Just a couple of quick Items for the weekend. First, Sen Ted Cruz, who cares. It is a PR disaster but not a major mistake. He is a US Senator and would have very little power to do anything but make phone calls to FEMA to ask how things are going. It is not like he is a Governor of a state whose actions may have killed thousands, but let’s keep Cruz in the news to keep Cuomo out.
The new all Democrat congress, which the media has judged centrist, assigned Sen. Bernie Sanders to be Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. He is now scheduling high-profile hearings that highlight the socialist agenda he has pushed for his 30 years on the hill. The first is titled “Why Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?” Future hearings are on such subjects as “making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share,” as well as the cost of climate change. I am sure these will be fair and open meetings. I will soon be discussing the concept of the wealthy paying their fair share and what that means.
Biden has returned the US to the Paris Climate Accords, by the way the US has meet or exceeded the benchmarks set before this decision.
Biden has recently overturned several Trump executive orders, two were designed to lower the cost of insulin and increase support for apprenticeships.
Have a good weekend and PLEASEThink about what is happening around you.
With the Democrat party controlling both houses of Congress and the White House there is a good chance that the federal minimum wage will be raised from $7.50/hr. to $15.00/hr. The drumbeat argument from the left has been no one should work for less then a living wage. I agree that all people should be given the opportunity to earn a living wage and the statistics prove that most do. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) approximately 1.9% of hourly wage earners make at or below the federal minimum wage. Another argument being made is that it disproportionately impacts minorities, again looking at the statistics we see this is not true. According to the BLS White represent 72.6% at or below, 49% are women. Black or African Americans represent 17.9%, women are 11.4%.
Is there an argument for raising the minimum wage, yes. The minimum wage has not been raised since 2009 and there should be some increase. The problem is that, like everything else they do, the federal government tends to discount tomorrow. The current bill will slowly raise the rate to $15.00/hr. over time, then what. The rate should have a built-in escalation provision that is tied to inflation, or the cost of living, or something.
The next area we must explore in the numbers is who is being impacted. To be exact those listed by the BLS by age shows that the majority, 43.1% are 16-to-24-year old’s, follow by 25% who are between 25 to 34 years old. Another way to look at this is that most of those who would benefit from an increase are those still in high school or just post-secondary education. Those with occupational education make up the least at 3.6%. Remember this is based on those paid hourly not the total working population.
The answer to low wage jobs is not to force an increase on business owners who can little afford it but to encourage an economy that will, through competition, pay higher rates. Stop trying to force a system that does not help those seeking to live a better life but to set the conditions where people have opportunity and a clear path to success on their terms.
Much is being said and written about advancing a third major political party. Many parties have existed in the United States since its beginning. The early parties are no longer with us, having outlived their usefulness or morphed overtime into what we have today. Recently there have been attempts to start viable third parties but all have failed. Even movements within the parties, such as the Tea Party, used to push toward an extreme view have ended badly. For good or ill the US is a two-party country and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. To determine the way forward for the republican/conservative movement we will take a page out of resent home improvement shows. Couples on these shows are given the option of keeping their current home with upgrades or moving to a new home. We must determine if we want to keep our party with upgrades or move on to an unknown.
Obviously, my recommendation is to upgrade and rebrand. We got a good start from President Trump and need to build on that. Trump acting in the interest of the country as a whole and fought for the individual. We need to find a way to shed the image of racism and the party of the one percenter. This will not be easy since the left owns the news media and will not allow for any positive reports about the right, to get much coverage. We need to work around this obstacle. Local organizations must be recruited to spread the word. The word must also be moderate and less extreme than some may wish. Most of what the republican party is about is moderate action to problems and reasonable solution that work overtime. This is anathema to the left who respond to everything with kneejerk reactions and a need for instantaneous gratification. We need to push back on the radical ideas that have no basis in fact and stop fearing popular reactions to unpopular statements.
