who came out to oppose the move. Not immediately – there was about a day between order and condemnation. This means someone quickly did some polling on the issue and found it catastrophically bad for Democrats. You know for certain their concern wasn’t the Constitution. Grisham is guilty of not only saying the quiet part out loud, but saying it before the Democrat party as a whole was prepared to defend it. But even with that, it is a huge problem.

The governor can be impeached. But the Legislature is controlled by Democrats. The State and local police could refuse to comply with an illegal order. But the cops most concerned – in Albuquerque – already announced they would enforce the rule. The Federal government can arrest the governor – as well as any staffers or police who cooperate with the order – on conspiracy to deny the civil rights of the people of New Mexico (this is actually a violation of US law; we really have enacted laws making it illegal to deny a person their civil rights…it has just never been enforced against a Democrat), but Pudding Brain’s DOJ won’t do that. So, we’re kinda stuck, aren’t we?

Sure, anyone arrested under the order can fight it in court and almost certainly they will prevail. Eventually. Could take a couple years, maybe longer. And what will they get after the fight? A court order nullifying the order, years after it went into effect (with maybe a judge ordering an injunction against its enforcement while the case winds its way through the courts). No penalty to the governor or for anyone who enforced the order. Lots of expense for those arrested on the basis of an illegal order. Nothing has more clearly shown that when the rubber meets the road, the Constitution is a mere scrap of paper…only in force as long as those with power agree to enforce it.

What we lack – and it is now a glaring lack, given that Democrats have dispensed with the Rule of Law – is any mechanism for enforcing the law – for securing our rights – when the government is actively working to oppress the people. A temporary fix is to get a GOP President in office willing to prosecute the governor. That would go a long way. But not all the way. In fact, might even make a Leftist hero out of her. And a GOPer won’t be President forever. Eventually, a Democrat gets back in and we’re back at square one.

It is a problem we’re going to have to deal with; the construction of mechanisms which allow the people to stop the government. Not quite sure how to go about this (some sort of Tribune like in ancient Rome?), but when all of the power is in the hands of people who don’t respect the law, we need something outside the law to stand between us and the government.

Democrats are increasingly angry over GOP governors shipping illegals to Blue cities. This means it is working; and we should not only keep it up, but increase the numbers. It is turning out to be a PR catastrophe for the Democrats…it is causing huge stress in Democrat cities (and among various Dem voting blocs) but the Democrats can’t seal the border to stop it because that would upset the far Left. They are in a pickle and it is gloriosu.

Senator Kennedy ripped into the Deputy Secretary of Energy over the price tag for getting us to “net zero” by 2050 and how nobody can say how much this will change the climate if we do it. It is in a lot of ways a grand effort by Kennedy but in the end, he lost the argument: because he conceded, repeatedly, that being “carbon neutral” is good; a goal we should achieve. We can’t do that – that is, we can’t even for a moment concede a point to the Democrats. All they believe are lies and we can’t go along with them.

There is no “climate crisis”.

Just as there is no “gun violence”. People are violent; guns are inanimate objects.

Abortion is not healthcare.

On and on like that.

Open Thread

I do have to point out that Donald Trump has been fairly ridiculous of late. Some of his statements and actions have been downright absurd. Thus far it hasn’t made a dent in his GOP Primary support…but my bet is that if he doesn’t get hold of this stuff it will. OTOH, DeSantis has also had some miscues. This is why a Primary is a good thing; whoever emerges with the prize will have earned it.

My position remains the same: I will support the nominee. There is no GOPer who is in any way the moral or intellectual inferior of any Democrat. Even supposing every bad thing said about Trump is true – and further stating that supposing every bad thing said about Biden is false – it is still no contest. Somewhere in Trump’s heart is the understanding that such things as abortion to birth, transition of minors and open borders are objectively evil and must be stopped. In Biden’s heart there is no such understanding – nor is there such understanding in the heart of any Democrat. The Democrat party proposes to push us into a world of complete lunacy where obvious facts are denied in service of ideological goals. It is the moral duty not of Republicans and not even of Americans to vote GOP…it the the moral duty of every human, as such. There is no evading this one: if the Democrats retain power for much longer, this nation will be destroyed. The stakes are that high. There can’t be any compromise…and no faltering of our will. Nominate Romney and I’ll vote for him. Anyone is better than any Democrat.

There has been a surprisingly large amount of pushback against “Pride” this year. In previous years we just laughed at it and moved on but this year there is a sharper edge to it. People are tired of it – and angry that everyone is being told to fall in line.

