Posts Tagged → policy
If I were a Bernie voter, I would vote for Trump
Bernie Sanders has a lot more in common with President Trump than you'd think, and if I were a dedicated Bernie voter, I would vote for President Trump in 2020, because only with Trump will Bernie's biggest ideas become political reality.
What do Bernie and Trump have in common? Two key things that speak across political and cultural boundaries:
One: Both Bernie and Trump are victims of Hillary Clinton's cheating and lying and conniving. Bernie was cheated out of the 2016 Democrat nomination because of Hillary's cheating with Democrat establishment fixer Donna Brazile. Remember Hillary getting the hidden notes, getting the debate questions and answers ahead of time from Brazile, the debate moderators coddling her and attacking Bernie? Yeah, that was real fair! Remember the 2016 primary election Democrat super delegates who were bought and paid for by the Clinton political machine, who were dedicated to Hillary over and above Bernie's high votes in their districts? Yeah, wasn't that super fair!
Now think about Trump, and how badly he has been victimized by Hillary, before, during, and after the November 2016 election. The whole BS "Russia collusion" thing was dreamt up and implemented by Hillary Clinton's campaign and supporters inside the Obama Administration. We now know that the 100% fake "Steele Dossier" is a 100% product of Hillary's campaign, and it is central to the whole Mueller political witch hunt against Trump, said witch hunt being 100% staffed by Hillary Clinton donors and active supporters. After nearly three years, Trump is still being falsely accused by Hillary and her chums, who want fifty bites at the fake collusion thing…fake fake fake evil Hillary!
Two: Both Bernie and Trump speak plainly and honestly about how both Democrat and Republican political establishments are stacking the US government against working people, against the citizenry, against our interests. Both Bernie and Trump have different policy solutions to this hijacking of the American government by the two main political parties, but both guys are saying the same thing. Who else are you going to hear this from? Will you hear it from political establishment hack Hillary, who in a hissy fit of sore loser spite and spoiled brattedness is this week blasting Bernie at every turn?
It is true that both Bernie and Trump have a lot of different policy positions, and why not? Bernie has held paid public office positions his entire career, while Trump has been a businessman taking risks and making sacrifices. Naturally their different backgrounds are going to result in mostly different takes on public policies.
But, if you are looking for someone to carry Bernie's biggest message, which is the failure of the federal government to actually serve We, The People, then you should give your vote to Trump. Because Trump is the US President and he is going to be re-elected in 2020, actually implementing big ideas, while Bernie is only going to continue the speaking circuit with a handful of people in the audience.
Trump is the best use of your one vote, and if it bothers you to vote for a Republican, consider your vote a protest vote against BOTH political establishments.
John Arway gone away, but not forgotten
Beyond nailing down and putting the finishing touches on some epic large land conservation transactions, my summer and Fall of 2003 were spent politicking and angling for the executive director position at the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission. After ten years, the last ED had recently left as most EDs leave these posts – everyone involved all too happy to not see one another again.
The door was wide open for a fresh newcomer, someone not from within the agency, for the first time in as long as anyone could recall. I knew I had a shot, and so did my supporters. I was excited.
As I met with elected officials and conservation leaders, presenting my own "impressive" credentials and qualifications for the job, and trying to amass my support from people who mattered, a single name kept coming up: John Arway.
Who was this faceless John Arway guy, who so many of the active conservationists mentioned? I had never seen him at a meeting, or at a land dedication ceremony, nor had we testified at the same legislative hearing. But many in-the-know conservationists knew him, or of him, and they were quietly supporting him for the ED job, increasingly so as we got closer to the interview process in December.
Many other ED candidates were emerging, some really impressive, and some less so. My own self-promotion continued up to the beginning of deer season, and then I sat back for the following couple of weeks to see how it would all play out.
I was granted an interview with the PFBC board of commissioners, and in fact I ended up being the very last one interviewed out of six candidates. But as soon as the interview process began the back channel scuttlebutt was that the real contest was already well under way, the board split evenly between wanting Arway, or the agency's long-time legal counsel, Dennis Guise, as the alternative.
Raging through and beneath the calm surface of the rote, officially procedural, professional interview process, the two main candidates fought each other tooth and nail, each calling up bigger, better, more powerful allies. In the end, it was not a question of qualifications, but of ….well, one of those simple things guys fall back on when measuring up an opponent. "Size."
So to say. Because both guys were equally competent, just each differently endowed with important skills the agency needed. It was an impossible choice between the two of them.
