Category: Politics

I thought spring was here to stay. Afternoon temperatures in the 60s and 70s. Dogwood blooming, cherry tree blooming, forsythia has bloomed and left, everything else is on the verge around the hillside. Across the land, idiots are in full bloom too but you knew that just by watching whatever amount of news you can bear.

When I got up this past Saturday morning it was snowing. Snow on a blooming dogwood is something I have not seen. I quickly checked the headlines to see if almost President Al Gore was holding a global warming conference anywhere nearby in what was once coal country. Blizzards follow him around. Divine intervention I am thinking. He was not here, but he was somewhere and if it is snowing after I already mowed the lawn three times it is his fault.

Friends have hinted to me that my thinking has tilted too much to the conservative side. In an attempt to balance out my life, I buried some bleeding hearts up in the back yard. Maybe planted is a better choice of words.

The President added Hiroshima to his apology tour. America has really screwed up the world. It must be depressing leading a nation that you despise.

What do you make of the Panama papers? Shall we start a pool for which Republican presidential candidate is going to be discovered inside those papers right in the nick of October? In politics there are no coincidences. There is already Clinton connections mentioned, but nothing to see here according to a lack of media interest.

Guccifer the Romanian hacker is in America. Turns out he hacked Sidney Blumenthal’s emails including exchanges between Hill and Sid. And the FBI is interested. We hear a lot about the contested convention predicted for the Republicans. Do not be surprised when the Democratic convention is a nominating convention for Joe Biden or John Kerry or another woman.

The delegate business is looking a little shady these days – on both sides. It is looking more like the votes cast in the primary elections do not mean a hill of beans. Writing your own rules to keep the power within the club has always been the case. It has just taken Donald Trump to expose it to the average American voter who had not a clue. The party cartels are going to pick the candidates to shove down the throats of Americans and they do not care if we come out and vote or not. Just as they do not care about who becomes President. Because no matter whom it ends up being, as long as it is a card carrying member of the club the games continue as usual. It is looking more like racketeering than government. I believe the hatred for Trump comes from the knowledge that he knows who paid who to do what for whom over the years and they know he knows.

They seem to think that it will always be as it is. It will not. At some point majority America, those who actually believe in America, will stand up.

How about slick Willie. He spoke the truth to the Black Lives Matter group. It probably caused Hillary to have an extra shot or two of bourbon. Did you ever notice how happy and natural she appears in those pictures of her holding a shot of whiskey up and smiling at it like it is her best friend. I am guessing she does not drink Gentleman Jack single blend Tennessee sour mash. But you never can tell.

I love these groups of protestors showing up at Trump rallies. These people, some well-heeled and educated, some paid protestors and some union thugs, and some stupid Bernie’s kids are first to call Trump Hitler or a fascist. Just shows their level of ignorance. Fascists demand that there be no other opposing view and it was Hitler’s brown shirts that used the tactic of disrupting rallies of political opponents.

I saw where the President and Vice President were speaking about how ready this country is for a woman President. Maybe that is why the President pre-pardoned Mrs. Clinton by publicly declaring her innocence. But he and crazy Uncle Joe may have had in mind Mrs. Obama or Pocahontas Warren.

I think maybe I need to go plant some more bleeding hearts.

© 2016 J. D. Pendry All Rights Reserved

A gay couple walks into a Christian deli/bakery in Texas wanting to order a wedding cake and associated catering services, and the owners refuse on the basis that their strongly held religious beliefs consider homosexuality an abomination and thus forbid their participation. What’s likely to happen next? We all know that the local media, tipped off by gay activists who were just waiting for the expected response, will immediately pick up on the story and present it as another example of homophobia and discrimination against members of the gay community. The local lead will be grabbed by the national liberal media and whipped into a froth of indignation, setting the scene for a federal discrimination lawsuit based on violations of the gay couple’s constitutional right to equal treatment as American citizens.

At the same time as that gay couple walks into the bakery, just a couple of doors down the street, a medically retired sergeant first class, an Army infantryman with a Purple Heart earned for the loss of his lower right leg during the last of his multiple combat tours in the Middle East, walks into a national coffee chain with his son and orders two large black coffees, no cream, no sugar, no nothing but coffee. The barista notices the .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol holstered on the sergeant’s hip and tells him he must leave, as no firearms are permitted on the premises, as a sign by the entrance clearly explains. The sergeant apologizes for failing to notice the sign, and he limps out quietly, followed by his bewildered young son. No gun rights protesters are waiting outside to begin a loud demonstration, no local TV station has been alerted, and there most certainly will be no high-publicity lawsuits filed.

The bakery owner feels that the freedom to practice his religion without government interference allows him the freedom to deny his services to the gay couple who feel they are being deprived of their right to equal treatment under the law. The retired soldier is exercising his clearly stated constitutional right to keep and bear arms. The coffee corporation is enforcing a corporate policy allowed under Texas law, but less constitutionally certain, to ban the presence of firearms on its premises, a right fortified by a long tradition of property rights.