Bottom line: gay is boring. We don’t care. Be gay. Have fun. But we don’t need to know you’re gay. And it is perceived that the sort of gay people most of us know – regular, rather boring folks who just live, work and pay taxes like anyone else – aren’t being celebrated. The celebrations are always of the most absurd and/or disgusting people. So much so that I’m starting to wonder if a bunch of weirdos have de-facto hijacked homosexuality because it allows them to be freaks without any fear of censure? Crazy people crave attention and approval…and if you’ll do something disgusting in public and call it gay, you’ll not only not get arrested, you’ll be called a hero. That sort of thing is an irresistible attraction for the narcissistic lunatic. They simply wouldn’t pass on the opportunity.

NYPD had their cop cars painted up in “Pride” colors and it looks like the artist managed to sneak in the anti-cop “ACAB” logo. This is enormously funny. Leftists never forgive.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers will apparently argue that the gun laws Hunter violated were unconstitutional. And, to be sure, they are: as I’ve noted before, “Shall not be infringed” is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t have any wiggle room. Any law restricting any person – and that is citizen or not – from keeping and bearing any arm they choose is a violation of the Constitution. But it is annoying that Liberals are such complete hypocrites.

Open Thread

Word is that the Russkies are calling up 500,000 reservists for a major Spring offensive. They’d just enough time to do that before the ground gets dry and hard in June. There is some dispute out there as to whether or not the Russians can equip that many but the Russians have massive stockpiles of arms and munitions – older stuff, but it’ll get the job done when your plan is to simply overwhelm with numbers, which is the invariable Russian plan after their initial effort falls flat. That many troops in the wide, flat lands of Ukraine are going to be tough to stop, as the Krauts discovered during the Battle of the Dnieper in 1943.

The Ukrainians can beat this horde but they’ll need to trade space for time and have in hand sufficient mobile reserves to strike hard at Russian flanks. We’ll see if they’re up to it.

The Regime Media is pointing out that time is not on the Ukrainian’s side – it never has been. Absent Putin quitting, unless the Ukrainians can destroy Russian military capability fairly quickly, it becomes a matter of who can call up the most and the Russians have vastly more military-aged males and material resources than Ukraine. This is why at the start I said that Ukraine needed mobile strike forces to go deep into Russian lines and, if possible, into Russia, itself. A positional slugging match – which is what we’ve had for months now – only ends in Russian victory.

Democrats in the States they control are, as per usual, enacting a host of new gun control laws to start 2023 – but I do suspect this will backfire on them. We already have two SC decisions noting that the right to bear arms is an individual right…what we don’t have, so far, is the actually correct Constitutional ruling: the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a very simple statement and it is the law we live under…all restrictions on the people keeping and bearing arms are unconstitutional. I don’t even think a law which says a felon (once out of jail, of course) can’t own a firearm passes muster (and it shouldn’t – once you serve your sentence, you’re square with the house and you should be treated no differently from other citizens…and anyone rated too dangerous to have a pistol after committing a crime is likely someone who should be serving life…reform the law that way, not towards gun restrictions). These attempts to backdoor gun control might eventually get a decision which simply enforces the law as written – and if anyone wants to restrict the keeping and bearing of arms, they’ll have to amend the Constitution.

Been a lot of attacks on US power stations of late. Someone is organizing and paying for it. I can only suspect that it is a dress rehearsal for an asymetric warfare attack on us at a later date.

Hundreds of Chicago teachers had sex with students. The more we see, the more we can’t escape thinking the world is run by a pedo ring trying to normalize it before they get caught.

Open Thread

Got into a long debate about gun control over on Twitter. Not a bad one, either. I mean, the people arguing with me were ignorant of basic facts and had imbibed a great deal of Progressive lies, but the debate was civil and it did open the eyes a bit on my side: they really are convinced that being armed is not something human beings are supposed to be…at least, not armed in any way that would give a distinct advantage. Maybe it stems from a Progressive desire to be fair? Don’t really know. But we’re never going to convince these people: they’ll have to be mugged by reality. As some of them have been as I’ve seen stories of Progressives in San Francisco quietly purchasing firearms as all police protection has been withdrawn.

