Congress Archives - Bookworm Room

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

February 28, 2018 by Wolf Howling 14 Comments

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

The 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

February 13, 2018 by Wolf Howling 13 Comments

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

November 13, 2017 by Bookworm 80 Comments

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.

I’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

November 6, 2017 by Bookworm 37 Comments

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.

I’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

July 14, 2017 by Bookworm 21 Comments

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:

The second is at Truth Revolt:

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

January 3, 2017 by Wolf Howling 12 Comments

Day 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

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Latest Progressive effort: Draft Obama as House Speaker in 2018

December 4, 2016 by Bookworm 9 Comments

There 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…]

Sanctuaries & Filibusters

November 17, 2016 by Wolf Howling 3 Comments

The mayors of twelve major cities have, since the election, announced that they will be “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens and, in one form or another, refuse to cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration law. This is a direct challenge to our Constitutional system, and one no progressive would tolerate if, say, it were conservatives refusing to comply with homosexual marriage. Actually, the twelve “sanctuary cities” are the tip of the iceberg, as Victor Davis Hanson explained when opining on the nihilism of this “sanctuary” movement some months ago:

There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions — entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities — that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions. Most of these entities are controlled by Democrats in general and liberals in particular. . . . .

If rule of law means anything, then this cannot be allowed to stand. Unfortunately, while there are some acts that Trump can take unilaterally, his hands are surprisingly tied. Democrats in the Senate, where Republicans do not hold a filibuster proof majority, have repeatedly refused to authorize the withholding of any funds from cities, etc., because of their failure to cooperate on matters of immigration law enforcement.

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The Bookworm Beat 11/17: Draining The Swamp

November 17, 2016 by Wolf Howling 3 Comments

Ms. BWR was the key to convincing me to hold my nose and vote Trump on the sole ground of control of the Supreme Court, so I’ve got the bar set quite low for this administration. That said, I like their first few steps so far.

Corruption

Two of the most corrupt influences on politics over our lifetimes have been Congressional earmarks and the regulator/lobbyist revolving door. As to earmarks, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan demonstrated some real leadership yesterday by shutting down an attempt by three Republican members of the House to reintroduce ear mark authority for Congress:

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., unilaterally halted a bid Wednesday to restore earmarks, those directives that steer federal funds to specific projects back home.

Sources told Fox News that plans to restore some earmarks were on the verge of being approved by House Republicans in their closed-door conference meeting when Ryan intervened.

“We just had the ‘drain the swamp’ election,” Ryan said, according to a senior House GOP source. “We don’t want to turn around two weeks later and have earmarks.” . . .

Amen. I understand the Congressmens’ desire to restore ear mark authority on the grounds that unelected federal bureaucrats are, in the absence of Congressional specification, directing the spending for specific projects at the state level. But does anyone really want to support reintroduction of ear mark authority to Congress? That is the equivalent of employing Mel Gibson as a bartender, naming Anthony Weiner as CEO of Twitter, or putting Robert Downey, Jr. in charge of the DEA evidence lock-up. At least the federal bureaucrats are limited in the money they can direct up to the amounts voted by Congress. If the House GOP needs to address this, they need to do so by limiting the authority of the bureaucrats to earmark the funds, not returning ear mark authority to Congress.

As to lobbyists, VP Elect Mike Pence banned them from the “transition team” once he took over as head from Chris Christie. Now this today from Fox:

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Progressives & The Supreme Court

November 15, 2016 by Wolf Howling 4 Comments

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s correspondent for the courts and law, is apoplectic that the right did not consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland (see Ms. BWR’s analysis here) for the Supreme Court, and now will never do so. She wrote about this recently in Republicans Stole the Supreme Court. Ms. Lithwick cites no legal or Constitutional authority to support her charge of nefarious action. Her crie de coeur is based solely on notions of fairness – something always important to progressives, but only when it can be argued favorably for them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to schedule hearings on Garland, stating that such an appointment should be a decision for the next President. That was a political decision that the American people just recently had an opportunity pass judgment upon.

