The Democrats’ Road to Hell

Posted on December 29, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

The ruling political class in Washington D.C. is always making matters worse through what appear to be appropriate solutions for serious problems facing the country. Then when they don’t work out as advertised many years after they’ve been implemented, they tell us that they’ve got the solutions for the newer, more serious problems that to the unsuspecting and unknowing public seem as if they came out of nowhere, and who are clueless as to how they began in the first place.

Two good examples of the long reach of history and major problems originating with Washington are one, how a permanent underclass that exists today was created during the 60s by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the other, the Great Recession that began in 2008 when the country’s financial system melted down and in turn created the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression that began in 1929.

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the last great Democrats before the party became unmoored from any roots it had in traditional constitutional principles, sounded the alarm as Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration that the new welfare state was creating an abundance of unintended consequences that were destructive to blacks, the primary demographic whom it was supposed to help. He came out with his “controversial” Moynihan Report in 1965 officially titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” that described those destructive consequences and how they started, the most significant one being the breakdown of the black family because of the perverse incentives created by welfare that was actually making poverty worse and creating a permanent underclass.

The origins of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 can be traced back to Jimmy Carter’s administration (another well-intentioned but misguided Democrat president) with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Like Johnson’s welfare programs, the CRA was supposed to benefit primarily low-income blacks, it turned out to be the big bang event that led to wickedly destructive financial consequences for everyone many decades later. The original purpose of the CRA was to loosen lending standards by banks so that more blacks could participate in the American Dream by being able to buy a house and to overcome what at the time was called “redlining,” an allegedly discriminatory practice by banks making it difficult for blacks to buy a home in non-urban neighborhoods.

Fast-forward to 1999, the last year Bill Clinton was in office as president, when on a bipartisan basis you had the wall between commercial and investment banking torn down with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This allowed all the high-powered investment banks to bundle and securitize all of the mortgage loans from across the country into asset-back securities called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). With the low interest rates down to almost zero following 9/11 by the Bush Administration, the housing market took off like a rocket for the next six years helped along with a great deal more loosening and degradation of mortgage loan standards by banks as required by Congress that began in 1977 with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act.

Unfortunately, a trillion-dollar market for specialized investments turned out to be a house of cards built on sand constructed out of the housing boom’s easy-to-get home mortgages. Many were extremely risky loans (called subprime mortgages) and were doomed to foreclosure. And all the new CDOs with exotic names such as synthetic CDO, Mortgage-backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps crashed within weeks, bringing down the world economy with them.

The moral of these two stories is that government should stay out of the social engineering business, as history has proven time and time again that it has a terrible track record and usually makes matters worse either in the short term or the long term or both. The rhetoric rarely matches up with the intended reality of social policy objectives and instead policy prescriptions most often end up being weaponized to bludgeon the Republicans for being cruel and heartless for not always going along with the Democrats.

Government assistance has morphed from safety net to entitlement where there is no accountability for the failures of the ruling political class that perpetually creates problems, as well as government incentives to “right social wrongs” that do the same by distorting the marketplace in ways that are not good for anyone.

So as the sun always comes up in the morning, the ruling political class will always present itself as the savior to all those unknowingly and adversely affected by problems it created in the first place. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, but in America, that’s okay with many, since the perpetrators will always be rewarded with re-election again and again in an endless and hellish vicious cycle.

Tim Jones, American Thinker

John Roberts: A Sickening Disgrace

Posted on December 27, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

According to some reports, Chief Justice John Roberts won’t consider the evidence of election fraud because he fears there will be more riots. Now think about this a moment. Imagine if the founders of America’s republic had said, “We can’t declare independence from the British monarchy. We can’t uphold the rights of man. It might cause riots.” Earth to cowardly RINO John Roberts: We are already at war. The country is deeply divided, more so than at any time since the (first) Civil War.

Sadly, we can’t do anything about that. What we CAN still do is uphold the Constitution. The Constitution called for an honest election. If riots result from your choice (and obligation) to look into the evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, then that’s on the rioters — not on the victims of the fraud. We have something called police. We have something called a military. Those individuals exist to uphold rights, in a free country. If rioters burn down private property and threaten the lives of innocent people, they should be arrested and prosecuted. YOU DON’T REFUSE TO TAKE A CASE BECAUSE YOU’RE AFRAID CRIMINALS WILL ACT LIKE CRIMINALS, OR TYRANTS WILL ACT LIKE TYRANTS.

