Lt. Col. Allen West has become one of my dearest e mail friends and is a constant memo reader. He speaks out forcefully expressing his contempt for Antifa and BLM.
I had written a memo to be posted Friday afternoon entitled: "What Is Happening To America Needs To Stop Or Our Republic Is Finished. Another Rant. Questions The Mass Media Will Never/Can't Ask." before I heard him speak on this video so I am posting his link at the top of today's memo.
I love this man's patriotism, his verve and his clear headed thinking. He is my role model. I only wish he would come visit again. He knows he and his wife (whom I have never met) would be our very welcomed guests.
Allen , you know you have an open invitation.
Thank the lord he has recovered from his recent terrible motorcycle accident. America needs him back in Congress, preferably as a Senator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I had written a memo to be posted Friday afternoon entitled: "What Is Happening To America Needs To Stop Or Our Republic Is Finished. Another Rant. Questions The Mass Media Will Never/Can't Ask." before I heard him speak on this video so I am posting his link at the top of today's memo.
I love this man's patriotism, his verve and his clear headed thinking. He is my role model. I only wish he would come visit again. He knows he and his wife (whom I have never met) would be our very welcomed guests.
Allen , you know you have an open invitation.
Thank the lord he has recovered from his recent terrible motorcycle accident. America needs him back in Congress, preferably as a Senator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Henninger and the voting method disparity. Who picks the president?
A Trump-Biden Niagara Fall
By
How the pandemic and protests are floating the U.S. into a political crisis.
Niagara Falls is a wonder of the world in part because when staring at its vast, churning expanse, what comes to mind is: I wouldn’t want to be swept over those falls. Welcome to the 2020 presidential election. Some 120 million voters are in the same boat, heading for a political crackup on Nov. 3. But hey, we don’t arrive at the top of the falls for two months. Why worry?
On Tuesday, this newspaper’s opinion columns carried a bracing editorial—“Will Courts Pick the Next President?”—on the impending mail-in voting fiasco. Read it and weep. The gist of the situation is that some states, oblivious to the laws of postal-delivery gravity, are allowing ballots to be put in the mail just days before Nov. 3. They may or may not show up by Election Day, but so what
Postal service experts have warned of the risks of mailing ballots within seven days of Nov. 3. But hardly anyone is listening to them. Amid the maelstrom of state voting procedures, lawsuits are being filed to challenge existing deadlines. A federal judge told Georgia that if a ballot is postmarked before Election Day, it has to be counted whenever it shows up.
In Pennsylvania, some officials want ballots counted even if a postmark is missing. State election officials are going to eyeball signatures on mailed ballots to see if they match what’s on file. Close doesn’t count only in horseshoes and hand grenade.
But here’s the really dynamite mail-in metric: Polling done by The Wall Street Journal suggests 66% of Trump voters plan to vote in person, but nearly 75% of Biden voters say they’ll mail it in. Arguably, we are going to have parallel elections for the same office. Not even close to arguable is that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will claim each won his election. Dueling inaugurations, anyone? Portland’s permanent political street-fighting could be coming to a neighborhood near you.
The excuse for rolling the election helplessly onto the rocks is, of course . . . the pandemic.
It’s worth noting how much of essential America is being subsumed beneath the pandemic’s unchanging conventional wisdom.
Schools, universities, urban economies, industries and now a national election must stumble forward as if nothing we know about the virus’s virulence or transmission has changed since March. At institution after institution, leadership has ceded decision-making responsibility to an amorphous power called “science.” That statement requires an apology to the scientists who world-wide have been conducting debate and discussion about the virus’s threat today versus the need to resume normal human life.
Are we really going to allow a national political crisis caused by a demonstrably flawed voting system to just, you know, sort of happen? A half year on, the pandemic has short-circuited independent or helpful input from much of the nation’s leadership on protecting the election.
Several reasons may explain the national outbreak of nonfeasance.
One is “Trump.” After marinating for three years in antipathy for “Trump,” many elites—in business, academia and the media—are willing to let the system rip to get rid of him. In turn, he’s happy to oblige the rancor. In the Cold War, this was called mutual assured destruction.
More intriguing is how racial issues that emerged after May 25 have suppressed normal political instincts and comment. The idea of Black Lives Matter has become a kind of alternative reality in which racialism informs everything, starting with that long list of torn-down monuments to such notorious racists as Ulysses S. Grant.
This presidential election was going to be difficult enough without the new element of racially motivated mob rage and one major party locked up over its historic ties to the civil-rights movement and the current movement’s street protests and violence. The BLM goal is to conform opinion. The result is that people who normally would speak up no longer do—about anything.
Last month, Seattle’s Police Chief Carmen Best, a black woman, was forced to resign. This week, Rochester, N.Y., Police Chief La’Ron Singletary, also black, resigned with a bitter statement: “As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character.”
Their careers, a testament to racial advancement, are collateral damage, tossed away in a day without defense from anyone. The complexities of their jobs aren’t discussable. Instead, liberals and many others—in and out of politics—hide behind the virtue of the moment, intimidated by social media and the social-justice sentiments of millennials.
