Month: December 2016

It’s because of women, and the way we treat them.  Islamic society is starkly patriarchal.  Women are chattel, who belong to their fathers.  It’s not uncommon for a young girl to be married off to her paternal uncle, or first cousin.  She has no say, no right.  Once married, she belongs to her husband.  She’s not fully human, to our eyes.

In America, and most of the West, women are free to choose.  They decide if, when, and to whom they marry, and they decide how long that marriage will last.  American courts universally defer to the mother when custody of children is an issue, and an American man who runs off on his family will be made to pay the price, if he can be found.  A lot of American women are sexual provocateurs, and enjoy showing off the flesh.  Such behavior in Islam is a death warrant.

I could go on, but it’s self evident.  A society is based on families, and the way families are structured affects everything.  A rigidly patriarchal family structure produces a rigidly hierarchical government.  The Absolute Nuclear Family, ours, produces democracy.

Tacitus, some two thousand years ago, was the first to describe the ANF, as it was practiced by the German tribes he studied.  Their descendants, the Anglo-Saxons, brought the ANF with them to Britain.  The Normans who came later also brought the ANF structure, which is almost universal in Scandinavia.

So the English who came to Jamestown, and then Plymouth, brought the Absolute Nuclear Family with them, and it is the American way of life we know today.  It was perfect for settling a continent, because one of its central features was that a young married couple were expected to provide a home for themselves.  They were completely free from any interference from either of their parents.  And the parents had no legal obligations to them.  They were on their own, legally.

What such a young couple needed was land, and America had a whole lot of that to offer.  For generation after generation American women produced eight, ten, twelve, thirteen children, and these children would have eight, ten, twelve children of their own.  My direct ancestor, Thomas Pettyjohn II, was a thirteenth child, and seventh son, born after the death of his father.  He married a cousin and they had twelve of their own.  That’s the old Absolute Nuclear Family in action.  And these people spread out all across the country, north and south.  From Virginia to Delaware to Ohio to Indiana to South Dakota.

I believe the ANF is responsible for the English success in settling America, as opposed to the French or the Spanish.  French and Spanish women refused to come to the New World, so the French and the Spaniards married Native women.  But the English women would come, and that made all the difference in the world.  And it was the lure of having an Absolute Nuclear Family, and land, all of their own, that brought them to Virginia.  Many were mail order brides, given clothes and other necessaries, and free passage to Virginia.  They were given a place to stay while they decided which of the numerous young men who sought their hand they would pick.  A successful suitor had to pay 120 lbs. of prime tobacco, worth $5,000 today, to reimburse the Virginia Company.  They were delighted to pay.

These young women were not required to pick anyone.  If they decided not to marry, that was their right.  Most did, of course, and these are among the earliest Mothers of America, whose offspring number in the tens of millions.

If I was rich I’d do a movie about one of those ships, bringing a boat load of mail order brides to Virginia in 1618, and what happened to them after they got there.  It could be quite romantic, come to think of it.

 

We’ve wanted term limits for a very long time, even though we didn’t always hate Congress like we do today.  Here’s a link to the data.  As recently as 2000-2003 Congress had a positive approval rating.  Right now it’s 20% approve, 76% disapprove.  20% seems high to me, but that’s Gallup’s number, so be it.

So 76% of us don’t like Congress, and 75% of us support term limits.  That’s a 3/4 supermajority.  That’s what you need if you want to use Article V.  A 3/4 supermajority, just as 3/4 of the States must ratify any proposed Amendment.  The Balanced Budget Amendment has the support of a 3/4 supermajority, and that’s why it’s close to succeeding.  Bipartisan support isn’t enough for Article V.  Even the support of 2/3 of the people is not enough.   It’s got to be something that the vast majority of the public wants.

20 years ago term limits had the same 3/4 supermajority.  Today is different than back then.  Right now people don’t just dislike Congress, they disdain it.  It’s so corrupt, and full of place holders and mediocre hacks, that it’s a national joke.  Just take a look at the Democratic House leadership.  These are all very old people.  And in their case, very ineffective people.  Why would a Democratic State Legislator try to save their careers by opposing term limits?  It wouldn’t make sense.  If we were ever going to get support from Democratic Legislators for Congressional term limits, the time is now.  Most of the people who will be term limited out are Republicans.  If you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like?

