Saturday, November 2, 2024

What life is like under Harris-Walz

How could we know? Those of us who live in Minnesota know. We've lived under the federal policies of Biden-Harris for almost four years. We've lived under the control of Governor Tim Walz for six years. Combine the effects of those two sets of elected leaders, and we have life under Harris-Walz. I don't think this is what joy feels like. Please learn from us and work to make sure this destructive duo doesn't bring their brand of joy to your lives too.

Minnesota has made national headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons. We used to be known as the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Prince. Now, we're known as the birthplace of the Defund the Police movement. 

First I, then my mother, were widowed 364 days apart under Harris-Walz. Life for us has become increasingly hard because of the failed leadership of these two.

Unfortunately, an accurate picture of life under Harris-Walz requires some math. 

"Bidenomics" was repeatedly touted by Vice President Kamala Harris as "working,"  We two Mnnesota widows have had to deal with Walz' penchant for raising taxes coupled with Biden-Harris' inflationary policies that have made life very expensive, not just for us, but for everyone. Minnesota boasts the 8th largest income tax rate and the highest corporate tax rate in the nation. People are fleeing in droves.

My mom has spent the two winters since dad died rationing her heating oil, which went up by a staggering 99.6 percent between Biden-Harris taking office and my father's death in 2022. She keeps her thermostat in the 50s during cold winter nights. My property taxes are skyrocketing, so my house payment rises. Cost of upkeep rises. The same thing is happening to my mom.

The week after my father died, my 81-year-old mother was back at the job from which she had retired to ask for it back. Now age 83 and a recent cancer survivor, she holds three jobs. She said, "Because of inflation and taxes, it's almost like I didn't go back to [the aformentioned job]. It's a wash financially." Thus the other two jobs.

"But inflation is going down!" people say, while they mean, "prices are going down." They're not. They're up 20 percent because inflation should be added up year over year.* If inflation is down to 3.2 percent from its high of 8.0 in 2022, it doesn't mean prices are going down, it just means they're going up at a lower rate. (We really need to do something about our education system because this shouldn't have to be Dick-and-Janed to anyone.)

Walz has passsed an ungodly amount of tax hikes. He's repeatedly raised taxes (despite a growing surplus) on the middle class while enacting an insanely expensive green agenda. The MN Department of Health and Human Services has been embroiled in an unbelieveable amount of scandal during Walz' tenure, the most recent of which involves $250 million in stolen COVID funds meant to go toward feeding hungry children. No hungry children were fed. Walz has been issued subpoenas by three federal agencies regarding the scandal.

Speaking of scandals, under Tim Walz, our beautiful city, Minneapolis, is so crime-ridden and in many places, desolate, that many people who don't live in it don't want to go there, or do so only if they absoutely have to. Many who live there have lost their businesses or livelihoods forever. 

"Crime is down. The numbers prove it!" people will say. But when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) numbers are calculated correctly, crime is up. Since 2020, the Minnesota BCA numbers show violent crime has gone up by 23.3 percent statewide.** And nobody can claim "crime's going down now," because it dropped by a lesser percentage in 2023 (6.1) than 2022 (8.6), so it's going UP. Tim Walz has overseen all of it.

If you live in a city outside of Minnesota that was burned, looted, destroyed and/or not rebuilt in 2020, you have Tim Walz to blame. He took three days to call in the National Guard during the Floyd riots, and when he was asked to do it he disparaged the guard by saying they were not highly-trained soldiers but were just "19-year-olds who are cooks." Nice words for a man who "proudly served" 24 years in the Army National Guard. 

He ordered the police at the 3rd Precinct to "stand down" and flee, to let it burn. I remember watching it and saying to my husband, "this is going to set a precident for the nation." I'm not psychic, just awake. Walz helped launch the Defund the Police movement, a local cancer that metastasized nationally post Floyd and helped increase crime and deflate morale among police everywhere.

