Burn In Hell – Page 31

Romney rubs it in

Posted on December 23, 2022December 23, 2022 by Mike

A pluperfect example of GOPe “thinking.”

Mitt Romney Tries to Explain the Omnibus Vote, and It’ll Leave You Punching Walls

Far better to punch Romney, if you ask me. Certainly more productive, and easier on the hands too.

On Thursday, 18 Republican senators joined hands with Democrats to pass yet another massive Omnibus spending bill. This time, it cost US taxpayers $1.7 trillion, setting spending baselines that will now be used for the next two years via continuing resolutions. All of this happened mere weeks before the GOP was set to take over the House of Representatives, meaning that the power of the purse that was just won has been conceded without anything resembling a fight.

Luckily, we have Sen. Mitt Romney around to explain that this wasn’t actually a betrayal of what was promised during the last election. In fact, you are just too stupid to realize that this is actually a good thing.

Romney begins by saying that he’s “convinced that this will cost less money than if we kick the can down the road until next year.”

So let’s just kick the can down the road this year instead. Hey, makes perfect sense, I guess, for certain values of the word “sense.”

He then cites the fact that the House GOP hasn’t selected a speaker yet to bolster his argument, saying that he’s “not sure they’re going to be able to take on the budget for this as well as the next year.”

In other words, you absolute rubes who voted for Republicans during the last mid-terms can’t be trusted to have your votes actually mean anything. Instead, you must be protected from yourself by having GOP Senators nuke the power of the purse before Republicans even take control. And you should be thankful that Romney and the rest did that for you.

The Utah senator then goes on to point out that even if House Republicans put together a budget, Democrats wouldn’t vote for it. Well, yes Mitt, we know. We are all well aware that Democrats actually keep their promises and hold the line. Why can’t the GOP do the same thing? Why can’t they lead and dictate instead of constantly reacting and bending the knee?

Oh, they can, right enough. Trouble is, they don’t want to. They know their prescribed role in this putrid little charade, and are content to stick with it.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Romney then does what establishment Republicans always do, which is to suggest that military spending justifies all manner of domestic insanity. That’d be the same military currently instituting a preferred pronouns policy and that hasn’t won a war since the early ’90s. To end the video, he then lists out all the pork he’s bringing home to Utah.

To sum it up, the Republican Party deserves to lose, and parties that deserve to lose rarely win. There is no point in winning elections if the results are the same. The GOP had a chance to stand up here and at least demand the inclusion of funds to secure the border, and they couldn’t even get that done. And in the midst of being fed that turd sandwich, we are told it’s actually smoked brisket.

Heh. Brings to mind a bona fide classic from years ago, which featured now-irrelevant Milquetoast Conservative and bland Vichy GOPe shill Hugh Hewitt smacking his lips in gustatory delight and declaring, “My, this shit sandwich sure is tasty!” Can’t recall now who posted it originally—the Onion, maybe, back when they were still worth reading, which sorta tells you how long ago this was—nor which issue Hewitt had folded like a cheap accordion on, even. Trust me, though, it was a good ‘un.

State of the nation

Posted on December 23, 2022December 23, 2022 by Mike

Radicalized, disenfranchised, post-Constitutional, post-Republic, teetering on the ragged, jagged edge of Apocalypse.

Who Radicalized the Right?
In the process of steamrolling normal people, the Left may have created the very “fascists” they claim to be against.

The term “far-right” is applied far too liberally these days, but the Right has doubtless moved away from conservatism and toward a more radical form of politics. There aren’t too many defectors from Donald Trump’s camp who feel the man is too extreme. Rather, the argument from Trump’s right is that he is not disciplined enough to—as the online Right likes to say—“crush our enemies.” Whether Trump, Ron DeSantis, or some other figure is the Republicans’ nominee in 2024, the frontrunner will not win the hearts of the base by appealing to what conservatives are pleased to call “principle” and speaking in a trans-Atlantic accent. That person will do it by showing he is strong and can be a protector to half the nation.

Of course, the whole purpose of constitutions is to limit power. In a constitutional system like ours, one is not supposed to be motivated by crushing one’s enemies. This has never been the inclination or aim of conservatives, who do not share the Left’s aversion to limits on political power. But things have changed. What happens when one side has no regard for the constitution or the limits of power?

The other side had damned well better recognize what has happened, acknowledge frankly that those they once thought of as “Our Fellow Countrymen” have morphed into an implacable, slavering, ruthless Enemy, and deal with them in accordance with that bleak reality if they hope to get through the inevitable conflict with even a pitiful tittle of their former liberties and rights still intact, that’s what.

The goodwill of the conservative has been mercilessly abused, and he is searching for shelter from the obscene freak show of anarchy and disorder that has descended upon his country.

Joe Biden is but the vessel of the deranged, domineering spirit behind the corruption. This malign force is not the beneficent liberalism of the founders, who cherished freedom of speech, religion, and opinion and, of course, the right to bear arms, and its implicit right of revolution. It is a tyrannical will that asserts total ownership of everything, proudly celebrates evil by calling it good, treats decent people like terrorists, exalts criminals and the insane, snatches children from their parents, and requires submission to itself—in mind and body—for citizens to earn bread.

On top of it all, the means of democratic recourse appear to be slipping. Our elections are a Third World sham, and millions of foreigners with no right to be here live in the country without fear of removal. Their numbers are rapidly growing under the explicit protection of an administration whose party, in between giving lectures on the rule of law, brags about replacing and disenfranchising the country’s natives.

The country is changing fast. A decade ago, the Left said, “We just want gays to be able to marry,” and now they say, “We just want to parade our depraved fetishes in public and sexualize children.”

Faced with all of this, a Caesar who promises to sweep away the trash begins to look appealing to many.

Appealing, hell. In times as fraught and parlous as these, countenancing the rise of a Caesar can quickly become a matter of sheer survival, quite literally so.

Especially when those on the other side are disingenuous, like our leftists, and appeal to principles they do not themselves believe in to get their way. No, the Left doesn’t care about constitutionalism, democracy, liberalism, or any of the high phrases that pepper their pompous speeches. Like a communist Popular Front, these are just words they use to put a benign face on tyranny, and blackmail their opponents into unilateral disarmament.

Forgive me, but for the life of me I can’t recall the last time I heard any Leftist even mention any of those things in passing, much less “pepper(ing) their speeches” with them. Well, excepting “democracy,” as in the “Our Sacred Democracy” bullshit, I suppose. Which mention was as transparently insincere and false as it was convenient for them in the moment, a mere tactic and nothing whatsoever more.

