Odds and Ends
One of my favorite congressmen, John Campbell, now an ex-congressman, looked at the current economic trends in his recent post. After looking at the pros and cons, his basic summary was “I see storm clouds on the horizon, but no rain in sight for this year.” It is worth a read. Note this is a change for him. Early last year, he predicted no downturn for 2024, but possibly one in 2025.
Typically, the Fed cut interest rates last year, but it does not want to cut them now. See Campbell’s post for the mixed effects of such a cut. Meanwhile, predictions of significant increases in inflation have not come to pass, the stock market is at record highs, and real wages are rising again for the first time since Trump’s last term. We even had the first monthly surplus since 2017. Trade deals are being signed, and much of the new investment is beginning to kick in. Consumer confidence has risen significantly. Things are looking promising at the moment. Still, I agree with Campbell about the storm clouds.
Much of the Left is a scam. It is a minority view that can project power far above its numbers. We saw that with USAID, which took billions in taxpayer dollars and used them to support Left-wing causes. Now we have another example. Following the Palisades fire, FireAid raised over $100 million to aid fire victims and fire prevention. None of it went to the victims of the fire. They gave it to left-wing groups, some as far away as Northern California. At least the group that engaged in voter registration among native americans gave the money back. Typically, this would be fraud, but it is California, so I am sure FireAid does not have to worry about that.
You can tell the Left is out of ideas when they try to recycle their problem to attack Trump. They ignored Biden’s mental decline until it was clear that he could not win. Yet, now, they try to claim that Trump’s cognitive decline is such that he should be removed and put in a retirement home. With Biden, they told us to ignore our own eyes; Biden was as sharp as a tack. With Trump, they tell us to ignore our own eyes; he really has declined.
Mamdami wants government-run grocery stores. Not surprisingly, it has been done in the past and does not work. Kansas City opened Sun Fresh, a city-run grocery store in 2018, sinking tens of millions of dollars into the effort over the years. Utopia had arrived. Yet, the place is a ghost town, with many empty shelves and lost $885,000 last year. Other grocery stores in the area turn a profit. The solution? It’s always the same: pour in more money, though it might close. Like most socialist endeavors, they sound wonderful on paper, but never actually work. This is because most have never run a business, and thus they don’t know what it takes. In short, they don’t know what they are doing.
I am reminded of George McGovern, who, when he lost in 1972, was the most far-left candidate the Democrats had run up to that time. Later in life, he opened a small hotel, which ultimately failed. When asked about it, he said he never realized how hard the government makes it to run a business. Perhaps he should have known that before he ran for President.
The evil that was the Biden border policy got even more absurd. We knew that Biden lost over 300,000 children, an unknown number into slavery and sex trafficking. We learned that at least some were given a hotline number to call if they had problems with their sponsors. Ok. But in congressional testimony last week, we learned that 65,000 of these calls went unanswered. They really did not care. They just wanted warm bodies to flood into the country. As one House Democrat put it, she needs more people in her district to help with redistricting.
The first rule of holes? Stop digging. This lesson is lost on the media and the Democrats. Sure, they are having some effect on their base. One pollster pointed out that less than half of Democrats knew about how Obama had ordered the intelligence to be changed to fit the Russia hoax. Meanwhile, most independents and virtually all Republicans were aware of the story.
The media is doing its best to lie and divert attention, but there is only so much they can do. They are trying to claim that Trump is himself just trying to divert attention away from the Epstein story. The Epstein story is probably one of the first big screw up by the administration. However, most Republicans don’t think Trump is trying to protect himself. Most believe that if the Epstein records contained information against Trump, it would have been leaked long ago. After all, what didn’t they do to get Trump? So why would they have held this back?
In any event, it certainly had not affected Trump’s support among Republicans, which, according to CBS, went from 88% positive to 90% following this scandal. It is not that the scandal caused this; instead, there has been a lot of other good news that outweighed any adverse effects from the mishandling of the Epstein story.
