Primary season is on the way. Many states have candidates lining up and filing during the late fall. The first primary is in Texas in early March 20 22. Governors, Senators and Congressional Representatives will be incumbents or are retiring.
Midterm elections are critical, and 2022 more than ever. Stay tuned! rsk
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/how-states-could-constitutionally-assume-abandoned-responsibilities-of-the-national-government/
The COVID pandemic has witnessed the exercise of state “police powers” on a scale and scope unprecedented in America’s peacetime history. Out of fear of contagion, massive amounts of private property in the form of shops, restaurants, bars, and other businesses were peremptorily seized and shuttered. The rights of landlords to collect rents and evict tenants were suspended. The ability of people to cross from one state to another was hobbled by regulations, quarantines, and delays. And most of this was accomplished by governors and mayors acting by decree, with only the most tenuous of statutory authorizations.
Initially implemented for what was to have been a brief period of medical unreadiness, the restrictions and impositions were extended month after month in the name of protecting Americans from a threat the specific magnitude of which was never clearly defined. Although some raised concerns about the legality of and need for these coercions, most Americans obediently submitted to them.
The purpose here is not to justify the particulars of what seems to us to have been a huge and clumsy overreach. It is instead to point out what such robust assertions of police powers could achieve, constitutionally and politically, if put to different and more legitimate ends—protecting Americans’ health and safety against what predictably ensues when the federal government abandons one of its primary charges. It is a road which, if taken, could not only repair the harms of gross federal nonfeasance but usefully up the ante in the struggle to thwart the Left’s accelerating efforts to unmake America. In other words, a course of action that could materially improve public health, safety, and welfare while also firing a powerful salvo across revolution’s bow.
We propose calling this the doctrine of “protective resumption” whereby, finding that the national government through negligence, inability, or malice had ceased to meaningly perform one or more of its core functions—thus endangering the health, safety, and welfare of a state’s citizens—the states either severally or acting in concert among themselves, could resume their core police power functions without being preempted by federal law. The states, it should be stressed, would not thereby be taking over national government functions, they would only be shielding, via recognized police powers, their citizens from the effects of these functions’ abandonment. This distinction is important since it would place limits both on what the states could do and how long they could do it. Moreover, it would not allow them to exercise any powers specifically denied the states by the U.S. Constitution.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/bangladesh-muslim-mob-vandalizes-and-loots-hindu-ashlyn-davis/
More on this story: days after a Hindu temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ganesh was vandalized and burned down in Bhong city, Pakistan, another South Asian Islamic country, the erstwhile East Pakistan, has followed the same line of bigotry. We must give credit to Bangladesh for outdoing its former masters and taking down not just one Hindu temple, but four.
On Friday night, a group of Hindu women in the Shiali village of Rupsha Upazila in Khulna took out a religious procession from the local Purba Para temple and were headed for the Shiali crematorium. They had to pass by a local mosque to reach their destination, and crossed paths with an Islamic cleric, who registered his objections to the procession. This spiraled into a heated altercation between the Hindu devotees and the Muslim cleric. As it was already past 9PM, both parties decided to take the matter up with the police the following day.
However, on Saturday, August 7 between 3 and 6PM, a mob of Muslims launched an ambush attack on the Hindus of Shiali village. Hundreds of Muslims joined this frantic mob and entered the village armed with locally-made makeshift weapons including cleavers, hatchets, and axes. Their first target was the four major Hindu temples in the village; they were desecrated and torn down in minutes by the mob. Six smaller temples in the proximity became the next targets, and were razed to the ground as well. Idols of Hindu deities at the Govinda Temple, Shiyali Purbpara Durga Temple, Shiyali Purbapara Hari Temple, and Shiyali Mahasmashan temple were crushed to bits.
But the ire of the Muslim mob was not placated by the desecration of these Hindu temples alone. They shifted their ire to human beings and their livelihood. Dozens of shops belonging to the Hindus, including Ganesh Mallick’s drug store, Sourav Mallick’s tea and grocery store, Srivastava Mallick’s grocery store, Anirban Hira’s tea shop and his father Majumdar’s shop situated in the local marketplace, were plundered; over fifty-five Hindu houses were ransacked and emptied of valuables. The jihadi crowd also looted milching cows and other cattle belonging to the Hindus, which provided a source of nutrition as well as income to the hapless people from the marginalized community. Numerous unarmed Hindu villagers were assaulted and suffered severe injuries in this clash; many were brutally beaten when they tried to defend their shops from the jihadist plunderers.