I believe it was no less a personage than President Obama who, days after his victory in 2009, told America “elections have consequences.” Indeed, he said it as justification for ramming a series of acts through Congress without even the slightest attempt to reach across the aisle. I recall exactly zero progs complaining about the unfairness of that in 2009, nor the trickery Harry Reid used to pass the Affordable Healthcare Act later in the year so that it would not have to undergo a final vote in the Senate — a vote the progs would surely have lost after a Republican was elected to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant seat. Nor did I hear a peep from the left in 2013 when Harry Reid overturned the Senate’s filibuster rule – a rule whose history dated back to 1806 – in order to pack the DC Court of Appeals with progressive judges.

Ms. Lithwick’s histrionics aside, the fact that control of the Supreme Court was at issue was dominant in the election. A nationwide exit poll shows that 61% of voters stated that the Supreme Court nomination was important, or most important, in their decision to vote. The people have spoken.

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Heated congressional races are yet another reason to curse open primaries….

October 5, 2016 by Bookworm 4 Comments

I hate open primaries. In a post a few years ago, I explained why, and I’ll repeat myself here:

The point of the primary system is to give citizens who are members of a specific political party the opportunity to pick that candidate who best represents their views. Then, in the Fall season, those cherry-picked party candidates get to go head-to-head, giving voters a genuine ideological choice. This is important even in states that tilt heavily in one direction or the other, because it means that, when voters are actually paying attention, they are exposed to more than just the majority party’s viewpoint.

In other words, if an Open Primary state tilts heavily in favor of one party or the other, the minority party isn’t just precluded from winning (and this holds true even if the majority party has some major scandal over the summer that causes its total collapse). . . it is also entirely denied a voice in the marketplace of political ideas. Without a candidate on the ballot, the minority party has no commercials, no debates, no opinion pieces, and no candidate interviews.

The one thing that didn’t occur to me when I wrote the list of horribles that result from open primaries was the possibility that, in the interim between the primary and the election, the formerly dominant party loses favor. As it is, that’s what’s slowly happening in this election:

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The Bookworm Beat 9/15/16 — the “polls they are a’changin'” edition and open thread

September 15, 2016 by Bookworm 17 Comments

If Bill Clinton and Al Gore couldn’t do it, then no one can. A Leftist Facebook friend posted an article from The Hill with a lede saying that Donald Trump “floats rolling back food safety regulations.” The implication, obviously, is that in Trump’s America, we’re all going to die from salmonella and e. Coli. Read through to the end, though, and you discover that Trump is instead making a remarkably sensible suggestion:

Trump’s economic policy plan also calls for “an immediate halt to new federal regulations and a very thorough agency-level review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.”

Agencies would be required to list all regulations and rank them in terms of their contribution to growth, health and safety. The goal, Trump said, would be to strengthen the rules that are useful and reduce the rules that harm the economy.

One of my Leftist Facebook friends stopped with the lede, of course, and envisioned our nation drowning in fecal matter emanating from food-poisoned Americans. In a comment, I quoted the above language and suggested that it was a good idea to control regulations, which are so big no one can know them, are often non-effective, are frequently inconsistent with each other, and are too often quasi-legislation.

To seal it for this Leftist, I reminded him that Bill Clinton had assigned Al Gore this very task of cutting back on America’s burgeoning regulations, although it never came to anything. And that’s when my Facebook friend essentially said “Well, if Al Gore and Bill Clinton couldn’t do it, then no one can. After all, Trump has never been a politician, and he’s really stupid, so what does he know?”

My reply was that voters may be hoping that it’s an advantage that Trump hasn’t been a politician. He may have out-of-the-box (i.e., out-of-D.C.) ideas that actually work. The response? A reiteration that Trump is stupid. (Has there ever been a Republican candidate, no matter how successful and brilliant, whom the Left hasn’t called stupid? I don’t think so. It’s a tired idea.)

Agencies must be reined in. Exhibit A in the “agencies need to be cut back and God willing Trump is the man to do it” category is the fact that the FBI thinks it is more important than Congress is. So it was that Jason Chaffetz had to explain to the acting FBI chair that, no, Congress gets to have all of the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview — and then serves him, then and there, with a subpoena.

The funny thing about the WaPo’s indictment of Trump as a scam artist. The Washington Post is beside itself with excitement that ardent Hillary supporter, and pay for play attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is starting an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. I got three paragraphs into the WaPo editorial supporting this investigation and castigating Trump before I broke into uncontrollable laughter:

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Your government at work

May 23, 2016 by Bookworm 12 Comments

I received an email from a friend who was recently in Washington, D.C. and had the opportunity to speak to a couple of people who work in the government. He sent me this disheartening wrap-up of his conversations with them:

1) When you see global or national financial figures emanating from banks (e.g., World Bank, development banks, UN) etc., they are numbers pretty much created out of thin air.