Thus, the narrative pushed in the media that Trump is losing support because of the fallout of the Epstein story, and this is the reason for their claims about Obama’s involvement in creating the Russia hoax, is like most of what they report about Trump: nonsense.
The same can be said about their attempt to recast the Russia hoax into simply a claim that Russia tried to interfere in the election. If that had been the story, it would have been like reporting that it gets dark at night. Of course, they tried to interfere, as do all of our enemies in every election. The Russia hoax had three central claims: Putin wanted Trump to win; Their interference had an impact on the election; and Trump colluded with the Russians to win.
Thus, the Russia hoax was the basis for the claim that Trump’s presidency was illegitimate and that he was Russia’s puppet, which was absurd, as he was harder on Russia than either Obama or Biden. Fox has had a lot of fun playing clips of Democrats and Media pundits now claiming they never said any of this, followed by them playing some of the vast number of clips from 2016 forward of them saying exactly that. Is it any wonder that the media and the Democrats are at historic lows in polls?
The Intelligence assessments in the December 6th meeting did not support the three core claims of the Russia hoax. Obama ordered them changed, which they were, over intelligence analysts’ objections. The new assessment became the basis for trying to remove Trump from office.
Nor is this the complete picture. I am confident that many of the same people who were part of the soft coup attempt on Trump continued their efforts into the 2020 election and beyond. The labeling of Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” by “51 intelligence officers” is a case in point. This claim has since been refuted, but it served its purpose by giving cover to Biden during a debate and allowing him to attack Trump as a puppet of Russia. As Harry Reid said about why he lied about Romney, “He lost, didn’t he?”
The problem the Democrats are now having is that their defenders in the media have lost their credibility, and thus much of their ability to defend them. They do not know what to do in the new environment, except make silly TikTok videos and swear a lot. After all, nothing gets your point across like a bleep in the audio track.
Here is the next video in our Capitalism vs Socialism series.
A Few Things.
Former Obama aide Rahm Emanuel once said, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste. A crisis is an opportunity to do things you have always wanted.’ Case in point, California. Months after the fires, the reality on the ground is that residents whose lives were devastated by the fire are now drowning in a sea of red tape. Despite all the “promises” to cut the red tape and fast-track the rebuilding, those trying to rebuild face roadblocks from their government. They get some permits, only to be blocked by vague requirements for others.
What is the Democratic plan? It seems to be stall, stall, stall, until the residents give up in frustration. Then the government can take their land for its purposes. They want to see the Palisades transformed into their vision of utopia, combining wilderness areas, parks, and low-income housing. Of course, that is as likely as California finishing its high-speed rail project, which it has spent billions on for years and has yet to lay any track. I don’t think it will ever be built.
Another California issue: Their green policies are working. The gas tax just went up again in the state that already had the highest gas prices in the country. Now, two refineries will be closing by the end of the year. One report said gas prices could spike to over $8.00/gallon. As a norm, I don’t expect that, but reducing supply will cause prices to increase, and not just in California. California will still get its gas and will pay higher prices for it. However, their gas must come from somewhere; thus, it will affect everyone as the supply problem ripples across the country. Thank you, California.
One thing about Trump is that he seems to get things done that no one else ever has. For Decades, the Right has complained about PBS and NPR for their waste and their liberal bias. I have been in several radio studios and one TV studio. They were very functional, but barebones affairs, different from the publicly funded PBS and NPR, which have nicer studios. Why should the government fund their competition? Because of the bias, I have not supported them since the 1980s. Their bias is clear to any who wishes to look, except their current CEO. Like most left-wing news sources, they claim to be unbiased. They don’t serve the people; they serve the Left. Nor are they needed in today’s world with a multitude of sources. Yet, despite all the promises, their budget could never be touched until now. And of course, Democrats are out there claiming the cuts to PBS and NPR will cost lives, people will die, and then wonder why people are not taking them seriously.