Most on the Right have awoken to this, which is why, outside of a handful of naïve but sincere conservatives, few went out of their way to condemn Trump when he apparently called to suspend the Constitution.

Okay, maybe it’s just me and my fading memory, but I really can’t recall Trump ever having issued any such call, either “apparently” or explicitly.

This may not be a “principled” way of thinking, as some conservatives understand it, but it is not an unreasonable approach in times of such enmity and trouble. The increasingly medieval nature of American politics has left many feeling that a faith in what used to be called principle is outdated and foolish.

When one’s opponents have declared themselves his enemies, nakedly and unequivocally, and regard “principles” not as a quality to be admired but as a weakness to be exploited, insistence on clinging to those principles is the exclusive province of a soon-to-be-subjugated fool.

In a stable, secure nation at peace internally, principles are fine and noble things, a source of pride and strength…provided those principles are shared in common amongst a clear majority of its populace. In a faltering, decaying nation, riven by strife, beset by rampant crime and corruption, however, a mulish adherence to principle can be not only a source of weakness, it can be downright dangerous.

The two dominant factions now resemble hostile nations living under one government while speaking completely foreign languages.

NOW you’re getting it. Because that is precisely where we are now.

Consequently, politics has become a struggle for survival in which, because of universal suffrage, all are conscripted. The inconsequential noise of mutual recrimination leads many to tune out, but to do so, to remain unallied, is to let oneself be trampled.

This is a sad state of affairs, but it is reality.

Yep. We don’t have to like it—SHOULDN’T like it, in fact. But like it or no, we DO have to face up to it, without flinching, dissembling, or further ado. Who “radicalized” us? Who gives a damn? That’s a dead issue at this late date, of no import and well behind us. The only thing that matters now is whether we retain the gumption to embrace that radicalization, and exact a heavy price from the rat-bastards for what they’ve done to us.

Situation Normal: All Fucked Up

Posted on December 22, 2022December 23, 2022 by Mike

Mollie Hemingway calls Yertle McTurtle “the single biggest obstacle to GOP success,” which statement is founded on a wholly erroneous premise: that what’s been going on with the Vichy GOPe for lo, these many years is somehow NOT something they consider to be “success.”

Au contraire, mon frere.

GOP Can’t Be Successful Until Mitch McConnell Is Gone
The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.

The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.

Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.

Senators don’t read ANY bill beforehand, nor do “Representatives”; for a long while now, that sort of lowly scut-work gets delegated to staff underlings, who then recommend a yea or nay vote to their bosses depending on certain factors—none of which includes whether it might be of help to the American people, or is something they actually desire to see implemented.

Update! Bill just comes right out and says it:

Sure, We’re Gonna Vote Our Way Out of This

Not this, nor anything else, actually.

Perhaps the biggest, most in-your-face insult of all regarding this latest act of Republicrat treachery and betrayal is, the omnibus smash ‘n’ grab “vote” wasn’t even close. Not by a long yard, it wasn’t. The number to forever remember, graven onto Real American memory until the end of days? The number which, to swipe a fine old phrase, shall live in infamy? Eighteen. Not one, not two or three, nor five or six, even. Eight. Fucking. Teen. Again, Bill just comes right out and says it.

Fuck. Them.

Fuck. Them. All.

Not one more vote. Not one more dime. Not one ounce of support in any way, shape, or form.

If we’re going to end up with a commie dictatorship no matter what we vote for, well, bring it on, the sooner, the better. Let’s drag the whole stinking, totalitarian mess onto the table and see how long it takes for the whole thing to collapse in a welter of fraternal blood.

Oh, I’d say the commie-dictator ship has long since sailed, Bill. Now we’re all just waiting around for the inevitable collapse. In fact, the former Assistant Sec of Housing for Bush 41, Catherine Fitts, says that ship has already sailed too.

CAF predicts, “If you look at FTX, my question is how much of the money sent to Ukraine got laundered right back for the (2022 midterm) election? So, to me, Ukraine is not a destination point, it is a through put point…At this point, and I hate to say it, but we are in full scale implosion. The corruption is that bad. That’s why I am telling you what we need is sovereignty. The federal government is not going to deliver…The financial coup has reached a point where if you want sovereignty, the only person who can deliver that is your state governor and your legislature…If you’ve got a great state AG, if you have great legislature, if you have a great governor, you better start supporting them. They are the people that can protect your sovereignty. You need governmental sovereignty if you are going to have individual sovereignty, and you better do it now. You have no time to be entertained by Joe Biden, Trump and Hunter Biden.”

The federal government corruption was turbocharged in 2019. CAF says, “While everyone was focusing on the teenage sex life of the Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh, the House, the Senate, the White House, Democrat and Republican, both sides of the aisle got together and approved Statement 56 of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) which said they could keep secret books. That was everybody—together. So, there is no Right vs Left. There is no Trump vs Biden. There is a machine in control of a spending machine that is financed with our taxes, and debt borrowed in our name, that is being sold into our pension funds and retirement accounts…That machine, to keep balancing the books, is implementing a depopulation plan. That is the reality that has to be faced and changing the President won’t matter…If you want to make real progress against the machine, you’ve got to talk turkey about where your money is going, who are the local leaders and who are your state legislators who are going to support you when this machine fails you completely. If it doesn’t fail you in 2023, it will fail you in 2024. So, you better be ready.”

Prognosis: GRIM.

Obscenity update! The great Julie Kelly joins Bill in just coming right out and saying it.

Traitors
The omnibus package itself is one insult after another to the American people. As Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) detailed in a December 20 tweet thread, generous funding to secure the borders of other countries is included in the bill with little more than crumbs to protect our southern border, now dangerously wide open to human smugglers and drug runners. Billions more will be spent to promote gender equity, fight “structural racism,” expand access to abortion, and construct buildings and parks named after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, retiring Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ark.) and former First Lady Michelle Obama among others.

Perhaps the most outrageous provision in the bill is a hefty budget hike for the Department of Justice. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who spends the majority of his time and resources targeting Donald Trump, his associates, and his supporters, will receive a nearly 10 percent raise next year, bringing the Justice Department’s annual budget to $38.7 billion. More than $212 million is earmarked to hire almost 100 temporary government lawyers to help prosecute January 6 protesters, a caseload now nearing 1,000 Americans with promises to add another 1,000 more.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations will get $569 million more next year as that agency’s budget exceeds $11 billion for the first time. Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray have made it clear by word and deed that the imaginary threat of “domestic violent extremists,” i.e., those who dare to criticize the regime will remain their top priority. This means more predawn FBI raids of Capitol “trespassers,” more indefinite incarceration for those awaiting trial, more prison sentences for nonviolent offenses, more misery, and more destruction of Constitutional rights.

