The Best Story I've Heard About January 6

Today, I saw the best thing I've read about January 6th, the dawning day of American political prisoners and the operation that created them, thanks to Mike Myles at 90 Miles From Tyranny.  

Ashli Babbit wasn't the only woman who was killed that day, but Ashli's killing was so obviously a horrible overreaction by Lt. Byrd who shot her, that her military service and life story have made her the one everyone thinks of first.  She was not a life-threatening risk to Lt. Byrd.  There was also a woman named Roseanne Boyland who died in the capital.  As it is, you'd be hard pressed to find the truth about anything done, anybody killed, and the thousands of years of prison time given to protestors.  I've tried to look up details on these cases but the media saturation with stories made to tell the official party line is making getting details practically impossible. 

From X (Twitter) account InvestigateJ6.

I saw a video of this some months ago, and it looked like that description, that the police beat her to death.  I saw the other people trying to resuscitate her.  The official cause of death was "accidental overdose of amphetamines," but she was known to have come off a drug habit and was trying to help others overcome their addictions.  

Of course, there were also men who died on January 6th; I've seen the names Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips, but the official narrative is that they died of heart failure - cardiovascular disease.  As a general rule, nobody cares about white men dying other than their families, so since they weren't wearing fur and horns or caught stealing Nancy Pelosi's desk, it'll be hard to find anything else about them. 

A big thanks to Tom Fitton and Judicial watch for starting the suit on Ashli Babbit's family's behalf.

EDIT Jan. 7 at 1340 EST to add:  Vivek Ramaswamy might have won the war of words on Jan.6, tweeting on the 6th about Ray Epps and adding the hashtag, #EntrapmentDay.  Note that on the 6th, DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves made it clear that the DOJ is now going to target Americans who were around the Capitol on J6 but did not enter the building.  Anyone who happened to be "around" the Capitol?  Would you define "around" Mr. U.S. Attorney?  A hundred yards?  A hundred miles? 

An Old Graybeard Story

When I'm not blogging, machining, 3D printing, playing in the ham shack or doing things related to those hobbies, I've been reviewing the ATF's Notice of Proposed Rule Making 2021R-05.  That's the one changing definitions of frames and receivers along with trying to greatly curtail the ability to make "Privately Made Firearms" or PMFs.  My intent is to put together as coherent an argument as I can, so I tend to have the NPRM open and a document in Libre Office in which I'm collecting thoughts.  

This leads to an Old Graybeard story.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the effort to stop the FCC from permitting the use of a bad technology back in the early part of the '00s.  The technology was called Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, and it was a boneheaded idea if ever there was one.  The concept was to take broadband Internet to the homes and instead of putting it over cable TV coaxial cable or Fiber Optics, they were going to use the power grid.  The amount of bandwidth a signal takes is related to the data rate; it's not 1:1 like a 10 Megabit per second line doesn't necessarily take 10 MHz, but in the "you don't get something for nothing" world of engineering, the 10 to 20 Mega Bits per Second signals they were talking about delivering, would take up essentially the entire HF spectrum.  

This was being sold to solve some imaginary problem of lack of broadband into rural areas.  Except the powerline technology isn't compatible with HF signals. Transformers are integral to the AC power grid, stepping voltages up and down over and over again.  These things work at 60 Hz; they won't pass the HF signals.  Every. Single. Transformer would need to have data jumpers around it, the system would need signal processing like amplifiers and filters all over. 

There are many things wrong with the concept besides the hardware problems.  The HF spectrum is allocated internationally and there are many services in there.  Marine radio, commercial aviation, military services, industrial uses, international broadcast and ham radio are just some of the things you hear in HF.  This threatened to wipe those services out near powerlines, which is virtually everywhere in the country.  As a country, we're signatories to several treaties that would obligate us not to interfere with anyone else in the world.

I spent a long time responding to the NPRM from the FCC as just myself; so did the company I retired from.  Since HF receiver design was one of my specialties, I was much more familiar with the reality of those signal levels in that chunk of spectrum, and it was instantly apparent they were going to seriously interfere with every single occupant of the shortwave spectrum.  Not just hams but aviation, broadcasters, military, everyone. Conversely, ham transmitters could render the BPL system useless, too.

"Word on the street" was that the head of the FCC (Colin Powell's son Michael) was in the pocket of industry so it wasn't surprising the FCC made it legal.  They exempted certain frequency bands, notably where their own monitoring stations were located, and a few other government frequency bands.  They allowed other users to sue to shut down the BPL providers and the providers decided fairly early on they'd be facing bankruptcy from lawsuits and quietly went elsewhere in the spectrum. (My interpretation).  Today, long distance/wide area BPL is gone and all that remains are some things that work over the powerlines in your house. 

So what does that have to do with the ATF NPRM?

The lesson that I got out of that experience was the FCC was going to do it regardless of what anybody else said.  The NPRM step was something they had to do because the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 says so.  They collected the thousands of comments against the idea and threw them out. 

To be fair, I've seen honest NPRMs from the FCC in the years since.  The FCC has accepted expert testimony from the ARRL or from groups of amateurs and modified proposed rules.

In the case of the ATF, it's hard to believe they'll respond to comments and improve the rules.  I've never seen them be even as "sorta sometimes reasonable" as the FCC.  I don't see why I'm bothering to work at it, but I just can't not do it.  We can't just say, "whatever you say, Master" to them.  Maybe a massive ground swell of opposition might have an effect. 

 

 

Four Weeks After Election Day

We're now four weeks out from election day.  It's early in the evening but within a few hours after I post this, people four weeks ago would have concluded Trump had won, and gone to bed.  That's when the industrial scale cheating started.  I won't go into all the reported incidents of fraud, and so many aspects that are statistically, and even physically impossible, because they've been covered in so many places.  There is so much evidence of fraud here that only those deliberately not looking at it could dismiss it.  I've heard several people say that we send observers to monitor the elections in other countries and they wouldn't approve this one. 

It looks to me like the first big problem is there are tens of thousands of pages of evidence, hundreds of lawyers to deliver them, dozens of expert witnesses, a case that would take a month to do justice in court and a deadline that has to be proven in a week.  The second big problem we have is that the government officials that would be the defendants in those cases have proven that they won't listen to a judge's orders and I'd be less than surprised if people told to preserve evidence were actively destroying it as I type.  A large number of judges and elected officials are perfectly happy with the fraud.  They don't want those pesky American citizens interfering with the election. 

Let's start with one thing that got me thinking this way.  Has everyone heard the report from General McInerney, a former very high ranking officer in the pentagon, saying that the stories about Dominion servers being captured in Germany are true?  That was an operation by US Army special forces against a data center run by the CIA.  Gen. McInerney says he hasn't gotten confirmation but has heard that some of the Army operators were killed.  Start out at the 40 minute mark in the video at NC Renegade.  This is the US Government fighting the US Government – on foreign soil, no less.  Where are those Dominion servers now?  Army intelligence?  When does that information get added to the court cases?