Here is another indication of TDS: On MSNBC, they had a story about the CEO and HR head caught by the kiss cam. “Because who gets to be a cheater in our society can feel maddeningly arbitrary. One man accused of cheating loses his job and perhaps his family. Another man becomes president of the United States. If anything, some of the president’s supporters celebrate his virility or excuse it as the predictable excesses of the rich and powerful.” Really? Must every story become a reason to rant against Trump?
Steven Colbert’s show was cancelled. Democrats say it is political. Others say this is just an indication that the era of late-night is over, given the decline in ratings. Another possibility is that Colbert had TDS and is just another example of go woke, go broke. Rather than being middle-of-the-road and making fun of both sides, Colbert was very one-sided, attacking not just Trump but half of the country. Thus, not surprisingly, his ratings went down.
Is this the end of late-night comedy? Perhaps, but note that, while Colbert’s rating went down in the last few years, Gutfeld has gone up and now dominates other late-night hosts, despite being in only a fraction of homes. Maybe late-night comedians should focus on being funny first rather than just attacking Trump and the Right.
Finally, to no one’s surprise on the Right, declassified documents showed what many of us suspected. We already knew that the Steele Dossier had originated from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Comey played a significant role using it to launch the Russiagate hoax, which claimed that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election. We also knew that part of this was the effort to take out Michael Flynn, and they discussed this in at least one meeting with Obama, and Biden suggested that they use the Logan Act. That we already knew.
Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents last week that showed that not only was Hillary involved, but that this was a concerted effort by Clinton, Obama, and his national security team following the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to undermine his presidency. Not surprisingly, this was ignored by ABC and NBC and only briefly mentioned by CBS in an interview with a Democrat asking if there could be charges. Other networks mentioned it briefly, and MSNBC’s primary focus was to downplay the story. “These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.” As with most other scandals, the more evidence there is, the more the media ignores it.
When Trump first claimed he was wiretapped, this was such an inconceivable idea that he was ridiculed for even suggesting it. It was too outlandish even to consider. Now we know that high-placed Democrats, including Hillary and Obama, actively conspired to undermine the results of an election and try to remove Trump. They lied, cheated, violated established norms and procedures, and even broke the law to try to have a soft coup against Trump. Is the media shocked? No, they fall into line and support Democrats; it’s what they do, and why very few trust them any longer, which is why Democrats are in such trouble.
How Low Can They Go?
A recent poll shows Democrats are at a low. “The poll, conducted between May and June by Unite the Country, a Democratic super PAC, showed voters perceived the Democratic Party as “out of touch,” “woke” and “weak.”
In an article in Axios, Democratic lawmakers say their constituents are unhappy. They don’t see non-violence tactics as working, and it is time for violence; there needs to be blood, and people need to be willing to be shot.
And this is after all the violent protests of the last few months. If the Axios story is true, things will only get worse. Holman recently said that this is going to lead to someone getting killed. Shortly after that, an assailant tried to kill an ICE officer, and the assailant was shot and killed. Unless they stop, more people will die.
What would you expect? Democratic leaders have been pushing inflated rhetoric for decades. There have already been several attempts at murdering officials, such as the shooting of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice, the attempted assassinations of a Supreme Court justice, and the two attempts on Trump.
What is different about Trump is that the inflated rhetoric didn’t work. Yet, rather than try something different, they doubled down. Since 2016, it has only gotten more hyperbolic. Now, Trump is Hitler, his supporters are fascists, the police are the Gestapo, pigs, and the KKK. They kidnap people off the streets, or just disappear them. They send people to concentration camps in order to ethically cleanse the country. They are destroying democracy. If what the Democrats said were true, why wouldn’t people resort to violence?
Attacks on ICE officers are up by over 800%. In the last week, there were two assassination attempts on ICE officers, the one mentioned above, and the other was a coordinated ambush by 12 people where a local police officer was shot in the neck. This group had the slogan “Fight Oligarchy.” Perhaps, you did not hear about that because some of the major “news outlets” did not deem it worthy to mention the attack.
