California has the right to secede

John Nolte on the California secession movement.

Why shouldn’t a free people have the God-given right to self-determination, the right to form their own sovereign government? By what right, either in 1861 or 2017, are a free people forced by the threat of government violence to remain attached to a government they see as immoral and oppressive?

While the legal details of allowing a state to secede from the United States would be endless, especially after some 240-odd years under an increasingly powerful and onerous federal government, all sarcasm aside, I can see no moral reason against secession. If the people of California wish to govern themselves, wish to oppress Christians who do not participate in gay weddings, wish to exploit Mexican illegals, wish to outlaw fossil fuels, wish to form an army exclusively made up of transgenders, that is their right.

Those Californians who disagree will be more than welcome in Wyoming....

People often say that if our Founding Fathers had ever conceived of the notion of a state wanting to exit the union, they would have offered a mechanism for secession in the Constitution.

Myself, I believe the exact opposite is true. Like abortion and same sex marriage, our Founding Fathers never offered any explicit rulings on these issue because at the time such things were inconceivable. What I mean is that it was not inconceivable to our Founders that a state would want to leave the union. Rather it was inconceivable that a state would not be allowed to secede and self-govern if they so desired.

Would our country not be better off under such an experiment? Without the oppressive federal government forcing a single form of governance and even a culture across all 50 states, could we not learn something if individual states were allowed to become the true laboratories of democracy, allowed to experiment freely with true self-governance, allowed to produce tangible, real world results we could all benefit from?

In just a decade, imagine what we could learn from, say, a sovereign California and Texas? Two polar opposites on almost every core issue: guns, religious freedom, energy, immigration, taxes, the environment.

Loathing for Trump has finally removed the hot-button issue of slavery and race from the crucially important issue of states' rights.

This is a very good thing, a seismic change in our culture, in our way of thinking.

Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal.

Don't send your kids to the Ivy League.

Weird how, since the connection to Democratic dirty-tricks firm Fusion GPS came up, the press stopped talking about the Russia “collusion” story overnight.

Imran Awan Scandal Shows Just How Much Dirt Dems Wanted to Hide By Focusing on Trump-Russia

When U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection teamed up to arrest Imran Awan, an IT staffer for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and other congressional Democrats, Americans began to realize just how broken and corrupt the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, such scandals beg the question of whether the Trump-Russia hype has not been a desperate attempt to distract the country from a long train of scandals on the Left.

Awan was arrested Monday night on charges of bank fraud, to which he has pled not guilty. As Forbes' Frank Miniter argued, however, his strange case "has all the feeling of the opening scene of a movie that might soon include political corruption and so much more."

Politico reported that Awan is "at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of lawmakers." He was arrested after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, The Daily Caller reported.

PJ Media's Debra Heine has been on the story since it broke in February of this year. Imran Awan and his Pakistani-born brothers, Abid and Jamal Awan, are under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on suspicion that they accessed congressional computers without permission and stole equipment.

The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who only fired Imran Awan on Tuesday after his arrest. News of the investigation broke in February, but Schultz kept Awan on staff for five months before firing him. Schultz even threatened Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa about the investigation in May.

The family had repeated long-term financial struggles, despite extraordinarily high salaries for congressional IT aides. Jamal, who public records suggest is only 22 years old, was paid nearly $160,000 annually, three times the average House IT staff salary. Abid was paid $161,000 and Amran $165,000. Even so, the family has a history of massive debts and bankruptcy.

Abid Awan had more than $1 million in debts following a failed business called Cars International that he ran in Falls Church, Va., from November 2009 to September 2010. Business associates said in court documents that Abid had stolen money and vehicles from them.

Just this past weekend, The Daily Caller reported that FBI agents seized damaged computer hard drives from the Awan family last February. According to sources, it looked like someone had "tried to destroy" the hard drives. Sound familiar?

Other House IT aides wondered whether the Awans were blackmailing the Democrats who waited so long to fire them. "I don't know what they have, but they have something on someone. It's been months at this point" with no arrests, Pat Sowers, a 12-year House IT aide told The Daily Caller.

"There's no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they'd take me out in handcuffs that same day, and I'd never work again," said a manager at a tech-services company that works with Democratic House offices. He also reported offering his company's services to Democrat offices for one-fourth the price of Awan and his brothers, but the Democrats declined.