The question I keep coming back to is where do we go from here?  What now?  If it's really the will of the people, and I can see Biden was fairly elected, I can accept that.  It looks to me like the chances of that being the case are about like picking a specific grain of sand out of the Sahara.  Zip.  Zero.  You’re not going to convince me (without lots of numbers checked in dozens of ways) that a clearly scatter-brained geezer who hardly came out of his basement, and got tiny numbers of people at rallies (14?) got more votes than Obama did in '08.

If cheating this obvious (and sloppy) doesn't get fixed this time, the cheating will be worse next time.  There are no more fair and free elections, unless the whole system, nationwide, coast to coast, gets torn down and reasonable voter ID laws are put in place.  The first problem is that these are up to the states to regulate and not the fed.gov.  The second problem is half the country wants it this way, as long as they get their preferred rulers. Add in that the professional apparatchiks in various government agencies (aka "the Deep State") desperately don’t anyone who might reduce the size of the Fed.gov, and we’re saying the Republic is dead. It was a nice experiment while it lasted but it didn’t work, so back to tyranny?

In Pennsylvania, they had a state judge tell the election supervisors to allow free access by Republican observers.  The election supervisors told the court to shove it. Then we had a Supreme Court justice tell them to clean up their act and they told him to shove it. We’ve constructed a society where lawyers decide everything, and if nobody obeys the judges, then what happens? I can see some state police trying to enforce what the judge and justice said, fighting other police who are trying to prevent the enforcement.  Just like the Army vs. the CIA.

David DeGerolamo at NC Renegade puts it like this:

There are many questions that are currently unanswered but there is one fact: if military personnel were killed by the CIA, the civil war between the people and the Deep State has started.

Wanna get your stat geek on?  This image show that Biden won by four of the most extreme vote ratios in the entire country. From this page (H/T to Mark Steyn)

Got A Couple of Hours?

On Wednesday night, Glenn Beck did a two hour presentation in the open on YouTube and available a couple of other ways.  The subject is the story of the Deep State and the impeachment hearings.  The video is still freely available here.   Two hours.  One short potty break at the top of the second hour with no other interruptions.  That's right; no commercials.

The program is called The Democrats' Hydra, a reference to the shadowy evil organization in the Captain America movies from the Marvel cinematic universe.  In mythology, the hydra was a multi-headed monster and it was said that if you cut off one head, two will grow back to take its place.  That became part of the MCU story of the criminal/terrorist group Hydra.  I've used the analogy for the Fed.Gov for most of the life of this blog.  Beck shows its origins.

Such a report couldn't be done without thorough research, so they used FOIA requested documents, Wikileaks releases, documents from trials in the Ukraine and many other places.  There's a summary posted online as well.  He points out that he knows that he's going to be accused of spreading conspiracy theories, but that's not what this is.  Conspiracy theories don't have documentary evidence backing them up  - some of them emails from the person committing the crime.  This is evidence that would probably stand up in a court of law (of course, IANAL).  As he puts it, it's the difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy facts. 

By the end of the first hour we see the state department operating independently.  It doesn't matter who the president is - the office which sets foreign policy according to the constitution - they're going to do the things that their agenda calls for.  Which is why the state department is in open rebellion against the president. 

The documentary gets to the modern era in the second hour.  We find current state department employees actively working to start revolutions all around the globe.  We find current state department employees actively training citizens in other countries how to take down their governments.  We find little details like that the state department used taxpayer money to print Saul Alinsky's “Rules for Radicals” in Macedonian (the language) to enable revolution in that country.  We find details of an initiative started as soon as Obama took office and renamed a year later (by the Hildebeest) as “Civil Society 2.0.”  Be aware of that phrase.  Like all propaganda, the things actually done by people acting under Civil Society 2.0 have virtually nothing to do with being civil. 

It's quite the story.  In a way, it validates all the worst things you've ever thought were going on in our country.  Definitely worth the two hours to watch.

The Dems Childish View of Wealth

For the longest time, I've had this vision in my mind about how AOC, Liz Warren and the rest of the Evil Party view wealth.  Their mental image of a rich person is from Scrooge McDuck cartoons, swimming and playing in vast piles of gold coins and other material wealth.

Their reaction to the fact that billionaires exist and are a positive thing in society are just so stuck at this four-year-old mental image.  This Twit's Tweet is a perfect example (name redacted to protect the moron), from an article at FEE (the Foundation for Economic Education).

No, Twit, people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the other billionaires aren't human incarnations of Scrooge McDuck; nor are they Smaug the Dragon from The Hobbit.  Smaug didn't play and swim in his gold coins, but he immersed himself in them and slept on them. 

The FEE article is a good starting place, asking the question, "Is Jeff Bezos Smaug the Dragon?"  It's a easy question to dismiss.  With a publicly stated net worth of $108 Billion and the richest man in the world, he doesn't live in a double wide off a dirt road in Arkansas, or a 3BR/2BA ranch house off a two lane road outside Seattle.  He definitely has "creature comforts", five mansions and a private jet, but the nice thing about being a billionaire is that those comforts don't soak up much of your net worth.  More than 95% of his net worth is in the market value of the portion of Amazon and other businesses that he owns.

And what is Amazon made of? Again, we’re not just talking about piles of money and luxury goods here. We’re talking about a business. For example, there’s the massive operation that takes the Amazon.com orders you and I make: warehouses full of computers processing oodles of data every day. Then there’s all it takes to fulfill those orders: facilities that cover acres, 100,000 electric delivery trucks, etc.

Those are the kinds of things that make up most of Bezos’s treasure: not stuff for personal use, but stuff that is made to make other stuff. Economists call such stuff “capital goods.”

Note that Bezos' treasure isn't gold coins or jewelry or things like that.  The capital goods that are the vast majority of his wealth are only worth something if they're being used to make things for other people.  They're not something everyone in the general population would likely want.  

The distinction is vital because of the plans that Liz Warren, Bernie, and all the other communists Democratic Socialists have to "tax the wealthy".  What happens to that wealth if Jeff has to sell some of Amazon to pay his wealth tax?  A sudden mass of Amazon stock on the market, especially if the fund managers and other professionals know he has to sell it, will drive the price down on markets.  The same thing would happen to every other company that another billionaire owns part of when that billionaire needs to pay their wealth tax. 

Maybe the DemSocs don't care: they still get their 2% of all wealth over $50 million and it doesn't bother them at all if Bezos has to sell more shares of stock, driving the price farther down. 