The mayhem lasted for hours. Once the thirst for Hindu misery was satiated, the mob decided to disperse. By this time, some Hindus had informed the local police, and some had formed groups to confront the jihadis. However, Shaktipada Basu, the president of the Rupsha Thana Puja Celebration Parishad, accuses the police of chasing away the Hindus when they first went to complain to the Shiali Camp police station. “Police of the Shiali camp resisted the Hindu villagers when they wanted to chase the attackers during the attack,” alleges Basu.
Khulna Superintendent of Police Mahbub Hasan informed the media that a heavy police contingent had been deployed in the area of clash and claimed that the unrest had been brought under control. “We are working with local people,” Hasan briefed the press.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/legally-flawed-eviction-moratorium-richard-l-cravatts/
When queried last week about the CDC’s controversial eviction ban, President Biden seemed intransigent concerning ending the moratorium protecting the nation’s renters. Even though, as he admitted, “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” the administration was going to leave the onerous regulations in place, since, as the President put it, “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”
At issue is a moratorium on evictions put into place in 2020 by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, with the intention of limiting the spread of COVID-19 by helping renters stay in their homes. Although the CDC’s order contended that “The ability of these settings to adhere to best practices, such as social distancing and other infection control measures, decreases as populations increase,” critics of the order—including the Supreme Court—have contended that the CDC lacked the authority to impose regulations affecting intra-state relationships between landlords and tenants—commerce overseen by states, not the federal government, and that the order was not only an overreach by the CDC but was unconstitutional as well by violating Fifth Amendment protections. By compelling owners of private property to forgo the collection of rents and lawful evictions, the CDC, as an agent of the government, was implementing what is deemed to be an unlawful “taking.”
The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment specifically states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation,” and while takings are generally of the type when the government takes physical possession of the property (for instance, through eminent domain for a public works project), unconstitutional takings also apply to regulatory takings, as well. In these cases, even though the government does not take physical possession of a private property, the property owner is denied his legal rights of ownership, even if the taking is temporary—as in the case of the eviction moratorium here.
Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh seems to have acknowledged that the moratorium should not, and will not, prevail after legal challenges when he wrote in his decision that, while the moratorium could be extended long enough for all stakeholders to get their affairs in order prior to its expiration, any further regulation had to come from Congress and from individuals states, not from a federal agency like the CDC without authority for such broad national policies affecting landlords and renters nationwide. “In my view,” Kavanaugh wrote in June, “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/cuomo-quits-over-cuomosexuality-gets-away-daniel-greenfield/
All over Southeast Asia, there are women and little girls bent over sewing machines in sweatshops churning out “Cuomosexual” t-shirts that no leftist letch will buy anymore.
You can’t buy a Confederate flag on Amazon, or a copy of a book challenging transgender identity, but the site is littered with $20 “I Identify as Cuomosexual” t-shirts and rainbow Cuomosexual face masks. Like Andrew Cuomo, his Cuomosexual crap has no future.
Now all the Cuomosexuals know just what identifying as a Cuomosexual really means.
You can use your $285 “Cuomo for President” cashmere sweater to wrap the shattered pieces of your “Crushin’ on Cuomo” coffee mug, and use it to mug somebody on 5th Avenue.
Last year, former Governor Cuomo endorsed tearing down President Teddy Roosevelt’s statue. Now his cult of personality icons are the ones falling on his walk of shame out of Albany.
Not so long ago, they worshiped him.
The Television Academy gave him an Emmy, the Washington Post compared him to FDR, and a poll showed him leading the field of potential presidential candidates in 2024.
Now it might as well be 2224.
Andrew Cuomo has many post-resignation career options. Former Governor Eliot Spitzer briefly became a CNN host, former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is a meditation teacher, and Anthony Weiner sells countertops. If Cuomo applies himself, he too can sell countertops.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/covid_hysteria_vaccine_passports_where_its_all_leading.html
To those of you scratching your heads about what is going on in America today, what with violence in the streets aided by local politicians, quitters like Naomi Osaka treated as hero(ine)s, woke corporations insulting their customers, China apologists (like the NBA) hiding in plain sight, COVID hysteria fanned by politicians and the media, white-hatred (e.g., 1619/CRT) being promoted by liberal white women, and P.C. everywhere…we have to ask what it all means.
