AOC epitomizes the tyrannical legislative branch, halting the growth of representation, term-limiting the president but not themselves, and now seeking to subdue the judiciary

 

AOC: Supreme Court Needs Oversight From Congress To Preserve Legitimacy, "Impeachment On The Table"

More representation for the people does not equal "bigger government and more politicians"

The last thing most Americans want is a bigger government and more politicians, yet the solution to the zero-sum redistricting game is to create more seats for the House of Representatives.

More.

The founders of this country wanted representation to GROW with population. The original formula, never ratified, would have entitled every 50,000 Americans to one representative in the House. You know, one who might actually know who the hell you are and what you think, elected by funds raised from you and not from special interests a thousand miles away?

Mostly Republicans stopped this constitutional process in 1929 by act of Congress, fixing representation at 435 in the US House. But the impulse to Congressional supremacy over the other branches of government has ever been bipartisan.

Now, the "ideal" House district represents 761,000 people. All it takes is an oligarchy of 218 to decide the fate of hundreds of millions, whose leader is a shadow president popularly known as The Speaker of the House who can serve year upon year while the real president is limited to two terms.

Such an awful outcome was never intended by the framers.

The resulting system has turned politics into a binary pressure cooker without a relief valve, threatening to explode in another civil war at any moment, if contemporary doom and gloom political rhetoric on the extremes of both sides is to be believed. 

In fact thousands upon thousands of Congressional staffers and lobbyists run everything and write the legislation, not the people through their elected representatives.

Politics is a fact of life. Aristotle taught us that man is a political animal.

Denying that fact is the surest route to the barbarism of civil war, or the present system of legislative tyranny which has saddled the American people with $30 trillion of debt. 

A bigger House is actually a smaller government where you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Australians lose their minds, news stories can't make up theirs about meaning of election

CNN: It was a stop global warming election.

The UK Express: It was a republican election to throw off the monarchy and give Australia's 2% indigenous population representation in parliament.

AP Obama: There was no clear majority as votes for "fringe parties and independents ... increases the likelihood of a hung parliament and a minority government." Counting may take another two weeks.

The Sydney Morning Herald: Labor is 4 seats short of a majority with 14 seats still to call, only 71% counted.

Joe Biden's Jul 23 phone call with Afghan President Ghani shows him unfit to be Commander in Chief, but not for the reason being trotted out

Everyone on the right is fixated on Joe Biden encouraging Ghani to paint a rosier picture to the press about the progress of the war in exchange for "aid".

In other words, Joe was trying to bribe Ghani to lie. The scenario is very reminiscent of VP Joe Biden's intimidation of the Ukrainians involving his threat to withhold US aid unless they fired a prosecutor who was looking into the Ukrainian activities of Biden's son, Hunter.

But this framing is a diversion, and a misrepresentation.

The call, to the extent Reuters has reported on it, shows Ghani reciting a litany of woe to Joe Biden about how catastrophe is imminent.

In what world does it make sense for Joe to respond to that with the offer of "aid" to a man who is clearly convinced that the end is nigh? Ghani was reciting that litany because everything was falling apart precisely because of the American pull-out. Just three weeks prior the US pulled out of Bagram in the dead of night Jul 2, from which point everything began to cascade out of control.

Ghani had to find what he was hearing from Biden incredible, in particular the promise of "continued close air support".

But close air support had already been withdrawn from Jul 2. It wasn't "continuing". It had already ended weeks prior. That was the problem, AND BIDEN DIDN'T KNOW IT. And even if he once knew it because his generals and advisers told him, HE FORGOT IT. Biden is behaving in the call as if he has resources at his command which are no longer there.

Imagine being Ghani having to deal with such unreality coming out of the mouth of the American president.

By the time of the call, Jul 23, the US withdrawal was already more than 95% complete according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, as reported by CNBC on Jul 21:

At the Pentagon on Wednesday, the nation’s highest military officer told reporters that the U.S. has completed more than 95% of the herculean task of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

“The sheer volume of movement involved in this operation has been extraordinary,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, adding that the U.S. conducted more than 980 airlifts of cargo in less than three months.

“Furthermore, all the military operating bases, outside of Kabul, have been fully transferred to the Afghan Ministry of Defense and the Afghan security forces.”

Joe Biden was in no position to act as Commander in Chief in Afghanistan on Jul 23 because there was nothing left to command. In truth, he hasn't been fit since before the election, during which he campaigned from the safety of a bunker, protected by the media in the tank for him.

His unfitness for the duties of the office is self-evident to anyone paying attention day to day, except that everyone pretends not to see.

They just smile and pass.

