The most urgent of the urgent

Take out your pencils, and no cheating

Photo courtesy Library of Congress, c. 1919

Time for another quiz, boys and girls. Question: Which peril is the most urgent?

a) An unknown number of American citizens trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan with no plan for getting them out.

b) The uncontrolled invasion by illegal aliens, overwhelming the system and imperiling the security of countless U.S. cities.

c) Denial of habeas corpus rights to political prisoners who are enemies of the state, jailed without charges or trial dates.

Answer: Yes.

We have other threats to our sovereignty as well, including the alarming transformation of the U.S. armed forces into a political arm of the Democrat Party, and the left's control of education and information media. These can wait. The above three can't, not even until tomorrow.

It is imperative that we citizens drop whatever we are doing, right now, and put our congressional representatives in the hot seat, where they belong. Today, now.

I did that Thursday morning, with this email to my congresswoman and my state's two U.S. Senators:

“I want to ask why there has been no writ of habeas corpus regarding Col. Scheller, and what you as a Member of Congress (Senator) are doing, or intend to do, to correct this lawless miscarriage of justice.

“Congress holds power over the military, and I find it disgusting that the two generals and secretary of defense who are most responsible for this calamity, now lying to Congress and trying to shift blame to the President, have not been fired. In the case of Gen. Milley, if Col. Scheller deserves a court martial, then so does he.”

I didn't mean to imply that Biden is blameless. As commander-in-chief, of course he is responsible for this mess he created. But Congress can't control Joe Biden, except to remove him from office. Congress does control military spending, and its refusal to demand the removal of two incompetent, dishonest generals and a grossly incompetent secretary of defense while a true American patriot sits in the brig without indictment is inexcusable.

It's time to get furious, time to demand action, time to make our lawmakers squirm.

Excuse our continual harping on this, but ignoring the problem doesn't magically make it disappear. While the press likes to say the Democrat Party is in disarray, don't be fooled by the smokescreen. They control the conversation because they control information, academia, Big Tech, and major corporations.

Republicans continue to work on the fine points of conducting a circular firing squad while Democrats hone their own skills. Democrats know little about governing, so they put their energy where it matters, running for office and getting elected. Ability is irrelevant, to wit:

Neighborhood Scout says your chances of becoming a violent crime victim in Buffalo are 1 in 100, while in New York City – not exactly a safety zone for peace lovers – it's only 1 in 279. Buffalo is rated at 6, meaning than only 6% of American cities are more dangerous. Pretty comforting.

How do Democrats plan to deal with this in their upcoming mayoral election? Replace the failed 4-term incumbent with – hold onto your hat – a socialist!

The presumptive new mayor says she hasn't read anything about socialism since high school and only knows it's complicated. But she thinks it's a swell idea for ruling, assuming she beats her vanquished foe running as a write-in. One thing we know for sure: Republicans need not apply.

Most of America's failed cities are run by Democrats who know how to fail upward. Pete Buttigieg is the failed mayor of a small Indiana city who is now the transportation secretary. Gavin Newsom, the failed former mayor of basket case San Francisco, is a governor whose incompetence served him well in the recall election.

Democrats stay in power because they know how to run elections, and Republicans don't. They know how to fight in alleys, and Republicans don't. They know how to cheat, steal, threaten, cajole, and Republicans don't.

Recently I asked our local Republican party leaders how they plan to challenge our left wing, radical LQBTQ feminist state representative. Her base is a quite small group of vocal 1-issue activists. She's in her second term, has no serious opposition even though this was once a conservative district, and she never stops campaigning.

She sends out at least two emails a week, promoting voter registration of Democrats and excoriating our governor for whatever he has done that week. We see dozens of photos of her every month in these missives, mostly sporting a government obedience mask. Her supporters must love it. The point here is that she knows how to communicate with voters.

An email from Republican Party headquarters said they would get back to me. I'm still waiting, and it's been weeks.

Recently I approached a party official with this question, and he was perplexed. Who's going to run? Gee, I don't know. Are you interested? This is the response from a professional politician whose job it is to recruit strong candidates.

Here's some advice to thinking-about-it office-seekers: It may be too late to make a serious run for 2022, at least at the statehouse level and above. I continually see people jump in at the last minute, sometimes only weeks before a primary. Electoral success requires the laying of pipe long before the gas is turned on. And forget about help from any Republican Party organization. Winners have to do it on their own, with their own supporters and friends.

Ronald Reagan lost the 1976 presidential nomination and then spent the next four years going around the country giving speeches and campaigning for fellow conservatives, raising money and making friends. This is how it's done.

Republicans are poor communicators, and worse, they aren't aware of it. Many times I have asked Ron DeSantis for comment, going back to his congressional days when he briefly ran for the U.S. Senate. Neither he nor his press office has even replied, even to say they were too busy to mess with me. This is the fate of small-time reporters and commentators.

U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer represents Alabama's 6th District. I brought up this matter with him a couple of years ago after a speech he gave. He said Republican politicians who ignore small-market reporters are making a mistake. He thinks too many of them believe that an appearance on Fox News is all that’s required. But good luck if you don’t have a book to sell.

