Presidents' Day LOL

 

Tyrant Trump wants the American military in our streets just like the PLA is in China, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits the use of federal troops to enforce domestic law

Maybe that all-volunteer-army idea wasn't such a great one after all.

A "large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country".  -- George Washington

The "means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home".  -- James Madison

"When once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty". -- George Mason   

 

 Trump Says He Is Prepared to Send ‘More Than the National Guard’ Into U.S. Cities 

... “We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities.” ... 

The president delivered his speech on the U.S.S. George Washington, an aircraft carrier docked south of Tokyo, at an American military base in Japan that was set up in the aftermath of World War II. It was an unsubtle show of force as Mr. Trump prepares to meet China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, this week, for talks that hold great stakes for the global economy. ...

 

The guy on the left slaughtered 60 million Chinamen, the guy on the right slaughtered a cherry tree

 

.

.

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise.

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.

Rush Limbaugh conservatism is so over, if it ever existed

The worst thing about the announcement of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton being hired by Premiere Radio Networks to fill the noon to three once occupied by Rush Limbaugh is that rushlimbaugh.com is promoting this. That wouldn't be happening without the support of Rush's widow.

Never mind what ex-CIA employee Buck Sexton agreeing to team up with this guy says about him, Travis is the last person to whom Rush's audience would ever warm:

A self-described "radical moderate" who is pro-choice and against the death penalty, Travis said he voted for former President Barack Obama twice and never voted Republican. In 2016, Travis voted for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. As an undergrad, Travis interned for U.S. Representative [Democrat] Bob Clement for four years while in college at George Washington University. In 2000, he worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. Travis was hired to work on U.S. Representative [Democrat] Jim Cooper's 2002 congressional campaign but was fired for wrecking Cooper's wife's car.

Premiere rolled the dice on this duo and came up with snake eyes. They will have to build an entirely different audience, but it sure as hell won't be a conservative one.

You couldn't have asked for a better recipe to blow-up conservative talk radio.

Looks intentional to me. Is Travis on the Democrat payroll?

Just like that EIB, like Rush Limbaugh, passes into oblivion.

New Monmouth poll shows these losers prefer Barack Hussein Obama over George Washington 63-29

Among Democratic voters, though, the “Father of Our Country” trails Obama by a 29% to 63% margin.

The lawyers suck because their PROFESSORS are even worse

Claire Thomas is director of something called the Asylum Clinic at New York Law School

Smith is at DOJ, is adjunct at George Washington and George Mason Law, was a John McCain staffer

When George Washington warned America in his Farewell about entangling foreign alliances, he meant Ukraine

The political divide in this country is in part characterized by those fanatics in both parties who have wanted to bring Ukraine into NATO, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and the cooler heads who realize NATO on the doorstep of Russia is a provocation.

That's what this is really all about.

Trump once represented the latter group, but of course he's a nincompoop who can barely string two coherent sentences together about anything. Don't expect that to change anytime soon.

The political divide is also characterized in part by those who insist America is a nation of immigrants and by those who insist on assimilation. The immigrant side unfortunately brings all the quarrels and divisions of the home countries onto American soil, which disturbs domestic tranquility.

Time for ya'll to follow our first president on this.

 

Alexandra Chalupa's timeline of her activities and of her fears about Paul Manafort's influence in Ukraine in his capacity as part of the Trump campaign isn't convincing

Alexandra Chalupa: The Ukrainian-American who exposed Manafort:

In late 2015, a small group of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian civic leaders visiting Washington, D.C. told Chalupa they had heard Manafort’s former clients in Ukraine were remobilizing again, and that Manafort had made a fortune working in Kyiv. ...

It was around this time that Chalupa started to develop a gut feeling that Manafort was poised to help Trump’s bid for the White House. ...

By early 2016, Chalupa notified a senior DNC executive that a political spin doctor who had worked against America’s interests for the pro-Kremlin Yanukovych and was linked to some of the most powerful Russian oligarchs serving Putin was to play an important role in the effort to get Trump elected. ...

On March 28, The New York Times broke the story that Manafort had joined the Trump campaign.

The problem with this timeline and Chalupa's obsession with Manafort's Ukraine connection is that Manafort's overture to Trump to come on to the campaign didn't come until February 29, 2016, according to The New York Times. And the overture came at the urging of Trump's close friend Tom Barrack, who wanted Manafort to help a flailing and inexperienced Trump by managing successfully the potentially explosive upcoming Republican convention in Cleveland. Manafort's Republican political experience dating from 1976 onwards is well known.

Chalupa would have had no reason to believe Manafort would suddenly become active in the Trump campaign in late 2015 and early 2016, as she claims, when it wasn't until sometime in mid-February 2016 that Tom Barrack made his pitch to Manafort.

