Rebane's Ruminations

A Different and Dangerous Impeachment

George Rebane

‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico.  He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left.  But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).

Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments.  Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out.  He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare.  The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers.  Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.

Democrat Public Education – The gift that keeps taking

George Rebane

Public schools are a government institution, and its teachers are civil servants and public sector workers.  As FDR warned more than 80 years ago, unionizing public sector employees is a very bad idea, and that has proven to be true over the intervening generations.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in what has happened in our unionized public schools over the last half century.  The Democratic party has filled our classrooms with undereducated leftwing ideologues and propagandized union flacks, which accurately characterize the aggregate of America’s classroom cadres of ‘educators’.

What they have produced in this interval is an innumerate citizenry with minimal critical thinking skills and a knowledge base to match – more than one in four Americans do not know the structure of their governance and the three branches of our government, never mind knowing what each does.  Internationally, we are at the bottom of the barrel of developed first world countries, and this considering that we are still the world hegemon and the second largest economy on the globe.  Our youth’s academic achievement, upon which our future and wellbeing rest, is poor and stagnant, while we watch teachers strike ‘for the children’(!?) demanding ever more money for their pension funds, administrative staffs, and unions.

Take a look at the most recent PISA test scores just released.  The Asian countries, led by Red China, are eating our lunch in each of the three critical academic categories – reading, math, and science.  (more here)

All this while daily, without being aware, we relinquish more freedoms to the state in the false promise of more prosperity and security.  The Left has been faithfully following Lenin’s dictum on education, and achieving the predicted results.  We now have an electorate half of which consists of a cohort of compliant slogan reactive sheep, ideologically herded by a lamestream media totally beholden to and the hand servant of the Democrat Party.  It is difficult to believe that our poor schools are just the natural result from being staffed by two generations of incompetent teachers.  But it is easy to cite reams of evidence from their own ‘educational literature’ that the product our academic factories produce is the result of a purposive and cynically conspiratorial effort by the Left.  And all this for the objective of weakening America internally through compliant collectivism so as to eliminate it as an impediment to globalization.

Once more we turn to Thomas Jefferson – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  The Democrats live by it, and the Republicans don’t have a clue.

Consciousness and uploading your mind

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.]

OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual stuff, and just take the secular humanist look at immortality which, since the sci-fi novels of the 1950s, has focused on ‘uploading’ the contents of your brain into some super-computer, or a phantasmagorical robot, or cyborg which then in principle can live forever.

Dropout Derby - 3dec19

George Rebane

It's a relief to see that no-count Kamala Harris get out of the race.  To indicate the level of politicians who cause grief to California, given Hillary or Kamala, I would take Hillary in a heartbeat.  And now that the Christmas season is upon us, I expect a lot more of the Dem clown car occupants sans traction will start hitting the silk.  Imagine dragging your staff through the holidays, having to go to your campaign offices, and knowing the handwriting is on the wall - this campaign ain't goin' nowhere nohow.

Sandbox - 3dec19

[From the last Sandbox I will repeat my 920am invitation.  'Paul, you guys continue going after the low-hanging fruit on Trump. Why don't you instead take on something more meaningful to Americans? - your assertions that tax rates don't affect economic behavior, or 'border walls don't work', or more regulations encourage commerce and entrepreneurial activity, or capitalism has created all the world's ills, or bigger government taking on a bigger share of the economy is better, or people are indifferent to living among others more like themselves, or ... .  There are so many things you guys believe in that you should really attempt to substantiate instead of displaying your ongoing spasms of TDS.' gjr]

Dropout Derby - 2dec19

George Rebane

Sharp-eyed readers informed me that I missed former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak dropping out yesterday.  That has been corrected in the illustrated data below.  Gov Bullock of Montana withdrew today; another Democrat who was unclear on the concept and fates of those unknowns who entered the party's 'Y'all Come!' candidacy for president.  In our Dropout Derby the Estonian Fox has jumped into the lead again.  Many thanks for the correction.

 

Democrats’ Big Lie #4688 – Voter Suppression

George Rebane

Voter fraud in America is real and bipartisan according to evidence presented by the Heritage Foundation.  To combat voter fraud, states have instituted “voter identification laws and programs to clean up wildly inaccurate voter rolls to help verify that only eligible individuals are voting, and that they are casting ballots in the jurisdictions where they actually reside.”  California recently had to be taken to court to start removing over 5 million inactive registrations from its voter rolls.  Pew reported back in 2012 that “one out of every eight voter registrations were inaccurate, with 2.8 million people registered in two or more states.”  And across the country, hundreds of counties record more registered voters than they have residents.

These visible and verified instances of voter and voting data are “just the tip of the iceberg” of vastly more cases of people voting fraudulently.  But for some reason known only to our legal beagles, manifest voter fraud is hard to prove in our courts.  However, most revealing, re the bipartisan argument, is which party is in perpetual denial that significant voter fraud is happening, and overwhelmingly opposed to combating the country’s efforts to field fair and honest elections.  (more here)

And the Democrats are equally busy on the other side of this coin.  Here their longstanding and comprehensive propaganda involves keeping alive and growing where possible, the message that Republicans are eternally engaged in the suppression of minority voting.  (Now this is really rich, coming from the party that invented minority voter suppression and practiced it for generations, and continues doing it to this day while hiding under the Alinsky argument.) 