2) Congressmen don’t make policy. Policy-making is generally delegated to 20-somethings to create and write up: congressman are too busy raising money and compromising themselves for votes: they simply vote on the legislation that their interns give them as a finished product. This is a big reason why government policy doesn’t work in real life.

3) Many alarmist defense-related issues that you read about (like us vis-a-vis the Chinese, Russians, etc) are simply designed to protect funding for the various armed forces branches.

4) EVERYTHING driven by the Obama administration is focused on their environmental agenda. They have defunded any and all global initiatives on building coal or nuclear power in developing nations, as well as actively tried to kill hydroelectric power on a global basis. Again, these are policies developed by 20-somethings implemented on the world at large.

5) The 20-somethings also pretty much run the White House and all government agencies. This is how it turns out policy by the Executive Branch.

So if you’re someone who does not have children or grandchildren in or nearing college, you should still be deeply concerned about what’s going on at America’s institutions of higher education. Every bit of misinformation and propaganda that’s being taught there ends up being directly implemented in our government.

My friend, who is one of the smartest, best-informed people I’ve ever met, went on to say that it’s tales such as these that have convinced him that Donald Trump is the better bet in the upcoming election than Hillary: “The Augean stables really need to be flushed out and I don’t see anyone but a true outsider with charismatic appeal and force of presence (a la Andrew Jackson) as having the fortitude and skill to pull it off. The problem, as I see it, is that most Americans really do believe that our government is more functional than it is.”

So far, Trump is saying a lot of the right things about issues that matter to me (Supreme Court, Second Amendment, etc.), but I don’t believe I’ve heard him talk about cleaning up Washington’s vast bureaucracy and making it somewhat functional again. If that was a goal, it’s entirely possible he could make it happen, so I’ll continue to live in hope.

The Bookworm Beat 9-27-2015 — the “things that make you think” edition and open thread

September 27, 2015 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Boehner was merely an effective manager, rather than an effective conservative

Andrew Klavan is kind enough to point out that Boehner was in some measure a very effective House Majority Leader:

I can’t help but notice that under Boehner — and largely because of Boehner, because Boehner outsmarted President Obama in the 2013 budget negotiations — federal spending has declined over a five year period for the first time since the post World War II cutbacks. And because of this, as the economy has struggled to a sputtering recovery despite Democrat mismanagement, the deficit has been sharply reduced…

Also under Boehner — and also largely because of then-minority leader Boehner (and the likewise much-maligned-by-conservatives Mitch McConnell in the Senate) — the disaster of Obamacare is 100% attributable to the Democrats. It hasn’t got a single Republican fingerprint on it.

As Klavan sees it, Boehner’s fall came about solely because he wouldn’t engage in a head-to-head fight with Obama over Planned Parenthood. Boehner believed (and still believes) that fight will destroy chances for a Republican victory in 2016. I have two points to make.

First, if Boehner’s right that the fight will fail it’s in part because he refuses to engage in the fight at the intellectual level. Carly Fiorina is the first prominent Republican to frame the fight in non-religious terms, and boy did she make the Left squirm when she did so. In other words, part of why Boehner can’t win the fight is because, even though he’s pro-Life, he has absolutely no idea how to fight against abortion at anything other than a monetary level.

Second, speaking of that monetary level, the fight really boils down to something James Taranto said three years ago, and it’s about the difference between checkbook Republicans and ideologically-driven conservatives. The context was the fact that Paul Ryan seemed to understand a conservative vision of small, not big, government:
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[VIDEO] Ben Shapiro explained how Obama has developed the hitherto unknown “F**k You” clause in the Constitution

April 9, 2015 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

One of Ben Shapiro’s strongest videos, explaining how Obama has effectively sidelined Congress and dramatically expanded his authority. Before you get too mad at Obama, though, remember that Congress, including the RINOS we elected, let him do this. There are myriad explanations for Congress’s passivity, not the least of which is that they’re utterly terrified to challenge the first mulatto president.