The End of England, Exhibit 937: English Police Ignore Ongoing Rape Gangs to Focus on Real Crime – Misgendering Language

In Britain in recent years there have been a number of horrific scandals in which police and community leaders ignored organized, continuous rape of young English girls by gangs of Muslim men, primarily of Pakistani origin.  As these scandals finally have come to light, the shocking and pathetic excuse given by the police and others is that they feared being charged with anti-Muslim bias and racism if they exposed the rape gangs.

The rape gangs activity in Rotherham, England, is just one of these scandals, but the most infamous.  The section below is from Wikipedia (link), with emphases mine.  Note the self-censorship – the absence of the word “Muslim” in this explanation that fear of anti-Muslim bias caused the ethnic English authorities to allow the Muslim gang rape gangs to rape their own children, and the euphemism “British-Pakistani” for Pakistani men then living in England. 

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the northern English town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. ....  From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council.  The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16.  From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread, and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.

In August 2014 the Jay report concluded that an estimated 1,400 children, most of them white girls, had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men.  A "common thread" was that taxi drivers had been picking the children up for sex from care homes and schools.

The abuse included gang rape, forcing children to watch rape, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, and trafficking them to other towns.  There were pregnancies—one at age 12—terminations, miscarriages, babies raised by their mothers, and babies removed, causing further trauma. .... 

The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors [including] fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations [and] the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority....

Shocking beyond words: “the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority” – the English men and women of the left-wing Labour Party allowed their own young English girls to be raped over and over again because to even call attention to it might cause the Muslims not to vote for them in future elections.   

So what in God’s name have the British police been doing with their time, if not arresting gang rapists of their own children?  Answer – sending teams of investigators to check out any allegation of “misgendering” and arresting young English mothers suspected of using incorrect language.  Here’s the recent news (link) out of the land of Winston Churchill (emphases mine):

A British mother was arrested and incarcerated for referring to a transgendered woman as a man in online communication.  Kate Scottow revealed Saturday that police came to her home, brought her to the local police station for questioning and left her in a cell for seven hours while her children watched, The Daily Mail reports.  Scottow had been engaged in a Twitter dispute with a transgender activist over “deadnaming,” or denying the gender that someone believes he or she actually is.  News of the arrest follows another incident in the UK, when 74-year-old Margaret Nelson was questioned by Suffolk police about her social media comments on transgendered people.

Scottow is still under investigation by police — who took her photographs, fingerprints and a DNA sample after arresting her.  They also took the woman’s mobile phone and laptop computer and haven’t given it back since Scottow was taken into custody on Dec. 1, 2018.  “I was arrested in my home by three officers.... for harassment and malicious communications because I called someone out and misgendered them on Twitter.”

Hayden’s complaints prompted both the police to arrest Scottow and a judge to deliver an injunction against her, according to The Mail.

English politicians and police allow Muslim rape gangs to rape their children while they spend their time quashing "misgendering" language.  Millions of men and women died in living memory to save England.  For this?  Dear God, what has become of these people? 

R Balsamo

Clinton Democrats, the FBI, & the Justice Department Caught in the Biggest Political Scandal in American History

By all appearances now, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party and their corrupt high-level operatives in the FBI and the Justice Department funded a pack of lies about Donald Trump’s supposed ties with Russia and dressed them up in an official-looking “dossier.”  They then used those lies to secure legal justification to spy on Trump and Republicans and promoted those lies through the liberal media to smear Trump during the 2016 election campaign.  Moreover, all indications are that the same senior FBI and Justice Department people who worked so hard to frame Trump were the same ones who colluded with the Clinton people to wrongly clear her of grossly illegal activity.  

This is the biggest political scandal in American history, all the more remarkable because many of the corrupt conspirators to this very day remain in senior positions in the FBI and the Justice Department.  Even now, they are allowed to obstruct justice by their Republican boss, the seemingly dazed and spineless Jeff Sessions, and his boss the Republican Donald Trump, remarkably the very object of the conspiracy.  What are Sessions and Trump thinking – that the FBI and the Justice Department don't report to them, and that they can do nothing about the Obama and Clinton partisan lawbreakers still apparently running those two federal organizations that are very much under their control?  I'm sure that never before in American history have such corrupt, subversive high-ranking federal officials been allowed to remain in office and continue their conspiracy by the very President who has been the object of their vicious malfeasance.  Breathtakingly remarkable.

R Balsamo

The Fascist Roots of the American Left

Linked below is a brief interview of Dinesh D'Souza, who has just published a new book titled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. 

D'Souza points out that Nazism and fascism are political ideologies of the "left" and not of the "right."  In my opinion, positioning those ideologies on the “right” side of the political spectrum was driven years ago in part by communists, American fellow travelers, and American anti-anti-communists who sought to distance their politics from Nazi Germany after it attacked its former ally the Soviet Union.

Socialism ultimately requires authoritarianism to enforce its aims, which is control by unelected elites who ostensibly, but not fundamentally, pursue equality of outcomes while vigorously suppressing liberty.  Variants of socialism, such as Russian communism and German Nazism, can be distinguished, but they both were, and modern variants remain, fundamentally hostile to liberty and capitalism and quick to use violence to achieve their controlist aims. 