It is more likely that Manafort became the convenient focus for Chalupa after the fact when all along it was opposition to Trump's proposed opening to Russia which motivated her activism and overtures to the DNC long before Manafort came on the scene.

There is absolutely nothing in this puff piece in The Kyiv Post about Chalupa's longstanding loyalty to and work for the Clintons.

Alexandra Chalupa is at the nexus of what has become the criminalization of a foreign policy difference between Trump Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and NeverTrumpers on the other, like John McCain who was notably famous for his deep involvement in the political dispute in Ukraine.

George Washington tried to warn us about the consequences of entangling foreign alliances, and those have been Exhibit A for the last two years.

Unlike Obama Beto's doing his apology tour BEFORE he gets elected, and right here in the USA instead of abroad

Meanwhile, a person who doesn't "know that anyone is born for an office or a position" followed by "I certainly am not" might possibly be open to the legitimacy of hereditary kingship.

George Washington would have skipped the cherry tree and come after this guy with an axe.

True believers are piling on Cernovich in defense of Christianity much like defenders of socialism pile on its critics

True believers say Catholic pedophile priests, Catholic betrayals of its own supporters, and legalized licentiousness everywhere are not representative of Christian civilization, much in the same way that the left has said perennially that Stalin's crimes in Russia and Maduro's in Venezuela, et cetera, do not represent real socialism.

The true believer dies hard because ideology, whether it's religious or not, is the opiate of the people, blinding it to the reality staring it in the face.

And the reality of Islam is that it exalts servility to a religious principle.

George Washington, dear friends, would not take the Lord's Supper, nor kneel in church. The father of our country, first in the hearts of his countrymen for many reasons, including those.

Indirect deaths from hurricanes from 1963-2012 numbered 1,418 but Maria in Puerto Rico alone caused 2,911?

My mother died of old age related heart failure two days after Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana in 2008:

48 deaths in the state of Louisiana were blamed on Hurricane Gustav. Five were due to falling trees, two due to a tornado and the rest were indirect deaths.

My mother wasn't counted among the 41 indirect deaths in Louisiana, for the main reason that she died in a different state.

But . . .

Hurricane Fatality Reports Leave Out Thousands of Indirect Deaths, According to New Study:

Looking at 59 hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin from 1963 through 2012, the study found that those systems killed a combined 1,803 people directly – by forces like flooding and airborne debris that were caused by the storm itself. But there were also a slew of lingering impacts that proved deadly in those storms, which caused 1,418 "indirect" deaths, according to the findings. ... Nearly half of the indirect deaths attributed to these 59 hurricanes were heart attacks, according to the study's data. Automobile accidents were also a major threat to life, whether the crashes occurred during evacuation or after the storm.

So we're supposed to believe tonight that about 2,911 (2,975-64) Puerto Ricans died indirectly in consequence of one storm (Maria) over the next six months according to the new math of George Washington University and Harvard University when over the course of nearly 50 years' worth of hurricanes indirect deaths for all storms combined came to just 1,418.

Sure we are.

Habeas corpus: Puerto Rico study showing 2,975 deaths not "a traditional death-toll accounting"

Normally one counts up the bodies, makes a list and checks it twice. But nothing in Puerto Rico is normal.

Reported here:

Researchers at George Washington University determined last month that Hurricane Maria alone resulted in 2,975 'excess deaths' in Puerto Rico. 

That finding wasn't the result of a traditional death-toll accounting, but a public health study that compared mortality in the six months following the storm with the number of deaths that would have been expected if it had not hit the island.  

'The difference between those two numbers is the estimate of excess mortality due to the hurricane,' the scientists wrote. 

The Hill: "Puerto Rico's government raised its official death toll which previously sat at 64"

But the culture of complaint that is Puerto Rico wasn't satisfied with the low number, so they commissioned a study to add deaths six months out from the post-hurricane period:

[A] George Washington University study commissioned by Puerto Rico's governor examin[ed] the effects of Maria in the six months following landfall in September 2017.

The long time period was used to determine the hurricane's lingering effect on deaths on the island. It compared the death rates in the post-hurricane period to other periods not affected by natural disasters.

Only in the minds of lunatics is the number of deaths from Maria 1,175 worse than from Katrina (1,800 estimated total deaths). This new methodology of liberal math is just in time for the politics of the current hurricane season, and coincides with Obama's ridiculous claim that this economic recovery is his, not Trump's.

The story is here.

Trump doubles down on autocratic rule in China, says "I think it's great"

If you're not offended by Trump's casual flaunting of the seriousness of his role as "leader of the free world" by now, then you are as un-American as he is and deserve to be ruled by a dictator.

Watch for Rush Limbaugh to dismiss this as just yet one more instance of Trump trolling his mostly liberal opposition in order to dominate the news cycle.