To that end, Chesa Boudin, the communist DA of SF, is in deep trouble – he fully implemented the Marxist-Leninist ideal of criminal justice and it really, really sucks. One of the unknown stories about the old USSR was how crime-ridden it was. Those who read The Gulag Archipelago know, but most people don’t…and it is simply because Soviet media didn’t cover it and Western media followed suit. But the basics of Soviet criminal law – that all crime is the result of social injustice – combined with a complete disarming of the Russian people meant that crime ran wild. You’d get 25 years for speaking ill of Communism, 10 years for murder…usually with time off for good behavior. While the bosses were tightly protected (sound familiar?) the common people were at the mercy of criminals. But unlike in the USSR, there is a recall possible in San Francisco – and nothing will spotlight the toxic environment for Democrats than the scion of the far Left getting the boot.

US Intel says that Putin is on the ropes. Given US Intel’s track record, I expect Russian tanks in Paris by next week.

The GOP continues to earn it’s title as The Stupid Party – with gas and food prices rising, a border crisis and Biden risking WWIII…they’re putting together a plan to reduce greenhouse gases. Got a newsflash for ya, GOPe – nobody gives a damn about Climate Change except those who are paid to give a damn about it.

Tampa Bay Rays went woke over the recent shootings…and DeSantis is vetoing a $35 million taxpayer give away to them. That is how its done.

Shall Not Be Infringed

As per usual in the aftermath of a shooting, the debate is over what restrictions should be placed on gun ownership. And even gun rights advocates essentially concede the point that there should be restrictions – the only thing being debated is what sort of restrictions there will be. We have to get away from that. We must, that is, start insisting that words mean what they mean and that written law is obligatory. Because we’ve allowed words to be twisted and permitted the written law to be optional we’re in the mess we have today. Time to take that stand: draw that line.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Our liberal friends like to concentrate on the first four words: asserting that firearms ownership is tied to militia, with the National Guard, essentially the Army reserve, being now the only legitimate place to bear arms. But that is just obvious drivel – anyone reading the sentence can see that the author was merely explaining the reasoning behind the amendment…and the militia is not the National Guard: it is, essentially, all adult citizens capable of bearing arms. It most emphatically is not the military – that is why it says “militia”. The Military is a permanent force raised and armed by the State. The militia is an ad hoc organization of self-armed civilians called into service in an emergency. Very different species! But even if you want to assert that the Militia is now the Military, you can’t get around the last fourteen words – the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Even if the author meant to write that you have to be in the Militia to bear arms, the sentence doesn’t assert anything like that – but it does clearly state that the right to bear arms is something that government can’t infringe upon.

Infringe is an important word here – because it means to transgress, to violate, to invalidate, to encroach upon. The author could have used all sorts of words here, but he choose “infringe” because he wanted to make clear that there were no circumstances where you could deny the people the right to keep and bear arms. The government, per the Second Amendment, can do nothing to prevent or even so much as hamper the ability of the people to keep and bear arms.

No exceptions! It doesn’t say “shall not be infringed, once you pass a background check” or “shall not be infringed, except in a gun-free zone” no “shall not be infringed except for reasonable safety regulations”. It says shall not be infringed and then, literally, period. End of sentence. Nothing to add, retract or modify. We’re done here: the government cannot infringe upon the people keeping and bearing arms.

Now, lets move on to the next very important word in the sentence: arms. What is an “arm”? Well, it is anything you choose to arm yourself with. It doesn’t say the right to keep and bear muskets. Nor the right to keep and bear swords. Or keep and bear arms as long as they aren’t too lethal. No, it says “keep and bear arms.” It secures our right to keep and bear anything you wish to use as an arm – as a weapon. The author could have been specific but he wasn’t – he merely wrote the word arms. Even if in the author’s mind something else was meant, the word “arms” means what it means: it means weapons in general. Anything from a Swiss army knife to a thermonuclear device.

Hey, Mark – you’re not saying that the people can keep and bear nukes, are you?

I’ll bite: yes. Technically, you have a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons. Now, in practical terms, the chances that any person will obtain the necessary materials, skills and funding to build a nuclear device is nil. But the way the Second Amendment was written does not provide any exclusions. You might want exclusions in there. The author might have thought there was still exclusions in there. But the words of the law – which is what we must adhere to – makes no exclusions. It says “arms” and that people can keep and bear them.

