Posse Incitatus

The Dems have betrayed just about everything they ever believed

One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."

Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.

I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed.  Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago. 

The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth.  The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.

Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them.  Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare."  Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.

But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well.  Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?

Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class.  Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it.  The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.

The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.

Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.

Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it.  The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.

Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes.  Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry.  But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.

One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism.  The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely.  At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.

I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!"  Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.

In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.

Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy."  Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism.  Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.

Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental.  Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.

 

Tax Policy 101

I don't know which is more infuriating: That an airhead like U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez can repeatedly babble nonsense that influences ignorant voters (all the while benefiting from nonstop fawning media coverage), or that "journalists" who interview her are too stupid to ask tough questions or engage in critical thinking.

This past Sunday, Cortez displayed her font of ignorance by espousing socialism and much higher income tax rates during a "60 Minutes" interview with Anderson Cooper.  Instead of challenging Cortez's naive beliefs, Cooper asked an inane question that went something like this: Some critics point to socialist countries with low living standards and economic distress such as Venezuela and Cuba. That's not what you believe socialism leads to, is it?

In other words, a softball right across the plate. Cooper also did not challenge the leftist assumption that single payer, universal healthcare is actually viable. No questions about doctor shortages, waiting lists, rationing or how we're going to pay for such an exorbitant proposition.

Cortez resorted to the same tired canard about how everything was hunky dory during the 1960s when the highest tax bracket was above 90 percent. When President Kennedy proposed cutting taxes across the board in early 1963, there were an astounding 22 tax brackets ranging from 14 to 91 percent. After he was assassinated, LBJ took up the tax cut mantle and succeeded in cutting rates about 20 percent across the board. Unemployment and federal deficits decreased, while disposable income and federal revenues increased.

You see, Cortez is too simple-minded to understand the link between confiscatory tax rates on the one hand, and tax shelters, exemptions / deductions, and a disincentive to invest on the other. Yes, rates were high, but few people were actually paying those rates. But cutting taxes inspired individuals and businesses to invest and create jobs, just as happened following President Trump's tax cuts of a year ago.

Less than 20 years after the LBJ tax cuts, President Reagan reduced taxes (and the number of brackets), and the economy roared. High unemmployment quickly dropped (as did sky-high interest rates), and federal revenues soared.

Sounding more like a fourth grader than a college-educated adult, Cortez actually said this:

“Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 percent or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.”

The "tippy top"? Really? This is downright embarrassing. Recall that Congresswoman Cortez is the genius who proclaimed that the unemployment rate is so low "because everyone has two jobs."

This is what happens when ignorance prevails; when the K-12 schools brainwash young people to think capitalism is bad, the wealthy are greedy S.O.B.s, and socialism is great. Ocasio-Cortez is just the type of politician who can succeed with voters obsessed by imagery, emotion, feelings and ethnicity. Substance? Practical experience? Historical knowledge? Respect for the constitution? Economic literacy? Why, these are not even on the radar.

Alarmingly, we may be in store for many more such lightweights as the country's collective IQ continues to crater and social media works at warp speed to dumb us down, down, down.

Trump's eight minutes of blunt truth

I did not watch President Trump's speech live, but saw it shortly after it was given. 

Having seen it, I can understand why Democrat-supporting media were reluctant to carry it and why so many of them went into fits afterwards.

It was a short, powerful message built on an unquestionable foundation of truth.

Trump's proposition is a simple one:  are we nation of laws?  Are we a nation at all?

The Democrats want to answer "no" to both questions, but can't do so in public and remain a viable political party.  So they lie, generate fake news and hope that somehow their water-carriers in the media will move enough public opinion to get them out of this scrape.

But there is no easy out.  Not now.

As I pointed out before, we have now run out of slack in the federal payroll system.  Despite lies you may have seen from Democrats, no government worker has yet missed a paycheck.

That is about to change.

When it does, the furloughed federal workers will have to wonder why they are losing their pay.  Sure, most dislike Trump, but not enough to go without pay to deny him a compartively tiny $6 billion appropriation.  That amount is a rounding error in the vast federal budget.

Other programs are also going to start feeling the effect of the shutdown, including food stamps.  