After WikiLeaks published emails hacked from the DNC server, evidence suggested the Democratic Party had favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. An email to DNC staff actually discussed "pay to play letters." Other emails revealed the blatant disregard and contempt with which Hillary Clinton and her staff viewed traditional Christianity.

This scandal also followed Hillary Clinton's email scandal, in which it was discovered that the former secretary of State sent classified information on her private email server. Even former FBI Director James Comey, in declining to prosecute Clinton, called her actions "extremely careless," and noted that her emails might have been accessed by foreign actors.

Democrats have jumped headlong into claims that Donald Trump "colluded" with Russia in order to win the 2016 election. While Donald Trump Jr. did take a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on the pretext that she would give him opposition material against Hillary Clinton, that meeting bore no fruit. While Trump did suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin hack into Clinton's email to reveal the missing emails, that also led to nothing.

Earlier on Thursday, however, it was revealed that Fusion GPS, the same Left-wing group that defended Planned Parenthood, attacked Mitt Romney donors, and compiled the Trump dossier, was hired by none other than Veselnitskaya to destroy the good name of a whistleblower murdered by Putin's regime. Oh, and Fusion GPS did not register as representing a foreign agent.

Clinton and the Left seemingly have clearer ties to Russia than Trump ever did (remember Uranium One?), but the Left and the Democratic Party have squeezed the Trump-Russia narrative dry.

Could it be that they were trying to distract Americans from yet more brewing scandals? Could they be trying to hide just how divided the Democratic Party still is, in the wake of 2016? Could they be hiding their lack of a message?

In defense of the bad white working class

Middle-class progressives have no qualms about exercising their natural right to determine the moral values of our world. Yet a fairer approach would surely entail sacrificing one’s own comfort for a cause. The trickier and scarier consequences of enlightened policies should fall on those who champion them, yet they rarely do.

•

The habits of progressive social and political discourse almost seem calculated to alienate and aggravate lower class whites. I confess that if a well-dressed, university-educated middle-class person of any gender or ethnicity so much as hinted at my ‘white privilege’ while I was a lumpen child, or my ‘male privilege’ while I was an unskilled labourer who couldn’t afford basic necessities, or my ‘hetero-privilege’ while I was a homeless solitary, I’d have taken special pleasure in voting for their nightmare. And I would have been right to do so.

At university, I discovered that this ethos didn’t apply. A season of despair would not send middle-class teens spiralling into a life of drug-addled indigence; they could simply brush themselves off and enrol again next year. Strong, class-enforced safety nets meant that self-pity could be accommodated, and victimhood could even form part of a functional identity.

Indeed, the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege. Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk, won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage.

Somehow the social progressives never give up their lifestyle, their safety and their attitude of moral superiority when they consign the lower classes to being the experimental animals in their real-life experiments in human depravity.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT Scammers

There’s more than bank fraud going on here.

This is not about bank fraud. The Awan family swindles are plentiful, but they are just window-dressing. This appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.

At the time of his arrest, the 37-year-old Imran Awan had been working for Democrats as an information technologist for 13 years. He started out with Representative Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) in 2004. The next year, he landed on the staff of Wasserman Schultz, who had just been elected to the House.

Congressional-staff salaries are modest, in the $40,000 range. For some reason, Awan was paid about four times as much. He also managed to get his wife, Alvi, on the House payroll . . . then his brother, Abid Awan . . . then Abid’s wife, Natalia Sova. The youngest of the clan, Awan’s brother Jamal, came on board in 2014 — the then-20-year-old commanding an annual salary of $160,000.

A few of these arrangements appear to have been sinecures: While some Awans were rarely seen around the office, we now know they were engaged in extensive financial shenanigans away from the Capitol. Nevertheless, the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak, who has been all over this story, reports that, for their IT “work,” the Pakistani family has reeled in $4 million from U.S. taxpayers since 2009.

That’s just the “legit” dough. The family business evidently dabbles in procurement fraud, too. The Capitol Police and FBI are exploring widespread double-billing for computers, other communication devices, and related equipment.

Why were they paid so much for doing so little? Intriguing as it is, that’s a side issue. A more pressing question is: Why were they given access to highly sensitive government information? Ordinarily, that requires a security clearance, awarded only after a background check that peruses ties to foreign countries, associations with unsavory characters, and vulnerability to blackmail.