In practical terms, what we’re really dealing with in keeping and bearing arms is arms that one person or, at most, a small crew of people can maintain, deploy and operate. And to drill down further, 99.99% of the time we’re going to be talking about small arms. But small arms does include things like automatic weapons, grenade launchers, anti-air and anti-tank missiles. And it must include those things because the clear intent of the author was to ensure that the population, without exception, was able to be armed sufficient to shoot back at an oppressor. It isn’t like no exceptions are placed into the Constitution. There’s lots of them in there – heck, even habeas corpus, the primary legal defense of free people, has exceptions. Arms do not. And the people who enacted and ratified it could read. They knew what they were doing. They were members of government who were ensuring that their fellow citizens could shoot them if they got out of hand. They were, of course, a much braver bunch than our current Ruling Class…and I’m pretty sure they had our current Ruling Class in mind as they wrote and ratified.

But aside from the crucial need to shoot oppressors, there is a larger issue at stake here: the rule of law. For many decades now, we have allowed the Ruling Class to say the law says something it doesn’t say and/or ignore what the law clearly says. The whole mess we have right now was allowed to happen because of this practice of law becoming really just whatever the bosses wanted it to be at the moment. It can’t be that way. Well, it can’t be that way in a Republic. You want that sort of thing, get yourself a monarchy where the King can decree suddenly that the law now says this or that. For us, the law says what it says and it won’t say anything different until we change it via Constitutional means. No short cuts. if you don’t like what the Second Amendment says then you can’t just ignore it and start infringing on keeping and bearing arms. If you want to place restrictions on keeping and bearing arms the only path you have is via Amendment: you’d have to change the law.

And that is the way it should be and must be because we must get back to Rule of Law. If we want to live in a Republic then the law, even when its stupid, must be enforced. After all, we made the law and must be bound by our own actions. It is the only way to safety. We’d be safer under the most draconian but strictly enforced laws we made than we can be under the most liberal legal regime that has people ignoring the law when it suits them. If I know I’ll have my head chopped off for doing A, I won’t do A…but what am I supposed to do when whether or not I’ll get my head chopped off for anything depends on the whim of an official? Because for a free people, in the law lies our only safety.

Open Thread

Feeling better! Covid does take it out of you. But, now I’m down to a cough and some general tiredness – sense of taste and smell is back.

That said…

The Democrat insanity on abortion has been on display all week and I think for many people it is their first real look at how Democrats – or at least their fanatic base – views the matter: they actually held a useless vote in the Senate to write Roe on steroids into law…it failed but their plan was to federally fund it on demand to the moment of birth with no conscience exemptions for medical providers. Thing would have been ripped to shreds at the Supreme Court had it passed. But that they even tried this useless thing – on a platform that, at best, has about 20% support – shows how insane they are about it. They’ve spent 50 years defending a Court ruling which, even if you’re pro-choice, is clearly unconstitutional and just horribly immoral…even liberal countries like France only allow abortion up to 14 weeks…and then only after two medical consults.

Meanwhile, China Joe and the Democrats continue to sink in the polls…and we’re starting to see that in primary voting, GOP enthusiasm is massively outpacing Democrat. We could be on the run up to a very large GOP victory.

Not that the GOP won’t do their best to blow it. I get people being sympathetic to Ukraine and disliking Putin’s Russia. I understand a desire to help them out – but for the majority of House GOPers to vote in favor of $40 billion no-strings-attached to Ukraine is just stupid. We know huge amounts of it will be siphoned off in graft. Meanwhile, here at home we’ve got an invasion at the southern border and our supply chains are so jacked up that in some areas there are shortages of baby formula.

Our domestic problems are large enough. And our foreign problems are China and drug cartels…even Islamist extremism simply isn’t worth our while to concentrate on at the moment. We have to get our house in order…not send billions to a Ukraine war which at any moment could drag us into open conflict with Russia. But there goes the Congressional GOP, nodding along with a Democrat/MSM Narrative. Wouldn’t be so bad if we could find a principal, but you just know they’re so in the Beltway that they’re seriously afraid we’ll think they’re Putin Puppets if they don’t go along with this boondoggle.

People are furiously fighting over Oz and, now, Barnette in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Lots of ostensibly pro-Trump voices being raised against them – in both cases over statements they made or may have made in the past. As I said regarding Oz, I won’t hold anyone to statements made in the past: especially if the statements are pre-2018 or so. We’ve all had a massive education these past few years and all of us view things a bit differently. As I pointed out on Twitter – what’s worse: a person who made ant-MAGA statements in the past, or a person who talks MAGA all day long and then knifes us? Plenty of the GOPers who voted for Ukraine aid probably have impeccable Conservative GOP credentials. I take everyone at face value these days: what do you propose right now? And sure I know that con artists will try to take advantage of this…but I’m at no more risk, and maybe a lot less risk, rolling the dice on a newly-minted MAGA than I am on the GOPe which has betrayed me for decades.