This is just a small sample of the joys of living under Harris-Walz. Walz gave us snitch lines meant to pit neighbor against neighbor; he seized and held onto emergency powers with an iron grip, only relinquishing them after the MN Senate wrestled them away after 17 months; he signed more than 100 executive orders during that reign of power; his mandate to send COVID-positive patients to nursing/care homes caused preventable deaths of the elderly and disabled giving MN the highest percentage of COVID deaths at nursing facilities in the country; millions of missing COVID money; rampant scandals; making MN a "sanctuary state for transgender youth" sanctioning state kidnapping of children and stripping away parental rights; our sanctuary state status making us a magnet for illegal migrants after we already took in huge numbers of refugees, straining all of our resources from medical care to schools.

Harris gave us tie-breaking votes in congress that caused high inflation; Bidenomics, which threw the American dream into the dustbin of history; the fastest growing segment of job seekers are retirees; food shelves meant for the hungry struggling to keep up with demand; families becoming homeless due to exploding rent and mortgage rates; expensive gas, electricity, and heating oil; wars breaking out around the world; 350 million missing children; a border open not only to those yearning to breathe free, but to those who seek to destroy us, even if its one woman or child at a time. 

Our lives under Harris-Walz could be yours if we don't vote to stop it.

The good news is that America has been in bad shape before and recovered. Minneapolis was dubbed "Murderapolis" in the 90s, but crime had come down significantly by the end of Republican Tim Pawlenty's two terms as governor. The gas lines and exploding interest rates of the Carter years led to the Reagan recovery because people were sick of their plummeting standard of living and voted their way out of it.

We can do this. We too can vote our way out of this. We need to do it. My mom can't work forever, and I will lose the home my husband and I worked so hard for if this doesn't turn around. Our children, grandchilden and great-grandchildren deserve a future that's much better than life is now. 

I hear there are about three persuadable people in the country right now. But since my family has lost three Republican men since the last presidential election, I'm hoping to persuade at least three people to vote Republican if they haven't yet, or if they were planning to sit it out, please don't. Hungry children and exhausted widows are depending on you. We could use some joy.

*Using Consumer Price Index numbers, when Trump left office, inflation was at 1.2%. For the years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 respectively, the equation is: +4.7+8.0+4.1+3.2=20%. 

**Violent crime in MN year over year for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 respectively: +17.2+21.6-8.6-6.9=+23.3. When crime shoots up by 38.8% over two years, it's dropping by a collective 15.5% over the next two years isn't a net drop but a significant gain. 

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Supreme Court decision allows Biden-Harris et al. to alter 2024 election

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s pending court case is America's only hope to reverse it for future elections

In the movie, "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's character famously screams, "You can't handle the truth!"

Can you handle the truth? Can you handle a lie? Or do you, an adult who can vote, take up arms, enter into contracts, etc., need government to decide for you what you can and cannot hear, see, or know, and where information is allowed to come from?

Do you need to be protected so you don’t have to do the work of deciding what’s true? Or worse, do you need to be fed an unbalanced diet of heaping helpings of propaganda? Your government thinks you do.

You may not have heard of Murthy vs Missouri. It was a case decided by the Supreme Court in June and reported with barely a whisper, though it affects every American just as much, if not more, than the cases the media shouted about. 

It's a startling example of government's fight to censor speech, and the Supreme Court's ruling allows the Biden-Harris administration and its agents to continue to ask or threaten social media companies to censor information it doesn't want its citizens to know. 

Because of that decision, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has brought a new case that may be our last best hope to keep government out of the censorship business. Since he's one of what the U.S. Governement calls "The Disinformation Dozen," a group frequently targeted for censorship by the Biden-Harris administration, he may have a better chance of prevailing. (The fact that our government has such a name for any group of Americans based upon their excercise of their First Amendment rights should scare all of us.)

In a nutshell, the Biden-Harris administration (plaintiff Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's name was used) was fighting to continue to censor online "misinformation, disinformation" in matters ranging from COVID 19, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine funding, to elections. Attorneys General from Missouri, Louisiana, and five citizens who claimed they'd been censored, were fighting to stop them.

Though the Court decided against the plaintiffs, they didn't dispute the facts cited in the lower court case that the Biden Administration and its agents engaged in censorship via threats to and coersion of social media companies. This is real, it happened, and thanks to the Court's ruling, it continues.

