Blake, Dagny, Brian "Horsin Round."
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Welcome to radical Democrat's transformed America.
Just what Obama wanted to create, tried and moved us towards..
George Floyd Autonomous Zone Issues "Rules For White People"
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Kim writes about a Democrat legendary Sec. of State who challenges H.R 1. Once again, radical Democrats seek to employ hysteria and Stacey Abram's lies, in order to press forward government usurpation of state voting systems. Another unconstitutional infringement on states because radical's seek to control citizens while destroying our democratic processes, in the balance.
The Democrat
Fighting H.R.1
New
Hampshire’s secretary of state blows up the claims of ‘voter suppression.’
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Behind the Democrats’ push for their federal takeover of congressional elections is their insistence that it will sweep away “racist” voting laws and increase voter turnout. No wonder they had no interest this week in hearing from a Democratic legend who knows—and can prove—that they are full of it.That Democrat is Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state. Mr. Gardner has been overseeing Granite State voting since Dec. 2, 1976, a week before Stacey Abrams’s 3rd birthday. In December, a bipartisan vote of the New Hampshire Legislature elected him to a 23rd two-year term. The longest-serving secretary of state in U.S. history, he’s an institution, famous for his apolitical commitment to the state’s constitution and its first-in-the-nation primary.
Mr. Gardner was invited (by Republicans) to testify at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which the Democratic majority titled “Jim Crow 2021: The Latest Assault on the Right to Vote.” Ms. Abrams got most of the headlines; the media and Senate Democrats barely acknowledged Mr. Gardner’s presence. And no wonder. It isn’t only that Mr. Gardner vehemently opposes his party’s H.R.1 bill, which would federally impose procedures such as early and absentee voting on the states. He also has incontrovertible evidence that the narrative behind it is a crock. Mr. Gardner told the committee. It can have the opposite result by undermining “the trust and confidence voters have in the process.” He called it a “fine balance.” The New Hampshire evidence makes the case. " Just because you make voting easier, it does not raise turnout automatically," Mr. Gardner told the committee. It can have the opposite result by undermining "the trust and confidence voters have in he process." He called it a "fine balance." The New Hampshire evidence makes the case
By Democrats’ definition, New Hampshire has some of the most “suppressive” voter laws anywhere. In the hearing and in a subsequent interview with me, Mr. Gardner explained that some of these rules are part of the state’s constitution. That document requires that residents show up to vote in person unless they are physically disabled or out of town. That means no mail-in voting. The state constitution requires that the final vote tally for each candidate be publicly declared at each polling place the night of the election after the polls close. This is one reason New Hampshire doesn’t allow early voting, which can cause the counting to stretch for days.
New Hampshire is one of four states that don’t allow provisional ballots—again, because it would derail the public reading of tallies. The state requires voter identification. It also requires in-person registration at a town hall or at a polling place on Election Day; it went out of its way to become exempt from the 1993 federal “motor voter” law that allows registration by motor-vehicle offices and other bureaucracies.
Racist? Suppressive? Onerous? Hardly. For the past five presidential elections, New Hampshire has been in the top five states for voter turnout. It’s been third in the past four presidential elections, last year pulling 72.2% of its voting age population to the polls. That exceeded U.S. turnout by nearly 11 points; in 2016 the figure was 14.5 points.
New Hampshire’s experience aside, Mr. Gardner offered the committee a contrasting (and more honest) history of voting in Oregon, the first state to shift to voting by mail. He recalled that in the early 1990s Oregon’s secretary of state pitched him on joining him in that move. Mr. Gardner declined. Before Oregon introduced all-mail voting in 1996, it had routinely been in the top 11 states for voter turnout in presidential elections, and often beat New Hampshire. It has never topped New Hampshire since, and in 2012 fell as low as 17th.
The Granite Stater says he believes deeply in making voting straightforward and accessible, and New Hampshire does that in many ways, including same-day registration. “But I’ve seen what ways to make it easier actually work and what ways don’t work,” he says. They aren’t all equal, and H.R.1’s provisions would likely do the opposite of what Democrats claim.
Mr. Gardner also provided the committee a chart showing U.S. voter turnout in presidential elections since 1952. He tells me he doesn’t think it is an accident that five of the six highest-turnout years were in the 1950s and ’60s, before the beginning of federal efforts to meddle in state elections with laws like the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. People lose trust, and even pride in their unique state systems. (Another factor might be the 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18.)
Mr. Gardner has also issued a statement blasting Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for their “attack” on his state and pointing out that the California system she wants to impose on the country has resulted in her state being ranked 46th, 49th, 49th and 43rd for turnout in the past four presidential elections. “There are 435 members of Congress; New Hampshire has two of them,” he tells me. Just five or six big states “have about half of all the members, and they’ll be writing our voting laws. I’m not telling them how to vote. Why are they telling us in New Hampshire how to vote? Especially given our record.”
And that’s the real question. Democrats’ “Jim Crow” claims are completely at odds with the evidence. If they are going to continue with H.R.1, they should at least be honest that the goal is to rig the system.
