Today’s political left is hard at work changing many things

August 2, 2022

One thing Joe Biden has done consistently is to support changing things. He immediately changed the U.S. energy status as an energy independent nation and a net exporter of energy achieved under Donald Trump, by restricting the nation’s ability to maintain that status.

And, during the Biden rule, definitions of well-known things have changed. A woman is a female of the species, with certain distinct qualities different from a male/man. Biden’s pick for Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ketanji Jackson Brown — a woman, by traditional standards — admitted in a Senate hearing that she was unable to define what a woman is. Today, many argue that the terms “woman” and “mother” are bad, and want to replace them with “birthing person.”

The recent porousness of the southern border allows tens of thousands of illegal aliens to enter the country each month. But the Biden administration has changed the definition of a “secure border” to include this travesty. The Border “Czar” — Vice President Kamala Harris — has done nothing to secure the border, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, even said recently that the southern border is “not open” and is “secure.”

And just recently, when the second successive quarter of negative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was announced, qualifying the U.S. as being in a recession — according to the long-standing measure used to determine what constitutes a “recession” — the Biden administration changed the definition of what constitutes a recession.

Yes, there are some positive economic factors, like a decent unemployment rate, and the recent negative GDP rate was not as low as the first one. But the high inflation rate and other factors show the overall economic picture as obviously negative.

Along with changing definitions, Biden is working to change the country. The standards and processes that have served us so well for more than two hundred years are no longer good enough. Packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the Senate filibuster, getting rid of the Electoral College are some of the things on the list.

It’s not that these features don’t work anymore, it’s that they are obstacles to the radical left agenda.

Biden rattled off a few positive economic figures recently, ending by saying, “That doesn’t sound like a recession to me,” just before making a hasty exit from the press. But let’s look at the numbers.

The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is “the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population […] the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work.”

The LFPR in January of 2017 was 62.8% (160,320,000 Americans) when Donald Trump took office. It rose to 63.4% (162,007,000 people) by Feb. 2018, meaning there were a good many more people working or looking for a job than at the beginning of Trump’s term. And then the pandemic hit.

The LFPR dropped to a low of 60.2% (160,074,000 people) in April of 2020, but rose to 61.4% (161,200,000 people) in Jan. 2021, a gain of 1.2% in 8 months, reflecting the re-entering of hundreds of thousands to the labor force.

It now stands at 62.2% as of June 2022. In the 17 months that Joe Biden has been President, the LFPR has risen 0.8%, representing a fraction of those who lost jobs or stopped working during the pandemic re-entering the labor force.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the Unemployment Rate like this: “Perhaps the most widely known labor market indicator, this statistic reflects the number of unemployed people as a percentage of the labor force.”

The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January of 2017 when Donald Trump took office. In Feb 2020, when the effects of the pandemic hit, the unemployment rate was 3.5%.

It is now. 3.6% as of June 2022. While this is a good unemployment rate, it is not as good as it was before the pandemic.

After the 17 months Biden has been in office, as of the end of June, there are fewer people in the labor force today than there were when Trump took office, and when the pandemic began.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells us that right now, the latest data shows that we have over 11 million job openings in the U.S., but only 6 million unemployed workers looking for work. 

The most serious aspects of the pandemic are virtually over, and there are nearly twice as many unfilled jobs as there are people looking for work. The labor force is 3.2 million people smaller than before the pandemic. The difference is those who were working and have either retired, or no longer need to work due to government subsidy payments in the name of helping people get through the pandemic.

These numbers support the idea that the country is in a recession. There’s not enough lipstick to put on the recession pig to hide reality.

Will the far-left stop at nothing to impose its will on the U.S.?

July 19, 2022

We all heard, read and saw news items on the left’s riots in major cities such as Portland; Seattle; New York City; Chicago; Atlanta; Minneapolis; Richmond; Miami; Kenosha; and the District of Columbia during the summer of 2020. 

Government buildings and private property were damaged and burned, businesses were looted and vandalized. Damages reported totaled in the billions of dollars.

The U.S. edition of The Guardian reported that “At least 11 Americans have been killed while participating in political demonstrations this year and another 14 have died in other incidents linked to political unrest, according to new data from a non-profit monitoring political unrest in the United States.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and his wife were threatened by a mob in Washington, DC following a visit to the White House in August, 2020, and fortunately were protected from injury by DC police.

Yet, little was done to the organizers and participants of these riots, and much of the reporting here at home was, shall we say, carefully worded. To wit: With a fire raging in a building in the background, a TV reporter termed the event “mostly peaceful,” and that was the usual coverage by the highly liberal media outlets, and was also the attitude of other liberals. Indeed, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris even bailed out rioters who were arrested.

Then this year, a draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion dealing with the Roe v. Wade issue, written by Justice Samuel Alito, was leaked to Politico by someone working in the Court, and published last May. 

Taking from the draft opinion indicating that the Court would overturn Roe, the left again rose up. Protests were organized at the homes of some of the constitutional conservatives on the Court. While these protests were noisy and otherwise unpleasant, unlike the “mostly peaceful riots,” they were mostly peaceful.

However, just like the criminal behavior in the cities in 2020, protesting at the home of Supreme Court Justices is against federal law. Section 1507 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code clearly states that it is unlawful to protest near a ‘residence occupied or used by [a] judge, juror, witness, or court officer’ with the intent of influencing ‘the discharge of his duty,’ adding that anyone who ‘uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.’”

Yet, while the justices were being harassed and intimidated, federal law enforcement, the Department of Justice and the head of all of that, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, sat on their hands and did nothing. To selectively enforce federal law is not what Garland is supposed to do.

But, it gets worse. Much worse.

An armed California man was arrested in the early morning hours on June 8th outside the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He was carrying a gun, ammunition, a knife, pepper spray, a screwdriver, zip ties, and other gear when he was arrested, not by federal agents protecting Kavanaugh, but by Montgomery County Police Department officers.

Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, California, told police that he was going to kill Kavanaugh because he was upset about the justice’s positions on Roe v. Wade and the Second Amendment.

Fortunately, while the AG and federal law enforcement were sitting on their hands, the local authorities were doing their job. 

More recently, a group of protesters gathered outside an upscale DC restaurant, harassing diners, including Justice Kavanaugh, forcing him and his wife to leave via the back door.

In addition to the Attorney General, other federal officials have done nothing to stop this illegal behavior and protect the justices from intimidation and potential harm.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “I don’t have an official U.S. government position on where people protest.” She appeared unaware that the U.S. government has a law covering this.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, threatened Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, saying they will “pay the price” for their decisions.

After the Roe decision, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, in an email sent out to people, encouraged them to “RISE UP” against the “far-right extremists” of the Supreme Court.

And now there is this. Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, wrote the following on his website: “We recently discussed the Georgetown law professor who defended ‘more aggressive’ protests targeting the Supreme Court justices, but Harvard clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo wants to guarantee that ‘The 6 justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again.’ Accordingly, Caraballo is calling for people to accost them every time they are in public.’” Apparently, she does not understand how the Court works.

Those on the left, whether they be elected or appointed federal officials, federal employees, biased journalists, or people trained in the law, and responsible for properly teaching students about the law, do not care about the law, or right and wrong. All they care about is getting their way, whatever methods are required to accomplish their goal.

What has happened to the concept of integrity and honor in one’s work?