Large swathes of America – the west coast, the east coast north of the Carolinas, most cities over 250,000 people – are controlled by an increasingly extremist left-of-center party that governs badly, fosters corruption and leads to a vacuum of effective authority in a way that makes large parts of the country incubators for crime.
The federal government, from that same party, one that has controlled much of the national agenda for over 80 years (even during the occasional period that the party has been out of power) is a centralized authoritarian state governing a decreasingly independent federation, practices “socialism lite”, and carries it out badly.
So when anti-Trump protesters demand we “Make America Mexican Again” – well, for vast swathes of this country, ese tren salió de la estación.
While our professional ninny class was jabbering about the Second Amendment (almost entirely to try to gin up enthusiasm for a geriatric white woman this November), America actually, quietly, and with the nodding approval of an ignorant majority, became an actual police state.
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that evidence found by police officers after illegal stops may be used in court if the officers conducted their searches after learning that the defendants had outstanding arrest warrants.
The Fourth Amendment is as near-death today as the Second was thirty years ago, and for pretty much the same reasons; political expediency.
We, the people, brought the Second back to life. Who’s going to do it for the Fourth?
UPDATE: The more I read about the actual case, Utah v. Strieff, the more nuance I see in the majority decision.
Which doesn’t change the fact that the Fourth Amendment has been beaten to a pulp this past 50 years.
When Central Americans sneak across the border to the US, the ones who get caught claim asylum as refugees. That entitles them to due process which means a hearing on their claims. Except the courts are backed up for years.
We don’t keep refugees in concentration camps at the border, we release them on their own promise to appear. And being potential refugees, they’re immediately eligible for welfare, plus they can work pending the hearing, and the US Government pays their way to be resettled across the nation while awaiting the hearing.
As Metro Transit’s $957 million Green Line project marked its second anniversary on June 14, even die-hard transit advocates acknowledge jobs, housing and commercial development have been a mixed bag.
“I think we’re on a great track with housing, and we always knew that housing was an area that would grow first,” said Mary Kay Bailey, director of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative.
Well, of course they knew that housing was an area that’d grow first; it’s being subsidized by various levels of government.
If you pay people to do something, someone’ll probably do it.
“But I think it’s time to keep our eyes on job growth. … We want to see it improve with more job-focused development. That’s an important piece for us as a city.”
While Minneapolis and St. Paul have increased their job base by 7 percent since 2011, the collaborative found that job growth averaged less than half that along the Green Line corridor, with wide variation from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some segments of the Green Line have yet to regain jobs lost since light rail construction began nearly six years ago.
The article mentions not a word about the crime rate in the neighborhood. I’m not going to blame reporter Frederick Melo for that just yet – he does a generally conscientious job of covering Saint Paul.
But while the city’s various spokespeople will downplay it for all they’re worth, the general sense in the neighborhood is that crime is up, especially south of Thomas Avenue, four short blocks north of University. And one undeniable fact – which, to be honest, may be a fluke; only time will tell – is that many of the city’s murders this year have happened up and down University Avenue. Of course, it’s early to tie that statistically to the train (notwithstanding one victim who literally died alongside the tracks last March) – but when you see smoke, it’s not unreasonable to think there’s a fire down there somewhere.
My mom worked at a nursing school. My niece is a NICU nurse. I have quite a few nurses among my closest friends.
So it’s hard not to say “I have all the sympathy in the world for the nurses that are striking at the various Alina hospitals”.
So I will let Larry from “Very Angry Bird” say it for me:
Normally, I am very sympathetic to anyone who is affected by the treachery and deceit of ObamaCare. The only ones who escape by shoulder to cry on are union types who supported ObamaCare when it was first being hatched. Since most unions are Democratic strongholds, the nurses union all supported ObamaCare. To put it in old west terms – they now know what it is like to be shot with their own gun.
nurses are wonderful people – but the nurses union is as hard left as the SEIU. The union jumped up and down and did cartwheels for Obama, and Obamacare, eight years ago.
Now, as the “Affordable Care Act” makes healthcare I’ll truly unaffordable for millions – exactly as predicted – the union is trying to insulate itself and its members from the policies that the union supported, worked for, and donated its members ‘money to.
While the pundits and talking heads make fervid proclamations about the Second Amendment – something many of them really just don’t get – the free market is voting with its feet:
“After getting robbed twice over the last three months, the owner of a Shell gas station in Sauk Rapids wanted to get more customers during the evening, hoping it would improve safety,” kstp.com reports. “Last week, station owner Frank Schwagel offered a 10-cent-per-gallon discount for law enforcement or people with proof of permit to carry after 7 p.m. each day.”
