President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's annual bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D.

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet.

Quote of the day - Government mandated electric cars edition

Johnathan Pearce hits the nail on the head:

In my view, the idea of making people rely on electric vehicles (EVs) and then curbing how much power they have, is a design feature, not a bug. Those of a Big Government cast of mind (most politicians) might rather like the idea of fitting “kill switches” into EVs so that a bureaucrat can disable them. By making cars costly and annoying, it also forces people to use public transport.

To dismiss the California ban on internal combustion cars as mere incompetence misses the depth of the fascist evil on display.  They want to own everybody in California, and make them submit to their will.  They simply hate freedom, and that's what cars mean.  It's what California used to mean.

Michael Bublé - I'll Be Home For Christmas

This was written in 1943, as we had 15 million men overseas staring down the Nazi and Japanese super races.  It's sadly newly fresh again, as Governors from sea to shining sea tell us not to go see our families for the Holidays - under threat of force of law.

 Somehow I suspect I know how those 15 million men would have taken the orders from Govs Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer ...

Quote of the Day, Wal*Mart edition

Heh:

But hey, TrailerParkTrashMart, thanks for opening the market up for every other brick-and-mortar firearms retailer in the country, and eliminating your loss-leader negotiating position to sell firearms below cost just to drive littler guys out of business. Firearms makers can now tell you to kiss their ass when you want their product cheaper year-over-year. That just ended too, whether you figured it out or not. Sam is probably spinning in his grave, and his half-wit kinfolk heirs clearly haven't the wits to run a roadside chicken stand. If he were alive, he'd kick their asses, then disown them all.

... 

I'll still visit your stores though.
Just to use the bathroom.
80-20 my turds land in the middle of the floor though, or in the sink bowl, every time.
Have fun with that. I sure will.
Be a real shame if something that simple caught on nationwide.

Remember, guys, the enemy always gets a vote. ;)
And I'll be eating a lot more ethnic foods, and voting often.
Got a hankerin' for some Panda Express broccoli beef today...

"Cleanup on Aisle 2..."

The whole thing is as good.  The Raconteur Report: purveyors of quality rants since 2008 ...

Why can't the government provide healthcare and the "Green New Deal"?

You can learn everything you need to know about the counter-productiveness of handing power to the government by reading this:  Canadian woman fined for not holding escalator handrail finally gets case before Supreme Court:

A Canadian woman fined for failing to hold on to an escalator handrail in 2009 has finally reached the Supreme Court in her search for justice. 

Bela Kosoian was using the subway in Laval near Montreal in 2009 when a police officer told her to respect a warning sign, in French, saying "Caution, hold the handrail", CTV News reported. 

She argued with the officer that the pictogram was advice rather than the law, but the officer promptly handcuffed her, detained her for half an hour and slapped her with a $100 fine for failing to take advantage of escalator safety features and a further $320 for refusing to identify herself. 

Kosoian was acquitted in 2012 but decided to sue the police and transport authority. She lost twice in Quebec before the Supreme Court of Canada took up the case.

[blink] [blink]

So some jack-booted fascist thug got all Respect mah authoritah on her, and the redress requires the Supreme damn Court.  No doubt the Police Officer is still on the force, if he hasn't since retired on a hefty pension.  There was almost certainly no unpleasant consequences for his use of handcuffs and detainment over a trifle.

Apply that exact calculus to the public school system, or the Veteran's Affairs Department, or to just about everything government does.  Heck, even the military which is about the best we can point to for government actually doing what it is supposed to.  The book Embrace The Suck captures the failure of everything government from the point of view of the Grunts.

And remember, the military's goal is a lot easier than the goals of any of the rest of the Fed.Gov.  The other departments have to try to build something that works, while the military has to kill people and break their stuff.  Dangerous, sure.  But a lot easier to understand and accomplish.

And to return to the original point of this rant: even if the Green New Deal weren't a wasteland of bone headed and counter productive boondoggles, the government couldn't implement it anyway.  The people who would need to do it are too busy handcuffing hardened criminals like Ms. Kosoian for the dastardly crime of ignoring their Betters.

This post is tagged with the labels fascists, police state, and government cockups because, well, you know.

UPDATE 19 April 2019 14:31: Of course, Sal the Agorist has something apropos:

pic.twitter.com/MxKMOBGs8E

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 19, 2019

Twitter bans French Government in order to comply with french "Fake News" law

This is delicious:

A social media campaign from the French government has been blocked by Twitter - because of the government's own anti-fake-news law.

Since December, France requires online political campaigns to declare who paid for them, and how much was spent.

But now Twitter has rejected a government voter registration campaign.