It surely doesn't help matters that the Democrat "Green New Deal" will cost thousands of times as much as Trump's wall barrier.

I think Chuck and Nancy know they goofed.  Trump used his bully pulpit to devastating effect and he will continue to do so.  The fact that he actually low-balled the violence associated with illegal entries shows just how bad the situation really is.

So does the fact that CBS felt the need to drop that inconvenient truth.

Typically, when the Dems are getting clobbered on an issue, they change the subject.  The problem here is that going back to Mueller for more leaked lies or some sham indictments of RUSSIAN shell corporations won't resolve the budget impasse. 

This has long been the fatal flaw of Democrat strategy: you can only spin you way out of so much.

Chuck and Nancy may well want to get out of this and focus on other, potentially more fruitful lines of attack, but they can't do so without caving in to Trump.

The Dragon's empty nest

Amidst all the saber-rattling and supposed super-weapons just around the corner, it is worth noting that mainland China is best by enormous and complicated problems that deeply undercut its global ambitions.

Here at the Posse we've noted more than once that China's dependence on the export market to fuel its growth leaves it deeply vulnerable to a trade war.  The United States largely consumes its own product and having to on-shore more production may produce short-term disruption but actually will strengthen the US economy in the long run.

China, by contrast, remains largely dirt-poor and its convict laborers and peasants simply can't afford the counterfeit i-Phones they produce in such abundance.  Absent the Western world willing to play a sap, China's economy will crater.

But there's also the demographic side, and here Mark Steyn once again takes his familiar role by pointing out that China is getting old well before it's getting rich.

One thing I will add is that China's military leadership is well aware of these trends.  All industrial nations track available manpower in case they need full wartime mobilization.  The trends in China must be deeply alarming to its leadership - particularly since the Chinese way of war has historically been to drown the enemy in Chinese blood.  That blood's increasing hard to come by.

China still uses a draft and like all nations, calls up only a fraction of its available manpower.  However, like Russia, China's leaders have watched the potential pool of recruits drop each year for decades.  They know with absolute certainty that the number available for the 2020 call-up will be smaller than that in 2019, and that the classes of 2021, 2022, etc. will continue to dwindle.

This is why China is pushing so hard to take control of the Western Pacific.   It is also why I feared that the election of Hillary Clinton would continue the road to war started by the weakness of Barack Obama.  With China pushing hard against a visibly declining United States, there was a serious risk that China would go so far that even Hillary couldn't fold.  The publicly mooted strike against US carriers by a Chinese general or a strike on Guam or Alaska would rouse the public beyond the Democrat media's ability to contain it.

Indeed, Hillary would likely lash out in a panic, since being the first woman president would mean she had to be super-manly.  And thus the war would begin.

Trump's assertiveness allays my fears because it sends a clear warning that the US will respond.  This means that China's leaders will have to strike knowing full well that total war will be the result.   There is no ambiguity and thus far less chance of a miscalculation.

But China remains a source of instability, and we can only hope its leaders understand that a diminished China is better than a radioactive one.

Crucial Consequences

For tens of millions of Americans, the so-called government "shutdown" is just more kabuki theater from unprincipled political hacks. They're not affected in the least by thousands of paper-pushing bureaucrats being furloughed and by others who work without pay (until the matter is resolved, when they will receive back pay). So the IRS, EPA and HUD are shut down? Cool!

Many people don't give a rat's ass if national parks and museums are closed, or veterans' memorials, or whatever. Maybe if this happened during the summer tourism season -- in particular near Independence Day, Memorial Day or Labor Day, more people would be outraged. But it's in the dead of winter, not exactly the time of year that people are planning on traveling to Yellowstone or the Smithsonian Museum.

However, it is apparent that certain consequences will piss people off. One is the fact that trash is piling up on the National Mall and in other well-traveled areas of Washington, D.C. While this primarily affects residents and workers in the capital, it also garners plenty of coverage from national TV networks that bend over backwards to make President Trump look bad. Social media further fans the flames.