Meanwhile:
Biden learned well Obama's lesson how to skirt Congress and the Constitution. Furthermore, Biden is dumb or naïve enough to saddle American productivity for worthless Chines promises to make the world green with American dollars.
Biden’s 10-Year Climate Plan
He’s committing the U.S. to a far-fetched CO2 emissions goal without a vote of Congress.
By The Editorial Board
Was President Biden trying to impress China’s Xi Jinping at Thursday’s climate pep rally by committing to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half below 2005 levels by 2030? His pledge
tees up sweeping new government controls over the economy of the kind you might see in one of Mr. Xi’s five-year plans. Mr. Biden now has a 10-year version of central economic planning.
Mr. Biden’s virtual world summit was intended to coax China and other emerging countries to make more aggressive emissions reductions. The U.S. accounts for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions, Mr. Biden told world leaders. Emissions in the U.S. and Europe have been falling since 2005 as natural gas and renewables have replaced coal power.
All of the CO2 commitments made in Paris, including Barack Obama’s to reduce U.S. emissions by 26% to 28%, would reduce the Earth’s temperature increase by a mere 0.17 degree Celsius by 2100—not even close to the 1.5 degrees that is supposedly needed to head off doomsday. Yet Mr. Biden now wants to double down on Mr. Obama’s futile climate gesture. But rising emissions from China have swamped these declines. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, China committed only to begin reducing emissions in 2030, and it has continued to build coal plants and expand industrial production. China’s CO2 emissions increased by more between 2015 and 2018 than the U.K.’s total emissions in 2018.
What would the U.S. have to do to achieve Mr. Biden’s new emissions pledge? Start with some perspective. The Obama regulatory fusillade got the U.S. only about halfway to his Paris pledge—and most of the reductions during his Presidency were from natural gas displacing coal in power due to market forces.
Amid last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns, greenhouse gas emissions fell to about 21% below 2005 levels. In other words, even with the economy shut down and a large share of the population stuck at home, the U.S. was less than halfway to Mr. Biden’s goal.
Some groups have done their own back-of-the envelope analysis of what it would take to achieve Mr. Biden’s 10-year plan. Take a recent Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) report that argues for a “strong whole-of-government approach.” This includes eliminating new gas-powered cars by 2035, presumably by ramping up corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards. Mr. Biden has also proposed sweetening federal tax credits for buying electric cars—currently $7,500—but soon consumers will have no choice but to buy them when their gas vehicles expire.
The Biden goal will require the electric grid to be totally rebuilt in 10 years. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. will also have to double its share of carbon-free power to 80% from 40% today—half of which is now provided by nuclear—to have any hope of achieving Mr. Biden’s pledge.
All coal plants would have to shut down, and natural gas plants would be phased into obsolescence. Wind and solar energy would have to increase six to seven fold. The Obama Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court blocked in 2016, looks modest by comparison. It sought to reduce CO2 power emissions by 32%. Most homes would also have to be electrified. So if you like your gas stove, you won’t be able to keep it. Farmers would also have to adopt “climate-smart agriculture and forestry,” EDF says.
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Unlike Mr. Xi, the U.S. President doesn’t have legal authority to decree sweeping emissions reductions across the economy. But liberals argue that Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, titled “International Air Pollution,” allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare in a foreign country.” The catch is that EPA can only do so if there is regulatory “reciprocity” among other nations.
Mr. Biden is essentially doing an end-run around the Constitution, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate for the President to enter a treaty. The emissions reductions that foreign leaders pledged on Thursday aren’t legally binding, but Mr. Biden intends to use regulation to bind Americans.
Businesses will be conscripted as foot soldiers in the progressive war on fossil fuels. Mercenaries like Google, Apple and Microsoft have already enlisted. America’s founders believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers would safeguard individual liberty, but this assumes Congress guards its power.
Mr. Biden will face no resistance to his regulatory overreach from Democrats in Congress. They will happily finance his 10-year plan to remake the economy, starting with his $2.3 trillion much-more-than-infrastructure proposal that is the Green New Deal in disguise.
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Earth Day 2021: The 10 Craziest Lies Told by Climate Change Alarmists
Finally:
One more radical effort to get an entire loaf of police de-funding but willing to settle for a smaller loaf and then try again at a later time. Democrats have been employing this strategy for years and Republican's have been dumb enough to ignore or respond. call it: " Death , one bite at a time."
Anticop Movement Wants Road Anarchy Too
The death of Daunte Wright bolsters demands to get police officers out of traffic-law enforcement.
By Heather Mac Donald
Traffic laws didn’t kill Daunte Wright, but critics of the police are using his death to call for an end to their enforcement. Likewise with George Floyd and laws against counterfeiting.
On April 11 Brooklyn Center, Minn., police stopped Wright, 20, for an expired vehicle registration. Officers then discovered that Mr. Wright had an open warrant for failing to appear in court on charges of illegal gun possession and fleeing from arrest. After following instructions to get out of his car, Wright fought with the cops and lunged back into the driver’s seat when they attempted to arrest him on the outstanding warrant. One of the officers reached for her Taser but, she claims, mistakenly grabbed her pistol instead. She fired one lethal shot.
