Libertarian Leanings

Take Courage Mr. Graham

Michael Graham's NH Journal analysis, Three Takeaways From the NHGOP’s ‘All-MAGA’ Primary Night, misses the really big takeaway. 

The alll-MAGA New Hampshire victory has Mr. Graham complaining:

New Hampshire’s Primary System Is A Fiasco. The Granite State may be great at running the First in the Nation presidential primary, but its “last in the nation” state primary is a nightmare. Having a system where the nominee merely needs a plurality — as opposed to “50 percent of the vote plus one” — is bad enough. Because there’s no minimum threshold of votes to win the nomination, the New Hampshire GOP has three candidates headed into the fall who won less than 40 percent of the primary vote.

Yeah, so what?  All of the GOP candidates were acceptable — to me anyway.  But my sense is that the candidates who lost were more the Washington Generals type candidates than the ones who won.  For those who don't remember, the Washington Generals traveled with the Harlem Globetrotters, pretending to be their opponents but were really in on the Globetrotters' dazzling act.  Even with that, the establishment candidates would still be an improvement over Democrats.  Bottom line:  we have our candidates who've shown they can win against the odds.

The NHGOP’s Lack of Leadership Matters. It’s a cliche’ to point out that political parties don’t have the power and influence they once did. Donors want to give their money directly to candidates or specific causes, not some nebulous political organization. The days of party leaders picking and choosing candidates in backrooms are clearly over.

Is it leadership or chicanery that makes possible the picking and choosing of candidates in backroom deals?  The candidates who won campaigned.  They appealed directly to the people in face-to-face encounters, while the ones who lost seemed to depend upon last-minute ad buys for TV campaign plugs.  Good leaders listen to the people.

The ‘Electability” Argument Doesn’t Work Anymore (If It Ever Did).  On his Tuesday radio hit, Sununu also said he endorsed state Sen. Chuck Morse for U.S. Senate “first and foremost because he can win. You can’t govern if you don’t win.”

But it turns out that you also can’t win if not enough people vote for you. And telling them to vote for the most electable candidate didn’t work in 2022. Morse, 2020 nominee Matt Mowers and Keene Mayor George Hansel all ran hard on “If you vote for the other guy, he’ll get creamed in November.”

In all three cases, GOP primary voters chose the “other guy.”

We in New Hampshire are about to find out if NHGOP leaders are going to line up behind the candidates chosen by Republican voters.  They can hardly call themselves leaders if they don't.

The big takeaway:  By choosing the MAGA candidates, New Hampshire voters have said they, the voters, must be the ones who choose.  Not the party leaders in backroom deals, and certainly not the Zuckerbergs and their hundreds of millions for pliable election officials, drop boxes, and ballot traffickers.

So take courage, Mr. Graham.  Our candidates can win.  Fight for them as if our country depends on it.  It does.

Oh, the irony: "Texas and Arizona have turned us into a border town!"

Katherine Donlevy, New York Post:  DC Mayor Bowser declares public emergency over thousands of bussed migrants

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser declared the busing of migrants to the nation’s capital a public emergency Thursday as over 9,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in the district since April.

The declaration authorizes Bowser to establish an Office of Migrant Services, which will provide support and services to migrants being sent to Washington DC from Texas and Arizona.

The district will initially allocate $10 million for the creation of the new office and will seek reimbursement from the federal government, according to the announcement.

“This is what we know. The crisis at the border is not lessening. It’s getting worse,” Bowser said at a press conference, adding that she expects “hundreds of more buses” to arrive in the fall.

Read the rest here.

Still with the Emergency Use Authorizations

Meryl Nass, RESCUE with Michael Capuzzo:  The High-Speed, Bivalent Covid Boosters Are Here

On Wednesday, August 31, the FDA issued emergency use authorizations for new Pfizer and Moderna mRNA booster vaccines for covid. The next day, September 1, the CDC’s advisory committee and CDC Director approved the immediate rollout of the new vaccines. They will be administered in the US starting this week.

Fastest vaccine rollout in world history

Surprisingly, more than a month before either agency had given its okay to the entirely new formulation, the federal government ordered 105 million doses from Pfizer and 66 million doses from Moderna.