One Democratic Congressman, Salud Carbajal, was given a business card by an ICE staffer. The Democratic Representative showed it to the protesters. The ICE official was later attacked by the protesters and had to go to the hospital. Meanwhile, other representatives and Leftist groups are giving lessons on how to fight back against ICE. But then, after all, how dare the administration try to enforce federal law, when Federal Law is supreme under the Constitution?
While Democrats loudly proclaim no one is above the law, such statements are not operative when it comes to them. They get to pick and choose the laws they like and determine when they apply, which, if true, would put them above the law by definition.
Democracy is based on persuasion. Issues are discussed to reach a consensus. Yet, it is very clear that the Left is not currently interested in persuasion. They use protests, not to change the hearts and minds of America, as the civil rights protestors did in the 1960s; they use them as an act of intimidation through the threat of violence.
There is the saying, The more things change, the more they remain the same. Both parties have gone through considerable changes. Yet, at their core, they have not changed. The Republican Party is the party of the individual and the Constitution. They are the party of individual rights that opposed slavery, preserved the Union, resisted Jim Crow, and fought for Civil Rights. They remain that today, and in fact, one thing Trump has done is return the party to Main Street and the working class.
The Democrats party is the party of groups. They fought to preserve slavery; they were the party of nullification and started the Civil War when an election went against them. When they lost the war, they still fought with the KKK and pushed Jim Crow. They resisted Republican efforts for Civil Rights until that became untenable in the early 1960s. Then they switched to pushing affirmative action to privilege certain groups over others, and identity politics. They complained when the Supreme Court said the best way to end discrimination was to stop discriminating.
Today, instead of nullification, they have sanctuary cities, but it is basically the same thing. They want to nullify federal immigration law. Instead of the KKK, they have Antifa. They complained with some justification about Trump not accepting the 2020 election. Yet, now you have leading democrats questioning Trump’s victory in 2024, and MSNBC is running stories about how Trump plans to steal the midterms next year.
They talk about threats to democracy, but fight the will of the people as expressed in elections. They manipulate language to get the poll results they want to justify their actions. For example, they refuse to use the legal term “illegal alien,” instead using migrant, or immigrant. Then they tout polls showing most people support immigration, for we are a country of immigrants. This is something I too support. But they ignore other recent polls showing that a majority support deporting all people here illegally.
Last time I wrote that there was a chance for a compromise. I think there still is, but it isn’t very likely. It would require the Democrats to put aside their hatred and work with Trump to seek one. They could protect the dreamers. They could probably protect some who have been here a while and are an integral part of their community. But they will not be able to protect all. Will they try to protect any? Probably not. They prefer their hatred.
Here is a key stat that reveals how disingenuous the Democrats are. They have told us they have only been concerned about the children for years. Yet under Biden, the government lost track of over 300,000 children, some of whom were trafficked into slave labor and sex work. They did not care. So far, the Trump administration has found about 10,000 of these children and is actively looking for the rest.
Do the Democrats want to help? Do they even care? Apparently not. When several children were found during the raid on the pot farm, instead of being upset over the violation of child labor laws, something the farm was known to have a problem with, Democrats were upset about the raid. For the Left, the problem was that the children were rescued.
Rather than get some of what they want, they are in the streets violently demanding that they get it all. All or nothing. They are getting closer to getting nothing.
The Changing Political Landscape
The One Big Beautiful Bill is now the law. The time for speculation and promises is over. Now it will either do what Republicans hope or what Democrats fear. Most likely some of both. There will be failures and successes, but the overall results should hopefully be clear. If it works, Republicans should do well in the mid-terms; if not, the Democrats will do well.
I am hopeful. After all, some of this we have done before. For example, one of the biggest complaints Democrats have with the bill is the “cuts” to Medicaid. These come from two main areas: removing illegal aliens and the work requirements for those who can work. The first has broad support. The second we did in the 1990s.