And that’s just fine with the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Washington who’ve been silent in the face of this unprecedented form of government retaliation against Trump supporters. In fact, outgoing Senator Roy Blunt (R-Miss.) explained that the Justice Department really needed the big funding boost. “I’ve always been for prosecuting anybody who violated the law on January the 6th,” Blunt told NBC News this week. “And there are, like, 800 cases already. So I can’t imagine that they don’t need some extra money.”

Good riddance, you clown.

The FBI, particularly in light of recent revelations of the bureau’s collusion with Big Tech to suppress coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop and criticism of mail-in voting, should be dismantled and defunded, not rewarded for its interference in two presidential elections among other malfeasance. Nor should the agency receive $375 million in capital funding to build a shiny new headquarters in either Virginia or Maryland as the bill also provides.

But that didn’t stop 18 Republican senators, including McConnell and two-time presidential loser Mitt Romney, from voting to pass the omnibus bill on Thursday. Another “yes” vote was from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the former chair of the Senate Judiciary who promised for years to “get to the bottom” of numerous Justice Department scandals.

No group of politicians has licked the boots of President Zelenskyy more than Republican senators. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is among Zelenskyy’s biggest supporters, insisting this week that “providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That’s how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.”

And there you have it. One of the most powerful—albeit most unpopular—leaders in Washington thinks lining Zelenskyy’s army-green pockets with more U.S. tax dollars is a greater need than tackling any number of ongoing crises roiling the country right now.

Because of course he does; after all, one of those things he cares deeply about; the other, meh, not so much.

Not to be jumping down the throat of a fine writer whose work I genuinely admire and enjoy or anything, but I noted the other day that Ace had (for the fourth or fifth time so far this year, or thereabouts) announced himself done forever with the Republican Uniparty wing—that never, ever again would he advocate for them, contribute to them, or *gag* vote for them. I’m not gonna go dig up a link, because as you all know, hey, I’m a slackass like that.

Now, Ace can say and/or do whatever he likes without reference to what I may think about it, natch. But unless and until enough of us awaken fully to the sordid facts about this sorry situation and resolve to act forcefully on that knowledge, we must expect that we’ll go right on being used as a sort of filthy, encrusted cum-rag by TPTB. They can only get away with this shit for as long as we allow them to, and not one moment longer. It’s high time we figured that out, I think; Lord knows, it’s been staring us right in the face for long enough by now.

Sorry, don’t care

Posted on December 17, 2022December 17, 2022 by Mike

Let’s try something a little out of the ordinary here: a fisking done entirely via FIFY (Fixed It For Ya).

A man who allegedly entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is being persecuted by the patently illegitimate system without ever having committed an actual crime, is now being accused of conspiring to kill FBI agents Ordnungspolizei thugs.

Edward Kelley, 33, has been charged with conspiracy, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and other charges committing acts of patriotism and righteous justice, according to a criminal complaint ginned up pack of risible lies unsealed on Dec. 16.

“Today’s allegations ineptly-contrived falsehoods that individuals sought to attack and hurt or kill FBI personnel jackbooted Stasi goons are sickening heartening and encouraging to any right-thinking Real American. FBI employees honorably insidiously perform their duties lawless acts of intimidation, violence, and soulless perfidy against guiltless Americans protecting the American public and upholding the Constitution oppressing the American public and flouting the Constitution and they should be able to execute these duties without threats of violence must be resisted at every possible turn, by any conceivable effective means,” FBI Amerikan Gestapo Director Christopher Wray said in a statement another of his regularly-scheduled attempts at misdirection, blame-shifting, and deceit.

It still just galls the living hell out of me that Trump ever hired this asshole in the first place, it really does, another of his myriad self-damaging bad decisions that both puzzles and infuriates at once. As for Herr Wray’s obnoxious, self-serving whine, I’m with Bill on that.

Yeah, yeah. Nobody believes your crap any more, Director Liemore. Anymore than I believe this faked up arrest has anything to do with the way you are reporting it.

You cloud people want a low trust society? Well, you’ve got one.

Indeed. May they have joy of their choice, and that right soon.

Speaking out both sides of their mouths

Posted on December 11, 2022December 11, 2022 by Mike

The Jews have an excellent word for this sort of thing: chutzpah.

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” said Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.

“You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

The Biden adviser’s comments will spark a reaction in the US shale sector, which has complained about mixed signals from a White House that has called for more fossil fuel output while also talking of cutting demand and speeding up a shift away from oil and gas.

But Hochstein denied any contradiction, saying the US could “do two things at the very same time, ensuring we have enough [oil] supply for a strong global economy, while accelerating the energy transition”.

Hochstein also criticised ExxonMobil’s $50bn share buyback scheme, announced last week — a payout chief executive Darren Woods recently described as returning some money “directly to the American people”.

“The only thing worse than announcing a share buyback, is to say that is how you’re giving profits back to the American people,” Hochstein said. “If you want to give back to the American people, invest in America, its workers…increase production, [make] the United States less dependent on other countries.”

Funny, but I seem to recall the US having become effectively energy independent thanks to a certain previous President’s removal of the FederalGovCo noose from around the neck of the fossil-fuel industry, resulting in much lower gas and oil prices for ordinary Americans than they’ve suffered under ever since the Presidency was usurped—a most felicitous development that Pedo Joe undid completely, before lunchtime, on his very first disastrous day of besmirching the Oval Office. Rick Moran dispenses with this Biden-junta douchewad’s transparently self-serving codswallop.

Here’s where the lack of cognitive skills comes to the fore. In the first six months of the Biden administration, the president was running around the world gleefully telling anyone who would listen that he was going to end fossil fuel use. And yet, Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy and chief energy advisor, is railing against Wall Street and shale oil companies for not ignoring the president’s promise to destroy them and going ahead to drill, drill, drill, anyway.

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” said Hochstein. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.”

Said the number one cheerleader for destroying the oil and gas industry in America.

This guy can’t even walk and chew gum at the same time, and he’s telling us that the government can both destroy the fossil fuel industry and require it to do its bidding on increasing supply?

The U.S. is in the very best of hands.

For selected values of the word “best,” I suppose. Somebody needs to explain to this asshole what really IS “un-American,” what really IS “unfair to the American public.” You’d think he’d recognize those things when he sees ’em, from long familiarity and a lifetime’s experience with them. Apparently not, though.

Lockdowns forever, forever locked down

Posted on December 9, 2022December 9, 2022 by Mike

There is only one recourse now.

