polecat news and views: April 2024

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

From now until Election Day on November 5, Donald Trump is going to be spending a huge amount of time in various courtrooms.

Gleeful liberals believe that the less Trump is able to campaign, the more his prospects for victory dim. This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate, one that is going to cost the Democrats the White House.

Long-time GOP politico Stuart Stevens sees it clearly. Trump's presence in the courtroom for some of the most pivotal months of the campaign instead of being out on the hustings is what's going to elect him in November.

Much of the public doesn't see the court cases against Trump as anything having to do with "justice." Instead, Trump and his team have successfully framed the prosecutions as persecutions. Trump sees himself as the victim, fighting a corrupt system that seeks to destroy him.

This theme is a part of the American mythos, portrayed in novels, movies, and endless loops of television shows.

New York Times:

The very competent operatives running the Trump campaign didn’t draw this up as their ideal campaign plan, but they will appreciate its potential. The Manhattan courtroom will be the setting for Mr. Trump to play the role of a familiar American archetype: the wronged man seeking justice from corrupt, powerful forces. The former president is good in this role, and that’s no small thing.

So while the Biden campaign is sending their candidate crisscrossing the country, Trump will be sitting in the Manhattan courtroom (and later, a Washington, D.C. courtroom) glowering at the judge while the prosecution helps him wrap up the presidency.

In this strategic paradigm, indictments and subsequent court appearances are a gift from the political gods. Mr. Trump is a candidate of anger and grievance, which has always had a strange quality for someone who was a millionaire in high school. How can the man with a golden toilet be a victim? White grievance was Mr. Trump’s on ramp to the victim podium in his previous runs. That’s still essential to the Trump candidacy, but now, in his telling, he can add the burden of persecution by corrupt (and mostly nonwhite) prosecutors to the cross he carries to that Calvary hill called the White House.

Stevens imagines Biden and his team wondering, "How is this guy still in the race?”

Biden needs to look in a mirror at the 81-year-old looking back at him. That and maybe hire some advisors who would tell him the truth about what the American people think of him.

"The guy" is still in the race because Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate without much of a record to run on except his pandering to every Democratic interest group in the country.

Trump's "grievances" notwithstanding, Americans of all colors understand what's happening to Donald Trump. Even if Trump is convicted of one or more crimes, the vast majority of Trump supporters won't let it bother them. For Trump, the narrative is set. It's now a question of energizing his supporters, turning them into angry, vengeful voters eager to go to the polls and avenge the slights delivered to their hero.

The Trump campaign is not about persuasion. It’s about stirring up anger inside every possible Trump supporter so that voting is a righteous act of fury, not a mere civic duty. If you believe the deep state stole the last election, the legal persecution of Mr. Trump is further proof of the state’s desperation to keep him from reassuming his rightful place in the Oval Office. Combine all of that with a less-than-inspiring Biden coalition, and it’s a blueprint for a Trump Electoral College victory.

And that victory will be signed, sealed, and delivered from courtrooms across America.

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/04/25/campaigning-from-a-courtroom-is-how-trump-will-win-n4928515?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&bcid=15803c7fc8c68b6fd1f0a5e7f4b59fc49df45d48335d4339ad60f7b0a0c7404d&recip=28668535

Wow: Biden Just Endorsed a Disastrous, Unpopular Economic Policy That Will Inflict Even More Harm

Wow: Biden Just Endorsed a Disastrous, Unpopular Economic Policy That Will Inflict Even More Harm

Guy Benson

When he was running for president in the 2020 cycle, Joe Biden promised that he'd never raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 per year. Based on his own announced policies, however, this pledge was an unachievable lie from the very start. He's proceeded to repeatedly violate the vow, through various actions and proposals, during his term in office. One recent reminder of this broken promise comes to us via the Internal Revenue Service. You may recall that during the debate over Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" -- which Bernie Sanders admitted was not about reducing inflation, and Biden later said he regretted the title of the bill -- Republicans warned that the legislation would super-charge and super-size the IRS. They also warned that a result of this would be a lot of tax-related targeting of non-rich Americans, who'd bear a substantial brunt of a doubled IRS.