I’ve got four trips through the area planned between now and the end of October. I’ll make a point of stopping at Schwagel’s store – even before 7PM, with no discount – to support them. I hope you will too.
“Journalist” buys an AR 15 at a gun store, intending to caterwaul about how easy it is for law-abiding citizens to do things they have every legal right to do.
After a showy but shallow “filibuster”, the Democrats in the Senate moved a bill that would have allowed the government to strip your gun rights (among others) without due process or any means of knowing one was on the list, much less how to get off it.
The orcs of the gun grabber movement put out their calls to their minions.
The Real Americans of the Second Amendment called the good guys to turn out, via phone and email.
We Real Americans have made a lot of progress in the past 30 years. And for all that, we are one SCOTUS decision, one bad election, away from returning to the hell of the seventies.
Andrew Rothman of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance was apparently on WCCO yesterday. “Protect” MN put out an email blast for its badly-informed chanting point bots to call in – which I doubt worked especially well.
I was extraordinarily busy over the weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to listen.
But “Protect” MN’s email blasts are always low entertainment (emphasis added):
Dear Heinrich
…
Mr. Rothman is one of the most vorciferous
advocates for the gun lobby in our state.
And Nancy Nord Bence is one of the most vociferously bad spellers in Minnesota public life.
He makes his living teaching Permit to Carry classes and representing the most extreme views of the NRA at the Capital
No. No, he does not. He earns his living in a day job like the rest of us.
This is the level of accuracy one expects from “Protect” MN.
Orlando murderer Omar Mateen – a man who seems to have mixed sexual confusion and extreme millenarian Islam on his way to becoming the worst mass-shooter in US history – was giving off warning signs even in childhood:
At age 14, he said he could shoot an AK-47 and mimicked an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. At 26, he bragged to courthouse co-workers of terrorist ties. Weeks ago, at 29, Mateen sought to buy heavy-duty body armor and bulk ammunition.
Many of his violent outbursts aped or celebrated Islamic terrorism and he repeatedly claimed connections to known terrorists, including the Boston Marathon bombers. He cheered the 9/11 attacks on the day they happened and once threatened to shoot partygoers at a barbecue when pork, which is forbidden to Muslims, touched his hamburger.
Bear in mind that Mateen passed not one, but eight background checks:
So let’s walk through this from the beginning:
Mateen spends his entire life as a vocal terror sympathizer. He also meets all the right people – has contact with other known terror figures, the whole nine yards.
The feds investigate him at least twice. Maybe they found nothing. Maybe political pressure led then to foreshorten their inquiry; maybe to avert accusations of “profiling” they took their resources to investigate NASCAR drivers in Alabama. We don’t know, and probably never will.
Mateen passes eight of the background checks that are the “common sense regulation” that the orcs of Big Gun Control want to subject the law-abiding citizen to – which is further evidence that they don’t care about crime, but do want to register gun owners.
Mateen – who was either in the midst of a struggle over sexuality, or was adopting a “gay” cover to case gay bars for his attacks – becomes enough of a regular figure in Orlando gay bars to not arouse notice.
For their part, the State of Florida made all bars “gun free zones”; every victim at “Pulse” was, by law, disarmed. While gun owners in many states – the states where “gun free zones” are treated as trespassing rather than misdemeanors or worse – routinely ignore “gun free zone” signs, nobody at “Pulse” apparently did.
Oh, yeah. It just must be the fault of Christian NRA members.
To: Rep. Liz Krueger (D-NY)
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Your Plan
Rep. Krueger
Sssssh. This is just between you and me.
Rep. Liz Krueger (D-NY)
Last week in Congress, you suggested people “infiltrate the NRA”.
Brilliant plan. I found the double-dog secret gateway that leads into the inner sanctum. Here it is. Please make sure you share this only with trusted agents of the Big Plan.
Victorian women were sheltered, modest, protected from anything that might upset them.
Hedonists are people living non-traditional lifestyles, the fringe that became hippies proclaiming free sex, free love, free drugs to expand your consciousness and blow your mind while you let it all hang out.
Modern women want to be Victorian Hedonists – they want to drink until they pass out at frat parties but not be scolded when the obvious bad thing happens. They want a free college education but must be protected from books that threaten their narrow worldview. They demand to be admitted to men’s clubs on equality grounds, then demand to exclude men from safe spaces reserved for women.
It’s either a completely new philosophy or it’s mental illness, I’m not expressing an opinion. My question: is Victorian Hedonism the basis for a sustainable society, or a harbinger of doom?