But Ghani didn't pretend. He prepared himself an out. That's why he escaped and is alive today and living in the UAE.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is living in la la land.

Hey Bernie, it's been an oligarchy since 1929, a legislative oligarchy, when you assholes stopped growth of representation in the US House

330,000,000/50,000 = 6,600 members of the US House, not 435.

Article the first. ....  After the first enumeration required by the first Article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which, the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

The idiots at Vox don't know that the constitution specifies a minimum congressional district size of 30,000

Here:

"Literally nothing in the Constitution prevents Congress from admitting the Obama family’s personal DC residence as a state — a state which would then be entitled to two senators, one member of the House, and exactly as much say on whether the Constitution should be amended as the entire state of Texas."

Article I, Section 2.3:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;

You can't have two per thirty thousand, that is, one per fifteen thousand, let alone one representative for just four people.

It doesn't occur to the idiots at Vox, nor Harvard Law whence the idea comes, that the main problem with the federal government is that the US House concentrated power in its hands decades ago by stopping the growth of representation. It's been on a spending spree ever since, picking the taxpayers' pockets.

Why do you think we have a $23 trillion debt?

Giving Obama his own representative just makes the Obama family more like Wyoming, our least populous state, which already has too much representation relative to California according to these liberals.

The feds grabbed this power by fixing the number of representatives at 435 way back in 1929, contrary to the intent of the constitution, which required a census every ten years in order to add representatives to the US House as the country grew in size. The original First Amendment to the constitution would have fixed the formula at one per fifty thousand, giving us over 6,000 representatives by today. It failed ratification by just one vote. The bastards finally realized this loophole in 1929 and pulled a power play.

Yes, maybe some mega states like California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio should be carved up to add states to the union and increase representation that way. Northern Californians and Southern Illinoisans already feel this way.

But carving up DC into a bunch of states? Really? It has about 705,000 residents total, less than the current average size of one US congressional district. If it were a state, the most representatives it should have today would be fourteen, but under the current way it's done, just one.

And the Obama family doesn't get its own private Representative to the US House, not while we're alive anyway. He got to be president for eight years. He can cast his useless vote now like everyone else.

What a farce is Vox. 

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issues rare public order rebuking FBI misconduct, acknowledges Americans cannot trust the FBI

This order responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI's case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. citizen named Carter W. Page. When FBI personnel mislead NSD in the ways described above, they equally mislead the FISC. ... The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above. The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.

Read the whole thing here.

Joe Biden has been lying for a decade that a drunk driver killed his first wife and child

Police determined that Biden’s first wife drove into the path of Dunn’s tractor-trailer, possibly because her head was turned and she didn’t see the oncoming truck. Dunn, who overturned his rig while swerving to avoid a collision, ran to the wrecked car and was the first to render assistance. Police filed no charges against Dunn, who at that time lived in North East, Md. with his wife, Ruby, and their seven children. Biden has been alluding to alcohol being involved in the crash for nearly a decade. During a speech in 2001, Biden told an audience at University of Delaware that a drunken driver crashed into his family. He told a similar story during a public appearance in 2007. More recently, the vice presidential candidate’s misrepresentation of Dunn has found its way into major newspapers, including the New York Times. It also has been repeated on radio and on television by major news journalists, including CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric.

At least he didn't say she was killed because she was pregnant.

More here.

Robin Munro: The Tiananmen massacre was not primarily of the students, rather the workers, not in the Square but citywide in Beijing

Remembering Tiananmen Square:

Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. ... By May 17, the sight of as many as 2,000 idealistic young students collapsing from heat and starvation brought more than a million ordinary Beijing citizens into the square in a moving display of human solidarity. “The students speak on behalf of all of us,” they would tell any foreigner who cared to listen. 

Having been passive spectators, the laobaixing now began to act as a bastion of active support for the students, bringing food and other supplies to the square on a round-the-clock basis. This specter of emerging cross-class solidarity led directly to the authorities’ decision to impose martial law in Beijing on May 20. ...

Action groups formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. ... The laobaixing were now in a posture of peaceful, nonviolent but direct confrontation with the government and army, and similar “turmoil”—to use the party’s term—rapidly emerged in dozens of other cities. Moreover, the laobaixing were beginning to articulate their own grievances. ...

However, the birth of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation a few days after the abortive imposition of martial law posed a much greater threat. That is because this group, headquartered in a couple of scruffy tents in the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square, raised an issue that had been taboo in China since 1949: the right of workers to engage in independent labor organization and self-representation. Such a demand struck at the very core of the Chinese Communist state, for the party’s main claim to legitimacy is that it rules in the name and interests of the “laboring masses.” Although its active membership remained relatively small, its formal membership soared during the first few days of June, reaching a peak of more than 10,000 enrollments after three of its leaders were secretly arrested on May 29.