In the end, it is up to the votes of Pennsylvania to sort it out – but my advice to everyone is don’t take anyone’s word for it. Look it up yourself. We know that the most fierce voices are raised against those who fight for us – Trump, Greene, etc. And that tells me something: somebody doesn’t want me to have a champion. So, my first inclination when someone is attacked from the right is to question the attacker’s motives.

Court ruled that California’s ban on gun sales to under-21 is unconstitutional. Which, of course, is “no duh”. And I hate to break it to you, but as soon as someone sues on the cigarette and booze bans, they’ll go down as well. An adult is an adult. Period. Personally, I think we should never have lowered the age to 18 – stupid mistake. But if you make 18 the age where you can vote and enter into contracts, then that covers everything an adult is able to do…so, if you want your ban on booze to 19 year olds to stick, better amend the Constitution to return the voting age to 21.

Team Pudding Brain wants to turn American health care over to WHO – in the name of fighting the pandemic, but actually because (a) they hate the American people and (b) would love to be able to shrug and say “hey, we understand your anger here, but this is a WHO decision” whenever the global elite decides it is time to crush us under useless medical mandates.

Open Thread

Polls are meh, but there is a poll which says that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 37% and African-Americans at 26%. If so, the Democrats are doomed. But, once again, it is a poll. On the other hand, I’ve seen various news stories indicating that Team Trump is rolling out a very sophisticated voter outreach program…not just designed to do the usual stuff, but do things like bring people into voting who haven’t voted before or not very often. If they can really pull off something like that, then the 2020 results might be the shocker of all shocks…and other than a few bits and pieces fed to MSMers (some of which will be deliberate misdirection), most people won’t see it until it happens.

Beto decided to hand the GOP a gift in the form of admitting that liberals like him are after gun confiscation. Beto knows he won’t be the nominee – and he also knows that he has no real future in Texas politics. So, he’s just setting fire to things because it will generate attention and money and allow him to live well. But the bottom line is that a Democrat President for candidate has called for confiscation…and you can rely on it that none of the others will really dissent from that view. They can’t: they’ve told their mostly-mindless base that guns are bad and for a Progressive, all bad things must be utterly destroyed. Just that one assertion might get Trump two or three million more votes in 2020.

Democrats want to impeach Trump – because they’ve been told that Orange Man Bad and, once again, all bad things must be destroyed. However, the Democrat leaders know that doing such a thing absent a half dozen GOP Senators willing to vote with them is political suicide…and that wouldn’t happen unless Trump’s approval among GOP voters drops below, say, 75% (latest poll shows him at about 94% approval among GOP voters). So, they are trying to have it both ways – telling their base that they are super serial gonna get that guy Trump, but behind the scenes not actually doing anything. Well, Trump’s DOJ is calling them out on it – essentially telling them to sh** or get off the pot; which boxes the Democrats in nicely. They’ll eventually either have to drop it or drive forward…either way it would be a political disaster for them.

Abortion “doctor” kept body parts of his victims…you know, like serial killers do. This is not at all surprising – no decent doctor would perform an elective abortion. Only the dregs of the medical field would go into that as a primary means of making money…and the dregs tend to be low caliber people. Like this house of horrors abortionist.

China has some food problems:

…lifting the tariffs, China has just admitted it cannot produce enough protein for national consumption, both as a staple or as a preferred meat. Imagine a US shortage of wheat and chicken, with no real access to corn or beef, and a couple dozen urban areas of 20 millions or more with just a third arable land as now. That’s China.

So, what’s the problem with China’s agricultural industry? Basically, they simply do not have enough land to grow the volume of soy they need; and, their pork production is highly diffused and is ravaged by a massive and seemingly uncontrollable swine flu epidemic. In fact, it is estimated that up to 60% of China’s pigs are infected with the flu.

To compound a bad situation to worse, Chinese officials are both incapable of enforcing a quarantine and too corrupt to stop the spread of the flu.

China is a giant on spindly legs. We have far more leverage over them than we suspect – and we’ve never used it, until just recently. We’ll see how Trump does.