This battle royale ended the day before I was interviewed, with the board hopelessly deadlocked between the policy weenie Arway, and lawyer Guise. With the two accomplished men set aside, the board was now looking for a "dark horse" candidate without war baggage, who could salvage the situation and bring peace and unity unto the bruised agency's divided ranks and leadership factions.
In the end, Doug Austen, PhD, was selected over me to run the agency. The chairman and several of my advocates on the board took me aside and explained that Doug had beaten me by 3/100's of a point, and that the ED decision had come down to that: How many points did the next best candidate have. It was a very close decision, as close as any decision could ever be.
Austen went on to run PFBC for about four years, and as he has a PhD in fisheries biology, he eventually begged off for less political drama and more biology and went on to his next neat job with the US Fish & Widlife Service. Today Doug happily runs the American Fisheries Society, I happily run my own small conservation-driven small business, and boy, did John Arway end up running PFBC.
When Austen left PFBC, Arway was better positioned to take the helm, and immediately take it by storm did he ever. From deep within the agency's rubber-meets-the-road programs, Arway brought to light and into implementation long simmering policy addressing natural gas fracking, combined sewage overflows from too much rain overrunning sewage plants, trout stocking, non-native invasive plants and fish, the sustainable economics of fishing, and many many more big and important policy questions that had sat dormant for way too long.
Arway's personal style is easy, smiling, genuine, with a natural affability that helps him slide the medicine in. The medicine being those long-put-off policies that no one had the balls to deal with, and which John knew to be too important to ignore any longer.
Fact is, the Pennsylvania legislature is full of career politicians who refuse to make difficult decisions, for fear of upsetting the voters and possibly losing their artificially cushy jobs. And so Arway made those tough and necessary decisions for them.
The legislature did not like that.
True to form, the careerist politicians wanted to both hinder Arway and second-guess him, without ever providing alternative decisions that would save or protect our state's incredible natural resources. At the end of all this bad government on full display to we taxpayers who underwrite it, Arway was ironically held up by the dithering careerist politicians as an example of a careerist bureaucrat long past his own use-by date. And so the legislature began to ever increasingly squeeze PFBC, financially, politically.
John Arway fought as only the honestly passionate can fight, with everything he had, without regard for his own personal longevity. Like Neo, the hero in The Matrix movie, John magically dodged every bullet fired at him, every knife stabbed at his back, and every rug pulled out from under his feet. And through it all he maintained that affable personality and firm determination to "do the right thing."
If you didn't know John Arway before he became PFBC ED, you knew soon after that he was one of the last of the conservation warriors cut from an old die that has long corroded and may now be broken and long lost. It is tough to imagine that any Pennsylvania resource agency will find and also choose again a tough leader and fearless resource advocate like Arway.
John recently retired from PFBC. Though he had every right to do so, he did not whine, he did not take shots at his enemies or opponents, he did not complain. Rather, ever the real pro, he listed the many natural resource conservation achievements he wished he had time to win and which he hopes the next generation will pick up and carry over the goal line.
The board was loathe to let him go. His many, many supporters are sad to see him step down. If you like to fish or drink clean water, you are sad to see John go. Both Austen and I talk about what might have happened had Arway simply been selected as ED back in 2003 and gotten his conservation agenda under way earlier. I do not always agree with John Arway on policy, but I will always agree that John Arway should be in the policy driver's seat.
We will miss you, John. Thank you for your service and for being the champion for the voiceless fish and the splashing mountain streams whose language we hear but do not understand.
Do you drink wine from a human skull?
Jakob-Creutzfelt Disease in Europe was traced back to a self-styled secret society in Italy, where members filed solemnly down into ancient burial crypts and drank local wine from the skull of a deceased past master.
No lie. Look it up if you like. Yes, people do strange things.
Even hundreds of years later, after the past master had died, the JCD 'bug' was still infesting that old skull of his, and the wine swilled from it carried the bug down the gullets of the secret society members and into their bodies. A lot of these secret society members died bizarre, horrible deaths, prompting health officials to investigate what was going on.
To date this is likely the only investigation in Italy's history that was both scientific and professional. And that is because it involved drinking wine.
JCD basically eats your brain and leaves you a drooling, deficient, dying husk of a human being. You die pretty quickly, and it is an ugly death.
"Spongiform disease" is also how this kind of prion-based attack is known, because the person's brain looks like a sponge, riddled through with holes where brain matter ought to be. Survival is not an option.
