Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Will “Unprecedented Obstruction of Congress” Become The New Democrat Meme?

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The NYT tests out a new Trump attack . . . and after 8 years of Obama, the NYT discovers “unprecedented obstruction” of Congressional Oversight.

Unprecedented ObstructionThe NYT editorial board is in high dudgeon.  Apparently, “Donald Trump Shows a New Level of Contempt for Congress.” Many presidents,” the NYT editors tell us, “have resisted congressional demands for testimony and documents. But not quite like Mr. Trump.” Really? Are they high? Or did the eight years of the Obama administration simply not count?

So what exactly has Trump done, . . . besides fully complying with a two-year fishing expedition for criminality that was the worst political dirty trick in our nation’s history. According to the NYT:

Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has declined an invitation to discuss immigration policy;

Stephen Miller is not an agency head who would normally be subject to a subpoena over public policy.  So how is his declining an “invitation” that he is free to accept or decline without recourse in any way obstructing Congress?

[Read more…]

On the Wall, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus Dan Crenshaw

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The debate about the border wall provides an excellent way to contrast two incoming freshman congress critters: Dan Crenshaw and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Dan Crenshaw Alexandria Ocasio-CortezI’m with those conservatives who believe that we need to take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seriously. It’s true that, thanks to her years at an American college, she went from a happy, laughing, dancing middle class girl to an angry Leftist harridan. And it’s true that her ideology is the same one that was responsible for over 100 million deaths in the 20th century, not to mention the fear and unhappiness that plagued easily another billion people in the same time. And it’s also true that her grasp of facts is, to say the least, weak if not out-and-out dishonest.

All the above is true, but what’s also true is that Ocasio-Cortez is excellent at social media, she’s pretty (if you like crazy-eyed angry women who hide behind kittenish cuteness), and the media adores her . . . just as they adored Barack Obama. The media has been a kingmaker before, and it plans simultaneously to protect Ocasio-Cortez from her idiocies while promoting her mediagenic charisma.

Ocasio-Cortez isn’t ready to be President any time soon (for no other reason than that she’s too young), but she can be a power broker. After all, we’ve learned never to underestimate a young, photogenic, telegenic Leftist media darling. As it is, it will take decades before America – indeed, the world — recovers from Obama’s ideologically-driven presidency.

Despite the small pocket of voters that elected her to Congress, Ocasio-Cortez is still a presence. With that in mind, please consider what she has to say about a wall securing our southern border – a wall, not to entrap people in the way of the Berlin Wall, but a wall intended to created an orderly way for genuine asylum seekers to present themselves at the US border, and a wall, moreover, that will protect Americans from people who break into our country, steal low-paying jobs almost solely for the benefit of rich white people, and who periodically commit violent crimes, the but-for cause of which is their unauthorized entry into the US: [Read more…]

Rashida Tlaib, unpleasant as she is, deserves to be taken seriously

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Foul-mouthed, antisemitic Rashida Tlaib is the avatar of an incoming class of Leftist congresswomen that needs to be taken seriously in the realm of ideas.

Leftists Rashida Tlaib CongressRashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-identifying woman who got herself elected to the American House of Representatives, gained instant notoriety when she excitedly announced that her single most important goal in Congress was to impeach President “Mother****er.” Then, one of her aides “jokingly” erased Israel from the map, renaming it “Palestine.”

While I don’t agree with her sentiments, I appreciate Tlaib’s honesty. At least she and her fellow freshman, women such as Ilhan “I married my brother” Omar, and Alexandria “Let’s turn America into Venezuela” Occasional-Cortex aren’t hiding the ball — which separates them from more seasoned, and dishonest, Leftist political operatives. They are openly letting American voters know what comes with electing them.

The Left is gloating about the attention conservatives are giving these women, which indicates that they think this attention does the women and their ideas an advantage. My instinct, therefore, is to ignore them, on the principle that this will deny them that advantage. After all, in politics, isn’t the saying that (unless you’re actually indicted) there’s no such thing as bad publicity? I’ve also seen conservative arguments that we shouldn’t be paying attention to Tlaib and her ilk because we’re giving them unnecessary oxygen.