The desired composition of the vaccine had only been formally determined by FDA after its advisory committee had met on June 24, 2022. 

[...]

This is the fastest rollout of a new vaccine in world history. How did it happen? Instead of this being a tale of human grit and ingenuity, it is a tale of human weakness and recklessness. Let me ask again: how did such a rapid vaccine rollout occur?

It occurred the only way it could possibly occur: by bending the rules, creating a new regulatory playbook, and failing to obtain any human data for the new vaccines. The manufacturers did not have to go through months-long trials, and FDA did not have to pore over any human trial data, because there weren’t any. Let that sink in: the new BA.4/5 bivalent vaccines have only been tested in mice, not humans.

Unexpected international coordination

Here is an amazing fact: On the same day that the CDC gave its approval to start the vaccine program, September 1, health agencies in Canada, Switzerland and the European Union’s FDA (the European Medicines Association) also rolled out new, bivalent booster shot programs. Almost simultaneously, the UK authorized two different bivalent boosters on August 15 and September 3.

The UK has told people to expect the largest rollout in history for the new bivalent boosters. And it has started the program by promising large bonuses to doctors if they manage to vaccinate every single resident of a nursing home by October 23.

Read the rest here.

Domestic Terrorists on the Move

What will Biden call them, Extreme Ultra MAGA Amish?pic.twitter.com/Vj1QFrpuCh

— General The Extreme Trumpy MAGA King⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🇺🇸🦅 (@TheGeneral_0) September 8, 2022

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree?

Jack Phillips, The Epoch Times:  Ex-FBI Boss Says FBI Trump Search Warrant Could Be ‘Suppressed’

“I think the government would be concerned … there’s concern that the search warrant itself was overly broad from the get-go,” former top FBI counterintelligence official Kevin Brock said in a Tuesday interview, noting that the warrant allowed for the government to look for every document that was generated during Trump’s tenure as president.

“That just seems too inexcusably overbroad,” Brock told Just the News. “Now there’s indications that they (the FBI) collected much more than they were authorized to collect.”

Brock, who was promoted by former FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2004, then suggested that because of its scope, the warrant “could be suppressed … and they would lose access to anything that was collected throughout the search as a fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Read the rest here.

Twitter and Meta Worked at the Behest of Government

Bobby Burack, Outkick:  Court Orders Biden Admin to Show Records Over Alleged Censorship Coordination with Big Tech

A court ordered the Biden administration to turn over records in a lawsuit that alleges censorship coordination with social media companies.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced the following on Tuesday:

“In our lawsuit against the Biden Admin for colluding with social media companies to censor speech, the Court just ordered DOJ to produce records from key WH & HHS officials like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, the WH Press Secretary [Karine Jean-Pierre], and other.”

[...]

Last week, state attorney generals obtained emails that show other officials of the Biden administration holding monthly calls with Facebook to discuss content to censor. 

Specifically, a Biden official asked a Meta executive to take down a Dr. Fauci parody account on Instagram. Meta agreed as the account is no longer active. 

And some instances aren’t all that secretive. In August 2021, then-press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the White House identified “problematic” posts for Facebook to censor, which included posts skeptical of mRNA vaccines.

Facebook said it removed over 20 million pieces of COVID “misinformation” about six weeks later.

Read the rest here.

California

I'm seeing a LOT of Libs comparing the California rolling blackouts to the Feb. 2021 Texas Ice Storm shutdown to dismiss it...that's a deeply dishonest thing to do.

Fundamentally, TX system wasn't designed to handle cold weather. CA's WAS designed to handle heat & failed anyway! https://t.co/C5ZM8bfqVl pic.twitter.com/nm6Dcz65x1

— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) September 7, 2022

Detransitioning from Transgenderism

Christina Buttons, Reality's Last Stand:  My ‘I Would Have Been Trans’ Story

The Detransition Subreddit page is nearing 40,000 members with new heartbreaking posts being made every day from young people who have permanently disfigured themselves with “gender affirming” medical treatments. Reading detransition stories like Helena’s are emotional for me because her history leading up to transition feels so familiar, like I’m reading my own diary.

I care because I can relate to the suffering that people are feeling. When I see young people struggling the way I did, I can feel their pain like it was my own.