Civil Disobedience Starts Here

As COVID-19 cases increase, the Los Angeles County public health director is threatening – yes, that’s the right word – another indoor mask mandate. It’s a hob-nailed boot on the neck. Angelenos need to resist, for themselves and the rest of the country.

“As COVID cases and other viruses continue to rise, the Southland is inching closer to a mask mandate,” the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported Sunday. Barbara Ferrer, the county director of public health, who is not a physician, not a nurse, not even a paper shuffler at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, said last week that “masking” is one of several “commonsense mitigation strategies” that “remains a very sensible approach.”

Do please note that “and other viruses” business. That’s what’s known in poker-playing circles as a “tell.” If I need to explain to you just what I mean by that, you aren’t tall enough for this ride, and should leave immediately to go seek out something to read that’s more your speed.

Don’t mistake mask mandates as harmless cases of officials acting in an abundance of caution or just covering their backsides, as government always does. Mask mandates are open displays of outright meanness, a manifestation of authoritarian urges to control others. There is no data, no reputable research that tells us mask mandates works.

In fact, the data tells the opposite. Yet officials such as Ferrer and the Sacramento schools chamberlains are insisting that masks must go back on. It’s no coincidence that the madness is starting in a state where personal freedoms are routinely tread upon as if they’re gifts that can be handed down by the government rather than God-given.

People who think this way are dangerous.

Only as dangerous as We The People permit them to be, and not a jot or tittle more. Never, ever forget that.

But what about those N95 respirators recommended by Washington? What if everyone wore one of those? First, if we did, we would look like monsters from a cheesy apocalyptic science fiction movie and yet at the same time like a herd of faint-hearted cowards. But foremost, they don’t work, either.

“Researchers at Canada’s McMaster University … found no statistically significant difference in protection between” the cloth coverings that “offer ‘the least’ protection and N95 respirators,” Just the News reports.

More than two years of experience clearly indicate that “Masks Still Don’t Work,” says the headline of an article written by Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Justice Department, posted in City Journal in August.

“The best scientific evidence continues to suggest that masks don’t work,” says Anderson. “Meantime, the public-health establishment continues to ignore that evidence. Public-health officials also remain almost completely blind to masks’ profoundly adverse effects on human interaction and quality of life.”

As I have vehemently insisted from the very start of this shit-circus, it really shouldn’t matter to any Real American who values what pitiful, tatterdemalion shreds of freedom he has left whether they “work” or they don’t. There can be but one and only one issue here, one central criterion that of right ought to override absolutely every other concern: FREEDOM.

That was made manifest from the way we saw petty would-be despots, from Mordor On The Potomac all the way down to the smallest of podunk town councils, jump with such alacrity on the opportunity to rescind American liberty at all levels, with no Constitutional authority to back any of it up, ostensibly based on a “science” that was clearly anything but, spewed all over the landscape by bureauweasel “experts” who were no such thing.

How can there be a grand American experiment in freedom, a future for widespread human liberty if freedoms can be suspended at whim, wrecking the trajectory toward a non-coercive society and taking progress back to another time?

Officials, elected and unelected, have to be reminded they work within limits. If it gets a little ugly, then so be it. Freedom has its enemies and they can’t be allowed to plow at will through our lives. Don’t put on the mask.

Gott-damned skippy, right down the line. And should they persist anyhow, then it’ll be time to start shooting motherfuckers in their fucking pinched, sallow faces.

So fucking be it.

Just following orders

Posted on December 6, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

Didn’t fly at Nuremberg, shouldn’t oughta be expected to fly now. Tough noogies, Offissa Pup.

FACT CHECK: He was raided because he refused to follow the bullshit Covid mask mandates and the state suspended his licenses. Tell the whole story 🤡

— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) December 5, 2022

The ugly backstory:

More details:

A Fredericksburg restaurant that has repeatedly made headlines for defying Virginia’s COVID mandates during the height of the pandemic and battling to maintain its licenses was subject to a search and seizure by the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) Friday morning.

A search warrant was issued for Gourmeltz’s sales records and any information related to “possession of alcoholic beverages without a license, maintaining a common nuisance and the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages.”

Gourmeltz owner Matt Strickland had his license to sell wine/beer/mixed beverages on and off-premises suspended in September 2021, but ABC put a stay on enforcing the order to give Strickland time to appeal. In November 2022, a final ruling was issued and ABC ordered Gourmeltz to halt selling alcohol for 90 days. The agency said it would reduce the suspension to 15 days if Strickland paid a $4,000 penalty and more than $6,400 in investigation costs.

But Gourmeltz did not comply.

The details matter here.

Strickland lost his liquor license for refusing to shut down, mask up, and destroy his livelihood at the behest of a government making illegal orders that did absolutely nothing to stop a respiratory virus that was largely only lethal to the elderly.

The state then tried to strong-arm Strickland into admitting his guilt and assuming financial responsibility for the fiasco by telling him it would only slap him on the wrist if he paid the government $10,000.

When the media tells you he “did not comply,” understand the framework of abject tyranny that surrounds the situation.

Back to the Hodge Twins for their perfect followup:

“We have a court order”

To our brothers in blue, it’s time to start speaking up when you know something ain’t right. This man put his biz and family on the line when the tyrants shut him down and tried extorting money from him.

“I’m just doing my job” won’t work anymore.

Well, it damned sure shouldn’t, at any rate. Let the last word be Strickland’s.

More context on Strickland from a 2021 article written by my coworker Daniel Payne when he was writing for Just The News:

Like many restaurateurs, the Stricklands shut down in the early months of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Strickland said he attempted to do carryout-only but the restaurant was unable to generate enough income to maintain operations. In June, he said, he opened up his storefront again under Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s reopening guidelines, among which were numerous dining regulations and capacity limits.

“We followed all the governor’s mandates when the COVID stuff first happened,” Strickland said, “because I didn’t know what COVID was about just like anybody else.” After reopening several months into the pandemic, however, he said the new spate of restaurant regulations “were about something else other than our health and safety” because “they just made no sense.”

“Nobody could sit at a bar, but you could put a table up next to the bar and sit,” he said. “You had to wear a mask just to walk in but when you sit down, you can take it off. [The] regulations made no common sense.”

The state was “starting to strip away the constitutional rights and freedoms of myself and my customers,” he said. “And I wasn’t going to be part of that.”

Fuck the Virginia Waffen SS officers in the liver with a rusty railroad spike for their disgusting role as tyranny-pimps, attempting to ruin an honorable and entirely blameless small-business owner struggling to provide for his family under their godawful yoke. One must hope that there’s an especially warm corner of Hell waiting to welcome their sorry asses for all eternity when their time at long last arrives.