R Balsamo

http://www.ora.tv/politicking/2017/8/4/dinesh-dsouza-democratic-left-are-the-real-fascists-in-us--not-trump-0_3ybxm8es699q

Illinois Democrats Choose More Decline and So Hike Taxes

Illinois Democrats, with the help of a few weak-kneed Republicans pressured and duped into joining them, just overrode the Republican governor’s veto to push through a massive, permanent income tax hike (for individuals, a 32% increase up to a shade shy of 5%).  Not many years ago, Democrats passed a temporary four-year massive (67% for individuals) income tax hike that they said would right the foundering ship that is Illinois finances.  To no one’s surprise, after the period of higher taxes Illinois was in a deeper financial hole than it was before all that additional tax revenue because the state’s profligate spending was never reduced.  Illinois doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.  The Democrat party formula is to spend recklessly on their constituency groups, and when the financial meltdown inevitable occurs pressure enough dim-witted Republicans into supporting a tax hike (Think of the kids!  What about the schools!); then repeat the cycle all over again. 

In the last 10-15 year, Illinois’ spending has zoomed while its population has shrunk.  Big dollars go to Medicaid and other social services that keeps dependents voting Democrat, and big dollars also go to current and retired government workers.  Illinois state workers are the highest paid, adjusted for cost-of-living, of any state in the nation, even before generous retirement benefits kick in.  (In 2016, there were 17,638 retired state and local workers whose annual pensions were over $99,000, with 15 over $348,000!)  And Illinois has far more units of government than any other state, and all of those townships and forest preserve districts and library boards and water reclamation districts have employees and expenses.  After all that spending, there’s not much cash left over for services for the regular people, otherwise known as the taxpayers.            

And those taxpayers are voting with their feet, as Illinois and Cook County (home of Chicago) lead the nation in population loss.  The Illinois tax base is eroding fast, and yet the Democrats have chosen to raise taxes rather than cut spending.  Higher taxes without spending reform will just accelerate the population exodus and the state’s financial decline. 

I have no sense of what the ultimate resolution will be for Illinois, which is arguably already in the direst financial straits of all the states even before this tax hike.  Like the City of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools System, Illinois is functionally bankrupt.  I blame chronic, excessive spending that increasingly benefits Democrat party constituencies rather than state residents as a whole, combined with chronic underfunding of pensions that appear overly-generous and based on increasingly over-market salaries.  Throw in the usual fraud and abuse, like pension-spiking, to the mix.  Although the nominal rate of the Illinois state income tax may seem not particularly high even at 5%, given the very high property and other taxes some analysts say Illinois residents have the highest overall tax burden in the United States.  Overspending and mal-spending continue seemingly unabated, and real pension reform remains a pipedream.

Increasingly, the political divide in Illinois is between those who benefit from the state and local government spending largesse, like current public employees, government pensioners, and welfare recipients, and those who foot the bill.  While the beneficiaries feed at the trough the bill-payers are getting fleeced, and increasingly they’re leaving for better pastures. 

R Balsamo 

Left-wing Media Howls About Trump Press Conferences

After eight years of Obama calling only on lap-dog liberal and ultra-liberal media outlets, after his actually trying to exclude Fox News from the White House Press Corps, and after his repeated bashing of private citizen Rush Limbaugh by name, and then after the mainstream liberal media’s continual smearing of Trump with Fake News such as, for example, that he was a frequenter of Russian prostitutes and is the incarnation of Hitler, the left-wing media is now cataplectic that at press conferences Trump is calling on non-left-wing news and commentary media outlets! 

How dare Trump not call exclusively on left-wing media outlets!  The end of the First Amendment! cries one pseudo-journalist, who displays his pathetic ignorance of what the First Amendment actually means.

The days of just three liberal national TV news networks and the New York Times filtering their way all the news Americans would see are long over, and it’s about time.  Their monopoly on the news is over. 

Looking back, the left-wing media’s infatuation and “slobbering love affair” with Obama was so bad that books have been written about it, and we were spurred to mock it in this post:

Two Reporters Injured Trying To Kiss President Obama’s Behind

R Balsamo

Cultural Counteroffensive

Islam-inspired mass murder continues apace in Europe, this Christmas season, and on cue some of the continent’s “progressive” leaders call for even more Muslim immigration as the antidote.  The prospects for a Europe free of major, violent social conflict diminish by the hour, and there the hour is late. 

Haters of western civilization, who grossly magnify its vices while minimizing its virtues, have convinced many unthinking people around them to join in their cultural suicide conspiracy.  All evils in the world are linked to the Judeo-Christian ethic, European history, and capitalism, while everyone outside that world is apotheosized.  Non-European peoples are lionized, all other faiths are whitewashed, and those whites who resist indoctrination are branded heretics from the true faith.  A new religion is amidst us. 

Western cultural norms and values stand in resistance to the aims of self-regarded enlightened elites to refashion the world in their image.  Islam, with particularly forceful elements now that stand in opposition to Western Culture, is for the elites a welcome enemy of their enemy.  Their airy dream is a world led to sunny uplands by self-appointed wise elders, free of the shackles of regressive religion and culture, where the benighted masses are separated from their guns and Bibles and that troublesome Constitution, and where dissent is suppressed for the greater good.  But the forces of light and liberty have regrouped, and counteroffensives have gained traction.  We leave 2016 in better shape than when we entered it.  Christmas is the season of hope.   

R Balsamo

Recount Fever

In an effort to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump, Democrat operatives initiated recount efforts in three states such that, if the results were overturned, Clinton would win the election.  The public, ostensible leader of this effort is failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who professes to simply want to ensure that every vote is properly counted.  Why, however, she has not filed for recounts in states, like New Hampshire, that were won by a narrower margin, or in all 50 states for that matter, she will not say.  We know the answer, of course.