Democrats pooh-poohed this concern, but when Republicans forced a vote to explicitly prevent the agency from auditing more American household earning under $400,000 per year as a result of the law, State Democrats unanimously killed it at the behest of party leadership and the White House. And guess what happened next? Exactly what conservatives said would happen. And now there's even more evidence proving us right:

The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out. President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class. Those are two findings of the IRS’s watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta). The report examines IRS progress on mandates from the Biden Administration backed by tens of billions in new funding. The first supposed goal was to audit more ultrawealthy and fewer middle-class filers, but it’s not going so well...The most recent data suggests the IRS is still focused on the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000. Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million. Don’t forget to save those charitable-giving receipts.

Nearly two-thirds of IRS audits were hitting individuals and families that were earning less than half of Biden's magic number. No one should be surprised. Now Biden has formally announced that he's going to impose a major tax increase on legions of non-rich Americans who earn well under $400,000 (though even many of those earners are complaining that they aren't really wealthy, given Bidenflation, the high cost of living etc). Democrats have lied endlessly about the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cuts and reforms, which helped turbocharge the US economy, resulting in record-high revenues and record-setting employment. They falsely claimed that the law was a giveaway to the rich that didn't help ordinary Americans. In fact, every single income group benefited, as did the overall economy. It's not a coincidence that Trump and Republicans are heavily favored by voters on economic matters. Further underscoring the Democrats' dishonesty, letting the Trump tax cuts expire, which Biden says he wants, would massively hike taxes on working and middle class Americans:

Budget expert Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute explains how calling for the tax cuts to expire would result in a $2 trillion tax increase for many millions of non-rich Americans, in addition to clawing back the child tax credit. The White House, with its mendacious and incoherent messaging is trying to have it all ways -- playing dishonest politics, as usual:

This is clumsy sleight of hand, claiming "deficit savings" as if all the tax cuts are going away (letting people keep more of the money they earn isn't 'government spending' in my view, as the government doesn't own those dollars), but separately talk about renewing 98 percent of the tax cuts in order to avoid huge tax increases on the very people they've pretended never benefitted from the Trump/GOP law. And then Biden's team goes out and tweets under his name that they're axing the whole tax cut, further confusing matters. Biden is lying about deficits and debt (which he does all the time), and/or lying about who benefited from the tax reforms he's demagogued and intentionally mischaracterized, and/or planning to slap basically the whole country with a gigantic tax increase, on top of the 19 percent price hike his inflation crisis has fueled since he took office. Tired of this yet?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/04/25/wow-biden-just-endorsed-a-disastrous-unpopular-economic-policy-that-will-inflict-even-more-harm-n2638211?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28668535

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News 5/01/2024

Sometimes they are out to get you

The “writers-on-water-issues” have served readers well. It’s hard, from 300+ miles away, more than that in RV camping season, to get mental and emotional juices aroused when water is, for us, either a municipal given in Bend, Oregon, or a fairly trusty-but-aged domestic well in Red Bluff. Forgive my ignorance and disregard over the “mandate” to register our humble, occasionally-repaired well.

However, our admirable columnists have labored over keyboards, researched local and state minutiae, and showed up at meetings that I would avoid even if ski season were over and I were in town. That said, it roused my conspiratorial suspicions to read recently that outside powers are apparently fiddling with measurements of ground water, not unlike how Gov. Newsom is fiddling with snow measurements, substituting a season-long trend for decades-long spot measurements used to assign water allocations.

Are Newsom et al creating standards for doling out less of California’s most precious commodity than is needed? Are there ulterior motives like refusing to build more dams as agriculture is deemphasized over urban needs? Yet, that could well be the common motive for altered snowpack measurements and groundwater standards.

First, it was the bogus “spotted owl” crisis used to decimate logging, rural economies, and classroom funding. We eventually found that 1) the supposedly “endangered” owl could and was adapting to nesting in non-old growth locales, and 2) the proximate cause of spotted owl decline was the barred owl. It was too late to reverse the damage.

Now, a writer suggests they might be “out to get us,” targeting the only remaining source of abundance for Tehama County, our agricultural base. It needs only the precious liquid gold resting behind dams built when Sacramento powers and politicos saw a priority to provide what a growing population needed: roads, dams and reliable electricity generation.

Monstrously expensive, resource-intensive, and sun-and-wind-dependent solar and wind-turbine power is a small percentage of electricity generation. Pipe-dreams involve: storage in batteries; moving it from remote, renewable-energy “farms” to California’s megalopolises; Electric Vehicle mandates that cannot be relied on for transporting people and goods.