Having thought the matter through, though, I’ve concluded that ignoring these women (and the Leftist men trailing mostly silently in their wake) is a mistake. What we’re currently doing, especially with Occasional-Cortex, is focusing solely on the abysmal ignorance that characterizes this new generation of Leftist politicians. That’s valid. They deserve to be called out on stupidity, and ridicule is a powerful weapon. [Read more…]

The Kavanaugh, Ford, Graham, and Flake show open thread

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I’m working on deadline, but I would very much like to hear your take on the way the Kavanaugh nomination has played out for the last two days.

Brett Kavanaugh Avenatti SwetnickSomehow it always happens that, when the news is hot, I’m either out of town or, as is the case for the past two days, hit with mountains of actual paying legal work. I would love to comment in detail about yesterday’s and today’s events, but I simply can’t, because I’m on deadline.

Therefore, all of you need to do the commenting instead.

I’ll just say quickly:

Kavanaugh: I watched his opening statement and kept tearing up every time he teared up. I’m a sympathy crier, but I think my tears were real and were for the lives the Democrats’ scorched earth tactics are destroying.

I found him absolutely compelling. If you watch, his whole body is trembling with emotion. That’s not a sociopath. That’s an innocent man unjustly accused. And if you haven’t watched it, I recommend you do. I usually confine myself to reading things, which is a much faster way for me to get information, but in this case, Kavanaugh’s voice and affect are part of what needs to be seen:

Also, when Kavanaugh talked about weekly attendance at church, something occurred to me: I don’t know about Ford’s faith, but I do know that a man as devout as Kavanaugh believes that he has a soul. With that belief, he also believes that lying or committing unjust violent acts, such as rape or sexual assault, puts his immortal soul in peril.

Kavanaugh knows that he’ll have to answer in the next life for his acts in this life. Those of his attackers who don’t share his beliefs, whether Ford herself, Democrat Congress critters, or the generic Leftists attacking him have a different belief system. They believe that, if they can get away with evil, immoral acts, they’re home free. The thought of a final reckoning before God does not slow them down.

[Read more…]

#TravisAllenWriteIn — California voters should write in Travis Allen for Senator *UPDATED*

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With Dems revealing their unfiltered totalitarianism, and no Republicans on the California senate ballot, write in Travis Allen’s name for U.S. Senate.

Travis AllenUPDATE: I’ve learned, to my dismay, that California disallows write-ins during the main election. Please go here for a different strategy in California.

When Democrats successfully turned California into an Open Primary state, I argued that this would destroy true democracy in California. Spring primaries are the time during which people in a specific party can elect their standard-bearer. Then, as the election nears, these standard bearers make their case to the entire state based upon current social, political, and economic conditions.

In an open primary state such as California, though, open primaries turn the “primary” into a pre-vote before a November run-off. Aside from John Cox’s unexpected (and delightful) appearance on the gubernatorial ballot, come October and November, when voters start paying attention, Californians do not get to hear conservative voices raised on national issues.

The events of the last weeks reveal something else that’s dreadful about Open Primaries, beyond just silencing conservative voices. If last-minute events show that Democrats are unfit to lead in Congress, concerned Californians have no alternatives other than . . . Democrats. That’s precisely what’s happened in this election cycle.

Up until a few weeks ago, California conservatives had two choices if they wished to have a say in sending a Senator to Congress: Kevin de León, who is an openly hard Leftist, or incumbent Dianne Feinstein, who has always positioned herself as a moderate Leftist. For many conservatives, this Hobson’s choice would have resulted in their picking Feinstein as the lesser of two evils.

Now we know, though, that there is no “lesser of two evils” when it comes to the only choices in California for U.S. Senator. Kevin de León remains as hard Left as ever. Dianne Feinstein, meanwhile, has slipped into the equally evil category. First, she was revealed either as the stupid dupe of a Chinese spy or someone who was complicit in Chinese spying. (She did, after all, make bank on China during those same years.)