Some of the key people working with Stein on this recount effort are, to no one’s surprise, Clinton and Democrat Party operatives, even though Stein was nominally the nominee of a different political party.  And, the source of the millions of dollars needed for these recount filings is also very unclear, but anyone not born yesterday knows where the dough is coming from.

No doubt the fevered hope among Democrats was that recounts would show enough Republican hanky panky to cast a shadow of doubt, of illegitimacy, over Trump’s win in those states.  But Democrats are really in trouble when they start believing their own propaganda.  The party of voter fraud is actually the Democrats, who don’t shy away from illegalities in voter registrations, in election day counting, and in post-election recounts.  Democrats have long internalized Stalin’s maxim that it’s not who votes but who counts the votes that matters.  Democrats particularly like hand recounts, where crooked recounts in heavily Democrat precincts remarkably find gobs of additional votes, for their candidates of course, while the tallies in Republican areas change little.  In heavily-Democrat Detroit, for example, where ballots are being recounted under no doubt higher scrutiny than expected, many more Clinton votes were initially certified than voters who were signed in to vote.  The Detroit elections director blamed the discrepancies on old voter machines.  Sure.  As any alert and honest student of politics from Chicago knows, the vote overcount from fraud in heavily Democrat areas, from California to New York City and all points in between, must be huge.  Yuge, as Donald Trump might say.

Now that the partially-completed recount in Michigan has revealed significant fraudulent votes for Clinton in the Democrat cities of Detroit, Flint, and Lansing, and as Trump’s big margin holds in Wisconsin as votes are reexamined (including a hand recount in ultraliberal Madison – surprise!), coverage of the recounts has been disappearing from the liberal media and Democrat legal maneuvering is petering out, as the liberal hoped-for narrative value of this story explodes in their faces. 

R Balsamo

NFL Head Roger Goodell Tolerates the Thug, Domestic-Violence Prone Football Culture and Supports Anti-American Protests But Slams Trump

Now comes National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell as a prime example, among so many, of the Democrat Party operatives who reek of hypocrisy as they bring their political smears into every walk of private life. 

Recently in this election season Goodell said he doesn’t know how to explain Donald Trump to his daughters and wife, presumably referring to Trump’s decade-old “locker room” talk and the politically-convenient, highly-suspicious late-election flurry of women who suddenly claimed, years after the alleged events and without contemporaneous documentation, sexual harassment from Trump.  Goodell the ass doesn’t mention the known sexual harassment by Democrat Bill Clinton, with an intern in the White House when he was the President of the United States, or the contemporaneously-documented multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault against that same Bill Clinton.  He doesn’t mention Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton’s long involvement in smearing women to cover up Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults.  Honest people realize that the decades-long Clinton behavior is part of the real “war on women.”  How does Goodell explain all that to his wife and daughters?

Goodell certainly doesn’t mention, of course, the elephant in the room – the thug culture of his own National Football League, where real, documented episodes of sexual harassment and violence by players against women are commonplace.  From the linked Sports Illustrated article:  “Goodell and the NFL have come under fire for being too lenient on domestic violence after high-profile cases such as Ray Rice, Greg Hardy and more recently Josh Brown were penalized lightly.”  In response to such criticism, “Goodell noted he thinks people do not understand the complexity of domestic violence.”  How’s that attitude for the real “war on women”?

Goodell also supports and encourages the recent wave of anti-American protests during the national anthem at football games but suppressed player efforts to honor with armbands policemen slain by Black Lives Matter-inspired radicals. 

Goodell tolerates real anti-women violence.  He is nothing more than a Democrat Party operative politicizing his non-political role as head of the NFL.  Why the NFL owners want him and support him is a mystery.

R Balsamo

http://www.si.com/nfl/2016/11/10/roger-goodell-donald-trump-women-explain-daughters

http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/11/10/roger-goodell-bad-nfl-america/

Trump Wins – Sic Transit Gloria Obama

The country is now digesting the stunning electoral victory of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  To be sure, the GOP did not win every election across this great country, but the Party is arguably as strong as it has been in many generations.  Although losing a few seats in the House and Senate, Republicans retain majorities in each, and they gained three governorships to bring their total to 33, the most since 1922.  And Republicans became even more dominant in state and local governments across the country.   

Some despondent Democrats have taken to the streets, shouting and smashing like spoiled brats in a temper tantrum.  The liberal media warned us about violence from those who would not accept the results of this election, and for once it was right.  As Wikileaks documents have confirmed in similar past outbreaks, the rioters are no doubt organized and egged on by shadowy Democrat Party operatives deep behind the scenes who seek to profit from the political and market reactions to their disruptions.

After eight years of Obama-era Democrat arrogance, corruption, and over-reach, the Republican Party has emerged stronger than it has been in memory, in seats and in spine and in will.  Trump, almost single-handedly, has vanquished the feckless and hapless Bush gang to the wilderness, and has consigned the malign Clintons and their disgraceful, corrupt profiteering cartel to the dustbin in the ignominy they deserve.

When Republicans sought some input and compromise in the years, not so long ago, when the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a large majority in the House, Democrat Obama scoffed, famously saying I won, you lost, so get out of the way.   He also said elections have consequences.  Now that the shoe’s on the other foot, he’s about to get a taste of his own medicine.

R Balsamo

Bud Light Drops Liberal, Haranguing Commercial After Sales Drop

Beverage conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev has stopped airing Bud Light beer commercials with liberal political messages that featured divisive ultraliberals Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen.  Sales took a dive since the commercials began.  In one ad, the two complained that women are paid less than men for the same work, a point that has been repeatedly debunked since it’s been shown that women make nearly 100% of what men make when careful apples-to-apples job and work-hours comparisons are made.  The lie makes for good Democrat propaganda to low information voters, but why spout this in a beer commercial?