The case began its life as Missouri v Biden. The Fifth Circuit court ruled against Biden et al. The ruling reads like a distopian movie script in which the FBI and other agencies dangled threats that included inacting Section 230 restrictions to get companies like Facebook to play along. Section 230 protects online media companies from being held liable for what people post on their platforms. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg said revoking it would be an "extential threat" to his platforms. 

In Missouri v Biden, the judge wrote, "...the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history." Joe Biden, DHS, CDC, FBI, DOJ, and CISA were just a few of the many defendants. The resulting injunction required many defendants to immediately cease their censorship activities as regards social media platforms. 

Then the Supreme Court took the case. When doing so, they stayed the lower court's injunction until they could hear the case, therefore allowing the Biden et al. to continue "coercing" social media companies to censor whatever or whomever they choose.

I've read the ruling, which was a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Coney Barrett, and the dissenting opinion, penned by Justice Alito, as well. It's a lot. 

To be clear, the Court doesn't reject the facts that the government and its agents engaged in "coersion and significant encouragement" to censor. They merely found that it was a poorly-constructed case and therefore lacked "standing" to bring it. Some reasons they lost the case were:

  • Because online media were busy little censorship bees prior to government threats (even if the threats broadened and extended censorship), they didn't prove that government was the first and only censorship entity. If the plaintiffs had sued the social media platforms as well, the Court may have been able to rule differently.
  • The Court said the plaintiffs had built their case not just on past harm due to government-required censorship, but that their case required a threat of "substantial future harm." They couldn't prove that the government would do it again. It's hard to prove a future action, so the case shouldn't have been built on this speculative requirement. It helped them lose. 
  • They sued too many people. The list of defendants is so sweeping (41 individuals and 13 agencies/departments) that the Court found it hard to rule that they all had equal responsibility or outcomes. The Court didn't like that the case treated such a large group of defendants "as a monolith" and suggested the case was flawed by this grouping and justice would be better served had plaintiffs sued fewer entities and individuals or brought suit against each of them separately. 

The ruling in Murthy v Missouri has left a road map for for others who can prove government censorship has harmed them, leading to RFK Jr's pending case, Kennedy v Biden. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled that Kennedy has standing. We can only hope that RFK Jr. has excellent representation and a case built on solid arguments. This case includes a large number of defendants as well (23 individuals in 7 agencies/departments).

In the meantime, the Biden-Harris administration, its elected and unelected officials named in the opinion--FBI, DOJ, DHS, State Dept., CISA, U.S. Election Assistance Committee (EAC), etc.--can continue to, as the dissenting opinion states, "browbeat" and "threaten" media to censor whomever they wish. 

Page 142 of the Missouri v Biden ruling cites testimony showing that government censorship of speech about elections continues: 
When asked if government cyber censorship of election speech established in 2020 is ongoing, FBI Agent Elvis Chan testified, "we've never stopped."
After election day 2024, there may be court cases or charges of fraud. Because government is allowed to censor, will people be able to speak freely about it? Not likely.

Allowed to continue unfettered, the Biden-Harris Administration and its agents will continue to do this, conveniently, right through the 2024 election. So think about this when you vote: which candidate fought, did battle, and threatened media to secure her ability to censor you? 

Sometimes the truth hurts. It can be shocking. I think we can handle it. It should be a call to action to vote against censorship and for our right to speak freely. All of our other rights depend on it.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

New law gives power over free speech to U.S. president--is ban of X planned?

Be careful what you wish for," as the old saying goes. And, as I often say, "When they want you to look over here  (and talk about the subject they choose), watch what they're doing over there."

While American news outlets were busy chattering about the South Carolina primary, impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, etc., legislators were crafting this:

The bipartisan “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Application Act” was signed into law in April 2024. It was, of course, shoved into a giant appropriations bill. (If you're slogging through the law, it's in Division H.) It not only requires a ban or forced sale of TikTok but gives unilateral power to the president of the United States to shut down online platforms.

This gives sweeping censorship powers not only to a person, but to an office, because power can always change hands. We're living in one of the most illustrative times in American history of that ever-present fact. As I write this, the president is...Joe Biden?