No, what that will “get us” are lives of reduced income, the priority of controlling mandates over economic freedom, and huddled masses yearning for better lives unavailable in a “progressive, green energy wasteland” of rich ruling classes and a shrinking middle class. History shows that, from Marxist Russia, Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba to Chavez’s Venezuela, entrepreneurial business and middle classes must be brought under the thumb, and boot, of central (dare I say) Communist authority. You’re watching it.

Further evidence: The near top-of-illegal-entries in the San Diego Sector—34,000 behind only the Tucson Sector at 42,000 in March—is welcomed by the Democrat political powers. Update: “By the third week of April, first place moved to the San Diego Sector…nearly 25,000 migrants surpassed El Paso’s 22,000 migrants and Tucson Sector’s arrest of just over 21,000 migrants” (“California Takes the Lead in Illegal Migrant Apprehensions,” Pjmedia.com, Breitbart.com). I lived in San Diego County in the 70s; it was pretty but I’d never go back.

That’s 1.1 million illegals in FY 2024. 85 percent of San Diego Sector’s 210,000 were released into the U.S. It’s a conspiracy fact, not theory, that Democrats in blue states like CA, IL, and NY see illegal aliens as a substitute for departing Republican residents. They see red or swing states like Texas and Arizona as ripe targets for “regularizing” the illegals with “documents” like driver’s licenses, work permits and eventual voter registration. It’s permanent Democrat rule by design.

Democrats undeniably expressed their need for bodies in their districts to maintain their Congressional seats. Their votes and policies adamantly reject using only legal citizens for apportionment and, most importantly, Electoral College (EC) votes in national election years.

The extra 10 to 20 House seats going to blue state Democrats mean potential majorities in Congress; the EC vote can then give the Democrat presidential candidate the edge in a close race. Even 10 or 15 extra EC votes from blue states due to illegal aliens can mean a 273 EC vote majority vs. a 265 EC vote loss.

***

Not to beat a “dead horse” or, in this case, dead fast-food jobs, but owners of multiple restaurants are accelerating their transition to kiosks for ordering and robotic burger-makers, together with price hikes to remain financially afloat.

It’s been truly said that the actual minimum wage is “zero”; youngsters with little work experience beyond household and yard chores aren’t worth $20 an hour. Joke: “How do you know a college grad with a useless degree and tens of thousands of dollars in debt? They’ll say ‘May I take your order?’”

“Dems in CA Assembly Say Gavin Newsom Has Every Right to Play Hide the Sausage Behind an NDA” (Redstate.com). The “sausage-making” process for the $20 minimum wage law—which exempted Newsom-connected contributors and their fast-food franchises—is hidden behind “non-disclosure agreements” that have no place in supposedly transparent, legislative “people’s business.” Dems: “Pay no attention; move along.”

Tennessee House Passes Law Allowing Armed Teachers, Lefties Hold 'Die-In'

GRAYSON BAKICH

What is it with leftists and big dramatic protests?

The Tennessee House of Representatives just passed a bill allowing teachers to carry concealed in schools, and Gov. Bill Lee (R-Tenn.) is expected to sign it into law.

Such a bill would require background checks, training, and approval from the school for teachers to be armed. All of that can be debated until the cows come home, but this is about lefties’ reaction to the bill.

The Tennessean described how protesters hysterically chanted "blood on your hands" and "stomped down at lawmakers."

Robby Starbuck posted footage of some of the protests on X, specifically a scene where people, including State Rep. Justin Jones (D, but you probably knew that already), staged a "die-in" on the House floor.

Look, I know protesting is meant to grab attention, but do you really need to lie down on the floor and make walking inconvenient for everybody else? And why not do something more active?

In fairness, staging this silly "die-in" as a form of protest makes a modicum of sense given what issue they are protesting, even if you have to be stupid enough to genuinely believe that letting teachers carry concealed means more kids will somehow die. Do they expect carrying teachers to start shooting kids who misbehave or something?

Regardless of how you feel about Tennessee's law, leftists have a knack for whipping up hysteria over anything conservatives do, usually claiming that people will die and all hell will break loose when some new law they hate is passed.

As I wrote about at the beginning of February, a bunch of jokers here in Florida did the same "die-in" tactic in protest of a law Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) signed into law.

That law in question? It's illegal to switch the "M" to "F" or the other way around on your driver's license. They would lay down in front of tax collectors throughout the state with signs saying things like "killed by the FL DMV/Ron DeSantis," "The Nazis kept track of us too," and "Hitler's steps: 1. Ban books. 2. Identify queer people."

