Post-Mueller Developments

The Mueller investigation is over. His long-awaited report is out and everyone has had a chance to read it. Despite Mueller saying there was no evidence of collusion or cooperation between the Trump Campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, most on the left still insist there was. Still more insist that President Trump tried to cover up a “crime” that Mueller says never occurred. The only visible change is that fewer Democrats are calling for Trump’s impeachment. Among presidential candidates, only Senator Elizabeth Warren is.

There’s been a similar reaction in Mainstream Media which had pushed the Trump/Russia collusion narrative hard for more than two years. They seem genuinely disappointed that Mueller found nothing. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, for example, said on Meet the Press last Sunday: “It [the Mueller Report] described a campaign eager to accept the help of a hostile foreign power: Russia.” Really Chuck? The report itself stated, and I quote: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russia Government in its election interference activities.”

Ever since it was called the “Soviet Union,” Russia has tried to interfere with US elections going back nearly a hundred years. The United States interfered with internal politics in the Soviet Union for just as long. Both countries interfered with elections in southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean throughout the Cold War, yet Democrats and media act as if recent Russian interference were something new. In 2016 the Obama State Department spent $350,000  in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu but Mainstream Media ignored it.

Conservative media outlets claim Mueller should not have accepted appointment as special counsel because there was never evidence of a crime involving the Trump campaign. President Trump and Attorney General Barr now want to investigate how the Mueller investigation started, alleging nefarious activities by the Clinton Campaign, the Clinton Foundation, as well as the Obama FBI, CIA, NSA, and DOJ during and after the 2016 campaign. Evidence for this exists going back three years and includes lying under oath to Congress and FBI officials but got no mention in Mueller Report.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating how James Comey’s FBI conducted the Hillary Clinton email scandal, how it investigated the Clinton Foundation, how it filed the FBI/DOJ’s FISA application on Carter Page, and the possible interference by the Obama Administration in the 2016 election, as well as other subjects. US Attorney John Huber of Utah was appointed special prosecutor for the case and he met with Attorney General William Barr shortly after the latter was confirmed. Horowitz and Huber have played their cards very close to the vest and have been waiting for the Mueller Investigation to conclude before interviewing key witnesses who were also involved with Mueller’s probe.

Courtesy of Conservative Tree House

The Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by North Carolina Senator Richard Burr has also been investigating the 2016 election in a relatively quiet way compared to its House counterpart. So, right now there are two ongoing investigations — DOJ IG Horowitz (with US Attorney Huber) and US Senate — as well as a possible new one by Attorney General Barr as indicated by his recent congressional testimony. The relatively small conservative media has been reporting for two years on evidence of criminal behavior by former CIA Director James Brennan, former FBI Director Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and several other former Obama Administration officials. Mainstream Media has largely ignored it.

Possible crimes involve lying under oath, misusing the FISA Court, and leaking to the press — but also abuse of power that includes spying on Trump and his associates and unmasking subjects of surveillance during and after the 2016 campaign. Trump’s base is crying for more such investigations while Democrats are indignant. The whole Russia/Trump brouhaha cannot be understood strictly as a Democrat vs Republican issue, nor strictly a right vs left issue either. The divide is more Trump supporters vs Trump haters across the political spectrum and from both parties.

The haters are blinded by emotion. I debate some of them regularly and see their counterparts in politics and media. They know journalistic standards have been dropped in pursuit of Trump but choose to overlook it believing ends — getting rid of him — justify means. Trump supporters recognize his faults but see opposition tactics as far more harmful for our democracy so they rally behind him.

We’ll get a feel over the next few months for how the body politic reacts to these post-Mueller developments. Are people sick of political investigations and just want them all to go away? How will primary voters react to ongoing impeachment preparations by Democrats? As the presidential campaign heats up, will candidates debate these issues?

Hairy Legs, Culture, and Chicken

The legions of left-wing loonies with whom we share this continent have continued their antics, as a few short items from last week indicate.

Item 1: Seven women with hairy legs are suing the police department in Toronto. They’re alleging they were profiled because of their hairy legs, and a few other things. “[Police] followed a profile that was created by senior Toronto Police Service officers in targeting these seven individuals,” said their attorney, Davin Charney. “That profile included markers such as people who have backpacks, lawyers’ numbers on their arms, people with Quebec licence plates, people speaking French, people wearing black clothing,” Charney added. “My clients fit into that profile, to some extent. And that is why they were arrested, and that is why many people were arrested during the G20 [summit].”