Bad as Feinstein’s China problem is, worse was yet to come. The Kavanaugh hearings have exposed Feinstein’s utterly disgraceful, morally bankrupt behavior regarding Christine Blasey Ford’s vague, uncorroborated charges against Kavanaugh. [Read more…]

Useful information for those who want to keep the House Republican

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Capitol Building CongressMy local Republican Women’s Federated send me the following useful information, both for California and for other states:

Remember these valuable California Congressmen:

Big Impact both inside and outside of California: Donate to Heritage Action which is supporting 12 key Congressional candidates with donated money.

Republicans must fight for every one of these seats.

  • Dave Brat, Virginia 7th District, incumbent
  • Scott Perry, Pennsylvania 10th District , incumbent but this is a newly drawn district
  • Keith Rothfus, Pennsylvania 12th District, incumbent
  • Andy Barr, Kentucky 6th District, incumbent
  • Yvette Herrell, New Mexico 51st District
  • Rod Blum, Iowa
  • Mike Bishop, MI
  • Ann Wagner, MO
  • Mark Harris, NC
  • Ted Budd, NC
  • Jay Webber, LA
  • Steve Chabot, OH

Other resource for active citizens to find out information.

Complacency is never a virtue, but that’s especially true when, as now, the stakes are high.

A Travis Allen write-in campaign for U.S. Senate. #TravisAllenWriteIn

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With the California Democrat Party having disavowed Dianne Feinstein, it’s time to shake things up with a Travis Allen write-in campaign for U.S. Senate.

Travis Allen #TravisAllenWriteInNews broke today that Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who has represented California in the United States Senate for 26 years, is no longer the darling of the California Democrat party. The problem is that DiFi, although she’s been trying to keep up with her party’s shift to the Left, still has some vestigial common sense. There’s no place for that in today’s “democratic socialist” Democrat party. It therefore shouldn’t have come as a surprise to DiFi that the party ditched her:

The California Democratic Party issued a stunning rebuke of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Saturday by decisively handing its official endorsement to state Sen. Kevin de Leon, her longshot Democratic challenger.

[snip]

In backing de Leon, a majority of the party’s 360-member executive board ignored Feinstein’s calls to stay neutral in the race. Her allies had warned an endorsement would only further divide Democrats.

The final vote margin was lopsided: A total of 217 delegates voted for de Leon, of Los Angeles, or nearly 65 percent of the delegates. Meanwhile, only 22, or 7 percent, cast ballots for Feinstein and 94, or nearly 30 percent, voted for no endorsement.

Sadly, because of California’s rejiggered “open primaries,” this slight to DiFi won’t affect her place on the ballot. That is, despite the fact that her party rejected her, she’ll still be on the ballot facing off against de Leon, rather than having de Leon facing off against a Republican candidate.

Why? Because there is no Republican senatorial candidate on the ballot. I explained this disgraceful, anti-democratic situation years ago, when California turned the November race into nothing more than a run-off election: [Read more…]

Wolf Bytes – 23 June 2018

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A lost wolf is a wherewolf

The Picture.

Time magazine publishes a BS photo of a young girl supposedly being separated from her mother at the border.  Now comes the minor correction.

On Friday, Time published a correction saying: “The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she (was) taken from the scene. The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.”

In Honduras, Denis Valera said on Thursday that his daughter and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, were detained together in McAllen, where Sanchez has applied for asylum, and they were not separated.

Victory Girls has a good post on this:

The photo of a sweet little girl in a red shirt and curly hair crying her eyes out went viral. Hearts broke all over the world and the rage against President Trump regarding his oh so heinous policies of detaining illegal immigrants ramped up to eleventy billion with a truckload of jackassery thrown in. Only one problem. That little girl was standing RIGHT NEXT TO HER MOTHER.

Shameless Proggies – Michelle Obama criticizes Trump for the heartlessness of following the policy her husband followed for eight years.

[Read more…]

Donald Trump’s achievements won’t last if Congress does not act

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Donald Trump’s conservative victories have been huge, but unless Congress reasserts its powers and restrains the Courts, his gains will be ephemeral.

