Archive for the ‘corruption’ Category

How the Conservative Party has sold out Britain in BREXIT.

Saturday, September 7th, 2019

King George III and Lord North have been blamed for botching negotiations with the American colonies. Now, the same Conservative Party seems determined to botch another negotiation; with the EU. In both cases, the party and negotiators were determined to keep the relationship intact, no matter how unequal.
An excellent piece in the Claremont Review explains.

Many statesmen warned from the outset that British ideas of liberty would not survive a merger with the E.U. The most eloquent early diagnoses came from the Labour Party, not the Tories. That is because the fundamental disposition of the E.U. is to favor technocratic expertise over representative government, and the Tories have not generally been the British party that placed the highest priority on the passions of the masses. In 1962, as Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was eying EEC membership, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell warned, “[I]t does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state…. It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say ‘Let it end’ but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.”

Interesting that Labour saw the danger first. In the US, the party of the Administrative State is the Democrats although both parties are heavily invested as Angelo Codevilla has pointed out.

Eventually even the reliably anti-Brexit Economist came to see that some of Britain’s major problems had arisen from constitutional meddling. David Cameron’s 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, in particular, made it much more difficult to call the general elections that would ordinarily have been provoked by the resounding repudiation of Theresa May’s withdrawal package. Blair and Cameron, the magazine noted, “came to power when history was said to have come to an end. They saw no need to take particular care of the constitution.” E.U. membership hid these problems—if Britain wasn’t paying attention to its constitution at the time, it was partly because it had been using someone else’s.

I had not realized that “Judicial Review” of laws was an American phenomenon. John Marshall has reached far into the future with his ruling in Marbury vs Madison.

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Post Mueller, what happens now ?

Monday, July 29th, 2019

The Mueller hearings were a huge disappointment to the Democrats, who were counting on scandal and impeachment to substitute for governing. Two leaders, Schiff and Nadler, seem unwilling to give up and try legislating. Schiff, who seems to most devoted to the Russia Hoax, has a darker side.

Schiff is the first Democrat since 1932 to represent the region.

He was an eloquent booster of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, seeking to put limits on some of the very expenditures that swamped his own race against former Rep. James Rogan, whom he beat by three percentage points.

(Limiting expenditures is a point Colbert needled him on. Colbert: “Isn’t that the equivalent of sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?” Schiff: “Well … I wouldn’t want to say it like that.”)

Rogan, of course was the target of massive Democrat fund raising to punish the House prosecutor for the Clinton impeachment.

That fawning “The Hill” tongue bath did not provide much for the “darker side.”

Nadler, another Clinton defender, has shed 60 pounds since his gastric bypass but he still looks about 100 pounds overweight. He is a little less strident than Schiff in public.

Where do they go from here ?

They get no help from Andrew McCarthy who demolishes their arguments.

Mueller’s anti-Trump staffers knew they were never going to be able to drive Trump from office by indicting him. The only plausible way to drive him from office was to prioritize, over all else, making the report public. Then, perhaps Congress would use it to impeach. At the very least, the 448 pages of uncharged conduct would wound Trump politically, helping lead to his defeat in 2020 — an enticing thought for someone who had, say, attended the Hillary Clinton “victory” party and expressed adulatory “awe” for acting AG (and fellow Obama holdover) Sally Yates when she insubordinately refused to enforce Trump’s border security order.

Of course, it wouldn’t be enough to get the report to Congress. The challenge was to get it there with the obstruction case still viable even though prosecutors knew they couldn’t get away with recommending an obstruction indictment. How to accomplish this? By pretending that the OLC guidance prevented prosecutors from even making a charging decision.

This resulted in the Ted Lieu question and Mueller’s answer which he had to retract after the break.

It is becoming more and more apparent that Mueller’s ‘assistant” prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann is the lead conspirator in the coup.

Weissmann is distinguished by his abysmal record as a corrupt prosecutor in several cases.