The first major side effect of that, though, is that they lower the net worth of everyone that's invested in those billionaire's companies, from major market movers to working people trying to save for retirement.  That lowers the government's revenues.  Who's to say that with a credible threat to require assets be sold to pay taxes, that all of the world's stock markets won't collapse?  I think Liz Warren would view that as a feature not a bug.

The second major side effect is that Amazon, like most retail companies, isn't a high margin company guaranteed to be around for a long time.  Big, successful companies go out of business all the time.  Just enter “Sears” in your favorite search engine, perhaps with the word bankruptcy. 

In the bad old days the DemSocs seem to long for, there was a two class system: the feudal lords and the peasants.  As long as they have the power and are on top, that's all they care about. 

Red Flag Laws and Mistaken Identity - Happens in Florida

This story didn't make the two local papers or any other local source I see, so we go to the AmmoLand newsletter today.  A St. Cloud (Florida) man had his firearms confiscated and his rights revoked because he has the same name as someone else.

Last Wednesday, Jonathan Carpenter of Osceola County, Florida was sitting at home when a mail carrier knocked on his front door.

The postal carrier had Carpenter signed for a certified letter from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Carpenter signed for it, but he was confused because he was not expecting anything from the state. He quickly opened it and was floored.

The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services was notifying him that they have suspended his concealed handgun permit.

“On or about August 12th, 2019 in Osceola County, Florida, an injunction was entered restraining you from acts of domestic violence or acts of repeat violations,” the notice read.

Carpenter was shocked and confused.  What seems to have happened next is he dove right into the hornet's nest.  An innocent man who believes in the goodness and fairness of the system would do that.

Figuring it was a mistake, Carpenter called the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to clear things up since he has never committed domestic violence against anyone. The representative told him he had to get a form from the Clerk of the Courts saying that there weren't any actions against him.

Of course they did.  When he went to the Clerk of the Courts, he was told there was an injunction against a Jonathon Edward Carpenter - a resident of a different address.  Carpenter told the agent he was not that person, had never lived at that address and had never been accused of any domestic violence.  That person directed him to the Osceola County Sheriff's office to clear things up.  Still thinking the state was just confused rather than malevolent, he went to the Sheriff's office.  He thought he could clear things up.

Not quite.

The Sheriff’s office supplied Carpenter with a copy of the injunction. In the statement, the plaintiff stated that she rented a room out to a “Jonathan Edward Carpenter” and his girlfriend. She alleged that this Carpenter was a drug dealer who broke her furniture and sold her belongings without her permission. He had a gun, and she feared for her life. She was not sure if the firearm was legal or not.

Carpenter had never met the woman in question and never lived at the address listed in the restraining order. Moreover, other than being white, he looked nothing like the man the terrorized the woman.

The man in question is 5'8. Carpenter is 5'11. The alleged drug dealer is 110lbs. Carpenter is over 200. The man has black hair. Carpenter is completely bald. Last but not least, the man in question is covered in tattoos, and Carpenter only has a few.

It was apparent that the police had the wrong man, but Carpenter was in for his biggest shock yet. The Sheriff’s office told Carpenter he had to surrender his guns. Carpenter never even had as much as a hearing, yet he was losing his rights.

And this is where the system springs its "trap"; more accurately, this is where the system shows it  doesn't care the least little bit that they have the right person, they just "got someone".   It's where the reputation for putting innocent people in jail (or worse) comes from.  The Osceola County Sheriff's Office doesn't think the obvious differences in appearances and histories between the man in front of them and the accused is enough for them to say, "oops, they sent the letter to the wrong dude.  Sorry.  No hard feelings."  They should be saying, "here's a few bucks for your trouble"; instead, this is going to cost Carpenter a lot of money to get back property and a life he should have never been deprived of.

And this is why we hate Red Flag Laws, aka Extreme Protection Orders. Guilty until proven innocent.  No due process.  No protections.  Just a stupid mistake causes innocent people financial ruin to put their lives back.

How did it come to be? According to the AmmoLand news,

A police officer I spoke to off the record thinks that the courts ran a check for a Jonathan Edward Carpenter with a concealed carry permit. Although he could not tell me for sure, he thinks that is what happened in this particular case. He did say that this is a common practice.

Seems very plausible that the abomination passed last year would automate this.  A warrant for someone on domestic abuse gets filed and it automatically generates a check to see if that name is associated with a CWFL; if it is, the Red Flag is automatically thrown.  

Meanwhile, Carpenter has to wait until August 27th to begin the legal proceedings to get his guns back. 

The Destruction of the West - California in the Lead

Thanks to lead-in from 90 Mile From Tyranny, we find an epic piece written by Victor Davis Hanson in National Review, "California: America's First Third World State".

California, as the biggest liberal enclave in the US, stands out from the rest of the states in the way that it seems to strive to attain the ideal social structure that so-called progressives long for:  a medieval society of royalty and peasants (as long as they're the ones on top).  In modern terms that means no middle class, just a wealthy, nobility class and a much larger lower (or under) class of indentured servants who keep them in power.

VDH opens with this trenchant observation:

Third World symptomologies are predictably corrupt government, unequal or nonexistent applicability of the law, two rather than three classes, and the return of medieval diseases. Third World nations suffer from high taxes and poor social services, premodern infrastructure and utilities, poor transportation, tribalism, gangs, and lack of security.

Another chief characteristic of a Third World society is the official denial of all of the above, and a vindictive, almost hysterical state response to anyone who points out those obvious tragedies. Another is massive out-migration. Residents prefer almost any country other than their own. Think Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, or Guatemala.

It's really worth reading the whole thing, but VDH puts together a strong case to back his points.  I'll excerpt a few here.

By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union. Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Another fifth is categorized as near the poverty level — facts not true during the latter 20th century. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients now live in California. The state has the highest homeless population in the nation (135,000). About 22 percent of the nation’s total homeless population reside in the state — whose economy is the largest in the U.S., fueling the greatest numbers of American billionaires and high-income zip codes.