Hmm. This is the kind of stuff you just cannot make up. Attorney Charney didn’t say anything about Birkenstocks, tattoos, knit hats, COEXIST bumperstickers, dreadlocks, hairy armpits, or odors, but that doesn’t mean Toronto cops didn’t take those clues into consideration as well.
The article said: “Plaintiff Alicia Ridge further alleges she was sexually assaulted during a roadside strip search.” The first of the 20 comments following the story was from “Stan M” who said: “I doubt Alicia Ridge was ‘sexually assaulted.’ There is a picture of her with the story.” I went back and looked at her picture and I think Stan had a point. Not only was she unattractive, but she had that petulant, Gloria Allred “I hate men” look going on. Maybe Alicia and her fuzzy friends have a case. I don’t know the laws about preventative detention in Canada, but I do appreciate the comic relief they provide as I follow the case.

Item 2: Across the ocean, the in-the-tank, Obama-supporting, mainstream media was in high dudgeon over Mitt Romney’s speech in Jerusalem. In the media throng were semi-covert agents of the Multicultural Police who accused Romney of racism after he referenced a correlation between Israel’s economic success and their democratic, Jewish culture that prizes education, equality, justice and human rights. Romney contrasted per capita GDP in Israel and the West Bank and attributed the difference to Israel’s culture of entrepreneurship. Thought Police in the Mainstream Media immediately inferred a slam on Palestinian culture. Now, at some level the MSM has got to know today’s Palestinian culture is sick. They must know kindergarten students in government schools are encouraged to become “shahids” - suicide bombers. They must know girls and women are murdered in “honor killings” if they dress like the women in the MSM dress every day. They must remember how Palestinian cousins in Egypt sexually assaulted 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan a few months ago, shouting “Jew! Jew! Jew!” But they overlook all that and slam Romney for his “gaffe.”

Why? What kind of mental gymnastics are necessary to juxtapose all that with their cherished concept of Palestinians as victims of Israeli “oppression”?

First, they equate culture with race, though they’re not the same thing. Racism is the belief that one race is superior to another - but they apply that logic to culture. Race is nature. Culture is nurture. One immutable, the other malleable. We used to learn that in Psych 101, but the multicultural brainwashing they got at the Columbia School of Journalism insists that “All cultures are equal!” That’s the mantra for mental zombies of the multi-culti cult and it trumps everything for those true believers who comprise almost 90% of the Mainstream Media.Typical street scene in Palestinian West Bank

I don’t know how many of them have actually been to Palestinian towns in the West Bank, but I have. Cultural clues are everywhere and contrast with Israeli culture is startling. Go into an Arab Muslim town in the West Bank and the first thing you notice is graffiti. The second is trash. It’s everywhere, either strewn about or in overflowing trash containers, and it’s not likely that I just happened to be in each town on trash day. It’s like that every day. Arab towns such as Nazareth in Israel proper are not as bad, but not clean either (over a million Israeli citizens are Arab). The third thing you notice is men hanging around in the middle of the day, smoking and talking. I saw none working, except a few in restaurants we patronized.Lastly, there’s Chick-fil-A. More than 600,000 turned out to support it when homosexual activists and their Democrat minions attacked it last week. After gay “marriage” is part of the Democrat Party platform, left-wing mayors in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia strong-armed the company because owners dared express conservative views on marriage. Democrats, the Mainstream Media, academia, and Hollywood have steadily cheered gay “marriage,” but it’s just not catching on - not when more than half a million spontaneously line up against it. The mayors quickly backed off, but it’s too late for Democrats. They’ve jumped in with both feet and it’s going to hurt them, big-time, in November.

Best Days Behind US?

Many feel that America’s best days are behind us, that our country peaked sometime in the late 20th century and has begun to decline. Maybe most Americans feel that way, I don’t know. Some point to disintegration of family. Others cite economic decline - that we don’t produce much anymore as manufacturing is outsourced. The old Yankee saying that we could “Make the thing, or make the thing that makes the thing,” doesn’t apply anymore. Still others point to welfare dependency and the rise of our big-government nanny state. While liberals still claim children go hungry in the US, the real problem is childhood obesity. The “poor” in America are too fat. Many lament that Americans have become not only fat, but dumb and lazy as well. It used to be so that Americans were too proud to accept hand-outs from government, but now they’re encouraged. Our US Department of Agriculture even recruits people in Mexico to come to the United States and apply for Food Stamps immediately upon arrival!