A lawyer representing whistleblowers referred Andrew Weissman to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG) for “corrupt legal practices”.

Weissman is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lead investigator in the Russia-Trump probe. He is the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That was Loretta Lynch’s territory. He rose through the ranks under Mueller’s stewardship.

In 2015, civil rights attorney David Schoen referred Weisman to the IG for his handling of a case targeting the Columbo crime family. Schoen said he is not a member of a political party and there is no political motivation.

Weissman was the lead attorney in the Persico trial and he withheld exculpatory evidence, a Brady violation. Schoen said he decided to revisit the nearly two-decade-long cases based on new witness information and “recent evidence that has come to light in the last several months.”

Weissman never told the defense that a prosecution witness, Gregory Scarpa Sr., was also working for years as an FBI informant. The underworld witness was nicknamed ‘Hannibal’ and the “Grim Reaper’ and committed over 100 murders.

The judge described AUSA Weissmann’s conduct as the “myopic withholding of information” and “reprehensible and subject, perhaps, to appropriate disciplinary measures,” according to the opinion obtained by investigative reporter Sara Carter.

He further distinguished himself with a rare Unanimous Supreme Court decision reversing his conviction of Arthur Anderson in the Enron case.

With a brief, pointed and unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction for shredding Enron accounting documents as that company was collapsing in one of the nation’s biggest corporate scandals.

The court held that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury failed to require the necessary proof that Andersen knew its actions were wrong.

But the decision represents little more than a Pyrrhic victory for Andersen, which lost its clients after being indicted on obstruction of justice charges and has no chance of returning as a viable enterprise. The accounting firm has shrunk from 28,000 employees in the United States to a skeleton crew of 200, who are attending to the final details of closing down the partnership.

28,000 people lost their jobs. The prosecutor who hid evidence was Weissmann.

In the interview with Devin Nunes, Maria Bartiromo asks the ultimate question: “who was the mastermind” behind all of these intelligence operations?

Released FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller revealed the remarkable trail of the 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.

On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000 in cash for future consultancy based on a $10k/month retainer.

This is a key part of the plot to destroy Trump. Read the whole thing. In fact, Papadopoulis’ book is a good place to start.

The agriculture war.

Saturday, May 11th, 2019

We are entering a period when the tariff controversy with China is getting serious.

The Wall Street Journal is worried.

A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs.

The U.S. raised punitive tariffs to 25%, from 10%, for $200 billion in goods leaving China on Friday and thereafter. President Trump also ordered staff to begin the paperwork to impose levies on the more than $300 billion worth of everything else China sells to the U.S.

While Beijing has met previous volleys of tariffs from the U.S. by raising duties on American goods—and the government has promised to retaliate—it held its fire. Though China has more limited tariff options, since it imports fewer products from the U.S. than the other way around, the Chinese leadership is also constrained by an economy that is in a shaky recovery from a sharp slowdown.

There is talk of China boycotting US farm products. They tried it a year ago.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war.

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.”

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans.

The boycott failed.

“China has to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans,” Oil World said in its latest newsletter. “The South American supply shortage will make it necessary for China, in our opinion, to import 15 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in October 2018/March 2019, even if the current trade war is not resolved.”

China may not be in good shape to handle a trade war.

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Vote Fraud will be the deciding factor in 2020.

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2019

The Democrat Party has been perfecting their techniques of voter fraud for many years. In 1960, the presidential election was determined by vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. Chicago has a long history of stolen elections. It is a joke to many Chicago residents but Chicago determines Illinois’ electoral votes.

Chicago is famous for its history of people voting from the grave and for helping President John F. Kennedy “steal” the 1960 election. (JFK beat Richard Nixon by 9,000 votes in Illinois by capturing what some considered a suspiciously high 450,000 advantage in Cook County.)

Officials insist voter fraud has largely disappeared in Chicago, but Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has said voter fraud and “horrendous” things happen in Chicago.

