Drones Over our Domestic Military Bases

Now we’re getting reports, and sightings, of drones flying over our military bases, installations like the East Coast Langley Air Force Base.

For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the US The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told [USAF General Mark] Kelly.

And

Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments.

No one in our government has any idea of the origin or purpose of the drone overflights, but that isn’t the worst of this. Instead, while the overflights are illegal,

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the US unless they pose an imminent threat.

This is the worst of it, and this law needs to be changed. Aside from the obvious—espionage flights over our military bases are most certainly an imminent, as well as a long-term threat—in a conflict, those drones will be armed but otherwise indistinguishable from the drones that have illegally flying over our bases for some time.

Not Black?

Now ex-President Barack Obama (D) is making plain (as if it hasn’t been for some time) the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt for Americans ignorant enough not to buy Party’s line.

You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses; I’ve got a problem with that. Because part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.

Because, after all, it couldn’t possibly be that Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a lousy candidate. It couldn’t possibly be that Americans who happen to be black men don’t like the Party candidate for economic, border, foreign policy reasons having nothing to do with her skin color or gender.

Those characteristics were the explicit reasons for which then-Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden picked her for his running mate. It’s apparent that, Obama’s contempt to the contrary, black men are smarter than that when they consider who should get their vote.

This is Obama echoing then-Party candidate Joe Biden’s 2020 racist claim that if a black American doesn’t support him that person isn’t really black.

A Determination to Create Dependency

The Progressive-Democrat-run government of California has placed on its November ballot a proposal to require a State-wide minimum wage of $18 per hour. The Wall Street Journal editors provide some data, citing a Beacon Economics study.

  • 90% of the 130,000 newly unemployed in California during the past two years were under age 35
  • Between the first quarters of 2022 and 2024, unemployment among those ages 16 to 19 increased to 19.2% from 10.8% in California, versus 11.9% from 10.5% nationwide
  • Unemployment among those 20 to 24 years old also ticked up 1.3 percentage points in California, while declining 0.7 percentage points nationwide
  • unemployment averaged 3.2% in the 20 states that followed the federal minimum wage compared to 4.1% in the 15 with minimums between $14 and $17
  • fast-food employment in California has declined 3.2% over the last five months while increasing 3.6% nationwide
  • fast-food prices in California increased 3.7% after the higher minimum took effect in April

The editors asked a question: Are they trying to keep teens out of work? It’s far broader than that.

Where do these unemployed go? To Government for early on unemployment insurance and for long-trm welfare payments. The youth—those 16-19 years old and 20-24 years old—who start out dependent on Government for handouts have very little hope of breaking that dependency; it’s hard enough for adults who’ve been and are being priced out of low-skill jobs. Especially in an economic environment so riddled with these Progressive-Democrat policies.

That dependency on government, though, is votes for that government’s incumbents and preservation of those incumbents’ power.

Disinformation Purveying

Randy Manner (Maj Gen, ret) accused, in his Wall Street Journalop-ed…former President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump of spreading disinformation regarding the Federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene. Tellingly, he opened his jeremiad with his own disinformation.

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would dismantle these lifelines and force communities to face disasters on their own.

There is no connection whatsoever between Trump and Project 2025. Both Trump and The Heritage Foundation, authors of the document, say so. The only ones who claim otherwise are the press’ imaginary “folks who know” and Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who quote that press.

Manner’s disinformation extends into Project 2025 itself.

Project 2025 would push the privatization of disaster-relief functions currently managed by FEMA….

It’s instructive that Manner chose not to quote the project where it proposes that. He cannot because the project proposes no such thing. Project 2025 itself (pgs 133-134) actually proposes dismantling DHS, which it says is dysfunctional, while saving FEMA by alternatively moving it to the Department of the Interior or combining it with CISA and moving the combination to the Department of Transportation.

Regarding Manner’s dishonest claim regarding privatizing FEMA, what the project actually proposes (pg 135) is

privatizing…the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program….

This is far from privatizing FEMA. Beyond that, letting insurance entities compete in a free market would bring down the costs to insurees, and to us taxpayers regarding government insurance entities, of insurance.

Manner’s distortions and disinformation peddling brings dishonor on the uniform he used to wear.

Regarding shifting FEMA spending, the project does propose

shift[ing] the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government….

But that’s where the responsibility should lie in our republican democracy. The State and local governments are the entities on the scene (on-scene command is a concept with which an ex-flag officer should be familiar), they know far better than the Federal government what the needs of their citizens are, and being closest to the scene of the disaster area and to those citizens within it, they are far better positioned to provide the immediate aid and targeted support those citizens need than is the Federal government. The Florida State and local governments are empirical demonstrations of this.

Only a Big Government enthusiast, who sees States merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of the central government (as John Jay would have had it at our Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia), would act as though we’re not a republican democracy, not a republic.

Manner should be ashamed of himself for writing such a jeremiad.

Intolerance and Frivolous Lawsuits

Jack Phillips, owner/operator of Masterpiece Cakeshop, had yet another lawsuit against him dismissed, this one by the Colorado Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it was dismissed on the trivial technicality that it wasn’t filed correctly.

The Wall Street Journal editors ask the question

[W]hen will the progressive cultural police finally leave him alone?

As long as the courts—which includes our Supreme Court, whose ruling in Phillips’ favor in an earlier lawsuit was based narrowly on the animus of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission—continue rule to timidly, the intolerant progressives will continue to persecute Phillips and the rest of us Americans who won’t bow and scrape at their intolerant feet.

What’s necessary to put an end to progressive bigotry, at least in our courts, is to sanction such legally frivolous, but morally bigoted, lawsuits. The plaintiffs in such cases should be required to pay their persecution target all legal costs, which often is already the case, and they should be required to pay the damages identified by the plaintiff. Further, the lawyers and their employing law firms—which do not have to be a party to such…frivolity—need themselves to be heavily sanctioned: the lawyer(s) fined steeply, beginning with 10% of their top line income and moving up for each subsequent frivolous suit in which they might participate, and the law firms employing them fined similarly steeply.

Courts are justifiably reluctant to find against plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers on the basis of their frivolous cases, but it’s been made crystalline by the persecution of Phillips that courts are being too timid here.