Autonomous workers’ groups quickly sprang up in most of China’s major cities. This was the “cancer cell” that the authorities had feared from the outset would appear if legal recognition were ever to be conferred on the student organizations. In the government’s eyes, if the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, erected in the square at the end of May, represented the arrogant defiance of the students and the symbolic intrusion of “bourgeois liberalism” and “Western subversion” into the sacred heart of Communist rule, the crude red-and-black banner of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, not a hundred yards away from the goddess, represented the terrifying power of the workers awakened.

Both had to be crushed, and the rapidly defecting party apparatus had to be frightened and shocked back into line.

Hey Thomas Sowell, the only person who has been term limited is precisely the wrong person to term limit

Foreign dictators like Xi Jinpingpong know they can outlast 2-term US Commanders in Chief and get away with bloody murder.

The founders didn't believe in term limits, otherwise we'd already have had them in the Constitution, but they did believe in the natural growth of representation, which a tyrannical, power hungry Congress voted to stop in 1929.

Fix that and we can vote the bastards out a lot more easily than we can now. It wouldn't take $10 million to win a lousy House seat representing thirty, forty or fifty thousand people as originally intended like it does now for districts representing on average 757,000 people, and it wouldn't if we also required all campaign money to originate in the respective districts of the representatives (states for Senators). 

#RepealAmendment22

#RescindReapportionmentActOf1929

Justin Amash has never abandoned his principles, and neither has the Devil

If Justin Amash cared one wit about the Constitution, he'd have spent the last ten years in Congress trying to restore the natural growth of representation guaranteed by Article One of the Constitution which a tyrannical legislative took away from the people by the Reapportionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of districts at 435. Justin Amash has been quite content with this power to lord his opinion over many many hundreds of thousands of people whose views he couldn't care less about, when the founders imagined a ratio of one representative to 30,000 people. You'll never hear about that from Mr. Do Everything By The Constitution. Likewise only direct taxes were Constitutional until 1913, but you'll never hear about "originalism" from Mr. Constitution, only that "What is is holy, and we must do it that way." He's an ignoramus who says is means ought, posing as a genius. All he cares about is his view, the "right" view, and getting re-elected in order to keep imposing it.

 

"Improper" drawing of congressional districts is not the problem, improper restriction of the number of districts is

To Fix Our Democracy, First End Gerrymandering:

Gerrymandering, the pervasive practice of drawing congressional districts for political purposes, owns a great deal of responsibility for the dysfunction of our government and the loss of trust among Americans in their government.

This story is a smokescreen obscuring the real problem, which is that Congress voted decades ago to stop the growth of representation. Gerrymandering is simply the problem you face after committing the offense of fixing the number of districts.

By 1930 the number of congressional districts had grown to 435, more or less naturally as required by the Constitution and the Census every ten years. The number would have kept growing, but the natural process was halted, by a bigoted, power hungry Congress.

The very people who are supposed to represent us stopped the growth of representation and fixed it at 435 in the 1920s, because they could.

The original First Amendment, never ratified with the rest of the Bill of Rights for want of but one vote, would have ensured the natural growth of representation with the natural growth of population in perpetuity by a formula. The argument was over the formula, so our forebears punted the problem, and the issue was never settled. Post-WWI, however, alarums began to sound over the expansion of the Congress to include lots of new representatives for America's burgeoning German-American population, so the Congress voted to fix representation at its then current level, 435, so they didn't have to sit next to the evil Hun in their own Capitol. (The Congress also effectively halted immigration, but that's another story).

So in 1930 one US representative held the power of the purse over 283,000 Americans, on average. Fast forward to today and a US representative can steal from 757,000 of us at a stroke, on average. How their power has grown, and how coveted the seats! Now you know why it takes $10 million to win one.

Just to get the ratio back down to 1930 levels, we'd have to have 1,163 congressional districts today instead of the 435 we do have.

Adding them would dramatically reduce the power the current 435 have over us, which is why it doesn't happen. Nancy Pelosi would have to herd 582 cats to get anything done instead of 238. And with 1,163 representatives, it's unlikely Nancy Pelosi would be the Speaker in the first place.

Redrawing the lines of this tyranny which they exercise over us isn't the solution. That's simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The power hungry House is the biggest impediment to our democracy. Ironically, a bigger House is the answer, because it returns power to the people.