Illustrated edition Trump not a sexual predator CongressThe Heritage Foundation, perhaps the leading conservative think-tank, is over the moon with what President Trump has accomplished to date.  This from the Washington Examiner:

With unprecedented speed, the Trump administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by the Heritage Foundation, a pace faster than former President Reagan who embraced the conservative think tank’s legendary “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint.

Thomas Binion, director of congressional and executive branch relations at Heritage, said that Trump has implemented 64 percent of the “unique policy recommendations” from the group.

At this stage of his presidency, Reagan had completed 49 percent of the Heritage policy recommendations.

“We’re blown away,” Binion said in an interview. Trump, he said, “is very active, very conservative, and very effective.” . . .

I share in the Heritage Foundation’s appreciation for Trump, the blackest of black swans.  True, Trump appears on the surface to be a loose cannon and given to extremes of hyperbole, as befitting any New York hustler.*  I have made peace with that, though — I studiously ignore everything Trump says or tweets, leaving that for the neo-Marxist media to feed upon while Don Surber and Scott Adams interpret it for the rest of us.  And I will be holding my breath every day Trump is in office.  On the other hand, I stand in awe of his effectiveness and that of his administration to date and would, this time enthusiastically, vote for Trump again.

All of that said, if Trump does not work with Congress to address several key reforms, his legacy will be as ephemeral as Obama’s has proven to be.  Worse, given where we stand today, still near the precipice of making the Constitution a useless piece of old paper, it is almost assured that the next radical neo-Marxist who takes the Presidency will take us over that precipice.  We absolutely must have structural reforms to return us to government by the Constitution.  The neo-Marxists should only be allowed to remake America if they can do so by force of persuasion and the ballot box as our Founders provided. [Read more…]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump: the Russia collusion story needs to end soon

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Available facts indicate that the Progressives’ Russia Collusion narrative is fake — and time is running out to investigate the true Clinton/FBI collusion.

With questions swirling around the Trump-Russian collusion narrative, we seem to be living in a John le Carré novel.  It is one full of spies where the truth is hidden deep beneath disinformation and, ironically enough, behind security protocols.  And just like a le Carré novel, it seems that there are many people in this mix determined that the truth should never see the light of day.

Is Trump a Russian intelligence asset with a taste for Russian prostitutes and golden showers who stole the 2016 election with help from Russia?  Perhaps.  But given the dearth of evidence supporting that contention after twenty months of investigation, another, better question arises: Is the Trump Russia collusion narrative the single most dirty — and criminal — trick in the history of American politics?  It would be intellectually dishonest in the extreme to say that only one of those questions deserves investigation.

Was the Russian collusion narrative started, then spoon fed to the FBI and the media, as a way to make Hillary seem less corrupt in comparison to Trump during the 2016 election campaign?  Was the narrative then pushed as hard as possible after the election as a way to delegitimize the Trump presidency; to serve as a vehicle to overturn the 2016 election results, and to protect people in government who had acted unethically, and perhaps criminally, as regards all things Hillary — i.e., those responsible for the criminal travesty that was the FBI/DOJ investigation and exoneration of Hillary for her email scandal, those who allowed the Uranium One deal to be approved without notifying Congress of related Russian corruption, and those DOJ officials who defied the recommendations of FBI field agents to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

Let me note here, before you start measuring me for a tin-foil hat, I am not alleging some grand conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others.  If this was a political dirty trick, then the truth is likely being held in a death-grip of secrecy among a handful of conspirators, they most likely being no more than one or two people in the leadership of the DNC and Clinton Campaigns, perhaps CIA Director John Brennan and/or Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, and/or Christopher Steele.  As to everyone else who then picked up this narrative and ran with it, sometimes unlawfully, that was not a conspiracy.  Far more likely it simply grew out of the partisan culture created throughout the government agencies by the Obama administration.  That culture, as Ms. BWR has fairly described it, is one of bias, entitlement, arrogance, and corruption, at least to the extent that ideological ends have at times justified patently unlawful means.  I believe Ms. BWR’s description also covers about 90% of the mainstream media as well.