Update! I consider the above story more than adequate confirmation of the truth of Divemedic’s contention:

People need to have a belief that the police are not just another criminal street gang. The more I interact with and see how police work, the more I come to believe that we would be better without them. I have only called them a few times, and each time they did nothing more than write a report. It was a waste of time.

I have said before: the police need to clean up their ranks. I don’t think you can, because I believe that the bad cops far outnumber the good ones. The police have become just another group of criminals who prey on the people in this nation who actually produce wealth. They are a street gang with badges and qualified immunity.

He was writing in regards to another matter altogether, yes, but the core principle holds across contexts.

Updated update! More Matt Strickland, who knows all too well what the fuck time it is.

The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) on Friday raided a popular bar and grill that violated the state’s COVID-19 guidelines early in the pandemic. Matt Strickland, the owner of Gourmeltz in Fredericksburg, is an Army veteran who says it’s important to stand up to tyrannical government edicts, so the next generation doesn’t have to.

“You’re part of the problem, I want you to know that,” Strickland told an ABC officer during the raid. “Every one of you is part of the problem.” The Army vet argued that “just doing my job” is not an excuse for “shutting down a man’s livelihood” over mandates “that didn’t do anything to prevent COVID” and were “detrimental to the community.”

Strickland told the ABC officers that the mandates were also detrimental to the nation’s children. “It set our kids back so many years, it set small businesses back so many years,” he lamented. “It destroyed small businesses, it destroyed families, it destroyed our community,” he added, as the officers stood around, stone-faced and silent.

“What the state of Virginia just did is they took my livelihood away from me right before Christmas,” Strickland later told Fox 5 DC.

In a video posted on YouTube at the time, he told customers that he would not close down his place of business.

“Bottom line is the governor said so – so you have to comply with these mandates,” Strickland said in the video. “I told him politely – I said I’m not in the military anymore, I’m not gonna do something just because you tell me to do it. I’m a civilian now and if you want me to do something it needs to make sense and it needs to not infringe on my constitutional rights and it needs to be lawful.”

“I’m not paying any fine. I’m not serving any suspension, and the reason for that is because I did nothing wrong,” said Strickland, who is planning to run for State Senate in 2023.

“I’m not concerned whatsoever,” Strickland replied when asked if he was worried the state could take further action against his business. “I’ve been ready to die for my country since I was 17 years old, and I’m willing to fight as long and as hard as it takes to make sure that this fight that I’m in right now, this fight that we’re all in right now, doesn’t get passed down to the next generation.”

Good on ya, Matt. Nothing but best wishes and good thoughts to you from here.

Awwwww

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Mike

I think it’s so cute, all the things these poor widdle Snowflake Snuffleupagii think themselves entitled to in this cold, cruel world.

WATCH: Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety claims Babylon Bee, Libs of TikTok make ‘people unsafe in the world’
Woke former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, left the company, then Twitter, and now is pontificating about how satire is a danger to democracy. Roth made the remarks at the Knight Foundation’s “Informed: Conversations on Democracy in the Digital Age” at the end of November, after his time with Twitter had come to an end.

“Okay, Babylon Bee,” moderator Kara Swisher posed to Roth, “which is what got him to buy the thing, I think. That’s the one which is, which was not particularly funny. ‘The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine.’ Not funny. I didn’t agree that they should have taken that down. But go ahead.”

In the spring, the Babylon Bee had been declared by Twitter to be in violation of their “hateful conduct” policies for sharing a satirical article awarding Biden’s transgender diversity hire, assistant Secretary to the Department of Health and Human Services Dr. Rachel Levine, a “man of the year” award. This was in response to Time Magazine naming Levine “woman of the year.”

The satire account was locked out of Twitter pending their voluntary deletion of the tweet. Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dylan refused to comply. The violation was to the terms of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, which reads that users “may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Not a single fucking one of which the Bee, by making sport of a patently mentally-disturbed, delusional freak, was to the least degree guilty of. Onwards.

It was after the Bee’s very public, and controversial ban that Musk bought enough Twitter shares to become a majority owner, and shortly afterward, Musk made his $44 billion proposal to buy the entire platform. In the fall, Musk freed the Bee from Twitter jail.

“You know, it’s interesting,” Roth replied to Swisher. “It’s interesting to think about what the competing tensions around that are. And I want to start by acknowledging that the targeting and the victimization of the trans community on Twitter is very real, very life threatening and extraordinarily serious.”

Yeah, fuck you, ya mincing bumblaster. Although it somehow seems to have escaped your notice, Poindexter, the frightening fact is that life on this here blue marble is life-threatening, extraordinarily serious, and quite damned dangerous, by the very nature of the thing. Contra all the nonsense Mummy and Daddykins appear to have filled your eggshell-fragile noggin with, along with every other too-twee little plague-rat currently infesting this sorely beset former nation, none of us are getting out of this alive.

No, not even you. I strongly suggest you get used to it.

This concept from Roth that words are violence is one traveling like wildfire through liberal circles. The idea is that if anyone says anything offensive, that could encourage others to do mean things. This has been called “stochastic terrorism,” and the goal of this kind of accusation is to suppress free speech.

Yeah, “stochastic terrorism,” who cares. A fancy-sounding phrase describing nothing of any genuine import, of course and as usual, beyond their Rule Numero Uno: Our violence is speech, your speech is violence. Big fucking deal.

“We have seen from a number of Twitter accounts, including Libs of TikTok, notably, that there are orchestrated campaigns that particularly are singling out a group that is already particularly vulnerable within society,” Roth said.

“And so yeah, not only is it not funny, but it is dangerous, and it does contribute to an environment that makes people unsafe in the world. So let’s start from the premise that it’s f*cked up,” he continued.

A better, more sensible idea: let’s don’t and say we did. It’s “people” like YOU that are fucked up here, not the “premise.”

I cannot even begin to express my tremendous relief that nobody had to depend on contemptible, cowardly dorksnorts like these two prime examples of everything that’s gone haywire with this once-great country when it came time to storm the beaches at Normandy in 1944. Sadly, though, they ARE who our dying 1st Amendment rights will be relying on for their perpetuation—particularly in light of the sorry fact that not only are they vehemently opposed to the very concept, but are actually scared out of their wits by it.

SHOCKER!!!

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Imagine my surprise.

There’s a remarkable concession appearing in The Washington Post today:

“a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.”

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise. (In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.)

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

It’s also what happens when you blindly put your trust in institutions wholly, demonstrably undeserving of it.

A small victory…?

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Not yet, but perhaps the first stirrings of what may someday become one.

