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Friday, March 18, 2016

March 18, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

I'll start off with a bit in the self-defense department, but the rest are general interest or current events stuff for today.



And now some current events and political commentary:

When politicians want to import tens of millions of new immigrants it can look like Washington is trying to remake the electorate. This isn't pure fantasy. In 1996, Bill Clinton's White House instructed the Immigration and Naturalization Service "to streamline the naturalization process and greatly increase naturalizations during 1996." Sure enough, Hispanics more than doubled as a portion of the electorate for Clinton's 1996 reelection, according to exit polls.

    Conservatives won't win any fights — over guns, marriage, taxes, spending, health care, or anything — if the U.S. electorate is remade in the image of California.

      Deeper than the issues, and even deeper than the structural political questions, is the nearly existential question that Trump raises. "IF WE DON'T HAVE BORDERS," Trump tweeted in November, "WE DON'T HAVE A COUNTRY!"
      [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better… [Samuel Francis in Chronicles]
        ... New initiatives are hard to push through. But it is not so difficult to undo things. One simply has to turn off the spigot by refusing to appropriate money for them, and that is what Mitch McConnell and his colleagues promised and failed to do.

          One could respond that they could not risk a government shutdown (though they claimed, while running for office, the opposite). But this response makes no sense. It is the President who shuts down the government by vetoing the budget. “Never mind that,” one could then reply. “They would get the blame. They have gotten the blame every time they tried.”

            This, too, is true – but it ignores one thing. Every time they tried they lost their nerve and backed down. Cowards who back down always get the blame. Think about it. Can you think of a single instance in which a man has taken a bold, brave stance and then later backed down in which he did not become an object of contempt?

              This matter is more important than it might seem. The truth is that modern liberty depends on the power of the purse. All of the great battles in England in the 17th century between the Crown and Parliament turned ultimately on the power of the purse. The members of Parliament were elected at least in part with an eye to achieving a redress of grievances, and that redress was the price they exacted for funding the Crown. Our legislature has given up that power. Our congressional leaders claim – once the election is over – that they have no leverage. If that is really true, then elections do not matter, and a redress of grievances is now beyond the legislature’s power. Absent that capacity, however, the legislature is virtually useless. Absent that capacity, it is contemptible — and let’s face it: the President and those who work under him have showered it with contempt.

                There is a lesson to be learned from the current mess: Congress needs to reassert in a dramatic fashion the power of the purse, and the Republicans need to start keeping their promises. To do that, however, they will have to show a bit of backbone.

                And, finally, some other stuff:
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