But by some indicators, the California middle class is shrinking — because of massive regulation, high taxation, green zoning, and accompanying high housing prices. Out-migration from the state remains largely a phenomenon of the middle and upper-middle classes. Millions have left California in the past 30 years, replaced by indigent and often illegal immigrants, often along with the young, affluent, and single.
...
California’s transportation system, to be honest, remains in near ruins. Despite the highest gas taxes in the nation, none of its major trans-state freeways — not the 99, not I-5, not the 101 — after 70 years off use, are yet completed with six lanes, resulting in dangerous bottlenecks and wrecks. Driving the 99 south of Visalia, or the 101 near Paso Robles, or the 5 north of Coalinga is right out of Road Warrior — but not as dangerous as the fossilized two-line feeder lines such as 152 into Gilroy, or the 41 west of Kettleman City. The unspoken transportation credo of Jerry Brown’s aggregate 16 years as governor apparently was “If you don’t build it, maybe they won’t need it.”
...
In 1973, when I first visited and lived in Greece, the roads were medieval. The old Hellinikon Airport was dysfunctional, if not creepy. Highway rest stops were filthy. I have lived in or visited Greece in the ensuing 45 years since, including occasionally after the 2008 meltdown and European Union standoff. And yet today, the freeways, chief airport, and rest stops of relatively poor Greece are in far better shape than are California’s. LAX’s poor road access, traffic, uncleanness, crowds, and chaos seem premodern compared with the current Athenian airport.
...
Power outrages are characteristic of Third World countries. Here in California we are advised to brace for lots of them, given that our antiquated grid apparently contributes to brush fires on hot days. As a native, I do not remember a single instance of our 20th-century state utilities shutting down service in the manner that they now routinely promise.
...
California’s cycles of wet boom years and dry bust years continue because the state refuses to build three or four additional large reservoirs that have been planned for more than a half-century, and that would store enough water to keep California functional through even the worst drought. The rationale is either that it is more sophisticated to allow millions of acre-feet of melted snow to run into the sea, or it is better to have a high-speed-rail line from Merced to Bakersfield than an additional 10 million acre-feet of water storage, or droughts ensure more state control through rationing and green social-policy remedies.
...
California schools are usually in the bottom decile of national rankings. No one in polite conversation asks why that is so, given that the state’s K–12 schools used to be among the most competitive in the United States.

Yet, again in medieval fashion, the professional schools and science and technology departments of California’s premier research universities — Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC — are among the highest-rated in the world. Imagine something like the scribal oases of Padua, Oxford, or Paris in an otherwise frightening 13th century. If one wishes to be schooled as an electrical engineer or cancer researcher, California is an attractive place; if one wishes to be a knowledgeable graduate of a public elementary and high school, it most certainly is not.
...
California now has the nation’s highest basket of sales, gas, and income taxes. With a state surplus, and a slowing economy, one would think that the legislature and governor would pause before even considering raising more taxes. After all, new federal tax law limits write-offs of state and local taxes to $10,000 — radically spiking upper-bracket Californians’ federal tax liabilities.

Yet the rule in California is to punish the upper middle class while pandering to the rich and romanticizing the poor. Thus, the legislature is now considering a punitive new inheritance tax, and it just imposed an Internet sales tax.
...
What caused this lunacy?

A polarity of importing massive poverty from south of the border while pandering to those who control unprecedented wealth in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the tourism industry, and the marquee universities. Massive green regulations and boutique zoning, soaring taxes, increasing crime, identity politics and tribalism, and radical one-party progressive government were force multipliers. It is common to blame California Republicans for their own demise. They have much to account for, but in some sense, the state simply deported conservative voters and imported their left-wing replacements.

Go read the rest.  Yes, I left some. 

In many issues and at many times, California has started changes that filtered into the rest of the country.  Many of the movements that are pushing California into third world status are elsewhere in the country.  Seattle.  Chicago.  Portland.  New York City.  Jersey City.  New Orleans.  And others.  These things VDH describes should be flashing warning signs, saying "don't do what they did", yet too many seem to want to go down the path into the third world. 

Idaho Embarks on Enormous Deregulation Experiment

If this is the post of the day, look to the right and see the graphic of the sunset with my message to Deregulate.  (If it's not the post of the day, look at the top of the right sidebar). 

1. Sunset all new laws.  That means all new Federal Laws get an expiration date.  
2. Throw out all useless old laws. Like how the Trump administration has thrown out 22 regulations for every new one they've added 

According to The Library of Economics and Liberty, and quoting from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Idaho has just thrown out all of their existing regulations.  All.  Admittedly, it wasn't planned and nobody seems to know quite what it means, but let me just quote from the article.

Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. The cause may have been dysfunction across legislative chambers, but the result is serendipitous. A new governor is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to repeal an outdated and burdensome regulatory code and replace it with a more streamlined and sensible set of rules. Other states should be paying close attention.

Instead, the legislature wrapped up an acrimonious session in April without passing a rule-reauthorization bill. As a result, come July 1, some 8,200 pages of regulations containing 736 chapters of state rules will expire. Any rules the governor opts to keep will have to be implemented as emergency regulations, and the legislature will consider them anew when it returns next January.

What does this mean?  Do STOP signs cease to be valid?  Is the state going to be overrun by inadequately licensed hair dressers or fingernail technicians, or some other specialty regulated into a tiny box by an established group of practitioners keeping newcomers out?  The authors of the articles say they don't know.

You might have come across the idea of a “regulatory reset.”  It would be like this, except deliberately crafted rather than the result of legislative dysfunction.  The idea is that the government eliminates all regulations and then brings back the ones it decides it wants.  Presumably, we would end up with substantially fewer regulations.  In practice, when deregulation is tried, regulatory agencies (think FCC, FDA, HEW, EPA and the alphabet soup of Fed.gov executive branch agencies) are reluctant to throw out sunsetted regulations.  It threatens their existence!  To borrow a quote from the Mercatus Center article:

The Idaho case also highlights the power of sunset provisions—or automatic expiration dates built into laws or regulations. In the past, academic research has found that sunset provisions are sometimes ineffective. Legislatures and agencies often readopt regulations without much thought.  To work well, sunsets may need to be structured such that large swaths of rules expire simultaneously, with reauthorization responsibilities falling to the legislature rather than regulators. Sunsets are perhaps most useful when rules are allowed to lapse and then forced back through the rulemaking process all over again. That way they can be subjected to public scrutiny, cost-benefit analysis, and perhaps even court challenges.  [Bold added: SiG]

The regulatory state hates this idea.  If the legislature is debating putting old rules back they're not working on new regulations.  I think that's a feature, not a bug.

It goes without saying that being in central Florida I'm just about as far from Idaho as one can get in the continental US and still be in the CONUS.  I imagine some of you are from Idaho and might have more insight.  Comments from anyone familiar with the Idaho goings-on are appreciated. 

Use By Date Approaching

Ran into this cartoon Tuesday and better use it before its "Use By" date gets here.

(Steven Breen)

Read those as Dr. Seuss prose, it works better. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a referenced story, but the list of ideas California's state legislature is contemplating was discussed in a few places as recently as last weekend, IIRC.

I did find a couple of interesting stories that illustrate the problem.  At Town Hall, Austin Hill writes about a proposal to implement a "third income tax" to pay for education.  The existing two are their California state income tax and the Federal Income tax. 

But now California, with an average statewide unemployment rate of over 12% (in some regions the rate is over 20%) and a budget deficit of somewhere between $10 and $15 billion, is considering the imposition of a third income tax. The additional income tax rate would vary, according to which region of the state one lives in, and would be imposed directly by school districts and county governments.