Others cite parallels to Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” repeating in the country which used to see itself as “the city on a hill.” According to Wikipedia’s description of Gibbon’s thesis, that empire declined because: “Romans had become ‘effeminate,’ unwilling to live a tougher ‘manly’ lifestyle.” It also cited Gibbon’s belief that Christianity’s ascendency after Emperor Constantine weakened the empire because: “Christianity created a belief that a better life existed after death, which fostered an indifference to the present among Roman citizens, thus sapping their desire to sacrifice for the Empire. [Gibbon] also believed [Christianity’s] comparative pacifism tended to hamper the traditional Roman martial spirit.”

While Gibbon cited the rise of Christianity as hurting Rome, still other Americans cite Christianity’s decline causing our decline. If America is indeed declining, then who is ascending to fill the global power vacuum? China? Radical Islam? God help us, but those would be the two leading candidates.

What’s life like in China? Well, it’s still communist. While it’s relaxing its historic demonization of capitalism, it’s maintaining, even increasing its big-government, dissension-hating oppression. For more than a generation, women have been allowed only one child. Get pregnant a second time and government will compel you to kill your child in utero, even if the pregnancy were concealed until eight months along. Criticize the government there and you disappear to a forced, re-education camp for indoctrination in political correctness. There, you might lose a kidney or even a heart to the black market in human organs - especially if you’re a match with a ranking Chinese Communist Party official who needs one.

How about life in a Sharia-compliant country like Iran - or what Egypt and Libya are likely to become? There’s the Iranian “Modesty Police” who arrest women on the street if they show skin or hair. Homosexuals are publicly hanged, and women accused of adultery - even if that “adultery” occurred as they were gang-raped - are publicly stoned to death. Those converting to another religion are “apostates,” and the penalty for that? Death.

Several writers on both left and right agree that American power is on the wane. Liberal former Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria wrote “The Post-American World” in 2008 and conservative National Review’s Mark Steyn wrote “After America” in 2011. Zakaria purports that America’s decline is only relative because other countries like China and India are rising while we stagnate, and only the degree of our dominance is declining. He thinks America will just lumber along sharing global leadership with China and India.Steyn, however, is far more concerned; his subtitle is: “Get Ready for Armageddon.” He sees America becoming sclerotic with big government debt, bureaucracy, and regulation. In this way, he parallels Gibbon’s observation that Rome lost its vitality and so has America. Steyn sees American decline as imminent and precipitous; hence the subtitle. He purports that British decline and European decline were genteel because America alone carried western civilization in the last half of the 20th century as it fended off communism and other forms of civilizational evil. Indeed, “America Alone” (2006) was prequel to “After America” (2011). Steyn sees the twin demons of Chinese-style big government and fascist, theocratic Radical Islam waiting to fill the void after American collapse.I hope both Zakaria and Steyn are mistaken in their forecasts. If they’re not, I’d much prefer Zakaria’s vision for our future, but I’m sorry to say that Steyn makes the stronger case. Can our decline be reversed? We’ll get a clue about that in November.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

So it’s a tax law, huh? If it were a law forcing people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, it wouldn’t be constitutional, but if it’s a tax law, it is constitutional. But Obamacare didn’t pass as a tax bill. Democrats in Congress who passed it (not a single Republican voted for it) insisted it wasn’t a tax bill. It was signed by a Democrat president who insisted it wasn’t a tax bill. It never would have passed if it were a tax bill, so they didn’t call it that. Rather, they called it “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” though few call it that anymore. Everyone calls it Obamacare.So the Roberts Court should have declared it unconstitutional and sent it back to the Congress, right? But they didn’t do that. Instead, Roberts re-wrote Obamacare as a tax law and declared it constitutional! He did this with the four liberal justices who just wanted to move it along no matter how that was achieved. Even Justice Flipflopper - I mean Kennedy - was flabbergasted. Talk about legislating from the bench! Even my middle-school civics students knew it’s the Congress that writes laws, not the Supreme Court.
And now government can tax us for what we don’t do? How is that possible? To tax our income, they had to pass the 16th Amendment back in 1913. Why isn’t the amendment process required this time?