Just to review, there are precious few factual allegations regarding the Trump Russia collusion narrative beyond the bald allegation that Trump was a Russian asset, a narrative Fusion’s Glen Simpson claims was known all over Moscow and was just there for the picking in June 2016.  People were “talking about it freely.”  (Sen. p87-88).  Amazing that Simpson and Steele were able to uncover that in a week whereas the CIA and NSA were blissfully ignorant during the eight years that Trump is alleged to have acted as a Russian agent, eh?

The people Steele names as active in the Russia Trump collusion are Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen.  Steele mentions Michael Flynn, but only in passing as someone the Kremlin was cultivating.  Steele alludes to two others, someone in the Trump campaign who “admitt[ed that the] Kremlin [was] behind [the] recent appearance of DNC emails on Wikileaks,” later claimed to be George Papadopoulos, and someone “close” to Trump who knew of his intelligence relationship with Russia, later asserted to be Sergei Millian.

As to specific acts alleged by Steele, there are only four that directly relate to Trump (at least by my count, ten by count of the Washington Times).  The first specific act alleged is that Trump engaged Russian hookers to do a golden shower in his Moscow hotel room in 2013.  The second is that Carter Page traveled to Russia in order to meet Igor Sechin, President of Rosneft, and a Russian political official, Diveykin.  The third is that George Papadopoulos admitted to knowing that Russia was behind the DNC Wikileaks affair.  And the fourth is that Michael Cohen met in Prague with Russian officials in the last week of August or first week of September. [Read more…]

The Roy Moore drama escalates but I’m not convinced *UPDATED*

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As the Roy Moore drama escalates, because I distrust those doing the escalating, the new information actually makes me more disposed to believe the judge.

Judge Roy MooreI’m watching with fascination the kill and then overkill with Roy Moore. The GOPers (especially McConnell, McCain, and Romney) are even more hysterical than the Progressives. I can’t figure out if this is Stockholm Syndrome on their part or if they, even more than the Progressives, fear what it would mean to have another Tea Party congress critter amongst them.

All I know is that the accusations are increasingly hysterical and egregious — and that this, rather than convincing me that they are true, has the opposite effect. Let me explain:

When Project Veritas starts small, with a mildly uncomfortable video for the Lefties, it always has lined up behind that first video an increasingly powerful arsenal of videos that highlight the falsity of the Leftists’ initial protests. Project Veritas doesn’t just accuse. Instead, it provides a constant stream of increasingly accusatory videos with real confessions and other statements against interest from the Lefties themselves.

In the case of Roy Moore, though, the Proggies (and GOPers?) are following up somewhat sleazy unsubstantiated accusations with apocalyptic unsubstantiated accusations. There are no videos, no confessions, no blue dresses. Instead, there are just old, stale charges from arguably quite unreliable sources. Rather than convincing me that Moore did something truly bad, it’s convincing me that Moore is making the wrong people very nervous.

Lefties will accuse me of double standards and no moral fiber for refusing to jump on the anti-Roy Moore express, but in determining the truth of an otherwise unsubstantiated accusation, we must always determine whether the source is reliable. When accusations against conservatives come from the completely unreliable and vicious WaPo; from a deeply damaged woman who was a drug and alcohol addict 38 years ago; from women who are Hillary or Bernie supporters; and from the exhibitionistic (but never effective) Gloria Allred via prompts to her clients, it’s hard for me to believe the accusations are credible.  [Read more…]

A cursory look at some of the day’s most interesting news

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Every day lately brings some interesting news. This post sums up a few of the top stories, along with my opinions about why they matter.

Woman reading interesting newsI’m watching, fascinated, as events unfold in Saudi Arabia. I suspect Trump has a hand in it and I certainly hope the Crown Prince’s modernization push goes well. If it doesn’t, much badness will follow. I wish I had more to offer, but absent more concrete information about arrests, exiles, helicopter crashes, and alleged Lebanese war declarations, I’m in wait-and-see mode.