I did not get it back then, and I still don't get it now.

A month later out in Missouri, some gentleman dressed like a Blue Meanie in a Marie Antoinette wig spoke against a law banning drag shows for kids by saying it would "eradicate gender nonconforming people from the public square" and create "a vacuum of hyper vacancy, of wealth inequality, and a whole bunch of trauma."

And as we've seen a bit more recently, a bunch of college kids at Columbia University and other schools up north are wailing and gnashing their teeth about "genocide" in Gaza as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas once and for all in retaliation for October 7.

What makes the latest case much nastier, as many of my colleagues here at PJ Media have noted, is that they are openly also calling for the destruction of Israel and the United States.

https://pjmedia.com/graysonbakich/2024/04/23/tennessee-house-passes-law-allowing-armed-teachers-lefties-hold-die-in-n4928462

Monday, April 29, 2024

There's No Right to Sleep Outdoors

There's No Right to Sleep Outdoors

Betsy McCaughey

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

In a Supreme Court showdown Monday over whether the homeless have a "right" to camp in public, almost no one mentioned the actual victims of that crazy idea. Homeless advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, told the court that living on the streets is a "victimless" crime. Victimless?

Everyone who has to step over needles and human poop and navigate around half-conscious humans while walking to work or taking their kids to school is a victim. Every store owner whose entrance is blocked by makeshift cardboard shelters is a victim. Every family that wants to use a park and finds it cluttered with sprawling tents is a victim.

The homeless are more likely to commit violent crimes than people who aren't homeless. The public has every reason to be wary.

Municipalities all over the U.S. are watching City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which challenges a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling barring penalties for sleeping with blankets and other paraphernalia on public property. The 9th Circuit -- known for its left-wing rulings -- says these penalties amount to "cruel and unusual punishment" because the homeless have no choice.

No choice is another whopper. San Francisco authorities report that 60% of homeless individuals living on the street refuse shelter when it's offered.

Grants Pass lawyers explain that the 9th Circuit has "erected a judicial roadblock" affecting virtually every municipality in the West, preventing them from clearing encampments. The results are "crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval diseases, environmental harm, and record levels of drug overdoses, and deaths on public streets."

Phoenix city officials, in a friend-of-the-court brief, complain that 9th Circuit judges are acting like "homeless policy czars," usurping what local governments should decide. Justice Brett Kavanaugh echoed that, warning against having "federal courts micromanaging" homeless policy.

That's what's been happening. Anti-camping regulations adopted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Portland, Oregon, were all barred following the 9th Circuit's precedent. And that precedent has also been cited by courts in the rest of the U.S. as a reason to tolerate homeless encampments.

Grants Pass is so atypical of the larger cities wrestling with homelessness that the outcome of the case is somewhat difficult to predict. It's a town of 40,000 with a small, church-run shelter.

But Monday's argument suggests the justices will rule 6-3 or 5-4 that municipalities can ban sleeping on public property. The ruling will affect the entire nation.

Except perhaps New York City, which is moving away from common sense. The City Council adopted a "Homeless Bill of Rights" in 2023, making Gotham the only big city with an explicit right to sleep in public spaces. Mayor Adams did not veto it. There would have been no point. The law was adopted unanimously. What are city lawmakers thinking?

Homeless people deserve compassion, but allowing them to freeze to death or succumb to disease isn't compassionate. Data show they are shortening their own lifespan by 30 years or more.

Jumaane Williams, the city's public advocate, sponsored the "Homeless Bill of Rights," blathering that the city must look at the root causes of homelessness rather than "stoking fear."

But fear is warranted. And the public deserve clean, safe streets.

Fair warning: Williams is eyeing Adams' job as mayor.

The court's expected ruling will allow local authorities across the U.S. to crack down on homeless encampments. But the justices cannot command that they do it. The law-abiding public -- the real victims of homelessness -- need to elect local leaders who will say "no" to preferring the rights of the homeless over the rights of the rest of us.

New York City voters, it's up to you.

When a Victory Becomes a Defeat: Biden and Bragg Are Making a Mistake, and It May Cost Them - Bigly

When a Victory Becomes a Defeat: Biden and Bragg Are Making a Mistake, and It May Cost Them - Bigly

By RedState Guest Editorial

“I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.”

