You Want Civil War? Because this is how you get Civil War!

Cook County prosecutors have dropped all charges against Jessie Smollet today. 

This is a very bad thing.

Dropping the charges in such a high profile case severely undermines the Rule of Law.

There are a few foundational ideas that critical to the survival of our civilization.  The Rule of Law is one of them, and you tamper with it at great peril.

John Adams described us as a "Nation of Laws, not a Nation of Men", and as The Patriot Post notes,


A nation of laws” means that laws, not people, rule. Everyone is to be governed by the same laws, regardless of their station; whether it is the most common American or Members of Congress, high-ranking bureaucrats or the President of the United States; all must be held to the just laws of America. No one is, or can be allowed to be, above the law.

This is obviously no longer true.

Who you are now matters more than the letter of the law. 

Hillary Clinton fails to turn over official documents and does not get charged.  Jame Clapper blatantly lies before Congress and does not get charged.  Eric Holder conducts an illegal gun running operation, gets held in contempt of Congress, and does not get charged. 

We rely on the legal system to support our civilization.  We don't engage in tribal feuds, or vigilante justice. We all abide by the rulings and sentences of judges because we have one set of law to which we all agree and are all subject.

If that fundamental social contract breaks down, we are headed for very dark times.  We already see what happens when there is no legal recourse for disputes in the drug gang infested areas of  Chicago.   Gang warfare that results in endless violence and death.

If the rest of country loses faith in the Rule of Law it will bring about civil war and the end of our civilization. 

Why are Venezuelan's Starving?

I think they are starving because of socialism.

Don't believe me? Then listen to NPR.

NPR has some ideas in a recent report titled Why are Venezuelan's starving?  Given the reputation for the Leftist orientation of NPR, you might be surprised who they blame.

Spoiler alert:  They blame Hugo Chavez and his misguided economic policies.

Don't get too excited. The NPR report never uses the word Socialism, or draws a direct link between Chavez's openly socialist policies and the collapse of Venezuela.  But it does talk about the government and government policy being the reason for the collapse.

Here is a key part of the transcript:

GUILLERMO ARCAY: That's something that started to change when Chavez started implementing what he called socialism of the 21st century policies.

ZUNIGA: Guillermo is referring to Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan late president. There were several agricultural policies that Chavez put in place. The first policy was price controls. That started in 2003.

GARCIA: Yeah. And price controls are exactly what they sound like. The government forces companies to sell their products below a certain price. The price is controlled. It is capped.
So in this case, back in 2003, the Hugo Chavez government started capping the price of food. Supermarkets could not charge people more than a certain amount for the food that they bought from them. It started with basic foods, like sugar and milk. And the goal was to make food cheaper for Venezuelans. But there is a reason that price controls are considered bad economics.

Reparations: An Idea the Nazi's Would Love!

Insane ideas float around the radical Left for years before they become mainstream Democrat talking points.  The latest absurd notion is Reparations.

Economist Robert Browne wrote the ultimate goal from reparations should be to "restore the black community to the economic position it would have if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination". 

The reparations proposals are long on posturing and short on specifics.  They make grandiose claims of oppression, but never really specify the mechanics of how reparations would work.

The actual victims of slavery are long dead, and the slave owners have also passed on.  So to whom do we give reparations?  Who pays?

Does Barack Obama pay?  He’s half white, after all.  Or does Obama get paid?  His father was black and wasn’t even American.   What about Tiger Woods?  He’s half Asian, and his father is black.

What counts as ‘black’, anyway?   People are dragging Kamala Harris on Twitter because she is half Indian and half Jamaican.  What category does she fall into?

Who pays?  None of my ancestors were even in the US until the 1880’s.  Obama’s mother’s family has been here since 1850 or so, making him far guiltier of being enriched by slavery than my family.

This whole idea is insane, and there is no way to execute it without creating massive injustice in the current era as a way to make amends for misdeeds of our long dead past. 

Perhaps we should adopt the policies of the world’s leading authorities on matters racial.  The Nazi’s had the ‘one drop’ of Jewish blood standard, and perhaps the Left will leverage that intellectual framework.  That will surely help calm racial tensions!