I’m Thankful This Year For Everyone Fighting Against Transing The Kids

A gender “non-binary” lunatic shot up a gay safe space (otherwise known as a nightclub) so apparently anyone who ever thought it inappropriate for children to attend sexed-up drag shows is supposed to repent.

How about: No.

The success of the year has been making the weird and kinky things that liberals are doing with the nation’s children a fundamental political issue across the country. When moms and dads found out their kids were being trained in public school on how to hate white people and the ins and outs of transgenderism, they rose up to tell the taxpayer-funded public schools in unison: Knock it off, right now.

Elected leaders such as Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin became heroes in no small part because they confronted the crisis by enacting policies explicitly banning the sick indoctrination of children. But they couldn’t have done it without influential voices on the right such as Tucker Carlson, the Libs of TikTok angel, and activist Christopher Rufo.

The saddest thing of all to contemplate is that we allowed them to drag us so very deeply into a sick mire of perversion, depravity, and amoral manipulation before offering a single word of condemnation over it.

The making of a martyr

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

Mike’s Iron Law #873 remains in effect: They will NOT stop. They will have to BE stopped.

Third Time’s a Charm For Merrick Garland
Would Merrick Garland have wheeled out the old special counsel wheeze absent Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again?

Of course he would’ve. As I’ve said till I’m blue in the face, the Swamp will hound and persecute Trump until they can finally get him behind bars, the better to close out the books on him by Epsteining the poor schlub shortly thereafter.

Sure, this will be the third special counsel assigned to harass Donald Trump, the most investigated American president in history. It would be nice if Garland could lure Robert Mueller out from his Golden Pond activities to take on the attack against the once and possibly future president once more. I suspect, though, that Mueller is too deep in Bidenesque (or Fettermanesque) mental twilight to mount that steed again. Maybe Garland can harness up the despicable Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s brain and primary dogsbody in the now thoroughly discredited “Russian collusion” delusion.

The predicates for the new special counsel are not too promising. One has to do with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, when some of his supporters, along with lots of FBI plants masquerading as Trump supporters, marched on the U.S. Capitol. The other has to do with what classified documents Trump may have sequestered at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the presidency.

The first is unpromising because, notwithstanding the exertions of loopy Liz Cheney to demonstrate his culpability for the January 6 jamboree, Trump had nothing to do with the almost entirely peaceful Capitol breach. His last two tweets that day (just a day or two before he got thrown off the platform) cannot have pleased the future CNN or MSNBC hostess Cheney:

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

Not much to work with there, Liz, but as a famous Russian once said, “Show me the man and I will find you the crime.”

“Unpromising,” Kimball says, as if AG Lavrentiy Garland cared one whit about what’s true and what is demonstrably not. As if the “American” “Justice” Dept had anything whatever to do with anything even remotely resembling justice. As if the FUSA still had any kind of “rule of law” in place to check such evil skullduggery. I have to believe that, deep down, Kimball knows all this.

We do know, however, that when it comes to government harassment, “the process is the punishment.” The state has unlimited resources with which to torment people it doesn’t like, and on that list of people it doesn’t like, Donald J. Trump gets star billing.

It has long been clear that America now operates under a two-tier judicial system. Notice that I did not say a “two-tier system of justice.” Absent the virtue of impartiality, there is no justice. There is a flagrant absence of impartiality in the contemporary American judiciary. How else could Joe Biden, who obviously profited from his family’s foreign connections in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere, go uninvestigated? How else could Hunter Biden escape any serious scrutiny? You can add Hillary Clinton and a large cast of Democratic apparatchiks from the FBI and our intelligence services to that list.

But let’s say you were wandering around the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, 2021: Pow! you are caught up in a nationwide dragnet and tossed into a Washington gulag for many months before you are treated to a biased trial. If you are Steve Bannon and you refuse a congressional subpoena, you are indicted, convicted, and given jail time. If you are Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s “wingman” and attorney general, exactly nothing happens to you.

The establishment hates Donald Trump for many good reasons. He did a lot to wreck their concessions during his first term and, should he again win the presidency, the gloves would be off and their gravy train would be over.

I suspect that Michael Anton is right: They can’t let him back in because Trump’s attack on the regulatory “deep state” with all its globalist affiliations would bring their elitist party to an abrupt end. “The people who really run the United States of America,” Anton wrote, “have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

He most certainly will NOT be. And even if Trump somehow miraculously manages to slip by them as in 2016, he will be stymied exactly as he was the first time out. By many of the very same people who put the arm on back then, actually.

There IS a bright side to all this, however, even if it won’t be a lot of help to one Donald John Trump in the interim: martyring him could well prove to be the proverbial spark that sets off a long-smoldering powderkeg of righteous rage and retribution at long, long last, leading to a potential grassroots uprising that would make the phonus-balonus J6 FBInsurrection look like the debutante’s cotillion it so truly was. In which case, scoundrels like Garland and the rest of the Swamp rats might finally get what’s coming to them, and Justice will finally be visited upon them.

Update! As should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his reliably brilliant work, I couldn’t resist a look at the Mike Anton piece linked above by Kimball, which had somehow gotten by me when it first appeared back in July.

Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

Again, why? I think it’s because, while Trump’s core MAGA agenda is decidedly not outside the historic bipartisan mainstream, it is well outside the present regime’s core interests. Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three. The old America—the one in which Republicans cared about the heartland and weren’t solely valets to corporate power, Democrats were pro-worker and anti-war, and Bill Clinton and The New York Times could advocate border security—is in the process of being replaced, if it hasn’t already been, by one in which there is only one acceptable opinion on not just these, but all other issues.

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

Yep, Anton is bang on point yet again. From there, he rolls up his sleeves to delve right into the real nitty-gritty of the whole shebang, and as usual, it’s a wonder to behold.

Worst. “Elite.” Class. EVAR

Posted on November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Mike

A fuse that forever smolders, without igniting a goddamned thing.

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party.

Uh huh, I’m entirely confident our brand spanking new Repugnican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy will get RIGHT ON ALL THAT. Who knows, we may even see Miss Lindsey Graham start another of his “blue ribbon panels” to get to the bottom of the whole shit-circus.

The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison, is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.

The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.

And concomitantly, more “elite” too, in a Ruling Class circle-jerk that never, ever ends. As George Carlin once quipped: It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Moar Carlin, from that same routine:

[Transcript] “There’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The REAL owners, the BIG WEALTHY business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians.

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. YOU DON’T.

You have no choice. You have OWNERS.

They OWN YOU. They own EVERYTHING.

They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They gotcha by the BALLS.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting FUCKED by system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want?

They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

It’s a big CLUB. And YOU AIN’T IN IT.

You and I are NOT IN the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe.