No surprise that beer drinkers don’t want to be harangued with Democrat social justice warrior propaganda.  I enjoyed this:  “Comments on the video [of the beer commercial] have since been disabled on YouTube.”  One can only imagine.  Moreover, the two personalities spouting the nonsense are very polarizing.  For example, Amy Schumer at a recent appearance went on an anti-Republican harangue that caused much of her audience to walk out.  And Seth Rogen has compared the popular, pro-American film American Sniper to Nazi propaganda.

One can just imagine the scene around the conference table at a trendy New York City ad agency: 

Hipster 1:  None of us drinks beer, and no one we know does, so how do we pitch this stuff?

Hipster 2:  I know, let’s get Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen.  Everybody loves them and their politics!

Hipster 3:  Great idea!  And how about they complain about how women are oppressed by men!

Hipster 4:  Another great idea!  Man, we’re hot today!  We’re gonna sell a lot of beer!

R Balsamo

The Clinton Criminal Enterprise – The Unveiling Continues

Former Federal prosecutor and astute analyst Andrew C. McCarthy has summarized the case against Democrat Hillary Clinton that she ran the United States State Department as a criminal enterprise, selling out America to enrich herself and her husband, former Democrat president William Clinton.  This sordid episode in American history is far from over, as the fallout from FBI Director Comey’s whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s felony mishandling of classified information has severely damaged his reputation and that of the FBI as a whole, and has corroded the American trust in that storied institution.  Comey yesterday announced that the FBI has reopened the investigation, purportedly because of the discovery of new evidence in the form of emails that somehow the FBI missed previously.  In addition, as far as I know the FBI is considering a Congressional request to open a criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation in light of the growing evidence it is a front for a criminal enterprise.

As I have written previously, Democrat Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt major American politician in American history, and the depth and breadth of her corruption is breathtaking.  Furthermore, she is a congenital liar whose every word, including "and" and "the" (to borrow a phrase), is a lie.  From Whitewater and the "cattle futures" Tyson bribe in her early days up to the bribery thinly-camouflaged as “speaking fees” and Clinton Foundation “donations,” she has been a one-woman criminal enterprise. 

Some excerpts from the McCarthy analysis:

Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have converted the office of secretary of state into a racketeering enterprise.  This would be a violation of the RICO law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971 (codified in the U.S. penal code at sections 1961 et seq.).

Hillary and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, operated the Clinton Foundation.  Ostensibly a charity, the foundation was a de facto fraud scheme to monetize Hillary’s power as secretary of state (among other aspects of the Clintons’ political influence).  The scheme involved (a) the exchange of political favors, access, and influence for millions of dollars in donations; (b) the circumvention of campaign-finance laws that prohibit political donations by foreign sources; (c) a vehicle for Mrs.  Clinton to shield her State Department e-mail communications from public and congressional scrutiny while she and her husband exploited the fundraising potential of her position; and (d) a means for Clinton insiders to receive private-sector compensation and explore lucrative employment opportunities while drawing taxpayer-funded government salaries.

While the foundation did perform some charitable work, this camouflaged the fact that contributions were substantially diverted to pay lavish salaries and underwrite luxury travel for Clinton insiders.  Contributions skyrocketed to $126 million in 2009, the year Mrs. Clinton arrived at Foggy Bottom [the State Department].  Breathtaking sums were “donated” by high-rollers and foreign governments that had crucial business before the State Department.  Along with those staggering donations came a spike in speaking opportunities and fees for Bill Clinton.  Of course, disproportionate payments and gifts to a spouse are common ways of bribing public officials — which is why, for example, high-ranking government officeholders must reveal their spouses’ income and other asset information on their financial-disclosure forms.

 While there are other egregious transactions, the most notorious corruption episode of Secretary Clinton’s tenure involves the State Department’s approval of a deal that surrendered fully one-fifth of the United States’ uranium-mining capacity to Vladimir Putin’s anti-American thugocracy in Russia.  [...]

The WikiLeaks disclosures of e-mails hacked from Clinton presidential-campaign chairman John Podesta provide mounting confirmation that the Clinton Foundation was orchestrated for the purpose of enriching the Clintons personally and leveraging then-Secretary Clinton’s power to do it.  Hillary and her underlings pulled this off by making access to her contingent on Clinton Foundation ties; by having top staff service Clinton Foundation donors and work on Clinton Foundation business; by systematically conducting her e-mail communications outside the government server system; by making false statements to the public, the White House, Congress, the courts, and the FBI; and by destroying thousands of e-mails — despite congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act demands — in order to cover up (among other things) the shocking interplay between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

Under federal law, that can amount to running an enterprise by a pattern of fraud, bribery, and obstruction.  If so, it is a major crime.  Like the major crimes involving the mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files, it cries out for a thorough and credible criminal investigation.  More important, wholly apart from whether there is sufficient evidence for criminal convictions, there is overwhelming evidence of a major breach of trust that renders Mrs. Clinton unfit for any public office, let along the nation’s highest public office.  