2017 is a prime number.  It’s indivisible, and thus one of a kind.  It’s a great year to pass Article V term limits Resolutions.  I think there’s a real chance we can get it done in California.  That might make people realize it’s not a left/right issue.  The Bernie Sanders voters and the Trump ones agree on this one.  There’s no reason it can’t be done.  It will be something to talk about at Nashville on 7-11-2017.  Prime numbers all.

Obama is out with a lot of last minute orders and actions, all of which are an indictment of Congress.  It is Congress that enables a President, any President, this sort of unilateral power.  Congress surrendered this power to the Executive, and they don’t want it back.  It would be too much work.  They’d actually have to pass some legislation, instead of leaving all the responsibility with the Executive.  But that would interfere with their fundraising, and other reelection activity, so that won’t happen.

28 years ago my buddy Robin Taylor and I introduced House Joint Resolution 54, calling for an Article V Amendment Convention for the purpose of proposing a Congressional Term Limits Amendment.  Some things take a while before they catch on.

Back in Alaska, the shortest day of the year was a big deal.  The day was five and a half hours long in Anchorage today.  After today you could tell yourself that every day will be longer, for the next six months.  We had eight hours here in the Gold Country.  Spring isn’t that far off now.   This is going to be a year to remember.

It wasn’t that hard to figure out why Romney lost in 2012.  538.com and others saw it right away.  Blue collar whites in the Rust Belt simply refused to vote for him.   The Obama campaign had convinced them that Romney was no friend of the working man.  And maybe he wasn’t, and maybe the next Republican nominee would have to be different.

What Trump alone understood was the hatred these guys had for NAFTA and other trade deals.  The Republican Party was a free trade party, and these voters wanted nothing to do with it.  Libertarians and fancy pants constitutional conservatives, like me, believed in free trade as a matter of faith.  Adam Smith was our go to guy, and the intellectual case for free trade was clear.  Comparative advantage, and all that.  Sure, there would have to be economic dislocation for a lot of working class Americans.  But it was all for the greater good.

To his eternal credit, Trump saw the hole in this thinking.   The burden of free trade was concentrated on a fairly small number of Americans  — the ones who would lose their jobs.  The benefit was widespread, and really didn’t impact most people.  Politically, this was asking for trouble.  By attacking these trade deals Trump would win the undying, unwavering support of as much as 1/3 of the country. Not enough to win an election, but a good base to build on, and build he did.

There were three other winning issues for Trump.  He was not a politician, he wasn’t asking people for money, and he was a rogue, unscripted.  Not just politically incorrect, he was brash, irreverent, and funny.

I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating.  Trump would have lost the election if it had not been for the Washington Post.  I equate NBC News with the Clinton campaign.  They would do anything to stop Trump.  For years they had been in possession of the Access Hollywood tape.  This was the one that would sink Trump, but the timing of its release was critical.  It had to come out so late in the campaign that he wouldn’t have time to recover.  They wanted just enough time for saturation coverage, and no more.  If that tape had come out a week before the election, instead of a month, Trump would not have recovered, and he would have lost.  But the WaPo found out about the tape, and jumped the gun.  They broke the story, and NBC was forced to come out with the tape prematurely.  When the book is written about this campaign, this will be the section I’ll be looking for.

I think if that Access Hollywood tape had come out a year ago, Trump would not have won the nomination.  His opponents, or one of them, would have beat that over his head without mercy.  Forget low energy Jeb, or Lil’ Marco, or Lyin’ Ted.  It would have been Trump the Groper, Donald the Horn Dog, Trump the sexual deviant and criminal.  He would have been the object of ridicule.  So, as far as I’m concerned, if you want to give credit where credit is due, NBC News put Trump in the White House, by covering up for him until the very end.

But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and it is not our role to second guess Him.  Based on what I’ve seen so far, Trump could be as consequential a President as Reagan.  And Reagan won the Cold War.  Go figure.  The Good Lord looks out for drunks, sailors, and the U.S.A.  It is for us to be thankful.