              

If Adam Schiff is right….

The Mueller investigation is winding down with zero evidence of Russian collusion.   

If the report has not been completed, you might ask, how do we know there is zero evidence?  

Because Mueller doesn’t want to be executed for treason.

If Mueller has evidence that Trump is compromised by the Russians, and he has been sitting on it for over two years without telling Congress and the American people, then Mueller is guilty of treason by way of failing to report treason.  

So we can safely assume that there is nothing criminal in the Mueller report.

Adam Schiff is now hiring an investigator to look into 'Trump collusion' now that the FBI and the Mueller team have turned up nothing.

If Schiff’s lone investigator finds evidence that the combined resources of the FBI and the Mueller team were unable to uncover, the implications would be profound.

It would mean the Mueller team and the FBI are completely corrupt, incompetent or both.

Two-plus years of investigation by the nation’s premier investigative agency missed the clues that this random former AG employee could find working by himself?

If this 'investigation' turns up a single piece of incriminating evidence not discovered by the FBI, we should fire everyone at the FBI and start over.   And Mueller and his team should all be disbarred and have to return all the pay they received over the past two years.

The Schiff investigation is a farce, or the entire FBI is.  One or the other. 

Popular Vote Compact is a Recipe for Civil War

The United States has enjoyed a remarkably peaceful transfer of power over its 200+ year history.  The only civil war we fought was over the issue of slavery, not the fact that Lincoln was elected President.   The basis of this stable, peaceful system is the Electoral College, where there is one clear winner under one set of rules.  Yet we hear Democrats complaining that Trump is “not my President” due to the fact that Hillary won the 'popular vote', which is not actually a thing.

The Constitution provides that:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

This has provided a number of key benefits to the Republic.  We have limited the power of the masses in the cities to elect purely urban candidates and limited the impact of election cheating to the state in which the fraud occurred.  It has also reduced the general level of contention around elections.   Recall Florida during the Bush Gore election.  Endless battles over every vote and hanging chad in the state.   But the rest of country was not subject to that level of contention because once each state’s electoral votes were allocated by the election result, there was no need to continue to count votes in every precinct.   

 

The Popular Vote Compact threatens to undo all of that.  It is a scheme to re-allocate the electoral votes of individual states away from the winner of the popular vote in the state, to the winner of the popular vote nationally.  This would destroy the Electoral College and undermine a pillar of our democracy.  

This Compact is intended to allow the Democrats would avoid a situation in which, for example, Hillary Clinton lost decisively in the Electoral College, despite winning the national popular vote.

This Compact is a terrible idea that will lead to division, chaos, and perhaps, civil war.

The Compact ensures that excess votes in places like California and Chicago will have a national influence, and the amount of electoral cheating will increase.  The Machine politics and ballot harvesting schemes will now affect the national results in a way they never could before.

It will also slow the results of the election from being final.  Most Presidential elections are determined before the voters have gone to bed on Election day.  It is the rare exception that the vote counting and voter fraud lasted for weeks.  This level of chaos would become the norm, and not just in the swing states, but in every precinct in the nation.

The lawfare, cheating, ballot tampering, ballot box stuffing, vote harvesting will spiral out of control.

The worst effect, however, will be that the Compact will potentially create 2 winners. 

Imagine a scenario in which, like the last election, one candidate has a decisive win under the Electoral College and is declared the winner, but the opposing candidate wins the popular vote after 3 or more weeks of recounts and hanging chads.   The Terms of the Compact kick in, and the individual College Electors are required to switch their votes to the opposing candidate.

You create a situation in which we have one winner under the system that worked for 200+ years, and another under this scheme of dubious legality.

 

How do you resolve this impasse?  It drastically increases the chances that a candidate, a party, or the people themselves refuse to peacefully transition power to the next administration.

The Popular Vote Compact is a terrible idea that will have disastrous results for the country.  We are already an extremely divided people, and a system that creates the potential for additional uncertainty is a recipe for civil war.