John Roberts, you are a sickening disgrace. If you had done your job and led the way, the three disappointing, wimpy, possibly blackmailed or threatened Trump appointees might have followed. We’ll never know. So now everything appears to hinge on January 6, and Vice President Pence’s willingness and ability to refuse to accept the Biden electors in states where evidence of electoral fraud is overwhelming. If this doesn’t happen, our republic is going down. From there, believe me: It will be every man for himself.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The voter fraud cover-up has exposed powers, principalities, and their multitudes of minions

Posted on December 23, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

If you’re like me, you thought The Swamp, the Deep State, and the forces of evil were tremendous. But this election has shown me that my understanding of the depth of the adversary was a huge underestimate.

In retrospect, the writing has been on the wall for a while. We’ve seen Cultural Marxism rising inexplicably for decades. We’ve witnessed betrayals from our so-called allies on the political right as they waffle back and forth from being RINOs and constitutional conservatives. We’ve seen mainstream media and Big Tech suppress the truth and promote lies. But as this election fraud and subsequent cover-up have demonstrated, the forces arrayed against us are far greater than anything most of us could have imagined.

They’re everywhere. Fox News host Sean Hannity often said the Deep State infiltration of the FBI was made up of 20 or 30 leaders and middle managers but the majority of the Bureau was honorable. Former CIA station chief Dr. Michael Scheuer has often called Hannity out for this, claiming the Deep State was pervasive and encompassed the vast majority of the FBI, including complicit agents themselves. As it turns out, he was correct.

There aren’t just a few bad apples here or there. It’s everywhere. That’s the only way to explain how the blatant coup against the nation has, until this point, been successful. The evidence is tremendous, yet the cover-up is far greater. They did it. They are continuing to do it. And as Jake Tapper highlighted by Tweeting a story about a Trump supporter who allegedly committed voter fraud, they’re emboldened to the point that they’re rubbing our noses in the conspiracy.

This, perhaps more than anything else we’ve seen so far, tells us that we must trust solely in God to deliver us. If it is His will, nothing can stop it, not even the vast conspiracy arrayed against us. If it’s not His will to stop the steal, there’s nothing we can do to change it. This is why we must be prayerful if we are to have any hope of keeping our country from being destroyed.

And that’s why we must keep hope alive. There’s still time. If it turns out that President Trump is vindicated and reelected, then we can count this entire experience as a positive because it has allowed us for the first time to see a huge chunk of the powers and principalities working against us. Before the election, many on the right still embraced Fox News, Attorney General William Barr, and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Now we know only a handful of Republican lawmakers are working on our behalf. Everyone else is against us.

By no means am I trying to sound like a victim crying foul because the powers against us were greater than I knew. This is actually an exciting time and I love being the underdog as long as I know God is on our side. And as long as we’re faithful, He will be. Throughout the Bible, He has demonstrated a willingness to help the faithful through troubling times. We must have faith that He knows the end from the beginning and His plan will make us prevail even if that means failure today. I hate sounding fatalistic or insinuate I’m giving up. By no means! On the contrary, I’m still confident that the truth will prevail if God allows. That puts me at around 85%-90% sure President Trump will win. I have to acknowledge the possibility that the truth will continue to be suppressed, thus the 10%-15% skepticism.

In the latest episode of NOQ Report, I detail what I believe is a much bigger conspiracy against us than we ever knew before. I know some will say they’ve known all along. Good for you! I try to be rational and that often means being skeptical of conspiracies that seem impossible. Until this election, I would have thought it highly unlikely the powers and principalities were forming against us for this election. I would have been wrong.

We just need to keep fighting, keep praying, and believe that the truth will prevail. If God wills it, nothing can stop it.

J.D. Rucker, noqreport.com

Spending WAY Beyond a Drunken Sailor

Posted on December 22, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

“The Swamp Strikes Back: 6,000 Pages, 6 Hours…Members of Congress Bristle over Being Given 6 Hours to Read Massive Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill” [Breitbart News]

You cannot spend your way to prosperity. Government merely robs from the productive to reward the nonproductive. The absurdity? These government “rescue” packages spend trillions to rescue people from the government’s own lockdowns. It’s insane and unsustainable. We are on the hyperinflationary road to a Venezuelan economy.