See, back in 1978, California voters passed a thing called "Proposition 13" which capped the amount that property tax could be raised year over year.  That means California school districts are broke just like the state.  They can't do what many other school districts in America do, and just raise property taxes by leaps and bounds every year.  Under the proposal, school districts will gain the right to decide on their own income tax levels to charge people living in their district. 

Do you find it surprising that they're getting legislative support for this idea?  If so, are you considering the government employee unions, long since joined at the hip with the Democrat party would like some of that sweet taxpayer money, too?

To add a little more context, Victor Davis Hansen, writing in the Daily Signal points out a couple of things to note.

For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3%, the highest in the nation.

About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

That last one is astounding.  That means 0.375% of tax payers pay half of the state's income tax revenue.  No wonder ordinary Californians keep electing the people they do.  Everything they vote for comes with the fact that someone else is paying for it.  It's OPM - Other People's Money - the most addictive substance in the world.  In addition:

• California recently raised gas taxes by 40% and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.
• The state has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3% is America’s highest.  As of April 1st, that sales tax is applied to any purchases from out of state merchants.  
• Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced a bill that would create a new state estate tax. Wiener outlined a death tax of 40% on estates worth more than $3.5 million for single Californians or more than $7 million for married couples.  Since $3.5 million will essentially buy a cardboard box to live in in San Francisco, that will impact families who have passed a home down generation to generation.  The current owners will lose those houses.
• In January, new governor Gavin Newsome proposed a tax on drinking water.  I'm sure that's an additional tax on water because I can't imagine people aren't already paying at least one tax on their water, if not several.   

It's no surprise that middle class Californians are moving out of the state.  I found it surprising that the rich are moving to California.  They're moving to the expensive cities and driving up housing prices which help force the lower income Californians out of state. 

I think California is working toward the Venezuela model of having a few rich people, mostly people living on handouts, and no middle class. 

Civil Asset Forfeiture - And the Beat Goes On

In the last few years, the opposition to the practice of civil asset forfeiture across the country has been rising.  The Institute for Justice has cataloged how the states have responded.  Note that some states appear in more than one grouping.  Much more detail at the IJ link. 

• Three states—North Carolina, New Mexico and Nebraska—have abolished civil forfeiture entirely.
• 29 states and the District of Columbia have reformed their civil forfeiture laws
• Fifteen states now require a criminal conviction for most or all forfeiture cases and a sixteenth, Utah, forbids forfeiture for cases where the claimants are found not guilty and are acquitted.
• Sixteen states and the District of Columbia require the government to bear the burden of proof for innocent-owner claims
• Nineteen states and the District of Columbia instituted new reporting requirements for seizure and forfeiture activity
• Finally, seven states and the District of Columbia have passed anti-circumvention legislation to close the equitable-sharing loophole.

This despite the president and his former attorney general Sessions vocally endorsing asset forfeiture.

Despite these reforms, the beat goes on.  Asset forfeiture is still happening, and local TV WALB in Lowndes County, Georgia tells the story of a what seems to be a routine traffic stop that resulted in the seizure of over $500,000 in Georgia last week.  H/T to the Foundation for Economic Education - FEE. 

Two Colombian men were headed south on I-75 when deputies noticed them driving erratically and pulled them over.

“In and out of lanes, just moving over the line, actually slowed down, got a very slow limit of speed on interstate, actually thought the driver might be impaired," said Paulk.

Sheriff Paulk said deputies reported that the men appeared to be very nervous, so they called in K-9s to check the car.

“The dogs, they’ll also alert on a large quantity of money like that, not just cause it’s money but because it has drugs attached to it," said Paulk.

How did they decide it was drug money and could be confiscated?

“All of it is wrapped the same way they wrap cocaine, the same rubber bands, the same style of wrapping. So, when you see that you know where that money’s derived from," said Paulk.

Sounds like a rock solid case to me!  I mean it used the same rubber bands!  I say, "rock solid case" deliberately tongue in cheek because "case" implies actual due process.  With asset forfeiture in several states, actual charges of criminal violation and resulting conviction are required. Georgia is not one of these states.

There isn't much to this story besides this allegation.  Personally, if I had to be carrying half a million dollars in cash, I'd be nervous about the prospect of being pulled over for nothing and the money seized.

Of course, the lack of criminal charges and proper due process is what most of us who are opposed to asset forfeiture are complaining about, just as many of us complain about "red flag laws" depriving gun owners of property with no due process, not even a hearing with defendant present, and often charging them for the return of their property.  In so many of these asset grabs they never even file charges.  They just see money so they take it. 

According to a Department of Justice Inspector General report, between 2007 and 2017, the DEA alone seized $3.2 billion from individuals who were not charged with a crime. Cash seizures without charges made up 81 percent of the funds analyzed in that report.

Beyond the DEA, law enforcement agencies around the country generate millions of dollars per year through civil asset forfeiture and are often allowed to keep or sell the property they confiscate. Utah police seized $2.1 million in 2017, and an overwhelming majority of the cases—96 percent—were drug-related, reflecting the widespread ramifications of the decades-long War on Drugs (proponents of civil asset forfeiture have claimed the practice is a key tool in the costly, ineffective policy).

I've been writing about civil asset forfeiture over the life of this blog (example).  Nothing would make me happier than see it disappear.  

(source - judging by the maps on the wall, probably not Lowndes county, Georgia)

Non-Surprise of the Day: A "Wealth Tax" Won't Pay For the Green New Deal

It's probably not a surprise to you that the Democratic Socialists of America are completely economically ignorant.  Politically, they probably aren't.  Politically, they unabashedly say they want to destroy capitalism and the US.  It isn't a surprise, then, that their "Green New Deal" economics is all about destroying the US economy. 

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute took at look at some of the real numbers behind the story and the tax increases we've heard talked about are so short of funding this Green New Deal fiasco that there's no way anyone can think they're being serious. 

There aren't many proposals that can really be looked at.  AOC did that famous screed on TV about the marginal tax rate on any dollars earned above a person's 10 millionth dollar (the "tippy top") being taxed at 70%.  We've heard about 90%.  How much does it really cost?  Jill Stein, the Green Party Candidate in the 2016 elections, proposed a “Green New Deal” costing between $700 billion and $1 trillion per year for public jobs and clean energy initiatives.  But that's 7 to $10 Trillion over the next 10 years, which is clearly not enough spending for the Democrats today.

Instead, the plans that have been widely talked about come closer to $50 trillion over 10 years.  Over and above the current deficits.

(W)hen assessing the needed tax revenues, a green-energy initiative costing $7–$10 trillion over the decade should be examined in the context of $42 trillion in additional Democratic-socialist proposals that include single-payer health care ($32 trillion), a federal jobs guarantee ($6.8 trillion), student-loan forgiveness ($1.4 trillion), free public college ($800 billion), infrastructure ($1 trillion), family leave ($270 billion), and Social Security expansion ($188 billion).