A month from now, when Trump takes office, we’re going to stop playing nice.  The Bushes, being Bushes, insisted on playing nice.  To Clinton and Obama, globalists to their core, playing nice was necessary because we must not alienate the one and half billion Moslems of the world.  We don’t want them to get mad at us.  What we’re afraid they’d do, if they really got mad at us, isn’t entirely clear.  At one point we needed their oil, but those days are over.  It’s mainly that they belong to another religion, and must be respected.  In the dumbest statement ever made by a President of the United States, Bush 2 declared, “Islam is a religion of peace.”  When you start off with something that moronic as your precedent, you’re bound to fail.

Trump’s got some people around him who understand what needs to be done.  With Flynn at NSA, Mad Dog Mattis at Defense, and T.Rex at State, he has a group of men who are willing to sit down with the Israelis, and with the Russians, and come up with a game plan to wipe these people out.  Track them down and kill them, just like the Mossad did to the assassins of the Munich Olympics.  It will take a while, and it won’t be pretty.  The Israelis just do whatever they have to do, and the Russians are perfectly willing to apply massive, brute force.  With our Navy, special forces, and technical capability we can accomplish this mission,  along with our friends in the Anglosphere, the Russians, and the Israelis.  That’s all you need, although help from friendly nations like Poland is always welcome..

It’s just a question of will, and Trump has more than enough of that.  He’s going to have an opportunity to demonstrate his resolve, and I expect him to take it.  It will probably involve an altercation with the Chinese Navy.  This time they stole one of our drones.  Who knows what’s next?

I wouldn’t rule out dropping the 82nd Airborne down on some ISIS stronghold, and having them clean house.  In and out in less than a week.  No permanent boots on the ground.  Just expeditionary forces, conducting police actions.  In and out.  My military training consisted of one semester in the U. C. Berkeley Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps in 1962.  I had a uniform, and everything.  I remember one time they tried to teach us the manual of arms, how you’re supposed to handle a rifle.  It was pretty sad.  We all thought it was sort of a joke.

So I may not have had much of a military career, but I am a politician, and I know the American people don’t want any more boots on the ground, any time, any where.  Our Army is for defense of the homeland, not imperial wars.  We’re not at war with a state, so the Army should not be sent overseas.  We have no reason to go to war with anyone.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was likely to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost.

Borders are walls.  They separate one country, and people, from another.  A border is a line, from one point in the world to another.  There are borders on the sea as well as the land.  When you cross the line you leave the law of one country, and enter the rule of another.  When borders are respected, there is peace.  Where there is dispute over a border, nations will go to war.  This is the way of the world, for chimpanzees, lions and men.  A nation of men has borders, as does a pack of chimps or a pride of lions, and we will all fight to defend them.

After World War One a lot of well meaning people decided the whole idea of nations and borders and wars was obsolete.  Nationhood had led to slaughter and chaos.  A better way was needed, and the dream of one world government came to be.  First came the League of Nations, and now we have the United Nations, and the European Union.  All designed to tame the scourge of nationalism and war.  All artificial concepts, dreamed up in some faculty lounge, and forced down the throats of people for a century now.

That dream is dead.  Brexit and Trump are just for openers.  Globalism has no constituency.  Perhaps in the salons of Paris or the beer halls of Berlin it lives on, but it’s dying, and it’s happening very quickly.  This was a powerful dream, and there are people who won’t let it go, but their cause is lost, their day come, and gone.

There are borders in this country, between the sovereign States.  American progressives oppose these borders, just as they oppose international ones.  For a hundred years they have sought to submerge the States into the federal government, to make them mere local administrators of federal rule.  But just as globalism is dying, so are the forces of centralization in this country.  Power will be returned to the States, and the people.

It begins in Nashville on July 11th, 2017.

Obama has been so wrong, and his timing so off, about so many things, it boggles the mind.  Here’s his current wisdom on the Electoral College, “The Electoral College is a vestige, a carry over from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on States.”

Yes, Barack, that earlier version included the provisions of Article V, which give the States the power to exercise control over the federal government.  And Article V is about to be used, for the first time in our history.  I wonder, Barry, back when you were teaching Constitutional Law, did you spend much time on Article V?