A pitiful $600 “stimulus” check in exchange for losing your job or business to lockdowns? It’s called socialism. You fools asked for it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Lockdowns are the Great Unequalizer

Posted on December 22, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Democrats and their liberal economic advisers obsess about income inequality. Will someone please tell them that no act in modern times has widened the gap between the rich and the poor more than the lockdowns going on right now?

Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the leftist National Low Income Housing Coalition, said, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.”

Politico reported that minorities and the poor have “been more vulnerable to job and income losses from the ensuing economic crisis, in large part because Black and Latino workers are over-represented in the service industries wiped out by shutdowns.”

James Parrott, an economist at the New York City New School, said that what the United States is experiencing is “the most lopsided economic event imaginable.”

The National Restaurant Association said that 40 to 50 percent of restaurants may go bankrupt in the months ahead if their stores don’t reopen immediately. Two of the U.S.’s most iconic restaurants, the 21 Club in Manhattan and the Cliff House in San Francisco, announced they had closed their doors permanently after nearly 100 years of business. As they die, so do hundreds of jobs in these cities. The workers out of work aren’t rich. Overall, 15 million middle-income people work for bars and restaurants.

Even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and arguably the planet’s richest man, complained that the lockdowns exacerbate inequality. With tens of billions of dollars of added profits, Amazon has been the world’s biggest beneficiary from locking down brick-and-mortar stores.

For once, liberals are spot on.

Lockdowns are crushing the little guy. Even so, it is the Democrats who are pushing this anti-freedom agenda. Here are the 10 states listed by The New York Times with the strictest lockdown orders: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Washington. What do they have in common? Democratic governors.

Liberals love to talk about following the science, but all evidence of the last nine months points to the scientific conclusion that lockdowns do not work to reduce deaths. Contact-tracing studies show that about half of those infected with the coronavirus got it despite staying at home. Only 2 percent of the transmission comes from restaurants, and almost none comes from outdoor dining, which is now idiotically prohibited in California.

The states that have not locked down their economy have lower death rates than New York and New Jersey. The unemployment rate for service workers in these states has skyrocketed to as high as 10%. In contrast, the red states, such as Utah and Florida, that are still open for business have unemployment rates for service workers as low as 4 percent.

Yet lockdowns are supported by politicians, university professors, journalists, technology executives, government employees, preachers, teacher unions and wealthy suburbanites. Their incomes are not in jeopardy. They won’t wait in lines for a meal. Would teachers support school closures if they weren’t getting a paycheck? How many people get tenure like six-figure salaried university professors who have been inoculated from the lockdowns they cheered on?

I don’t see Yentel or many other “low-income advocates” protesting the lockdowns; do you? They think a government stimulus program of $1 trillion will solve the problems of the poor and the unemployed. Handouts are no substitutes for jobs and paychecks. Millions will fall through the cracks in any case.

There is an old joke about a boy who kills his parents and then throws himself on the courts’ mercy because he is an orphan. The modern-day version of that story is liberals who have helped burn down the house and then piously complain about rising homelessness.

Arthur Laffer, Walter Williams, Milton Friedman and so many other great economists have always warned us: The poor and minorities are the first victims of anti-growth and boneheaded public policies. Tragically, we are once again learning that lesson.

So, why is the left all in for lockdown policies? These policies are doing just the opposite of what they preach: “rewarding wealth, not work.” Perhaps the answer is that the left cares a lot more about power than the poor.

Stephen Moore, American Thinker

The Biggest Political Blunder in American History

Posted on December 22, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

If courts and state legislatures award Joe Biden the presidency, the anti-Trump cabal, driven by a four-year single-minded obsession to defeat President Trump, will have committed the greatest political blunder in American history — the unabashed and overt theft of the 2020 presidential election.

This myopic and oblivious group so misunderstood the depth and breadth of support for Donald Trump that their blatant manipulation of the election would fall monumentally short of the planned for and anticipated landslide defeat of the incumbent. A landslide they needed in order to dominate the political arena for the foreseeable future and avoid any backlash from the electorate for their duplicity.