The city’s election history is even crazier than most people realize, though, with Republican feuds leading to homes being bombed and names being stolen from tombstones just to get extra votes for the “Democratic Machine.”

Texas was just as bad in the days when it was run by Democrats. San Antonio was particularly famous as a corrupt fief of George Parr, a political boss. Lyndon Johnson used his influence with that boss to win the Senate election of 1948 and the presidential election of 1960.

A study of Lyndon B. Johnson provides new evidence that the 36th President stole his first election to the United States Senate, in 1948.

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found.

In 1960, Lyndon proved his worth again. Those problems have also fueled continuing scholarly interest in the 1960 presidential election because of the difficulty in determining whether Kennedy really won through honest means or corrupt ones.

Scholarly analysis of the question of how Kennedy won has focused, quite rightly, on administration of the electoral process in two crucial states: Illinois and Texas. Kennedy ultimately was credited with the electoral votes of both, which gave him victory in the Electoral College tally. The problem with answering the question of how he prevailed there is twofold in nature. In Illinois, the most recent and fair-minded study (Kallina’s Kennedy v. Nixon) concludes that sufficient evidence does not exist to determine whether Chicago’s Democratic machine stole more votes there than Republicans did downstate. Texas presents a different kind of problem. A system of free and fair elections in the modern sense had not yet taken hold on the ground there in 1960. Voter fraud was fairly common, safeguards to prevent it were few, and 1960 was no different in those respects. Thus, the most dispassionate analysis of this issue from the perspective of fifty years later is that we will never know whether Kennedy really “won,” in the sense of what result an entirely honest and effective administration of the electoral process in Illinois and Texas would have produced on Election Day in 1960.

Now, we face another at-risk election. The most recent vote fraud methods include The “Motor Voter Act,” passed by a 1993 Democrat Congress and signed by Bill Clinton and which included voter registration with driver’s license renewal. No proof of citizenship is required and states like California have now legalized drivers’ licenses for illegals, facilitating non-citizen voting. In 2018, some precincts in California had 114% voter turnout, reminiscent of Philadelphia. Also, 11 California counties have more registered voters than citizens.

Judicial Watch says 11 counties in California are in violation of a section of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to do a “reasonable list maintenance” of voter registration lists.

To support its argument, it compares population numbers in the 2011-2015 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to California’s registered voters — which combines those on active and inactive voter lists. By that calculation, 11 counties have more total registered voters than adults over the age of 18.

“In our experience, these kinds of registration rates indicate a failure to comply with the voter list maintenance requirements of the NVRA,” the letter says, adding that such inaccuracies undermine public confidence in the electoral process.

Naturally, the California Attorney General denied this and accused Judicial Watch of “Voter Suppression.”

Other attempts at validation of voter registration, this time in Texas, resulted in harassment and attempted prosecution of those trying to control vote fraud.

Engelbrecht said shortly after founding and leading True to Vote and King Street Patriots, she was visited by law enforcement agencies and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), even though outside of filing their tax returns, she and her husband never dealt with any government agency in nearly two decades of running their small business.

“We had never been audited. We had never been investigated, but all that changed upon submitting applications for the non-profit statuses of True the Vote and King Street,” she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee.

“Since that filing in 2010, my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, my family and I have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies,” she added.

That, of course, was when Obama was president. Elijah Cummings is the Congressman who is attempting to obtain President Trump’s and his family’s financial records for a fishing expedition.

The latest method, which is related to the increasing use of mail-in ballots, is called “ballot harvesting” or Vote Harvesting”

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”

The voting system in California is so bad that a Democrat in California’s 21st district who was down by 6.4% on election night ended up winning three weeks later.

The Democrats don’t even hide their blatant voter fraud anymore – they just pass laws to make election fixing legal and the Republican party just sits back and allows it.