The TikTok ban doesn't doesn't take effect until 270 days after the law was enacted and gives the president power to extend it for 90 days. Why? I'm not a mind reader, but I believe the law was written with a seemingly-arbitrary 270-day grace period to give TikTok a chance to save itself (the left REALLY wants this), while making it look like they're banning TikTok (the right REALLY wants this), thereby punting a political football until after the 2024 election. Conveniently, 270 days from the law's enactment is January 20, 2025, otherwise known as Inauguration Day, or in presidential-canididate speak, "Day One."

Then it could be open season on X--formerly Twitter--or any other media platform the president sets his or her sights on. I question whether TikTok, the only platform named in the law, was its true target.

Watch how the law defines people it seeks to squelch with language so broad that it might be harder to find social media platform owners who don't meet its foreign adversary definition, the bar required for a platform's extinction: 

  • The law ultimately allows the president to shut down any online platform whose owners or parent companies are controlled by a "foreign person or combination of persons" deemed adversaries. 

  • An "adversary" is the above-mentioned person(s) who "is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in" an adversarial country. 

  • These persons must have at least 20 percent ownership "directly or indirectly" in the entity that owns the platform.

  • Most importantly, this law applies to "a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity." 

  • The list of foreign adversaries can change at any time at the discretion of the Secretary of State. 

This is an expansive, fluid law filled with definitions meant to apply to as many individuals and entities as possible. It gives power to one person and could apply to most online communications platforms. 

If you’re comfortable with this power being given to our current president, would you be comfortable with it being given to the last one? Or the next?

Whatever you think of TikTok (I'm not a fan), it allows censorship by the U.S.government. Whether or not X is censoring speech is more subjective. The left claims increased censorship of mostly pro-Palestinian content, and censorship claims by the right have largely disappeared with the platform's 2022 acquisition by X Corporation, owned chiefly by Elon Musk, a foreign-born billionaire. 

The list of X Corp's investors changes, but most are not American. As the new law is written, the president wouldn't need to just look at Musk's financial ties in foreign adversarial countries, but at the totality of X Corp's investors.

An example of how this new law could be applied to X is that Musk's financial relationship with China is considered by some to be "cozy," and Tesla, which he also owns, is now an official car of the Chinese government. China is number one on the list of U.S. government adversaries. Few, if any, people who do business in China are not "subject to" their government's control.

Do you think there are any billionaire social media owners or large corporations, for that matter, who don't have ownership in companies in China, the adversarial country cited in the TikTok ban? Whether this is good or not is up for debate. Since we allow Chinese companies to trade on the stock exchange, it's increasingly difficult to avoid investing in or with them. 

Proponents of the law would say, "Why would Americans want foreign adversaries involved in their social media platforms? Isn't preventing that a good thing?" On its face it seems so; however, most efforts to chip away at rights or privacy are presented under the guise of "who wouldn't think this is good, this is for our protection," e.g. the Patriot Act.

Only the People should have the right to control speech through free market forces. We should speak about subjects important to us often and persuasively. One step removed from our own speech is our giving consent to congress to make laws on our behalf. This isn't a perfect system. Our representative government failed to protect free speech as Congress used our fear of China to hand over unilateral power to the president to limit free speech via this new law. Elections matter.

This new law, sweeping anti-free speech laws just passed across western nations, and recent Supreme Court rulings on First Amendment cases (the subject of my next post), show that our fight for free speech is constant and requires diligent attention to its protection. In other words, don't let yourself be distracted lest your freedoms be taken away while you aren't looking. 

Monday, August 26, 2024

God damn those people: Perspective needed on Afghanistan exit



Sparsely-attended Congressional hearing on Kabul Airport bombing 

I wrote this piece the day of the bombing at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan, which took the lives of 13 American soldiers and injured countless more. I ran across it recently, and thought I'd share it today, on its third anniversary. 