It wasn’t until my late twenties when I was correctly diagnosed by a psychiatrist and a therapist with Asperger’s Syndrome, and my life made sense for the first time. I finally had an explanation for why I couldn’t function at the level of my peers or make friends easily, my sensory issues with light and sound, my clumsiness, feelings of being overwhelmed by my environment, my obsessive special interests, and much more. 

[...]

Trust me, I know how difficult it is to believe that all of the leading medical institutions, mainstream media, government, and academia have it wrong. The hardest part for me was to accept that all of these institutions that had never given me reason to doubt before cannot be trusted when it comes to this issue. It sounds like some grand conspiracy theory, and in a way it is, without the ill-intent (at least for most). People, even in positions of authority, believe they are doing the right thing, but it is based on a biological impossibility and propped up by extremely low-quality evidence. 

If you’re still unsure whether my “conspiracy theory” has merit, answer the following questions:

Should men who have undergone male puberty be able to identify as a woman, compete in women’s athletics, crush the competition, and steal awards from women who have worked their entire lives to be the best in their sport? Should males with fully intact penises be admitted into women’s prisons where there have already been instances of rape and female prisoners have been impregnated? Should children be told they are transgender if they don’t align perfectly with the stereotypes of their sex? Should adolescents be given medical interventions that permanently alter the body instead of talk therapy to find out why they feel the way they do? 

If you answered no to these questions, as most reasonable people would, congrats—you’re a far right, radical, anti-LGBT, bigoted transphobe too! 

Christina is too kind, I think.  Reasonable people who answer no to those questions are also often called Republicans. Whether you consider those in authority who push transgender ideology ill-intended or well-intended, it's almost impossible to escape that there are political intentions.  How many of those positions of authority are in organizations that depend, at least in part, on federal subsidies or grants?  Those positions may even have been specifically created as a condition for funding.  With transgender ideology pushed in public schools and in the universities which benefit from federal spending, is it really such a surprise that gender affirmation has blossomed into an industry?

In April of 2016, an election year where Democrats were not expected to do well (with the exception of Hillary), Obama's DOJ filed a lawsuit against North Carolina and what was then called the "bathroom bill."

DOJ's lawsuit highlights statements by North Carolina officials in support of the law, including a statement from Lt. Gov. Dan Forest (R), who has said that a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte "would have given pedophiles, sex offenders, and perverts free rein to watch women, boys and girls undress and use the bathroom."

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the lawsuit “is about a great deal more than just bathrooms” and affects the “dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens.” Speaking directly to the citizens of North Carolina, where she herself was born and raised, Lynch said the law inflicts "further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share."

"This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation,” Lynch said. “We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry."

Yes, the time had come to trot out the old Republicans-are-bigots attack. Nothing new in that. Progressives and Democrats have been calling Republicans racist bigots for decades.

But it's nothing short of tragic that so many young girls have become the new cannon fodder for old political attacks.

Read the rest of Christina's article here.

Biden Directly Involved in Mar-a-Lago Raid

Margot Cleveland, The Federalist:  Special Master Order Reveals Biden’s Direct Involvement In Trump Raid And Six Other Bombshells

NARA’s acting archivist sent to Trump’s lawyer. That letter explained that Biden had decided to defer to the archivist’s “determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not [the archivist] should uphold the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege.’” Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall then explained in the letter that based on her consultation with the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, she had decided not to honor Trump’s claim of privilege.

While the media has previously highlighted those aspects of the letter, Monday’s order highlighted a key sentence in that same letter that went less noticed by the press: “NARA will provide the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022” (emphasis added). 

This language indicates that Biden did not merely defer to the NARA but asked the NARA to give the documents to the FBI. Of course, deferring to the NARA’s judgment equated to Biden authorizing the hand-off to the FBI, but this passage suggests a more direct connection between Biden and the investigation into Trump. 

Read the rest here.

Dems: Rules for Thee, But not for Me

Biden is now calling people who question election results a threat to democracy.

Yet he and his own party have been doing it for years.

Dems hope nobody sees these clips.

RT this video to expose them. pic.twitter.com/lIHJG6NzJM

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) September 5, 2022