R Balsamo

Republican Cowardice Is a Provocation: Democrat Lawfare Misconduct Stopped in Wisconsin But Will Just Move Elsewhere

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by three Wisconsin Democratic district attorneys who sought to revive an immoral and unethical ginned-up, years-long faux-criminal investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s recall campaign.  These despicable Democrats, unhappy with Walker’s success in curbing Democrat union excesses, until finally stopped by the Court mounted a "John Doe" lawfare campaign that issued dozens of subpoenas, seized equipment, and confiscated millions of documents from those many Wisconsin law-abiding Republicans they illegally targeted.  These disgraceful Democrats no doubt were encouraged to conspire to abuse the law and their political offices by past Republican weakness in similar Democrat lawfare operations, and felt, almost certainly correctly, that even if stopped they would suffer no consequences. 

I haven’t followed the case closely, but Walker seems to have hardly fought back to help those who worked hard to support him.  If the parties had been reversed, Republican prosecutors would never have brought invalid and unethical charges in the first place, but even if they did a Democrat governor would have used all the powers at his disposal to destroy them.  Walker, with his eye on a run for the White House, had other priorities than vigorously defending state Republicans against unfounded lawfare attacks by rogue Democrats.

Democrats are masters at ginning up prosecutions for their partisan gain.  Three recent, particularly impactful examples come to mind.  In 2005 county Democrats in Austin ginned up an investigation of Texas Republican Tom Delay, then Majority Leader of the U.S. House and one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.  He was driven from office, and then later his conviction was overturned by the courts.  But not before the Democrats had taken out one of their strongest opponents.  And the Democrats seem to have suffered no consequences for this malicious lawfare.

Later in Texas as well, Democrats ginned up a case against Republican Governor Perry and weakened his presidential chances.  In 2014 Perry was indicted by a grand jury in a heavily Democrat county by a vicious Democrat prosecutor for threatening to veto a bill the Democrats liked and urging the replacement of that Democrat prosecutor after she was convicted of drunk driving and incarcerated but had refused to resign.  The courts threw out all charges against Perry as unconstitutional, but not before the Democrats had harmed his national standing and reputation.  The Democrats seem to have suffered no consequences for this malicious lawfare.

In Alaska in 2008, Democrat prosecutors ginned up a case against sitting Republican Senator Ted Stevens, which caused him to lose his upcoming election.  In the wake of the “scandal,” a Democrat won the seat in an otherwise Republican state and that Democrat cast the 60^th vote for Obamacare.  After the election, the conviction against Stevens was overturned when a Justice Department probe found evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct.  The federal judge on the case called it the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he'd ever seen.  As an aside, the Democrat federal prosecutors were part of the Bush administration, which just underscores the environment of profound Republican spinelessness in which rogue Democrats everywhere operate.  But the Democrats got what they wanted, and suffered no real consequences for this malicious lawfare. 

The cowardice of Republican leaders, who refuse to vigorously defend each other when under attack, invites more and more of these Democrat abuses.  In the movie The Untouchables Eliot Ness was advised to bring a gun if his criminal enemies brought a knife, but Republican leaders respond to knife attacks by turning the other cheek.  Obama publicly tells his Democrats to “punch back twice as hard” and “get in the faces” of their enemies, but Republicans hesitate to fight back.  Their weakness is a provocation, and, as Osama bin Laden said, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they are naturally drawn to the former.  This sordid story of Democrat misconduct and Republican spinelessness explains, more than any one single issue, the popularity of Donald Trump.  As Lincoln said of Grant, “he fights!”

As the illegally-targeted Wisconsin Republicans pick up the pieces of their lives and livelihoods, the Democrats have moved on and are scouting their next targets.  

R Balsamo

Death of a Republic – the American Experiment is Over

Not for nothing have so many referred to the United States as “the American Experiment.”  After tens of thousands of years of rule by kings and queens, dictators and tyrants, aristocrats and oligarchs, it’s been an open question whether a people could maintain a constitutional republic, where no one is above a just law fairly and equally applied, such that at the founding, Benjamin Franklin said to the American people “you have a republic, if you can keep it.”  The experiment is over.

There is a law against being “grossly negligent” in the handling of classified material, which must be kept secret as a matter of national security.  On July 5, when the embers from Independence Day celebrations still glowed and the latest memories of this most special American celebration were still fresh, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one James Comey, stepped up to a microphone in Washington, DC, and began talking.  His FBI team had just completed its investigation of alleged serious national security breaches by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State in the Obama Administration.  Comey, himself an Obama appointee, recited a litany of findings that he described showed “extreme carelessness” in the way Clinton and her subordinates handled classified material.  Furthermore, he recited findings that contradicted numerous Clinton statements to the American people and to Congress, under oath, about her handling of classified material. 

Astoundingly, but sadly not surprisingly, Comey then blew smoke over the whole matter. He began talking about “intent” to compromise national security, although intent is not a requirement to be found guilty of mishandling classified information.  He said there was no clear evidence that Madame Hillary had any intent to compromise national security, although, he said, her email correspondents had their email traffic with Madame Hillary hacked by nefarious outsiders.  Never mind that Madame Hillary quite intentionally set up her own unsecured personal server for all of her government emails, contrary to rules and common sense, presumably in order to keep secret her dealings with foreign and domestic moneymen (otherwise known as Clinton Foundation donors) in a pay-to-play criminal operation.  She then lied repeatedly to the American people and then to Congress, under oath, that she never received or passed along classified information.  We know of many of her lies because the FBI has found them out.  Madame Hillary has had intent from the start in this sordid affair.

How’s this for the way Madame Hillary cared for precious national secrets? – “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.  We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent.  She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.  Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account.”  Possible?  Rather, a near-certainty. 