There is no cure, and the cancer-like prions use their protein shells to fully resist fire, cold, desiccation, Hollywood, and high cholesterol. Once a prion is present, it cannot be destroyed by anything human. Prions seem to live forever in the dirt under your feet, and possibly in food grown in that dirt, like corn and soybeans.
JCD is known as Mad Cow Disease among bovines, Scrapie among sheep, and Chronic Wasting Disease among cervids, like deer, here in America. In other words, there is a prion out there for every mammal, though this is a new science we are just beginning to understand.
For a long time the guy who discovered prions was said to be a fake. And then his work was replicated, and he became a celebrated scientist. The politics of "climate change science" do not apply to prions and human health, thankfully.
One thing is clear: Prions develop most among wild animals that are new to being domesticated, like deer. It is their bodies' reaction to being unnaturally cooped up. Something in the wild animals' artificially confined body is misfiring, going haywire, and imploding.
CWD has its genesis in the wildlife management equivalent of drinking wine from a human skull: In most states, including Pennsylvania, deer farms are not required to have two strands of metal fencing separating the confined deer from wild deer. Deer are not yet a domesticated species (if cows, sheep and goats are any indication, it will take another 3,000 years to domesticate deer), they are still wild, and they herd up for protection, as do all social animals.
As a result, wild deer approach the deer inside the deer farm enclosure, touch noses through the fence, exchange body fluids, and get CWD. The wild deer then leave and go off into the wild deer populations and spread CWD among otherwise healthy deer across the landscape.
As a result of this madness, CWD is spreading through Pennsylvania like wildfire, except no one is paying attention. Not really. Only the Pennsylvania Game Commission is trying to solve this crisis, and the agency is being stonewalled at every turn.
You know why?
Because the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is protecting a nascent $16 million annual deer farm business sector from having to install double fencing.
Do you know what hunting is worth annually in Pennsylvania? It is worth $1.6 BILLION, and a great deal of that is from deer hunting.
So here in Pennsylvania, we have a state agency, the PA Dept. of Agriculture, essentially preferring the complete shielding of deer farms from a necessary and responsible practice, and thereby sacrificing Pennsylvania's wild deer herd and the huge sustainable, renewable economy built on managing those wild deer.
This poor policy from the PA Dept. of Ag is really bad government on display. This is Bad Government 101. Actually, this is failed government.
You cannot make this stuff up, and the CWD situation here highlights why political involvement in a democracy is so important. If you sit back and wait for someone else to solve problems, most often no one else will get involved. You have to lead the charge yourself, and thereby attract fellow supporters.
If you want to get involved, call the PA Dept. of Ag at this number, 717 -772-2853, and tell the nice person who answers the phone that you want DOUBLE FENCING at all deer farms. It is as simple as this.
And if you don't give a whit about hunting or deer management, consider the impacts CWD will have on other wildlife beyond wild deer. It is an earthquake building under our feet, and we can stop it, if we want to.
Looking back on 2017, it is tempting to list all of great accomplishments, and the few failures, of the new administration in DC.
One could spend a week discussing them all, but for the sake of time, here is one person's opinion about what we have gained, and what we have yet to gain, from the new administration.
Where haven't the citizens of America gained under the policies of the new administration?
From tax reform to ending executive policies designed to bully American citizens through the illegal use of government coercion, President Trump is daily deleting prior executive orders, and often substituting his own pro-freedom policies in their stead.
One gain has been the reining in of the US EPA, a place at which I used to work as a policy and legislative staffer, and which has long had an unprofessional staff culture of political activism substituting for careful reasoned decisions, shaped by law, in the interest of the American People. Fundamental transformation of USEPA was long overdue. The same can be said for NOAA, a huge source for fake climate change junk science, which is now getting a new chief who actually is a meteorologist and who does actually know a thing or two or three about Earth's climate. How refreshing.
Another gain has been the moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. No, this decision is not about Israel, it is about Western Civilization, of which tiny outpost Israel is the canary in the coal mine. Trump made this decision in the face of United Nations opposition, the same corrupt UN that is run by the biggest tyrannies in the world. He made this decision in the face of violence and threats of violence pouring forth from literally every single Muslim nation. The embassy move draws a stark contrast between a Christendom determined to survive, and everyone else. Sorry, the Jews are just the foil here, not the cause celebre.
If there is one friction point of real consequence in Washington, DC, it is that surface where the federal judiciary meets the executive branch.