I haven’t missed the fact that the killer in Texas got his gun because the government — in the form of the Air Force — failed to put his felony conviction into the gun registry databases. The problem with gun control, of course, is that it not only leaves most of the guns with the government, it also puts government in charge of the guns remaining in citizen hands. As best as I can tell, government see-saws between over-zealous and completely incompetent.

The other thing I haven’t missed about the tragedy in Texas is that it was citizens who saved the day. An NRA instructor with an AR-15 attacked the killer, causing him to stop shooting. (I keep telling my Lefty friends that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun . . . and that it can take a long time before the police show up with their guns.) Then, it was two citizens who chased the killer down, causing him to crash his car. At that point, that human detritus either died from a self-inflicted shot or from an AR-15 bullet. I don’t know and I don’t care.

Incidentally, the heroic citizens who saved the day are Stephen Willeford, the NRA instructor who stopped the madness, and Johnnie Langendorff, the man who gave chase (with Willeford in the car with him). I refuse to name the killer. He deserves to be disparaged anonymously and then forgotten entirely.

I continue to believe what I tell anyone who is willing to listen to my views about the Second Amendment: There is no such thing as perfect safety. When we avoid one danger, we tend to pitch o ourselves headlong into another. Combustion engines were hailed in the early 20th century as the answer to terrible (horse) pollution. Nobody envisioned lead and other toxic emissions. Modern football helmets, were seen as the ultimate head protection. Nobody predicted that (a) players would start to use their heads like battering rams and (b) modern players, instead of being wiry little guys, would be giants.

When it comes to guns, the invariably unimaginative Leftists see only that guns kill people. They don’t see that guns save people (as happened with Willeford’s appearance on the scene of what could have been a much more terrible outcome). They don’t see that government is a terribly inefficient engine to protect us from guns.

Most of all, they don’t see (or refuse to see) that the surest way to die on the wrong end of a gun is to leave all guns in government hands. Those who could bear witness to this fact are dead — they’re dead in every land, ghetto, and concentration camp that the Nazis controlled; they’re dead in every land that the Soviets controlled; they’re dead in every place that the Maoists governed; and they’re dead in Cuba, North Korea, vast swathes of Africa and Latin America, and in every place in which Islamofascists gain control.

If I have to accept — as we all must — that there is no such thing as perfect safety, I’d rather put my faith in my fellow Americans than in my government. And yes, only Progressives could be stupid enough to demand government control over guns at the same time that they’re still vociferously claiming that our government is in the hands of a madman. That cognitive dissonance alone shows just how bad their arguments are. (You can read more of my thoughts on the subject here.) [Read more…]

Transgender folks in the military — this is what the slippery slope looks like

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Obama planted a poison pill when he put transgender folks in the military. Republicans should discharge them, instead of quibbling about surgery.

Two interesting headlines about transgender people in the military. The first comes from Gateway Pundit:

Transgender military

The second is at Truth Revolt:

Transgender military

Here’s the short story: Republicans tried to stop forcing taxpayers to provide the money so that mentally ill service members who reject their body’s sex and, instead, believe they belong to the opposite sex, can have their external sexual organs sliced off and be given hormones that can cause cancer and other nasty things. Twenty-four RINO’s sided with Democrats to continue federal funding for this surgery.

The problem the Republicans who oppose funding have is that the Obama Pentagon officially declared that thinking you’re really a member of the opposite sex is not a mental illness. If it’s not an illness, but is merely a problem with ones body, why in the world should service members with hernia’s or dislocated shoulders get free medical care while people suffering from excess penises or breasts are denied?

The issue, then, isn’t the funding question, it’s the “who let mentally ill people openly service in the military to begin with?” question. That’s the problem.

In terms of the mental illness known as body dysmorphia, all of the following people suffering from exactly the same problem: [Read more…]

Day One of the 115th Congress: Let Trump-et’s Sound

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constitution-humorDay one of the new Congress and we are already seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

Senate puts  Obamacare on the Reconciliation chopping block.  Remember when, among Harry Reid’s many machinations, he used reconciliation to pass Obamacare following Scott Brown’s election to the Senate, thus destroying the Dem’s filibuster proof majority?  Well, that which can be passed by reconciliation can be undone by it as well.    This from Vox (enjoy the schadenfreude):

Senate Budget Committee Chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced a budget resolution Tuesday that includes “reconciliation instructions” that enable Congress to repeal Obamacare with a simple Senate majority. Passing a budget resolution that includes those instructions will mean that the legislation can pass through the budget reconciliation process, in which bills cannot be filibustered.