Clinton talked an excellent game as a moderate, and one of the things he ran on was welfare reform. Once in office, he did basically nothing about it, but still talked about it. When Republicans won the Congress in 1994, they began working on it and produced a bill just before the next election, a key component of which was work requirements. Clinton opposed the bill. Still, given the approaching election and that it was one of his “signature issues,” eventually he signed it, promising to fix it.
The bill was a significant success, and by the end of his term, Clinton was bragging about it as one of his significant accomplishments, and it remained so after he was gone. It is still mentioned occasionally when talking about Clinton’s term. The work requirements worked well until Obama gutted them. What is happening now is that they are being partially restored.
The process to get the bill passed was pretty much what I expected. A complicated process that came down to the last moment. With slim majorities in both the House and Senate, how could it be otherwise?
As I have said before, parties are not monoliths, but coalitions of various groups that compete and sometimes have contradictory interests. To work out a compromise that could ultimately pass took a lot of time and effort. This is why I believe that many Democrats were unwise, at best.
In the Senate, Republicans could and did lose only 3 votes. Granted, it is impossible to tell if the three who ultimately voted against the bill were a hard no, or just allowed to vote no because their vote was not ultimately needed, so it is unclear how much influence they had on the final bill.
That was not the case with the Democrats. They made a strategic decision early on that was a hard no. Had they made a different choice, this could have been a compromise bill, that passed with a comfortable margin. It would have been a significantly better bill. Sure, many Republicans would have voted no, and each Republican no vote would have had to have been replaced by more than 1 Democratic yes, to make it worth the effort. But think about what Democrats could have gotten.
As it was, even the extreme parts of the Republican party could demand things be put in the bill, and the only counterbalance would be conflicting demands from other Republicans. However, with the input of Democrats, some of those more extreme demands could have been ignored.
One thing that could have been done, and still could be, is real immigration reform. The border has been a problem for most of my life. Biden completely broke it and left a huge mess, and it is one of Trump’s best issues. But he has been in the past, and I believe still is, open to reform.
The broad outlines could include, for example, very tight controls on immigration and visas going forward. A guest worker program that allows people to come legally for a short time for things like seasonal farm work. (We used to have that in the early 1960s.) Everyone who came here after a specific date, say January 2021, has to leave. Those who came before that and have a serious criminal record (to be defined) also have to go. Dreamers get to stay, and local community boards could be set up to determine whether the rest get to stay. However, if someone is allowed to remain, they are the financial responsibility of that community. Of course, this would not be a problem for those who are productive members of society. No one who came here illegally, except dreamers, can get citizenship.
That is a broad outline. Democrats would have their opening offer. The result would not be acceptable to all Republicans, but I believe most. The hard part for the Republicans is that we have made similar compromises in the past, but have been burned by Democrats.
For example, in the 80s, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens in exchange for securing the border. Democrats got their amnesty, and we have all seen what happened with the border. Trump would have a fight among the Republican base to convince them he was not once again being taken to the cleaners. Democrats would have to give up more than normal because of their failure with past agreements.
Still, I believe there is a deal to be had. Maybe just a partial deal to move the ball forward. For example, legalizing the dreamers in exchange for better enforcement of VISAs. There is, or at least was, support for legalizing Dreamers among Republicans. Rubio had a bill that was very close (a few weeks) from getting the support needed to pass when Obama issued an Executive Order to legalize them, which blew up Rubio’s chances and thus killed the bill. Since the EO was clearly unconstitutional, and later ruled so, ending the bill was its main impact, and the Dreamers are still a problem.
Returning to the bill, think about what the Democrats could have asked for. For example, Alaska Senator Murkowski was a no vote until the last minute when she made a request for her state, got it, then voted yes. What could Democrats ask for? To put it in their terms, who could they protect? As it was, no one. They were too blinded by their hatred of Trump to even consider it. Those who aren’t, like Fetterman, are either too afraid of their party to break ranks or, more likely, too small in number to be worth the effort on the part of the Republicans.