How does it work? Absentee ballots used to be available to those who would be unable to vote in person on election day. This has changed. Some states have 100% “mail-in” balloting. All votes are by mail and there is no way to verify if the voter is the one who fills out the ballot. A variation on this is for a “volunteer” to visit homes of voters and “offer to carry the ballot to the polling place.” If the “Volunteer” happens to be a Democrat activist who visits only homes with Democrat registration, 100% voter turnout for Democrats is assured. There are even a few instances where the “Volunteer” visits a home where a Democrat voter resides along with a Republican voter or two. The “Volunteer” accepts the Democrat ballot but not the others. Worse, the “Volunteer” might accept all the ballots but discard the ones from “the wrong party.”

This method relies on the “Motor Voter Law,” which registers low interest or illegal voters, then the passage of 100% “mail-in” ballot laws. The 2018 election was a test run of the method and it worked like a charm in Orange County CA and in Phoenix AZ, where late votes defeated Martha McSally in the Senate race. It will be ready for 2020 and Republicans had better be prepared.

The Mueller Report

Friday, April 19th, 2019

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The Mueller report was released to the public with sections redacted that apply to possible future prosecutions or Grand Jury proceedings. Naturally, this created a firestorm among Democrats hopefuls. Ans conspiracy theorists on the Left.

The actual volumes (There are two) are here.

Useful analysis is here on volume 2, which seems to be very subjective.

Another opinion.

In this sense: At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.

Everything else in the Trump-Russia affair flowed from that one question. Paul Manafort’s shady finances would not have come under investigation were it not for that question. Carter Page would not have been wiretapped were it not for that question. Michael Flynn would not have been interviewed by the FBI were it not for that question. Zillions of hours on cable TV would not have been expended on Trump-Russia were it not for that question. And in the largest sense, there would have been no Mueller investigation were it not for that question.

A more complete analysis is here.

On page 323 of the report, the special counsel acknowledges that he is aware of the origin of the Russia hoax because he quotes the president’s Aug. 24, 2018, tweet asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele and “his phony and corrupt Dossier.” But somehow neither Sessions, nor Mueller, nor anyone else has been able to put 2 + 2 together and come up with the correct answer.

Why did the investigation not end there ?

The fact that there is no mention of Steele at all in Volume 1 of the report (which covers Russian interference in the 2016 election) is shocking since it was his unverified dossier that promoted the lie that the Russians had control of Trump because they possessed compromising material on the real estate tycoon. Steele’s participation with Russian sources is the most direct evidence of Russian interference in the election, but Mueller showed no interest in it because it implicated Democrats.

Steele and his “dossier” was the reason for the FISA warrants. Oh well.

Volume 2 (which covers obstruction) does on page 235 acknowledge Steele’s existence as the source of what even Mueller calls the “unverified allegations” published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. It also notes on pages 239 and 240 that Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the phony dossier on Jan. 6, 2017, and that the briefing was subsequently leaked to the public.

Moreover, page 246 acknowledges that the president wanted the FBI to investigate Steele’s allegations on Jan. 27, 2017, but that Comey talked him out of it.

Can’t have that. It would ruin the story.

Most telling perhaps is that there is no direct reference to GPS Fusion in the entire report other than that anonymous reference by Corallo to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Nor for that matter is there any reference to the Perkins Coie law firm that was the go-between that hired GPS Fusion on behalf of the DNC to generate the phony Steele dossier.

The story will continues with lies instead of facts,

The key to the Russia hoax was the CIA’s hostility to Michael Flynn

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen.

The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor.

It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.

General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others at the civilian intel agencies chewed it over, decided what to do, and sent instructions back to the war zone. By the time all that happened, the battlefield had changed. Flynn short-circuited this cumbersome bureaucratic procedure and moved the whole enterprise to the war itself. The new methods were light years faster. Intel went to local analysts, new actions were ordered from men on the battlefield (Flynn famously didn’t care about rank or status) and the war shifted in our favor.