New York Times, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, April 23, 2024

Imagine my surprise when I discovered I agreed 100 percent with this statement in the New York Times.

Not that I think the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is going to lose this case against former President Trump. In fact, I believe that thanks to the ridiculous partisanship and left-wing propaganda that has brainwashed the New York jury pool, and because of the ridiculous bias of the presiding judge in the case, Donald Trump is likely to be convicted in this case, on whatever the imaginary crime is that he is actually being accused of.

But sometimes, a person can win the battle while actually losing the war. And that is what Joe Biden, Alvin Bragg, and their allies are currently in the process of doing.

When even the New York Times has an op-ed by a liberal law professor in good standing that the Bragg case is a joke, you can be sure that the real swing voters for this upcoming election will dismiss any conviction here as obvious partisan lawfare. And every day that this partisan farce continues, the left-wing mainstream media, which heartily believes its own propaganda that Donald Trump is some demonic, undemocratic, corrupt person, will continue to play it up, apparently in coordination with each other to develop anti-Trump talking points. This will allow Trump and his allies to legitimately campaign against the partisan lawfare by the Biden administration. After all, the opening statement in the prosecution’s case was made by the former third ranking Biden Department of Justice lawyer, who transferred to being a lowly line prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s Office. That is unprecedented; and it is not a good picture for Bragg.

And it gets worse.

Summarizing the entire case, as the average voter would certainly do, the charge is that Donald Trump paid off a woman whom he may have had sex with to keep quiet, and that he reported the payments incorrectly and thereby did something illegal (although this violation is only a misdemeanor; how it becomes a felony is unclear). In other words, the case is all about trying to punish a former U.S. president for having sex with a woman who is not his wife and, maybe, lying about it.

This should sound very familiar. In 1998, Democrat President Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with a woman who was not his wife and for lying about it under oath. But despite Clinton having lied under oath, he was not removed from office or punished in any way (outside of the impeachment that was fought fiercely by the Democrats). And what did prominent Democrats say, at that time, about that situation, and the attempt to remove Clinton?

They all said ignore the sex scandal and MOVE ON:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “It is time we move forward, and not have the Congress and the American people endure a specter of what could be a yearlong focus on a tawdry but not impeachable affair.” He continued, “(t)he world economy is in crisis and cries out for American leadership, without which worldwide turmoil is a grave possibility. This investigation, now in its fifth year, has run its course. It's time to move on.”
Former Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a speech decrying “(i)n the investigation of the president, fundamental principles which Americans hold dear — fairness, privacy, checks and balances — have been seriously violated and why? Because we are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. ... Until the Republicans free themselves of that hatred, our country will suffer.”
James Carville, prominent Democrat consultant and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, said publicly, and wrote: “(i)n my world, you don’t abandon a guy over sex. You stick with him.” (Stickin’: The Case for Loyalty, James Carville, 2000)
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, also a former high-level aide to President Clinton, who had created a whole command center designed to smear Bill Clinton’s sexual assault and rape accusers to elevate him to the presidency, said that Paula Jones (who was involved in another part of the scandal), who had claimed that Clinton had sexually harassed her, should be ignored because she was "just another woman seeking cash for telling a tabloid tale."
And Joe Biden, a U.S. Senator at that time, came out against Clinton’s impeachment, decried the situation as a partisan hit job, claimed that public opinion should partly guide the result, and stated, “The American people are fully capable — without our guidance or advice — to determine what standards they want our President to meet… Spare me from those who would tell the American people what standard they must apply when voting for President.” He also concluded that a President is unique and the head of a political party, who should not be removed, and if so, it “should not result from the judgment of a single prosecutor — whether it be the Attorney General or special counsel — and a single jury. Prosecution or non-prosecution of a President is, in short, inevitably and unavoidably a political act.”

Bill Clinton and his Democrats won big in the 1998 elections, the Democrats unexpectedly gaining seats in Congress. So, it turned out that the American people, indeed, wanted to “move on” from the Clinton sex scandal.

I think the same thing is going to happen here. The Democrats are going to achieve their pyrrhic victory by convicting Donald Trump of an imaginary crime. And then, as a result, and like poor King Pyrrhus, President Biden is going to lose his throne.

https://redstate.com/redstate-guest-editorial/2024/04/25/when-a-victory-becomes-a-defeat-biden-and-bragg-are-making-a-mistake-and-it-may-cost-them-bigly-n2173295

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