The company could not find a solution to obey the letter of the new law, officials said – and opted to avoid the potential problem altogether.

LOL.  The French.Gov is, of course, beaucoup fâché at this whole countretemps - the idea that a vaguely-worded law might actually be used against them!  Why it's nothing short of lèse-majesté.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Statist Pricks.  This post is tagged "statist pricks" because, well, you know.

Why everyone hates the Government, vol. CXIII

Deer falls through ice into frozen lake.  Man tries to save deer.  Game Warden threatens to fine Man:

John Stoll Jr. was leaving his house near a lake at Gifford Pinchot State Park in York County on Saturday when a friend told him that several deer had fallen through the ice. They were stuck in frigid water. 

By the time Stoll got there, a few of the deer had made it across the lake, near a bridge. 

The 54-year-old helped lead at least three deer back onto the bank. 

The deer were reportedly stuck in the water for hours, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Stoll said there was another deer on the other side of the lake. 

A buck looks up at community members who tried to rehabilitate in their garage in Warrington Township. (Photo: Submitted)

The buck was being pulled onto the bank by rescuers and the fire department when Stoll arrived. It was trembling and cold. Stoll said he couldn't stand to see the deer suffering and offered to take the buck home. 

"Nobody said I couldn't take it," Stoll said. 

He got help loading the buck into his work truck and hightailed it back to the garage at his home to try and keep the buck warm. 

In a thread of Facebook videos, Stoll and his stepson are seen aiding the buck by trying to keep it warm with blankets and gently petting it to calm its nerves. 

Many people on Facebook were rooting for the buck's recovery and asked to be updated on its status. 

The buck seemed to be getting better, but it took a turn for the worse and died in the early hours of Sunday morning. Stoll buried it. 

"We were so devastated that he didn't make it," Stoll said. 

That wasn't all of the bad news Stoll would have to face, though. On Monday afternoon, a Game Commission warden told him that he would be fined for taking and keeping the deer in his garage. 

Because Respect My Authoritah!

Stoll plans to fight the fine, which he expects to get in the mail.

Mr. Stoll should ask for a Jury trial, as it's likely you won't be able to find a jury that will convict him.  If this doesn't work, he should invite the news media.  Normally they're entirely untrustworthy, but this sort of thing is catnip to them.  He should tell them to bring the cameras, as the Game Warden and the District Attorney will be available to answer questions.

I've used the post tag Statist Pricks because, well, you know.

More, please

Follow me on Snapchat! pic.twitter.com/Z8ecoPMgiq

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) August 25, 2018

I'm too damned wordy

I mean, I have a whole tag here for "Decline of the Progressive West" with hundreds of posts and this guy goes and sums it up with this.

pic.twitter.com/64GaWde6GO

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) May 16, 2018

How's all that UK Gun Control working out?

But I thought it was just us Cowboy Yanks that had a problem:

SCOTLAND Yard has sent out extra patrols in London after a blood-soaked Bank Holiday weekend in which a teenager was shot dead and boys aged 13 and 15 survived being blasted with a shotgun. 

Two more men were shot or stabbed and three were doused in acid as the capital's shocking violence claimed yet more victims.

London is turning into Chicago.  But Moms Demand Relevancy in no doubt relieved that more than half the casualties were stabbings and acid.

At least their top cop is honest:  'We are doing all we can to address this.'  Translation: when seconds count, the police are minutes away.

The Gun Control movement has blood on its hands.

Ignorance is no excuse for a law

Hold mah beer ...

Rush - Red Barchetta

Recent posts about self driving cars has made me grumpy, and longing for the open road.  Our Governmental Overlords will want to squash this attitude, since individuals driving their own cars will make it more difficult to field autonomous driving vehicles - and that will make their paymasters in Silicon Valley poorer and unhappy.  And so we can expect increasing restrictions on personal control of our own automobiles.

Yes, I think this is a possibility (albeit a remote one).  But I'm not the only one.  Let me take you back to 1981 for some dystopic Rock Opera on the subject.



You can have my 4 barrel when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers, bitches.

The Government's war against Christmas (Lights)

It seems that we have far too many Government employees:

The Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has created an example of regulate first and explain why later. In October they proposed new regulations to outlaw strings of bulbs, lighted lawn figures and similar items that would be declared as hazardous. The red tape deals with certifying wire sizes, fuses, and tensile strength of all “seasonal decorative lighting products.”

This includes Christmas tree lights, lighted wreaths, menorahs, outdoor strands, lawn figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, or Santa or Rudolph or Frosty the Snowman. Yes, Kwanzaa, too. CPSC is an equal opportunity Scrooge. The agency estimates that their proposed regulations will impact 100 million items per year with a market value of $500 million.

