Tag Archives: political parties

Ashamed of our Heritage

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The Democratic Party of Connecticut is that. They’ve voted to strip the names of two of our Founders from their annual fund-raising dinner. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were slave holders, and so are unfit to be…what…Founders? Never mind that most of our Founders were slave holders—that was the norm of the time—or had feet of other serious clay.

What’s next, Washington’s Birthday will exclude George Washington, slave owner?

This was Party Chairman Nick Balletto’s “brainstorm.”

Democrats are the party of inclusion. And in my opinion, the time has come to reevaluate the name of the JJB [the dinner] to reflect the diverse makeup and forward-looking vision of our party[.]

Sure. The party of inclusion via the KKK. The party of inclusion via Jim Crow. The party of inclusion of racist, sexist affirmative action that excludes groups of Americans because they don’t have the preferred—dare I say privileged?—skin color or gender.

This is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party made manifest.

Democrats and Unions

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Illinois’ Democrat-controlled legislature—both houses—passed a budget earlier this year that spent $4 billion more than it intended to collect in revenue: a $36 billion spending bill against a $32 billion revenue bill. Never mind the rank dishonesty of this—bankrupt Illinois has no hope of raising those $4 billion except by borrowing, and these Democrat legislaturists know that. They have no intention, then, of repaying the borrowing, and that’s the dishonesty.

But leave that aside for a moment, and consider the following.

Governor Bruce Rauner (R) vetoed the bill because of that deficit, so the State is operating without a budget. Nevertheless, Rauner said the State would keep paying its government employees; as AFSCME said in support of Rauner’s decision,

public service workers in state government are on the job despite the lack of a state budget…and they should be paid for their work on time and in full.

Well, not so fast. Illinois’ Democrat Attorney General Lisa Madigan (just by happenstance, she’s also the daughter of the State’s Democrat Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, whose own father was a New Deal pusher), with the full backing of her Democrat legislaturists, went into Illinois’ courts to block payment for those same “public service workers.”

Strictly to make a political point for their own benefit, these legislaturist Democrats are trying to prevent their employees from being paid, and they’re using their (erstwhile?) union allies as speed cushions for their bus. The Democratic Party of Illinois is typical of the national Democratic Party.

Democrats and Regulation

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Uber is successful in competing with the established taxi industry, and New York City Mayer Bill de Blasio (D) is all upset about it. He wants to freeze Uber’s (and other ad hoc rides-for-hire companies’) growth until he can figure out how to regulate them:

[W]e support a short pause in the rapid increase of for-hire vehicles to make sure that the future growth of this industry lives up to the policies and principles we set out as a city.

“Short pause.” Sure. He supported his argument in that piece by citing other jurisdictions where Uber had resisted…being over-regulated.

Hillary Clinton is his BFF on this:

while the “gig economy” may be “exciting” and “unleashing innovation,” “it is also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”

Because. Just because. It exists; it has to be regulated.

Democrats abhor anything that’s not under their regulation, not under their control. Americans just are too stupid to see to their own affairs without Know Betters instructing us. And our Know Betters are the only ones qualified to define “what a good job will look like in the future.”

Update: de Blasio seems to have recognized the error of his ways. For now.  Clinton has not.

Hillary Clinton’s Emails

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It just gets better and better. Hillary Clinton has released a “FAQ” about her emails and her destruction of a significant fraction of them. Byron York, writing in The Washington Examiner, had some thoughts about them.

One of the FAQ questions Clinton posed concerned whether any of her emails were under subpoena at the time they were destroyed.

The emails that Clinton chose not to keep were personal emails—they were not federal records or even work-related—and therefore were not subject to any preservation obligation under the Federal Records Act or any request. Nor would they have been subject to the subpoena—which did not exist at the time….

Except that

The subpoena to which Clinton referred was issued March 4, 2015, after the committee learned that Clinton kept her emails on a separate, secret server. Clinton seems to be confirming that she destroyed her email records (and all backups, according to her attorney) in early December, which would be three months before the Benghazi committee subpoena. So Clinton’s argument is: there’s no way I was subject to a subpoena because I destroyed everything before the subpoena was issued.

Putting aside the question of whether Clinton’s emails were already covered by an earlier subpoena—Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy [R, SC] maintains they were—there is still the question of whether Clinton, all along, had a legal obligation to preserve her emails and hand them over to Congress. And on that question, there seems no doubt Clinton was legally required to do just that—and despite that obligation destroyed the emails anyway.

On September 20, 2012, nine days after the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Clinton asking for “all information…related to the attack on the consulate.” The letter told Clinton, “In complying with this request, you are required to produce all responsive documents that are in your possession, custody, or control, whether held by you or your past or present agents, employees, and representatives acting on your behalf.” The letter specified emails as documents covered by the request.

The letter was clear. In response, the State Department produced not a single email to or from Clinton. The world now knows, of course, that Clinton did in fact possess emails covered by the request and did not turn them over.

Even if Clinton’s argument that her personal emails were somehow not covered by the Letter, the subpoena, or the Federal Records Act and related legislation holds water, how can we know Clinton destroyed only personal correspondence, correspondence that “were not federal records or even work-related” as she claims? We can’t know. Clinton destroyed the evidence.

It’s all the more important that Congress lay hands on her servers, hard drives, and other storage media, and do a proper forensic investigation.

A Court Gets it Right

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This time a State Supreme Court, in particular, Wisconsin’s. Recall that some rogue Democratic Party prosecutors in Wisconsin have been persecuting a number of Wisconsin citizens for the dastardly crime of supporting Scott Walker. Recall further, that the law under which this victims were being persecuted was claimed by those prosecutors as allowing them to silence their victims, even to the point of preventing those victims from speaking publicly about their persecution. Hence the term “John Doe statute.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court took a dim view of such…shenanigans. Last part first: the Court ruled that the prosecutors must

cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation.

If it had been me, I’d have required the prosecutors to post a substantial all cash bond against their performance of this requirement, and for 10 years thereafter against their continued performance, but I’ll take this. Still, I’d like the bond in light of the Court’s evident disdain for the prosecutor’s behavior:

…the special prosecutor relies upon, leads us to the unsettling conclusion that it is left to government bureaucrats and/or individual prosecutors to determine how much coordination between campaign committees and independent groups is “too much” coordination. In essence, under his theory, every candidate, in every campaign in which an issue advocacy group participates, would get their own John Doe proceeding and their own special prosecutor to determine the extent of any coordination. This is not, and cannot, be the law in a democracy…

The special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories…would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished. In short, the special prosecutor completely ignores the command that, when seeking to regulate issue advocacy groups, such regulation must be done with “narrow specificity.”

And

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them.

Another problem, though, is that this disregard for the law and for the speech of others isn’t limited to the Wisconsin branch of the Democratic Party.

The Court’s decision can be seen here.