Identity politics has driven the concept of differing views to the point that there can be only one why of looking at any situation. In a recent interview on CNN Freshman Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) called for a truth commission to root out and combat extremism. She is not the first and I have not heard much from the right. This type of ideology, that puts itself above the constitution, needs to be confronted. We have heard from the new Secretary of Defense that he is ordering a 60-day standdown to confront extremism in the military, while most recently the acting chief of police in Washington DC said they are exploring ways to investigate police officers who may hold extremist views. What no one has defined is what is extremism. Will visiting a Proud Boys web site cost you a career or a promotion? Will there be equal examination for Black Lives Matter or Antifa? The right should be standing up and screaming about this, but so far nothing. Where do these type of big brother investigations end?
The Republican party needs to return to the roots of American thought and culture. We must push the ideas of freedom and liberty. We must continue to push the concept of the individual above the collective state. It must be understood that America is unique in the world. Solutions that have worked or perceived to have worked elsewhere may not work here. At the same time, we must understand that we cannot export American culture.
We have reached a time in which too many of our citizens are ashamed of being American for reasons they cannot explain. We must get everyone to PLEASEThink about how great our country is and how we can work together to make it work.
Steven Covey author of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” set up as one of the habits, to put first things first. First things first was the title of his next book. Without a doubt the Republican party must begin to rebuild itself, so should the Democrat party but I will not get into that. To rebuild we must borrow Covey’s second habit “begin with the end in mind.” What do we want the party to look like and how will it serve the nation and the people. Conservatism is the obvious place to start but what is conservatism? Book publisher Henry Regnery once said, “Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times.” There was a time when conservatism was in ascendancy and may have peaked with President Reagan. When once asked to define conservatism, the father of modern conservative thought, William F. Buckley responded “Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition. Now this leaves room, of course, for deposition, and there is deposition — the Civil War being the most monstrous account. But it also urges a kind of loyalty that breeds a devotion to those ideals sufficient to surmount the current crisis. When the Soviet Union challenged America and our set of loyalties, it did so at gunpoint. It became necessary at a certain point to show them our clenched fist and advise them that we were not going to deal lightly with our primal commitment to preserve those loyalties. That’s the most general definition of conservatism.”
Where to go from here? The truths Buckley referred have been twisted and turned until they are unrecognizable. When Buckley and Regnery where speaking the main enemies were the Soviet Union and China. There was a clear distinction between Western and Communist governments. After the Berlin wall came down and the east opened, and then the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, many people still remembered the horror stories that had emerged. before that we were told by Solzhenitsyn of the type of system existed. It has been more then a generation since the fall of the Soviet Union and China has developed a hybrid system that fooled the west for years. The left proceeded during this time to convince the world that the old communist systems were not that bad, that socialism was an answer to all the problems that exist.
As we said, one of the things the left likes to claim is that they alone can solve the problems of race and are the only party that believes in equality. This is an area the Republicans have tied to reject but have done a bad job. While highlighting the number of minorities who have switched to the Republican party they fail to say why. The liberal left continues to tout the need for a central government role in all aspects of life and try to bribe minorities to stay by promising monetary support across the board. What is less likely to be shown is that minority business ownership and the number of minorities in the middle class has grown to a point that it is approaching equality with the white population. When this began to become apparent in the Trump administration politicians and news media brough to light concepts of white privilege, white supremacy, and critical race theory. The Republican party backed away from discussing this and in some ways encouraged the belief in this line of thinking.
The main tactic of the left is to convince people to stop thinking and to just accept group think. The end state we must strive for is that the individual counts and will not be lost in the drive for collective thinking. A main tenet of conservatism has been prosperity. For many years now there has been a strong push to villainize the wealthy and the idea that all problems with the poor derives from too few people having too much money. Economic inequality is a buzz phrase of the left. This is usually followed by the statement that the rich must pay their fair share, with no one saying what a fair share is.
Beginning with the end in mind lets look at convincing the people that there is nothing wrong with wealth and building wealth. That the individual is responsible for their own welfare and that the purpose of government is to ensure there is no roadblock to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but it does come from the government.