That means Republicans will only need 50 of their 52 members in the Senate, and a bare majority in the House, to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act. According to the Wall Street Journal, the budget resolution could be passed by both houses as early as next week. . . .

 There’s basically nothing that Democrats alone can do to stop this. Budget resolutions can’t be filibustered, so if Republicans vote to include reconciliation instructions for Obamacare repeal, there’s nothing the opposition can do about it. And, of course, they can’t filibuster the actual repeal bill; that’s the whole point of using reconciliation. . . .

This is great news, though it is still unclear exactly what the Republican Congress will replace it with and, as the WSJ points out, how they will do so.  Many seem to be taking the position that any replacement must be subject to filibuster.  I think that ridiculous myself.  The Senate should just take the position that if Obamacare could be passed in whole by reconciliation in the first place, then so can its replacement.  Let the DNC try to fight that one in Court.  There are several replacement alternatives, including a detailed proposal by Tom Price, very soon to be head of Health and Human Services, that would foot the bill, yet the Senate and House have not jointly settled upon one.

The Bad

[Read more…]

Latest Progressive effort: Draft Obama as House Speaker in 2018

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obama-and-pelosi-2010-flickrThere is a new petition on Change.org asking Obama to become House Speaker in 2018. Not only is it almost charming in its lack of awareness, it is also a reminder that the Left never gives in or gives up. When the personal and the political are the same, when even brushing your teeth is a political act, you’re going to be committed to political activity 24/7.

The petition opens by reminding potential signers that they’re now living with the horror of total Republican control. Worse, Leftist activity, including “protests and lawsuits are not going to be enough to stop Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Sam Alito, and company from rolling back decades of progress virtually overnight, particularly if rank-and-file Republicans feel no pressure to dissent from Trump’s party line.”  That reference to “decades of progress” is a funny one, because as best as I can tell, Trump is determined to roll back only 8 years of “progress,” which doesn’t even equal a single decade.

What you’re seeing here is something I’ve written about frequently, which is the Lefts’ belief that the 1950s are always lurking just around the corner with Jim Crow (a purely Democrat initiative), back alley abortions, gays deeply closeted and, perhaps worst of all, men and women playing their assigned gender roles. The fact that Trump was considered a benefactor to the black community before he ran as a Republican or that his initiatives towards gays and sex roles seem to be limited to blocking the federal government from telling schools to ignore biological gender or forcing nuns to buy birth control seems to have eluded J. Q. Adams, the petition’s author.

Panicked at the thought of all these inchoate horrors, Adams asks, “What can be done?”

Well, Adams has a “long-shot” idea. We know it’s a long-shot not only because he says so, but because, after accusing the GOP of gerrymandering Democrats out of federal existence, he admits that it may not have a lot of momentum after what he calls, with magnificent understatement, “the Democrats’ recent difficulties in midterm elections.”  Those “recent difficulties” see Republicans with the greatest hold over America at both the state and federal level in more than ninety years.

Adams is a man of faith, however. He believes that, Democrats can block Trump’s momentum, if they can just pick up “24 seats to win the House and 3 to win the Senate.”  To do this, after failing in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, all that Democrats need to do is create “a powerful national message” letting Republicans know that they’re on the hook for everything from “Trump’s bigotry and misogyny, to his trampling of cherished freedoms and democratic norms, to his dangerous foreign policy, and to his plans to privatize Medicare, cut taxes for the rich, take away 20 million Americans’ health insurance, abolish workers’ right to organize and women’s right to choose, and allow climate change to continue unabated.”

With that kind of agenda, Adams concludes that there’s only one man for the job:  Barack Obama!

[Read more…]