AUGUST 26, 2021:  I tuned in to FOX today for news about the bombing at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. I took a trip around the dial, as I often do, to see what other networks were reporting. CBS was covering it. NBC had Hoda and Jenna doing a tribute to kindness. I like kindness, but I think NBC could use some perspective on what's important to air during what seems like a historic moment.

ABC aired a rerun of the July 27 episode of The View, which opened with an extended clip of testimony by some capitol police officers from the most recent January 6 hearing. I'm not at all surprised.

The irony wasn't lost of me as I listened to a capitol police officer testify, "...I feel like I went to hell and back protecting [his kids] and the people in this room," he said of the events of that day almost eight months ago. "But too many are now telling me that hell doesn't exist, or that hell actually wasn't that bad...Truly nothing has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day, and in doing so betray their oath [sic] of office," he said in his rerun testimony, as hell played out in real time in Afghanistan. 

President Biden announced in an April 14 speech that the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan between May 1 and September 11. On July 8, Foreign Policy Magazine published an exclusive interview with Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. In it, he said that after foreign forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban's goal is to create an “Islamic government,” and “we will be compelled to continue our war to achieve our goal.” Despite Biden's promise of an "orderly" exit, it was clear that this could get very messy.

They knew they'd be in the middle of this potentially messy withdrawal when they'd televise eight very public and publicized January 6 hearings, which lends credence to the theory of governmental/media misdirection. When they tell you to look over here, always ask, "What's happening over there that they don't want me to see?" They're still trying to misdirect as I write, with Hoda and Jenna prattling on.

I wonder when, or more importantly, if, we'll see a Congressional hearing on our withdrawal from Afghanistan. I wonder what the soldiers who are in the middle of this awful bloodbath would say.* 

Turning back to The View, the "ladies" begin to give their reactions to the harrowing January 6 testimony. Still no word about Afghanistan. I turn it off in an effort to hold onto my breakfast. To run this episode today shows that ABC wouldn't know perspective if it crawled in bed and snuggled with them. 

There's a startling lack of perspective on display everywhere you look. Some people are just in the wrong profession, and the list includes ABC executives (The View is in their news division), NBC executives, people producing and viewing January 6 hearings as infotainment, anyone in our government making decisions about Afghanistan, etc., etc. I don't accept any excuse for their lack of it.

I'm capable of perspective even though I just watched my husband go from robust health to taking his last breath in eight short weeks, during which we experienced hellish levels of incompetence and devastation. His little brother was found dead four days before my husband died, and I had keep it from him, for God's sake. 

The nightmare hasn't stopped in the three weeks since his death. Everything that can go wrong has. Appliances breaking, mice invading, and a legion of devestating heartbreaks too personal to detail here. Planning his memorial service has been horrific. I insist it be held outdoors because Covid's Delta variant is here, so I'm afraid the governor [Tim Walz] will suddenly decide to make the event illegal if I have it indoors, and I can't get people to return my calls because hospitality has died along with my husband in the industry that bears its name.  I'm left alone to deal with things that are too big for one person. I've never been so exhausted, so broken.

The cherry on top of all of the heartache and pain came two days ago. The head honcho at the cremation place called to say they FORGOT to take my husband's fingerprints, which I'd authorized to have made into jewelry for us to remember him by. Another loss in a hurricane of loss. 

Even after all of that, just weeks after watching my life partner of 40 years die and all of the resulting stress and pain I'm living through, I say to myself when watching scenes of Afghanistan: people hanging from the wings of planes, mothers handing their infants to American soldiers, young women screaming for their suddenly dead husbands, "Those people have it so much worse than I do. God bless those people, and God damn those who made the decisions that led to this disaster." 

Perspective. We need more of it.


*UPDATE: (If you Google hearings about the Afghanistan withdrawal, you get a lot of links to the hearing, held in March 2024, during which the Generals, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, etc., had their say. I had to dig to find a hearing with testimony from service people who were actually there.) The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a shameful, sparsely-attended hearing entitled, "During and After the Fall of Kabul: Examining the Administration’s Emergency Evacuation from Afghanistan” on March 8, 2023, notably just three months after Republicans regained the House. It's available on YouTube and was not cinematically produced by ABC. Witnesses included two soldiers who were there that day and several representatives of private agencies working to evacuate Americans and their Afghan partners, e.g., interpreters. One of the soldiers who testified--severely wounded that day--has a disclaimer under his name on the official Congressional Committee website that his testimony "...does not represent the views or opinions of the Department of Defense or U.S. Marine Corps." There is no similar disclaimer for any other witness or, notably, for any witness in the January 6 hearings. 