That's right, the Fed.Gov is fixin' to regulate your Christmas lights.

So what is CPSC’s justification for adding red tape to the red, green, blue, yellow, white and other colored displays? They report 250 deaths from fires or electrocutions by Christmas lights. That’s not 250 deaths per year; it’s 250 deaths since 1980. They had to add together 33 years of statistics to misportray danger.

That averages seven deaths per year in our country of about 320 million people. The worst single year, CPSC reports, had 13 deaths. But most (80 percent) of those deaths were back in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, deaths have declined annually. In 2013, there was one single death attributed to fire or shock from Christmas lights. One. That also was the average from 2008 through 2013: One death per year.

If the Republicans were smart (they're not), they would cut the headcount budget of the CPSC by 20%, with the political fight over this starting up in, say, November 2015.  Let the Administration fight Christmas.

Then again, this would require a GOP that had two brain cells to rub together.

Thought Crime

You will not read these double plus ungood scriblings of later day Goldsteins, Citizen.  These links are merely posted here to inform you that they are not to be linked.

What If ObamaCare, Too Big To Fail Banks and the State Are All the Wrong Sized Unit?

This thought-crime posting offers the following thought-crime graphic describing the growth of the State. You will not read this.

This Enemy Of The People suggests that Rousseau's "Popular Will" is not the underpinning of glorious revolution.  Or that it doesn't work and leads to slaughter of innocents.  As if any are truly innocent. Da, tovarich?  At least he shows that Locke fellow to be a criminal, as well as the entire American "Revolution".  Link is from Foseti so you know not to click, right?  RIGHT?

People's glorious Central Planning is Class Oppression?  Bah.  Send author to work camps.  You will not read.

How the Revolutionary Cadres are trained, for mediocrity and obsequiousness.  But this is secret, Comrade.  Those who blab outside the Inner Party will be liquidated.  Also via counter-revolutionary running dog Foseti.

Of course no list of Thought Crime is complete without Uncle Jay, but at least he can drink vodka, nyet?

Go, and do not read.  Instead look at glorious People's motorcycles, from People's Automotiv Collectiv #17:

So much better than nekulturny Chinese People's Revolutionary Motorcycle.

Bah.  What does cruiser motorcycle know about snow in Great Patriotic War?

RIAA: All your computers are belong to us

The Entertainment industry wants the legal right to put trojans on your computer and hold your files hostage.  Srlsy:

The hilariously named "Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property" has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But amidst all that crazy, there's a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware.

Because the RIAA would never make a mistake and think that a Grandmother was pirating rock 'n roll music:

On Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America withdrew its lawsuit against Sarah Seabury Ward of Newbury, Massachusetts, after the 66-year-old grandmother said she had never used or even downloaded any peer-to-peer file-sharing software. Bolstering her claim is the fact that Ward and her husband own a Macintosh computer, which is incompatible with the Kazaa file-sharing network they're accused of using to share more than 2,000 songs.

Another reason to run Linux, if that there law gets passed.

Quote of the Day - how health insurance should work

Nothing I could add could possibly improve this:

The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system.

Worst case scenario with a catastrophic-only plan is you end up with $10,000 in debt. That’s a debt load many times smaller than what the Federal government thinks students should take out to get a college degree. We’ll let you borrow $100,000 to get a sociology degree but, we think that $10,000 is an unconscionable amount to pay for medical expenses? So unconscionable that we have to FORCE YOU to buy a plan with more extensive coverage?

Of course, we all know the real reason for this. it’s meant to force healthy young people to subsidize healthcare for older sicker people. Just force them to pay more for insurance than they ought to, and force them to buy more extensive coverage than is rational.

Word.

Quote of the Day: Legal prison rape editon

It's Popehat, which means it's on-target:

Every day young adults are arrested for possession of minor amounts of pot, sent to jail, and gang raped. On my best days I'll say that this doesn't happen because the politicians writing anti-drug laws are in favor of anal rape, or because beat cops are in favor of anal rape, or because wardens are in favor of anal rape or because prison staff are in favor of anal rape. They're all just normal human beings doing their jobs…as part of a huge and grotesque machine that arrests people for possessing leaves of a plant and puts them in rape factories.

J'accuse, baby.

Arguing that we shouldn't be outraged at government because "it's just us" is one of the worst lies we tell ourselves.

Frankenstein's monster was stitched together out of people like us. Nazi Germany was stitched together out of people like us. Mao's PRC was stitched together out of people like us.

And though it's not as bad, the US government is still pretty nasty, and it too is stitched together out of people like us.