But a potentially bigger problem is that many Transportation Security Administration agents who screen baggage and provide security at airports are calling in sick. Put simply: They're ticked off about having to work without pay (even with the realization that they will be made whole eventually). If you're just getting by, have meager savings, and have bills to pay including credit cards and a car note, it is maddening to go weeks without a paycheck. These workers know that if they can throw a monkey wrench into air travel across the nation, that's damned good leverage. It puts tremendous pressure on lawmakers to resolve the shutdown in short order.

The pressure will definitely build on members of Congress during the next couple of weeks. Most likely, the shutdown will end by late January at the latest. But then, the Trumpster is always one step ahead of us in terms of his shrewd strategy and ability to judge what works and what doesn't.

A couple points to consider: As I've mentioned before, even a deluge of negative publicity bashing Trump for supposed suffering wrought by a prolonged shutdown won't hurt his poll ratings. Heck, he's been holding steady at 40-43 percent with unprecedented 90 percent negative coverage from the vermin media. What does he care if they come out with both barrels blazing?

A second thing to note: The majority of federal government employees, if they are involved in the political arena, tend to be Democrats or sympathize with Democrats. So if they're in a world of hurt come Jan. 28, it is Democrats in Congress who will be incurring their wrath. The phones will be ringing off the hook (dated myself with that phrase); the blistering emails will swamp in-boxes; Twitter and Facebook will rage.... Trump may have to concede something on DACA, or may have to accept less than $5 billion toward the wall. But I can't help but think he still holds the upper hand in this stalemate.

The Democrats won big on Nov. 8, and promise to mount a full-frontal assault with investigations, subpoenas and possibly impeachment. Let them have their fun. Knowing Trump's track record for running rings around them, they may just be spinning their wheels.

Fake Pope rails against fake Catholics

After enough outrages, one starts to take a jaded view of things.  The nerve becomes dull, and it's hard to work up much ire seeing the same old people do the same old things.

That's pretty much how I feel about Pope Francis.

Last week, he did yet another theological loop-to-loop and decided that Catholic "haters" aren't welcome in the pews. 

This is of course a complete reversal from what he has said for years, which is that the Church is a 'field hospital' for sinners who need help.  The more broken and compromised the better!  He was all about mercy, indeed making it a centerpiece of his message.

But that was before we learned he had turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of children by pervert priests for years.  Moreover, he's still not really troubled by it and he wishes the faithful would just let it go already and focus on compassion to migrants (who are often part of sex trafficking) or Mother Gaia rather than the icky things his subordinates to innocent children.

It's a tough time for the Church to have a pope like this.  The US Senate is starting to quiz judicial nominees about their membership in the Knights of Columbus, treating it as analogous the Communist Party of the 1950s.

That such open bigotry can be displayed in the United State should be a top concern of the Church, especially considering the actual violence being used elsewhere, but Francis is too busy doing his version of Orange Man Bad to notice.

Actually, he reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton during the impeachment period, when his mantra was that he needed to get back to the business of the American people.  Impeachment was just lies about sex, and no one should care.  It was a distraction.

Francis is saying the same thing about his refusal to purge the Church of sexual predators.   Presumably the reason he's saying this is that he can't say anything else without having his compromised associates turn on him.

And increasingly, no one cares, because if you can't trust your children to be safe in the hands of the Church, everything else is just details.

What's in a Name?

Never mind the facts! Forget about the truth! All that matters is how I FEEL!!!

This is the mindset of so many leftists, and once again it is playing out in California, the ultimate land of fragmented, far-out liberal factionalism. My esteemed co-blogger has mentioned numerous times the friction between LGBT transgenders and traditional feminists. There are also tensions between gays and LGBTs, and some minority LGBT folks who claim their subset (which sounds like shorthand for a fast-food cheeseburger) is chock-full of racism.  But today's topic deals with ethnic tensions.

First, let's step back and recognize that oversimplifying things is a frequent offense of liberals and the not-so-bright political reporters who cover them. For example, Hispanics are often lumped together as one voting block or grievance group, when anyone who lives in Florida knows damned well that Cuban-Americans are generally far more conservative than Puerto Ricans. And natives of South America's more prosperous nations, such as Chile, Argentina and Peru, look down on Central American hellholes El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala as much Americans do. My wife is from Peru, and she attests that Peruvians don't think much of Mexicans. And so on and so forth.