What it all means is getting illegals the vote. The rest is head fakes.
Consider the following: if you were a liberal politician and your goal were permanent liberal big government, wouldn’t the quickest route be (aside from voter fraud) to get illegal aliens the vote? With anywhere between 20 and 40 million illegals in the U.S. today, that goal is now in sight, using COVID as an excuse, while not letting this “crisis” go to waste (per Rahm Emanuel).
The first step toward this goal is to terrify everyone with COVID horror stories, cherry-picked data, and so-called “expert” guidance and testimony. This gaslighting has already been accomplished by leftist politicians, the CDC, Big Media, and Big Tech. Next, vaccine passports will be mandated to “protect” everyone and coerce the unvaccinated. This step has already been floated by the Biden administration, which means that it is deep into vaccine passport polling and planning. After the vaccine passports are distributed, someone (a leftist, of course) will naturally suggest that they be used for voter identification, using this to counter Republican accusations of rampant voter fraud that were engendered by the 2020 elections. After vaccine passport distribution, tens of millions of new voters will magically appear in red and purple states to flip them blue.
My suggestion is to resist vaccine passports vigorously so this unhappy chain of events will never occur. Luckily, many minorities feel the same way, which is why the Biden administration has created what could be called a Civilian COVID Corps (transforming into AOC’s Civilian Climate Corps later) to convince this important liberal voting bloc to vaccinate.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/trading_with_the_enemy_is_wrong.html
The Navy and Marine Corps have kicked off their two-week Large Scale Exercise 2021, a massive effort that spans 17 time zones, to test their vision of how to conduct war on a global scale against peer competitors. Such an operation is reminiscent of the Cold War, but then we are in another Cold War facing a coalition of powers who want to dominate the international order. That coalition is lead by the People’s Republic of China with the strong support of a Russia seeking to recover from its defeat in the first Cold War. Both powers have been strengthening their ties with Iran at the intersection of Europe and the Indo-Pacific. In response, the U.S. has reenergized its alliances and expanded them, most importantly in partnership with India. The Trump administration recognized the danger of renewed Great Power competition, and the Biden administration is continuing many of its policies because the change in the White House has not changed what is going on in the outside world.
The most prominent flashpoint is the South China Sea, where China has created artificial island bases backed by a naval buildup to support its claim to imperial sovereignty over this vital maritime realm in defiance of international law. China and a U.S.-led coalition are both conducting rival air and naval exercises in this sea demonstrating their ability to defeat the other. Beijing has complained to the UN that “The US has been stirring up trouble out of nothing, arbitrarily sending advanced military vessels and aircraft into the South China Sea as provocations.” Washington is not acting “unilaterally.” Great Britain has sent is new Carrier Strike Group to the region. Dutch and German frigates are there, along with a French task force to show NATO unity. Beijing’s state media outlet Global Times made a direct threat “We advise US allies to be particularly cautious…They must be bluntly told that if their warships rampantly behave as the U.S. military does in the South China Sea, they will more likely become an example of China defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity — just as a popular Chinese phrase indicates: To execute one as a warning to a hundred.”
India has sent a task force into the South China Sea as part of the Quad, which includes Japan and Australia along with the U.S. China claims to have the largest fleet of warships in the world. Beijing’s full spectrum military buildup and militant rhetoric have been the real provocations that has brought forth a powerful response.
Yet, in the midst of this very evident confrontation that actually goes back to the Obama administration “pivot” to Asia which saw the escalation of naval exercises during 2010, corporate lobbyists in Washington are still pushing for closer commercial ties with the Beijing regime. On August 5, nearly three dozen business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Semiconductor Industry Association sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, claiming Beijing had met “important benchmarks and commitments” in the so-called Phase One agreement negotiated by President Trump, including “opening markets to U.S. financial institutions and reducing some regulatory barriers to U.S. agricultural exports to China.” The aim of the letter was to cut tariffs and expand trade with China while ignoring its aggressive behavior in the larger context of world affairs.