Perhaps this is normal. For 40 years, Democrats had comfortable majorities and were in the dominant position for such negotiations. That began to change in the mid-90s when Republicans won back control. Still, their cultural legacy was as a minority party since the 1920s. Even now, Republicans are still learning how to be in the majority, and Democrats still struggle with minority status.
Democrats are also struggling with their identity and currently seem to be moving even farther left. They used to be the party of the working class. They opposed illegal immigration because they understood the impact on the working class, as illegals drove down wages and increased the strain on government services and schools. In one of the ironies of Biden, he had a bust of Cesar Chavez in the Oval Office. Still, Chavez was a vocal opponent of illegal immigration as it undermined his efforts to unionize farm workers in California.
While Democrats still rail against billionaires, they have become the party of billionaires, taking the side of Wall Street. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week, Wall Street always does well during good times, but it is Main Street’s turn to do well for the next four years. Thus, Democrats ultimately voted against no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security. Were these all significant tax breaks for billionaires? Democrats complain about how they are losing access to cheap labor and worry publicly about who will mow their lawns and buss their tables. Is losing access to cheap labor a significant middle-class concern?
Not only have democrats moved away from working people, they have moved to the Left in other ways as well. For example, according to CNN, in 2017, Democrats used to be Pro-Israel by 13%; now they are Pro-Palestinian by +43 percent. They nominated a socialist to be mayor of NYC. Patriotism has dropped to 34% among Democrats. Republicans were still patriotic under Biden, but Democrats link patriotism to their being in office. They also confuse the perfect with the good.
Many really believe their own rhetoric about Trump and his supporters, which is sad. A commentator who appears frequently on MSNBC called for the world to sanction the United States as a threat to peaceful people everywhere. He was upset with our ending Iran’s nuclear program. They are pretty clearly losing their minds, and so hardly in a position to compromise. It is looking like they will be in the political wilderness for quite some time.
It will be interesting to see if Musk’s new America Party catches hold. Since we do not have a parliamentary system, there is only room for two parties. The only way for Musk’s party to succeed is to effectively replace one of the existing parties. Most Republicans are generally happy with their party, and Democrats are generally unhappy, so you usually would expect Musk’s party to attract disaffected Democrats. Yet, Musk was recently the enemy, and his reason for starting the party was that the Republicans did not cut enough, which is not usually a Democratic position. Thus, I expect that not much will come of it.
I recently read The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray. I recommend it. First published in 2017, it is fascinating in that it could have just as easily been written about the United States under Biden, but then Biden’s first Presidential bid collapsed over plagiarism, so it was not surprising that his immigration policies mirrored Europe from a decade earlier.
Still, it shows that what is happening is not just one country’s policy but something much deeper on the Left. The main question is: What is Western culture, and is it worth preserving? The Left seems to be saying no to the question of preserving, with little or no thought about what might replace it. You can see this in LGBTQ++ or whatever it is this week, supporters standing up for countries that would toss them from the rooftop of a building if they went there. You see this in the patriotism stats among Democrats above.
The basic summary of Murray’s book is that Europe’s leaders ignored public opinion and opened their borders. When their populations complained, they called them racists and xenophobes. As the problems mounted, they ignored them. Thus, when things like honor killings and rapes by immigrants skyrocketed, they were officially ignored and even denied to a shocking degree. Murray has a very tragic letter of apology from a rape victim to her rapists (plural) apologizing to them for their having to live in such a racist country.
As populations were ignored by their leaders, they moved right on the political spectrum, increasing the power of what had been virtually non-existent right-wing parties, bringing some into power. All the while, the leaders blamed their populations for not keeping up with their enlightened policies.
The number one job of a politician is to listen to the concerns of their constituents and then represent them. Earlier in this century, this was a problem for both parties. Trump tapped into that in 2016 and won, transforming the Republican party in the process, moving it toward Main Street and the working class. Democrats had the same problem, but they were shielded by a press that actively lied for them, promoting them, while doing all they could to savage Republicans.