Thus, this cabal, which consists of the Democrat party establishment, Tech and Wall Street billionaires, the mainstream media and left-wing elitists, will find itself in a quagmire of being unable to govern. The Democrat party’s dominant and radicalized left-wing base will revolt over failed promises and expectations while the extent of the fraud will inevitably be fully exposed, resulting in nearly half of the citizenry viewing the government as illegitimate.

The unleashing of Covid-19 on the world by the Chinese Communists opened the door for massive voter fraud, primarily via mail-in ballots, to be introduced into traditional battleground states. Operating on the four-year premise that the destruction of President Trump justifies any means, the Democrat party establishment extra-constitutionally imposed changes to election laws in a number of states.

At the same time their cadre of co-conspirators were also mobilized. The social media oligarchs and the mainstream media controlled and blatantly censored the flow of information. The self-styled progressive billionaires, in violation of campaign laws, poured untold millions into so-called get out the vote campaigns. And the left-wing elites mobilized their army of foot soldiers to intimidate state and local politicians as well as state and federal judges in addition to being frontline participants in various statewide voter frauds.

These conspirators smugly believed that they had successfully set up a scenario wherein Donald Trump would be defeated in such a massive landslide that a vast majority of the citizenry would never question the results. Further, Donald Trump would be so marginalized that his future as the leader of a growing political movement would be rendered moot as he slunk, tail between his legs, back to Mar-A-Lago. Thus leaving the political playing field in the hands of the established ruling class in near perpetuity.

Instead the worst-case scenario played out. The election came down to four battleground states, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania with a total margin for Joe Biden of 120,000 out of 18,600,000 legally or illegally cast votes or 0.6%. The question of fraud, despite the cowardice of the federal and state judiciaries, cannot be swept under the rug particularly as so many illegalities have already been exposed.

Further, nearly half of all likely voters (75% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats) believe there was sufficient fraud in the election to ensure Biden won. Despite the best efforts of both social and mainstream media as well as the Democrat party hierarchy, that perception will never dramatically change, as in a recent poll just 56% of Americans say Biden is their president. Once in office, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would be viewed by a significant plurality of Americans as transparent frauds and imposters thanks to an unabashedly fraudulent election. A citizenry already consumed with contempt for the ruling class due to their ham-handed police-state tactics in dealing with the Chinese Coronavirus is now waking up to their duplicity and megalomania.

Without the modicum of a mandate and open hostility towards a Biden/Harris Administration, there is very little the ruling class can do to enact their agenda with the specter of revenge in the 2022 mid-terms hanging over their heads. However, there is a more pressing issue that will impact the nation. The left-wing base of the Democrat party can rightfully claim that it was their grassroots efforts that pushed the Biden/Harris ticket over the top. Had there been the landslide all had anticipated and planned for, then the left would have had no choice but to be satisfied with the crumbs from the executive table as their role in the election fraud would be downplayed.

But there will be no crumbs from the table, as many of the grandiose plans of the ruling class will have to be shelved. This will not sit well with the rank-and-file left-wing radicals as they will realize they were mere pawns in the lawless seizure of power by their nemeses. The billionaire class, the corporatists and the ruling elites and their collective self-interest runs counter to Marxist/socialist ideology of the left. None of the promises made during the campaign season will be kept as these doctrinaire socialists and their leaders will be shunted to the side while their erstwhile allies focus on maintaining their stranglehold on the levers of power in the face of an aroused and determined opposition led by Donald Trump.

In the spring and summer of 2020, the ruling class, in a marriage of convenience, tacitly allied themselves with another anti-Trump faction, the left’s uncontrollable militant militias, Antifa and Black Lives Matter. By their collective silence and capitulation in the face of ongoing riots, violence, intimidation and looting, they conveyed to these self-styled revolutionaries that they are spineless and easily intimidated. When the radical left is ignored and marginalized by a Biden/Harris Administration and the frustration level reaches a boiling point, then these militants will again take to the streets in an even more violent manner.

The bitter harvest of massive election fraud will be a government beset with an inability to govern, as it will have no good will with the bulk of the American people and a political base it cannot placate. The perpetrators of this fraud are predestined to fail as well as hasten the ultimate demise of the Democrat Party. The only issue outstanding is whether this nation will descend into chaos and bitterness as a result.