Open Thread

I got into a gun control argument with a Brit on Twitter the other day – very unusual in that it wasn’t nasty. But, it also didn’t really have a conclusion…the guy simply stopped responding. This was after I pointed out something which most don’t think about these days:

To love someone is to do what is best for them – if I am to show love for my fellows then certain things are required of me. One is that I never permit someone to be unjustly attacked. Another is that I restrain the wrongdoer from carrying out his plans. The former is far more easily understood than the latter, but neither are really thought of these days.

What my interlocutor was on about is that my Christian faith – which he claims to share – is about mercy and turning the other cheek and so forth; so, it isn’t really right for me to have a gun to shoot the burglar. But the reality is that it is almost a moral requirement that I be armed – as I’m physically capable of bearing arms – because if I am unarmed I can neither defend my neighbor nor attempt to prevent the burglar from doing his evil deed. I can only sit helplessly by…while my neighbor is robbed and maybe killed and the burglar risks his immortal soul in the commission of his crime. How can I be said to be showing love to either of them by doing nothing? There is much we’ve lost: most importantly our sense that justice and mercy go together. Its not one or the other – and, in fact, if you try to do either in isolation, you’ll get neither.

Germany’s Populist-Conservative AfD did well in regional elections – so well, in fact, that Germany’s other major parties (CDU, SPD and Greens) are thinking of a partnership with the German Communist Party (now called Linke, because “Communist” sounds bad). This is the mask fully dropping: all the parties were simply about who gets to slice the pie, not about what the pie shall be. And the Ruling Class in Germany – and around the West – wants the pie to be about open borders and only the Elite getting to decide what happens. We’re all in this together, folks: as goes AfD goes Brexit goes Trump. Either we all win, or we’ll all be destroyed.

John Hindraker is probably like most of us these days – watching what’s happening and figuring the Democrats are completely out of touch with reality. Of course, he also notes that he could be the guy out to lunch. We’ll all find out next November – but, I’m betting it is the Democrats who are busily alienating 60% of the electorate.

France’s Macron is offering a $15 billion bribe to Iran to keep it in the nuke deal – which we’re out of and Iran never had the faintest idea of abiding by. I don’t really understand this: is Macron that stupid, or does Iran just have so much dirt on Europe’s Ruling Class that they have to play ball?

South Dakota Democrat Party closes its last two offices for lack of funds. One down, forty nine to go…

Open Thread

Lots of things are being proposed in the wake of the mass shootings, the most pernicious being the red flag laws. Imagine an America where liberals get to turn you in to the police with the accusation that you’re insane, and then you have to prove you’re not in order to keep your right to bear arms.

Democrats, sick people that they are, are fundraising off the shootings. Beto has been the most vile in this, directly accusing the President of racism.

The Dayton shooter seems to have been a far-left kook, while the El Paso shooter supposedly had some rightwing leanings. This works out to the MSM covering El Paso while downplaying Dayton.

The people of Hong Kong are rising up against their Communist overlords – but they will not be successful. The Chinese government would like to defuse the situation with little or no bloodshed, if possible, but make no mistake about it: Hong Kong will be brought fully under the heel of Beijing. The people of Hong Kong have no way to resist: they don’t have guns.

Meanwhile, China is developing a plan for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…and like the last one attempted by Japan, they aren’t asking Great East Asia if they want to be part of it.

Leftists forced the New York Times to memory hole a headline about Trump the left didn’t agree with. Paper of record, ya’ll…its just a record of how to surrender to Communist apparatchiks.

Open Thread

You’ll be happy to know that San Francisco has created Poop Patrols to pick up all the feces flooding the streets of San Francisco. With a little luck, they’ll be able to head off any coming cholera epidemic. Reminds me of the old joke: what did Socialists use for light before candles? Electricity.

OTOH, modern Capitalism is Jeff Bezos worth $150 billion and trying to influence our national political decisions in a way which favors him. Seriously, guys, start looking into Distributism. It is the only way out of this mess.

The Louisiana AG has excluded Citibank and BofA from a $600 million finance program for roads – because they are anti-gun. Good. Time to start punishing corporations for taking sides in politics.

Our Perfect and Wonderful CIA which we May Never Question blew it’s communication security and allowed the Chinese in. I’ve been of the opinion that the CIA has been penetrated by enemy agents since Day One. I just can’t forget that the CIA vetted itself in it’s original hires and there was no assurance that those doing the vetting weren’t enemy agents.

Pearl Jam has provided a massive, in-kind donation to Trump’s 2020 re-election effort.

The MSM, in an effort to allay concerns that it is united in attacking Trump, coordinated an attack on Trump in the editorial pages of about 300 newspapers.