Populated with political radicals, the federal judiciary has rogue judges who routinely use their positions to legislate from the bench, not adjudicate within the constitutional confines of their actual duties. They try to implement specific policies, instead of determining whether or not the question before them is simply constitutional, or not. They continually usurp powers from the executive branch, to the point where these judges have set themselves up as the actual bureaucrats running America.
Got a grievance? Bring it before the right federal judge, and you could get a very detailed, specific holding directing the executive branch of government to implement a certain policy in a certain way under a certain time frame.
The first problem here is that the judiciary rarely has actual jurisdiction in these subjects, because they are wholly functions of the executive branch. Immigration is one such area. Immigration and borders are clearly left to the executive branch to run. And yet America has federal judges who routinely issue holdings they believe will block the implementation of the executive branch's functions. And these same federal judges will do the same things repeatedly, defiantly, even after the US Supreme Court has struck down their previous decision. These rogue judges are using their official positions to advance social justice causes.
A similar policy subject is gun regulation.
Despite the US Supreme Court's Heller decision and others like it, lower courts routinely issue holdings on gun regulation that are in direct, clear conflict with US Supreme Court decisions.
A third policy subject is transgenders in the military. Recently a federal judge held that the US military must accept transgenders, ignoring the clear separation of constitutional powers between the executive branch and the judiciary. The executive branch has sole discretion over who it allows into the warfighting military, and civilian courts have zero jurisdiction. For a federal judge to insert himself into military matters is a clear violation of the US Constitution.
The second problem with this is, this is not the way the court system works.
Lower courts are always bound by the holdings of higher courts and by the duties and roles clearly spelled out in the US Constitution. Judges who disregard the higher courts and the Constitution, and instead issue their own politically motivated holdings, are destroying the rule of law in America. They are far overstepping their boundaries, and trying to make law and policy instead of deciding law or remanding a decision back to the political process. In essence setting themselves up as dictators who make all legislative, policy, and legal decisions.
If these rogue judges are successful, America's court system will become meaningless. It will be a random assortment of competing political decisions governing hundreds of millions of citizens, made by a small handful of unelected people in black robes. These are decisions that are supposed to be hashed out through the political process by elected officials, accountable to the American People through elections and votes.
So, the failure here for the Trump Administration has been an unwillingness to simply disregard these rogue judges, and then move ahead with the administration's immigration policy, foreign policy, and military decisions. Moreover, Trump's administration should be openly calling for the impeachment and removal of these rogue judges. Official abuse of power is the most serious threat to American representative government, it must be confronted head-on, and that is not happening. Why is a mystery, because if there is one hallmark of this presidency, it is this president's willingness to and enjoyment of directly communicating with the American People in the clearest terms.
The rogue judges issue highlights a scary fact that most establishment Republicans are loathe to address, and that is how liberals will do absolutely anything to impose their will on the American People.
The liberal lust for power and control, as marketed through "social justice" causes, means that their ends always justify their methods. It means that all officials with liberal opinions have to do is claim a higher moral ground, higher than existing law, and implement their views through their official role, no matter if it clearly contradicts established law, procedure, and policy.
This of course is not how any democracy or republic works. It is politically unsustainable (it is patently illegal), but it is evidence that liberals will burn down America in order to wrest control of it from the American People, or to prevent their political opponents from running it as the result of elections that liberals are unhappy with. It is also evidence that establishment Republicans have zero fight in them, because they do not believe in anything more than making more money than a person has use for.
If there is a need for a new political group in America, it is one that is focused on documenting official abuses by federal judges, and then working to hold them accountable. Impeachment and removal from the bench is what is needed.
So, in conclusion, 2017 was a very good year, an exciting year, and we can hope for more of the same in 2018.
9-11, still happening in slow motion
"Nine Eleven" evokes images of smoky towers in lower Manhattan, and still photos of planes rocketing toward the towers, and people throwing themselves from the windows to escape the flames, heat, and toxic black smoke.
Finally, the twin towers fell, or rather collapsed, not long after the Muslim hijackers from Saudi Arabia had sacrificed themselves and the passengers on the planes.
Their goal was to attack America, as did their fellow hijackers on other planes that day. Flight 93 went down here in Pennsylvania, and it was my role to try to purchase or protect with conservation easements that landscape around the crash site. Working with staff from the National Park Service was mostly fun, sometimes frustrating, but in the end, the site was secured and the area set aside as a memorial.
Other memorials have been established at the Pentagon and in Manhattan.
But what is a memorial worth if the lesson it memorializes is lost?