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Great American Think-Off debates whether free speech is worth the cost

Every year since 1994, the Great American Think-Off board releases a new philosophical question. They put out a call for essays on the topic that take a clear yes or no stance. A blind judging process results in the board's announcing that year's four finalists (deemed Americas Greatest Thinkers), the people who wrote the best, most persuasive essays on that year's topic: two arguing yes, two arguing no.

The finalists then travel to a tiny town in west central Minnesota called New York Mills to participate in a debate. The winner is named America's Greatest Thinker. 2024's question was: Is Freedom of Speech Worth the Cost? I was one of the finalists.

I've waited for each year's question to be announced for about a decade. Sometimes the question didn't speak to me, sometimes the question was too broad. Sometimes I missed the deadline because life happens. I entered in 2018 when the question was "Which is More Influential in a Person's Life: Success or Failure? I argued for success. I received an Honorable Mention. I was honored. 

I admit that this year's question on free speech took me aback. I was surprised (but not shocked) that we are debating whether free speech is worth it, in America, the land of free speech. I would, of course, argue that yes, freedom of speech is worth the cost.

So I wrote my essay, which, except for my husband's eulogy, was the hardest thing I've ever written. My "in-house editor," my husband, had died. Everything I've ever written for publication has passed under his eyes before being sent for submission. It was like writing while being beaten with a grief stick, especially because the contest rules require the essay to have a personal connection to the subject matter, and my personal connection involved the death of one of my dearest friends.

Submissions came from all over the world. The submissions breakdown was 25 percent from ouside the U.S., 25 percent from Minnesota, and 50 percent from around the U.S. The blind judging process produced three finalists from Minnesota and one from New Mexico. Random and unusual, I'm told.

Being chosen as a finalist came with a flurry of activity. There were six weeks of media interviews. Headshots and bios were submitted. During our weekend in New York Mills, we were welcomed and celebrated at all of the events planned by the smart, interesting people of this small town devoted to art and the dying practice of civil debate.

The winners are determined by audience vote. It was live-streamed on YouTube (it's still there) but no remote voting was allowed. I was knocked out in the first of two rounds by the eventual winner. I was a free speech absolutist in a place where I don't think that was valued, and there was definitely room for improvement in my first-ever debate performance.

I was disappointed that I didn't bring home the gold medal, but I was proud to have been chosen to debate. I did my best despite huge mental and physical obstacles: 

  • Layers of grief (the above-mentioned losses and my arriving for the first day of "Think-Off Weekend" for a solo stay in a quaint bed and breakfast on what should have been our 38th wedding annniversary). 
  • I slipped (dislocated) two ribs an hour before taking the stage due to the rigors of a solo road trip with a rare genetic condition that makes my bones loose. When it happened, I realized I couldn't take a deep breath without visibly and audibly shuddering. I couldn't project my voice and thought, "I'm going to have to eat that microphone so peopele can hear me." Someone asked, "You went through with the debate with dislocated ribs?" Of course I did. 
  • Feeling like one of very few conservatives in town while knowing I was the only conservative in the debate.
  • I'm a full-time caregiver, which is a 24-hour job. I hadn't had a full night of sleep in six months. It's really hard to retain information in a chonically sleep-deprived state. I was given five nights of sleep in the days before the debate, for which I'm forever grateful.

Here's the link to the winning essays. (Scroll down to the third essay, which is mine.) 

I'm not proud of much these days, but I'm proud of myself for this. In my third year of widowhood, I've been challenging myself to do hard things. Alone. I got to debate one of the most consequential questions of our time because I wrote this essay despite gales of wind blowing in my face, not at my back, during every step. And I did it anyway. I did what I think we should all do right now: I excercised my right to free speech because I possess it. 

For now.