Your tuition dollars at work (continued)

Why colleges shouldn't be allowed to teach history. As if the very existence of a college “gender studies” program isn't enough cause for ridicule, the University of Pennsylvania no longer calls its department the Alice Paul Center. The new name is the “Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies.”

Alice should be relieved, actually. A suffragette who played a major role in getting the 19th Amendment ratified, giving women the right to vote, she is a true American historical figure, not a phonus-balonus feminist goofball. The U-Penn fanatics are ecstatic, however. “The existence of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming persons is not, and never has been, up for debate,” says Melissa Sanchez, a professor of comparative literature who will run the operation.

This is a true statement. In fact, we looked all the way back to our nation's founding and the bitter political battles between Jefferson and Hamilton in Washington's first cabinet. Try as we did, however, we couldn't find one record of a debate about trans, nonbinary, or nonconforming persons. We can only hold scholars like Melissa Sanchez at the University of Pennsylvania in unbridled awe. Her revelation at the very least equals in importance the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. – from a story at Campus Reform.

In the news . . .

Proof that economics is no longer taught in our high schools. Our nomination for the Nobel Prize in economics is Jen Psaki. At a press briefing Monday, the public face of White House propaganda gave a lesson in basic economics. Why Thomas Sowell didn't include this information in Basic Economics or Applied Economics is a mystery to us. We wonder also how Nobel Laureates Paul A. Samuelson and Milton Friedman missed this one.

Here's part of her lecture: “There are some – and I'm not sure if this is the case in this report – who argue that, in the past, companies have passed on these costs to consumers. . . . We feel that that's unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.”

Jen was belly-aching about the suggestion that corporations – perish the thought! – might try to pass on higher taxes to consumers if Biden's big tax hike goes through. This is is no different than complaining that an employer might try to raise prices to cover increased labor or materials costs. The principle is simple and straightforward, something a fourth grader can understand if it's explained properly.

An Obama-appointed federal judge continues a disturbing trend of jurists who strike down laws based on a sponsor's campaign positions. Judge Beth Bloom overturned Florida's sanctuary city ban, calling it unconstitutional but admitting her reasoning was that it discriminates against She didn't explain how. She cited Gov. DeSantis' campaign promise to stop Florida communities from protecting illegal aliens from apprehension, but the ban says nothing about the race of those who enter the country illegally. Bloom accused DeSantis and the state's Republican Party chairman of having “discriminatory motives.” The state will appeal the permanent injunction. – from a story at USSA News. . .

Great moments in crime prevention. Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police Supt. David Brown appeared at the City Club of Chicago this week with a progress report on their new “holistic approach” to policing. Caught up in the defund-the-police movement, Lori wanted to make sure city taxpayers weren't wasting money on ineffective practices at the street level, and so she replaced some of the police budget with social workers, food drives, and fishing trips for kids. She says it's working, with the number of carjackings declining and the number of cleared murder cases increasing (not the number of murders, only the clearance rate).

Except for a 37% drop in burglaries, the CPD's own website tells a different story, the Chicago Tribune reports: “The number of homicides so far this year is up 4% compared to 2020, 56% from two years ago and 17% from 2017. Shootings are up 10% compared to 2020, 66% from two years ago and 23% from 2017.”

Lori still has to work out some kinks. Last weekend three thugs walked into an Ulta Beauty store in the Norridge neighborhood and cleaned out its shelves of hoity-toity Christian Dior and Giorgio Armani makeup – in broad daylight with a customer recording the scene. A store employee said the police were contacted, for what purpose we don't really know. . .

The New York Times quietly “corrected” its statement that Border Patrol agents had whipped illegal immigrants, but only after the horse had left the barn, so to speak. We put “corrected” in quotes because a correction implies a mistake, and it was no mistake that the Times fabricated a story that wasn't based on a single fact. Where we come from, this is called a lie.

Even so, the correction was weak, incomplete and insincere, like a kid forced to apologize with a “Sorry” he doesn't mean:

“An earlier version of this article overstated what is known about the behavior of some Border Patrol agents on horseback. While the agents waved their reins while pushing migrants back into the Rio Grande, The Times has not seen conclusive evidence that migrants were struck with the reins.”

The Times hasn't seen any evidence because there is none. It didn't happen.

Times propagandists are dishonest, but they aren't stupid. Like the lawyer who says something he knows the judge will order the jury to ignore, the Times is deft at making false statements, quietly correcting them later at the bottom of some inside page that few readers ever see. That is how the Times and other state-friendly media influenced the 2020 election with the Russian collusion hoax, now proved such beyond a doubt. Yet to this day millions of Americans still believe it.

Videos worth watching

Normally we don't spy on readers, but our curiosity was too much to resist, and so we got to snooping around in the statistics for last week's Friday Letter, helpfully compiled and reported by Substack. To our embarrassed dismay we learned that our readers were more interested in the video links we posted than in the mindless drivel we've been spewing out over the last 459 Fridays. That's a lot of Fridays. Figuring your attention span is short like ours and you'll soon forget about this, we nonetheless present for a second week some links to interesting videos. Let's hope it doesn't become habit.

Kamala Harris praising a college student for accusing Israel of “ethnic genocide.”

Col. Scheller's parents react to his jailing for questioning policy, while Gen. Milley escapes court martial for aiding and abetting China.

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Steve's columns are often excerpted at USSA News.