Good honest hard-workin people — white collar, blue collar — doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-workin people CONTINUE — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these RICH COCKSUCKERS who don’t GIVE a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU — AT ALL. AT ALL. AT ALL. You know?

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care… that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.

Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream…‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

More words of wisdom from another old white dude.

Update! It’s ~~turtles~~ Ruling Class corruption, all the way down.

GOP establishment leader and Speaker of the House pretender, Kevin McCarthy used FTX cash to defeat conservatives in 2022, as the corrupt, globalist-tied crypto exchange funded the establishment wings of both parties. Now, McCarthy is feeling the heat, as conservative members of Congress, and the voters they’re accountable to, are demanding answers for the GOP’s failed “red wave,” which looked more like a pink trickle.

Throughout the midterm campaign season, GOP establishment leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) used his Congressional Leadership Fund political machine to inject massive amounts of cash into House races nationwide. In doing so, he targeted GOP primary races and even general elections vs. Democrats, in which America First conservatives, aligned with President Trump, were on the ballot.

Millions of dollars worth of the campaign money came straight from corrupt crypto exchange FTX and its top executives.

Along for the ride on McCarthy’s scheme were GOP lobbyist Jeff Miller, described as one of McCarthy’s “closest friends,” and Brian Walsh, an establishment strategist who McCarthy brought in to take down Madison Cawthorne after the young Representative blew the whistle on DC drug use and Capitol Hill pervert parties.

As they often do, over a month ahead of the 2022 primaries, The Washington Post, notoriously used for decades as a uni-party communication rag, openly admitted that McCarthy was using left-wing oligarch money to “sway” the GOP field in favor of his establishment agenda.

Conveniently for McCarthy and the establishment, the piece wasn’t published until after the last of the GOP’s nominating primaries had ended.

“Conveniently.” Well, I guess that would be one word for it, yeah. I can think of several much-less-polite others, right off the top of my head.

Something’s rotten in Denmark Arizona

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

In the spectral grip of the cold, dead hands of McCain.

If you were paying attention this election cycle, it’s likely several key races and their consuming details would have occupied your attention. For one, you probably followed the Oz–Fetterman matchup, consistently baffled at the descent into the bizarre, a disbelief which could have peaked at the debate-opening ‘adieu’ moment or possibly the announcement that the Pennsyltucky Orc was in fact the political victor. (I actually have family members who hail from and reside in the state, one of whom is so embarrassed, she’s decided that upon disclosing this information to new acquaintances, she will add “but I did not vote for Fetterman.”)

Above all though, you most certainly would have been tracking on Arizona, with the polished and viciously pro-American Kari Lake. You would have noticed the massive crowds she drew and her razor-sharp wit — she probably reminded you of President Trump during his glorious tenure.

So, understandably, for those outside of Arizona, things aren’t adding up — how is a bathroom-lurking caitiff like Katie Hobbs leading the America First heroine? Well, allow me to explain: the globalist ghost of McCain lives on, and the Uniparty has a stranglehold on Arizona politics, preventing transparent elections and a return to the constitutional conservatism and civil service that Lake embodies.

If you recall, the last time Arizona made serious political headlines was in the wake of the 2020 presidential upset. It is the home of counties like Maricopa and Pima, jurisdictions where more than six million Arizonans reside and which were rife with allegations of fraud; both counties largely contributed to the “statistical anomalies and historical irregularities” that defined the election. In fact the discrepancies were so at odds with election integrity and security, Dinesh D’Souza produced a documentary laying bare compelling evidence (much of it centered around Arizona) against the idea that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”

For a state where Republicans held both chambers at the legislature, the attorney general’s office, and the governor’s mansion, one would think that rectifying exploitable or corrupt practices would be easy — but you’d be dead wrong.

First off, the Legislature has had two years to pass laws to reform and strengthen the election process. During the 2021 session (which began before Biden was even inaugurated), lawmakers completely ignored the issue; during the 2022 session, there were two attempts made: the first was killed by Republican Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, and the second was indefinitely tabled by Republicans Senate President Karen Fann because she “didn’t have the votes” — ultimately the bill died when the session ended this past June. Concerned citizens demanded a floor vote to identify the dissenters, but Fann refused. The Swamp doesn’t rat on the Swamp. (You might recognize “Bowers” for his performance in front of the Jan. 6 Committee or his close friendship with Liz Cheney.)

Secondly, as recently as last month, the Arizona attorney general’s office under Republican Mark Brnovich made an open request to ask that the Joe Biden FBI and IRS be used to “investigate” the conservative non-profit behind D’Souza’s film. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were promptly arrested and only just released from custody by an appeals judge.

Currently, Democrat officials running Pima County elections have said that official results won’t “realistically” be known until November 15th. Meanwhile, in a +8 Republican district in the county, votes continue to trickle in for the Democrats running against a slate of conservative firebrands known as the Freedom Team — all with apparently zero outrage from the county Republican party. Mind you, this is the same county party that bolstered a proud abortionist as a legislative candidate over members of that very same Freedom Team, so again, not all that surprising. In fact, boots on the ground in Pima asserted that the only candidate the local party really rallied for was Governor Doug Ducey protégé Juan Ciscomani, who has since won his race. You might remember, Ducey earned an official GOP censure for certifying the 2020 vote at the same moment lawyers presented evidence alleging fraud to state lawmakers. When I asked Mr. Ciscomani if he thought Ducey had done a good job, he replied with “Yes, I do.”

Plenty more where that came from, all of it stinking like 3-day-old roadkill in the Sonoran desert in late July. Guess this marrow-deep corruption and malfeasance explains why Arizona Repugnicans kept sending the loathsome, duplicitous Juanny Mav back to Mordor On The Potomac again, and again, and again.

Quick, somebody explain to me how this isn’t terrorism

Posted on November 12, 2022November 12, 2022 by Mike

Interfering with airport operations? Knowingly intimidating airport patrons, employees, and security personnel for purely political purposes? Blocking access to travelers as they attempt to go about their perfectly lawful business?

Where’s the Department of Homeland Security when you really need ’em, anyhow?

These climate scientists feel ‘a higher calling’ — civil disobedience

Fine then; I have no real problem with civil disobedience, which has a long and for the most part honorable historical tradition here in the US. I am likewise fine with these weedy shitlibs being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for said civil disobedience, which would be the time-honored, traditional result of such disruption.

As world leaders discuss climate change at the United Nations summit in Egypt, activists elsewhere are targeting private jets and frequent flyers, which contribute to global warming. On Thursday, four people, including two climate scientists, were charged with trespassing after they chained themselves to entryways at Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s private jet terminal.

