Fruits, Nuts, and Democrats
Often, when people set out to show how quickly a place can decline, they point to Detroit. Once an extremely prosperous city, thanks to industry cutting out for greener pastures and white people cutting out to save their lives, the place began to resemble downtown Beirut.
Often, when people set out to show how quickly a place can decline, they point to Detroit. Once an extremely prosperous city, thanks to industry cutting out for greener pastures and white people cutting out to save their lives, the place began to resemble downtown Beirut.
California is Detroit on steroids. It once boasted superior schools, beautiful cities, a very solvent economy, and the best climate in the country. After being run exclusively by Democrats for the past several decades, it can still boast about its climate, although the endless droughts are even putting that into question.
By constantly raising taxes in order to provide for illegal aliens and pensioned civil servants, Gov. Jerry Brown and his trained seals in Sacramento have sent the white middle class running off to Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. Because even that wasn’t enough to scare away all the Republicans, the Democrats began creating sanctuary cities where Latino criminals, along with the homeless rabble, consisting almost exclusively of drug addicts, alkies, and the certifiably insane, could find refuge.
Those who remained behind pretty much consisted of the hyper-wealthy of Hollywood and the Silicon Valley who live in their own lavish, well-protected bubbles and those of us who, because of advanced age or limited circumstances, are more or less compelled to stay put.
Now, I hear that Stockton, California, has decided to be the first city in the nation to offer its residents something called “a free universal income,” otherwise known as a Bernie Sanders wet dream.
It will take the form of a $500-a-month check sent to a hundred people. No news yet about how or by whom the hundred will be selected. It’s to be an experiment starting in 2019 to see if this extra money will lead people to go out and get jobs, start businesses, and somehow save a city of 300,000, 70% minority, with a median family income of $49,271 — roughly $9,000 less than the national average.
Frankly, I don’t see how an influx of $50,000 a month in additional welfare is going to produce any miracles in a city run for decades by Democrats, a city that already has one bankruptcy on its record.
Being a cynic at heart, it’s my guess that the real beneficiaries of this program will be Stockton’s drug dealers and liquor store owners, who, no doubt, are already licking their chops in anticipation of this future windfall.
I have come to the conclusion that congressional Democrats don’t care about anything but winning elections. That may sound naïve of me. But I used to think they were sincere about their agendas but simply wrong on the issues. Now I believe that the entire party, from Schumer and Pelosi on down, doesn’t give a fig about illegal aliens and the so-called Dreamers. Otherwise, it would have passed legislation during the first two years of Obama’s administration when it had sufficient numbers to do anything it wanted, as it proved when it passed the Affordable Care Act, which destroyed a perfectly fine health care system.
Speaking of which, if Democrats cared about health care, they wouldn’t have created a 2,500-page bill about which Nancy Pelosi famously said it would have to be passed before anyone knew what was in it. Dr. Frankenstein did far less damage with his own monstrous creation.
If Democrats cared about safeguarding the nation, they would have funded the military. If they really cared about abortions, they would have passed a federal law instead of leaving it up to the Supreme Court to totally ignore the Constitution in deciding Roe v. Wade.
Democrats only want to have issues available, such as open borders and abortions on demand, with which to rev up their base as elections roll around. Their problem is that in revving up their own base, they inevitably rev up the opposition.
I really thought Mrs. Barrett would be Trump’s selection for the vacancy on the Supreme Court, but I am not the least bit disappointed with his selection of Brett Kavanaugh.
In fact, I think the guy is about as bulletproof as a Republican’s nominee can be. He works soup kitchens, coaches girls basketball, teaches black kids, and has a wife and two daughters straight out of the Saturday Evening Post. That doesn’t mean Democrats won’t try to portray him as a combination of Attila the Hun and Nurse Ratched. But I don’t believe they will make much headway. With 10 senators up for reelection in states Trump carried by more than 15 percentage points, it’s unlikely that they will throw themselves on Dick Durbin’s sword and vote against seating the eminently qualified Kavanaugh.
It does raise the question, though, as to why John McCain so stubbornly holds on to his Senate seat, a seat he hasn’t filled in eight months. It just goes to underline the egotism of the man that he doesn’t care about his party or the citizens of Arizona or, for that matter, the nation.
He called himself a maverick. I can think of a lot of other words that are far more appropriate.
The most important thing about Kavanaugh’s joining the Court is that it will, temporarily at least, mark the end of the days when liberals could get their way, not through elections but through judicial decrees dealing with immigration, abortions, same-sex marriages, the Second Amendment, and capital punishment.
It is unfortunate, though, that the Court has become every bit as partisan as the Senate. There was a day when candidates were judged by their understanding of the Constitution. The ideal was a justice who interpreted things as they understood the Founders intended. Along the way, beginning, I suppose, with FDR, justices were selected entirely on the basis of their political allegiance to the sitting president.
More and more, justices came to think of themselves as legislators. They would make law, not merely interpret the laws passed by the legislative branch of government. Whereas it used to be said that members of Congress were failed lawyers, Supreme Court justices became the equivalent of failed legislators.
It is not a good thing for the nation that so many important decisions by the Court are the result of a 5-4 vote. It is in fact a very bad thing that the votes tend to be as predictable as death and taxes.
Anthony Kennedy became known as the swing vote on the Court, meaning he would side with the liberal bloc when it came to social issues like abortion and same-sex marriages and with the conservative bloc on most other matters. It used to make me wonder why we even needed to pay those other eight people to show up.
Come to think of it, it bothers me that I just described the four rational judges as conservatives. We don’t tend to think of the men who wrote the Constitution in partisan terms, so why is it that we have been forced to think of justices in that light? Every judge should be a constitutionalist, period.
Instead, we have heard justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg say that if a newly formed nation were looking around for a constitution to adopt, she would not advise them to use ours. That alone should have led to her overdue dismissal from the bench.
This being summertime, the same question has once again occurred to me, as it has for several years now.
How is it that women, who would normally be embarrassed to be seen in public in their lingerie, don’t give a second thought to being seen in bathing suits that reveal everything but their names and telephone numbers?