Floyd allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill, a federal offense, at a Minneapolis convenience store on May 25, 2020. The cashier called police after Floyd refused to return the cigarettes he bought. Floyd intermittently resisted arrest, prompting the responding officers to put him face down on the ground, handcuffed. Officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck and collarbone for nearly eight minutes. Floyd passed out and died. A jury convicted Mr. Chauvin of second-degree murder.
Wright’s and Floyd’s deaths were caused by a combination of their own actions and those of the arresting officers. But leftist politicians and commentators are blaming the laws the men violated in the first place. “No one should die over a traffic stop,” New York City Councilman Brad Lander said. CNN’s John Avlon asserted that “passing a counterfeit bill can get you killed in the U.S.” Yale legal scholar James Forman Jr. and a law student wrote in the Washington Post that “having expired tags or temporary plates” must be added to the list of actions that can “shatter Black lives”—never mind that Wright’s abortive arrest was not for expired tags but for failing to answer to gun charges.
Calls are escalating to take the police out of traffic enforcement and retail theft response. New York state Attorney General Letitia James has proposed that New York City police cease routine traffic stops. Urban League President Marc Morial told CNN that police departments should “discontinue the discredited broken-windows policing of the 1990s,” including traffic enforcement. Instead, the thinking goes, unarmed civilian traffic agents and speeding cameras should enforce the rules of the road. Berkeley, Calif., has already banned officers from making stops for many traffic offenses, and jurisdictions like Lansing, Mich., and the District of Columbia are following suit.
But it is precisely high-crime areas that most need traffic enforcement. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an office of the Transportation Department, has a program based on the “nexus of crashes and crime.” For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime. And when the police pay inadequate attention to traffic violations, “people feel they may break the law with impunity,” according to a 2000 study.
In Oakland, Calif., nearly 60% of fatalities and serious injuries occur on only 6% of the city’s streets, overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods. Blacks in Oakland are twice as likely as others to die or be severely injured in traffic incidents, and black pedestrians are three times as likely to die, according to an Oakland equity study.
Yet Oakland police were ordered to decrease their traffic involvement sharply following a Stanford study accusing them of racial profiling. The result has been growing disorder. Councilman Loren Taylor reported last month his constituents’ sense of a “general lawlessness and a lack of accountability for driving however you want to in the city.” Traffic deaths were up 22% in Oakland in 2020. Most of the victims were black.
Milwaukee has documented the inverse correlation between car stops and nonfatal shootings, robberies and car thefts. When traffic enforcement declines, those crimes increase, says former Police Chief Edward Flynn. It is a truism of policing that “criminals are bad drivers,” Mr. Flynn says. “They don’t follow traffic laws or update their vehicle registration. Years ago, I learned that expired inspection stickers were the quickest way to find a warrant fugitive.”
Police veterans doubt that unarmed civilian agents would be able to keep order. Felons would be likelier to flee an unarmed agent—if the agent is lucky. Like most unwinding of police authority in the name of racial equity, forbidding uniformed traffic enforcement would endanger the people the reformers claim to be protecting.
Last September a North Minneapolis high-school principal publicly begged for more police enforcement after one of her seniors was fatally gunned down. “We are literally in a city that is completely and entirely out of control,” said Mauri Melander Friestleben in a self-made video. “I can see outright laws getting broken, traffic laws, people driving outright through red lights, speeding, going 60 to 70 miles per hour. We got kids on skateboards getting hit by cars.” Yet the police do nothing, she said, having been bludgeoned into passivity by the city’s anticop activists.
As for shoplifting and the use of phony currency, stores are under pressure not to call the police or even to detain offenders. The effective decriminalization of shoplifting in San Francisco unleashed widespread looting, as this page noted last November. In New York and Chicago, gangs of thieves regularly rampage through stores grabbing high-end items, confident in their impunity. The victims of such predation are not only corporations but immigrant small-business owners.
This process of decriminalization has been going on for several years and is rapidly accelerating. Left-wing district attorneys decline to prosecute arrests that are said to have a disparate impact on blacks for crimes including subway fare evasion, trespassing, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, public intoxication and even some gun-possession offenses.
Such a retreat isn’t what the law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods want. “I cringe when I hear people say black communities are over-policed,” Sandra Wortham, sister of a slain Chicago police officer, wrote to the Chicago Sun-Times. “My neighborhood is not over-policed. My lived experience has shown me that policing that tackles the small things prevents the big things.”
The solution to the rare but tragic police-involved deaths of unarmed civilians is not to get the police out of law enforcement. It is improved tactical and anti-stress training for officers, combined with an unequivocal message from political and community leaders to anyone who comes in contact with police: Comply with officers’ lawful commands, and don’t resist arrest.
Ms. Mac Donald is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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This Is How Israeli Ingenuity Is Making the World Better
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