Category: Politics

“The bigger issue is that Obama is waging a war against Christians in this country. Christians need support in this country. Their religious liberty is at stake,”
—Donald Trump
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/09/18/trump-declines-to-correct-questioner-who-calls-obama-muslim-at-nh-event/

This Saturday, August 1st, the Platform Committee of the California Republican Party will be meeting near LAX. The Committee will have an opportunity to change the wording of the Platform and perhaps reshape the Party. Chairman Jim Brulte will preside at the meeting. Will the same folks that embraced the Log Cabin Club show-up in force to build on their recent victory? Some pundits say, “Yes”.

Recently, Steve Frank published an article on the Republican Party Platform and changes that he expects will be made.

Here are a few of his predictions

Marriage and Family: “At the same time the California Republican Party recognizes the right of same-sex couples in California to enter into a State sanctioned marriage that affords them all the civil legal protections the State offers to heterosexual couples”

Right to Life/Abortion: “Most Republicans pro-life and pro-choice believe the difficult decision to have an abortion in the first months of pregnancy is best left as a private personal and family matter.”
Last Remnant In California of Republicanism is GOP Platform Will It Change

The question I asked was, “Does Steve have inside information that ‘the fix’ is in on these changes?”

The Sith Lord says “No”. He says that what happens Saturday will depend on who actually shows up to the meeting.
• He feels that Brulte would like to see the status quo maintained within the Party.
• Many possible changes have been floated by both Liberals and Conservatives but he knows of no consensus on either side for any particular changes.
• With dwindling registration, it’s not a good time to have a platform fight that will likely result in the Conservatives withdrawing from an active role in the Party.

If Frank is right, the Party will likely split over social issues. Brulte may want the Platform unchanged but the myriad of socially agnostic young folks that were the force behind adopting the Log Cabin gang may not be under his control when they sense victory over the old order (Conservative social issues) is within their grasp.

If the Platform proposal on Saturday is a marked departure to the Left, it will likely pass in September. The Liberals have already proved that they have the votes.

What happens Saturday has the potential to shred the Republican Party to the point of extinction in California. Finally, Charlie Munger has victory within reach but to what end?

I’m minding my own business and reading my email.

I get stuff from all sorts of Tea Party groups but this advertisement is out of bounds or should be. I’m reading an article about a Florida gun store being a Muslim free zone and then scroll down to see this.

I guess our transformation into the Soviet Union has a ways to go, even under this President. In the meantime, perhaps the Tea Party needs a new webmaster.

This appeared in my Spam email folder today. Oldest message is on the bottom.

Freedom in the United States is experiencing a “cascade failure” as even more power is taken from citizens and given to Washington. I don’t think that it’s a matter of folks not caring; it’s that they seem powerless to stand up to the rising tide of evil and lawlessness that is modern politics. What was once the dynamic of the Evil Party versus the Stupid Party has changed into the Evil Party versus the Enabling Party.

In much of modern American politics, Republicans are irrelevant—especially on both Coasts. There is nothing to unite them except they’re not Democrats. As a group, the current crop of office holders stands for nothing and offers less. The Republican Party has forsaken the way shown them by Ronald Reagan and instead created a leadership vacuum within our country. This lack of principled leadership has transformed the Party into a playground for egotistical rich people that want instant political power without earning it. You know the names: Bush, Robertson, Romney, Isa, Munger, Trump, Fiorina, Whitman, etc.

In California, this situation is especially dire. The leadership of the California Republican Party has contented themselves with establishing a top-down organization that is nothing but a “good ‘ole boys club”. They do not care what rank and file party members feel or what is important to them. In fact, regular Republicans are nothing but sheep to be led and a macro group of potential donors.

The CRP waste millions of dollars each election cycle by hiring the most inexperienced and often incompetent people that money can buy. They filter out men and women of integrity with their ineffectiveness. As a group, their paid staff is just as useless as their consultants.

Every two years, this broken political apparatus is thrust upon well-meaning candidates who are then led to their political slaughter while staffers and consultants rape their campaign war-chests. The Party then discards the candidates that loose and promote the weakest staffers to work in Sacramento as their reward for helping to maintain the status quo. Then in two years, they do it again to a new crop of candidates.