Joe Doakes
These days, you’d be nuts to bet against “harbinger”.
Glenn Reynolds, in a piece about Big Left’s lies about “gun culture”:
Remember, none of this is about saving lives. It’s about the cultural domination of the people in flyover country, by their coastal “betters” who get a near-erotic thrill out of such domination, and who are reduced to blind rage whenever their efforts at domination fail.
I’ve been saying for years – usually as a jibe at my DFL friends – that while the Big Left has been jabbering about “the upcoming class war” for decades, most lately with its “Occupy…” “movement” with its rhetoric of the “1%” vs the “99%”, most of them don’t reallize they finally got their class war. It is the gun issue. And they’re the Patricians, the 1%, the lotus-eaters.
And Michael Bloomberg isn’t ponying up millions for gun control because he’s concerned about all those poor black and brown people in Chicago and El Paso being murdered.
On Sunday, June 12, ISIS won a dramatic victory. Without risking any of its terror assets and without having to spend one dime of its financial assets, an ISIS volunteer vindicated its strategy of inspiring terrorist acts and launched the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The act not only shattered the lives of the victims and their families. It no doubt inspired still more jihadists to plot their own attacks both at home and abroad. Facing battlefield reverses in Iraq and Syria, ISIS struck back at its chief enemy. But the wins didn’t stop there. Incredibly, ISIS won not just in Orlando. It’s winning the aftermath. The American response to the attack has been beyond ineffective, veering decisively toward the counterproductive. We’re doing nothing more to deter or prevent terror attacks and everything to deceive our own people about the true nature of the threat. Rather than unite to fight a common enemy, we’re dissolving into partisan, polarizing stupidity.
Going after the NRA over Orlando – which many politically and socially prominent gays and media figures are doing – is a little like attacking the Eastern Orthodox Church over Hitler’s invasion of Russia; they weren’t there, and they had nothing to do with it.
French notes the deepening vacuity of our political class in dealing with this:
The western and moderate Muslim world’s campaign against ISIS remains dilatory and indecisive.
It’s not only validated ISIS’s latest tactic of farming out its terrorism in the West to “do it yourselfers” who get their information from ISIS’s very polished print and web presence, it gave them a poster boy with a big victory.
The entire US response so far? Jabbering about gun control (which doesn’t affect terrorists in the least – even if you went door to door and grabbed every gun in the United States tomorrow, they could switch to gasoline, dynamite or knives), scabrous pronouncements against Christians and gun owners.
Everything but the two things that would work: getting serious about ISIS, which is not only not the “JV team”, but is running rings around Barack Obama, and decreasing the number of places where citizens are rendered statutorily helpless targets.
Everybody knows David slew Goliath, and that it was an amazing feat because David was a kid and Goliath a giant. He won using a sling – a child’s weapon.
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says America needs an army of Davids, ordinary people with ordinary skills to take on extraordinary tasks using their own particular skills.
Suppose a fundamentalist Christian preacher in America were to embrace the concept? Suppose he preached to his congregation: “God has turned His back on America because we have embraced Satan. The only thing we can do is start over, just like Sodom and Gomorrah. But we don’t have to wait for God to act, the Lord helps those who help themselves. Every one of you can play a role in bringing God’s justice to this land, just like David slew Goliath, you can be an Army of Davids. Do you work for the power company? Search for a way to disrupt the grid. Do you work in for the water department? Search for a way to poison everyone in the city after you massacre the staff at the Christmas party. Do you have knowledge of firearms? Kill all the gays in a nightclub. You don’t need to travel overseas to kill sinners, they’re all around you. You don’t need specialized training, you don’t need financial backing, you don’t need have your plans approved or coordinate your action with anyone else; just do it. The Lord will approve.”
Suppose impressionable young men and women took him up on it and began to commit random acts of terrorism. Do you think the Obama administration would find a way to restrict his preaching, limit membership in his church, seize his pamphlets, block his radio transmissions, deny him internet access?
And it’s gonna be as bad – no twice…no, eleventy-teen times as bad as Islamic Extremist terror:
Also this week came news of the DHS comments concerning right-wing extremists, which were made during the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s January meeting – only one month after Muslim terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 Americans in an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.
“Member [Austin Police Chief Art] Acevedo reminded the Council that the threat from right-wing extremists domestically is just as real as the threat from Islamic extremism,” the official meeting minutes state.
Johnson apparently agreed with Acevedo’s sentiments, the official records noted.
Sometime in the next three months, look for DHS to reclassify Islamic Extremism as “right wing”.