Between the pandemic and protests, we have fallen into a culture of silence this year. Now it looks as if we will nonchalantly let the mail-in vote mess float a presidential election over the falls into a political crisis. Stock up on water wings.
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Is this what a JoKe loss will turn into?
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And:
Is this what a JoKe loss will turn into?
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AND:
Greenberg fears tyranny will reign.
Don’t Squander Our Victory Over Tyranny
As a World War II veteran, I’m worried by political violence and electoral chaos.
By
Those of us who served in World War II proudly took part in an American-led effort to save the world from tyranny and oppression. Once the Allies were victorious, America launched a postwar effort to export our values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, due process, and free enterprise. The result was greater respect for human rights and more than 70 years of global stability and prosperity, which lifted countless millions out of poverty and despair.
Today, those same American values are under wide-scale attack in the streets of the U.S., while many of our leaders stand idly by. They have made the calculation that it is politically advantageous to ignore or minimize violence and lawlessness rather than stand up for the rule of law. That is a dereliction of duty. It puts our country in jeopardy. Our great democracy can’t be sustained if the people we entrust to protect it are unwilling or unable to do so.
We must take all measures possible to ensure the integrity of our elections. Every American should be wary of the motivations of those advocating for wide-scale, mail-in voting across the country. It is untested and would likely overwhelm the system. Do we have the ability to verify the outcome of that massive vote? Will the winner be recognized, or will it take an indefinite time and divisive court battles to establish a result? Will the losing party accept the verdict? If not, who becomes president on Inauguration Day?What a shame it would be if the world’s leading democracy proves incapable of conducting a fair, orderly election with a valid outcome. I would hope we can save the country from that kind of embarrassment and the potential civil unrest that could ensue.
Those of us who served in World War II were prepared to pay any price for the country. I was recalled, as many others were, when the Korean War broke out. We never questioned the need to serve and protect what we stood for as a nation.
Mr. Greenberg is CEO of C.V. Starr & Co. He served as a U.S. Army platoon commander in World War II and a company commander and captain in Korea.
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Olson voted for Hillary, hates Trump and points out his reasons which are the same he refused to recognize and/or dismissed when he voted for Hillary.
Never Trump, Now More Than Ever
Mr. Trump erodes public trust and embarrasses his office. Join me in not voting for him.
By Walter Olson
Four years ago I was a “Never Trump” voter. Now, I’m more set than ever in that view: No Trump, doubled. That’s even though I far prefer his economic policies to those of the Democrats. I’ve written many times to defend his administration’s policies against unfair attacks from the left, and I’ve applauded his judicial appointments. But I won’t vote for him, for reasons of Constitution and character.
No modern president has shown so little care for or grasp of how government works—for instance, what powers the president does and doesn’t have. None have found it as hard to put the nation’s well-being above his own, on matters as basic as setting aside the interests of his family business.Especially vital is that a president set aside personal interest in relations with foreign powers. He should present a united front with his domestic political rivals against foreign meddling in U.S. politics, and he should refrain from using U.S. leverage over weaker countries to seek personal electoral advantage. In the Russia and Ukraine affairs, it’s true that some of his opponents went beyond the available evidence in charging him with misconduct. But even shorn of exaggeration, his conduct fell short of what Americans should expect.
At the start I was happy to allow the man a honeymoon, thinking the shock of great responsibility might lead him to put away childish things, that he might mature as did Shakespeare’s Prince Hal (in “Henry IV”) and banish his internal Falstaff. Mr. Trump didn’t change. He won’t change now.
I’m no foreign-policy interventionist, but it is wrong to envy the methods of overseas strongmen. Friends who plan to vote for him don’t deny the lack of impulse control, the vindictive meanness of spirit, the Niagara of lies. Don’t fuss so much about the man himself, they say. Follow the policies.
But the presidency—unlike the Senate, where self-absorbed talkers can sail by for years without notice—has executive responsibility. It is charged with delicate relations with rival foreign powers, and with responding to crises.
When the crisis came as a pandemic, a different president, conscious of his limitations, might have stepped back to let Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx do the talking. But Mr. Trump has bluffed his way through life claiming to know more than the experts. He needs to be the groom at every wedding and the infant at every christening.
Stories abound of how zany ideas are quietly tamped down, or ignored entirely, by appointees around the agencies. But that’s not a stable situation. In time he will insert more personal loyalists into agency jobs.
Remember the “character counts” conservatives? The classicists who went back beyond the Federalist Papers to the Greeks and Romans to ground conservatism in civitas and virtue? Who thought deeply about the dangers to the republic from a man on horseback, a demagogic flatterer of the people, who preaches “I alone can fix it”?
“But he fights.” He is a litigious man who has openly boasted of using losing lawsuits to harm his critics. Yes, a president needs some combative spirit, but it should be discerning—especially when aimed at fellow Americans—and give way in due season to a spirit of reconciliation.
We don’t know when the next crisis will come. It might be a close election in which Mr. Trump needs to accept the decision of the judiciary. We might need national unity. Instead, this man’s tweets are the ground glass in the national milkshake.