It's also absurd to lump Asians together as a monolithic group. For starters, a cursory look at history shows that the Chinese and Japanese were mortal enemies for well over 100 years. Cambodia and China mixed it up against Vietnam. Japan lorded over Korea for decades, and Japanese soldiers abused Korean women as sex slaves. I've only scratched the surface, but you get the point.

Well, tensions between Americans of Chinese and Japanese descent have flared up again on the Left Coast. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the tensions have to do with perceptions about a name. Long story short: A Palo Alto school board decided to rename a middle school because its namesake, David Starr Jordan, was an advocate of eugenics. (He was a so-called progressive, too, which is no surprise.)

The school board wanted to name the school after a local man, Fred Minoru Yamamoto, who was a World War II hero with a segregated Japanese-American combat unit. He was killed by German artillery fire in France. The problem: Palo Alto's Asians of Chinese descent were up in arms because they remember a bad Yamamoto: Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet during World War II, a man regarded as a war criminal by the Chinese.

Following vicious local battles on social media, and irate Asian-American parents turning out at school board meetings to let their voices be heard, the board voted to name the school after two other individuals. The Japanese-Americans mounted a backlash against the Chinese-Americans for demonizing the Yamamoto name.

The Journal quotes one woman who, although of Chinese descent, is married to a man of Japanese descent and opposed dumping the Yamamoto name. She acknowledges that some people of her ethnic group have legitimate anguish about the name, but believes many opponents hold the view that "my son is not going to a Japanese school, named after a Japanese guy."

Another person, a recent immigrant from China, sounds surprisingly enlightened as he explains why he opposed the push to scrap Yamamoto: "We went through this kind of thing back in China," he said. "Bureaucracy stuff and political correctness stuff. We don't want to see this kind of thing happen again here." Understandably, the man asked to remain anonymous.

Well, Mr. Anonymous, I credit you for your perception and level head. You understand how out-of-control the forces of government-sanctioned political correctness can be. You've learned it from bitter experience. But where you're lacking is  in the realization that this sort of wrongheaded jihad has been well underway here in the United States for several years. Confederate monuments have been torn down, streets and buildings renamed, state flags changed.

It's bad enough that there are people stupid enough to think we can scrub away history's unpleasant realities by making cosmetic changes. But the Palo Alto full frontal assault on a name -- one word -- is even more Orwellian. It fits right in with the PC speech plague, which ironically coexists with increasingly coarse dialogue in entertainment, politics and everyday life.

Once again, leftists: Please, please try to overcome feelings, emotions and imagery. Too often, they steer you the wrong way and will lead to totalitarianism.

The overlooked equal and opposite reaction

I've been reading up on the events leading to what we may soon have to call the first American Civil War and have picked up on a number of factors I had previously overlooked.

For example, most accounts focus on the intense belligerence of the Southern states and their threats to secede following by the actual act.

What they leave out is that Northern states were issuing parallel proclamations and declaring their willingness to fight to keep the Union intact.  The South shouldn't have been surprised by the federal unwillingness to either abandon key forts (like Sumter) nor its decision to fight.  The Northern states had been preaching it as loudly as they could. 

In an era where the primary military forces were state-supported, the resolutions passed by Northern legislatures authorizing military forces in advance of any federal request should have spoken volumes about what was to come, but it was ignored.

I think the modern Democrats are making the same mistake as the Democrats of 1860 regarding the will of their opponents not only to resist but counterattack.  Beltway conservatives are widely (and correctly) regarded as effete squishes who actively seek the favor of their erstwhile rivals.  This surely convinces the Democrats that they can push as hard as they want for raw power and all they'll get in response is clucking about "coarsening discourse."

Mitt Romney is a classic example of this, and his pathetic broadside at President Trump was also a white flag being waved at the Dems in advance of anything they might do.  The message was sent and received.

But Mitt Romney doens't speak for the party, only a tiny Beltway-based sliver of it.  Dems who assume they can continue to harass people, state police-sanctioned riots and otherwise flout the law are only building up reciprocal energy that will come back at them with a vengeance.