This is a really cynical Big Lie that the Democrats direct toward the most vulnerable and least educated minority constituents who have demonstrably minimal critical thinking skills and even less motivation/ability to discover the truth for themselves.  Instead they listen to existential racists like Mad Max Waters, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.  These Democrat demogauges, echoed by their lackey lamestream, continue to lie to their black and Latino voters that there exists an active and effective national program of minority voter suppression carried on by Republican conservatives.

Their latest ‘evidence’ of this is the defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams who refused to concede defeat because of supposed “voter suppression”.  Again, nothing of the sort happened.  What really defeated Abrams was the increase of black voter registrations from the last midterm which “actually topped white voters in percentage terms, 68.4% compared with 66.8%.”  When you really dig into the actual voting data on nationwide black and Hispanic turnout – “despite voter ID requirements, registration checks, and limits on early voting in some states” – you see the real percentage increases as cited by the US Census Bureau.  The details are even more damning to the Democrats, whose Big Lie actually does cause many minorities to believe that their votes won’t matter anyway because, out of frustration, many of their neighbors will not vote.  And such big lies continue keeping minorities compliant and on the plantation where Democrat political leaders unanimously believe they belong.  (more here)  

These are the kind of Democrat big lies we will keep covering as the Left continues their attempt to focus the country’s attention on Trump’s foot-in-the-mouth braggadocios and impeachment circus, instead of his accomplishments which daily benefit almost all Americans.  And as always, I invite progressive readers to present substantive arguments/data that counter the above commentary.

Scattershots – 29nov19 (updated 30nov19)

George Rebane

Recent correspondence with Russ Steele - astute observer of the human condition, especially in Washington DC and Sacramento – brings to mind some thoughts about two particular items.

Gov Gavin Newsome confirms his scumbag politician credentials by issuing an executive order “meant to sharpen the state’s focus – and its spending – on global warming.”  Basically, his new meddling in California’s already maximally meddled public funds is going to redirect new tax receipts and fees from fuel and vehicle registrations on the progressive environmental agenda to further punish California’s economy.   He is bamboozling Californians by not using the money to fix and maintain our state’s dilapidated roadways, and he’s reaching into the drastically underfunded government employee pension funds (CalPERS, CalSTRS, UC) to induce them to further neglect their mandate  to max investment returns by redirecting existing funds to vehicles that serve the progressive propaganda narratives.  These are some of the many ongoing ‘bait and switch’ uses for directed taxes that we have been suffering from years of Democrat controlled Sacramento.  (there's more in the paywalled SacBee) 

Michelle Obama presidential chatter ascending. (more here)  The Dems are more than desperate with their clown-car load of unwinnable candidates who daily recite and sing socialist sonnets and paeans that promise to enrich the nation’s envious – those of us who are short on education, marketable skills, money, and/or gumption.  So from the wings we have had other prominent Democrat hopefuls start throwing their hats into the ring – Bloomberg, Steyer, Patrick, … - with high hopes that the DNC and Team Pelosi will pull the plug on the clown-car and offer voters a more sane looking and centrist Democrat in November.  And then there’s Michelle.  From my perch, it is hard to identify a more unqualified and unattractive candidate for president from the longer list of still sidelined Democratic personages on the national scene.  Here is a kept woman with absolutely no accomplishments to her name.  Well, maybe two.  When wife of a rising state senator, she was placed into a hospital administration job doing ‘critical’ work for $300K a year.  It was so critical, that when she left for greener pastures on Pennsylvania Avenue, no one was hired to replace her.  And then there’s her famously bust school lunch program that crashed and burned when she was First Lady.  Yet the Dems may still consider the American electorate fundamentally stupid enough to vote for her on name recognition alone, if for nothing else than relief from alternatives such as Sanders, Warren, …, and, of course, ol’ uncle silver-tongue Joe.

[30nov19 update]  Socialists are systemic liars.  They succeed in their destruction of lands and economies only because they dangle what seems as an attractive ‘easy way out’ to the huddled and great unwashed who can always be induced to yearn for something for nothing.  Today these socialist scumbags, concentrated in the leftmost wing of the Democratic Party, are floating more free-money plans than their constituents can count.  They point to the European model and make it all look like a slam-dunk as soon as they’re voted into office.  Overwhelmingly, most of these voters know nothing of the EU’s socialist goings on.  They wholeheartedly believe Democrat candidates who “insist that America could afford a European-style welfare state if only it taxed the rich more heavily.”  However, today “Europe’s beleaguered middle class knows better.”  The bottom line, as demonstrated time and again by OECD data, is that the middle class always pays.  Why?  Because that’s where the money is; the rich don’t have enough and are mobile when you start raping them.  And when the successful leave, the pie shrinks, and governments wind up trying to wring milk out of turnips.  To give a hint of their desperation, the EU governments max tax rates at north of 50% which kick in at the workers’ median income levels.  To that are added all kinds of other “social insurance contributions” topped off with a very regressive VAT of around 21% on ALL consumer goods.  On top of that there are federal real estate taxes that heavily impact people trying to retire and the young attempting to get into their own homes.  And the most hidden of all are payroll taxes on employers which reduce the wages for all European workers. (more here)