After 9-11, our mainstream media did everything it could to cast Muslims as the actual victims of 9-11, not the perpetrators. Certainly not all Muslims can be painted with that hijacker's brush that day, but it is a fact that throughout the Muslim world the day's fiery images were greeted with shouts of joy and celebration. Including here in America.
Jihad groups like CAIR quickly went on offense, playing to defensive notions. CAIR and other groups played upon big-hearted Americans' sense of fairness and justice. And so they demanded that we not only forget that 9-11 was by and for Muslims, but that we actually embrace Islam so that we could come to understand that it is actually a great belief system. Anti-Christian groups like CAIR actually used 9-11 to achieve greater inroads against Christians in America and against Christianity globally.
So far their approach has kind of worked. For example, the mainstream media refuses to report how the Muslim Students Association at a major university is actually holding a big celebratory bake sale today. You have to go one or two layers down into media sources to find this infuriating fact. Another example is that key Trump administration appointees are still cozying up with CAIR and other jihadist groups, in the hopes of makey-nicey public appearances translating into a protection scam on the ground, like the mafia used to do.
"Nice country you got here. Shame it's so…Islamophobic. We'd hate for some Muslims to take all this Islamophobia stuff the wrong way and start cutting off American heads here…" goes the CAIR sales pitch. And so the State Department and Homeland Security Department are continuing the failed Obama policies, which allowed civilizational jihad to continue.
A new report shows that the government of Saudi Arabia funded a dry-run of the 9-11 events, helping its jihadists perfect their hijacking methods. Why we have not occupied Saudi Arabia and confiscated their oil reserves as punishment and reparations for the damage they caused America is a mystery. Any other self-respecting nation would do that. Like it or not, Russia does that kind of response. And it works.
So here we are, 16 years after 9-11, and the net result is that we are still under attack, just as we were that day. Except this attack is slower, quieter, and playing on our silly notions of fairness and justice, which are being bent and used back against us.
To millions of Americans, the 9-11 memorials are a huge red flag. They are a "WAKE THE HELL UP, AMERICA, YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK" sign, neon on a dark night. As any national memorial should be.
But do Americans have elected leaders who understand what it takes to remember 9-11 in a meaningful way, learn the lesson from that day, and apply that lesson to our laws and policies; that is the question.
Until that question is affirmatively answered in a way that protects and supports America, the answer is that 9-11 continues in slow motion.
By Josh • Posted in Immigration • No Comment
Tyranny by Ten
This Tuesday, two and a half days ago, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals created a new law about guns and gun ownership in America out of thin air and completely contradicting recent US Supreme Court decisions the lower courts are bound to follow
If you want to see why citizens' faith in the judiciary branch has declined, this bizarre decision is the best latest example.
It is gross over-reach far exceeding the court's authority, and nullifying all of the judicial precedent litigated and decided before by the highest court.
Recall that judges cannot make up law.
They are fully bound by precedent.
They cannot make up policies.
They cannot come to a conclusion that is outside the subject of what has been litigated in front of them.
They cannot second-guess Congress.
They cannot ask what personal motives were behind a president's executive order.
It does not matter what a judge personally thinks. None of this is supposed to enter into a judge's ruling. When it does, the ruling is meaningless garbage.
Judges can only interpret the laws that are passed by Congress and signed by the President, or the state equivalent. That is it. That is their sole scope and ability.
At their most precise and honest moment, judges simply determine if a law is Constitutional, or not, or if it needs to go back to the state or federal legislative branch for re-work.
Brazen activism like this week's decision serves only to undermine the judiciary, not strengthen it, because people will either utterly ignore these wayward judges, or they will seek to have them removed from their office, for good cause. Or both.
I myself do not feel bound by this illegal decision, and I will not comply with it no matter who says I must. These ten judges-gone-wild do not outweigh the collective decisions of the populace. If this court wants my guns, the authors of this decision can come to my home and try to take them away.
Come and (try to) take them!
In this particular instance of judicial malfeasance, ten of the court's fourteen judges decided on their own that a new legal test was needed, a test that had never been used before by Congress, by the framers, the Constitution, or prior courts.
These ten judges decided to call it the "weapons of war" test, and they simply state that the Second Amendment never intended for American citizens to possess "weapons of war," which according to these judges include the basic AR-15 rifles that are commonly used to hunt coyotes every week across the nation. Never mind that this new test would have eliminated from their personal possession the very military grade guns the American Patriots used to defeat the British.