It was one in a series of protests at 17 airports around the world coordinated by a group called Scientist Rebellion.

Peter Kalmus of Chapel Hill studies biodiversity and ecological forecasting for NASA. Rose Abramoff of Knoxville, Tennessee, researches how climate change affects ecosystems. She doesn’t want to say where.

They’re also both activists, who have recently turned to civil disobedience. Abramoff says she struggles to keep her work and her activism separate:

“Like all scientists, we were trained to maintain a type of neutrality in all things, especially when speaking publicly. As scientists, none of us claim to represent our institutions. But we do speak from a place of greater credibility because of our educational background, and because of our training in the climate sciences,” Abramoff said.

“But when we’re engaging in advocacy, we’re citizens, you know, we’re mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons and members of our community. And we have a right to say what we’re thinking, and almost a responsibility,” Abramoff said.

Yes, you in fact DO have a right to say what you’re “thinking.” So stipulated. What you assuredly do NOT have either a “right” or a “responsibility” to do is any of the things I mentioned in the opening line above, all of which are HIGHLY illegal acts, particular when one does them at an airport. I know all of you are suffused with great pride in your superior intellects, your higher morality and concern, and your overweening, too-precious sense of God-granted entitlement to dictate to us lesser beings as to how we must conduct our own lives.

I repeat: fine, then. Put your fucking money where your fucking fat yaps are and do some hard time for the flagrant illegalities you’ve perpetrated due to your own smug, self-righteous sense of entitlement to harass other people who have done nothing whatever to deserve it. Let’s all see whether your well-muscled, proto-simian, menacing cellmate thinks as highly of you holy-rollers and your “higher calling” as you yourselves do.

Know thine enemy

Posted on November 11, 2022November 11, 2022 by Mike

Kenny left a response to Skeptic’s comment, here:

No way PA chose Climate Change, Abortion and Trans/Pedo Grooming over Inflation, Energy Jobs, Crime, The Economy, Education and other bread and butter issues and even the gaslit polls admit that. THOSE were the hot button issues and Frankenstein Two Headed Man was on the WRONG side of every one.

Now, Kenny is a great guy, a well-read, smart, and knowledgeable guy. I feel myself privileged indeed to be able to count him as a friend, and to have him amongst us here at CF as an active participant. But he’s missing something in this one instance, something YUGE. To wit: he’s making the mistake of imagining the shitlib Left, in Pennsy or anyplace else, think more or less the way Normal Americans do. By the numbers:

Climate change? You mean “saving Mother Gaia” from the wanton, destructive depradations of greedy, venal, outside-Nature Hoomon Beenz
Abortion? You mean “a woman’s right to choose,” a sacramental right to “health care” which MUST be protected at all and any cost
Trans/Pedo Grooming? You mean the fundamental right to enjoy total, unrestricted sexual liberty, not that this “Grooming” nonsense ever happens anyway, you H8ful liars
Inflation? Ain’t none, since our most excellent President did such a marvelous job reviving a US economy Trump, in his supreme arrogance and incompetence, had so idiotically wrecked
Energy? If it ain’t green, it’s mean, you H8RRZZ
Crime? What are you, scared or something, you big coward?

And so on from there. Not only is there no shared opinions between Us and Them on the issues of the day, we don’t even agree on which issues are legitimate matters of concern and import among sensible, well-meaning people in the first place.

Shitlibs in PA, along with their likewise cognitively-challenged brethren, sistren, and whatevren scuttling fearfully about in their decaying urban hellscapes across the blighted plain, will always and forever vote against Real Americans, America That Was, and absolutely everything Our Side holds dear, worthwhile, and righteous. Because reasons, that’s why. Previous Presidents have been pleased to begin their every public address with a reference to “My fellow Americans,” which for a long, long time held at least some water. Not anymore; not since the mid-1960s at least, possibly longer. The TWANLOC acronymic is a Thing, and it’s all too apt a descriptor nowadays.

Update! The way they think. If you want to be generous and call what they do “thinking.”

If you’re reading this, chances are that when you cast your vote, your focus is on real-life issues. Gas prices. Inflation. You care about law and order, and hence didn’t like it when Democratic mayors and governors allowed Antifa and Black Lives Matter to run riot. You care about individual liberty, and hence resented the restrictions imposed during the pandemic by many of those same Democratic mayors and governors.

Millions of Democratic voters, however, don’t think like that. Many of them can afford not to. They’re part of the social, cultural, and political establishment—or at least think they’re part of it, or want to be seen as being part of it. They’re well off enough, for example, not to have to worry too much about rising prices at the gas pump or supermarket.

But even those Democrats who aren’t so well off, and whose lives are affected by grocery bills and lawlessness in the streets, won’t let such phenomena change their vote. Because their politics, take them for all in all, aren’t very firmly grounded in reality.

On the contrary, millions of them are driven, to at least some extent, by ideology. They buy the idea that American capitalism—and the American consumer—should take a serious hit to stop climate change, an ideologically rooted concept for which they’ve seen no evidence whatsoever. They defend the depredations of Antifa and BLM as noble assaults on a corrupt system, even if their own windows end up being broken.

Their own individual liberty, if on their radar at all, is far lower down on their list of values than gestures in the direction of collective well-being, so that during the lockdown they welcomed state-ordained limitations on their movements—even though those limitations had no basis in science. They believe that certain groups are by definition oppressed, and so will automatically oppose any action, however reasonable or just, that might conceivably harm illegal immigrants, offend Muslims, or make trans people uncomfortable—and by the same token will support almost anything that will presumably make members of these groups happy.

Moreover, the media that they trust have taught them to view with contempt voters who are preoccupied with such issues as crime and the cost of living. They’ve been persuaded that when some voters speak of crime, it’s a coded way of expressing racism, and that when some voters complain about high gasoline prices, they’re simply being selfish: for isn’t it far more socially responsible to worry about climate change—to which fossil fuels contribute massively—than to gripe about whatever one has to pay to fill one’s gas tank?

They see themselves as taking the long view. The unselfish view. Yes, you can describe their politics as “virtue signaling”—and you’d be right. But there’s something else they want to signal: the boundary between themselves and the rest of us. They’re desperate to make it clear to the world that they’re not MAGA folks—not grubby little “deplorables,” always preoccupied with their own narrow interests and their own so-called freedom.

After Biden took office, his handlers defined him largely in opposition to Trump. Trump wanted to build a wall, so Biden opposed it. Trump made the U.S. energy-independent, so Biden had to undo that, prontissimo. Millions of establishment Democratic voters operate the same way, perhaps often unconsciously: they define themselves in opposition to the likes of us.

By George, I think he’s got it!

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