It is all over, Trump was acquitted. It is not all over and will not be for some time. It is not in the interest of the left to allow it to die. It is not in the interest of the right to let it die. Just as the years following the Civil War the Republicans continued to wave the bloody shirt blaming the Democrats for ripping the Union apart, the Democrats will now wave their bona fides as the ones who tried to protect the nation from a dictator. The Republicans will then point out that it was the Democrats who twice used their positions to attempt to overthrow the President and then to deny a private citizen the rights of citizenship. Much of the movements on the left are due to the inability to accept the outcome of the 2016 election. The problem with the right is their inability to accept the declared outcome of the 2020 election. We now see Both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer calling out the 43 Senators for voting to acquit Trump of the charge of inciting an insurrection. Schumer has said if acquitted he would move to have Trump censured invoking the 14th amendment in order to stop him from running in 2024, again in order to overturn the verdict. This would not be a direct violation of the constitutional probation against double jeopardy but it would violate its sprit.
The Impeachment is done, in fact, so we need to do some analysis and then look to the future of conservativism in America. Did President Trump make mistakes following the 2020 election, the answer has to be yes. The Trump presidency, without reverting to emotion, was very successful. Unemployment decreased across the board for all citizens, with black and other minorities seeing the lowest unemployment in history. With the removal of business killing regulations businesses bloomed including the greatest growth in minority businesses. Business began to return to the US and the dollar got stronger against foreign currencies. The Iran deal was reversed stopping the flow of money into Iran that had been used to increase its terrorist activities across the region. North Korea was somewhat subdued, at least the threat was minimized. Russian expansion into Ukraine was halted and its economy was struck a blow with the loss of oil revenue into Europe and Europe itself was forced to acknowledge its overdependence on US military deterrence to keep it safe.
The impeachment was a microcosm of problems and solutions in America. The left continued to show itself driven by hatred and ideological intransigence. The right on the other hand was looking to decide what they really are or what they stand for. The left had decided to impeach Trump even before he was sworn into office. The mainstream news media, which is 90% left leaning, began to attack Trump from policy disagreements to personnel attacks on him and his family. The right is paralyzed by its perceived history of being the old white man’s party. The left popularized the belief that they alone were able to bring equality to the American people and that the right only wants to hold down anyone not like them. All disinformation campaigns begin with a little truth. While in the past the Republican party has been dominated by older white males it is today more of a big tent party. Party leadership crosses race and gender as well as age. The Democrat party has in the past advanced the cause of civil rights and gender equality. Today democrats are seen as stalled and unable to progress to the next level. This has allowed the right to justifiably claim that the left has used minorities and is holding back any forward progress, more on this in the nest blog.
The impeachment has freed both sides to pursue their separate agendas. Please Think of what this means. In the next few days, I will go deeper into the how I see the future.
I was happy to see the Trump defense team had its best day, admittedly the bar was set very low. They were brief in their close, I will be as well. The basis of the defense was, as it always has been, that there is no evidence of Trump inciting the riot. To prove their point, they played video of democrat members calling on their constituents to fight and fight hard the Trump agenda. Showing several videos of then candidate Joe Biden saying that if this were high school, he would take Trump out behind the gym and beat the crap out of him. The obvious intent was to off set the videos the House managers showing that Trump call on his followers to fight and fight hard. The Trump call was also included in the article of impeachment to say it was Trumps intent to attack the building. There was a point that the defense pointed to the lead House manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and stated, he himself, in 2016 called for the election of Trump to be reversed. They then turned on the video the managers played on the first day and told the Senate the truth, it had been cut, rearranged, and manipulated.
What this and the actions of the House managers shows is that nothing in this “trial” is based on facts or evidence. This is all for political show and should end as soon as possible as the result is widely known, acquittal. The Q&A session was of no consequence as nothing was learned. There was also nothing new in Saturday’s session except for the House managers calling for witnesses and the Senate voting 55-44 to allow them. What should have ended today will now drag on. There will be little to learn from witnesses that is not already known, this just continues the tie up of the government. We know from last years show trial that the government was tied up at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic slowing government response. What will the result of this delay be? One aspect is that Gov Cuomo has just been outed as faking the number of Covid deaths in state nursing homes to keep Trump from acting or interfering. Keeping this trial going could keep Cuomo out of the press.