These characters could not possibly have qualified. Never mind access; it’s hard to fathom how they retained their jobs. The Daily Caller has also discovered that the family, which controlled several properties, was involved in various suspicious mortgage transfers. Abid Awan, while working “full-time” in Congress, ran a curious auto-retail business called “Cars International A” (yes, CIA), through which he was accused of stealing money and merchandise. In 2012, he discharged debts in bankruptcy (while scheming to keep his real-estate holdings). Congressional Democrats hired Abid despite his drunk-driving conviction a month before he started at the House, and they retained him despite his public-drunkenness arrest a month after. Beyond that, he and Imran both committed sundry vehicular offenses. In civil lawsuits, they are accused of life-insurance fraud.

Read the whole thing.

How the Russians Interfered With the Election

Here's the real Russia story.

The Russians objective is to destabilize America. They probably believed - like the pollsters and the media - that Hillary would be elected. They saw an opportunity to exacerbate the Left/Right divide without respect to who won the election. The revelations regarding Hillary's corruption were intended to create a the belief that she was not fit to be President when she won.

If Hillary had won, the Right would have grumbled, like they did after Obama's victory. The surprise Trump win completely unhinged the Left and supercharged the Russians attempt at political destabilization.

The press has willingly played into their hands. Lots of people now believe that elections, especially the last election was stolen. Facts don't matter to people's beliefs, especially when so many people share that belief.

I would say that the Russians succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Congratulations MSM and Leftist. You played your parts perfectly. But then, the Left have always been Russian dupes.

Great Trump speech to the Boy Scouts ...confirmed by indignant Virginian Pilot editorial.

The Virginian Pilot is an nearly infallible guide, as I have mentioned many times before.  If you take their position on any issue and do the opposite you are almost always going to be right.  I hedge my bets just a tad because I'm not sure what their position is on the sun rising in the East.

That's why I know that Trump's speech to the Boy Scouts in West Virginia must have been great because today they editorialized against it ... without ever quoting any part of it.

Other members of the media compared the Boy Scouts to Hitler Youth.

For those who want to know what Trump said:

Liberals label Boy Scouts "Hitler Youth"

I really hope they keep it up ... Trump's second term coming up.

The Ruling Class in full frontal nudity is an ugly sight ....

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)

“Trump, as I keep saying, is a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”

Liberals Stop Pretending to Care About John McCain After His Health Care Vote

It was all an act.  McCain was a useful idiot when he opposed Republicans but they reviled him when he ran as a Republican.

Via Instapundit:

TAKE A BOW, DNC-MSM: Last night, the Boy Scouts became the Hitler Youth. Today, Sean T. Collins, a freelancer who has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, and the New York Observer among other publications, declares “The world would be a better place if McCain died in Vietnam,” in a since-deleted tweet, as he and other Democrat operatives with bylines attack McCain for wanting to “kill” people by repealing Obamacare, as NewsBusters notes.

Newly declassified memos detail extent of improper Obama-era NSA spying

The Obama Administration learned from the mistakes of the Nixon White House how to spy on their political opponents and not get caught - until they left office.

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

Watch: Interview with Neema Guliani, ACLU's Chief Legislative Counsel

Meaning of Cosa Nostra

Reading Peggy Noonan’s piece in the WSJ (“ObamaCare Is Taking On Water” 10/26/13), a particular line jumped out: “….If they knew it, did they not tell the White House?....” I am beyondbelief amazed, how many times over the last five years we have heard and read this line. I am equally amazed how the Obama regime has been managing that Obama personally “never takes on water” sort of speak. So, let me run a train of thoughts here.

As most people know, Cosa Nostra means “Our Thing”. You know, a “Thing” that we discuss between ourselves, never let anyone into the inner circle, a structure where the cardinal modus operandi is “All For One”; but never “One For All”. A “Thing” where the Boss must be protected at all cost, and for this service the inner circle remains just that: “Inner”. Our Thing. Cosa Nostra. The Cosa Nostra theory and rules have been serving its members and bosses for over two hundred years. One of the most well known cases of the ins and outs, is Al Capone’s case who was not and could not be charged with multiple murders and a long list of other serious crimes, because no one

was talking. The boss was protected. He ended up in prison on a simple tax evasion case.