In this dystopian political world, they do manage to persuade some to volunteer. However, the number of folks willing to volunteer in campaigns is in rapid decline. Once exposed to campaign dysfunction, many volunteers disappear long before Election Day. Few will return for the next cycle. The shortage of volunteers is regarded not as a symptom of a Party in trouble but “just the way it is”.

The trend of declining Party registration appears irreversible. The folks in power have little incentive to change. The smaller the pool of California Republicans, the bigger fish they become. That the pond is evaporating is beyond their ability to comprehend.

Barring Divine intervention, this generation of leaders and the next few are a lost cause.

In a heated debate over same-sex marriage with Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Thursday, CNN morning anchor Chris Cuomo exclaimed that Americans’ rights “do not come from God.”

Cuomo’s abrupt response came after Judge Moore stated, “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution. They come from God. That’s clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Cuomo, a licensed attorney, sharply interrupted Judge Moore, arguing, “Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that.
“They come from man. … That’s your faith. That’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”

CNN anchor Americans rights do not come from God

I know Judge Moore. I met him about 20 years ago, shortly after he posted the Ten Commandments in his court room. He is the epitome of a “Southern Gentleman”. He is soft spoken and has a spine of steel. Unlike most Ivy League and public school graduates, he actually has an education and believes in the principles on which this country was founded.

Chris Cuomo is the son of “Mario the Pius” as Rush Limbaugh often called the former New York Governor. Cuomo is just another North-East Liberal who is Catholic in Name Only. He—like many others in our country—managed to spend years being indoctrinated in classrooms while avoiding an education.

The author of the article quoted above points out that Cuomo is a licensed attorney…as if I’m supposed to be impressed. Most attorneys that I know are bumbling, incompetent, and so unfamiliar with the law that most of their legal advice is in fact contrary to the laws they are sworn to uphold.

What you see in the brief exchange quoted above is the centuries old debate between two worldviews represented by John Calvin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I had to read Rousseau in college and I’m sure Cuomo did too since his answer is just a regurgitation of Rousseau’s Social Contract; “Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”

What they don’t teach in college is that Rousseau did not write his Social Contract in a vacuum. The key is where did he live when he wrote his famous book on political theory? Geneva. Once you know where it was written (and when), then you are a big step closer to understanding its content. Rousseau’s famous work is in fact a rejection the teachings of John Calvin and an attempt to substitute a secular humanist worldview for a Christian and biblically based one.

Rousseau and Thomas Hobbs (Leviathan) are the two pillars of modern, secular, political theory. The fact that neither man is correct doesn’t seem to bother anyone. The important thing is that both man rejected any biblical basis for the existence of government. Once Scripture can be ignored then government becomes all about power. In a sense we are back the Pharaoh v Moses (the thesis of Gary North’s book on Exodus).

People like Cuomo think Judge Moore is some wild “cowboy” off doing his own thing or a scofflaw for ignoring the US Supreme Court. Federalism issue aside, Cuomo again is displaying his ignorance of history. Moore is exercising the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate. For those who have never heard of this here is part of the Wikipedia article.

The doctrine of the lesser magistrate is a concept in Protestant thought. A lesser magistrate is a ruler such as a prince who is under a greater ruler such as an emperor. According to many figures of the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, the lesser magistrate has the authority to rebel against the tyranny of a supreme ruler.
The doctrine of the lesser magistrate finds its origin in John Calvin, who wrote that whereas private Christians must submit to the ruling authorities, there are “popular magistrates” who have “been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings”. When these magistrates “connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people” they “fraudulently betray the liberty of the people” when God has appointed them guardians of that liberty.

The lesser magistrate is prominent in the Lutheran Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which argued that the “subordinate powers” in a state, faced with the situation where the “supreme power” is working to destroy true religion, may go further than non-cooperation with the supreme power and assist the faithful to resist.

Lesser Magistrate

Surprised to see John Calvin’s name here or Martin Luther? I’m not. So again, this conflict is Calvin v Rousseau.