But obviously logic is not of concern to these judges. The language of the majority decision and supporting decision is florid, full of political and emotional hyperbole, uses sophomoric logic and impolitic language ("the American people deserve a break"), and is simply disconnected from Constitutional text or legal precedent.
It is the equivalent of my kids saying "So, there!" in an argument.
Beyond being merely political, the majority bizarrely state that the decision is consistent with the US Supreme Court's Heller decision, when it is in fact completely contradictory. Talk about shades of Orwell's "1884," where up is down, black is white, etc.
This is not a legal decision, it is a political decision. It is a bold, defiant "I dare ya!" act by ten radical politicians wearing sombre black robes. And it is not just about guns. This decision is about rogue, out-of-control judges destroying the fabric of our Republic, which was not designed to turn over all issues to the judiciary, as if they make our every decision for us. This court throws the whole delicate machine of democracy out of kilter.
These judges are anti-democracy, plain and simple. They want a certain policy outcome, and because they cannot get it legitimately, legally, through the established legislative process, they simply want to wave a magic wand and make it so.
As much as this illegal decision shocks me, I do have to thank these judges, because they have outed themselves. By engaging in such egregious over-reach, illegally reaching deep into the realms of policy and law, they have willingly exposed themselves as frauds deserving of the most serious correction our system of government allows for – removal from the bench.
Now it is up to those American citizens who want to 'drain the swamp' and reclaim American government so that it serves We The People, to remove these anti-democracy activists from their sacred judicial roles. We can push to have them impeached or removed administratively.
Either way will do. Tyranny by ten cannot stand. We the People demand our rights.
Amidst Obama's Scorched Earth Exit, Trump Dept. of Interior Pick a Huge Bright Spot
As one might expect of a spoiled, petulant, over-indulged man-child, Barack Hussein Obama is not following traditional presidential transitions.
Instead of spending his time talking about the greatness of America, its promise, its successes, its opportunity, and peacefully transferring power to his successor, Obama has gone on a wild spree of destruction and mayhem across America and in the international community. Aided and abetted by the mainstream media, which share his anti-Western Civilization agenda, Obama has not been held accountable.
"Monkey-wrenching" might be the right term for this bizarre display of poor-loser behavior.
Dozens of useless but expensive new regulations with no basis in reason or science are being rammed through the executive branch. Same for executive orders. Nearly a thousand violent federal prisoners are being released, having obtained clemency from Obama; these scary men will surely bring unlimited suffering and horrors to American citizens over the next couple years. Like the Guantanamo Bay jihadists released by Obama for the AWOL traitor Bo Bergdahl.
Internationally, Obama has abandoned Ukraine to Russia, Iraq to Iran, Syria to Russia and ISIS, and Israel to its insane neighbors plus all of the anti-Jewish bigots around the world. Failing to veto a bizarre attack on the Jewish state at the useless United Nations last week, the Obama administration left the tiny island of democracy to its own devices while empowering the most radical, evil, violent anti-Western foes attacking Israel today, and America tomorrow.
This destructive scorched earth retreat from a failed eight years is the best that Obama can do. It just highlights his hatred for Western Civilization, Christianity, Jews, hard working normal American tax-paying citizens, goodness.
But you know what? Donald Trump is giving us hope every day for all of the great and positive things his administration will begin doing in three weeks.
My favorite two choices by the incoming Trump Administration are the selection of outsiders at EPA and the Department of Interior.
At EPA, Scott Pruitt is the right guy to take the fight over fake "climate change" directly to the religious fanatics promoting it.
I know EPA well.
It is where I started my career after graduate school at Vanderbilt University, and where I spent exactly seven years vainly trying to figure out liberalism and bureaucratic obstructionism. Oh I did some amazing jobs at EPA, and I had a big impact. But I grew tired of the liberal culture there among the staff. I grew tired of policy battles initiated by unaccountable bureaucrats at war with capitalism (yes, this is a straight up true fact from my own amazing experiences at EPA).
For me, changing EPA's name to Department of Environmental Health would signal the correct staff culture change and professional alignment. "EPA" connotes a certain outsider status and identity, which suits radicals and gives cover to bomb-throwers in the taxpayer-funded ranks.
At Interior, Congressman Ryan Zinke is a perfect fit, and actually pretty inspiring from what I have read about him.
Zinke is a former Navy SEAL. Need anyone say more….a selfless, patriotic hero, basically. Thumbs up.
But Zinke is also a conservative conservationist, a rarity in my experience.