That 21 percent of GDP cost would double federal spending. And that does not even account for a baseline budget deficit rising to 7 percent of GDP over the decade — bringing the total budget gap to 28 percent of GDP.

Riedl then goes through some additional numbers.  Let's start here.  Let's not bother with taking 70% of income over $10 Million, let's take every penny of income over $1 million - you know they want to.

Analysis of IRS data shows that this would raise 3.8 percent of GDP — not even enough to balance the current budget, much less finance a Green New Deal. And even that figure implausibly assumes that people continue working and investing. Slightly more realistically, doubling the top 35 percent and 37 percent tax brackets, to 70 percent and 74 percent for singles earning more than $200,000 and couples earning at least $400,000, would raise roughly 1.6 percent of GDP. That figure also ignores all revenues lost to the economic effects of 85 percent marginal tax rates (when including state and payroll taxes) as well as tax avoidance and evasion.

Is he being reasonably accurate?  I think so.  A few years ago, I calculated if you took 100% of income for the "top 1%", which was around $300,000 at the time, you couldn't run the government for more than a few weeks.  Bill Whittle said it well in this video.  Even though it's dated 2011, I think the numbers aren't so different that the concept is worthless - it's within a factor of two. 

Riedl does the same sort of disassembly of the current tax proposals as Bill Whittle talked through in that video (taken, BTW, from Iowahawk, whom I used to link to when he still blogged).   There is simply no way to pay for this with "tax the rich" proposals; they need to raise taxes radically on everyone.

Writer Mica Mosbacher for Townhall adds a piece on Riedl's article and adds an important nugget of information. 

To make the math work, though, Democrats would have to revise their definition of “super-rich” to encompass pretty much anyone who can afford to pay their bills on time, which is precisely what Senator Warren seemed to suggest in a recent MSNBC interview about her wealth tax proposal.

“When we’re only taxing income, we’re taxing two people who may have the same income but are in wildly different economic circumstances,” Warren complained, making clear that the intention of her wealth tax is to punish people who manage their finances responsibly.

Yet, even Warren’s own economists estimate that her wealth tax would only bring in about $2.75 billion over 10 years.

It's a clue by four when the candidate alludes to taxing everyone and her staff economists say her wealth tax falls pitifully, abysmally short of raising the funds she needs (not even .01% of it).  If you haven't figured this out yet, when they say they're going to "tax the rich" and the corporations, they mean YOU.  You may not consider yourself to be rich, but they simply can't make it work without taking everything from everyone. 

We have to assume that's the plan.

(Tell ya what.  AOC gets entirely too much publicity.  Let's skip "bucktooth Betsy" and use Faux-cahontas for variety).

The New Economic Theory Behind the Entire Democrat Left Wing

There's a new theory behind the rantings of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Occasional Cortex and the leftward running Democratic presidential candidates.  Well, actually, it's not new.  And it kind of dignifies it to call it a "theory".  It's a particularly stupid idea, which is to say it's to do what they always do: just keep spending what you don't have.  They just gave it a name they can hide behind.

Hat tip to 357 Magnum for the link to an article on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  "The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism - Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphics" at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise. I hope it's obvious that you don't do an article on economics explained by graphs printed over pictures of girls in bikinis without the required amount of goofing around and lots of snark. 

The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create.  Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold.  MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway.  So let’s go all in.”  This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas.  Not exactly.  The credit card has a credit limit.

So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print.  The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend.  This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place.  Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets:  this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter.  The implications are stunning.  “Why not just pay for everything?  The government can just print the money, right?”

We're not making this up.  She actually said this - and then she said the world was going to end in 12 years and we "just pay for" whatever it costs to meet the "Green New Deal" dream costs, too.

Getting back to the Modern Monetary Theorists, this is deep thought, folks.  Mitchell actually uses an example to try to correlate money created by QE to the number of points football teams can score in a game.

An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game.  There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you.  Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.

How does this relate to money?  What?  Are you some kind of hater?  It's some sort of tortured, brain-dead, logic.

People don't have enough money?   Just add a zero to every printed bill and instantly people have ten times as much money!  Never mind consequences, there won't be any because they say there won't!  Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates.  We just need high taxes to take the excess money out of circulation... so government can buy something or other.

You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item.  So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture.  It is that valuable.

Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree.  An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more.  It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange.  It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work.  And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want.  Like coffee.

There has to be a balance between mocking this and emphasizing that people trying to run the entire country really believe this.  Don't think it's not popular to run on the idea of "infinite free stuff for everyone"?  Have you been watching lately?  As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise put it.

Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true.  They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering.  Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.

(Another link from 357 Magnum - this time to CNSNews.com)

A Year After Parkland Shooting, Florida Students Are No Safer

That's the conclusion of the Chairman of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, Pinellas county Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who says the various school districts around the state "have no sense of urgency in making our schools safer".

I don't want to act like I think it was a difficult prediction on my part, but I nailed it last March.  After then Florida Governor Rick "Voldemort" Scott signed the mess formerly known as SB7026 into law, I had said that there are ways around the good features of the law but not the bad ones, so nothing good would happen. 

The strongest feature is the Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program, which allows people who work on school property to carry concealed.  As bonus, the volunteers get to take 132 hours of classroom and range training to get better at their new role as marshals. ... The bad part of this is that a late compromise took teachers out of eligibility for the program, so in effort to say, "we're not arming teachers", they took away the teachers' right to defend themselves.

The way around it, though, is that the local school district and sheriff's department can decide not to allow the program. In a county as sapphire blue as Broward, what do you think the chances are the Sheriff Israel will allow it? A sheriff known for chumming around with Hillary and Obama - before he was known for assigning responding officers to "wait outside while students died". You know how it goes, there's two chances: slim and none, and slim already left town.

It seems statistically hard to come up with any organizations as unlikely to take responsibility for anything as local school boards.  Want to guess how many school districts have decided to take advantage of the Guardian Program?  How many added specially trained security forces?  There are 67 counties in Florida; I'm not sure it's always one school district in a county, but there's at least one per county so it's a good approximation.

Two.  Out of 67.  Call it 3%.  I'm sorry to say that my county isn't even one of them. 

What the law and the school districts have done for Florida schools is to recreate the exact same solution as that of Broward Schools on that horrible day in Parkland.  MSD High School had one armed person, the deputy who single-handedly changed the name of his department to the Coward County Sheriff's Department, the deputy who refused to engage while the shooter was killing students under his guard.  One officer isn't adequate for a campus that big to start with; this officer just made the bad situation worse. 