Just as in 1860, Democrat vitriol produces and equal and opposite reaction.  Just as then, the Dems don't seem to notice it, and they likely won't until it's too late for everyone.

Key dates for the partial government shutdown

As a service to our readers, I thought I would break down a few key dates to give better situational awareness as to what's going on in Washington.

The partial shutdown is not taking place in a vacuum, after all.  Despite its inefficiency, the federal government still has deadlines for payroll submission and knowing these can help provide insight in the ongoing negotiations (such as they are).

The previous pay period closed on December 22, but all timesheets were required by midweek in anticipation of the shutdown.  The pay earned during this time was sent out on Monday, Dec. 31.

When the funding lapsed, affected federal employees were put on furlough, which is basically paid vacation.  However, unlike paid vacation, they cannot collect a salary.

The current pay period will close on this Saturday, January 5.  Normally, government employees would be submitting their timesheets, which have a deadline of January 8. 

This could be extended through extraordinary efforts (and when it comes to getting their pay, federal employees will make that effort), but whether or not this happens, the next payday is Monday, Jan. 14.

Thus, if the situation is not resolved, that is when federal workers will get their first payless payday.  It is important to understand that due to the lapse in funding, they can't simply take vacation pay. 

Now once funding is re-established, the government will (as noted) quickly try to run the back pay to minimize hardship for employees, but it will take time.

Thus a key question is how much suffering the Dems wish to inflict on their fellow government enthusiasts.

To this point, there has been no pain, merely uncertainty.  That will shortly change.  That is therefore when movement is most likely.

Greenpeace turns to shipbreakers of Bangladesh to scrap flagship Rainbow Warrior

For a while I've been chronicling the rot among various (formerly) respected institutions.  Today's example (via Ace of Spades) is the story of how nominally environmentalist organization Greenpeace decided to dispose of its iconic flagship by using the infamous shipbreakers of Bangladesh.

Greenpeace apparently leaked the story in November, hoping to bury it and avoid bad publicity.  One might think that one of the premier environmental organizations doing something like this would be news, but one would be wrong.  Leftist journalists (and their editors) have their priorities.  They increasingly see themselves not as conveyors of information but rather gate-keepers whose job is to boost their cause and political interests.

One can read the lame excuses of Greenpeace at the link, but it's entirely insincere.

For a long time Greenpeace's core mission has been fund-raising with a little virtue-signalling thrown in.  Actual environmental improvement, sound conservation practices - these things are for the little people. 

Thus, when the Rainbow Warrior II had reached the end of its operational lifespan, the suits who run the organization wanted to get rid of the hulk as cheaply as possible.  That pointed to the hideously unsafe and environmentally toxic beaches of Bangladesh. 

Of course, one might think that since Greenpeace has specifically targeted this practice for condemnation, they'd have enough institutional self-awareness not to do it.  One might think that, but one would be wrong.

This could have been a teaching moment, and the recycling of the Rainbow Warrior II could have been an excellent fund-raising opportunity for the organization.  Heck, they could have made trinkets out of the hulks various parts and sold them off at an obscene profit.

But they didn't because like most institutions today they suffer from the twin handicaps of short-sighted thinking and a lack of basic competence.  I'm reasonably certain that the entire "business" side of the organization consists of earnest upper-middle class kids who breezed their way through school on the backs of tutors and degree programs based on "building awareness" rather than any sort of critical thinking.

Such creatures typically end up at trendy non-profits and rely on an ossified donor base to insulate them from the real-world consequences of bad decision-making.

The problem is that eventually, stupid will win.  The decision by environmentalists to ally with corporate globalists is a prime example.  One cannot claim to favor protecting the environment and still support the free flow of capital to third-world hellholes with no environmental protections.  China's air is literally toxic, and this is deliberate policy of their government to achieve economic growth.

Each time a leftist-dominated state like California passes "clean energy" legislation, everyone knows production will simply move offshore to avoid the rules and exploit cheap labor.

Blue-collar workers have already figured this one out.  It's an open question whether their college-educated "betters" will have the brain power to do likewise.