James Williamson guest blog: Imminent Rebellion: Are we there yet?

June 20, 2020 — buckeyerino

Editor’s note: James Williamson is a native and former resident of Ohio who currently lives in Nevada.  He is also one of the brothers of yours truly, Daniel Jack Williamson, the owner of this blog.  He has written many other guest blog articles for Buckeye RINO, including a series of posts with the phrase “Imminent Rebellion” in the title (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). –DJW

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a political blog post.  You may ask, why so silent while the world seems to be falling apart around us?  Well, in my past posts, I was warning what could happen if we continued our current trajectory.  Now we are so far along, the idea of civil war and revolution are almost considered mainstream.  Why repeat what others are already saying?

So now I suppose my task is to say something that no one else is saying.  Or at least not many people are saying.  Or perhaps what is being said but not heard….

It seems we have plunged the country into chaos.  I say “we” because ultimately the nation’s behavior is an aggregate of the individual decisions of the 300+ million inhabitants of what we call the United States of America. I can’t think of any period in American history where the rule of law has been so threatened since the Civil War. Many critics of the president accuse him of undermining the law intentionally.  While there may be specific instances where this is true, we could also find examples of presidents trying to skirt or even defying the law going all the way back to George Washington. (Remember Andrew Jackson’s response to the Supreme Court regarding the Cherokee decision?) These behaviors are always concerning. Left unchecked, they can certainly lead to tyranny, which is why we oppose them.  On the other hand any elected official is ultimately merely a human being and therefore flawed in their thinking and behavior.  There will always be abuses.  If we can’t accept that, then we will have a hard time accepting self-governance.  Fortunately, our founding fathers anticipated this and included a mechanism to limit the amount of abuse an individual could inflict by separating governmental power into three equal branches.

“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” –Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801.

Thomas Jefferson, in a rhetorical way, points out that we have no choice but to accept imperfect leaders.  It may be this pursuit of the “perfect” president or form of government that has lead us to this point.  Ideology trumps practicality and, it seems, words now trump actions. No one will argue against the observation that our President is flawed.  I can also say that almost no one would say they didn’t know what they were getting into before the election.  We knew Donald Trump was a billionaire real estate magnate who loved to spend time in front of cameras.  We knew he loved salesman’s puffery and engaged in it daily.  We knew  he could be unpredictable and volatile.  We knew he liked to spend money…. You get the idea.  So why did we think any of this would change when he became President?

By now you are probably asking, “what’s your point?” (Maybe I am too…)  We are living in chaotic times with a chaotic President, or so it seems.  Notwithstanding the apparent chaos and the intensity of the rhetoric, we continue as a nation.  As long as we can maintain rule of law we will be able to continue as a nation.  The breakdown of the rule of law leads down two paths: anarchy (think French revolution) or war (US civil war).  Either way the results are usually unpalatable to the general public long term and some form of government emerges. So how do we avoid anarchy and war? The first step is to calm down and think.  Rational thought will lead to more deliberate actions that generally produce better results.  Emotional thought generally leads to actions that bring a lot of unintended consequences.  For example, if you eliminate (abolish, defund) the police how will government respond to violent crime?  The emotional thinker doesn’t have an answer but wants to forge ahead anyway.  A rational thinker may not have an immediate answer and so would be reluctant to move ahead without a solid plan in place.

Slow down.  Think before you act. The main difference between machines and people is the ability to reason and to think critically.  If we act out of emotion without rational, critical thought, we are worse than a robot.  A robot doesn’t have the ability to think critically but it also doesn’t make mistakes. An emotionalized human has set aside what makes them unique in the animal world.  There may be times where that is appropriate (i.e. when our life is in danger) but if emotions like fear, rage, and resentment drive all our decision making the results of our actions will be no better than the negative emotions that drove them.

It is often said that actions speak louder than words.  Anyone listening to media may come to the opposite conclusion.  Perhaps in a business that thrives on rhetoric and argument words are more important than actions to the likes of CNN, Fox, Facebook, and Twitter. Heated rhetoric sells.  Ironically the very same organizations that claim to be against Trump are the very keys to his electoral victory.  Why did Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton while spending a small fraction of his competitor on the campaign?  Because the news media couldn’t keep their cameras off of him.  They acted out of emotion and didn’t stop to think.  They were so convinced that what he was saying would sink his own ship that they forgot one of the maxims of the marketing industry: all press is good press.  Trump was the political equivalent of the Kardashians.  (Maybe that’s why they get along?) Doesn’t matter if people make fun of you, doesn’t matter if people think you are ridiculous, doesn’t matter if you have substance…. Just keep the cameras pointed at you!!!!  And the media fell for it……

Now to the subject of actions.  I still operate in a world where actions do speak louder than words so here’s a few (just a few) actions by the president that reassure me:

1.       Judicial appointments – The President has taken this responsibility seriously and has appointed more judges than any other president in history.  Yes, there were extra vacancies because Mitch McConnell drug his feet and outright blocked Obama appointments, however, Trump has wasted no time in filling these positions, which indicates that he understands how important the judiciary is in maintaining rule of law.

2.       Criminal justice reform – There are a lot of critics of the bill and I myself have not studied it, however just the fact that it passed indicates that the President recognizes there is a problem and took measures to correct it.

3.       Trade renegotiation – Trump, as a businessman, understands the fundamental cost vs. benefit analysis and has come to the conclusion that we are paying too much for what we are getting.  This includes NATO  and the UN.  People may not like his style (foreign countries sure don’t) but he is advocating for the country, which is what a President is supposed to do.

4.       Firing incompetent or partisan government employees (especially Bolton) – I know this one causes a lot of alarm for some but Trump needs to say, “You’re fired!” about 10,000 more times.  I spent time working at a federal facility and it is way too difficult to get rid of bad employees there.  They know it’s near impossible to get fired and they abuse it.  Bolton was an especially important target.  He’s the equivalent of Conrad Von Hotzendorf, one of the high ranking officials of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  His constant war-hawking nearly plunged the country into a massive conflict many times before WWI.  One of the reasons it didn’t happen sooner was because Franz Ferdinand was the counter-balancing voice of reason that prevented the empire from making rash moves.  Once Franz Ferdinand was killed that voice fell silent.  Trump knows that a war with Russia would not end well for the US.  Agree with him or not, firing a reckless war-hawk demonstrates that there is more to Trump than just rhetoric.

And now for the list of things that concern me:

1.       Rhetoric – this goes without saying.  It is said that our strengths can be exploited and turned against us.  The rhetoric continues because it’s what got him elected.  It may get him elected again this fall.  What it won’t do is help anyone following him.  It provided cover for his actions. Most people can’t even tell you what he has or hasn’t done because they can’t get past what he is saying. That’s a two edged sword and could come back to bite him just as hard as it bit the media that (supposedly) opposed him.

2.       Spending – I just read that our federal budget is now higher than WWII levels relative to GDP.  That is a problem.  Honestly this was probably my biggest concern while he was a candidate and continues to be a concern.  Trump is not alone on this.  Congress, and the federal reserve seem to be very compliant. I don’t think Hilary Clinton with a democratic congress would have spent any more than we are spending now.  Maybe if AOC was president…. Unfortunately this has been a problem for so long we may be past the point of no return.  This probably warrants a separate entry.

In conclusion, while it seems that we are marching inevitably toward separation we continue as a nation.  As long as we continue to uphold our elected leaders and the rule of law we will continue as a nation, even if it seems the sky is falling.  When we, speaking collectively, stop upholding the rule of law and not only seek to overturn, but succeed in overturning election results (think assassination, frivolous impeachment, etc.) our existence as a nation will be in grave danger.

 

Posted in Congress, Donald Trump (R), executive branch, guest blog, judicial branch, law enforcement, legislative branch, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, protests. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Abusing a badge for the purposes of badgering

June 23, 2018 — buckeyerino

First, read this.  Then I’ll weigh in.

At the outset, let me offer my apologies to the police officers who follow their conscience and the law in performing their duties.  I am told by reliable sources that the vast majority of police officers are not just conscientious and dutiful, but also brave to the point of putting their own safety in jeopardy in the interest of keeping the rest of the law-abiding public out of harm’s way.  I have met some officers that I know to be like that.  I can only hope that these reliable sources are true.

Yet, from my experience, I have met too many police officers who abuse their authority in pursuit of unworthy agendas.  How many?  Okay, now, one is too many, but I have had more unhappy encounters with police officers than that.  For now, I will share just two such experiences.

One of them lived across a street from my house on the west side of Columbus.  I called the police a couple of times due to this neighbor’s deliberate hostile provocations, but of course, after the responding officers paid a visit to the neighbor to find that this neighbor was one of their own, they returned to my door to give the neighbor’s “side of the story” (a story so lame that the responding officers delivered the message sheepishly, looking down at the floor or to the side because it was so awkward to be put in the position of repeating bald-faced lies) along with an anemic apology that in no way offered reassurance that my trouble with this neighbor would go away any time soon.

Another couple of police officers accosted me as I walked down the street on the Near East side of Columbus.  Supposedly, the police were keeping an eye on traffic–meaning motorists–but I was a pedestrian and I had not jaywalked.  At that time, I lived in the area and my car was in the shop for repairs (under warranty), so instead of driving to the grocery store, I walked.  It was my intention to purchase a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread and then return home.  They asked for my ID.  I gave it to them.  While one was questioning my integrity and suggesting I was up to something sinister, the other was on the radio asking if there were any outstanding warrants against me.  When the word over the radio was that I had no criminal record, the imperious police officer who had been antagonizing me with his farfetched ruminations on what I was really up to then changed his tune (as he handed back my ID and half-apologized) and urged me to be cautious while walking along the sidewalk because someone had been murdered the previous week at an intersection just five blocks away.  No such murder happened the prior week at that location, but I decided not to quibble with the policeman any further.  It was getting late and I just wanted to be on my way, which meant letting them go their way without argument.

Now, about that first story, let’s set aside, for a moment, that my next-door neighbor on the west side of Columbus was also routinely antagonized by the police officer who lived across the street.  Let’s set that aside because the next-door neighbor was a college professor from Nigeria who had just bought his first new house in the USA for himself, his wife, and two children–all formerly from Nigeria.  Now, I’ve been married and divorced twice, but let’s also set aside, for the moment, that I was married to my first wife at the time.  My wife and I had just bought our first new house together.  Let’s set that aside because my wife was from Japan.  Let’s also set aside that the rest of the residents of the subdivision were white and that it seemed that the police officer across the street never bothered them.  Let’s just assume that he might have peeved his other (white) neighbors, but that I just didn’t know about it.  Let’s just assume that this police officer across the street was just a pain in the butt to everybody indiscriminately, and that his poor behavior toward us had nothing to do with race.  Still, there should have been some way for the residents of the neighborhood to check the bad behavior of the police officer who lived among us.

Now about that second story, it is too hard to set aside that race was a factor.  Yes, most of the residents of the Near East were black.  I am white.  Besides living in the area, I had also worked in the area as a teller at a bank (a bank branch located even closer to the site of the previous week’s “murder”).  The police officer who was so suspiciously questioning me came right out and stated “White guys only come here for two reasons:  drugs or prostitutes.”  Yeah, he actually said that to my face.  I only had six bucks with me.  How many drugs or prostitutes can I buy with six dollars?  That money was for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread at the grocery store.  Really.  That previous week’s murder just a few blocks away?  That was a white man murdered by black suspects, so be careful!  Still, I was really doing nothing that would have reasonably led to suspicion, let alone probable cause to investigate me.  Though nothing came of it, the officers’ suspicions were unreasonable.  What mechanism is in place to discourage the unreasonable actions of police officers?

Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that all of these police officers were white?

But, turning back to this week’s police story out of Lorain:  A Lorain police officer accosted a man and directed the man to take a seat in the back of the patrol car.  The man wants to know the police officer’s reason for this.  The police officer says the man is going to jail and that the officer will think of crimes to charge him with on the way to the jail.  The man happens to be the boyfriend of the police officer’s daughter.  Allegedly, the man had been found in possession of marijuana at least once before in his life.  If you and your daughter are both totally against marijuana, why, the man’s marijuana possession might be a good cause for concern.  But, hey, the daughter’s eighteen, not a child.  She can make decisions independently from her police officer father.  I think it’s a lot more perplexing and disturbing for a convicted murderer on death row to receive marriage proposals from women who only know of him due to news coverage of the crimes he’s committed, but, hey, adults make their own decisions about love.  The police officer’s daughter could certainly have picked someone much worse.  On the flip side, the police officer’s daughter could not pick a perfect man to fall in love with because perfect men do not exist. (Did I mention that I’ve been divorced twice?)

It just so happened that the police daughter’s officer was a passenger in the man’s car along with two other people who lived in that neighborhood.  The mom of those two other passengers was at home. For now, let’s just call her Ms.  You can read all their names in this Chronicle-Telegram article that I prompted you to read at the start.  When Ms. came out of her house to see what the ruckus was, the police officer told Ms. that he wanted to retrieve his daughter’s computer from inside her house.  Ms. was going to allow him to do that, except the police officer was getting mouthy.  He said that he was going to write a $300 ticket to one of Ms.’s kids for not wearing a seat belt.  Ms. changed her mind. On second thought, the police officer would have to get a warrant to retrieve his daughter’s laptop from Ms.’s house.  The confrontation escalated.  Then Ms. told the police officer that she would call 911 to report the officer’s actions.  The police officer countered by saying he would arrest Ms. for calling 911 when there was no emergency to respond to.  He ordered Ms.’s two kids out of the man’s car and into the house.  Lo and behold, the officer finally sized up the fact that his daughter was still in the man’s car.  He decided he would rather have his daughter in the back seat of his patrol car than his daughter’s boyfriend, so the boyfriend was permitted to get back out while the daughter was stuffed back there.  The police officer left, daughter in tow.  The police officer received a dispatch to a road rage incident.  He did not respond to it.  After the fact, he said that he contacted another officer to handle the road rage incident, and that the other officer said he’d handle the incident on his own.

So, a guy is upset with who is adult daughter is dating.  Hey, it happens.  The rest of the fathers do not pull out a police badge and stuff their daughter in the back seat of a patrol car.  The police officer harassed Ms. and two of her family while carrying out this personal agenda and threatens them with criminal charges because they became upset with him.  He was the one who caused them to be upset in the first place.  If he wasn’t there, nothing criminal would have happened.  He was the instigator.

But the one thing that sends shivers down my spine is that a person who is charged with upholding the law and enforcing the law flat out told someone that the officer was going to send that someone to jail for charges that he intended to trump up.  There is no way whatsoever that a person like that should be on the police force.  To allow such an officer to remain on duty would totally undermine law and order.  It would undermine the public trust.  Never mind all the rest, if courtroom testimony were to bear out the fact that this police officer had any intent of trumping up charges, he, himself, ought to be criminally charged on top of being fired.

But the union is obligated to defend him from being fired if he filed a grievance contesting his dismissal.  We’ll find out more about that after arbitration this September.

By the way, the police officer and his daughter are white.  The daughter’s boyfriend is black.  Let’s set that aside for a moment to say that, no matter the identities of the people involved, the trumping up of charges by a police officer and badgering people from behind an officer’s badge just for the pursuit of the officer’s personal agenda that happens to be at odds with carrying out the officer’s lawful duties is more than enough reason to terminate his employment.  Okay, the moment for setting that aside is over.  Make of it what you will.

Posted in abuse of power, crime, law enforcement, Local Politics, Lorain, race. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

May 2018 Ohio primary election results reveal lack of energy among GOP grassroots

May 9, 2018 — buckeyerino

I haven’t written much on this blog in recent years due to bigger concerns in my personal life, but perhaps in the next little while, I’ll post more often.

As I write this, it is the day after the Ohio primary elections held May 8, 2018, and I am worried about the current condition of the GOP as I peruse the election results.  I won’t recap any of the vote totals, as that can be found elsewhere.  The election results, at least in north central Ohio, tell me that money won every single GOP primary race.  This signals that the energy of the grassroots is gone or almost gone.  Where are the political upstarts that rocked the establishment GOP candidates during the Obama era?  Does it take an Obama presidency to energize the grassroots?  Even as recently as the 2016 election cycle, non-establishment candidates enjoyed at least some small measure of success against the status quo.  But looking back at yesterday’s elections, I now declare this trend to be dead.

Whether one agreed with “Tea Party” principles or not, the competitiveness of Tea Party candidates signaled an engagement of the grassroots.  When the grassroots were energized, campaign cash advantages were not guarantees of success in the GOP primaries.  Establishment candidates were more likely to feel the pressure to articulate why they were deserving of voters’ support.  I think that’s healthy.

Why this new complacency?  Yes, the GOP currently holds the reins of power both in Ohio and in the nation’s capital, but I do not necessarily believe we have the best of the GOP holding those positions.  The primaries were the best shot of improving the quality of our representation in government, and I think we blew it. Few debates were held.  The Ohio Republican Party did not remain neutral in these primaries.  They kept their thumb on the scales.  In doing so, their endorsed candidates were relieved of the pressure to articulate why their nominations would be of value to the voters, for they could just go along for the ride knowing that the ORP would fight the nomination battles for them.

Now, with the moneyed candidates, ones that are more loyal to donors than to voters, advancing on to the November 2018 elections, I think the lack of luster among the GOP’s nominees will only make it easier for the Democrats to rebound.  The last time I saw such a poor crop of nominees, or worse, was in 2006, a bloodbath of an election year.  Granted, this group of nominees is not as tainted by scandal as that group of GOP nominees back in 2006, but the lack of excitement is the same.  The weakened influence of the Tea Party evidenced yesterday, I believe, will translate into poor GOP turnout in November.  Brace yourselves for a rough ride this fall.

Posted in Congress, legislative branch, National Politics, Ohio General Assembly, Republican Party, State Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

No need to get scared about Trump tariff talk on steel and aluminum

March 8, 2018 — buckeyerino

Oh no!  A trade war!  It will hit consumers!  It will make investors nervous!  Foreign nations will become our enemies!  The damage we do to ourselves will be worse than we do to importers of competing products!

The sky is falling!

The sky will fall eventually, but not on account of this tariff.

It is so funny to hear MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and other media outlets sounding alarms practically in unison.  I am beginning to think that all the media are becoming contrarians.  If Trump says something decidedly unambiguous, then the right thing for any media outlet to do is oppose it, just on principle.

If you look at the stuff I’ve written about Trump in the run-up to the 2016 elections, then you know I supported candidates other than Trump in the primaries and urged voters to consider all the presidential candidates, not just Trump and Clinton, when voting in the general election.  I distrusted Trump at the outset just by the fact that he is a casino tycoon (I have always opposed gambling).  I have not written of Trump in flattering terms.

There are many troubling things that could topple our nation and the world.  The financial system was not fixed by the 2008 bailouts.  The bad actors in the financial sector implicated in that meltdown fiasco are still there, right?  There will still be a huge financial disaster in our future.  Count on it.  Prepare your families for it.

But this tariff?  In the bigger scheme of things, this is no big deal.

Trump is right.  Steel and aluminum are strategic industries.  If worse comes to worst, our nation does not want to be in a position of having outsourced all of our steel and aluminum production.

Also, those who insist that the government, by imposing tariffs, is picking winners and losers in what is supposed to be a free marketplace need to acknowledge that these proposed tariffs are small potatoes compared to many of the other government interventions in our economy that have distorted the marketplace.  Consider the health care insurance industry, for example, and the lobbyist-bought legislation at state and federal levels that have led to a captive marketplace.  Consider the telecommunications giants, especially ISPs, cable TV systems, and cell phone companies and the terrible, even predatory, customer “service” they provide because they do not fear new start-ups entering the marketplace in their industries.  Lobbyist-bought legislation and executive branch administrative code regulation at state and federal levels has pretty much guaranteed that Comcast, CenturyLink, Time Warner, and their ilk will never be dislodged from atop the heap, no matter how deeply dissatisfied customers become.  Obviously, the financial industry does not operate on a level playing field.  We all saw that with the undeserved bailouts in 2008 of financial companies deemed “too big to fail.”

Sure, a tariff my cause jitters on Wall Street.  Free trade ideologues will denounce protectionism.  But the government’s most insidious protectionism is not embodied in these tariffs.  The government is very protectionist when it comes to Wall Street.

Remember why Trump won the election?  He flipped several states in the Great Lakes region from blue to red–Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin–in addition to carrying purple states like Ohio.  Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio all have robust Democrat Party organizations, but rank-and-file Democrats stopped taking marching orders from East Coast and West Coast elites within their party.  The #MeToo movement has finally addressed some of the West Coast hypocrisies that sowed distrust among Midwest Democrats.  The East Coast enjoys the protectionism of the federal government.  The East Coast elites and West Coast elites atop the Democrat Party do not share as much common ground with Midwest Democrats as they used to.

The coastal elites drive foreign cars.  On the roads of the Midwest, the concentration of American-branded cars is much greater than on the coasts.  Midwest Democrats are faced with bread-and-butter issues that the elites do not face.  Sales of American-branded cars put food on the tables in the Midwest.  Why don’t the coastal elites care whether Midwesterners have food on their tables?  With all their wealth, why do they buy so many imports?

The coastal elites want to create sanctuary cities in the exact same locations where the minimum wage is being boosted to $15 an hour.  The reason undocumented immigrants are shielded in the cities with high minimum wages is obvious to the average Midwesterner.  The undocumented immigrants are being exploited–paid under the table at less than minimum wage–to create a mirage that steep minimum wage hikes are actually viable.  “Who will scrub your toilets?” asked a celebrity–one I will not name here–in defense of encouraging undocumented immigration.  In the Midwest, we scrub our own toilets.  I, myself, worked as a hotel housekeeper and laundry attendant back in the day.  I also worked agricultural jobs like picking strawberries in the summertime.  But I scrubbed toilets and labored in farm fields in Ohio, not California.  I am a white male, not an undocumented immigrant.  Midwesterners WILL DO and HAVE DONE the kind of work that the coastal elites say that we are unwilling to do, but Midwesterners do not like competing with exploited workers being paid under the table.  If there were no undocumented workers, employers would have to pay more for toilet-scrubbing workers’ wages.  The presence of an exploited undocumented class of workers totally undercuts any organic efforts at improving compensation for toilet-scrubbing work.  Raising the minimum wage is not organic–it’s artificial.  And when raising the minimum wage occurs artificially at the same time that undocumented immigration is encouraged, then that only persuades employers to bypass the minimum wage and exploit undocumented workers for toilet-scrubbing duties.  The Midwest does not want this coastal trend to infiltrate the Midwest, but that infiltration has already gained a foothold.