Gualtieri asserts that widespread use of the guardian program as authorized by the law would mitigate deputy shortages being faced by most sheriffs’ offices around the state.  He also noted some Sheriff’s Departments are refusing to train school personnel as allowed, but apparently not mandated by the law.  He wants the legislature to mandate that training should a school board adopt the guardian plan.  That makes sense and is just one example of the flawed thinking of the legislature as they quickly reacted to have something in place by the end of the last legislative session. [BOLD added: SiG] 

It's hard to look at this and think that any progress has been made.  It's hard not to conclude that Parkland isn't the tiniest bit safer than it was last Valentines Day. The same goes for virtually every school in the state.  You know it's going to happen again because nothing has been done to keep it from happening again.  Somewhere, some psychotic teen is dreaming of how they're going to rack up the highest body count anywhere and knows just where to find the unarmed, unprotected victims: right in the gun free zone where they're always found.

It's a rule of thumb that any law named after a victim ends up being a legislative crap fest.  I should have expanded that to include any law named after a notorious crime is a crap fest, but never put it in those words. 

A Couple of Florida Gunny Updates

It has been apparent for quite a while that the fight for gun rights is shifting to the states - where the officials can be bought for less and Bloomberg's money goes farther.  After the Fall Fiasco (what I'm calling the election) the one thing we knew for certain was that our new Agriculture Commissioner would be Nikki Fried; those of you from outside Florida may not realize this puts her in charge of the concealed weapons licensing in the state.  As I said at that time:

I honestly don't know if that's pronounced "Freed", like set free, or "Fried" like fried chicken.
...
All I really had against her could be summed up in a description that's easy to put together out of her campaign website: "she's a liberal, activist, big city lawyer".  In her campaign, Fried promised to make the focus of her administration pushing medical marijuana and opposing the NRA.

Both of her priorities are a wasted of taxpayer money.  I'm not sure how the secretary of agriculture has any say whatsoever over the medical marijuana industry. 

Today I learned from The Truth About Guns (TTAG) that Fried has chosen anti-gun activist Mary Barzee Flores to be the actual Deputy Commissioner in that role.  Official press release here on the Department's web site. 

The photo, complete with the Demanding Mommies' logo and tagline, is from her 2018 (last fall's) campaign for the House of Representatives.  She campaigned on "taking on the NRA" (exactly what Fried said), closing the "gun show loophole" and all the other cliche's that the Demanding Mommies, Bloomy, and the other dependably uninformed groups all spread around.

So what?  How important is she?  Good question.  The actual laws that regulate the process are established.  It's true that the previous Ag Commissioner and Governor DeSantis' opponent in the primaries, Adam Putnam, did a lot to streamline the process and make it easier to get and renew your Florida concealed weapons license.  My guess on that it is if something is a department policy and not state law, it's easy for Flores to ignore it in an attempt to slow down licensing.  I can't see how she can create new laws to require things that currently aren't required, but I can see wait time stretching out, working hours for the department employees stretching out and more aggravation in the process.

On the other hand, without prior solid evidence to the contrary, I don't think it's a preordained conclusion that she'll follow the law in every detail.  She might welcome a fight with state Senate or House to try and get some Cred as being on Bloomie's side.

---

While on the topic of the state gun laws, I want to call your attention to two things on the blog of Jon Gutmacher, the Orlando Gun Lawyer and "the man who wrote the book" about Florida's gun laws. 

First, Jon is starting to update the new laws in the state legislature and released his first summary of one yesterday.

Understanding Florida House Bill 6007:

Florida Statute 790.06(12) provides a list of places where carry per your CWL is not authorized. House Bill  6007 proposes to remove the language in subsection (13) about any college or university campus from the restriction on your CWL, and thereby authorizes it.  Thus, if passed, anyone with a valid CWL will be allowed to carry at a college or university campus.  But, you still can't open carry as that is prohibited by F.S. 790.053.

Second, last week Jon posted a call to sign up for an email from him as a sign to contact your legislators when he thinks it's important, good or bad.

To join just put "JOIN THE FIGHT"  in your subject line,  and email me at:  gutlaw@gmail.com.   I don't need or want any additional information, although adding a first and last name somewhere doesn't hurt.

Does contacting your representatives matter?  I don't know.  I think it's true that having more contacts is better than a one or two.  I asked him what he thought and he answered frankly.

emails don't do much other than when in large numbers give notice to legislators that it is in the public eye, and they probably then check the numbers as numbers.  Phone calls to staff are more important, and get lots more attention.  Again -- the more, the more attention paid.  Same with faxes - assuming anyone still has one.  Letters -- even more - but by the time they get there, the event is usually over,  and again -- a numbers game.   ten, twenty, thirty -- probably gets a sigh from staff, a hundred opens an eye or two,  a few hundred and up get noticed and usually action of some type.  But -- rarely are the numbers there.  

So Jon isn't particularly sanguine about the prospects, but until the lead is really flying and everyone is openly talking about the ongoing Civil War, we've got to keep trying.  Doing nothing and throwing up your hands is a sure way to end up before the firing squad.  Or the wood chipper. 

A tweet from Hollywood Producer Genocidal Jack Morrissey who thinks any children who disagree with him should  be shoved in a wood chipper alive - thanks to J. KB @ Gun Free Zone.

The Perfectly Legal Corruption No One Cares About

That's the title of a column by Derek Hunter on Townhall today.  Excellent article but maybe 1/100th as long as it could be.

The media is in a tizzy over the lawfare framing of General Michael Flynn, attorney Michael Cohen, and everyone else being ruined by the Robert Mueller investigations.

General Flynn had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, so surely he must have known the stakes in talking with the FBI, even though they said it was just a chat so no need for a lawyer.  Surely that must be what they call a perjury trap: if you remember one detail wrong, one detail that doesn't match the transcripts (again, transcripts that Flynn must have known they'd have) or remember one thing differently than someone else has testified, you're guilty of perjury.  Even if you're right and the first guy was lying.

What do you think is more likely? That Michael Flynn couldn’t perfectly recall the contents of a phone call made while on vacation, or that Flynn decided that he’d lie to the FBI’s face without any legal counsel over the contents of a phone call where nothing illegal is discussed?

Like Derek Hunter, it's hard to care much less than I do about Trump paying off a couple of whores to keep silent about having sex with him 12 years ago. He wasn't president at the time, he wasn't even running for office.  He was "just" another New York City billionaire - a private businessman.

What I don’t like is when people whose salaries we’re all paying use more of our tax dollars to pay off people they’ve harassed and keep that quiet.

There have been more than 260 settlements costing more than $17 million, paid for by you and me, so our elected Members for Congress can avoid being held responsible for things they’re now clutching their pearls over the President having done with his own money.

The use of public tax money for the same thing, by elected congressmen and senators, is disgusting, reprehensible and vile.  It should have never been allowed - just like allowing the same senators and representatives to engage in insider trading and other things "normal people" will get arrested for should never have happened.

