Independence Day

I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, viruses, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Becoming Happy

It’s what Thomas Jefferson said a while ago:

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

If the people become happy, though, they—we—would have little need for so large a government. And that would put a lot of bureaucrats, and most importantly, politicians out of business.

That is what today’s Progressive-Democrats and too many establishment Republicans fear, even above fearing failing our nation—being unnecessary.

No Voter Fraud?

Here’s one case—a single incident, but much too large a case to be dismissed for that.

Paterson, NJ, with a population of 145,000, last month held—rather, is holding, since the city isn’t done counting votes—an election for City Council, among other positions. The election was done by mail-in voting since the Powers that Be considered the city’s Wuhan Virus situation that serious.

16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.

Nineteen per cent of the votes have been tossed.

Why?

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

There’s more:

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

And

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

But who cares, right? It’s only 3,200 votes that were…wrong.

In a single ward of one council seat race, 24% of the votes cast were tossed by the State’s Board of Elections.

One case? Not so much. Statewide, across all of its 31 elections, the Elections Board had to “disqualify” 9.6% of the mail-in ballots cast. Even with Paterson’s failures discounted, the Statewide failure rate is over 8%.

Mail-in ballots, which have none of the controls of absentee ballots, are a petri dish for the voter fraud that Progressive-Democrats insist is a right-wing conspiracy.

“Fundamentally Transforming America”

Leftist thugs are busily tearing down statues. They began by masking their destructiveness, centering it on destroying statues of Confederate generals, but now they’re showing their true colors: they’re tearing down statues of national founders, abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, US Grant, Liberals like Theodore Roosevelt, desecrating monuments to an all-black regiment that fought for the Union against slavery in our Civil War and to WWII heros.

They’re vandalizing government buildings and defiling churches.

They’re even assaulting their own for daring to document the destruction.

Here is Michelle Obama in May 2008:

We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.

Here is Barack Obama, just five months later and immediately before the election:

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

And now their minions are busily trying to destroy our culture and our history.

Remember this in November.

Occupation by Remote Control

Details of the People’s Republic of China’s overt takeover of Hong Kong via its new “security” law have been released by the government organ Xinhua News Agency. The high points, summarized by OANN, are these:

  • Hong Kong must establish a “local” national security council to enforce legislation, headed by the city’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam
    • to be supervised and guided by a new PRC commission specially created for the purpose
    • a PRC “adviser” will be a member of the council
  • New local police and prosecution units to be set up to investigate, enforce the new law
    • backed by PRC security and intelligence officers deployed to the new commission
  • Lam will have power to appoint judges to hear cases related to national security
    • bypasses existing judicial appointment procedures

Notice the supremacy of the PRC law over Hong Kong domestic law.

Notice, too, that those entities each have a Communist Party of China apparatchik embedded.