The steel and aluminum tariffs, if they pan out, will mostly aid the midsection of the country.  Why should the midsection of the country be worried that Wall Street does not approve?  The midsection of the country did not approve of Wall Street bailouts, but had to swallow them anyway.  The tariffs would hardly turn the tables on the status quo, but it’s a start.  To the Midwest voter, Clinton was status quo and Trump was the only hope at turning the tables.  One might further qualify that Midwest voter as being Midwest white voter due to the strong preference for Clinton among nonwhite voters, but one also has to acknowledge that the nonwhite voter turnout in 2016 did not measure up to nonwhite voter turnout in the prior two presidential election cycles, suggesting the coastal elites may have lost some ground there, too.

So the protests against the tariffs are loudest along the coasts.  The Midwest does not have a problem with that.

In the GOP presidential primaries of 1996 and 2000, I voted for Alan Keyes.  He was an ambassador, so he has some sense of international consequences of domestic policies.  In terms of taxation, Alan Keyes favored tariffs over income taxes.  Our nation’s founders levied tariffs.  They did not tax personal income.  The US Constitution had to be amended to even allow for income taxes.  Keyes made a very persuasive case that the national government should be leveraging trade for generating government revenue, and that income taxes erode the sovereignty of the people of this nation.  I do not fear tariffs.

As for trade wars, they might be scary with another president at the helm, but I have to acknowledge that Trump is not your usual president.  In fact, Trump has a level of expertise in negotiating deals that other presidents have not possessed.  I actually feel quite confident in Trump’s capabilities in the trade arena.  There are things Trump is terrible at and there are things that Trump is good at.  This is something Trump could excel at.  I’m on board with the tariffs.

Posted in Donald Trump (R), economy, executive branch, industry, International Politics, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, taxes, trade, Wall Street. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Ohio’s early voting has begun and there are more choices for prez and vice prez in 2016 than you might think

October 12, 2016 — buckeyerino

Early voting for the general election of November 2016 has begun.

Dear readers, especially Ohio registered voters, it is time to vote for President and Vice President of the United States, as we do every four years.  The early voting period has begun.  There is no reason to push voting off until the last minute, if you’ve done your homework and investigated the candidates and issues appearing on the ballots.

There are more than two political parties.

Oh, maybe you’re holding off on voting until all the “October surprises” have been revealed.  If you are, then you are probably still entertaining thoughts about voting for the Trump/Pence Republican ticket or the Clinton/Kaine Democrat ticket.  I’m not.  I’m so done with both of them.  To be fair, I do think that Trump is wholly justified in remaining at the top of the Republican ticket.  He won the party nomination fair and square.  Fortunately, in our nation, we don’t have to vote for a party slate.  We can vote for individual candidates on an a la carte basis.  Our voting system is so much better than the parliamentary elections held in so many other parts of the world.  Also, the media tries to rigidly uphold the two-party system (Democrat and Republican) in the United States; but the truth is, there are more candidates to choose from than just Trump or Clinton.  I’m glad of that.  If I could only vote between the two of them, I would pull the lever for Trump, but I’m so happy that I don’t have to (and I won’t).

Your ballot will list more candidates for president than just Trump and Clinton.

Ohio’s ballot also lists Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka as Green Party POTUS and VPOTUS candidates, Richard Duncan and Ricky Johnson as independent POTUS and VPOTUS candidates, and Gary Johnson and William Weld as Libertarian POTUS and VPOTUS candidates.  Maybe you’re thinking, “those other candidates are nobodies who couldn’t possibly be experienced/skillful/prepared/savvy/qualified enough to be President,” but, if so, you may be mistaken.  For example, the Libertarian ticket–Johnson and Weld–features POTUS and VPOTUS candidates who have both been state governors.  So I would urge voters to take more than a cursory glance at independent and minor party candidates this election cycle.  You may find candidates among them that are superior to the ones that the two major parties have nominated.

Also, there are POTUS and VPOTUS candidates that you are able to vote for who are not listed on the ballot. 

I’m talking about write-in candidates.  You can only vote for one pair of POTUS/VPOTUS candidates, so if you intend to vote for a write in, you have to make sure you didn’t inadvertently cast votes for one of the pairs already listed on the ballot.  A word of advice: Don’t just write “none of the above” as a protest write-in vote.  It won’t get counted.  In order for a write-in vote to be counted, you must write in the name of a candidate who actually met the qualifications to be a write-in candidate as determined by the office of the Ohio Secretary of State.  Please be aware that the workers at the polls are partisan (equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans at each voting location, ideally), so they have no interest in volunteering information about write-in candidates.  If you directly ask them for a list of the names of qualified write-in candidates, then I think they would be obliged to respond, but you would be better off if you did this homework in advance and examined the write-in candidate list ahead of your visit to your polling place.  This year, the POTUS and VPOTUS ticket I am voting for is among the qualified write-ins.  Here is Ohio’s list of qualified POTUS/VPOTUS write-in candidates for the November 2016 general election (POTUS candidate’s name of each write-in ticket appears to the left of each “/” with VPOTUS candidate’s name of each ticket appears after each “/”):

James Jerome Bell/Scheem Milton Hempstead

Michael Bickelmeyer/Robert Young

Darrell L. Castle/Scott N. Bradley

Cherunda Fox/Roger Kushner

Ben Hartnell/Dave Marshall

Tom Hoefling/Steve Schulin

Bruce E. Jaynes/Roger W. Stewart

Chris Keniston/Deacon Taylor

Barry Kirschner/Rick Menefield

Laurence Kotlikoff/Edward Leamer

Joseph Maldonado/Douglas Terranova

Michael Andrew Maturen/Juan Antonio Munoz

Evan McMullin/Nathan Johnson

Monica Moorehead/Lamont Lilly

Joe Schriner/Joe Moreaux

Mike Smith/Daniel White

Josiah R. Stroh/Paul Callahan

Douglas W. Thomson/Thomas A. Ducro, Jr.

Notice that the list of write-in candidates does not include any mention of party affiliations.  This does not mean that all of these tickets have no affiliations to political parties.  The Darrell L. Castle/Scott N. Bradley ticket, for example, is actually affiliated with the Constitution Party . . . a political party that some Tea Party voters might take an interest in due to shared notions of limited government and close adherence to the U.S. Constitution, yet more tolerant of the rule of law than, say, a number of Libertarians that might feel a little too restricted by laws in general.  On the other hand, the Evan McMullin/Nathan Johnson ticket is an independent ticket, for McMullin has cast aside his former affiliation with the Republicans from the time he served as a Congressional aide.  As far as McMullin, a former CIA operative, is concerned, if Trump personifies what the Republican Party currently stands for, then McMullin wants to make a clean break with that.  So feel free to google and research the candidates listed here.  If you find your favorite POTUS/VPOTUS ticket among the qualified write-ins, then I recommend you jot down your selection in a little note to yourself to take with you to your polling location to make it easier to cast your write-in vote.

No, you’re not throwing your vote away if you vote for a ticket other than a major party ticket.

As long as you are casting your vote for an eligible candidate of your liking, your vote will be counted and it will have an impact.  How large of an impact?  I don’t know.  We’ll have to see how the future unfolds.  In my opinion, in this election year, we may begin to see some movement to break the stranglehold that the two major political parties have on our government, since the Dem and Rep nominees for prez this time around are not so popular.  Or, perhaps the Republicans and Democrats may remain dominant, but undertake reforms if they perceive that they are each becoming too unpalatable to the U.S. electorate.  If they reform, or if there is any other shake-up on the horizon, votes for candidates from outside the two major parties may very well influence those political shifts.  Especially if you are unhappy with the direction that the nation is headed in, don’t stay home.  Vote.

 

 

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump (R), executive branch, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, Republican Party. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Clearly, the US Dept of Justice has become a political apparatus

July 6, 2016 — buckeyerino

FBI Director James Comey held a press conference on Tuesday morning, July 5, 2016, to reveal publicly what had become of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and computer server during her term in the office of Secretary of State.  Criminal charges are not forthcoming from the investigation, but Clinton was characterized as being “extremely careless” in her handling of classified communications in ways that violated federal statutes.  It is also clear that Clinton’s accounts of her own conduct on the matter are untruthful.  MSNBC’s Morning Joe has a clip highlighting excerpts from Comey’s speech juxtaposed with excerpts of Clinton’s false narrative of her handling of classified information via email and computer devices.  This clip is less than 2 minutes in length:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_mj_intro_160706

James Comey has a “straight shooter” reputation.  He has heretofore been considered highly ethical by politicians of both major political parties.  Some are now second-guessing his ethics, for liberal politicians are complaining that he overstepped by sharing investigation results when he shouldn’t have, for no criminal charges are forthcoming, while conservative politicians are complaining that Comey has overstepped by precluding the bringing of criminal charges by “reasonable” prosecutors.

I appreciate that Comey was forthcoming.

This CNN article points out that Comey’s press conference was not what the US Department of Justice had planned for Clinton’s “exoneration.”

As an aside, I have been severely disappointed by CNN coverage of Clinton this year.  They have played too much softball with her, which amounts to carrying water for her.  The fact that I can find more probing questions and scathing criticisms of Clinton on MSNBC signals how far off the track CNN has become from providing fair and balanced coverage.  Yes, CNN prepared a video clip similar to the one above from MSNBC; what is lacking is the harder hitting conversations such as shown in the 15-minute Morning Joe segment below:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_mj_toptalk1_160706

Also, headlines favorable to Clinton are not only as easy to find as on MSNBC, the headlines unfavorable to Clinton are buried deeper on CNN than MSNBC.  Part of this is a function of MSNBC’s focus on politics over other types of news stories, but though CNN covers a broader range of news, I still call into question the newsworthiness of many of said headlines compared to the newsworthiness of the stories critical of Clinton.

But back to the center of the story:  The press conference the Obama administration envisioned for the wrapup of the FBI investigation of Clinton was to be a joint one, with a spokesperson (perhaps Attorney General Loretta Lynch, herself) or spokespersons from the US Department of Justice accompanying whoever the FBI provided as a spokesperson.  Comey decided to spring this press conference as a surprise, both as to the timing and as to the content, in order to avoid the appearance of the complicity of the US Department of Justice in letting Clinton off the hook.  In my view, this ironically underscores that the US Department of Justice is complicit.  I have no doubt that the US Department of Justice would have stage managed this press conference very differently and would have not shed nearly as much light into the investigation as Comey did in his solo appearance.  Though I, like other conservatives, wonder at Comey’s seemingly premature or misguided ruling out of prosecution, I find it easy to forgive him for it when I consider that the public would not be in possession of the truth were it not for Comey’s initiative in stepping to a microphone on short notice . . . such short notice that he effectively circumvented any other government entity from interfering with his message.

Loretta Lynch was coming up short in appearing to be above-board.  However, even before she had a private meeting last week with Bill Clinton, in fact, even during the term of her predecessor, the politicization of the Department of Justice was already becoming visible.  As I mentioned in my prior post, at some depositions, the Justice Department had dispatched its own lawyers to make sure that the scope of questions asked during investigations were narrow.  The Justice Department appears to have much to hide.  They have skin in the game.  As I wrote in the prior post, not only is Clinton susceptible to blackmail by our geopolitical foes, like Russia, so is the Obama administration.  This brings me to my next point: Clinton had to dodge prosecution in order to keep Obama’s flank protected.  It’s why Obama has been certain from the get-go that there would not be a prosecution of Clinton.  He couldn’t allow a prosecution because it would have exposed his own vulnerabilities and culpabilities.  The envisioned stage-managed joint press conference had apparently been discussed well in advance of the conclusion of the investigation, showing that a determination to not prosecute had already been made.  Comey’s preemption of that joint press conference by his own solo appearance is, I’m sure, more than a little bit worrisome to both Obama and Clinton.

We can expect to see Obama on the Clinton campaign trail a lot for the remainder of the election season.  His best protection is getting her elected.  Her best shot at election in light of these damaging revelations is to energize Obama voters.  Expect her campaign to be contacting all voters that were identified as supporters of the previous Obama campaigns.  Black voters are especially important to Obama and Clinton.  Black voters have held Obama in very high esteem and they absolutely would not want Obama’s legacy tarnished.  Any further erosion of confidence in Clinton leaves Obama that much closer to the possibility of being tarnished.  The two, Obama and Clinton, will likely meet the same fate:  They are triumphant together, or they are doomed together.  Do not marvel that former intraparty foes are now cooperating closely, for they both have much to lose if Clinton does not succeed.

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, criminal justice, executive branch, Hillary Clinton (D), International Politics, judicial branch, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Obama, Clinton, Kerry inaction in Syria caused by Russian blackmail

July 2, 2016 — buckeyerino

Syria is a place where the Islamic State thrives but where the USA has been unwilling to go. There are even rumblings, purportedly from Foreign Service officers, that the USA ought to change strategies in Syria, including ousting Assad as ruler of Syria along with taking the fight to the Islamic State. VP Biden has said that we don’t dare do that because no one has a crystal ball to show how such a story would end. It could end quite badly, with a failed state (chaos) in a strategic location.  Nonetheless, with the Islamic State taking credit for violence in Bangladesh overnight, and an airport bombing in Istanbul just a couple of days ago, and a mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub, on top of still-seared-in-our-memory attacks in Brussels, San Bernadino, and Paris, the USA’s actions against the Islamic State confined to just Iraqi territory, do not appear to be bringing an end to the terror.  Russia has taken some actions against terrorists on Syrian soil, but Russia is also interested in protecting Assad, a useful pawn, just as Iran has, for many decades, been a useful proxy for Russia.

I ran across a video clip from MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday, July 1, 2016 wherein the pundits just acted bewildered over the Obama administration’s ineptitude in countering the Islamic State.  The plan appears to be to leave all Syrian-territory campaigns against the Islamic State in the hands of the Assad government (which is allied with and militarily aided by Russia and Iran).  The pundits on Morning Joe, in their bewilderment, surmise that the Obama administration is too risk-averse to do what needs to be done in Syria: Extinguish the Islamic Stand and depose Assad.

Click the following to open up the Morning Joe segment referenced above:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_mj_burns_160701

I’m not at all bewildered.  Russia has all the leverage.  They are blackmailing the Obama administration.  How do I deduce that?  I think if I just connect a couple of dots for you, I think you’ll be able to connect them with other dots so that you can see a bigger picture emerging.

When Syria crossed the red line of using chemical weapons, instead of punishing Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with the Assad regime so that chemical weapons would be dismantled.  This is a clear signal that the USA did not envision anyone leading an independent Syria other than Assad.  So, despite the various factions jockeying for power in Syria, and despite the fact that we may feel sympathetic to one or more of the factions fighting to topple Assad, Kerry’s agreement reached with Assad underlines that the Obama administration will not seek regime change in Syria.  I am not surprised by this.  As for the reason why I am not surprised at this stance, it flows from a postmodern ideology (which I don’t agree with).  I don’t plan on delving into the ideology in this blog post.  It is sufficient to merely connect the dots to show Obama had no intention of toppling Assad or mobilizing our military in Syria.

But I will go further to say that not only does Obama have no intention of intervening in Syria, the Russians will make sure that Obama does not change his mind.

Remember that Clinton email server controversy?  Oh, yeah!  It’s all over the news!  The FBI has been investigating it!  Right?  But oftentimes, when key witnesses have been deposed, not only do the witnesses lawyer up as they head into these depositions, but the State Department and Justice Department have also, from time to time, sent their own lawyers.  Why?  To limit the scope of what questions the FBI asks.  So, connect this dot.  What does it mean when the State Department and the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a part!!!) see to it that the FBI inquiries are very narrow?  It’s one thing when questions go unanswered (and some witnesses have pled the 5th Amendment).  We, the public, are only permitted transcripts, so even our window into whatever little answers there are is a very narrow window.  It’s entirely another thing when question after question that the FBI would like to ask is considered out-of-bounds.  I say that the dots connected here are that the integrity of both the State Department and the Justice Department could be compromised if all questions could be asked and were answered.  If all facts came to light, it would devastate more than just Hillary Clinton.  State and Justice have skin in the game.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, wanted to be sure that any personal communications were to be safeguarded on the private server.  Never mind the classified top secret government information, for concern over leakage of that would be secondary to leakage over Clinton’s personal communications.

The mainstream media, for the most part, have been downplaying the Clinton’s private email server as a mistake.  The server could have been successfully hacked, but we don’t know that, so says the MSM.  So as long as we don’t know if the server was hacked, this mistake is forgivable and no harm has been done?

What if, on the other hand, the server was successfully hacked and Russia possesses ALL of the information that was on it, not just the top secret classified stuff, which might include troubling info about State and Justice, but Hillary’s personal stuff, too.  Since the Reagan administration, the Bush family, the Clinton family, and the Obama family have safeguarded each other’s White House secrets.  Though Republican voters had very little interest in a Jeb Bush POTUS candidacy, I think the Obamas and the Clintons were very much depending on a Bush nomination.  If Bush had been the presumptive nominee, his interest would have probably been confined to winning, not exposing Clinton or Obama, for they could expose two former Bush presidents.  If Russia possessed ALL of that information, Bush would probably suppress as much of the information as he could.  The mood of the electorate, though, has been for outsiders to oust the insiders.  If we, the voters, could trade places with an “outsider” candidate, like Trump, and we, as the outsider candidate, became dimly aware that the Russians possessed ALL of that information, would we want it?  Somewhere in that information that Russia would have is something that is “Kryptonite” to not only Hillary, but to the Justice Department, and to the State Department, for that’s what we can infer by all the lawyering up and the narrow limits placed upon the FBI inquiries.  So, if we as the outsider candidate, were aware that records exist of scandal and corruption, would we, unlike a Jeb Bush, have an appetite to expose it?  Such a scenario, then, would strengthen the hand of the Russians, for Clinton and Obama are in a more precarious situation than if they were running against Jeb.

The only way to wipe out the Islamic State is to get Russia and Iran to do it, for the Assad regime is not powerful enough to repel the Islamic State, nor will Russia allow anyone to interfere with Assad or Iran.  They have blackmailed the Obama administration with all that they know about our government’s corruption and scandals at the highest levels.  Obama cannot change course on Syria even if he wanted to (but he doesn’t).

How bad could the corruption, the scandals, possibly be?  For now, I leave those dots for you, the readers, to connect.  You’ve been hearing bits and pieces of things, haven’t you?

By the way, Saudi Arabia:  For all the influence that you think you bought by donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, you are not as protected from Iran as you think you are.  Russia poses an existential threat to Clintonian power, so that means Iran has more leverage than you.

 

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump (R), executive branch, Hillary Clinton (D), International Politics, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, terrorism, Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

The passing of George Voinovich

June 12, 2016 — buckeyerino

A common theme appearing in coming-of-age tales is one of a youth who becomes disenchanted with a hero.  The youth discovers the hero has flaws.  The youth becomes a bit cynical.   The youth feels disillusioned.  The youth doesn’t look at the hero the same way again.  It’s just a part of growing up.

But then one is not all the way grown up at that point.  One has to grow up a little bit more and not only be forgiving of flaws, but giving permission to others to be flawed.  Why?  Because no one is perfect and because no one ought to coerce another to give up their flaws.  We have to respect agency–people making choices about their own lives . . . and if someone doesn’t make any wrong choices, then that somebody isn’t making choices, period.  Furthermore, one only has to look in the mirror to find a person who needs forgiveness for being flawed, for making wrong choices.

So as I reflect on the passing of George Voinovich and what George Voinovich meant to me, I have to own up to making a hero out of him.  By September 2009, I was disenchanted.  Now, I find my criticisms a bit harsh and now I find myself wondering why I didn’t try to muster some forgiveness sooner.  I need to look in my mirror and take a good long look at a flawed person again to cement in my mind the need for forgiveness.

I first remember Voinovich from my boyhood, when he was mayor of Cleveland.  He performed two miracles.  One was getting elected as mayor of Cleveland as a Republican.  That he had been a Cuyahoga County commissioner some time prior to that was amazing enough, but Cleveland mayor?  Republicans just don’t get elected as Cleveland mayors.  It just doesn’t happen.  At least, not anymore.  There have been mayoral elections in Cleveland where Democrat primaries settled the mayoral races.  The other was that he led a Cleveland economic renaissance immediately after his predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, had led the city to financial default.  If only Detroit could have been so lucky as to have a person like Voinovich take over as mayor after Kwame Kilpatrick was ousted.

He went on to be Ohio’s governor, and then U.S. Senator.  He was the rare Republican who could sweep the vote across 88 counties.

One of the issues that I really felt close to Voinovich on was his opposition to casino gambling.  His steadfast stance on the issue was perhaps the main reason I lionized him.  The casino lobbyists had infested Ohio by the swarms, targeting weak and corrupt legislators of both parties.  The lobbyists kept saying that casino legalization would be an easy revenue raiser.  Voinovich had brought Cleveland back from financial default without resorting to gimmicks like gambling.  The lobbyists were doling out campaign contributions left and right, but Voinovich wasn’t having any of it.  It’s refreshing to see politicians who will not be bought by the agents of sleaze.

I really feel like Voinovich’s star shone brightest when he held executive office.  Not so much legislative office.  He was better at on-the-spot and uncompromising executive decisions than the highly deliberative and compromising legislative decisions.

My first taste of government service came as a volunteer intern in the office of Governor George Voinovich.  Though my tasks were menial clerical ones, I felt like I had an excellent aerial view of Ohio’s political landscape from atop the Vern Riffe State Office Tower.  I assisted with the filing of the “Governor’s Clips.”  Each day, staffers combed through the print media to assemble a digest of the day’s political stories.  This digest kept the governor informed about the issues without occupying too much of his time.  This was back in the day before internet killed print media, and back when filing cabinets held paper files rather than computers holding data files.  After the governor read each day’s clips, that wasn’t the end of them.  They had to be filed for possible future retrieval.  They had to be filed according to date, according to source, according to location, according to the names of people in the news clips, according to issues, etc.  I do that on this blog with tags.  With paper files, tags don’t quite cut it.  The date, location, and source filing was easy.  That was done by others before I even arrived at the office.  My task was to skim through the stories, themselves, to pull out the keywords, then make as many photocopies of the clipping as I needed in order to file away each story according to each keyword.

Working with the “Governor’s Clips” gave me a brief glimpse into my political future when I encountered an article outlining a state legislator’s gambling expansion proposals: Some guy named Joe Koziura wanted a casino built on Lorain’s lakefront.  I was incensed.  Years later, in 2002 and 2004, I would run against that same Joe Koziura for the office of state representative, but lose both times.

Until 2009, I had voted for Voinovich every time his name appeared on my ballot.  I had handed out his campaign literature door-to-door.  I had attended some of his fundraisers (which meant that some of his campaign money came from me).  I had also worked phone banks getting out the vote on his behalf.  But the chinks in my hero’s armor had begun to show.  Congress bailed out Wall Street in 2008, something it should not have done.  I didn’t understand Voinovich’s voting patterns.  When I finally paid a visit to the offices of the U.S. Senate in Washington, DC, I figured it out.  Those office buildings, especially the Hart Senate Building, resembled palaces.  Democracy gives way to aristocracy in the rarefied air of these Senate offices.  It was the Beltway Bubble.  Our Senators are too far removed from the real world, and even a man as principled as George Voinovich succumbed to the disengagement with the real world.

In the upcoming Senate race, I have no love for Ted Strickland, who reneged on his pledge against the expansion of gambling on his watch as Ohio governor.  Voinovich and Strickland had touched base on the topic of casinos, and Strickland had told Voinovich that he would hold the line against them.  He lied.  He lied to George Voinovich.  He lied to Ohio.  Strickland doesn’t deserve Ohio’s vote.  I here and now endorse Rob Portman for reelection.  However, I would note that Portman has been around DC for far too long.  Between a stint in the US House, and a stint in the US Senate, Portman served in the George W. Bush administration.  I would urge Portman to (get reelected and) use this upcoming Senate term to groom someone else to succeed him.  Make that two someone elses, for we need someone to oust and succeed Sherrod Brown, too.  And I would say that we need more diverse representation than what we’ve had.  Portman has had “listening” tours around Ohio so that he feels like he hears from folks outside the bubble, but I would say to Portman that, at some point, before he serves any additional terms in DC beyond the next one, that he needs to BE one of the folks from outside the bubble if he’s to remain useful as a representative of Ohioans.  This is what I learned about the bubble on my trip to DC.  Even a hero like Voinovich could not make sound decisions after spending too much time in the DC bubble.

Farewell, George Voinovich.  We didn’t end up with quite the Ohio that we wanted.  Four casinos are legal in Ohio now.  The lobbyists wouldn’t be denied.  But as long as you were in the real world with us, outside of that bubble, no lobbyist could cross your conscience.  We need a government with a conscience.  Badly. And so I should have forgiven you a long time ago. I do forgive you.

 

 

Posted in endorsement, executive branch, gambling, legislative branch, Local Politics, National Politics, State Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Trump University fraud . . . is this news? Trump’s a casino owner, which means he’s been in the fraud business a long time . . .

June 6, 2016 — buckeyerino

If you’ve been reading Buckeye RINO since its inception, then you probably know how I feel about the gambling industry.  I’m totally against it.  I’m even against state lotteries.  I don’t even play bingo or buy raffle tickets . . . even for charity.  If I feel like contributing money to a charity, I’ll do it as a straight up donation rather than as an entry into a game of chance.  I’ve written many times about how the gambling industry is a fraud industry.  All the marketing for gambling tells you that you have chances to win.  The truth is, the house always wins.  This means, in the aggregate, gamblers lose.  Right now the media is fixated on the fraud that was Trump University.  It would be helpful if the media would also fixate on the even bigger fraud that the gambling industry perpetrates.  Hey media! . . . want to go after Trump University?  Fine.  How about going after Trump casinos, too?  How about going after all the casinos no matter who they’re owned by?  After all, the more money consumers spend on gambling, the less money they have for anything worthwhile.  Gambling redistributes wealth in the wrong direction.  Gambling feeds economic contraction.  Gambling compromises law enforcement, especially casinos, for casinos are used for money laundering.  The sad tales of those few consumers who complained about the value of their education at Trump University pale in comparison to the sad tales of those who have lost so much more at casinos.  Leave it to the media to strain at gnats and swallow camels.

Why should we be surprised that Trump cannot admit that Trump University is a fraud?  Why should we be astonished that Trump lashed out at a judge, any judge, for releasing information about suits being pursued against Trump University?  Casino owners would never admit that they perpetrate fraud and that an important part of their business is laundering money.  Deflect, deflect, deflect.  Trump has called into question the bias of the judge because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.  Guess what?  If the judge had been a white Presbyterian New York Republican male, like Trump, the strategy would still have been to deflect, deflect, deflect.  The demographic background of the judge wouldn’t have saved any judge from Trump’s attacks so long as the judge did something that met with Trump’s disapproval.  Remember that casino owners are special people with special rights.  Casino owners are entitled to more than the average citizen.  When it comes to public servants such as judges and legislators, casino owners view them with contempt because either they are contemptible because they can be bought or they are contemptible because they can’t be bought.  Gambling buys politicians.  Remember why Trump has donated to Hillary Clinton in the past?  Because Trump buys all the politicians that he can.  He finds that contemptible.  Trump self-funded his primary campaign to show that he could not be bought like Hillary.  But then there are other public servants, like the judge in this Trump University case, who can’t be bought or persuaded, who, since they stand in Trump’s way, they are also to be treated with contempt.

What is novel about this election cycle is that casino owners in the past were donors to political campaigns.  They weren’t politicians, themselves.  Donald Trump is now a politician.  He’s on the ballot.  A casino owner’s business is a sleazy one, which makes running for office quite a dicey proposition, as it’s hard to dismiss the sleaze factor when the political opposition puts a target on one’s back.  I think the fact that Hillary Clinton was anointed as the inevitable Democrat nominee emboldened Trump to run.  I think if the undisputed Democrat frontrunner were trustworthy, ethical, and incorruptible, Trump would have stayed away from the presidential race.

My disparagement of Trump should not be mistaken for support for Clinton.  I believe Ambassador Stevens is dead because someone in the administration wanted him dead.  The terrorists who took him out in Benghazi acted on information.  Clinton didn’t safeguard information.  I find it telling that at a Cheryl Mills deposition (Mills being a chief operative of Hillary Clinton’s), not only did Mills have three attorneys there to help her navigate the interrogation, there were also two attorneys for the State department and two attorneys for the Justice department, meaning that a lot hinged upon what was permitted to be asked and how minimal the responses needed to be.  In other words, if Cheryl Mills had been inclined to freely answer truthfully about every last detail, the integrity of the State department and the integrity of the Justice department would have been impugned just as much as the integrity of Hillary Clinton.  Mills had to walk a tightrope.  She wanted to keep all of the information to herself, but she had to make at least a minimal effort to appear that she was cooperating.  We’ve only been given transcripts of the deposition, for the judge agreed that video would have been too politically damaging to the Clinton campaign.  The State department is putting on a charade that they are cooperating.  They allowed the inspector general report to come out (but if State were really on top of things, they would have had an inspector general in office throughout Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, but, instead, there was never an inspector general at State for the whole of Clinton’s tenure there).  The Justice department is putting on a charade by conducting an investigation (but if the FBI, a branch of Justice, is doing the questioning, why were two lawyers from Justice present to make certain that the FBI’s inquiries were limited and make certain that Mill’s responses were also limited?).  Just now, the media is starting to learn that archived footage and transcripts of official press conferences at the White House and at State have been doctored so that future historians would only able to cobble together a revised history.  I think Ambassador Stevens was the type of person who personally understood shady things were going on and also personally disliked that he had to put up with them.  I think someone in the Obama administration figured that they’d rather have a dead Ambassador Stevens than a whistleblower Ambassador Stevens.  I think Edward Snowden is convinced that the Obama administration would have preferred a dead Edward Snowden than a whistleblower Edward Snowden, because Snowden didn’t blow the whistle until he was safely away.  I think if Hillary Clinton is elected to office, the corruption of the federal government will only worsen.  We’ve seen the IRS politicized, the FBI politicized, the State department politicized; and the list will go on.

I will not vote for Hillary Clinton; I guarantee that.  I’m hoping that Bernie Sanders will succeed in his quest to wrest the Democrat nomination away from Hillary.  I also don’t plan to vote for Trump, though I see a silver lining if he were to be elected (a shake-up of the establishment).  Especially if there’s no Bernie in the equation (but maybe even if there is), I will probably vote for a minor party candidate, which is not unprecedented for me.  I vote my conscience.

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders (D), Donald Trump (R), executive branch, gambling, Hillary Clinton (D), International Politics, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

James Williamson guest blog post: The disruptor of the disruptors

May 29, 2016 — buckeyerino

Editor’s note: James Williamson is a native and former resident of Ohio who currently lives in Nevada.  He is also one of the brothers of yours truly, Daniel Jack Williamson, the owner of this blog.  He has written many other guest blog articles for Buckeye RINO, and for that, I am grateful. –DJW

The Disruptor of the Disruptors

Following announcements by Ted Cruz and John Kasich that they have suspended their campaigns [and with the unofficial delegate count for Trump exceeding the 50% mark before reaching the end of May], it appears that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. Much to the chagrin of the Republican old guard they are going to get a candidate that broke all the rules (never ran for office before, didn’t spend large sums of cash in the primary, ignored political correctness… … … … list goes on) as the de facto leader of their party. You might call it a coup. You might call it a collapse. Many are heralding the end of the Republican party. I don’t think it’s any of those.

I’ve read numerous op-eds by pundits that Trump became the presumptive nominee because no one took him seriously. What precisely do they mean by “taking him seriously?” Are they suggesting that they weren’t trying hard enough to get the public’s attention early on in the race? All the Republican candidates were trying to get media attention and Trump sucked all the oxygen out of the room. I think they all knew that even if they thought his ideas were a joke they could not ignore his persona. Trump has spent the last 40 years in front of a camera and he knows how to get attention. I don’t think they underestimated him there. I think the operative word here is frustration.

Maybe they are suggesting the other candidates should have spent more money? Some of the candidates spent much more money than Trump (most notably Jeb Bush before he bowed out) to no avail. Apparently money can’t buy what Trump has to offer. Or perhaps, Trump recognized that people really don’t want to see political ads for 18 months straight? Maybe Trump will start a new trend in politics: Save your money early in the campaign. Even though Trump spent very little money I don’t think that was a factor in the other candidates taking him seriously.

Perhaps what these pundits mean is that they should have attacked Trump more? If negative attacks would be effective on Trump he would probably get more of them. Unfortunately that is the name of Trump’s game. Even Hillary Clinton learned the hard way that Trump has an amazing ability to take a negative statement and turn it on you. (Remember what happened when she said he was sexist?) I’m not sure what taking Trump seriously would have done to change the other candidate’s campaigns. Can someone help me here?

I’m also not sure how Hillary and company taking him seriously is going to make a difference.I read that Reid (who is obviously supporting Clinton) is already starting the criticism and gearing up for a fight. So what does he bring on in the first round of the fight? Trump is a sue happy tax cheat and a hater… You’re going to have to come up with a better one than that Harry. Maybe you need to revisit what happened when Hillary called him sexist. If you did you’d be putting your armor on because if you get his attention you just might end up in the line of fire. Oh, and make sure you protect your whole body because Trump apparently doesn’t have any issues with hitting below the belt….

I have a news flash for the Democrats: Negative attacks won’t work, spending more money won’t work, ideological arguments won’t work, even charm won’t work (if Hillary had any…).

Unfortunately for politicians you can change your views and you can change your rhetoric but you can’t change who you are and that’s what they would have to do to defeat Trump. People are voting for Trump because of who he is, but more importantly because of who he is not. He is not a career politician. He is not an apologist. He is not a sell-out (well so far…). He’s not hiding who he is or what he believes (just changes his mind a lot). He’s not a pushover and probably most important he’s never been a resident of Washington DC.

I saw this coming late last year.The event that convinced me that he was going to be the nominee is when he suggested blocking all Muslim immigration and his numbers went up… his numbers went up!!!! Labeling him as a xenophobe has not worked at all. That’s because I don’t think he is a xenophobe. I think what is happening here is that Trump is the only one who is listening to the key swing voter constituents that are going to decide the elections. Yes, you heard that right: Trump is the only one listening. Cruz appealed to his base, not swing voters. Sanders is doing the same. Hillary is making an appeal but with the media in her back pocket she is still thinking she can shape public opinion rather than listen to it.

Let’s analyze this for a minute. What has the public liked about Trump? Well, they actually like the idea that he wants to slow down immigration and more thoroughly vet immigrants. I don’t think he ever intended to keep them all out and of course he won’t but the bluster and outrageous promises are his style. I think that for him it’s not important to be precise in what you say but to show passion when you say it. It really seems to be resonating with rust belt voters in particular. Contrast this with the open door policy of the Democrats and even some of the Republican field. The candidates think they are being reasonable but what the public hears is: “We don’t care what you think!”

The public also likes it when Trump talks economics. Why? Because he, and only he, is articulating many of their frustrations. Decrying rising cost of health care, part time work, stagnant wages, dwindling manufacturing resonates with voters in key states like Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Obama is crowing about how wonderful things are and Hillary has to follow in that wake because she is, after all, the heir apparent. Voters don’t like to be told that everything is rosy when they think it’s not. Message to voters: “We don’t have a clue what is really going on.”

The last area that Trump is strong on is his America first slogan. Even I’m on the bandwagon there. Bad trade agreements, half-committed involvement in foreign conflicts, offering protection to everyone without getting reimbursement, apologizing for our history, and squandering our hegemony on goals that don’t further America’s best interests have been the fruits of several administrations now and Americans don’t like it. In particular I think that Trump’s message on national security resonates with voters. It’s closely related to the issue of immigration. While I certainly don’t advocate starting wars going around publicly announcing you aren’t willing to get involved in one is precisely the sort of thing that invites it. I think the average American knows this and they get nervous when they hear the doves saying we need to show more love and compassion toward antagonistic nations. Message to voters: “We’ll still be spouting rhetoric while the country burns, just like France in WWII.”

While I certainly believe that war should be avoided, what good does a military do if it’s never an option? How is a nuclear weapon a deterrent if the enemy knows you will never use it? I think Reagan proved that being willing is often all that it takes. Jimmy Carter couldn’t get Iran to release hostages because they were certain he wouldn’t send troops in after them. They weren’t sure that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t. History is rife with similar situations. Unfortunately for us, while our “leaders” have forgotten history the Russians have been learning from it. They are running amok because they know the current administration won’t do anything serious. That may change if Donald Trump becomes president. He said in his America First speech that we need to be more “unpredictable.” Yes, I believe Trump is a poker player. He knows that showing all your cards up front doesn’t help you win. After all that’s what America really wants right now: a winner. Right or wrong I think that there are enough people in the country now that believe that Trump is the winner they are looking for. Can you say, “President Trump”?

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump (R), executive branch, guest blog, Harry Reid (D), Hillary Clinton (D), International Politics, John Kasich (R), National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, Republican Party, Ted Cruz (R). Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Ohio Primary on March 15, 2016: Buckeye RINO endorses Kasich and Sanders in GOP and Democrat prez races

March 11, 2016 — buckeyerino

The heyday of this blog was a few years ago when I had my hands less full of things to do, thus more time to write.  I don’t post new blog articles as much as I used to.  Imagine my surprise to see that my blog traffic is actually on the rise despite my relative silence.  I guess people are really, really, really interested in the elections this cycle.  When I look to see what is driving traffic to Buckeye RINO, I see people are digging up my endorsements in past election cycles, particularly in races lower on the ballot than the race for POTUS.  I’m sorry all you readers who came to Buckeye RINO only to find news about years past and very little about this year.

For this primary election, the only local endorsement I’ll make is that I support Michele Silva Arredondo for Lorain County Common Pleas Court judge on the GOP ballot.  I’ll remain silent on all the other local and state races.

In the GOP race for POTUS, I endorse John Kasich, and in the Democrat race, I endorse Bernie Sanders.

I’ve been hesistant to endorse a GOP candidate for U.S. President.  In a blog article much earlier on in this election cycle, I chronicled how no candidate in either party excited me, and this is still the case.  It seemed to me, on the GOP side, that as soon as I pick a favorite, my favorite drops out and then I have to search out another favorite, so I hope my endorsement, at this date, is not the kiss of death for John Kasich.  For a while, I favored Bobby Jindal, then Rand Paul, then Carly Fiorina, then Ben Carson.  Each has exited the stage.

I’ve had some beefs with Kasich.  If you dig through Buckeye RINO, you’ll see some of my criticisms.  But when I reflect upon my biggest disagreements with Kasich as governor, a number of those disagreements are about education.  Education is a big issue when one is governor, but there are bigger fish to fry as President of the United States, one of which is the national debt that has our nation perched atop a crumbling economic precipice.  Kasich balances budgets.  Yes, it took government shutdowns during the Clinton administration to force the White House to accept the budgets, but it stuck.  Ted Cruz has caused government shutdowns in the name of good fiscal policy, too, but Cruz doesn’t know how to remain friends within his own caucus.  With Kasich’s government shutdowns, his colleagues were still his friends, which means that Kasich is better poised to identify a Congressional coalition that will help him govern as U.S. President.

Cruz actually made me angry when his staff pulled a stunt during the Iowa caucuses claiming that Ben Carson was dropping out.  Cruz operatives apparently pulled the same stunt this past Tuesday in Hawaii at the expense of Marco Rubio.  In these and other instances of dirty tricks, Cruz was very lawyerly in defending his campaign.  How Clintonesque.  What a turnoff.

See the little search window at the top of the left sidebar on Buckeye RINO?  If you type in the search term “gambling,” you’ll see that I despise gambling.  Trump, being the casino tycoon that he is, wasn’t likely to get my nod for nominee, anyway.  Also, I have decried religious intolerance before, so when both Cruz and Trump harp on and on against Muslims, they are not winning any points with me.  As for the flap about Trump somehow being in cahoots with the KKK, I think that’s all manufactured by the desperate.  I fail to see past Trump conduct that fits with this seemingly manufactured narrative.  If I see conduct from Trump in the future that smacks of racism, I’d be happy to call it out, but I fail to see such a pattern thus far.

Marco Rubio has revealed himself to be a candidate of the donor class, not a candidate of the grassroots.

Having said all of that, in November, I’ll vote for any of the Republicans over Hillary Clinton, should she be the Democrat nominee.

Democrat voters in 2008 made the right decision in nominating Barack Obama, notwithstanding I voted against him in November of 2008 and 2012.  Yes, I disagree with much (but not all) that our current POTUS has done and is trying to do.  Some have said he’s the worst president in history, but I’d have to disagree.  There’ve been worse.  Hillary Clinton, had she won it all in 2008, would have been worse.  Bernie Sanders would be a far more ethical, far less corrupt president than Hillary Clinton would.

DOJ politicized under Obama?  You bet.  IRS politicized under Obama?  You bet.  But while Obama claimed that the IRS was a phony scandal perpetrated by a bad actor or two with no connection to the White House, I could easily envision an emboldened President Hillary Clinton issuing a charge to the DOJ and the IRS to take down the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that menaces her and the country (or at least menaces her plans for the country).  With Obama, there’s denial.  With Clinton, she’d be justifying it.

One may wonder:  How can a right-of-center blogger favor Obama and Sanders over Clinton when they are further to the political left than Clinton?  My reply would be that I sense that Hillary is capable of far more heinous treachery.  U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is further to the left of Clinton, too, but if I had a choice between Warren and Clinton, I’d take Warren.  As for Sanders’ socialism, I would just note that the political pendulum swings back and forth.  Socialism won’t take firm root before it is out of vogue again.  In the meantime, Sanders is more honest than our current president, more honest than many of the GOP candidates, and far more honest than Clinton.  We could use some cleaning up of Beltway ethics, and I think Sanders could deliver on that front.  Depending on the GOP nominee, there is a possibility I could vote for Sanders in November if he were the Democrat nominee.  It depends on how dirty politics looks by then and how squeaky-clean Sanders looks by comparison when election time draws near.

A Sanders presidency may clean up corruption, whereas a Clinton presidency will maintain the status quo, letting the corruption continue.  You can see it in the New Hampshire Democrat primary exit poll data that showed that it is the privileged Democrats who will benefit from a Clinton presidency.  The only group of Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire were those who thought the country was headed in the right direction, who were not worried about the economy, who had not felt betrayed by their government or their political party, and whose annual income exceeded $200,000.  Voters in subsequent primaries and caucuses should take note:  If you are unhappy with the way things are right now, Hillary is not your candidate.  She is there to do the bidding of the privileged Democrats who donate to her: Maintain the status quo.  These privileged Clinton Democrats don’t have much in common, demographically, with the rest of the Democrat Party.  The Clinton Democrats are the ones who pull all the levers within the party machine (hence the “superdelegates”), they often have prestigious titles working in America’s universities, liberal think tanks, non-profit organizations, and crony-capitalist businesses such as those on Wall Street.  These people, if they get in trouble, they get bailed out.  That’s who Clinton represents.  If that description doesn’t fit you, then you have no business voting for her. Clinton and some media types have said what a wonderful thing the Democrat primary race where voters have two good choices and the candidates see eye-to-eye on most issues.  This is a lie.  The difference between who Sanders is and what he represents and who Clinton is and what she represents is huge.  To me, it is the difference between broad sunlight (Sanders) and a dark alley (Clinton).

When I was a young boy (3rd grade), my career ambition was to be a U.S. Ambassador to France.  With that thought in mind, I majored in international studies at Ohio State.  Nowadays, my field of specialty is teaching English to speakers of other languages.  When I contemplate the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, along with the deaths of three others at the hands of terrorists, it gives me chills.  The terrorists acted upon information.  For all I know, the information the terrorists acted upon came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for she did not safeguard top-secret information, including information about U.S. assets and personnel abroad.  Looking at events leading up to those deaths–where it seems that security vulnerabilities were deliberately overlooked–and looking at events unfold after mischief was clearly afoot in Benghazi–where it seems that the opportunity to evacuate was doable but somehow deliberately nixed–I can only arrive at the conclusion that Stevens’ death was the desired outcome.  Was he a man who knew too much?  Even if his death were merely due to Clinton’s negligence, rather than malfeasance, it is still too much for me to stomach.  If I were a U.S. Ambassador to anywhere, I’d want the U.S. government to have my back.

Hillary Clinton tried to rig the elections in 2008, but Barack Obama outsmarted her.  She has outdone herself this time around, with nearly every superdelegate handpicked for their loyalty to her.  The election on the Democrat side is rigged.  Only rank-and-flle Democrat voters have the power to throw a monkey wrench into her machine, and I hope they’ll do just that.

As for a brokered GOP convention, I do not favor the pandemonium that Mitt Romney seems to invite.  If Trump has the delegates, then he’s the nominee.  If Trump goes on to lose the election, then the establishment can engage in party-building after that (and get in touch with the grassroots) and make a push for redemption.  If Trump goes on to win the election and the establishment still cannot make amends with him and thus will not allow him to be their standard-bearer going forward, then found a new political party and recruit elected Republican legislators across the country to switch to this new party starting in January.  If this new party succeeds well enough at this recruitment, it could conceivably enact laws in many states that would grant major-party status to their new creation.  If we’re to have a falling out, let’s have it then, after January, in the broad light of day.  Make new rules then.  Don’t bend and break rules midstream this July in some smoke-filled convention backroom to thwart a vast array of voters.

I hope that Ohio will do the right thing.  Kasich for the Republicans.  Sanders for the Democrats.  Make November a sweeter pill to swallow.

Posted in Bernie Sanders (D), endorsement, executive branch, gambling, John Kasich (R), Michele Silva Arredondo, National Politics, Political Blogosphere, State Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Is a “natural born” citizen the same thing as a citizen “naturalized at birth?” If not, Ted Cruz is in trouble.

January 27, 2016 — buckeyerino

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was born in Canada to an American-born mother and a Cuban-born father.  That Senator Cruz is an American citizen from his birth is not a question posed here.  He was a citizen at birth . . . period.

Senator Cruz is now seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for President of the United States in this 2016 election cycle.  Another Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has called into question whether Senator Cruz, under the US Constitution, is eligible to be President.  Trump warned that if Cruz is not eligible, the Republican Party would find itself in an awkward situation if Cruz were the nominee.

The US Constitution, approximately midway through Section 1, of Article II, spells out the eligibility of presidential candidates:

“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

The US Constitution, just by itself, in isolation from acts of Congress, confers citizenship to those born on U.S. soil.  For those who may be citizens at birth not born on U.S. soil, one must look to the acts of Congress.  Citizenship by parentage was not an issue tackled until the Naturalization Act of 1790, three years after the ratification of the US Constitution.  See where this is headed?  At the time of the writing of the US Constitution, citizenship by location of birth was fairly well defined.  Birth citizenship through a parent or parents off of U.S. soil was an open question not yet taken up.  Congress, not the Constitution, bestowed Ted Cruz with citizenship at birth.  The 14th Amendment to the Constitution expanded upon who was to be enumerated as a citizen, but that amendment has little to no bearing upon the case of Ted Cruz.

The following passage is excerpted from the Naturalization Act of 1790:

“And the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States [ . . . ]”

Clearly, Senator Cruz is a citizen of the United States based upon this statute.  His Cuban-born father did reside in the United States for a few years in advance of Ted Cruz’s birth in Canada.  The phrase within the statute that reads “shall be considered as natural born citizens” seems to settle the matter of Ted Cruz’s eligibility to become POTUS, does it not?

Or does it?

The use of the helping verb “shall” is binding upon the government, so that bodes well for Cruz, along with the phrase “natural born.”

But why say “shall be considered as” rather than “are?”  If the statute were to read, “And the children of citizens of the United States . . . are natural born citizens,” then no question would remain about Cruz’s eligibility.  But “shall be considered as” might signify that a person in such circumstances is naturalized at birth, not needing to follow the same processes of naturalization that others born off of U.S. soil must go through, but it still falls under the auspices of naturalization law.  Does this statute create a “naturalized at birth” citizen separate from a “natural born” citizen, with the one being “considered as” the other?  Is there a distinction there?  Or does “shall be considered as” equal to “are,” relegating the concept of “naturalized at birth,” in an instance such as this, to mythology?

Clearly, Ted Cruz is convinced that there is no “naturalized at birth” in play concerning his own citizenship.  Donald Trump isn’t convinced otherwise, it’s just that, as he pointed out, questions might be raised.  Any other time this question might have been put to the test in our presidential races, it never was.  Those who might have come under questioning were never the eventual nominees of the major parties, anyway.  Ted Cruz, however, stands a chance to be the Republican nominee.  Though no caucuses have been conducted and no primary election votes counted, the two frontrunners of the GOP appear to be Trump and Cruz. The other GOP candidates appear to be trailing badly.

Trump’s question, in a backhanded way, could be taken as a compliment, for Trump is implicitly acknowledging that Cruz could become the party’s nominee.  Aside from posing the question, Trump has always asserted that he, himself would be the nominee.  But if Cruz does become the nominee, I think Donald Trump is absolutely right that the question over natural born citizenship will loom much larger than the so-called “birther” issue that tried to nip at Obama’s heels.

You may have heard Democrats that have openly expressed a desire for either Trump or Cruz to be the GOP nominee.  Why?  Because they think the election of the Democrat nominee to the presidency is a slam dunk if one of those two happens to be the GOP nominee.  What if the Democrats get what they wished for in a GOP nominee, but the general election picture appears to be much less of a slam dunk?  What if the Democrat nominee is not faring well and the prospect of a President Trump or a President Cruz is becoming a very real one?  Will the Democrats pull out all the stops?  Will they seize at any straw they can?  Of course, they will.  If Ted Cruz is the nominee, and the matter of his eligibility has not been settled definitively, the GOP may have a real mess on its hands because if the Democrats are not faring well, they will seize at that straw.  That’s all Donald Trump is pointing out.

I believe that, if Cruz is nominated and stands a real chance of winning the general election, the Democrats will seize upon this, and it won’t be resolved until after Election Day.  If the Democrat nominee wins, then the question goes by the wayside.  If Cruz wins, I think his inauguration in January will be hijacked by the Democrats and hauled into the courts.  I think they will seek a court injunction barring Cruz from taking office until after the question is settled in court.  If the Democrats’ injunction is granted and, under that scenario, if Cruz wins in court, then how many months will it take to do so?  When would Cruz be allowed to take office?  Who would be acting as POTUS until that point in time?

What if Cruz loses such a suit months after winning an election?  Do we reconvene the electoral college with another GOP nominee?  Does the VP candidate, who won just as many electoral votes as Cruz, the winning presidential nominee, get to take office as POTUS?  Would the electoral votes have to be vacated, leaving no nominee with a majority of electoral votes, and then get decided in the U.S. House of Representatives?  Or, scarier still, does the electoral college reconvene without a GOP nominee?  I think it’s the scarier scenario that would prevail.  Alternate Republican hopefuls will be bombarding electors with sales pitches while Cruz’s case drags through court.  But unless GOP electors uniformly embrace the VP nominee, I think the electoral college vote would be a mishmash, perhaps landing the decision in the US House, or perhaps by flipping the majority of electors over to the Democrat nominee.

If you are a staunch Cruz supporter, steel yourself, because emerging victorious will likely be a rougher ride than you’d ever imagined.

Posted in executive branch, National Politics, US Constitution. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

2016 POTUS race is like cable or satellite TV: so many options, but nothing that’s interesting

December 24, 2015 — buckeyerino

Yeah, the ratings for the Republican presidential campaign debates are through the roof.  Yeah, there are lots of choices this time around–and that’s a good thing.  That being said, I’m getting frustrated that I can’t identify a candidate I’m excited about.  I had a favorable opinion of Bobby Jindal based on how much less corrupt Louisiana state government is than it was before he took office.  A record of reform is appealing to me.  Jindal, however, is one of four GOP candidates who have dropped out of the race.  Lindsey Graham dropped out very recently.  Further back, Rick Perry dropped out.  Scott Walker was the first to drop out (which made total sense to me).  On the Democrat side (not that anybody across the aisle interests me), Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee have dropped out.  That still leaves 13 Republicans and 3 Democrats in the running:

To get an idea of the lay of the land, I’ve listed the candidates top to bottom in each party to approximate recent polling data (not an exact science to be sure).  I’ve linked each name in that list to the corresponding official campaign webpage.  Go ahead and click on the links.  See if anybody excites you.

Let me list some of the grievances that cause me to cross candidates off my list of preferences:

  • Crony capitalism?  Support for bailouts?  Ties to the gambling industry?  Ties to businesses “too big to fail?”  Pay-to-play politics?  Manipulate markets through artificial means to predetermine winners and losers of your own choosing?  More beholden to campaign donors than to voters?  Sorry, not for me.  Oops!  I just shoveled a bunch of people off my list already!
  • Isolationism?  Reluctant to propel our nation to lead the world?  Fearful of increasing legal immigration?  Hey, wake up!  People are watching us all around the world.  I am mindful of that.  We cannot have leaders that bury their heads in the sand.
  • Dishonesty?  Trying to be enigmatic about policy positions?  Talking out of both sides of your mouth?  Unwilling to be held accountable?  Holding double-standards?  Dodging culpability through legal technicalities and obfuscation?  Lacking integrity?  (I’m looking at you, Hillary Clinton.  This is why you’d be the last person I’d vote for of either party.)
  • Lack of leadership?  No executive experience?  Unable to rally people to your cause?  Unable to form coalitions?  Unwilling to negotiate with those on the other side of the political aisle?  A lone voice in the wilderness that no one cares to listen to?  Ineffective administrator?  Constantly making excuses for poor performance?  The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?  Take credit for the good but pass blame for the bad?  The buck doesn’t stop at your desk?  There are places in society for such people.  They can be bloggers, just like me.  And, just like me, they shouldn’t be POTUS.
  • In trouble with the law?  Domestic violence?  Sexual harassment?  Driving while intoxicated?  Use of recreational drugs?  Evaded taxes?  Commingled personal funds with business funds, campaign funds, NGO funds, or government funds?  Hired a domestic that was not eligible to work in the United States?  Steered contracts for bribes and kickbacks?  Hid information from FOIA requests that the public has a right to know about?  Does a life of privilege protect you from reaping legal consequences that would ordinarily befall someone in less-priveleged circumstances?  No one should be exempt from the law.
  • Utopianism?  Should free markets go the way of the dinosaur?  In the interests of economic egalitarianism in pursuit of a classless society through destratification, should our society and economy be centrally planned by a benevolent federal government comprised of the best thinkers within the ivory tower?  Do we need to be saved from ourselves?  Are we citizens irrationally prone to vote against our own best interests?  Should the interests of the betterment of society trump the ambitions of individuals?  Wouldn’t equality guarantee happiness for everyone?  Well, I don’t call myself Buckeye RINO because I am okay with being herded like cattle.
  • Constitution allergy?  Is the U.S. Constitution inconvenient?  Should speech, religion, the press, and peaceable assembly be regulated?  Should firearm ownership be confined to on-duty law enforcement and military personnel?  Is the whole population comprised of suspects, thus seeking warrants just bothersome red tape?  Do the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution intrude on the branches of government to the point that each branch needs work-arounds to circumvent the checks and balances?  Are the people too subversive to be sovereign?  Is it too hard to declare war before engaging in acts of war?  Is due process too much to expect when the government has an interest in seizing private property?  Shouldn’t the Senate have the same right of introducing an appropriations bill as does the House?  Should special interest groups be delegated the responsibility of writing the legislation that gets introduced in Congress?  If any act of Congress, on its face, is unenforceable, should the executive branch be given carte blanche to add whatever administrative code to it deemed necessary to make it enforceable?  Should the new loophole of regarding the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” render the Constitution malleable to the point at which it means whatever it is expedient to say it means at any given point in time?  Should any U.S. District Court judge be permitted to strike down the laws of any state, or institute new state laws, based upon the federal government’s interests and the federal government’s notions of political correctness?  Is holding on to power, whether for incumbents, the federal government as a whole, the two major political parties, businesses “too big to fail,” or government bureaucracies (like the IRS, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bureau of Land Management, the DEA, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, ICE, the FEC, the EPA, etc.) so imperative that the sovereign people, the 50 states, and the U.S. Constitution must ultimately be subjugated?  I cannot abide politicians who act in this manner, and maybe that’s why GOP voters have been driven toward non-politicians early on in this election cycle.