The bottom line is that Cuomo wants the power of the State to be wielded against biblical values and see “gay marriage” imposed at the point of the sword. My response to that is what we pray in the Litany, “Good Lord deliver us”.

The biggest disappointment to me in this last election cycle was the campaign of Darrell Fong for State Assembly. Fong was missing in action in Elk Grove. For him to cede the entire city because Jim Cooper—his opponent—is on the city council was stupid. Cooper has the highest negatives of anyone in Elk Grove and arguable the entire county. When Cooper ran for sheriff a few years ago against Scott Jones, Cooper lost every precinct in Elk Grove to Jones. Cooper has been on the Elk Grove city council since 2000 when Elk Grove was incorporated.

Fong clearly did no meaningful opposition research on Cooper. Cooper’s public record and conduct are fertile ground in the hands of any political opponent. Grand Jury reports on Cooper’s conduct are a matter of public record. Cooper’s conduct on the city council is embarrassing.

Cooper hides behind his badge and Fong could have called him on it. Cooper is a constant “no show” at community events. Cooper never prepares for meetings. Cooper is in fact a lazy slug, but others let him hide behind his badge; if Jim can’t do the job then he needs to give-up on political life and just be a cop instead of doing a half-assed job of it.

At council meetings, I have seen Cooper offer his job as the excuse for not being prepared or attending council meetings when in fact he was attending fundraisers for himself instead.

I know a classmate of Cooper’s from his days at the University of Phoenix and it’s the same story. At Phoenix, most homework is done by small groups to encourage accountability and collaboration, Cooper never was prepared or did his share of the homework and was carried by the other members of his group. He did not earn the grade he was given.

Cooper has a reputation as a bully with a badge. He also seems to have fathered children in every assembly district in the county. While this is acceptable to many in the Democrat Party; us Republicans tend to go for the old fashioned one man-one woman relationship.

If anyone in Fong’s camp had paid attention to Cooper in the sheriff’s race, they had the golden issue to spank him with…traffic cameras. During the sheriff’s race, much was being made of the cutbacks in the department as tax revenues declined as a result of the collapse of the “housing bubble” and general economic slowdown. Cooper’s solution was to entirely fund the sheriff’s department from fines that resulted from traffic cameras. This is a matter of public record. Cooper wanted to exponentially increase their use in the county; hence my phrase “Cooper Cams”.

Fong should have tied the “Cooper Cams” around Jim’s neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross and sunk him with this issue. At every intersection with a traffic camera, Fong should have placed a sign that said, “Smile you’re on Cooper Cam” or “Every flash increases Cooper’s cash” or similar things. Link the traffic cameras to Cooper and he would be toast.

Lastly Fong should have contrasted his opposition to using public funds to subsidize the Sacramento Kings with Cooper’s support of using public funds for soccer in Elk Grove. Had Fong advocated this opposition and said that he would let voters decide the issue instead of committing them to the liability without asking, he would have stood a high probability of winning.

Hugh Hewitt wrote a book a few years ago called, If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat”.

Chicago has a reputation of dead guys voting. In fact I used to say, “When you die, you don’t quit voting, you just change parties”.

Well not to be out done, New York has finally found that 850 of their active, registered voters were alive when Lincoln was President.

Here’s the URL before it gets pulled down.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/22/850-people-officially-over-164-years-old-nyc-board-of-elections/

A single Bronx voter listed in official records as being 164 years old led Board of Elections officials to review their files — where they turned up another 849 New Yorkers who were supposedly alive when Abe Lincoln was president.
The stunning discovery came after The Post reported last week that the birth date of Luz Pabellon, a spry 73-year-old who has been living and voting in The Bronx since the 1970s, was recorded as Jan. 1, 1850.
This week, a search of the records in all five boroughs found 849 more voters with the same wacky birth date.

New York election officials promise to try to fix this after the election.

With people like this defending the integrity of the ballot box, is it any wonder that their ilk don’t have a problem when voter turnout is 120 percent of registration? Instead they say, “Nothing to see here, move along now”.

More Fraud

CHICAGO — Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats.

Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library.

“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

The conservative website Illinois Review reported that “While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/22/calibration-error-changes-gop-votes-to-dem-in-illinois-county/