But against the evidence and against common sense, Comey then concluded that Madame Hillary had no “intent” to compromise national security, reading the requirement of intent into a statute that only requires gross negligence.  Comey said Clinton and her people were, in their ongoing security transgressions, “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” as if that isn’t gross negligence.  (As an aside, one might ask – if Comey really wanted to clear Hillary Clinton completely, why did he recite her long list of transgressions?  Answer:  because he and the Obama people feared that one still-patriotic FBI agent would go public with it all, so better to bring out all the dirty laundry proactively and then play it down.  A classic trial attorney strategy.) 

To cement the conclusion that this was a political decision to “clear” Madame Hillary of patently illegal (and traitorous) activity, if more evidence is even needed, Comey two days later admitted under oath, responding to pointed questions by certain Congressmen skilled in eliciting the truth from reluctant witnesses, that the FBI did not put Madame Hillary under oath when they questioned her – a shocking admission of a shocking omission.  Furthermore, they shockingly did not record the question and answer session, so there will never be a video or transcript to prove up any false statements.  And the FBI acknowledges but waves away other illegal behavior, such as Clinton’s admission that she shared her emails, many determined by the FBI to contain classified information, with her lawyers who have no security clearance – a clear criminal act, with intent; such as evidence that emails and other electronic documents were erased after a subpoena was issued for them, which would be intentional obstruction of justice.  The FBI then said it would not recommend to the Obama Justice Department that Clinton be prosecuted for her national security breaches, and quickly thereafter the Justice Department said it was ending the matter without prosecution.  The Obama FBI and Justice Department have made it quite clear that Hillary Clinton is above the law.  Their inaction is legally indefensible and morally reprehensible.

Comey is just the latest in a long line of Americans, with Supreme Court Justice John Roberts not far in front of him, who have betrayed their oaths and betrayed the trust of the American people.  [Comey, by the way, in the Bush Justice Department was the one who appointed as Special Prosecutor in the Plame Affair one Patrick Fitzgerald, who disgraced himself (link) by turning the investigation into an unethical anti-George W. Bush witch hunt; so much for Comey’s ethics and judgement, and Bush’s as well.] 

Yes, liberals will roll their eyes over all of this and declare it all to be a molehill.  But they truly do not realize what has ended here, what line has been crossed.  The United States is entering a different era, one of the strongman politics well-known in Latin America, where laws, such as they are, only apply to the little people, the unconnected, and where the societal trust necessary to underpin any democracy is all rotted away.  These American so-called progressives, grabbers of power and privilege like all the aristocrats and oligarchs before them, who peddle their socialistic ruse to the foolable, are only in it for themselves.  American liberals have sewn the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind. 

It can be hard to pin an exact date on many shifts in history.  Just when did the Roman Republic die?  Just when did Athenian democracy wither away?  Perhaps it’s a series of corrosive events, eroding the landscape until after a sudden stumble we look up from a downward slope to see we cannot climb back up.  From now on, when asked whether one should study American law and the Constitution, a fair response would be, to quote Madame Hillary: what difference, at this point, would it make?       

R Balsamo

Brexit All About?

What is the meaning of Brexit?  This from Theodore Dalrymple, a British writer, critic, and retired physician:

For a long time, Britons who wanted their country to leave the European Union were regarded almost as mentally ill by those who wanted it to stay.  The leavers didn’t have an opinion; they had a pathology. Since one doesn’t argue with pathology, it wasn’t necessary for the remainers to answer the leavers with more than sneers and derision.

Even after the vote, the attitude persists.  Those who voted to leave are described as, ipso facto, small-minded, xenophobic, and fearful of the future.  Those who voted to stay are described as, ipso facto, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking. 

This from Megan McCardle, an American commentator and currently a Bloomberg columnist, said to be of a libertarian (small “L”) bent (although she supported Obama at least once, so consistency may not be her strong suit):

The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down….  [P]erhaps they were just unable to grasp … that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment -- a nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a new one.

In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.  [….]  …[T]he dominant tone framed [by journalists about Brexit was] as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia.

Whether Brexit will in fact lead to economic damage for Britain (or for anyone else) in the intermediate to long term is of course entirely speculative, and it seems that one could make a high-level argument that it could be of lasting benefit.  Brexit offers to me a sliver of hope for a reversal, through a spreading true-reformist counter-revolution, of the heretofore seemingly inexorable economic and cultural decline of Europe specifically and the West generally.  In the West, the cultural gulf between the elites and the hoi polloi they seek to control seems greater now than it has been in generations, if not centuries.  And of course as well, the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, bien-pensant transnational-minded elites will try to reverse the effects of this vote – after all, the morlocks cannot have their way.

R. Balsamo

Illinois State Workers, the Highest Paid in America. And the Happiest? – Not

So today I drove over to the state Dept of Motor Vehicles to get a new license plate sticker for my car.  My current sticker was expired – two months ago, which I noticed just the other day.  In the past, the Illinois Secretary of State sent out reminder post cards about the need to renew one’s 12-month plate sticker.  But due to a budget crisis in Illinois, as I now have learned, the Secretary of State is no longer does that.  One more thing to keep track of. 

Quite coincidentally, just this morning I read a brief report from the Illinois Policy Institute, a good-government watchdog organization.  Here’s a part of that message:

For years, Illinois taxpayers haven't been represented at the bargaining table between Illinois' largest government union and the state.  Illinois' former governors cared more about appeasing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees than protecting the taxpayers the governors were supposed to represent.  That's how AFSCME workers have become some the highest-compensated state workers in the nation.

    

AFSCME wants to remove the governor from contract negotiations because union officials know [Gov.] Rauner will not agree to [their] outrageous demands.  Union leaders are demanding $3 billion in additional salary and benefits for union members in a new contract.  They're seeking four-year raises ranging from 11.5 to 29 percent, overtime after 37.5 hours of work per week, five weeks of vacation and enhanced health care coverage.  Those additional demands would come on top of the costly benefits that AFSCME workers already receive.

Here are four facts about [Illinois] state-worker compensation the union doesn’t want taxpayers to know:

1. Illinois state workers are the highest-paid state workers in the country [when compensation is adjusted for the cost of living]

2. AFSCME workers receive Cadillac health care benefits

3. Most state workers receive free retiree health insurance

4. Career state retirees on average receive $1.6 million in pension benefits. [O]ver half of state workers end up retiring in their 50s.

State of Illinois workers should be the happiest on earth.  Every Illinois state government facility should be filled with beaming, cheerful workers that would put Disney World, the erstwhile “Happiest Place on Earth,” to shame.  But for some reason, when at the Illinois DMV today it was clear I wasn’t at Disney World.

By the way, the State of Illinois is functionally bankrupt, as are the City of Chicago and the Chicago Public School System, all long-controlled by Democrats and all of which are kept afloat through financial chicanery and legerdemain.  But, as the saying goes, they have all finally run out of other people’s money, and the slight-of-hand isn’t working any longer.  But don’t try to tell that to the Democrat government worker unions.

The Decline and Fall of Us – Dispatch from Peggy Noonan

Ms. Noonan has gotten lots of things wrong in recent years, particularly her infamous support for Obama in 2008 after she became infatuated by the mirage of a man she had concocted of her own fantasies.  Recently she sobered up to write the following trenchant piece pointing out that modern intolerant progressives have pushed regular Americans to their limit, and have no idea of what the reaction might be:

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left.  This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits.  We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it.  It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined.  It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.  This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.  Don’t make them bake the cake. ... Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is.  That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable.  They don’t know what they’re grinding down.   They think America has endless give.  But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

The Decline and Fall of Us – Dispatches from the Front Lines

Laugh or cry – or both?  At Indiana University, some students freak out when they mistake a Dominican priest in his white robes and long rosary for a KKK Klansman with a whip.  They don’t know what a priest and a rosary look like – ignorant enough of culture, religion, and history to be supporters of socialist Bernie Sanders.  The Dominican priest serves at the on-campus St. Paul Catholic Center, IU’s Catholic Church and student center.

There's no money in toilets.  Online payment-processor PayPal is cancelling a planned expansion in North Carolina because that state has a new law that basically says a person must use the toilet and shower room that corresponds to his or her genitalia, to prevent exposed adult males mixing with young girls, teens, and adult women who might not fully appreciate such a display.  Paypal standing up for the rights of transvestites to bare their genitals to members of the opposite sex!  Otherwise, discrimination!  Meanwhile, in what will be no surprise to any sentient being who's been paying attention, Paypal (like Apple [which is led by a gay man]) has centers in many countries that execute homosexuals (see link).  To sum up:  According to Paypal executing homosexuals is OK, but males have a right to be naked in girls’ locker rooms.  

Learning from the masters.  The California Attorney General is a supporter of and donator to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.  She has now sent "investigators" to raid and harass a film maker who recently helped expose Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling body parts from aborted babies to biotech research firms.  As one PP staffer said to one undercover filmmaker, livers are in real demand and will cost extra.  The AG has learned from the master, when Obama sent the FBI to arrest a Coptic Christian film maker who had made a short video critical of Islam on some pretense so he and Hillary had someone to blame for the muslim terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the ambassador.    

Woman or man – what's the diff, really? (see above.)  Liberal Time Magazine, thinking it can fool the hoi polloi into thinking it’s an intelligent and high-brow source, proclaims Evelyn Waugh as one of the most-read female writers among college students.  Personally, I’ve much enjoyed his Brideshead Revisited, and the great miniseries film of it that made Jeremy Irons a star.

R Balsamo

The Twilight of Chicago and the Democrat Model of Government

The days of reckoning draw near for the effectively bankrupt City of Chicago, after more than 50 years of financial corruption by the ruling Democrat Party.  Two baleful news items about the city hit the wires today.

First, the Illinois Supreme Court today declared unconstitutional, under the state constitution, a plan by the desperate Chicago Democrat mayor to reduce some public employee pension payments.  The major driver of Chicago’s financial disaster is the massive annual payment required to fund the current pension plan for retired and active employees.  The mayor’s plan runs afoul of the public employees pension protection provision of the Illinois constitution, says the high court, a provision snuck in by Democrats when the state constitution was rewritten in 1970.  Now those generous pensions – far better than those in the private sector, aggrandized by various abuses such as the notorious and common practices of “pension spiking” and “double dipping,” and underfunded for years by the Democrats themselves who spent the money on other stuff for themselves – have bankrupted the city (as well as the state and many of its cities and other units of government).  To raise cash, Chicago Democrats last year enacted a massive property tax hike, and after today more such increases are likely to follow as the Democrat takers squeeze more and more cash from the producers.  But a greedy parasite that kills the host off which it lives ultimately causes its own death as well.  Chicago and Illinois Democrats have been doing that in slow motion, having learned nothing from the smoldering ruins of the Democrat Party paradise of Detroit. 

Second news item – the top headline today at the website of the now ultraliberal, Democrat-friendly Chicago Tribune:  “Chicago area sees greatest population loss of any major U.S. city, region in 2015.”  Just one more piece of evidence that Democrats have yet to realize that many tax-paying citizens and businesses can simply move away when they have had enough.   More and more workers are work-at-home and thus can live anywhere, and retirees can also pack up and leave for states with less corruption and lower taxes.  And all that is happening.        