After this was posted it came out there will b no witnesses just a statement for the record from Congresswoman Jaime Herrea Beutler (R-Wash.). More on this is the next post,
I will pick up on Monday and ask that you all continue to PLEASEThink, look for your own information and make up your own minds.
Today we enter day four of the “trial” of President Trump. The House impeachment managers wrapped up their presentation yesterday. I do not know what the Trump defense will do today in their wrap up but it brings to mind and old Don Adams quote that goes something like “For he past hour my worthy opponent has stood before you and made a complete ass of himself, now its my turn,”
To recap the closing arguments Donald Trump must be found guilty to stop him from running again or for anyone else to ever use violent rhetoric to rule a country. That by not immediately sending help or ordering his followers to stop he violated his oath to defend and protect the constitution. They even rebuked the concept that Trump must meet a higher standing for free speech as the President.
The right to free speech is the conner stone that made the American dream possible. Yes, there are exceptions and inciting to riot/overthrow of the government is one of them. To say the President must meet a higher standard than the constitution is an indicator that the house managers have no respect for the constitution.
The House managers continued to discuss in the most emotional terms what happened in the building that day and continued to call those inside Trump insurrectionist. They have however failed to connect anything Trump said to the riot. There have been reports that many there said they came because Trump called them. This is an individual interpretation of some of the rhetoric that came out of Trump. In 1170 King Henry II of England was reported to have uttered the phrase “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest.” This was interpreted by four knights to mean kill Becket the Archbishop of Canterbury. Most now conclude that Henry did not mean for this to happen and it was an expression of exasperation. Today, like in 1170, the leader’s words are interpreted by different parties to mean different things.
One of the points the managers tried to make was that the president did not care about the riot and was more interested in blocking the vote to certify the election. Proof of this came when they entered into “evidence” a phone call made to Sen Lee’s phone for Sen Tuberville insisting that he block the Senate somehow. The problem with this is that Sen Lee stood up to say that the “evidence’ being presented was in error. Lee tried to have the whole thing struck but was told that was not allowed by Senate rules. In the end the managers allowed it to be removed as evidence saying they got it from a news report. In his close Lead House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin made a big show of how they could not question Trump and asked the defense team to provide the answers three questions in the name of Trump. This of course would violate the 5th amendment, but again constitutional protections are not important to the managers.
It must be said that the House did not prove its case and we will see how the defense does in its close.
As we enter day three, we will need to wait and see if the House managers can come up with anymore heart-rending videos. Much of day two was spent showing videos of rioters rampaging through the building and sound bites of people looking for Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence. The House managers went so far in their emotional presentation to point out that the rioters had erected a gallows outside the building calling it a symbol of Americas racist past. Of course, those of us who pay attention know that hanging the bad guy was a staple of the American west. This last is a bit off subject but thought I would throw it in. The Trump defense also tried it had at videography showing several Democrat politicians calling for Trumps impeachment from the time he was elected to prove that impeachment has been the objective of the Democrats since the beginning. As I said yesterday this is not truly a trial, not the American sense.
In many courtroom scenes the attorney for one side will stand up and object to a line of questioning or a piece of evidence based on relevance. Trumps defense, in an actual court of law, would have likely had an objection of relevance sustained on yesterday’s video since it showed the fact that there were rioters in the building saying things that should and will lead to their arrests and conviction, but it failed to connect their actions to any actual direction from Trump. On the other side the video show given by the Trump defense would have similarly been disallowed since it did not connect to the current article of impeachment.