I read Dakota Meyer’s book. He was denied permission to accompany his Civil Affairs unit into an Afghan village because he was being punished for shooting at Taliban tribesmen firing mortar rounds into his base camp. The reason ? They were “not in uniform.” The ROE of the Obama administration saved his life as the unit he should have been with was ambushed and killed. He made attempts to rescue them, resulting in his award the Medal of Honor.

On 8 September 2009, near the village of Ganjgal, Meyer learned that three Marines and a Navy Corpsman, who were members of Meyer’s squad and his friends, were missing after being ambushed by a group of insurgents. Under enemy fire, Meyer entered an area known to be inhabited by insurgents and eventually found the four missing servicemen dead and stripped of their weapons, body armor and radios. There he saw a Taliban fighter trying to take the bodies. The fighter tackled Meyer, and after a brief scuffle, Meyer grabbed a baseball-sized rock and beat the fighter to death.[8] With the help of Afghan soldiers, he moved the bodies to a safer area where they could be extracted.[9] During his search, Meyer “personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe.”

In his account of the battle in his book, he relates how it took hours to get permission for artillery to respond to the ambush.

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California agonistes.

Tuesday, February 26th, 2019

I moved to California in 1956 to attend college. Los Angeles was a paradise. The weather was great. The traffic was no problem. I learned that the LAPD did not take bribes and was not amused at attempts to offer them. After growing up in Chicago, I had learned to put a ten dollar bill behind my drivers’ license in case I was stopped. In Los Angeles, I did so and was lectured about the consequences of offering a bribe by a stern LAPD officer.

I lived in the fraternity house and one year slept on an outside second floor porch. I had four blankets on my bed but no problem, with flies or mosquitoes. I remember flying back to Los Angeles one New Years Eve from Christmas vacation in Chicago. The palm trees told me I was home. There was a brush fire in the hills but it was nice to be back. I would sometimes drive up to Sunset Boulevard just to see the city at night. The TV show, “77 Sunset Strip” showed just what it looked like. We would drive into Hollywood and sometimes eat at Villa Frescati. We had a lot of fun. Too much fun as I lost my scholarship.

The first sign of trouble was described in Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “Mexifornia.” There was trouble before that as the Watts Riot in 1965 began the endless pandering to the angry mobs.

The Rodney King riot in 1992 was another harbinger of trouble. The LAPD officers who saved Rodney King’s life by taking him down without significant injury before Melanie Singer shot him, as she planned to do before they arrived, were rewarded with prison sentences from the second trial. Double Jeopardy was not outlawed in the Clinton Administration. By that time, I was nearing retirement as my back injury was affecting me.

I had lived in Orange County for 20 years at that point and it was still a great place to live. After my back surgery, I spent a year in New Hampshire. Had my grant come through, I might have stayed, at least for a few years. I returned thinking I might have a second career in administrative medicine. I did work part-time reviewing workers comp claims but the career in measuring medical quality never got started.

The decline of California has become more and more apparent. Even the hospital in Orange County where I had practiced for 20 years has entered a period of decline.

In 2008, we began to see the anticipation of Obamacare. Hospitals began to expect tighter margins and, being the most incompetently managed large organizations in the US, they decided to reorganize with little idea of how to do so. They expected that vertical integration would increase their profits (Which are as large in non-profits and in for-profits) so they spent millions to buy the medical practices of doctors on the staff. This put the doctors on salary and bonus systems but there was a natural conflict of interest. Doctors had for many years been the object of frustration and even hatred from hospital administrators. We don’t take orders well and many resisted the efforts of the hospital to make us order either more tests,

Doctors in urban areas, or even deeply populated suburban areas, are employees. The days of independent practice are mostly gone.
In 2017, we left California for Arizona where I had had a weekend home for years. I still subscribe to the local Orange County newspaper where I can read stories like this one, and this one.

I used to take my medical students to homeless shelters in downtown Los Angeles to see how County patients lived. Now “the homeless” are everywhere, defecating on the streets of San Francisco. A medical group, probably the American College of Surgeons, cancelled their San Francisco convention last year.

