Legislation Without Representation (at the Treehouse)

art credit: britannica.com

Many people I know think everything in America today is just hunky-dory; they just shake their heads if I bring up any of the critical issues involved in this election (see e.g., The Flight 93 Election blog here). Many people I know who plan to vote for Hillary don’t see anything wrong with anything she does, even when her actions clearly violate the law. Hard to know where to go sometimes. 

It’s especially discouraging to have to try to counter the corrupt mainstream media narratives, day in day out, especially on television. Media bias, media malpractice, propaganda – whatever you call it, the corrupt media is carrying water for the corrupt political class. 

Sundance/Conservative Treehouse is one of my daily stops online. His essay today on “Legislation Without Representation” is a sobering sanity check. Here’s a short extract:

There are many who use a frame of reference about ‘saving a constitutional republic‘; while I do not mean to be dismissive of this benevolent sensibility — in case you have not been paying attention, we’ve long since passed the threshold of that possibility.

The architecture of our own U.S. government is now operating independent of the electorate (Obamacare, Omnibus, etc.).  Congress is consistently passing legislation without appropriate representation (PR [Puerto Rico] Bailout, Omnibus, Corker/Cardin [link added] amendment, Fast-Track Trade Authorization, etc.), and the various operational constructs, divisions, and agencies within the DC UniParty are now fully weaponized against us (IRS targeting, FBI Comey/email non-finding, etc.).

Whether we like to admit it or not, just like the futuristic Skynet, our government has become self-aware, risk adverse and is intent on sustaining its UniParty agenda against any threat, risk or voice that might rise in opposition.

Read the whole thing here. It's not as pessimistic as you might think.

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The Great Internet Giveaway

image credit: salon.com

Internet management EXPIRED

Bad news. I might have thought it would be a banner headline, but if you scrolled down, Drudge linked to this Yahoo.com report:

The US government on Saturday ended its formal oversight role over the internet, handing over management of the online address system to a global non-profit entity.

The US Commerce Department announced that its contract had expired with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the internet's so-called "root zone."

That leaves ICANN as a self-regulating organization that will be operated by the internet's "stakeholders" -- engineers, academics, businesses, non-government and government groups.

The move is part of a decades-old plan by the US to "privatize" the internet, and backers have said it would help maintain its integrity around the world.

US and ICANN officials have said the contract had given Washington a symbolic role as overseer or the internet's "root zone" where new online domains and addresses are created.

But critics, including some US lawmakers, argued that this was a "giveaway" by Washington that could allow authoritarian regimes to seize control.

A last-ditch effort by critics to block the plan -- a lawsuit filed by four US states -- failed when a Texas federal judge refused to issue an injunction to stop the transition.

Read the rest here. No good can come of this.

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Obama's illegal Internet giveaway

photo credit: wnd.com

State AGs sue to stop Obama's internet transition

  

Politico’s Tony Romm reports:

Four Republican state Attorneys General [Mike DeWine is not one of them] are suing to stop the Obama administration from transferring oversight of the internet to an international body, arguing the transition would violate the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit — filed Wednesday in a Texas federal court — threatens to throw up a new roadblock to one of the White House’s top tech priorities, just days before the scheduled Oct. 1 transfer of the internet’s address system is set to take place.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general for Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas contend that the transition, lacking congressional approval, amounts to an illegal giveaway of U.S. government property. They also express fear that the proposed new steward of the system, a nonprofit known as ICANN, would be so unchecked that it could “effectively enable or prohibit speech on the Internet.”

The four states further contend that ICANN could revoke the U.S. government’s exclusive use of .gov and .mil, the domains used by states, federal agencies and the U.S. military for their websites. And the four attorneys general argue that ICANN’s “current practices often foster a lack of transparency that, in turn, allows illegal activity to occur.”

“Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement. “The president does not have the authority to simply give away America’s pioneering role in ensuring that the internet remains a place where free expression can flourish.”

Read the rest here. Ohio AG Mike DeWine’s website is here. 

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Debate moderator

From one of the Tea Party for Trump sites:

The Trump Pledge

10 hrs · 

What are the odds that the only person in America that has never heard of the Clinton Foundation or the Benghazi scandal is Lester Holt? 

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Twilight Zone 2016

This one was forwarded from someone who saw it on FB:

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." 

A new civil rights agenda

photo credit: therightplanet.com

A couple of days ago, I posted a chart demonstrating the radical agenda of Black Lives Matter as it relates to race riots in Charlotte and elsewhere. It’s an important subject in this election season, especially since candidate Donald J. Trump is going where few GOP candidates have gone: into the inner cities to explore a “new civil rights agenda” with black leaders such as Pastor Darrell Scott and Sheriff David Clarke.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and one of my favorite contributors to various blogsites, had an article yesterday at Town Hall entitled ‘Favors’ to Blacks. His comments are particularly on topic as to why a “new civil rights agenda” is in Trump’s platform. Here are some extracts:

Back in the 1960s, as large numbers of black students were entering a certain Ivy League university for the first time, someone asked a chemistry professor -- off the record -- what his response to them was. He said, "I give them all A's and B's. To hell with them."

Since many of those students were admitted with lower academic qualifications than other students, he knew that honest grades in a tough subject like chemistry could lead to lots of failing grades, and that in turn would lead to lots of time-wasting hassles -- not just from the students, but also from the administration.

He was not about to waste time that he wanted to invest in his professional work in chemistry and the advancement of his own career. He also knew that his "favor" to black students in grading was going to do them more harm than good in the long run, because they wouldn't know what they were supposed to know.

Such cynical calculations were seldom expressed in so many words. Nor are similar cynical calculations openly expressed today in politics. But many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks "favors" that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run.

One of these "favors" was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.

In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.

A big "favor" the Obama administration is offering blacks today is exemption from school behavior rules that have led to a rate of disciplining of black male students that is greater than the rate of disciplining of other categories of students.

. . .

But Washington politicians are on the case. It strengthens the political vision that blacks are besieged by racist enemies, from which Democrats are their only protection. They give black youngsters exemptions from behavioral standards, just as the Ivy League chemistry professor gave them exemption from academic standards.

In both cases, the consequence -- unspoken today -- is "to hell with them." Kids from homes where they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police.

This is ultimately not a racial thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental exemption from behavioral standards in Britain have led to remarkably similar results among lower-class whites there.

. . .

If a “new civil rights agenda” honestly confronts such issues and explores real solutions, I am all for it. Some of those real solutions will involve eliminating destructive government interference and shrinking the welfare state. Those are Tea Party values.

Read the entire article here.

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Hillary’s track record as Secretary of State

photo credit: businessinsider.com

Betsy McCaughey contributed a post-debate essay today to The American Spectator website. The article, “Failure at Foggy Bottom,” examines Hillary’s track record running the Dept. of State:

Hillary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president. Don’t believe it.

At the end of her taxpayer-funded audition on the world stage, she came home empty-handed, with no meaningful gains for the United States. Voters are too smart to be wowed when she rattles off names of Islamic terrorist splinter factions and third-world capitals.

Evidence shows she left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. If anything, her record at Foggy Bottom should disqualify her to be president.

. . .

This presidential race is a contest between a builder and a blabberer. The builder, Donald Trump, manages 185 major business ventures around the globe. Until 2009, Clinton had never run anything. Running the State Department was her chance to prove she could do it. She failed miserably.

Read the chapter and verse here.

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