Today it is possible that arguments will in fact be turned to the actual article of impeachment. In part the article says that on January 6th “President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol.” Italics are mine. A problem with the video on the first day is its lack of a timeline or time stamps. If they had been included it would be apparent that there were two separate groups, the one listening to the President and those at the Capitol. Those at the Capitol had already breached the building so it was not the group that was listening to the president. We have also heard from law enforcement that the attack was preplanned and therefore not a result of the speech. Because of this the managers are arguing it is the result of his past speeches.
The true purpose of this “trial” is also seen in the indictment “Further, section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from “hold[ing] and office … under the United States.”
In the end we ask that you again PLEASEThink about the true
purposes of this action which is not to seek justice but for political purposes.
For those who do not recognize the picture above, it is Oliver Cromwell. Two years after his death his body was dug up and he was put on trial and beheaded.
As we move on to Impeachment day two, we should review day one. Since the last shall be first, the argument was made that the entire trial is unconstitutional because it is intended to remove a seating President who is already out of office. This motion was defeated by a 56-44 vote. The argument was made that Congress is not the body to decide constitutionality, that is the Supreme Court. In this instance under the rules of this trial they are in fact the body to make that decision. I remember a charge to a jury where the judge told them they are deciders of the facts; the judge is the decider of law. This indicates that this is not a “Trial” that is a reflection of US jurisprudence. The jury decides facts and law, the presiding officer is not a judge but in this case is also a member of the jury. One of the things they get to decide as well is rules of evidence. This brings us to the first presentation, the video.
For those of you who did not have the pleasure of seeing the video, it was a compilation of what transpired on January 6th in Washington. The problem with it was it was chopped together, out of order and censored to give the impression that the riot occurred while Trump was standing on a platform extolling his followers to take over the Capitol building. This video “evidence” would never have been allowed in a court of law in this country. This would-be tantamount reworking a police officers body cameras footage to reflect a series of events that did not happen. This is falsifying evidence. This was not intended to show facts but to elicit an emotional reaction. Then there is some pre-trial activity that must be addressed. The chief House impeachment manager, Rep Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md) in a letter to Trump stated that if he did not testify it would be seen as an admission of guilt. Raskin, a graduate of Harvard Law school, apparently never read the Constitution or understands the 5th amendment. I am sure that if any prosecutor made this statement elsewhere, they would face some disciplinary hearing.
I am not passing judgement on Trump who must bear some personnel responsibility for what took place, but not criminal liability for other people actions. Those who attacked the seat of government must be tried and convicted for their own actions.
I am asking my readers to PLEASEThink about how this trial is taking place. Detach yourselves from your emotions and judge this in the light of American culture and fairness. Trump is his own worst enemy, much of what he says is emotional rhetoric, but it is protected under the 1st amendment. We cannot become a country that puts people on trial for what they said that we disagree.
While the nation is consumed by the Impeachment trial, we have not heard much on Biden’s moves to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran deal. Since President Trump withdrew the US from the Iran deal there has been a massive hue and cry from certain segments of the political spectrum that Iran is going to go Nuclear and the people will starve with any return to sanctions. Iran has never stopped its nuclear program and its people were starving before the deal.
The US as well as the EU has requested re-negotiating the deal to allow for the addition of missile development, more stringent inspections and, very important, inclusion of human rights. In two on-air interviews/debates I have had recently with Iranian foreign policy people it was made clear that there would be no re-negotiation and the US must first recommit to full compliance before going any further.
The US and other allies went too fast and gave up too much in the original agreement. Those calling for a return to the original have never addressed what the problems are. I am not naive enough to believe that Iran will ever be in full compliance or that any attempt at reducing missile development or getting meaningful access to all sites will be successful. What can be hoped for is that the level of human rights abuses can be exposed to the world. The daily killing of Kurds and others as well as the destruction of any religion other then their version of Islam must be exposed and would-be during negotiations.
When so many call out for social justice to ignore the abuses in Iran for political means is disgusting. Iran is the chief supporter of terrorism in the world including facilitating al-Qaeda and ISIS supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and the killing and destruction of Kurdish culture and the Baha’i religion. These things must be addressed before any return to any negotiation,
pleasethink1 