California Democrat Maxine Waters won her first term in Congress in 1990 with 79 percent of the vote. Her toughest reelection bid came in 2012 when she squeaked by with 71 percent. Yet every two years she raises a campaign war chest for that foregone conclusion.

With the millions of dollars she’s raised, Waters has paid her own daughter, Karen, more than $800,000 since 2004 to run a statewide mail campaign promoting other Democrats. This past election, where Waters took 75.8 percent of the vote, was a good year for Karen too. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Karen is now owed $183,022.15 on top of the $108,000 she has already collected during the midterms.” Nice pay for essentially licking stamps.

Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay Jr. was first elected in 2000 with a scant 75 percent of the vote. His closest reelection bid was in 2002 when he only managed 70 percent.

With his reelection a mere formality, he won this year with 80.1 percent, Clay still managed to slide a substantial chunk of his campaign cash to his sister. Michelle Clay is a lawyer who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a full 809 miles from Congressman Clay’s district. The Free Beacon reported, “From Jan. 4 until Oct. 31, 2018, Rep. Clay Jr. disbursed numerous payments ranging from $500 to $10,000 and totaling $198,500 to his sister's firm.”
...
[Last year, retiring] congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who paid his wife almost $400,000 between 2010 and then. That’s a nice nest egg to add to a Congressional pension, isn’t it?

These Members of Congress are not unique, and it’s not a scam limited to one party, and most disturbingly, it’s not even a crime. When you set the rules, the rules are always in your favor.

And that last paragraph is the problem.  It's not limited to one party and it's not even a crime.  These stories are only scratching the surface.  As soon as one scam is clamped down on (remember the congressional check-kiting scandal of 1992?) they come up with another.  They can always find a legal way to steal money. 

(Nominated to chair - not sure it's a done deal yet, but "elections have consequences" you know)

Edit to add 2034 EST:  This is post #3000 in the life of this blog.  I'm not quite sure what to say, other than "day-um".

The Migrant Caravan Manipulation Continues

Last spring, when the "Migrant Caravan" to the US/Mexico border was going on, I did a piece talking about how we're all being manipulated by the media on this.  Since there's another caravan going on, I tried to determine if the same forces are in play and the same game is being played.

Short answer: Yeah.  You bet.

Representative Matt Gaetz from the NW part of Florida posted this video to Twitter, showing a couple of guys going through the caravan crowd handing out money.



It should be obvious, right?  Here we have thousands of people migrating a long distance and leaving whatever home and life they had.  They have to eat.  They have to "function".  The military saying that "an army marches on its stomach" doesn't just apply to armies.  Furthermore, take a look at he people in this freeze frame: do they look poorly dressed?  Do they look like destitute refugees?  Not to me.  To me, they look fairly well dressed and even fairly affluent. 

How much money are we talking about?  Talk show host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham is being widely quoted for this tweet.

Who is funding the migrant “caravan”? Each migrant’s passage can cost as much as $7K each. Per capita income Honduras is $2.3 K.

A rough number for the cost of moving this caravan becomes trivial with this estimate.  Given I've heard estimates of 4000 in the crowd, that says it's a $28 Million dollar effort to rush the US border.

At the American Thinker, Daniel John Sobieski writes the funding comes from the Honduran government and Non-Governmental Organizations funded by George Soros.

It is doubtful that such sums came from the kiddies' college funds.  Evidence of Soros funding of an earlier "spontaneous" migration have been found among the tentacles of support that flow from his Open Society group coffers

The article linked, though, is from last May, and mentions the groups I talked about back then.   The organization taking the lead is “Pueblo Sin Fronteras”.  The name translates as "people without borders", but a more poetic translation might be Open Society, the name of one of Soros' pet organizations.  "A World Without Borders".

“The caravan is organized by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, but the effort is supported by the coalition CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, which includes Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLIN), the American Immigration Council (AIC), the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services (RICELS) and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) – thus the acronym CARA,” WND reported. “At least three of the four groups are funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.”

It looks like this story is a duplicate of the last "caravan of central American refugees" story from last spring: much more "AstroTurf" than "grass roots".  By the way: did you happen to notice that Judicial Watch says there's 3.5 million more registered voters than living adults in the US?  Funny, that.

Thar's Gold in Them Thar Hills That Thar Poop

San Francisco has a poop problem.  I know everyone has heard that.  The city gets an average of 65 complaints every day about poop in the streets: 14,597 calls placed to 311 between January 1 and August 13, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, making one of the most expensive cities in the US among the worst in the world for cleanliness and hygiene.  That's not even counting the discarded needles.  According to Business Insider, the city plans to respond with what's being called 'the Poop Patrol'.

Starting next month, a team of five employees from the Department of Public Works will take to the streets of San Francisco's grittiest neighborhood, the Tenderloin, in a vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner. They will ride around the alleys to clean piles of poop before citizens have a chance to complain about them, the Chronicle reported.

ZeroHedge reports that the poop patrol will be fairly lucrative work: the city has allocated over $100 Million to fix things. 

After quoting Mayor Breed, who acknowledges, “We’re spending a lot of money to address this problem,” the following San Francisco Public Works budget items are presented:

• A $72.5 million-a-year street cleaning budget
• $12 million a year on what essentially have become housekeeping services for homeless encampments
• $2.8 million for a Hot Spots crew to wash down the camps and remove any biohazards
• $2.3 million for street steam cleaners
• $3.1 million for the Pit Stop portable toilets
• $364,000 for a four-member needle team
• An additional $700,000 set aside for a 10-member, needle cleanup squad, complete with it’s own minivan

And crucially, there's now "the new $830,977-a-year Poop Patrol to actively hunt down and clean up human waste."

The SF Chronicle casually notes in parenthesis, "By the way, the poop patrolers earn $71,760 a year, which swells to $184,678 with mandated benefits."

What would they have to pay you to clean up poop all day?  $71,760 with full city benefits, probably including retirement, all the insurances (health care, dental, etc.) and ample holidays might sound pretty good.  Most people don't end up getting paid 2-1/2 times their pay in benefits.  I'm sure they're generous benefits.  If you have no particular skills, this might be the best pay you'll ever get.  In fact, even if you have a decent job, this might be the best pay you'd ever get. 

It begs the question of whether one can live on $71,670/year in San Fransicko.  A 2015 article on Investopedia makes me think it's possible.

A snapshot of a poop map, from KFI AM640.  Actually rather old data, 2015, so it's probably much worse now.

Like most of you, I have ideas about how to permanently solve this issue without spending $100 Million a year, but those ideas would get me accused of being a Hatey McHater just hating on those poor, innocent homeless people.  With worse hygiene habits than the slums of Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro.