When the Affordable Healthcare Act, commonly known as "Obamacare" was passed the then right wing of the Republican Party mounted a scare campaign that there would be "death panels" for healthcare.
Now, of course, the public is acclimated to the bill and the Republicans won't touch it.
Anyhow, the Wyoming legislature of the period passed a bill sponsored by an extremely conservative legislator to amend the constitution to add this text:
Wyoming Constitution Art. 1, § 38. Right of health care access
(a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.
(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.
(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.
(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.
While it took her seemingly forever to do it, a district court judge in Teton County has ruled that Wyoming's recent ban on abortion violated this provision as abortion is "health care".
I'll be frank. I'm abhorred by abortion and its not health care. It's infanticide. But this gives us an example of the costs of paranoia. The amendment to the constitution was unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. And now its come back to defeat an issue that was a greater one to its sponsors.
Indeed, the sponsor of the amendment was quoted awhile back to the effect that he'd be horrified if his bill resulted in ongoing abortions. Well, it did. He should be horrified.
Now this goes on to the Wyoming Supreme Court where I'll guess it will be upheld. There will be an effort to repeal the amendment, but my guess is that it might very well fail. Legislators will attempt to draft bills around the decision, but they'll fail as well.
This stands to potentially be a disaster of epic proportions for the West, and the United States in general.
It also bears the huge risk of the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The odds of it prevailing are regarded as long, but the President could avoid the matter by withdrawing all the lands immediately and declaring them national monuments, or the U.S. Supreme Court, if it takes it up, could declare them to be unceded Indian lands.
Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.
The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out. I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.
And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.
But Trump's hard to figure.
I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.
I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1
That's hard to judge at a distance. Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be. One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.
Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others. By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage. If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock. He doesn't even seem like the same person.
That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately. Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent. People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset. His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first. It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect. That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora. Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart. Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.
If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence. He's a good salesman.
I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once. But he is a good salesman. He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling. He doesn't have to believe it.
Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell. They'd often move between one sales job and another. If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever. Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling. It was the selling that they were interested in.
I strongly suspect Trump is like that.
At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016. Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas. People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.
Populist Outrage.
Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now. It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew. You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group. But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.
J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.
I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to. When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence. That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.
Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable. He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does. He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.
He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.
For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.
That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird". All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying. If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.
Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.
More this than this.
We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020. Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes. It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:
Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things. Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category. It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers. Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism. What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced. It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2 and Reno3do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4, who for a while just urged societal retreat. Now Kevin Roberts5. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction. He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic. It's Amazon write up states:
America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.
In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.
Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.
All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.
The good news is, we’re going to win.
The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.
Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.
The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.
That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.
Vance's biography really demonstrates this. He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism. He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one. Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition. While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6
So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?
It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.
It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion. Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it. I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.
So is this "weird"?
Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy. And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".
Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets. The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.
Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird 9 while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird. If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird. The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.
Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.
The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart. Very smart, in fact. And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not. Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.
They do.
They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.
But what they've gambled on was two things. One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda. They did that for him, through Project 2025. They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.
They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term. He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.
That figure is J. D. Vance. And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.
Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for. He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump. Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.
Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.
The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.
Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President. But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it. Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.
Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem. But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.
And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution. Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt. Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.
Footnotes
* This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.
**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing. It isn't. Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.
What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church. That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion. Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians.
1. I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb. So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.
It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.
2. Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.
3. R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism. He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.
4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option. He's moved to Hungary. Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.
5. Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.
6. It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years. These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
7. Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican. He's on the fringe right.
8. Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird. Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out. The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world. They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.
Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.
Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.
Democrats don't lose elections, they throw them away.
Yeoman.
July 10, 2024
House Democrats met privately yesterday with a majority of those who spoke expressing the opinion that Joe Biden needs to drop out of the race. Sen. Michael Bennet became the first Senator to do the same, noting; “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House"
That he get out is obvious.
Biden has defiantly been refusing to do so.
It's nearly a symbol of his generation, one which simply won't yield when prior generations did. This pattern repeats itself everywhere in current American society.
In other news, it was revealed that Biden cancelled an early evening meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during the G7 conference as he had to go to bed. The same source reports that he had trouble working outside of the 10 to 4 time frame.
More locally, out of state lobbying group Make Liberty Win has been sending around mailers on candidates it endorses noting them as "100% pro gun", a pretty absurd claim in a state in which every candidate can claim the same thing. For the most part, the endorsed candidates are from the far right, with one single exception.
I looked up one candidate on their flyer that I received. The candidate indicated that he though Reagan and Trump were the two greatest Presidents the country had ever had. What a jarring comment. While I feel that Ronald Reagan, who was a much more cynical campaigner than people want to believe, can be blamed for the rise of the populists were now experiencing, he was a true conservative, a relatively decent President, and a necessary economic correction for the time. He was also not afraid to use American power overseas. Trump's a liar whose embraced populism and isolationism. I don't really see the two of them getting along well, if they were in a private room discussing politics, or in a debate.
Congressman Hageman has indicated that she's spoken to Donald Trump about drug problems on the Wind River Reservation. This is a topic that needs to be addressed, but it is a symptom of our current politics that an incumbent Congressman would discuss a current problem with a prospective chief executive, rather than the current one.
July 11, 2020
George Clooney wrote an op ed in The New York Times urging President Biden to drop out of the race.
I really debated posting this item here as, by and large, I really don't care what celebrities have to say about anything whatsoever. But ultimately, I decided to note this as Clooney, who had recently held a fund raiser for Biden that Biden was at, wrote an article that was observational. Praising Biden, whom he considers a friend, he noted:
But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, whom we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.
Clooney knows Biden, and he's right.
Mostly right anyway. George F. Will's scathing article urging Biden to do the same thing, which was blunt and not kind, argued the following point:
The compassion owed to someone apparently in the cruel grip of an inexorably advancing disease that destroys selfhood should not obscure this fact: Biden’s malady is not robbing the nation of either an impressive political talent or a singularly public-spirited official. Biden was a mediocrity in his 1980s prime, when his first lunge for the presidency quickly collapsed, as his second would in 2008, and as his third almost did after he finished fifth in New Hampshire’s primary in 2020. In the office he eventually attained, he has chosen his defining legacy: the self-absorption of his refusal to leave the public stage gracefully.
Biden was only elected in 2020 as he seemed to be a safe, one term, President when it was assumed that Donald Trump would go away. Not gracefully, but still away. That's proven false. Biden is four years older and no longer the hope that he once was. Democrats have had four years to find a replacement for the aging Biden, but Biden is standing in the way, just as Trump refuses to go away and allow his party to form into something stable.
Also blistering was the article from the slightly left of center Atlantic, which noted, in an article using a Biden line as its title C'mon Man!:
Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove.
Ideally no one gets hurt along the way: Maybe grandpop refuses to give up his license, drives into an oak tree, and only the car gets totaled. But sometimes there are casualties: Maybe a pedestrian gets hit.
President Joe Biden, 81, is acting like one of history’s most negligent and pigheaded leaders at a crucial moment, and right now, we are all pedestrians.
In contrast to this you have those Democrats boldy saying "nothing to see here". An interesting example of that is the most recent post of Robert Reich which insists its only Democratic donors who want Biden out.
Not hardly, Bob.
cont:
The editorial board of The New York Times has declared Donald Trump "unfit to lead".
Protecting the unborn, save for banning late term abortions, long a Republican policy, is notably out of the platform this year. A promised mass deportation figures prominently.
July 14, 2024
In one single horrific terroristic action, 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks almost certain guaranteed the election of Donald Trump.
Crooks attempted to murder Donald Trump yesterday. The details are not in, no doubt conspiracy theories are already circulating like mad, and we don't really know what caused this to occur. Crooks was killed by security.
Trump was in the midst of a speech in which he had apparently been decrying the dangers of illegal immigration.
Whatever the motivation for the assault may be, and we may never know them, the campaign language on the far right, and to a degree the far left, has been heated now for at least three election cycles, with this one taking the top. Trump supporters have grown increasingly aggressive in their speech. It is, therefore, not a really a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention that a violent action occurred.
Indeed, while I haven't posted anything on it here, I've been expecting something like this to occur, although I thought it most likely to occur if Trump was reelected. Repeated resort to violent and extreme language, in and of itself, provokes violence, and the far right has not only used that language, but on January 6, they acted upon it. Trump's citation to authoritarianism, which is extreme, nearly made such an action inevitable.
The fact that this occurred will make Trump sort of a hero martyr and carry him back into the Oval Office. A certain section of Trump's supporters from the Evangelical right will see this as proof that his mission is ordained and protected by God. The dramatic photograph of Trump rising his fist in defiance will now be seen on campaign posters from here on out. Like so many violent actions, whatever Crooks was attempting to achieve, it likely achieved the opposite.
One thing that will be interesting to see is how the Republicans now treat the topic of gun control. Numerous mass shootings have done nothing to cause them to move, but the party now so slavishly follows Trump, and Trump is now a shooting victim, that I expect the hardline position that has been taken by the GOP to be abandoned, much like their long standing positions on abortion have seemed to, and their position on national defense did before that.
July 15, 2024
President Biden addressed the nation last night.
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Last night, I spoke with Donald Trump. I’m sincerely grateful that he’s doing well and recovering. And we had a short but good conversation.
Jill and I are keeping him and his family in our prayers.
We also extend our deepest condolences to the family of the victim who was killed. He was a father. He was protecting his family from the bullets that were being fired, and he lost his life. God love him.
We’re also praying for the full recovery of those who were injured. And we’re grateful to the Secret Service agents and other law enforcement agencies who — and individuals who risked their lives, literally, for our nation.
As I said last night, there is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence for that matter.
An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a na- — as a nation. Everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen.
Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important than that right now — unity.
We’ll debate, and we’ll disagree. That’s not — that’s not going to change. But it’s going to — we’re going to not lose sight of the fact of who we are as Americans.
Look, Vice President Harris and I were just briefed in the Situation Room by my homeland security team, including the director of the FBI, the secretary of Homeland Security, the attorney general, the director of the Secret Service, my homeland security advisor, the national security advisor. And we’re going to continue to be briefed.
The FBI is leading this investigation, which is still in its early stages. We don’t yet have any information about the motive of the shooter. We know who he is. I urge everyone — everyone, please, don’t make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations.
Let the FBI do their job, and their partner agencies do their job. I’ve instructed that this investigation be thorough and swift. And the investigators will have every resource they need to get this done.
Look, as this investigation continues, here’s what we’re going to do.
First, Mr. Trump, as a former president and nominee of the Republican Party already receives a heightened level of security, and I have been consistent in my direction to the Secret Service to provide him with every resource, capability, and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.
Second, I’ve directed the head of the Secret Service to review all security measures for the — all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to start tomorrow.
And third, I’ve directed an independent review of the national security at yesterday’s rally to assess exactly what happened. And we’ll share the results of that independent review with the American people as well.
And, finally, I’ll be speaking more about this tonight at greater length from the Oval Office: We must unite as one nation. We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are.
And so, may God bless you all. And may God protect our troops.
Thank you very much.
cont:
Trump has chosen J. D. Vance to be his running mate. Since switching his earlier views and deciding to favor Trump, Vance has been nothing if not fanatically pro Trump.
The Bombay Explosion occured at Mumbai, India) when the British SS Fort Stikine caught fire and exploded, creating mass destruction and killing around 800 to 1,300 people.
Kohima was relieved with a British breakthrough.
Col. Shaukat Ali Malik of the Indian National Army entered Moirang with his troops and raised the flag of the Azri Hukumat e-Azad Hind for the first time on Indian soil.
The stories above illustrate the complicated nature of India and the Indian people in World War Two. Col/ Sjailat Ali Malik was a Muslim Indian who had previously served in a British Indian police force, the latter being quite militarized. The INA was a collaborationist army in combat against the Allies, while of course the British Indian Army was an Allied Army, but subject to the British Empire and therefore not really a "free" army.
Following the war, the INA would be regarded with sympathy by many Indians. I don't know what happened to Col. Malik, but the Muslin portions of Indian broke off from it immediately with independence, forming Pakistan. Today, what had been East and West Pakistan are Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The Red Army reached the Carpathian foothills.
Gen. Nikolai F. Vatutin died of wounds received in an ambush by Ukrainian partisans on February 29, 1944.
What's correct is that the legislature, reflecting Wyoming politics in general, which frankly reflects the largest party in the state, has become divisive and mean.
Indeed, hatred is what defines politics right now. The populist wing of the GOP hates the government and the people who work for it. They hate the Democrats as well, and they hate the members of their own party who aren't as extreme as they are.
Driscoll noted, in making this comment, that “We’re not going to pay our employees well. We don’t really care a whole lot about, and what we want is a very de minimis government that does the baseline of things." Again, he's mostly right.
The article is revealing regarding Drisocll, whom I know little abotu, but whom I'm gaining respect for. It noted, for example, that he feels that there are Senators who would like to follow the mistaken path's of cheap governments of the Deep South, something I've noted here myself. The article also notes that Driskill "believes fighting a war against green and alternative energy projects is fruitless exercise for Wyoming’s long-term fiscal outlook".
Indeed, he noted:
We probably can effectively put the state in a tailspin, and we can probably do it in a very short period of time. It’s disheartening to sit here and see us potentially cripple ourselves over a policy that federally just makes us look silly.
He's right. And the state is looking really foolish to outsiders.
Driscoll was bold enough to predict conventional energy jobs going away, and he's right again.
For us to come out and say we are not going to in any way deal with any of the CO2 sequestration projects means that we lose our oil and gas and coal, which means we lose 50% of our tax base. It is insanity, absolute craziness.
And he also noted that he feared cuts made to the University of Wyoming’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and gender studies program, while a needed wake-up call for UW, will lead to professors leaving the school.
It likely will.
March 4, 2024
Governor Gordon to Hold Public Bill Signing on Monday, March 4
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon will hold a formal bill signing ceremony today, Monday, March 4 at 1:30 pm in the Governor's Ceremonial Conference Room in the State Capitol Building. The ceremony is open to the public.
The Governor will sign the following bills:
SEA0004SF0003State employee leave for volunteer emergency services.
HEA0014HB0014Prior authorization regulations.
HEA0008HB0023Vehicle registration e-certificate and grace period.
One day after a Senate shakeup of the joint negotiating committee, it came to a compromise budget.
Hmmm. . . .
The Senate voted 16-15 to suspend its own rules to resurrect a bill that eliminates gun-free zones in a move that Senate Majority Leader Driskill called "absolute idiocy".
Bills signed into law so far:
Enrolled Act # Bill # Bill Title
HEA0001HB0073Abandoned mine reclamation accounts.
HEA0002HB0072Worker's compensation-provision for adverse deviation.
HEA0003HB0071Broadband development subaccount-amendments.
HEA0004HB0046Chancery court-timeline for resolution of disputes.
HEA0005HB0040School district trustee oath of office.
HEA0006HB0027DFS and law enforcement-cross reporting.
Bills that passed into law, so far, without the Governor's signature.
SEA0008SF0009Parental rights in education-1.
March 7, 2024
Chloe's law banning the sexual mutilation of children has passed the legislature.
March 8, 2024
Governor Gordon Vetoes Bill that Could Hurt Charter Schools and Public Education System
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Gordon issued his first veto of the 2024 Legislative Session today, calling a bill addressing charter schools a “bailing wire fix” that could threaten the sustainability of charter schools in the years to come. The Governor is an ardent supporter of school choice, and he points out that the legislation does not treat all charter schools equally.
Senate File 61 - Education-charter school amendments authorizes charter schools as “local education agencies” (LEAs) to apply for, receive and administer federal and state grants. However, the bill repeals the ability of the state’s Charter Authorizing Board to serve this function before that board has even had an opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness, the Governor said. In addition, the proposed legislation could impose significant costs and administrative burdens unequally across charter schools, potentially posing constitutional issues.