I developed a three pieces puzzle, to explain what is going on in the White House since January, 2009. Let’s see if it makes sense.

As the FIRST PIECE: For five years, we have been forced to listen to Barack Hussein Obama’s tirades on “my team”, “I directed my staff”, “the way I see it”, and the permutation thereof. Not to mention the “My red line”, and “My calculus” comments, or his bragging about ordering Osama bin Laden’s killing and the drown strikes. From all of Obama’s speeches and comments, one can safely and with high accuracy conclude that there is nothing going on in the Obama regime without Obama’s stamp of approval. This is beside Jay Carney’s constant, in-your-face, bold faced lies on prime time television. Obama’s micromanaging control freak nature most probably extend to who and when mops the White House floors (don’t doubt me; his kindred spirit, Jimmy “America’s Brain Injury” Carter was personally running the tally as to who can play on the White House tennis court). A few months ago, in an interview, the reporter used the “ObamaCare” designation, to which Obama made the “I don’t mind they calling it ObamaCare” (probably a 90% close paraphrase) comment. Obama is not only directing everything in his regime, he is proud of it.

Read the whole thing.

Sea levels are falling

Don't tell the Virginian Pilot, their heads will explode.

The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?

Even someone who hates Trump sees that the media just doesn't get it.

The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things.

There are their views on trade. Or their views on what they call “populism”. Or their views on what they call “bipartisanship”. Or their views on just about anything having to do with the decline of manufacturing (sad but inevitable) and the rise of the “creative” white-collar professions (the smart ones, so meritorious).

This is one of the factors that explains the many monstrous journalism failures of the last few decades: the dot-com bubble, which was actively cheered on by the business press; the Iraq war, which was abetted by journalism’s greatest sages; the almost complete failure to notice the epidemic of professional misconduct that made possible the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump, which (despite the media’s morbid fascination with the man) caught nearly everyone flatfooted.

Everything they do, they do as a herd – even when it’s running headlong over a cliff....

These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.

This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.

What do I mean? Consider Politico’s famous email tip-sheet, Playbook, which is read religiously every morning by countless members of the DC press corps, including myself. About two-thirds of the publication consists of useful summaries of the day’s news stories.

The rest, however, is a sort of People magazine for the Washington journalist community, in which the reader is invited to celebrate leading journalists’ (and politicians’) birthdays, congratulate leading journalists (and politicians) for their witty phrase-making, learn which leading journalist (and politician) was seen at which party and anticipate which leading journalist (and politician) is going to be on which Sunday program.

Americans Protest ‘Very Fake News’ CNN Outside of Atlanta Headquarters

I have been waiting for this.  More, much, much more!

On Intimidation and Character Assassination

Intimidation is a common feature of Leftist politics, such that most regular folks routinely hide the extent of their true political beliefs.

Leftists have taken it upon themselves to insinuate that this is racism, or some other -ism, and that we are all secret fascists who merely don’t want our horrible views exposed to daylight. But they have it exactly backwards, probably by design. You see, actual neo-Nazis and modern fascists are anything but secretive about their beliefs. Though they are very few, they are also very loud. They want to be seen. They have already paid the social price for it. Calling a Nazi a Nazi doesn’t hurt their feelings any. They know what they are.

In this, SJWs and their ilk are projecting their own behavior onto their ideological opponents. Many SJWs are thinly-veiled Communists, so they presume that we must all be thinly-veiled Nazis. After all, it’s the sort of thing they would do in our place.

In reality, most people on the Right are just scared. Not of physical violence for the most part, though perhaps some worry about that too. Rather, they fear character assassination. They fear being tarred as racist, sexist, or some other thing, and losing their friends, their jobs, and their good names.

It all comes down to the media. Without the power of the media to amplify such nonsensical accusations, nobody would fear the Left. We would laugh at such insults. The stupidity of calling everybody a secret fascist would be readily apparent. But with the media able to pick any random target it wishes, and assassinate that person’s character at will, with little to no possibility of defense… the fear is there.

Incidents like what happened to Justine Sacco reinforce this. Remember Brendan Eich “resigning” (we all know the he was pressured to do so). Remember the media trotting out to the middle of nowhere to find a pizza shop that didn’t want to cater gay weddings. The implication is that anyone could be a target. Being a small business owner in the middle of nowhere doesn’t make you safe.