The letter purposely missed the real point about the “trade war” with China, which is to correct past “public policy choices” which President Biden has accurately blamed for allowing American firms to create “fragile supply chains across a range of sectors and products. Unfair trade practices by competitor nations and private sector and public policy prioritization of low-cost labor, just-in-time production, consolidation, and private sector focus on short-term returns over long-term investment have hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, siphoned innovation from the United States, and stifled wage and productivity growth.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8612317/Cook-County-prosecutor-Kim-Foxx-dismissed-25-000-felony-cases-including-Jussie-Smollett.html?ito=amp_twitter_share-top
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped charges against 29.9% of felony defendants during her first three years in office, the Chicago Tribune found
Foxx’s case dismissal rate is more than 35% higher than that of her predecessor
The state’s attorney told the Tribune that its analysis gave an ‘incomplete picture of her commitment to keeping the public safe’
She said she’s dropped cases against low-level, nonviolent offenders so prosecutors can focus on violent crimes
But data showed Foxx’s office has dismissed cases involving murder, shootings, sex crimes and serious drug offenses at a much higher rate than her predecessor
Foxx gained notoriety last year when her office dropped felony charges against Jussie Smollett, the actor accused of staging a racist, anti-gay attack on himself
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/10/apocalypse-porn/
There’s a new trend online. Forget blacking out your Instagram page to show how much you care for black lives. Never mind bigging up your pronouns. That’s so last month. Right now it’s all about apocalypse porn. Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change. This is the world our greedy, destructive species has created. This is the hell that awaits us all if we don’t stop taking cheap flights to Malaga and drinking from plastic straws. ‘Welcome to global warming!’, as one observer of the Greek fires quipped.
Apocalypse porn is everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper or switch on a tablet right now without being confronted with images of fire and floods. Plagues of locusts can’t be far behind. The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.) Footage of Greeks sailing away from a raging fire has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. ‘Very apocalyptic’, said one journalist. Not just apocalyptic, but really apocalyptic. We’re beyond Revelations – this is worse.
The recent European floods are spoken of as warnings to mankind, as if Nature were a sentient force reprimanding us for our hubris and folly. Footage of flooded German and Belgian towns was marshalled by armies of virtue-signallers to the cause of ‘raising awareness’ about man’s self-made apocalypse. ‘How many dead will we accept [before we act]?’, asked one Belgian scientist. Change your ways or people will die. Images of flooded Tube stations in London were instantly held up as glimpses of the future, warnings from the generation of the 2050s who will live short, hot, suffering lives if we don’t achieve Net Zero in the next five years. It all echoed leading green thinker Mark Lynas’s medieval sermon several years back – that if humanity doesn’t change its ways, then ‘Poseidon [will be] angered… his wrath will know no bounds’.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/governor-andrew-cuomo-resignation-economic-regulation-taxes-minimum-wage-fracking-nuclear-11628632159?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation was memorable, but we shouldn’t forget his policy legacy. New York state was slowly emerging from the Great Recession when he was elected governor in 2010. Amid massive job losses and collapsing revenues, he took office in 2011 with a focus on rebuilding public finances and promoting economic growth.
During his first term, he positioned himself as a Clintonesque centrist with a pro-business tilt. He’s still often called a moderate, but the label has been inaccurate for years.
By the start of his second term, in 2015, Mr. Cuomo was promoting “economic justice” in the form of a $15 minimum wage, initially restricted to New York City. In his third term, starting in 2019, he sprinted to the left and loudly proclaimed his progressive credentials as a new generation of left-leaning Democrats assumed control of the formerly split Legislature.
Things were different a decade ago. “New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation,” he declared in his 2011 State of the State address. “Our young people will not stay. Our business will not come. This has to change.”
Within six months of taking office, Mr. Cuomo closed a $10 billion budget gap, drew a hard line in contract talks with state employee unions, and persuaded lawmakers to approve a strict 2% cap on annual growth in property taxes. The cap doesn’t apply to New York City, but it’s still among the most significant limited-government reforms ever enacted in the Empire State.
But Mr. Cuomo failed to back up the tax cap with the relief from state mandates that local governments need to manage efficiently. Instead, after a few months of tough talk, he consistently pandered to public-sector labor unions. He nurtured a close alliance with New York City’s overfed building-trades unions, whose generous contracts and inefficient work rules are largely responsible for New York’s excessive capital infrastructure construction costs.
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