The news cycle.

That remark by the press during the 2016 campaign that Trump could shoot someone in the street and still get elected has drilled itself down into Trump's brain and has become a veritable axiom and exemplar to Trump about his invulnerability, which explains the freedom with which he has so many times gone off the reservation of his own supposedly strongly held beliefs: "They say I have the most loyal people -- did you ever see that? -- where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters".

Obviously, he doesn't have any strongly held beliefs, except the belief in his own greatness which his twisted sense of self has from the beginning latched on to in the flimsiest of quarters, the news cycle.  

From the story here:

"He's now president for life, president for life. And he's great," Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump's remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday," Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.

It is not clear if Trump, 71, was making the comment about extending presidential service in jest. The White House did not respond to a request for comment late Saturday.

U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, said on Twitter that "whether this was a joke or not, talking about being President for life like Xi Jinping is the most unAmerican sentiment expressed by an American President. George Washington would roll over in his grave."

Everyone named Jefferson or Washington better change your name quick

You could be next.

The American Revolution: Not an upheaval, but a return, a restoration

From the story here:

First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention, General George Washington.

Trump resurrects Bush's idiotic war on evil ideology

Trump, quoted here:

'This wicked ideology must be obliterated – and I mean completely obliterated – and the innocent life must be protected. All innocent lives. Life must be protected.'

"The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal," Bush said in 2011 after Osama bin Laden was assassinated by Obama.

How long is long term? 6 years? 10 years? 16 years in Afghanistan and Iraq? The better ideology isn't working too well, is it?

You don't defeat ideas. You defeat the people who have them, and keep them out of your society. You know, like a Muslim ban.

But no, we're "rights" absolutists and can't bring ourselves to infringe the rights of those who want to kill us.

That's the ideology that is killing us.

Living in the West should be viewed as a privilege, which then distributes the rights. Lose the privilege, and lose the rights.

Our real enemy is libertarians and liberals who think every man, woman and child in the world is entitled to come here, live here and enjoy the benefits previous generations bled and died to ensure for themselves.

The Manchester bomber is not equal to George Washington.

Congress sucks: Let's make it bigger!

As we all know, Congress sucks.

About only 17% of Americans approved of the Congress in 2016 according to Gallup, which is indicative of the historical lack of esteem for it. The average is just 31% approval since 1974. Real Clear Politics has its own tracker here, going back only to 2009. It is a composite of various polls, yielding an even lower average of 14.5% approval than Gallup's current 18%.

You get the idea. At best only about a third of the people approve of the job Congress is doing at any given time. And the top reasons given are 1) gridlock, bickering, not compromising and 2) not getting anything done, not making decisions.

So why make Congress bigger?

In a word, to make it more representative, end the gridlock and get something done.

In short, make Congress overwhelmingly Republican . . . because the country is.

Currently, just 435 congressmen and women represent districts unnaturally carved out of America's 3,144 counties, parishes, boroughs, census areas, independent cities and the District of Columbia.

I say unnaturally carved out because after every census the gerrymandering fight begins to redraw the congressional district lines to favor incumbents of the party in power whose boundaries transgress all over those counties, parishes, boroughs, census areas, independent cities and DC.

We've already got all these boundaries and units that go back to the beginning of the country in many cases, so we don't need these 435 fake Congressional districts anymore.

My own county with a population of just over 600,000 is carved up by two congressmen who each represent over 700,000 spanning many other counties. That doesn't make any sense.

The constitution never intended this.

It intended representation to grow with population, but in the 1920s Congress saw a loophole and fixed representation at the then current 435. There's nothing magic about 435. Why not 439? 394? 943? Did Moses decree 435? George Washington? The founders never settled the question, but they never intended representation to stop growing with population. If we followed an early formula, we'd have one Congressman for every 50,000 people. That would mean 6,473 in the US House today!

Ever since the 1920s we've been treated to an increase in oligarchy where just 218 votes are needed to ram something down the throats of more and more people.

You know, like Obamacare, which was passed without a single Republican vote.

Meanwhile Republicans just showed that they own the grassroots politically, winning the counties 2623 to 489. Here's the map that shows that, from brilliant maps dot com:

If you want to end the gridlock and get something done, reform the Congress to represent the country for a change. Abolish the Congressional districts, and elect representatives to the US House from every county across this land.

You say you want a revolution . . ..

The difference between conservative talk radio and Donald J. Trump is basically religious

Conservative talk radio accepts the rules but Donald J. Trump flouts them.

He's a good Protestant, and a great American: The father of our country, George Washington, refused to take communion, and wouldn't kneel in prayer.

The GOPe can write all the rules they want, and then they can rewrite them.

Better get started.