Two more problems: the Constitution requires that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t give the Supreme Court power to write law or re-write law. Obamacare originated in the Senate, then was re-written in the Supreme Court.Article I empowers a legislative branch to write law. Article II empowers an executive branch to carry out the legislation. Article III empowers a judicial branch to ensure the Constitution is adhered to. Roberts overstepped. He’s not empowered to rewrite legislation. So, is the United States a constitutional republic or isn’t it? Are we governed under the rule of law or aren’t we?There are reports from both left and right that Roberts switched his vote at the last because he was worried about what media and Democrat criticism would do to the image of his court and to his legacy. If those reports are true, we’re screwed. We have a chief justice whose decisions are not based on the Constitution. For as long as he is the fifth vote on vital constitutional issues, we will not be a constitutional republic. If government can do this, is there anything they cannot do?Shrewd Democrats structured this penalty bill, I mean tax bill, I mean “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” so as to give people benefits first and penalties/taxes years later - so that makes it difficult to repeal। When has government ever taken away an entitlement? I cannot point to a single instance in our history, and I can see what’s happening in Europe when “austerity” measures are proposed which would cut entitlements there। No wonder politicians fear this, but that doesn’t stop them from promising more and more entitlements like Obamacare which they know we cannot afford to deliver for very long before we go bankrupt. Stockton, California just went belly-up and it looks like the whole state will soon follow. Then other states. Then . . . who knows?

It may be that in the wake of what Roberts did, the Tea Party will reinvigorate voters and elect a Republican Senate, a Republican president, and retain a Republican House. If all that happens, they may introduce a repeal. It’s a long shot that it’ll go all the way through the process though. It’s more likely that government takeover of health care will continue.

And what would that look like? I have a pretty good idea. A few years ago, I was stopped every morning for ten days by a woman with one of those turn-around, stop/slow signs on Route 5 here in Lovell. I’d wait in a line of cars until she turned the sign. Then I’d proceed slowly past several orange, state trucks and a dozen or so men standing around talking while one of them occasionally operated a machine that was cleaning out the drainage ditch beside the highway. During two of those days, I watched a small, private, local business paving a driveway while I waited. It was a frenzy of activity as a few of my former students laid, graded, and packed a gravel base the first day - then put down a layer of pavement the second day. It looked great and it still does. The state government crew took almost two weeks on a job that should have taken a day - with half the “workers” and equipment.What’s going to happen to our small, private hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, etc. when the federal government takes them over? You already know, don’t you? Longer delays, increased costs, and poorer service. “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”? Talk about a misnomer.

Emerging from the Constitutional Convention back in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government the Founding Fathers created. His reply was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Change Course Or Collapse? Choose

Hard times are ahead. As a nation, we’re marching toward a cliff and the question is: Will we continue and go off the precipice or will we change course? Anyone with a basic knowledge of arithmetic knows things cannot go on as they are. Political leaders have promised that we can provide medical care for the poor, the elderly, and now everyone else as well - forever. They talk as though it will be possible to provide food, clothing and housing for anyone who asks too. I’m no math genius, but even I know that’s impossible. Yet our political leaders insist that if we increase taxes on the rich we’ll be able to keep marching. They have to know that even if we taxed the rich at 100% it would only provide enough revenue to keep going for a few more months before bankruptcy.

So many Americans have depended on government for so long, they don’t know how to take care of themselves. But if the country goes bankrupt - if we march off that cliff - all that government assistance will end abruptly. Then what? Chaos, of course. Many are preparing for exactly that scenario to one degree or another and I see what they see, but isn’t there still some way to avoid it?

That we cannot continue as we’re going is indisputable, but what’s the alternative? How can we avoid marching off the cliff? Can we make cuts to the checks and programs slowly? Can we do it slowly enough to both avoid the cliff and give dependent Americans time to adjust to making their own way? Will they? There was a time in America - still in the memory of living citizens - when people did live by their own labors. Those who could not were supported by families or by churches and private charities. Can we gradually return to that kind of nation? Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I prefer to think we can. I prefer to think there are still enough Americans who realize the path we’re on leads to bankruptcy and chaos. I prefer to think there are enough of us to elect a congress and president who will cut the behemoth government has become - cut it surgically, systematically and incrementally. If we do it gradually, can we avoid chaos? Can we avoid violence? Whoever we elect must also be capable of explaining to the American people in terms they can understand why cutting is vital to our survival, why it has never been possible for government to fulfill the promises it made. Look at Social Security alone: it can only work when there are more people being born than are growing old - as long as children in American families outnumber parents. That’s how it was in America while I was growing up, but it isn’t that way anymore. Those who dreamed up Social Security during the New Deal and added more expensive social programs during the Great Society, then started preaching about over-population. They championed birth control and abortion to prevent births, then justified it all by preaching that “the planet” couldn’t sustain them. What they conveniently overlooked was that the world they thereby created couldn’t sustain their beloved Social Security either. The children they prevented or the 45 million they killed in the womb since Roe v Wade in 1973 would not be paying FICA taxes. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme with elderly baby boomers as its beneficiaries until it collapses. Those children they did allow to be born are the ones who get stiffed. Medicare and other Great Society programs have similar scenarios. The handwriting is on the wall. Unlike Babylonian king Belshazzar, we don’t need a biblical prophet to translate it for us. We don’t even need a calculator because the arithmetic is simple. The handwriting on the wall for 21st century Americans reads: “Change course or collapse.”