Conflicting rights in both cases – yet in only one will one side be taken by the media and used to portray the other as a shameless bigot and denier of constitutionally guaranteed protections, bringing the obvious question:

If not for the determined gay activists and a complicit media, is there any real difference in terms of our constitutional rights? Does the biblically inspired local baker have a lesser right to conduct his business as he sees fit than the corporate coffee sellers who impose their policies based on a liberal corporate culture reflective of the CEO’s personal bias against firearms? What would be the result if the baker put a sign in his window politely explaining that his religious beliefs prevent him from participating in gay marriage ceremonies? Is that at all different from the corporate coffee shop saying that you must suspend your constitutional right to keep and bear arms to enter these premises because our owner dislikes guns?

You tell me…

Crossposted at American Thinker

If you’re tired, like me, of being bulldozed by political correctness, especially when it applies to gays and the transgendered, then you just have to cheer for North Carolina Governor, Pat McCrory, for standing up to the corporate extortion against his state for passing commonsense legislation to deal with the issue of who can use what bathrooms. Unlike Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal, who caved in to the out-of-state pressure and betrayed his constituents, McCrory showed some spine and nicely told all the corporate extortionists where they could stick their threats of jobs and tax losses.

This is a phenomenon taking place all over that part of America where common sense still rules the thinking of those ordinary citizens fed up with the growing lunacy of political correctness. This is especially true in those situations where the lesbian/gay/whatever coterie seem hell-bent on forcing their behaviors on communities that have long held them unacceptable. The problem arises when gay activists are unwilling to settle for resigned, indifferent acceptance of their proclivities, instead becoming insistent on forced public acknowledgment and acceptance of such issues as gay marriage and restroom access. This they do by taking aim at businesses operated by those whose faith precludes their participating in nuptials that are an outright abomination according by their religious tenets or opening public restrooms used by their daughters to whatever confused gender-bending male arbitrarily decides he’s female.

As for Christian businesses, walking through the door of the targeted baker, florist, or photographer, the gay activists know full well they are going to be refused. That is entirely the point, for the refusal of service for a gay social event sets into motion a process of legally lynching those business owners who fall victim to this form of social intimidation. The usual course is mass negative media exposure closely followed by civil legal action from gay activist organizations to compel the targeted business to surrender their religious beliefs and provide services. Their only other option is to close their doors.

Here’s my conundrum: if it is immoral, even criminal or civilly liable for these mom-and-pop Christian businesses to deny services based on their fundamental beliefs, why is it not also immoral or legally actionable for large corporations to refuse their services to the citizens of those states where those who govern choose to pass legislation to protect the religious freedoms of their citizenry?

If I’m a huge professional football fan living in Atlanta and the NFL people remove my city from contention for a near-future Super Bowl because they feel my state is discriminating against the transgendered, am I not the victim of discriminatory business practices on the part of the NFL? What about those organizations and corporations that cancel annual conferences and business meetings because of the actions of my state legislature? Aren’t these big corporations refusing to do business with my state simply because they consider our practices immoral, just as those bakeries, florists, and photographers see gays as immoral? Other than scale, I see little difference.

Okay all you smart readers: Tell me where I’m wrong.

Crossposted at American Thinker

It would be no surprise at all if, even before the enactment of our nation’s 16th Amendment, Democrats had been anticipating the value of a federal income tax as a club to smite their political enemies. While their most vocal proponent of the issue, William Jennings Bryan, didn’t include that particular consideration in his compelling exhortations to enact such a tax, it is not difficult to visualize that perennial presidential candidate (1896, 1900, 1908) offstage in a smoke-filled room offering other Democrat leaders this enticement: C’mon guys, when I’m president we’ll be able to hammer the Republicans with tax audits until they do our bidding.

Not to say that abuse of taxing authority is limited to Democrats; Richard Nixon reportedly used the federal tax audit to punish political enemies who angered him enough. But there’s no question that it has been the Democrats under Barack Obama who have made taxing power a weapon of mass destruction.

Granted, in the most recent IRS scandal it was a passive use: the withholding of tax-free status from conservative political organizations. The damage from that is impossible to assess, although the coast-to-coast fallout could be that we are now enduring a second four years of Chicago Way corruption of our legal system. The fact that the milquetoast members of the Republican majority in Congress have consistently failed to follow through on their investigations and pressure for indictments has only emboldened Democrats nationwide.

All of this brings us to this situation in Seattle, where a liberal Democrat city council has enacted an extortionate tax specific to guns and ammunition, a flat $25-per-gun purchase and anywhere from two cents to five cents per round of ammo. The tax is having its desired effect, driving gun stores out of Seattle to surrounding suburbs. That this tax on citizens’ Second Amendment rights will have any true impact on the number of household guns in Seattle is, like most liberal endeavors, laughable. It will, however, raise both prices and demand in Seattle’s criminal black market, and it’s a dead certain fact it will send jobs and the taxes that were already being collected from these gun stores to other, more sensible municipalities.

But the real lesson to be learned here is that while Democrats deny and dismiss the destructive effects of higher taxes on American industry, instead attributing manufacturers’ moves to offshore locations to corporate greed and an unwillingness to pay unionized workers a fair wage, Seattle’s Folly demonstrates full well that they know better. Here they have deliberately weaponized their taxing authority to target one small, specific business type for no other reason than to force it to do precisely what they deny giant American corporations are doing: move to a less tax-oppressive environment. The only difference is that this time, the Democrats in power view the move-out as a desirable outcome.

When the Democratic Party finally expires from this metastasizing corruption, the carcass will no doubt have the green bile of hypocrisy oozing from every orifice.

Crossposted at American Thinker