The neighborhood’s open drug use and tent encampments, among other issues, are what allegedly prompted the unidentified medical group to call it quits with SF, even though the city spends approximately $300 million to help the continuing crisis.

“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, tells San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross.

The ACS Clinical Congress has been there every three years since the 1960s. No more.

Then the neglect of infrastructure was emphasized by the 2017 Oroville Dam failure.

In February 2017, Oroville Dam’s main and emergency spillways were damaged, prompting the evacuation of more than 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River and the relocation of a fish hatchery.

Heavy rainfall during the 2017 California floods damaged the main spillway on February 7, so the California Department of Water Resources stopped the spillway flow to assess the damage and contemplate its next steps. The rain eventually raised the lake level until it flowed over the emergency spillway, even after the damaged main spillway was reopened. As water flowed over the emergency spillway, headward erosion threatened to undermine and collapse the concrete weir, which could have sent a 30-foot (10 m) wall of water into the Feather River below and flooded communities downstream. No collapse occurred, but the water further damaged the main spillway and eroded the bare slope of the emergency spillway.

This year is another wet winter and the dam has probably not been repaired. Nothing is fixed as the state declines into decrepitude.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

California ranks first among the states in the percentage of residents over 25 who have never finished the ninth grade— 9.7 percent of California residents, or about 4 million Californians. It also rates 49th in the number of state residents who never graduated from high school — or about 18 percent of the current population.

In other words, about 7 million Californians do not possess a high-school diploma, about equal to the size of the nine counties of California’s Bay Area, roughly from Napa to Silicon Valley. In some sense, inside California, there is a shadow state consisting of high-school dropouts that’s larger than 38 other U.S. states.

A large share, if not the majority, are illegal aliens.

What is going on?

Three concurrent — and yet antithetical — trends explain the malaise, though they’re rarely talked about. Indeed, one of the landmarks of the new California mentality is denial and self-righteousness that assume it is illiberal to notice that a quarter of the nation’s homeless population sleeps on California streets, or that violent crime is 20 percent higher in California than the national median, or that San Francisco ranks No. 1 in per capita property crime rates of all the nation’s largest cities.

The result ?

The Grapes of Wrath — in Reverse

Second, in the last decade and a half, about 6 million Californians over the age of 25 left the state; in the last 30 years, perhaps 10 million fled. There are no accurate statistics on the political ideologies of the departed or even their actual numbers. But most studies suggest that the reasons for radical outmigration were quality-of-life complaints, soaring home prices and taxes, poor state services, failing infrastructure and schools, and rising crime.

Joel Kotkin has a new piece in City Journal That should worry California politicians.

a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to metros with dense big cities, but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–2017 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.

They are too dense and too arrogant in their ignorance to notice.

We left and are happy in Arizona. We are close enough to drive over for birthday parties. Our home in Tucson would be more than a million dollars in Orange County if we could even find a one acre lot.Christmas lights

Tucson has an Opera and the University of Arizona is here. I am sad to see what has become of California. It was a wonderful place when I was going to college and for decades after. The insanity that has gripped the state seems to be a development of the past 25 years. Jerry Brown and his obsession with global warming is part of it. The massive influx of illegal aliens is another part. I doubt it can be salvaged in my lifetime.

The Attempted Coup is Collapsing.

Monday, February 18th, 2019

Victor Davis Hanson thinks the attempted coup d’etat is dead.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed.

The conspiracy is certainly collapsing. Where did Andrew McCabe come from ?

He was a lawyer but not a sworn agent of the FBI until 1996..

McCabe began his FBI career in the New York Field Office[18] in 1996.[20] While there, he was on the SWAT team.[21] In 2003, he began work as a supervisory special agent at the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force.[22] Later, McCabe held management positions in the FBI Counterterrorism Division,[18] the FBI National Security Branch[23] and the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

I see no evidence of any administrative roll, such as SAC or ASAC.