I already eliminated all the presidential candidates based on these 7 bulletpoints.  Now what?  Choose the least of the evils?  In that case, I find myself being pushed toward Rand Paul, for the 7th bulletpoint trumps them all.  I don’t think of Rand Paul as a leader.  I have no data from which I can extrapolate what kind of administrator he would be.  Libertarians often outsource the work of government because the government is deemed too inefficient.  I am not libertarian.  I think many functions of government should be kept in-house.  Ideally, there’d be a chain of command within government that would hold bureaucracies accountable to the chief executive and responsive to the people, thus a political leader should reform government agencies and lead them to greater efficiency.  I don’t agree with many tenets of libertarianism, legalization of recreational drugs being just one example of what I oppose.  I worry that a libertarian running the government would be like steering a rudderless ship, for I think that libertarianism aspires to such an extreme of individualism that it interferes with a sense of community.  I think having a sense of community is the essence of good government that rules by the consent of the governed.  I think Rand Paul is isolationist.  In foreign policy, I fear a President Rand Paul would project weakness.  I fear that the U.S. would step aside as world leader, and that, in turn, would leave a vacuum that Russia or China or many other nations would like to fill.  I must admit that I believe in American exceptionalism.  I think we have the best nation on the planet, and I wish that other nations would emulate ours at least to the extent that their respective constitutions grant liberties to their respective populations that are equal to our own Bill of Rights.

What scares me about so many other candidates is that they want to sound so tough on the homeland security front that they are willing to part with key provisions of the Bill of Rights, whether it’s gun control, the tendency to attempt to muzzle the media in the face of criticism (or script, in advance, the messages delivered by the media), and a barely concealed animosity toward religion on the left; or treating all citizens as suspects on the right.  Have you heard the GOP candidates’ stances on encryption?  They are chilling.  I believe the freedom of speech includes choosing who is and who is not the audience of any given communication.  This blog is unencrypted because I hope for a wide audience for the views I state here.  But if I’m talking about a sensitive personal matter, I want to communicate in complete privacy only to a specific audience of my choosing.  Unfortunately, the national security hawks want every civilian communication to be a public one with plenty of ways to eavesdrop at their disposal.  I never liked the so-called Patriot Act for its infringement of 4th Amendment provisions regarding warrants, or should I say the granting of policing power with either no warrants or issuance of secret warrants, thus circumventing the constitutional checks and balances upon policing power.  The result is an arrangement that makes the government opaque to the people and the people transparent to the government.  I think the people of this nation need to put terrorist acts in perspective.  What is the ratio of terrorist-on-American crime with respect to American-on-American crime?  Remember the chorus on the right side of the aisle that responded to prominent white-on-black criminal cases with the knee-jerk reaction of “What about black-on-black crime?”  The casualties from terrorist-on-American crime are much fewer than non-terrorist-on-American crime.  I suggest we not throw away our constitutional rights over this.  Chris Christie said he puts national security first because, for hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center, he didn’t know what had become of his wife.  Along that same line of reasoning, if someone close to Chris Christie, heaven forbid, should be threatened by a firearm, would that make it okay, in his mind, to rescind the 2nd Amendment?  I think the 2nd Amendment is one way to ensure that terrorists will never take control of our nation.  Do you remember a time when military coups were ubiquitous across the Third World?  In those nations, the people lacked the arms that governments and military insurgents had.  What purpose do assault weapons serve in the hands of a free people?  Some of the answers to that question are that we maintain a civilian-controlled military, that we deter foreign invasion, and that we prevent the formation of a totalitarian state (or that we have the power to overthrow a totalitarian state, heaven forbid).  I offered Chris Christie’s position as an example of the candidates’ rhetoric on national security, but he really shouldn’t be singled out, for candidates at the bottom of the polls, like Jim Gilmore and Martin O’Malley, all the way to the top of the polls, like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, envision a security state that must take precedence over constitutional liberties.

For the time being, I suppose I am cornered into the Rand Paul camp, and I don’t like it.  I’m not a happy camper.  I’m hoping candidates whose leadership skills I admire will come to their senses and take the side of the US Constitution.  Barring that, watching this race unfold is like channel surfing and finding nothing intriguing on TV.

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Death sentence warranted for murderers when the killings continue in prison

August 13, 2015 — buckeyerino

I understand the well-intended notion that the government should not be in the business of executing people, but I cannot fully subscribe to it.  For murderers who have already been sentenced to life in prison, they deserve a death sentence if incarceration doesn’t stop them from continuing to murder.

I agree that it would be a travesty if the state executed a person who should never have been found guilty.  Despite the fact that jury verdicts must be unanimous, I believe that juries are not infallible in determining guilt.  This is part of the reason why I believe that executions should be rare, for slam-dunks are rare.  Juries may deliberate for hours and hours before rendering a verdict. When that much deliberation is needed, it would seem to suggest that the jury is doing more than just meticulously reviewing the evidence, for it would seem to suggest that there was a difference of opinion about guilt that had to be reconciled.  If such were the case, I would tend to think that such a case would not have been a good candidate for capital punishment.

I have heard the arguments and seen the numbers that appear to demonstrate that the death sentence is ineffective as a deterrent.  Personally, I am in general agreement with the sentiment that executions do not lead to lower murder rates, thus I do believe that executions are poor deterrents with one exception: An execution does deter the executed murderer from murdering ever again.

Supposedly, when a murderer receives a life sentence, where we “lock them up and throw away the key,” it is to remove that murderer from society so that the person lacks the capacity to murder again.  I read the story of a recent prison killing in California that reminds me that such life sentences are not foolproof.  What should be done with the prisoner already serving a life sentence who commits murder again while behind bars, and the evidence of guilt is incontrovertible?  Death is the appropriate sentence.

In this California case, the murder victim, himself, should have, himself, been executed a long time ago.  Perhaps the prisoners who killed him felt that they had to resort to being vigilantes in order to do the job that the state had not done.  Whether the killing was justifiable or not is a matter for a jury to decide.  Investigate and put the killers on trial.  If any convicted murderer is convicted once more in this case, death is the appropriate sentence.  Nonetheless, it was a mistake for the state to have let this murder victim live for so many years behind bars. Pinell was given a life sentence for rape in 1965.  He killed a guard at the Soledad prison in 1971 and received a second life sentence.  He slit the throats of two prison guards (who survived the attacks) in an attempt to escape the San Quentin prison in 1971 and was given a third life sentence.  If he had killed a fellow inmate while serving out his sentence for rape, perhaps some mitigating factor would have resulted in a manslaughter charge rather than a murder charge.  I find it hard to believe that Pinell’s killing of a prison guard falls short of murder.  I think it would have been appropriate to sentence him to death for that offense even though his prior conviction wasn’t for murder.  Slicing the throats of the two guards in the escape attempt were clearly two counts of attempted murder, so 2 life sentences were not deterring Pinell from committing murder, notwithstanding the guards’ survivals.  Even if he didn’t receive death for the murder of the Soledad guard, he should have been sentenced to death for the attempted murders of the San Quentin guards.  Why wouldn’t California be more protective of the lives of its prison guards?  Three life sentences make no sense.  Death makes sense. Might lesser sentences invite future prison riots?  These capital crimes were committed in 1971.  It is now 2015.  Pinell’s execution should have been in the rear-view mirror long before now.

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Fox News being selfish in only allowing 3 hours for first GOP debates scheduled for Aug. 6, 2015

August 1, 2015 — buckeyerino

Sound bites from the people that matter (the candidates for the GOP nomination for the 2016 presidential election) and hours of hashing and rehashing the sound bites from the people that don’t matter (media pundits): That is what we have to look forward to in the wake of the first GOP presidential candidate debates. This imbalance is the essence of my complaint.

The first GOP debates of the 2016 presidential campaign season will be held on Fox News on August 6,2015.  Seventeen candidates are eligible to participate in one of two debates that evening.  Originally, just one debate during two hours of primetime was scheduled to start at 9 PM Eastern Time.  That primetime debate would only have allowed for the top 10 candidates in the polls to be on stage.  Because of backlash, Fox News has announced an additional hour of debate for the remaining 7 candidates that starts at 5 pm Eastern Time, so all the major GOP candidates get some time on-camera.

But let’s put things into perspective.  Are these debates going to use all 180 minutes of those time slots on these debates?  Or will their be commercial breaks?  Or, at the least, station breaks?  Even if they air the debates nonstop without interruption, three hours does not seem to be much time considering that Fox News is on the air 24/7.  A candidate would be really lucky to total more than 10 minutes of speaking time during these debates.  How much can you really learn about a candidate’s platform in 10 minutes, especially if the moderator is steering conversation away from the message a candidate wants to emphasize?  With such a short timeframe to work with, a moderator has to be very selective about what issues to raise and responses to elicit.  Viewers will not get a chance to learn the depth and breadth of each candidacy.  Therefore, there will be too little information revealed to make apples to apples comparisons between candidates’ competing visions.

24-hour news networks can be boring to follow over the course of a day because so much information is repeated ad nauseum.  The debates will provide a welcome break from that.  Why not pre-empt all of the regularly scheduled programming that evening to give us a solid block of time to hear all the candidates more in-depth in a round robin that puts them all on stage at once?  After all, this is the debut.

A debut means that it is a special occasion that comes around only once every four years, so why the stinginess on time?  At any other time of the campaign season, people will have already dropped out–people who might have been worthy of further consideration, had they only been given a chance to have their say. One of the reasons that the freedom of the press is encoded into our U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights is so that we can access information about these very important political matters.  TV news outlets should exist for stuff such as this.

I say, start the cameras rolling at 4 pm and keep them rolling until midnight.  Yes, that’s a full eight-hour work shift during which the candidates need to remain engaged, but the work of the President of the United States is far more grueling than that, thus it should be no big deal.  Yeah, people need to eat and people need to use the bathroom during eight hours, so seat the candidates at long tables that will allow them to be served some dinner.  Since only one person can talk at a time anyway, there should be plenty of time for the other sixteen candidates to swallow a few bites and take a few swigs of their drinks as they listen in.  The candidates, of course, would need to be cued when they are on-deck so that they are free to speak without food in their mouths when it becomes their turn.  The candidates can grab restroom breaks during commercials.  While food is being served, the debate format can be Q & A between moderator and candidate, with each taking a turn.  After the food has been cleared away, the debate between candidates can begin in earnest, wherein candidates can challenge each other’s positions with much less input from the moderator.  At that point, the moderator would merely play traffic cop by identifying which speaker has the floor at any given point so that candidates do not talk over each other.

Who is going is going to watch an eight-hour debate in its entirety besides die-hard political junkies, you ask?  Never fear, for, in the weeks following, the pundits will all pile on to rehash what was said.  Therefore, if you only caught pieces of the debate, you are sure to see regurgitations of it.  The difference is, instead of the pundits playing upon the same sound bites over and over again, there will actually be enough substance from the candidates’ mouths that the pundits might actually say something insightful rather than knee-jerk.  There will be more context within which to analyze candidates’ statements.

When hours of punditry have to pick over mere seconds of sound bites, the political commentary tends to resemble tabloid TV reality shows.  We have enough of that on the tube already.  If the news networks made the changes I recommend, there would be more meat for the pundits to digest, and the commentary might actually become educational, and that would be refreshing.

Aren’t there way too many pundits?  Don’t they take up way too much broadcasting time?  More time should have been alloted to this debut event–specifically to the candidates.  The pundits are like the poor: They will always be with us.

By the way, here’s a recap of the 17 candidates, in no particular order, with links to their official websites (except for one, the latest entrant, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who doesn’t seem to have launched his website yet).

Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore

Former New York Governor George Pataki

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee

Former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum

U.S. Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio

U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz

U.S. Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul

U.S. Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina

Pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson

Real estate tycoon Donald Trump

Ohio Governor John Kasich

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

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