This primarily worked until recently, but now many more people are aware of the media’s lies, and the media’s trust has fallen to single digits. Yet many Democrats don’t realize the political landscape is changing, as they are still focusing on the 20% of issues, expecting the media to shield them. As a result, they are increasingly the party only of the wealthy, college-educated elites and are losing the middle class, as the election results of Mamdani showed.
Trends are Emerging
Week after week, things continue to improve for Trump as Democrats’ prospects get even worse.
For Trump, there were recent statistics showing that real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) rose again for the first time since his first term. The increases in his first term were pretty much the first time since the early 1970s. Also, gas prices hit a four-year low.
Then you had the successful strike on Iran. Almost like clockwork, the media, based on a leak, tried to question the efficacy of the attack. Still, their jubilant reporting of failure didn’t even last the day before it was called into question. Their experts all predicted that the attack would destabilize the region and lead to Iran getting a nuclear bomb. Instead, the threat of Iran, something I have worried about since 1979, is significantly reduced, and the week ended with the ceasefire holding. For the Democrats, their hatred of Trump blinds them to a more reasonable reaction. When Obama had the attack that killed Bin Laden, most Republicans applauded, but Democrats could not reciprocate.
Despite complaints that Trump was damaging relations with our Allies, there was a successful NATO meeting where the Secretary General argued that Trump should be given credit for pushing the organization to meet its commitments, as this would not have happened if Trump had lost the election. Finally, the Supreme Court ended its term with a series of favorable rulings for Trump. (Side note: Jackson’s dissent on stopping nationwide injunctions was hardly judicial reasoning.)
The latter is an excellent example of soft power. Nationwide injunctions never happened until the 1960s. While they were questionable, they were accepted as they existed in a gray area. Then, they were so overused with Trump that the Trump administration challenged them in court. Now they are gone. Such is the case with soft power; it exists unless pushed too far.
Thus, for the Administration, wages are up, prices are down, the border is secure, the world is safer, and peace is breaking out in the Middle East and Africa (Congo and Rwanda). There is still much to do, but it’s a good start.
On the Democratic side, it seems the far left is winning in the battle for the Party. In the decision to follow the example of 1972 (to the left) or 1992(to the center), the Party appears to be going after 1972. The likely results will be, as it was in 1972, a massive loss next year. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real and unfortunately is alive and well on the Left.
For example, Judge Brian Murphy ordered the Administration to stop deporting illegal aliens to third countries. The Administration stopped and appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Administration, yet the judge refused to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision. So, the Administration has to appeal to the Supreme Court again.
Cythina Gonzales, vice mayor of Cudahy in CA, publicly calls for gangs to step up and protect their territories from the “biggest gang there is,” ICE officers.
Democrats in New York voted for a socialist as their candidate, Zohran Mamdani. However, this may be an indictment of rank-choice voting. Not only is he a socialist, but a racist, promising to tax the “white neighborhoods.” Mamdani promised to make New York more affordable by enacting policies that have repeatedly failed. Do you really think $30 minimum wage, freezing rents, free buses, defunding the police, and setting up government-run grocery stores will actually improve people’s lives?
Like most blue states and cities, people are already leaving New York. So, how is he going to pay for all this? As Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialism is great until you run out of other people’s money. But the Left never seems to learn. They are always chasing utopia. Despite all the failures of the past, this time they will do it right, this time it will work, or so they promise.
Meanwhile, while Momdani has the support of people like AOC, more reasonable Democrats are lamenting Momdani’s win. I have even heard some wonder if the Party can be saved. Perhaps the only solution is not 1972 or 1992, but to follow the example of those who broke away from the Whig party over slavery and founded the Republican Party. While not an easy choice, the only alternative would be another round of losses to break the hold of the far left on the Party that keeps it pushing for the 20% of so many 80-20 issues.
Happy Fourth of July!