Hot Showers and Indoor Toilets

Indoor toilets and hot showers are great. Both are only short steps from my bed and I start every day with them. Central heat is nice too. I hope to have all three for the rest of my days - about twenty more years for an almost-sixty-year-old, heterosexual white guy according to the actuaries - but I’m not fully confident that I will. For that, I’ll need steady and affordable supplies of electricity and fossil fuel for the next two decades and those require a stable infrastructure, both physical and financial. In spite of what the lefty Cassandras proclaim about us running out of fossil fuels, we’re not, and we won’t for centuries to come. It’s the cracks in our financial infrastructure that worry me. Maybe it’s the widespread strikes in France over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. French unions are shutting down refineries and pipelines. Maybe it’s the riots in Greece over similar benefit and retirement issues. Both portend unrest here in America, which is on the same path many European countries have been traveling. Frenchmen and Greeks and many other Europeans are like petulant children who expect their parent government to take care of them while they put their feet up and relax. They want to retire young, then collect full pensions and benefits for two or three decades. They don’t seem to care or even understand how unrealistic those expectations are. They don’t have enough young people to work and pay the taxes necessary to keep it all going - and it’s their own fault.

When so many French, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Greeks choose not to bear enough children even to replace themselves, who did they think was going to keep working to support them in their declining years? Yeah, I know children are expensive, take a lot of energy and sacrifice and are a pain to raise sometimes, but what’s the alternative? Did they think immigrants were going to fill in for the children they never had? Immigrants, legal and illegal, have swarmed into Europe from Muslim countries to the south, but they’re not assimilating. They don’t want to become Frenchmen, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes, or Italians, and they are proving to be a net drain on government services instead of contributing to the pensions and benefits of aging Europeans. Rather than showing affection for their new homelands, the new immigrants seem disdainful. Immigrant neighborhoods are breeding grounds for terrorists. All this has lead German Chancellor Angela Merkel to declare that multiculturalism - the liberal dream that people from every culture would come to Europe and be smiling, happy people holding hands - “has utterly failed.” She might as well have said that European socialism has utterly failed as well because it has. It’s responsible for a generation of selfish, pampered, spoiled citizens who want what they want no matter what it costs. They don’t care if everything comes crashing down after them, as long as they get theirs while they’re still living.

After 33+ years as a public-school teacher in Maine, there’s a pension coming to me for the rest of my days - theoretically. I have no debts. My expenses are low. My wife and I know how to live frugally, having spent most of our lives together working multiple jobs, paying the bills and raising a family. With a pension, we could cut back our workload a bit and live fairly comfortably but one thing nags at me: Can I depend on that that pension being there in five years? Ten years? Maybe. Maybe not. State pension funds are in trouble all over the country, underfunded by over $3 trillion. As Andrew Biggs writes in the Wall Street Journal: “According to accounting rules adopted by the states, a public sector pension plan may call itself "fully funded" even if there is a better-than-even chance it will be unable to meet its obligations.” Many don’t even reach that threshold. Just as in Europe, government employee unions and left-wing politicians here signed extremely generous agreements over the years that both sides must have known were little better than Ponzi schemes. They worked well for the first waves of retirees, but - as with Social Security - bankruptcy looms for baby boomers like me who are beginning to retire now. The forty million babies aborted in America over the last four decades would have come in handy about now, but oh well. It’s likely they’d have been much more productive than the 12-20 million illegal immigrants from Latin countries to our south who have been allowed in to replace them. Like Muslim immigrants in European countries, they’re a net drain on our system, but at least they’re not plotting to bring down western civilization as Muslim immigrants are in Europe. That’s a consolation. Socialist Democrats running the White House and Congress have added over $3 trillion to our national debt in less than two years. The Federal Reserve is printing $100 billion a month, yet unemployment is still rising. Nonetheless, my toilet worked this morning. Hot water was there in the shower. The heat came on. I still have a job to go to and the election is less than two weeks away.

One day at a time.