Nobody is safe from the media. That’s what they want you to believe, but in such a way that no one clearly states it, that nobody clearly admits it, so that they always retain plausible deniability.

Note that since Trump unexpectedly won the election, the media has been dedicating itself 24/7 to doing nothing but assassinating his character. They even tacitly excuse literal assassination, in the case of Steve Scalise.

You don't hear much about Steve Scalise in the media. In fact outside of Fox News, Steve Scalese has disappeared. Because the media can't admit that it encouraged one of their followers to assassinate Republicans.

HUNGARY'S LEADER: EU AND SOROS SEEK TO "MUSLIMIZE" EUROPE

He has a point.

Mark Steyn vs Michael Mann, Climate Change: The Facts, Keynote 4

Mark Steyn- Diversity and disintegration

And from the multicultural center of Minnesota we have this heartwarming story of multiculturalism in action

A law-abiding unarmed woman makes the mistake of calling 911 and, when the responding officers arrive, they shoot her dead. The American media's reflex instinct is that this is an out-of-control murderous police-brutality story. To be sure, it's more helpful if the victim is black or Hispanic, but in this case she is female and an immigrant, albeit from Australia. And certainly Down Under the instinct of the press would also be to play this as an example of a country with a crazy gun culture and the bad things that happen when innocent foreigners make the mistake of going there, even to a peaceable, upscale neighborhood. Or in the shorthand of the Sydney Daily Telegraph front page:

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

In both Oz and the US, the next stage of the story would be cherchez le cop - lots of reports of a redneck officer with a hair-trigger temper and various personal issues.

But there's a complicating factor. It's so complicating that The Washington Post finds itself running a 1,200-word story on the death of Justine Damond without a word about the copper who shot her - nothing about his background, record, habits, behavior. Not even his name.

Because his name is Mohamed Noor. As Tucker Carlson pointed out on Fox News the other night, the reason you know the officer's identity is significant is because the Post went to all that trouble not to mention it.

Mr Noor was born in Somalia, and these days, aside from being home to the fictional Lake Wobegon, Minnesota is also home to the all too real Little Mogadishu - mainly thanks to generous "family reunification" from a country that keeps no reliable family records. (Last year, I had a Somali minicab driver in London who was planning to move to Minneapolis "because my brother lives there. Well, he's not really my brother," he added cryptically.)

If you take seriously Sir Robert Peel's dictum that "the police are the public and the public are the police", then, if your town turns Somali, you're going to need some Somali policemen. And, just like Garrison Keillor's radio tales of old Minnesota, the new Minnesota also requires its heartwarming yarns. In the deft summation of Michele Bachmann (a favorite guest on The Mark Steyn Show) Officer Noor is an "affirmative-action hire by the hijab-wearing mayor of Minneapolis".

Mayor Hodges doesn't wear a hijab because she's Muslim (yet) but to show she's cool with it - and, if you're not, you're a bigot. Yes, it's a bit hot under the hood and it cramps your peripheral vision, but the new Minneapolis is all about embracing discomfort:

Running for re-election in November, Hodges said the city must embrace the discomfort of transformation, a theme of her campaign, and work tirelessly to create "One Minneapolis" that "works for everyone," and where everyone contributes to making the city work for everyone else.
She invoked the metaphor of the seed, breaking apart to make way for new life, to describe what's happening in Minnesota's largest city.

"Minneapolis, our shell is cracked. And from that will come the full flower of our potential, whatever we are destined to be," Hodges said. "To some, who can only see this moment, it may indeed look like complete destruction. In reality, it is transformation."

So don't worry, it may look like "complete destruction", but any moment now we'll be in full bloom. For her, the recruitment of Mohamed Noor, the ninth Somali officer on the force, is a good-news story, about the glories of "embracing the discomfort of transformation".

For others, including those on the receiving end of his ministrations, Mohamed Noor is a bad-news story. A few days before he shot Justine Damond, a complaint was filed in federal court by another Minneapolis woman, who also called 911 and claims she was assaulted by Noor. Disinclined to embrace her discomfort, she has instead sued.

Warmists Stunned by Roger Pielke in Senate Testimony on Climate Change

Mark Steyn’s Stand Against Climate Alarmism: In-Depth with the Climate Crybully Conniption-Inducer