He's a hunter. Thumbs up.
Way too many Republicans and conservatives actually oppose environmental protection and wildlife conservation, because in a certain simplistic view, these things get in the way of unbridled, maximal development. And if a bunch of Marxist econuts say one thing, then the truth must automatically be the exact opposite (not…why do conservatives always allow the Left to define the green battlefield?).
It is embarrassing, no, make that humiliating, to hear some Republicans slavering over the opportunity to liquidate public lands. This is proof that the Left does not have a total lock on policy insanity.
America's public lands are a beautiful treasure, a dowry, a gold mine of recreational opportunity and personal exploration, a huge temple in which to worship God from desolate mountain tops to silent, tranquil remote valleys. I am blessed to have been able to really explore many, many national and state parks and forests from Maine to California over my 52 years, and God willing, I have plans for a lot more exploration of new places across America the Beautiful.
Camping, hiking, fishing, trapping, hunting in far-flung wilderness places are all favorite activities for me and for tens of millions of other Americans.
Being from Montana, Zinke innately understands the personal connection healthy-minded Americans have to their scenic public lands.
Yes, it is true that public lands are a big government footprint in some places. But they are also one of the very few things that government seems to be able to do pretty well. Though I would suggest eliminating the Bureau of Land Management, as its original charter has long since expired and its staff culture sucks. And I would also look into creative ways to resolve some of the longstanding conflicts over natural resource management and extractive activities on public lands. And multiple use policies require some fine tuning. Like allowing hunting and trapping in the remote areas of most national parks.
I speak from experience here, too, having directly worked with the National Park Service, US Forest Service, and staff from other federal resource agencies.
Not all of these challenges, or problems (yes, they are problems when they threaten to destroy entire pristine watersheds) require an either-or decision or black-and-white policy view. A lot of nuance can be brought to bear. Zinke seems like the guy to do that, which is incredibly refreshing.
See? The clean fresh breeze is blowing out the stench already. Despite the evil darkness of the Obama years, the penetrating shining light of the incoming leaders lightens and cheers my heart, gives me hope from the change.
Zinke and Pruitt cannot be confirmed soon enough.
Let's make America great again.
Farewell Senate Campaign Page, Hello ol' Blog!
With the Pennsylvania Primary election just eleven days away, the time has arrived to go back to the blog and leave the campaign policies and pledges to candidates Andrew Lewis and John DiSanto.
The last blog post was in June 2015. How surprising it was back then to see the amount of traffic the blog received, and from all corners of the world. Most of our readers were from Harrisburg and Washington, DC, two government hot spots and centers for policy development. Wonks galore in those two locations. But then there were the places like Washington STATE, Louisiana, Upstate New York, and California, where many fewer dedicated policy weenies reside. Even recently a bearded Democrat said he missed this blog, "Even though I don't agree with you a lot of the time, you are a good writer and you have interesting subjects."
So we begin again. However, with the election just days away, you can expect some politicking to occur here. Welcome back, dear reader.
An uncomfortable question
Two days ago, a dear friend sent me the text of a recent speech by Colonel Richard Kemp, a highly recognized and decorated British military leader.
Col. Kemp has been speaking all over Planet Earth about how America, Western Civilization, and Israel are bound together in a single, common fate. Freedom, liberty, and other basic democratic values are under assault, he says, from political correctness.
Here is the URL to Col. Kemp's taped speech:
http://besacenter.org/videos/col-richard-kemp-the-amoral-revolution-in-western-values-and-its-impact-on-israel-2/
If you are really interested in my response to my friend, read on:
"Thank you, –G–. Receiving this from you is a good sign. Richard Kemp is a hero because he is willing to go against the politically correct tide. Unwilling to falsely condemn Israel, and thereby also falsely condemn the West, he is vilified by leftists and their political enablers, namely, Democrats. At what point, my dear beloved friend, do you begin to join Col. Kemp and others in saying publicly what must be said? Namely, the Democrat Party has become the vehicle for legitimized anti Israel, anti America political actions?
Your loyalty to one political party, shared by most American Jews, is bizarre to me, and especially so when that party is so clearly a threat to everything you say you value and hold dear. Everything Col. Kemp says he is fighting for.
And this applies to AIPAC, too, which has rolled over for the Obama administration, clearly loaded with anti Jewish, anti Israel, anti America policy makers, including the president himself. AIPAC is an arm of the Democrat Party, now trying to sell policies that are dangerous to America, Israel, and Western Europe, instead of standing and fighting against those (Democrat) policies.