A high degree of social trust is needed both for a dynamic economy and for the rule of law. But as legal scholar Orin Kerr puts it, “the president’s signature move is to attack the legitimacy of everyone and every institution who is not in lockstep with him.”
Some offer the “Flight 93 election” theory, in which every four years we face a last-chance, bet-the-country abyss. I don’t buy it. Our country has a system of rotation in office. The other party gets its turn, and the country survives. It will survive Donald Trump, too. But the country should not have to face four more years of him
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Kim discusses Trump's
Pennsylvania Bet
Trump’s Pennsylvania Bet
He seeks to attract more ‘forgotten men’ and to limit damage with suburban women.
By Kimberley Strassel
To watch Donald Trump on the stump is to wonder if this is a campaign with a strategy. To study the Trump re-election effort in Pennsylvania is to understand the carefully calculated bet it is making.
Pennsylvania is becoming ground zero of the 2020 election. Commentators tend to forget that Mr. Trump in 2016 won 304 electoral votes, 34 more than a majority. He can afford to lose a Michigan or Wisconsin. But he has few paths to the White House without the Keystone State. The president knows it; he’s dive-bombing the state. And Joe Biden knows it, making it his new basement.
Conventional wisdom is that Pennsylvania is the perfect example of why Mr. Trump will lose. Critics point to the bleed Mr. Trump has suffered among suburban voters, in particular the “collar counties” around Philadelphia. The president, they say, is too toxic personally to win those voters back, while his rural base isn’t enough to offset the deficit. It is a simple and tidy analysis—and therefore one that misses the complexity of a modern presidential race.
One flawed assumption is that Mr. Trump’s “forgotten man” vote is static. The campaign has spent the past few years diligently recruiting more of those disaffected citizens. In 2016 registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the state by about 920,000. Since that time, the Democratic advantage has narrowed to about 760,000—a 160,000-voter gain in a state Mr. Trump won by 44,000 votes.In rural counties, the campaign has kept hitting themes that will drive these new voters to the polls. In a recent speech in Latrobe, Mr. Trump warned that Mr. Biden would “take away your guns,” ship jobs to China, and sit silent as rioters rampage. He explained that Democrats would “wipe out” an “entire industry” by reinstating the “last administration’s eight-year pure war on Pennsylvania oil and coal and fracking.” He gave a shout-out to a Pittsburgh boilermakers’ union that endorsed him, and to local cops.These latter lines are aimed at disillusioned Democrats. As progressive policies have taken over the Democratic Party, greater numbers of moderates—especially in rural areas—have started voting Republican. Take Westmoreland County, home to Latrobe. Registered Democrats still about match registered Republicans in the county. Yet with each cycle, fewer prove willing to support their party’s nominee. In 2000, 46% of the county voted for Al Gore. In 2008, 41% voted for Barack Obama. By 2016, only 33% went for Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign is banking on picking up a further share this year. Mr. Biden understands this risk, which is why he is now trying to hide his antifracking agenda.
In South Central Pennsylvania the campaign has a different mission: improving the president’s 2016 numbers among obvious GOP voting groups. South of Harrisburg sits a concentration of evangelical Christians and rock-ribbed conservatives—many of whom in 2016 didn’t trust Mr. Trump to govern like a Republican. The campaign is reminding this constituency of his pro-life actions and court nominees.
Another pocket of potential votes: Latinos. Towns like Reading, Bethlehem and Lancaster are home to growing numbers of Venezuelans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Mr. Trump has been showing new strength among Latino voters, with national polls suggesting he is likely to improve on his 28% share in 2016. Campaign officials acknowledge it will be harder to expand Latino support in Pennsylvania than in Cuban-heavy Florida. But they also note a distinct lack of interest among Pennsylvania Latinos for Mr. Biden, and are working to capitalize.
And no, they aren’t ceding the suburbs. No one is foolish enough to believe Mr. Trump can in two months repair his image with many suburban voters, especially women. But a straightforward appeal to pocketbook issues and public safety could refocus enough minds to tamp down Biden margins. A national Yahoo News/You Gov poll from the end of August suggests those messages may be sinking in, with Mr. Trump now leading Mr. Biden among suburban voters 45% to 43%, a 9-point shift from the same poll in late July. Mr. Trump is also ahead on the questions of who would better handle the economy and crime.
A last bit of the bet: enthusiasm. Media types continue to predict unprecedented Democratic turnout, and maybe it will materialize. Yet Mr. Biden continues to lag Mr. Trump in enthusiasm by double digits—a result unprecedented at this point in a modern presidential election. If even a few of those college kids and African-American voters stay home, Democrats have a problem.
This Trump coalition is a bit here, a bit there. It isn’t the usual GOP three-legged stool, and it isn’t robust enough to deliver a knockout victory. Pennsylvania is going to be tight (and potentially a litigation nightmare). But for the purposes of Nov. 3, the only question is whether this strategy—which is being replicated in different guises in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin—can eke out a lead at the finish line. Those claiming Mr. Biden has this in the bag may be repeating the mistakes of 2016.
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