Says Justin Amash, whose party stopped the growth of Congressional representation in the 1920s, consolidating legislative power in ever fewer hands (his)

The president is term-limited, you are not.

Jerusalem Post boasts 6% of the new Congress is Jewish, complains Christians are over-represented

Wait until it's full of Muslim motherf*ckers and then see how you like it.

There are 34 Jews in the House and Senate, which is 6.4% of the total 535. All but two are Democrats.

JEWISH REPRESENTATION IN CONGRESS NOW THREE TIMES THAT OF NATION AS WHOLE:

Congress as a whole is overwhelmingly Christian — even more so than the country. Seventy-one percent of Americans identify as Christian, compared to 88 percent of Congress. Both Protestants and Catholics are over-represented on Capitol Hill.

The Tobin Q ratios for Germany and America tell us Elizabeth Warren and David Dayen are wrong

Louis Woodhill, here:

Put simply, a Tobin Q ratio higher than 100% means that a company is creating economic value, and a Tobin Q below 100% means that a company is destroying value.  The most fundamental social responsibility of a company is to add value to the capital it employs, so the most fundamental job responsibility of a corporate CEO is to keep the Tobin Q ratio of the company he or she leads above 100%. 

Writing for The New Republic, progressive David Dayen argues:

“There’s proven evidence that this model of corporate governance [Warren's] can work. “Co- determination,” the term for worker representation on corporate boards, has created a form of capitalism in Germany where workers are far more equitably compensated and decisions are made with an eye toward long-term goals.”

The problem with this argument is that Piketty’s data shows that, since 1995, America’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged more than 100%, while Germany’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged about 55%.  In other words, America’s evil, rapacious corporations are creating economic value, while Germany’s enlightened companies are doing the equivalent of burning 45% of the euros entrusted to them.

Your next opportunity to pick a parasite is little more than two months away

In a truly representative republic which reflected the intent of the Founders, America would have 100 senators picked by the state legislatures, not by popular vote, and at least 6,561 members of the US House (using the ratio of 1 representative per 50,000 of population intended by Article the First, not ratified; the father of our country wanted a ratio of 1:30,000 for 10,934 members of the US House in 2018). Instead we have 100 senators and 435 representatives, and 10,840 lobbyists in 2018. The corporate takeover of the Congress was a fait accompli by 1929, thanks to Republicans.

The English today are better represented than Americans with one member of parliament to about 101,000 of population, for all the good it does them. In the US the current ratio is 1:754,092. When Republicans stopped the growth of representation once and for all in 1929, the ratio stood at about 1:280,460. Using the 1929 ratio in 2018 would mean 1,170 members in the US House instead of 435.

Surely what was good enough for 1929 is good enough for 2018, no? But good luck even with that.

"Wayne Isaac" provides a sage estimation of Richard Spencer, and much else besides

Here at American Greatness:

Spencer’s aims are rooted instead in a romantic vision of defending the volksgeist. ... Spencer is, at heart, a contrarian social critic. ... Instead of bourgeois and proletariat, we now have whites versus the marginalized. Spencer is the poster-boy archvillain of that construct. The entirety of Spencer’s argument is simply to posit the opposite of the Left: whites aren’t bad. In fact, they’re wonderful. ... [I]n the end, he is a provocateur and critic of liberalism, nothing more. Spencer’s politics are reactionary not “Progressive.” His erudition and urbanity allowed him to become the perfect representation of all the Left’s nightmares: a defender of whiteness sensible enough to be a threat but fringe enough to be safely skewered by the elite everywhere and anywhere. Spencer is a convenient Leftist boogeyman. But in the end, there is no “there” there. Spencer is wide, not deep.

We've had facts vs. alternative facts, but now Nancy Pelosi introduces "classified facts"

Which, since we're never going to be allowed to see them, mean only some people have the true but secret knowledge, right?

So we're supposed to just trust authority, you know, like her.

Nancy Pelosi is Exhibit A for the enemy in The Open Society and Its Enemies, but there are twenty-five more letters in the alphabet, and hardly enough.

Pelosi, quoted here:

"What they're putting forth is a total misrepresentation. It is false," Pelosi told CNN's Chris Cuomo. "In order to refute it, you'd have to tell the facts, and the facts are classified."

Representation as performance art: 49% of political campaign expenditures in 2016 went to media

12.1% went to fundraising, 11.2% to salaries, 9.4% to administrative costs, 6.7% to campaign expenses and 5.2% to strategy and research. $375 million of spending was uncategorizable.

A total of $5.9147 billion was spent.

Data here.

Since 2012 Republicans have voted against the Bush tax cuts and against repeal of Obamacare

We have no representation.