Schwab is the latest big corporation to climb aboard the Great California Exodus express.  It is now moving its corporate headquarters from fetid and fecal San Francisco to Texas, one of the nation’s go-to states with much lower costs and much lower taxes.  Schwab management saw the Democrat handwriting on the wall twenty years ago, and since 2000 has reduced its California workforce by 90%.  In Texas Schwab’s employees “can have a higher standard of living, and more after-tax income, at the same salaries.”  Meanwhile the once golden state continues spraying its companies across the country like out of a fire hose.  The rush out is now of epic proportions, about which the lamestream is silent, as are the local leftwing lackies in denial.  In the last two years alone, “660 California companies have moved 765 facilities out of the state since 2017. This includes 10 corporations that have moved their headquarters out of San Francisco.”  And guess what, the Democrat dimwits in Sacramento split between not knowing what’s happening, and not knowing what causes it. (here)

‘Does America Still Have a Common Creed?’  Stanford historian and Pulitzerist David M. Kennedy now worries “that the country no longer agrees on a shared identity of purpose.”  Regular readers know that RR has recognized this as a fundamental factor in our approaching Great Divide, and has answered that question with a firm NO!  And in these pages, the collectivist commenters have done their part to confirm that answer which is now even shared by Prof Kennedy and more mainstream academicians and observers of the American scene.  Kennedy repeats our common theme that “societies that have deep, chronic, intergenerational ethnic differences inside the same body politic don’t have particularly encouraging histories. … The basic human instinct to prefer one’s own kind to another is impossible, I think, to eradicate entirely.” Therefore forging “a coherent society out of people who are different in their origins and aspirations is a project, and a fragile one. America’s capacity for absorption has been exceptional.”  And today that capacity is almost all but gone, with no one professing a clue as how we might retrieve it.

Commenter ‘Robert Cross’ (presumably a sackhead) provides an iconic example of today’s leftwinger in the hustings, in addition to a continuing revelation into the workings of the liberal mind.  (His 1052am comment is good place to start.)  His lexicon is limited to what his national lamestream press du jour purports it to be – to most words and concepts he references, he cannot give a cogent definition – and his attempts at logic wander in a nether world that ranges between tortured and non-existent.  For example, he evinces no knowledge of and provides no record of responding to any of the extensive and referenced points my readers and I provide when we meet in the field of ideas - to illustrate, he could have contended any of the above-raised issues, instead he launches a well-oiled personal ad hominem.  We of the conservetarian persuasion are demonstrably constant champions in various degrees of free market capitalism, personal responsibility, entrepreneurial spirit, private property, limited government, textual constitutionalism, individual liberty, and America as a sovereign nation-state and a first-world hegemon.  However, the Robert Crosses of the land, as attested by years of their writings and the policies of their political leadership, daily demonstrate their affinity for the politically correct hive mind, homogenous culture, central planning and control, conformal collective action, ever larger government, identity politics, reducing the private sector, Marxian economics, and the dissolution of America’s sovereignty into a global government.  And the most important aspect of the latter belief system is that it cannot be nor dare it be substantively defended by either its national braintrust or any of its grass roots constituents (as again demonstrated in these pages).

Happy Thanksgiving - 2019

Jo Ann Rebane: Thanksgiving reflections from my childhood 

My family lived in Alhambra (southern California) and so did my maternal grandparents, my bachelor uncle, and my paternal grandmother.  We always dressed up for any meal at my grandparent’s house, especially Thanksgiving.  Daddy wore a suit, Mama wore a nice dress, and my sister and I often wore matching dresses that my mother had sewn for us, and of course our good shoes.

Grandma Clara was a fine cook, roasted a turkey to perfection, made tasty smooth gravy, and was a master of flaky pie crust which usually had a pumpkin filling.  The dining room table was set with Grandma’s fine china decorated with little yellow flowers, thumbprint Fostoria crystal goblets, and white linen table cloth and napkins.  My Grandparents sat at either end of the table.  My mother sat between my sister and me with our backs to the buffet while Daddy sat between his mother and my uncle on the side of the table facing us. 

The Thanksgiving table scene could have been straight out of the above Norman Rockwell painting.  Grandpa Charles sat at the head of the table and to my right.  Between us was a card table where the side dishes resided.  After my father said grace, Grandpa, a butcher in his youth, conducted the ritual sharpening of the carving knife against the steel.  Then he proceeded to create perfect slices of white meat and laid them on the edge of the turkey platter.  He released the drumstick and skillfully worked between the tendons to separate the dark meat. 

My job, which I took seriously, was to serve a portion of each side onto each plate after Grandpa had placed the turkey on it and then pass it along.  Conversation centered on school and church news, sports, and my uncle’s recent experiences in the Navy.  After the meal, Grandpa excused himself to listen to the ball game on the radio (before TV).  Daddy followed his little girls into the front room to read the newspaper, or watch us color, and also read when we were older.  Clean up was conducted in the kitchen with Grandma washing every dish, pot and pan, Mama rinsed, and my uncle did the drying, often flourishing the dishtowel like a matador’s cape.  

Later the adults played canasta at a card table set up in the front room where a fire crackled in the fireplace.  This was followed by the best part of the day - for a late snack we each made our own turkey sandwiches on good bread onto which I liked to put on lots of mayonnaise, crispy lettuce, and pickles.  After that we all said good night and Daddy drove us home in the dark.

Dropout Derby - 27nov19

George Rebane

Wayne Messam (who??) drops out.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/democrat-wayne-messam-dropped-out-of-the-2020-presidential-race.html

President Warren’s War on America

George Rebane

You can only control that which you can measure.

Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren has drawn up extensive plans to reduce the United States into a socialist second world country on its inevitable slide into full blown communism, which is the ultimate goal (whether they call it that or not) of at least half of today’s long list of the party’s progressive wannabes.

Among her many-pronged assaults on our country, her recent one on changing the face of its K-12 education is worth looking at.  Its focus is closing the “black-white achievement gap”.  The Dems have had our school system by the throat since around 1970 when the Great Society’s liberal reforms started arriving in the nation’s unionized public school classrooms.  A lot of damage can be done and has been done over the last half-century. (more here) Checking performance via the established battery of standardized tests, the results have not been good for a nation desperately trying to maintain its white hat lead in the international technology competition with bad actors like communist China.  And in the area of educational achievement, the black-white gap has grown as one of its many measured dimensions.

This is more than embarrassing for Democrats who cannot reasonably place the blame on lack of education funding, or the quality of teachers, or the Left’s destruction of black middle-class culture.  So President Warren will solve the problem by doing away with all those pesky tests that measure and highlight leftwing public policy failures.  She will nationalize the so-call ‘Madison Model’ which calls for an unreasonable increase of $800B over ten years in school funding, strengthening of teachers’ unions, and putting a brake on the growth of public charter schools that outperform their unionized versions.  Oh yes, and did I mention that she will do away with all those finger-pointing tests, which according to then Madam President will “level the playing field” between the races, and “ensure that every student has access to a meaningful, high-quality public education”?

What needs to swept under the rug that covers the leveled playing field are realities like “only 34.9% of Madison students are proficient in English, well below the statewide average of 40.9%. But in Madison only 10% of African-American students are proficient in English, compared with 57.2% of white students. Only 79% of African-American students graduate from Madison public high schools within five years, compared with 94% of white students.” (more here)

Then why it’s advertised as the Madison Model is also beyond comprehension, since the Madison Metropolitan School District spends an “avalanche” of cash averaging $15,241 annually on each of its 27,000 students while continuing to be “plagued by one of the worst racial achievement gaps in the state and perhaps the country.”  Nevertheless, future President Warren has studied the model and pronounced it good, and today gives us all fair warning that she plans to similarly afflict the remainder of this fair land.

From my perch Elizabeth Warren is by far the most dangerous politician in America, not only for the grim array of cynically destructive plans she has outlined for us, but because she really has a chance of being nominated next summer as the Democrats’ candidate for president.  And she then has a chance of being elected because the country today suffers from an intellectual deficit so vast that half of our electorate tell pollsters that capitalism is bad, and they would like to give socialism a shot at making everything as good as the Democrat socialists describe in their daily dose of campaign promises.  What’s more, Donald Trump has a chance of making that a reality if, in the interval, he manages to stick his foot deeper into his mouth.

And this all could happen if the Democrats finally get some purchase on their years-long campaign to oust President Trump.  However, anyone who thinks people like Sanders, Booker, Harris, Buttigieg, have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the nomination are smoking funny stuff.  We all know that the DNC and Team Pelosi are sweating bullets about a number of serious roadblocks to 1600 Pennsylvania – beyond their clown-car of candidates, they have locked and loaded a slate of devastating public policies like Medicare for All and versions of the Green New Deal.  Their disdain for private property and wealth will require more than a back flip too far for them to countenance b/millionaire candidates like their sideline of Bloomberg, Steyer, and Yang.

And now they have a new worry, as two recent polls (rejected by progressives here) show that more than one out of three black Americans approve of Trump’s doings.  That itself can be devastating because the Dems have always considered African-Americans to see the party as their succoring liege lords as long as they stay on the plantation and vote reliably.  The reality is that “even 20 percent African-American support for Mr Trump would all but dismantle Democratic Party presidential hopes for 2020. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election with 88 percent of the black vote. That was about a six-point falloff from Barack Obama’s share of the black vote in 2012.” (more here)

So keep an eye on Pocahontas, we already know that Injun speaks with forked tongue, but her promises about the new road she wants to lead us on is way more scarier. (more here)

Democrats’ Big Lie #4687

George Rebane

That Republicans suppress minority voter turnouts continues as the perennial Big Lie by the Left, and forms a staple of how Democrats maintain their minority plantations, especially in the blighted urban areas they have controlled for decades.  Today’s election hysteria is based on the blatant lie that in Georgia “it was the voter suppression, particularly of African-American communities, that prevented us from having a (black) Governor Stacey Abrams right now” according to Corey Booker.  Fellow demogauges Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg piled on with equivalent statements – “partisan voter suppression … dictates the outcome of elections before the voting even begins.” 

Now these are the kind of real Big Lies that actually do impact peoples’ behavior, in this case convincing minorities that their votes won’t matter because the Republicans have already stolen the election.  The facts, suppressed by the lamestream, are exactly the opposite – “… Black and Latino turnout nationwide last year hit a record high for a midterm election despite voter ID requirements, registration checks, and limits on early voting in some states. Turnout increased 13.4 percentage points for Hispanics (40.4%), 11.4 percentage points for blacks (51.1%), and 11.7 percentage points for whites (57.5%) from 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

And in Georgia the purposely hidden count was shouted down by charges that qualified minority voters were “purged” from the rolls.  Another lie which “had scant impact on minority turnout: A larger share of blacks (59.6%) voted than whites (56.1%) last year. Black turnout in Georgia increased 16.6 percentage points from 2014 versus 11.3 percentage points for whites, and Ms. Abrams received 90% more votes in Atlanta’s Fulton County than the Democrat did four years earlier.”

When it comes to lying to the American public, the Left has dominated that turf for decades for the simple reason that they represent themselves as the voice of the aggrieved and wanting, defending those who can’t or won’t from those who can and do.  Therefore people must be told they are aggrieved, and public policies must fashioned to keep them wanting.  It was ever thus.  (more here)

 

Cancer Researcher at Work

George Rebane

It’s time for one of my infrequent Proud Grandpa sessions.  Granddaughter Elizabeth is a project lead doing cancer research at UCLA.  Her work continues in the fight against Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM), a particularly deadly form of brain cancer that took the life of our granddaughter and her cousin Ellen at the age of 14.  The research is part of her work toward a PhD in neurosciences.  Today she is at the Society for Neuro-oncology conference in Phoenix presenting her work, a project she actually started during her undergraduate studies, to the cancer research community.  The photo shows her with a storyboard illustrating her research and the published paper on which she is the lead author.

Elizabeth is part of our Northern Tribe from the Seattle area.  Today she lives in Westwood (home of UCLA) literally three blocks from the first apartment that Jo Ann and I rented after we married while still undergrads.  Elizabeth is the fifth in our family to get degrees from UCLA, and will be the second to earn her PhD from there.  Grandma and Papa (prenom de famille) couldn’t be prouder of this arrow into our future.

Sandbox - 22nov19

[In addition to all the other issues that need to be covered, I draw your kind attention to the 22nov19 update of the most recent 'Ruminations'.  gjr]

Millionaires Surtax on Steroids

George Rebane

Should the Democrats win in 2020, the country will suffer a spate of confiscatory tax increases on virtually every aspect of our economic activities.  One of their recent additions to taking your earnings and belongings is the Millionaires Surtax sponsored by Sen Van Hollen and Rep Beyer of Maryland.  This would levy an additional 10% tax on all earnings above $1M for individuals and $2M for married couples.  The envy-driven of the land would approve with the snort that ‘what does anyone need with so much annual income?’

What the great unwashed miss is that such a tax on income hits a wide swath of middle-class earners when they have a rare or once-in-a-lifetime income event that they have been planning and working hard for over perhaps most of their lives.  Families that have risked, built, and worked a small business or saved and lived long in an appreciated home or investment real estate that they then finally sell to establish their retirement nest egg; it is these folks who will be hit hard when they receive their income spike in any one given year.  It is that nest egg which they have planned to prudently invest to provide for their not-so-spectacular subsequent annual income stream that no longer comes close to qualifying for such a ‘millionaires surtax’.  But during that payoff year, the federal government swoops in and treats them as if that windfall represents their regular income stream.

And that is just a bit of what our socialists on steroids will do. “Democrats these days are also proposing to raise the regular income-tax rate, the corporate-tax rate, the capital-gains-tax rate, the dividend-tax rate, the death-tax and payroll-tax rates, while creating a new wealth tax, a new financial-transactions tax, a new carbon tax and a new pharmaceutical tax, even as they would repeal 100% business expensing and the 20% income exclusion for so-called pass-through firms.”  And this is just the beginning, since we haven’t mentioned new taxes on already taxed assets.  Asset taxes on what you already own are meant to take down your private property to a value level that the government thinks is the most that people should own.  Think about that. (more here)

Van Hollen, Beyer, et al, and the phalanx of Democrat presidential candidates all parrot the eternal etude to envy – “fair share”.  Their message continues that it has been the country’s wealth-producers who have caused the poor to be poor, and through their “greed” – in earning what they earn, and having what they have – are denying them “a fair shot to succeed”.  Here in their own words, “The new revenues would finance investments needed to build a more dynamic economy where everyone has a fair shot to succeed, instead of a dynastic economy based on existing wealth. And it’s supported by patriotic millionaires who agree they should do more to give others a better chance to achieve similar success.”  From Lenin’s mouth to God’s ear.

Ruminations – 21nov19 (updated 22nov19)

George Rebane

Those creative Dems on Team Schiff have again expanded the definition of ‘evidence’.  The initial expansion qualified 'allegations' for inclusion. And from yesterday’s hearings we learned that ‘perceptions’ have now joined the ranks of culpable evidence.  For those paying attention, ‘feelings’ are waiting in the wings, and are next to shoulder and again lighten the burdens of what we formerly knew as evidence.

Last night’s Democratic debate was kabuki komedy taken to a new level.  Moderated by four fierce femmes, crack journalists all, from (gasp!) MSNBC, the carefully staged candidates were repeatedly lobbed fuzzballs like, ‘We all know Trump is a brazen and corrupt scumbag, who has done this (insert allegation), and that (insert allegation), …, and even this (insert allegation); what other things can you add to his sins, and how would you be a better president if elected?’

Someone with a caring and sympathetic heart should really show Uncle Joe to the Senior Statesman Suite at a first class Baltimore assisted living center.  He doesn’t deserve what his ‘friends’ are doing to him in the public forum.

The current desperate push to to embrace preventable man-made global warming (aka climate change) is causing its science-free adherents and echo chambers to cite and regurgitate ever more ridiculous reasoning supposedly from 10,000+ “climate scientists” warning of civilization’s impending doom that can only be saved through ample applications of central planning and socialism.  A more sober assessment of all this (‘Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence’) comes from Dr Walter Williams, economics professor and syndicated columnist.  It’s definitely worth perusing with cup of coffee in hand.  (H/T to correspondent)

[22nov19 update]  The Left’s assault on education and America’s public schools continues full speed ahead.  Yesterday in Howard County, Maryland the school board redistricted school boundaries so as to cover their collective asses and once more denigrate underachieving black kids with a policy that explicitly says ‘black kids can’t learn’ - they will not benefit from better teachers and schools.  To equalize test performance scores between a mostly white district and a mostly black district, the school board redrew district boundaries so that smarter white kids will be bussed longer distances into badly performing black schools, and vice versa.  The school board doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about the kids, black or white, but only covering their political butts from criticisms of “inequality”.  So they gave up on the black kids and will now ‘equalize’ the test scores by bussing more kids longer distances, thereby winding up with lower scores from both districts which, however, will be more equal.  All this is going on while we’re pissing and moaning about the House impeachment circus, which takes up all the news bandwidth.  Try to find a SINGLE Democrat congress critter who will point out this atrocity.

Underwriting China’s Bad Behavior

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 November 2019.]

While our country is embroiled in the fight to oust a duly elected president on yet to be established evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors before voters have a chance to weigh in on the matter next November, a much more realistic threat to our fortunes and future continues to grow without any effective defense in sight.  Few Americans know of communist China’s strategic designs that include the relegation of America into a second-rate power in developing and employing the technologies that provide for our national defense and overall quality of life.  However, the few people who do follow national affairs are aware of China’s doings regarding the proprietary intellectual property they have stolen from our defense and private sectors, and how they continue on that same course today more effectively than ever before.

The Senate permanent sub-committee on investigations just released an extensive bi-partisan assessment report in excess of 100 pages titled ‘Threats to the US Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans’.  It details how the US has for years failed to counter China’s enterprises to recruit scientists, acquire research, and maintain an ongoing program that compromises the fruits of our taxpayer funded research and development programs conducted in our universities and by our private enterprises.  The investigation’s findings criticize numerous federal science-funding agencies including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Energy Department, and many more than can be listed in this short commentary.

The basic MO of the Chinese government is to operate euphemistically named “talent recruitment programs”, more than 200 of these hire both visiting Chinese nationals and American citizens, numbering over 7,000 that include Nobel laureates.  These scientists and engineers are contracted and paid to transmit the fruits of their US-based research to Chinese agencies that then disseminate the information to the Chinese military and industries which compete with US companies in international commerce.  These surreptitious technology transfers amount to plain old thievery for hire, and according to the Senate report, our failure to stop them “continues to undermine the integrity of the American research enterprise and endanger our national security.” (more here)

The main Chinese extortion of technology program is called the ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ under which researchers in America are bought and paid for the benefit of communist China, which has openly stated that it intends to be the world hegemon well before 2050, and along the way to become the global leader in science, technology, commerce, and military power.  The Thousand Talents Plan, almost all of it effectively funded by US taxpayers through its $150B annual support of federal STEM R&D appropriations, is well on its way of meeting China’s global strategic objective.

What should be even more galling to Americans is highlighted by Roger Robinson Jr, a think tank CEO and former senior director on President Reagan’s National Security Council.  In his recent article ‘Why and How the US Should Stop Financing China’s Bad Actors’, he details how the global capital markets, dominated by the United States, provide China with the direct financial support through trade and security markets that fuels their current rapid progress toward global primacy, as they violate almost every principle and value of western civilization.

Robinson states that “it is an empirical fact: the majority of American investors are unwittingly funding Chinese concentration camps, weapons systems for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and more. This is because the U.S. has no security-minded screening mechanism for our capital markets, which have roughly $35 trillion under management.”  And in the main, these investors include America’s pension funds for teachers and government employees, along with the billions of dollars from university endowments.  Investors whose talk preaches climate change and green investments, as their walk pours untold billions into the treasury of the world’s biggest tyranny and polluter.  And there’s much more to learn here than time allows, but I hope that some of this news will invite listeners to do their own research and act accordingly.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Democrats’ Big Lies #4685, 4686

George Rebane

California’s Cris de Coeur continue.  The state’s Democrats deny that the state has been steadily diving for the bottom, and has already reached it in the many sectors of fiscal and social performance.  This Big Lie is dutifully picked up by all the local leftwing lackeys who must echo the narrative out of Sacramento.  This morning we read a plaintive lament (here) in the 20nov19 Union by Alyssa Mayo, a native Californian who states, “I am as middle class American as they come.  But because I live in California, I am surviving … far from thriving.”  She goes on to list the nationally known grievances about our state, also highlighting that “every day, I watch people that I respect and love leave California.”  (In the last decade the Rebanes have bid good-bye to 11 families of friends and relatives who have struck out from California for greener pastures.)  Ms Mayo’s big concern as a “silently struggling” sufferer is shared by most, not progressively blind, that “California will get worse. I don’t know what the next downhill slide will be.  But I’m sure that it will result in losing more hard-working Americans in this state.  For those of us who remain, feebly bucketing out the ever-growing rising water, we will continue to hope for a miracle.  A miracle to save our home.  A miracle that may never come.”  My suggestion to the ‘silent suffers’ is to abandon hoping for that miracle, and instead do something radically different next time in the voting booth.  We don’t have to continue placing our futures into the hands of incompetent scumbags.  Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for a different result has never worked.

In ‘The Big Lie About Charter Schools’ David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute (an established Democrat policy think tank) debunks the bamboozle that Democrat candidates have been foisting on their constituents for at least a couple of decades.  This year the standard refrain that charter schools ‘siphon off the funds of public schools’ has reached crescendo from the throats of Dem presidential wannabes.  First, charter schools are public schools, but of the type that don’t have fatten the wallets of teachers’ union leaders and staff.  Charter schools set their own teachers benefit packages and curricula to create schools where parents want to send their children.  We all should remember that the Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association whose income is diminished by every kid who leaves a broken unionized public school.  The actual financial impact is negligible and/or minimized by various convoluted ‘make whole’ programs at the state level, but it all sorts in Osborne’s article.  The bottom line that’s a shot in the shorts for the unions is their mismanaged and mostly unfunded teachers’ pension programs.  These rely on more younger teachers paying into the expanding ponzi scheme from which the retiring teachers’ pensions will be drawn.  And that’s where the under-performing unionized schools don’t have anywhere else to turn.  So put the claims of Warren, Sanders, and even ol’ Uncle Joe about charter schools into perspective when they tell you (perhaps at tonight’s debate) that charters take money away from public schools.

Sandbox - 15nov19

[From the comment stream under 'America Askew' it's interesting to note that no one cares much about how California's electorate is composed.  California is not the only state that both invites and enables voting by the disenfranchised among us.  Please post your belated concerns under the referenced commentary, and your 'here's why I don't give a crap' hereunder.  gjr]

Scattershots – 15nov19

George Rebane

‘Schiff’s Obstruction Theory’ is a particularly revealing analysis of constitutional law and its SCOTUS interpretations by David Rivkin and Lee Casey, two well-respected lawyers with White House experience who practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington DC.  A key point in their analysis is Schiff’s reluctance to formally adjudicate his claimed evidence of presidential obstruction of justice.  “If (Schiff) were confident in his legal position, he’d want to put the case to a judge.  Yet he seems desperate not to.”  Schiff’s main and legally intractable argument circles the contention that it is an impeachable offense for a president to resist impeachment.  The detailed expansion of this important constitutional interpretation about the role of separation of powers in an impeachment process is worth knowing, especially if you’re going to debate the matter in a reasonable manner.

Teachers union leader Glenn Sacks has come up with “the cure for what ails America’s schools”.  And as we would expect, the man has not a clue about the real ailments of our public schools, for the simple reason that he has not looked in a mirror.  In his 15nov19 lecture (here) he details all of the extra “clerical work and other chores (that) sap educators’ limited time”, and provides the simplistic and proven ineffective solution – “hire more support staff” (aka new union members).  Nowhere does he even hint at how the unions have increased the teachers’ list of clerical tasks and “other chores”, and nowhere does he mention that his solution will require more funding for schools already misspending their large allocations of taxpayer funds.  And to put a ribbon on it, nowhere does he recognize that the new progressive parenting prescriptions have led to the breakdown of the students’ social contract with how they respond to teachers and how they behave toward each other and the school’s infrastructure while on campus.

‘170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data Show No Evidence of Significant Warming’ by T.K. Bjorklund of the Dept of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston presents a somewhat technical but still accessible discussion of evidence that our current climate hysteria is way overblown.  This is one of a legion of papers by learned skeptics of the politicized global warming alarums promoted to substantiate more restrictive and expensive collectivist public policies from ever larger and more intrusive governments.  I look forward to our leftwing readers’ comments that address the substance of Dr Bjorklund’s presentation.  (H/T to reader.)

America Askew – 14nov19

George Rebane

The 14nov19 Union reports (here) that an unlicensed illegal alien, Joaquin Lopez Pinto, a Honduran national, killed his passenger on Hwy 49 when he ran off the road and hit a tree.  For that he was charged with a misdemeanor vehicular homicide and driving without a license, and given a suspended sentence with two years’ probation.  We are also assured by DA Chris Walsh that “this conviction won’t affect his immigration status” since the “low-level offense would not trigger the interest of federal immigration officials.”

To at least half of Americans such cases illustrate the corruption of our judicial systems at all jurisdictional levels.  We are aghast that the sumbich was not taken into custody and deported back to Honduras.  But the other half will see nothing wrong with such a response to multiple criminal behaviors by people who don't belong here.  And that is also the half which denies that such illegal aliens regularly give rise to undetected voter fraud.  Why?  Because they point out that such voter fraud no longer is investigated or prosecuted in our land – therefore it doesn’t exist.

To register and vote in California, all you need for ID is a street address and a driver’s license, SS number, or state ID, none of the acquisition of which require proof of citizenship that is accepted on the basis of just a personal attestation.  The entire schema has been and continues as a blatant invitation to augment Democrat vote counts during elections.  And that is why it is only the leftwingers – progressives, liberals, Democrats, … - who vehemently oppose any effective procedures to vet a person’s bona fides as a legitimate franchised voter.  And the icing on this putrid public policy is that implementing any such verification procedures will somehow inhibit the participation of minorities in our elections.

The Silence of Socialists

George Rebane

This morning’s cartoon in the 12nov19 Union (filched below) was a heartening surprise.  Our leftwing political cartoonist Bob Crabb is possibly the first from his political pole to recognize the Great California Exodus frequently covered here and recognized nationally.  The state’s socialists, echoed by our local progressives, are in terminal denial that California is losing its wealth creators and attracting the country’s transfer payment dependents and illegals to keep the population growing.

This reminded me of the many other issues about which our Left does not want their voices heard – for the simple reason that they have nothing reasonable to say and their usual apologetics to their cognitively challenged core constituents sound utterly foolish in the public forum.

This country-wide sound of silence starts at the national level where congressional Democrats have totally given up legislating and are focused solely on removing a president they know they cannot defeat at the polls; most certainly not with anyone still riding in their clown car of current candidates.  Even their own brain trust has let it be known that they are seriously looking for a Plan B, someone who will have at least a snowball’s chance in hell come next November should their almost four-year effort to impeach fail.

California is already a lost cause.  Its decades of one-party rule has left one third of its population without a voice as its socialists continue to tax, price, and regulate out the last vestiges of individual effort, initiative, and enterprise.  The message from the Sacramento socialists continues to be ‘my way or the highway’.  And millions of productive Californians respond by choosing the highway as each additional and more insane than the last diktat issues from the statehouse.  Our lefties have nothing to say about that in the public debate, save that the more looney ones deny that it is happening.

On the national scene the Democrats present us with a list of freebies designed for those legions who can’t or won’t.  No one with a functioning intellect knows how to contend with or pay for the proposed Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Free College, Open Borders, Wealth Taxes, Welfare for Illegal Aliens, … .  These pages witness the response of the national Left – none want to address these issues, and instead focus only on what they consider ‘evidence’ for impeachment and President Trump’s standings in the most recent polls.

For years I have pointed out in my commentaries policy questions and principles to which our leftwing readers will not respond, and instead either ignore or side-step the relevant issue.  A textbook example of this can be found in the response from the Left to my recent commentary on income inequality. (here)

Debating relevant and substantive issues for the country has never been a strong suit of our progressive Left.  They cannot understand, let alone offer, a cogent structure of the relationships of influences and causes which impact the outcomes of a public policy.  Not being able to go deeper, they simply respond by repetition of a strong opening assertion and expect that to carry the day.  This is akin to their concept of social justice and justice in general, where widely and frequently trumpeted allegations are taken as proxies in good standing for evidence.  When we compare the national experience of our socialists’ sound of silence with what history records that has been experienced in other lands under collectivist assault, then we find that it was ever thus.

Ruminations – 8nov19 (updated 13nov19)

George Rebane

Progressives moving to suburbs and small towns after they have soiled their coastal urban areas.  Almost half of San Francisco residents now want to leave the shithole city.  These people – overwhelmingly ignorant and anti-capitalist - are like locusts and will also devastate their new homes wherever they land.  The process will not take place overnight, but it will be inexorable, especially if their states continue to adopt the disastrous policies of California.  Nevada County turning ‘blue’ is a poster child for this migration of socialists blind to socialism.   (more here, here, and here)

James Dean lives again through the magic of CGI (computer generated imagery) in an upcoming movie. (here)  In my field we foresaw the resurrection of dead, iconic movie stars almost 40 years ago when then nascent CGI technologies made their way into smaller companies that started servicing the movie and TV industries. (My own company and Hughes Aircraft were the first two west coast companies to establish the then advanced computer graphics labs for defense work.)  The current owners of these movie stars’ estates will have a chance to cash in again.  The impact of such a CGI resurrection on opportunities for today’s myriads of living actors is TBD.

University of California prepares to abandon academic meritocracy.  The Left’s constant push to compromise America’s future is making additional inroads in a field they pretty much have dominated and devastated our educational systems with their ‘social justice’ organizations now threatening to sue UC if it continues to use standardized testing (think SAT and ACT) as a basis for admittance.  As always, these anti-American warriors use the bogus argument that meritocracy discriminates against minorities.  Has anyone taken a walk on a UC campus lately?  Does anyone think that developing any realworld system - inventing an algorithm, writing a program, or building a bridge - will benefit from fewer or incompetent STEM graduates?

‘California’s Disastrous State Illustrates Limits of Progressivism’ writes Victor Davis Hanson in his lates review of how our state has been turned into a third-world wannabe in the hands of the resurrected Socialist Party of America who still use their old name of Democrats.  Unfortunately, the limits of progressivism will be achieved when California becomes a social wasteland toward which it is now accelerating.  And the local idiots still think it's only some obscure foothill codgers who hallucinate about the state's long downfall.

[10nov19 update]  My skepticism about the reality of preventable man-made global warming is nicely summarized in this article written by climate scientist Dr Jay Lehr.  It incorporates most of the factors that I have addressed over the years about the global warming issues as part of Rebane Doctrine.  (H/T to reader)

[13nov19 update]  Apropos to the above update, another Democrat has outed a previously hushed truth about the public positions and policies of progressives.  Sen Mazie Hirono (D-HI) publicly admonished Americans “to fundamentally change the way they think about climate change” – more specifically, she urged that people “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.” (more here)  This, of course, has been a major Rebane Doctrine tenet about preventable manmade global warming in these pages for years.

Sandbox - 8nov19

[So what's Bloomberg's entry into the Dems' presidential race going to do to the Dropout Derby?  Will there be a rush to the exits by those who can't get traction?  How will the current 'Final Four' go after the new white billionaire vying for office?  gjr]