There are a lot of reasons you're going to say I'm wrong. Most of them are covered here, but I'm interested in hearing any others.

 "It's just us" = "It's your fault".  Me, I don't think so.

So if posting a pic of your kid with a gun gets you a visit from CPS

Should I expect a knock on my door?

Suck it, Jersey.

Therapy for New York Times Op-Ed writers

So it seems that someone wrote a chin-tugging NYT Op-Ed saying that since she was clinically depressed and a suicide risk, they government should take away her (and your) second amendment rights:

Do more to help us protect ourselves because what’s most likely to wake me in the early hours isn’t a man’s body slamming at my door but depression, that raven, tapping, rapping, banging for relief. I have a better chance of surviving if I never have the option of being able to pull the trigger.

Actually, there's someone who can help her.



This article by the Times is the most grotesquely manipulative thing I've seen since, well, since the gun grabbers used the blood of a bunch of kindergarten kids to propose a bunch of stupid, useless laws that wouldn't have protected those kids.  The NYT's cynicism is simply staggering, and only exceeded by the moral degeneracy of their continually using the weak and vulnerable as props to flog their ridiculous dogma.

Lying. It's what they do.

I refer to the Media, of course.  The Czar of Muscovy brings down the Axe of Love in a post about the Media's shamefully blown coverage of the Sandy Hook atrocity:

One cannot possibly accept that the media are ignorant on this issue. While that is a probability on most issue, one month has passed in which media types were given every conceivable explanation for the distance between AR-15s and other rifle platforms, why AKs are not ARs, why a .223 is not a monster bullet, the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic, and so on.

The smallest amount of fact-checking would have cleared this up in no time.

Instead, you have active suppression of evidence followed by an informed distortion of the record.

How bad is the situation?  So bad that the best case scenario for the Media - the one that most preserves the scraps of their tattered reputation - is that the entire MSM is institutionally incompetent to report on anything relating to guns.  That's the best explanation, and the others are, well, precisely as your Autocrat describes.

And so to my snark from yesterday, about the Gun Control crowd whining that the evil NRA is using fear to whip up support.  The two are inextricably joined.  Gun owners (and more importantly gun sympathizing non-owners) see the lies that are not the accidental rarity, but rather are the core argument of the anti-gun crowd.  They see the blatant misrepresentation by the media.  They hear the calls for confiscation.  What is their natural reaction?

Panic gun buying.  Joining the NRA.  Deciding that this is the time to make the stand.

And so all the complaints that Diane Feinstein's and Andrew Cuomo's calls for confiscation were "taken out of context" fall on deaf ears - after all, if the Media is seen to always exaggerate to the benefit of the Gun Control agenda, this is just more of the same, right?

And the same goes to pro-gun Democrats.  And while there are a lot of them, they are in terrible danger of not getting credit for it.  After all, a bunch of their fellow Party members lie through their teeth - aided and abetted by the Media - and so why shouldn't we wonder if they're lying, too?

And so there are two clear lessons from this debate: The Media has destroyed their credibility with the entirety of the American public: everyone (both pro-gun and anti-gun) read their statements as code words and both sides assume that the Media secretly is firmly on the side of gun control - and therefore slants its coverage to push that agenda.  Both sides discount the actual content of the reporting, correctly only perceiving the agenda.  This means that the Media has absolutely no ability to shift opinion in favor of further gun control.  Since everyone thinks that they're rooting for their "home team", there's no possibility of being seen as a neutral broker.  In fact, the only impact they could have would be to report the facts correctly which would likely have a massive swing of popular opinion in favor of gun rights.

The second lesson is that the Media is now damaging the Democratic party.  The majority of the population simply doesn't believe them on this topic, and when the Media reports that Senator Manchin (D-WV) "supports gun rights" they read this as code reporting - even if it may be true.  Given that gun rights is a topic that energizes voters like few other topics - especially voters who are not political junkies - this is very, very damaging to Democratic candidates in competitive districts.

There's a quite good chance that the damage has already been inflicted on the Democratic Party's 2014 hopes.  The message has been sent, and it has been received.  The Media can only make this perception worse with their coded support of gun control.  What remains to be seen is whether the NRA will take this as an opportunity to explain to "pro-gun" Democrats that they're simply not believable any more, and as long as (say) Nancy Pelosi is still their leader in the House that even those politicians who were once considered pro-gun are presumed to be at the beck and call of their anti-gun political party.

Because until there is a cost to the Democrats for pushing this anti-freedom agenda, they'll keep pushing it.  Sure, they'll claim that the "support the Second Amendment" and the Media will dutifully report that.  And everyone will watch this and think "They're lying.  It's what they do."