At some point you and all the other Jewish Democrats must choose: America, Israel, Western Civilization….or the Democrat Party.
By Josh • Posted in Family, Government Of the People..., Immigration • No Comment
Is it time for civil disobedience and ignoring kook judicial holdings?
Civil disobedience, non-resistance obstructionism, and peaceful protests against clearly unfair laws and violent government agents is time-honored in America.
Civil disobedience works because it appeals to the higher mind, it appeals to the best, highest conscience in Western Civilization. You have to have an open mind to have civil disobedience work on your political views so that you vote for change from the status quo.
It won't work in a Muslim country, where civil disobedience will just get you locked up and tortured, or summarily killed.
It did work for Ghandi in India because the 1940s British empire valued democracy and voting rights, and the public cry at home over images of British soldiers shooting peaceful protestors in Delhi's public streets threatened to up-end political control at home.
Americans have successfully employed civil disobedience since the 1920s: Segregation laws, no voting rights for women, a lack of equal rights or opportunity across so many sectors of society… the causes were real and political changes were needed for America to live up to its promise.
And ain't America an amazing place that it is designed to change and heal old wounds, to become a better place?
Because the original use of civil disobedience was so righteous, because so many of the laws being protested in the 1920s through the 1960s were so outrageously unjust, the behavior eventually took on a connotation of being above the law and always justified. In fact, over time even violence became justified in the name of Marxist versions of "justice," and pro-violence slogans like "No Justice, No Peace" evolved.
Today, violent, fake civil disobedience has been employed by the "Occupy Wall Street" thugs, and by the violent criminals in Ferguson, Missouri. These events always start off as a routine, rote, formula civil disobedience act, and then they quickly devolve into destruction, arson, violence, beatings, attacks on bystanders….all in the name of some Marxist version of "justice."
Inevitably, politically allied elected officials have begun to implement their jobs in a similar fashion. No matter what the law says, they ignore it, and make a big public deal about subverting the law. As if they are justified. They actually take pride in failing to implement the law as they are supposed to.
Examples of elected officials ignoring and subverting the law are a county clerk of courts issuing same-sex marriage licenses, despite Pennsylvania law saying it is illegal. Or Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane refusing to defend state laws, because she personally disagrees with them. Or California banning state judges from belonging to the Boy Scouts. Or the Obama administration willfully failing to implement immigration law. Or Harrisburg City mayor Eric Papenfuse refusing to rescind city ordinances that are plainly illegal under state preemption law, because Papenfuse holds certain personal views about guns.
This lawlessness by the very people entrusted with safeguarding and implementing the law is dangerous. These wayward officials stand on quicksand, because the basis of our republican form of democracy is the rule of law – equal application of the law, irrespective of what one personally believes.
If government officials begin ignoring laws they disagree with, and implementing law that was not voted into being by the consent of the voters, then the rule of law is over, it has ended. The glue that holds America together is corroded, and the whole edifice can come down.
But let's ask why only one side of the political debate does this. We know they get away with this because the mainstream media protects them, but the MSM veil has been pierced by the Internet, so the flow of information is no longer completely bottled up by fellow travelers.
Put another way, why don't other people, say people like American traditionalists, "conservatives," engage in the same behavior?
Here is an example of what could be done: Last week a federal judge ruled that Arizona must issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Never mind that these people are in America ILLEGALLY, the claims they make for their applications could be and often are fraudulent, and the cost of these services is unfairly covered by taxpayers.
Why don't the good officials of Arizona simply ignore that judge's insane ruling? That judge has no ability to actually make Arizona issue drivers licenses, and if I worked in Arizona government, or if I still worked in federal government and had something to do with allowing illegal immigrants in, I would simply ignore that judge's crazy ruling, or the illegal commands of the occupant of the White House.
There, folks, how do you like the taste of that medicine now?
Think of the many kook, nakedly political judicial decisions that are handed down, contrary to law and policy. Why reward these dictatorial jurists by following their dictates? Why not simply ignore them? God knows, they are earning it.
Civil disobedience and official lawlessness is a game that everyone can play, and at some point the people who have been acting like adults will recognize they only stand to lose by following the rule of law while their opponents exploit their fidelity, and only by fighting fire with fire will they make it clear that everyone must follow and implement the law, no matter what their personal views are, or everyone loses.
Or, people can do it the old fashioned way, and work to get the law changed one vote at a time.
By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People..., Immigration • No Comment