Steve McCann, American Thinker

In Our Hearts We Know Trump Won

Posted on December 20, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Now that we know that the Supreme Court includes seven weak lily-livered cowards, we can’t expect it to recognize the full impact of the Deep State machinations. To many Americans, what is happening today smacks of high treason with a coup in place to remove a sitting president. They regard the definition of treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but it is way more complicated than that. At the time of the founding of our nation and the drafting of the Constitution, we were at war with England and there was no doubt exactly who our enemy was. But the United States has only declared war five times, the last being in WWII.

In my last column, I quoted an interview in the Wall Street Journal with a Viet Cong colonel who admitted that people like Jane Fonda gave the Cong the confidence to keep fighting: “We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.”

So why wasn’t Fonda tried for treason for giving aid and comfort to our enemy? Since we have never declared war on Vietnam, Iraq, Iran or China, it would be much more difficult to charge her than it was for convicting Iva Toguri D’Aquino aka Toyko Rose who was pardoned by President Ford. In addition, the Constitution requires at least two witnesses or a confession to proceed.

Right now, however, it is quite clear that we are battling a most cunning and malicious enemy — the Deep State. Our freedoms given to us in the Constitution have been targeted by an enemy within. Marcus Tullius Cicero said it best:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.”

The Deep State has many accomplices against the United States in the mainstream media, and the social media organizations that censor truth and spew out lies to a public too gullible to recognize it’s been had.

Donald Trump was never fooled and in the 2016 campaign, he vowed to clean out the swamp. What no one expected was the level of extreme and unwarranted hatred that has followed him ever since he came down that escalator to announce his entry to the presidency race. The Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) has infected Hollywood celebrities so badly that former favorites have been reduced to blithering, noxious, foul-mouthed spewers who seem unconcerned that they have lost a very wide audience.

Most of Trump supporters, myself included, did not have him as our first choice when the primaries began. We all had our favorites. Mine was former Texas governor, Rick Perry. Most of us, however, were definitely against Hillary Clinton and the idea of Bill Clinton ever being in the Oval office again. Clinton was the first president I’ve ever regarded as treasonous. It was very clever of the Democrats to frame his impeachment as due to an improper sexual incident rather than one of high treason.

According to David Horowitz of Front Page Magazine, as president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China. His administration took in millions from the military and intelligence services of at least one hostile foreign power. All of this was done in exchange for illegal campaign contributions from a massive totalitarian country determined to eclipse the U.S. as a world superpower. Don’t take my word for it. Google the word China Gate 1996 or read about Johnny Chung and his many visits to the White House. “One of the key technological breaks China received, without having to spy to get it, was the deliverance of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons,” writes Horowitz.

What about our global warming expert V.P. Al Gore who oversaw the Clinton amnesty program, Citizen USA which naturalized 986,000 immigrants bypassing regular security checks? Consequently about 50,000 were later found to have criminal records but they were naturalized just in time to vote for the Clinton/Gore 1996 reelection. Didn’t matter since the DOJ was headed by Democrat Janet Reno.

So what? Now Clinton is an elder statesman befriended by the Bush family and his wife Hillary Rodham, we find, is just as crooked and venal as he is. Ho Hum.

The Trump supporters or the Deplorables as we are called, love our president for what he has achieved in the last four years and we don’t give a whit for what he was before. What we do know is that everything he has done has been for all Americans and to save our great nation from the enemy within. What we all believe is that Trump won reelection in a landslide. This is the only fact that makes sense. Compare the millions that attended all his rallies to the empty parking lot Biden events that were held when he infrequently left his basement. What happened on November 3^rd, Election Day was that the counting stopped and the Deep State minions had to switch to Plan B. Why? The original theft was supposed to be confined to the Dominion computer program switching Trump votes to Biden but the algorithm was set to handle fewer votes than the Trump landslide. Plan B depended on the phony mail in ballots that would be counted as valid because Democrat election officials had unconstitutionally changed the rules to allow massive voter fraud. We know this because there are videos, hundreds of signed affidavits by witnesses, many patriotic whistleblowers and yet the Never Trumpers, Rinos, the SCOTUS and the lamestream media are “the none so blind, they will not see.”

I pray daily for our president to prevail but I now call in the big guy to fight for us.

Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Deep State
May God rebuke them all, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all his evil minions
who prowl about our nation
seeking the ruin of America.
Amen.

Alicia Colon, American Thinker