McCabe did not oversee the Clinton email server probe while his wife was running for office and he was excluded from FBI investigations into public corruption cases in Virginia.

Was he involved in the Clinton Foundation scandals BEFORE his wife ran for office with the assistance of Terry McAuliffe and his $700,000 ? I learned that Virginia has no rules about the use of campaign funds for personal use. She lost and and the remainder of the donation was hers.

Conservative Tree House has some more on McCabe.

Mark Penn, former Clinton campaign aide, agrees that it was an attempted coup.

The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

This is a bigger scandal than the successful Nixon coup d’etat.

The differences are two. One, Trump has no skeleton like Nixon’s aid for the burglars which opened him to accusations of coverup. Two, unlike Nixon, Trump does not care what his enemies think.

al Qeada in Congress.

Thursday, February 14th, 2019

Minnesota has elected a Somali Muslim Brotherhood representative to Congress.

She is on the Foreign Relations Committee of the House and should not be.

First of all, she committed an immigration felony by “marrying” her brother to get him into the country.

As many candidates do, Omar has made her personal background an integral part of her campaign. But neither the candidate nor the reporters who covered her have shown much interest in exploring one aspect of her personal story that recently came to public attention: the fact that she is not legally married to the man she advertises as the husband and the father of her three children. In fact, she is legally married to another man—who may be her brother.

It will be interesting to watch her progress through the Democratic Party which is more anti-American every year,

The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year,. two small activist groups planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.

groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.

The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.

“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.

The other “activist” group present was The “Indigenous Peoples March” made up of American Indian protestors.

We stand together to bring awareness to the injustices affecting Indigenous men, women and children as Indigenous peoples and lands from North, Central and South America, Canada, Pacific Islands, Oceania, Asia, Africa as well as the Caribbean diaspora are a target of genocide.

“We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.” – Malcolm Fraser

This is certainly true of those who live on reservations and maintain the primitive practices of pre-Columbian aboriginals.

That certainly was not true of Ely S Parker, who was the Colonel on US Grant’s staff who wrote out the surrender documents at Appomattox Courthouse which ended the Civil War.

Parker was born in 1828 as the sixth of seven children to Elizabeth and William Parker, of prominent Seneca families, at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).[1] He was named Ha-sa-no-an-da and later baptized Ely Samuel Parker. His father was a miller and a Baptist minister.[2] The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Ely had a classical education at a missionary school, was fully bilingual speaking Seneca as well as English, and went on to college. He spent his life bridging his identities as Seneca and a resident of the United States.

The confrontation between Indian activist Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann was staged with a cameraperson behind Phillips recording Phillips’ version of the incident. The result was a national uproar that has not settled down yet.

Fortunately for the boys, the Black Israelites had been recording their own video for an hour. It showed that Phillips approached the boys and precipitated the confrontation, which was peaceful.

The blogosphere has been correcting the record while the MSM spreads lies. That may change as the boy’s family has hired a libel attorney. Apologies are starting to roll in. I expect there will be quite a few although some media sources are doubling down.

Part of this story is the media’s war on Catholics. It might just be related to the next Supreme Court nomination.

An excellent discussion this incident has appeared today and makes some additional good points.

Mark Steyn has anatomized with his customary insight.

There is, Steyn noted, a “strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors—as in the stampede of congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times.” Just so. And here is the kicker: “Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay—which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.”

What is it with the cringing right ?

More on Catholic hate from Howie Carr.

Here are a few recent public statements by Democrats and their media pals about Roman Catholics. Consider the reaction if they’d made the same comments about, say, Muslims.

“A bunch of racist (expletive) Catholic kids … Indian Country has dealt with enough (expletive) from racist Catholics.”

“I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools.”

What if you ranted of Muslims, “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.”

Okay, all of the above vitriol was written by pampered pajama boys from, respectively, BuzzFeed, the Times and something called Vulture.