“We cannot normalize”

ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.

US Naval Academy Midshipman Honor Concept and Mikie Shirrell

New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Governor, it turns out, was barred from walking with her Naval Academy class during its graduation ceremony, although she was allowed to graduate and be commissioned into our Navy. Her explanation for this is this:

I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk….

What she didn’t turn some of her classmates in over was a cheating scandal that impacted 130 midshipmen in her class.

And she’s proud of that refusal.

This is the Naval Academy’s Honor Concept [boldface in the original, italic emphasis added]:

Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known.
They do not lie.

They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented.
They do not cheat.

They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property.
They do not steal.

By refusing to turn in those classmates about whom she knew, by refusing to testify over the course of the cheating investigation, Sherrill openly lied by omission. She further lied by tacitly obstructing that investigation. She affirmatively prevented the truth from being known.

This is the concept of honor and integrity that Mikie Sherrill is putting on offer for the good citizens of New Jersey. It seems a poor fit for any Governor’s office.

The Party that Invented Political Weaponization

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have been bleating for most of this year about the alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice. However, Party invented that weaponization with ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who swore fealty to Obama with his “I’m his wingman” oath, and then proceeded to use his AG office to go after us American citizens for daring to disagree with Obama’s pen and phone activities. Obama expanded that weaponization with his use of the IRS to go after Conservative nonprofit political organizations.

Biden expanded, while particularizing, that Party weaponization with his DoJ and its subordinate FBI categorizing concerned mothers as domestic terrorists and traditional Catholics as far-right extremists that bore watching. He and his followers engaged in explicit, politically motivated prosecutions of Trump over the riots at the Capitol and over his concerns about election integrity in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Trump has been attacking political opponents during his second term? Or is he going after wrong-doers who happen to be, also, in the other party?

Whatever those answers might be, here’s Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) promising more, explicitly more, Party weaponization with promised attacks, not just on Trump, but on anybody “doing the bidding of the Trump administration.”

One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the “pay to play schemes” of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years…there will still be accountability to be had. And that process begins now, but it will not be complete until there is an independent Department of Justice and certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

In Democratic hands—my irony meter pegged hard.

This is the level of integrity Party has on offer for 2026, 2028, and in the out years.

Obamacare Subsidies and Appropriations Bills

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen and Senators are attempting to extort Republicans into surrendering on extending/restoring Progressive-Democrat-passed (in 2021) Obamacare expanded subsidies.

Unfortunately, they’ll likely succeed, as too many Republicans in each house are too timid to stand their ground.

Never mind that if those Republicans would crawl out from under their desks, they easily could make the case that any government shutdown would be (and after the realization, was) the sole doing of those Progressive-Democrats. It’s those Party members, after all, who threatened to close our government if they weren’t meekly obeyed and who in the realization did close our government.

These Republicans think they face regarding the Progressive-Democrats’ announcement is a chimera, too. The Federal government never really shuts down. With current tax law, funds come flowing in to Federal coffers are plenty for the Federal government to keep paying, on schedule, almost all of existing Federal outlays. The losses from any supposed shutdown would be primarily via Federal contracts with businesses that provide services to the Feds, but most of these businesses would be made whole under the terms of those same contracts.

The larger, underlying problem this extortion exposes, though, is the Republicans’ failure, in their aggregate, to pass all of the dozen separate appropriations bills they’re nominally required to pass every year. These appropriations bills are the actual spending bills that commit actual dollars that the Federal government has committed through its various allocation bills, which is where the government says what it wants to fund. Appropriations are those funds.

Had the Republicans in Congress actually passed those dozen bills on schedule, or at least by the end of the current fiscal year (which has another week left, so theoretically they still could), as they promised at the start of the year and of which they’ve only passed three or four, there would be no risk of a shutdown, and the Progressive-Democrats would have no extortion bricks to throw threw government windows.

Will the Republicans learn this lesson for the second year of this Congressional session? They never have in the past. I’m not holding my breath for the future.

“socialize the agricultural system”

That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.