The lesson that Democrat takers have yet to learn is that they must control their greed and corruption, since the producers, the people who work to support them in their corrupt excesses, can move away, and a city left with only Democrats trying to live off each other soon collapses. 

R Balsamo

Organized Mob Action Disrupts Trump in Chicago; Cruz Goes Off the Rails

Yesterday evening, an organized mob action disrupted, with some minor violence, a planned rally in Chicago for leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.  The disruption was promoted via social media.  It is politely being called a “protest” by its defenders, but it was nothing of the sort.  Many Trump haters were inside the building and began their disruption there; they were not just peacefully protesting outside.  People have a right to peaceful protest, but not a right to disrupt and prevent others from speaking.  This was massive criminal behavior that the Chicago police seemingly did little to stop.  Watching this on TV one could see among the protesters sombreros, “Muslims Against Trump” t-shirts, Mexican flags, and Bernie Sanders posters, among other things.    

Trump haters say this was democracy in action, and that Trump brought this on himself by his condoning of violence against his opponents.  But that is a lie.  Rightly or wrongly, he has only condoned violence, on a few occasions with off-hand remarks in the heat of the moment, against violent disrupters at his rallies who are assaulting and attacking his supporters.  That is self-defense.  He has not suggested or encouraged his supporters to roam the streets causing trouble for others.  Trump holds rallies, and the anti-Trump mob comes to him, to prevent him from speaking and to assault his supporters.  These neo-fascists are attacking him, not vice versa.  Conservatives and Republicans do not do that to their opponents, they have not disrupted Clinton and Sanders rallies, and they are tired of others doing it to them.  Disruption, intimidation, assault, and battery are tactics increasingly used by neo-fascist leftist groups such as Code Pink, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter.  Of course, they are only following the guidance of Barack Obama, who famously urged his supporters to "get in the faces" of their opponents and "punch back twice as hard."  But most Americans I suspect have had enough of this.   

To blame Trump and his supporters for defending themselves inside their own rallies against violent agitators who come to disrupt their events is too much.  But that is the liberal smear right now.  Even worse, I am very, very disappointed to see that Ted Cruz has joined in that very smear, desperately seeking to score cheap political points by siding with those who hate free speech and who seek to silence their political opponents. 

This anti-democratic mob action to deprive the leading Republican presidential contender of his right to speak to his own supporters at his own rallies will likely only help Trump in public opinion and hurt the anti-democratic liberal fascists.  I have not been a Trump supporter, but after years if not decades of failed Republican Party leadership I very much understand his appeal on some specific positions as well on his apparent willingness to politically fight hard for his convictions.  

And all this should hurt Ted Cruz as well, whom I have supported for president, who should know better than to side with the neo-fascist mob.  Who will stand up with him when the mob next comes for him?    

R Balsamo               

Liberal Political Correctness & Weak Republican Leadership Continue to Strengthen Trump

In this presidential election cycle, I’m for Ted Cruz.  Nevertheless, I understand full well the appeal of Donald Trump, and how his candidacy has been created by the serial spinelessness, foolishness, and unfaithfulness of Republican Party national leaders.  Even more than his specific stance against open borders, an American wage killer and Democrat vote generator loved by the elites in both major parties, it is Trump’s projection of strength that has propelled his rise.  He refuses to apologize for American success and traditional American sensibilities.  He lets no one kick sand in his face.  Imagine, for example, if Democrat operative Candy Crowley, masquerading as a TV debate “journalist,” improperly intervened in a presidential candidate debate, with misinformation to boot, to protect Obama against Trump.  Unlike the weak Romney, Trump would have ripped her apart.  But she would have known his strength beforehand, and wouldn’t even have tried.  As the saying goes, weakness is a provocation.   

Now some kook allegedly in the KKK, which historically has been the militant wing of the Democrat Party and whose notable leaders through the years have all been Democrats, supposedly “endorsed” Trump.  Thus the liberal media is all atwitter demanding that Trump say nasty things about the KKK.  The tactic is obvious – make an association between the KKK and the Republican Party in the minds of fools and the foolable, and keep peppering Trump, and other Republican candidates, with this “issue” as a distraction and a smear.  No one really thinks Donald Trump cares about the handful of Democrats in what’s left of the KKK.  But new Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, perhaps the greatest and fastest political disappointment in a generation and BFF with the nasty, open-border Hispanic racist politician Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, taking his cue from Democrats now demands Trump and other Republicans denounce all bigoted groups, as if Republicans were somehow connected with them and responsible for them.  One of Trump’s most appealing characteristics is that he aggressively rejects biased premises.  Here, the Democrat smear is that many Republicans are crypto-bigots, so their leaders must publicly denounce any and all bigots; Trump rejects the premise, while Ryan accepts it.  Ryan is a foolish man, and a lousy retail politician.  Challenge Trump on issues and on character, not with smears – it just makes him more sympathetic and stronger.  Next Ryan will demand Trump denounce Adolph Hitler (who in reality was a socialist).  If Ryan was this forceful with his Democrat buddies the Republican Party wouldn’t be in the mess it’s now in.  The end result of all this Democrat-driven nonsense is more votes for Trump.        

Seeing the Democrats about to nominate Hillary Clinton, patently the most corrupt major politician in American history, whose party has weaponized government against conservatives, makes me despair for the Republic.  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  If the American experiment devolves and the era of the strongman is upon us, I certainly would prefer Trump to Clinton, any time and place.

R Balsamo