“Without a thorough examination of the consequences and impacts on our state, students, parents, and taxpayers, I fear we may risk exacerbating existing impediments to charter growth and innovation while simultaneously raising the overall cost of education to unsustainable levels over the long term,” the Governor wrote in his veto letter. “Such a scenario is neither fiscally responsible nor supportive of students and parents who choose charter schools for their education.”
District-authorized charters could continue to receive LEA services from their Authorizer, but State-Authorized charter schools would be expected to provide these services without any new resources provided. The Governor concluded by urging the Legislature to undertake a comprehensive review of Wyoming’s charter school statutes as an interim topic. This would ensure that Wyoming’s education policies are fair, equitable, transparent, and accountable, he wrote.
The Governor’s veto letter is attached and may be found here.
Governor Gordon Expresses Concern That Legislature has Only Passed Budget for Itself While the Rest of Wyoming Waits
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon’s message at the start of this legislative session was clear: The only constitutionally-required duty the Legislature has is to pass a balanced budget for the coming two years. That still has not happened. While the rest of Wyoming waits for its budget, the Legislature has passed a budget only for lawmakers and their staff.
The Governor’s decision on the Legislature’s budget is due today (Thursday), while the budget for the rest of Wyoming remains in limbo until Friday. Noting that he is forced to consider funding the separate Legislative budget while awaiting that vote, the Governor issued several line-item vetoes. These vetoes would not imperil the ability of the legislative branch to function.
“I am optimistic even at this late hour that a budget for the other two branches of government could arrive as soon as tomorrow,” the Governor wrote. “Accordingly, as I understand the importance of funding the Legislature in the coming two years, I am not vetoing this entire piece of legislation, but am exercising my constitutional ability to disapprove of items in this spending bill.”
Governor Gordon struck the word “Energy” from a $76,800 appropriation for membership dues to the Energy Council, a legislative organization dedicated to energy policy. The Governor said “the Senate persists in sending confusing messages” about its support for the state’s energy industry and the thousands of people it employs. He invited the Legislature to override his veto “to send a clear message to the people of Wyoming and me about whether or not each chamber supports our energy industry, and follow up those words with action...”
The Governor also had requested an inflation adjustment of $48 million to address increased operational costs the state has experienced over the past two years. The Legislature reduced that request to $28 million in the version of the budget bill currently being considered. Accordingly, the Governor reduced the Legislative budget request by $50,000 for new Legislative furniture and accessories so that all branches of government can contribute to the cost savings imposed by the Legislature on the rest of Wyoming.
The Governor’s letter is attached and may be viewed here.
The End?
This is supposed to be the end. Will they make it?
March 9, 2024
And they did conclude. Here is the current list of bills that were signed into law.
Governor Mark Gordon has signed the following enrolled acts into law. The full text of all bills from the 2024 session may be found on the Wyoming Legislature's website:
Enrolled Act # Bill # Bill Title
HEA0001HB0073Abandoned mine reclamation accounts.
HEA0002HB0072Worker's compensation-provision for adverse deviation.
HEA0003HB0071Broadband development subaccount-amendments.
HEA0004HB0046Chancery court-timeline for resolution of disputes.
HEA0005HB0040School district trustee oath of office.
HEA0006HB0027DFS and law enforcement-cross reporting.
SEA0024 SF0032 Hemp-limitations on psychoactive substances.
SEA0025 SF0022 Public service commission-electricity reliability.
SEA0026 SF0018 Indian child welfare act-safe haven amendments.
SEA0027SF0007Behavioral health redesign-vulnerable adults.
The Governor allowed the following enrolled act to go into law without his signature. Click on the bill for the Governor's letter:
SEA0008SF0009Parental rights in education-1.
The Governor exercised his line-item veto authority on the following bills. Click on the bill for the Governor's letter and the specific strikethroughs:
SEA0028SF0002Legislative budget.
The Governor vetoed the following enrolled act. Click on the bill for the Governor's letter:
