Stop Lowering Your American Flag
In September of last year, driving by Chattanooga’s largest private school, an outstanding Christian school we have supported for decades with scholarships for at-risk kids, I was dismayed — outraged, actually — to see the enormous flag they proudly fly in front of the school lowered to half-staff. The school is a very well-managed organization, but administrators had never established a policy regarding when to abide by presidential flag proclamations. Thus, a staff person was dutifully following those proclamations when issued.
I was outraged because the flag was lowered in memorial honor after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the result of a proclamation by then-president Donald Trump. The school is now working on a policy regarding its flag.
Presidential flag proclamations apply only to federal installations, not to state and local government installations, and certainly not to private organizations — all of which may elect to lower their flags.
Trump’s RBG order followed the standardized flag etiquette proclamation for lowering flags set by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. Eisenhower ordered that flags should be lowered for 30 days after the death of the president or a former president and for 10 days after the death of the vice president or a SCOTUS chief justice or a speaker of the House. For an associate justice and other notable national leaders, the flag is to be displayed at half-staff from the day of death until interment. The flag is lowered for one day following the death of a member of Congress.
There are annual days when flags are lowered on federal installations: Peace Officers Memorial Day (15 May, sunrise to sunset); Memorial Day (last Monday in May, sunrise to 1200); Patriot Day (11 September, sunrise to sunset); National Firefighters Memorial Day (first Sunday in October, sunrise to sunset); and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (7 December, sunrise to sunset). It is appropriate and fitting that private organizations also honor these annual days for lowering flags, most notable among them being Memorial Day. To understand why ALL Americans should honor Memorial Day and reject the use of that day for commercial profiteering, read our latest veteran profile, “An Orphan’s Medal of Honor,” and visit our Memorial Day tribute page. Also see our flag etiquette page.
Legitimate reasons for ordering flags to half-staff notwithstanding, over socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s first months of unprecedented presidential malfeasance, he has repeatedly ordered American flags to half-staff to align with his race-hustling and gun control political agendas. That prompted my first objection to this degradation of our flag two months into the Biden/Harris regime change: “socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Uses Flags as Political Rags.”
Five times since then, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden has ordered flags to half-staff to memorialize the victims of mass killings where the assailant used a firearm, the latest being the San Jose tragedy where nine of our fellow Americans were killed. In each of those cases, on the heels of his proclamations socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden has disgracefully used those incidents to promote his assault on the Second Amendment — an abject desecration of flag proclamations.
For the record, regarding such tragedies, only a sociopath would feel no sense of empathy for the families and friends of those who have been murdered or violently assailed by sociopaths. But for perspective, beyond the high-profile incidents where innocents are murdered, in 2020 there was a surge in the daily murder average, now estimated at more than 52 murders every day. Those murders occur primarily in Democrat-controlled urban centers, and arguably they’re a direct generational result of Democrat social policies. Of course, honoring those victims does not fit the Demos’ political narrative, and changing those policies does not fit their agenda.
Bottom line, America: STOP lowering your flags to comport with politically motivated flag proclamations.
~The Patriot Post
The Democrats Are Tough on Crime?
James Carville is a shrewd strategist and a keen political observer, but he’s neither a hypnotist nor a magician. So, try as he might, he won’t be able to keep folks from spewing coffee all over their monitors when they hear him say, “The modern Democratic Party is flat-out better on crime than Republicans.”
No one believes that. Not even Carville himself.
A month ago, Carville took to Vox, a leftist news outlet, to sound the alarm about wokeism. He knows that while his party and its radical base have embraced the issue, no one else has. “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” he said with Carvillian candor. “Maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost f—king no one wants to do that.”
This week, though, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Carville has chosen to be a lot less candid. He begins:
From 1993 to 2019, crime steadily decreased in the U.S. Every president since Bill Clinton inherited a declining crime rate and left office with a further decline in crime rate, until Donald J. Trump came along. During Mr. Trump’s final year in office, violent crimes and homicides spiked. Yet if you tuned into Fox News, you’d draw the conclusion that the Democratic Party is opposed to law and order.
No, James, we’d draw that conclusion because the Democratic [sic] Party is opposed to law and order. One need only look back on the past year to see ample evidence of it. The George Floyd riots, and the demonization of the cops, and the Democrats’ calls to defund the police — all of these things were brought to us by the Democrats. And all of them say the same thing: soft on crime.
Carville tries to distract us by disingenuously calling Donald Trump’s presidency “one long crime wave.” It wasn’t. “Eight of his campaign associates were put in shackles,” he writes, without saying a word about the Democrats’ three-year Russia collusion hoax that railroaded them into unrelated and insignificant criminal convictions.
What Carville refuses to acknowledge, though, is that when the American people see footage of 72-year-old Paul Manafort being perp-walked for the crime of failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, they don’t think, Ahh, the Republicans are soft on crime.
But when they see footage of urban centers in flames, and widespread looting, and downtown shopping districts being boarded up, and statues of our Founding Fathers being defiled, and Black Lives Matter thugs harassing restaurant patrons, and leftist rabble chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” — when they see all these things, they absolutely do think, Ahh, the Democrats are soft on crime.
Nice try, James, but this cake has long since been baked.
Carville calls himself “a proud Democrat,” but no one believes that. Oh, he used to be a proud Democrat, back in the '90s, but these days he’s an alarmed Democrat, an anguished Democrat, because he knows better than anyone that his party has taken a hard left turn since the days of the more centrist scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton.
Our nation’s big-city law enforcement agencies have never before engaged in self-preserving pull-backs from the urban areas where policing is most desperately needed. But they do today. And the result has been widespread mayhem. Cops are quitting in droves. And they’re not quitting because of a lack of support from Republicans. They’re quitting because they’ve been denounced and defunded by Democrats.
Last night, Tucker Carlson covered the Democrats’ efforts to whitewash their party’s many calls to defund the police by substituting the word “reimagine” for the word “defund.” It’s a desperate ruse, a euphemistic ploy, and the American people will see through it.
James Carville is a brilliant dude. But he’s not coming clean. He’s not playing it straight with us. In his heart of hearts, he knows that his party, the Democrat Party, is the anti-cop party, the soft-on-crime party.
If crime is an issue in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats will be on the losing end of it. And no amount of reimagination will make it otherwise. ~The Patriot Post
The Big Border Lie
“The border is closed,” asserted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during his testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Despite the number of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. over the past three months hitting record highs, Mayorkas insisted that there is no migrant “invasion.”
Mayorkas made his reality-denying claim in response to the arguments of Republican Congressman Chuck Fleischmann. “Frankly,” Fleischmann said, “it appears that President socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s message to one and all is the U.S. has no limits to who can come because the administration will not enforce any of its immigration laws. Is that the message, that this country will not enforce its immigration laws?”
“No, it’s not,” Mayorkas insisted. “The president could not have been clearer in his articulation of this administration’s position, nor could I have been clearer and continue to be so, which is the border is closed, and this administration administers and enforces the laws of the United States of America — and that is not only the laws of accountability but also the humanitarian laws that Congress passed years ago.”
To be honest, it may be difficult to determine what was the bigger lie uttered by Mayorkas — that “the border is closed,” or that socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden could not be clearer regarding his administration’s border enforcement. What is clear is that Mayorkas is bending the truth on both counts.
When pressed on the massive drop in the number of deportations despite the increase in illegal crossings, Mayorkas essentially played dumb. Of the deportation statistics reported by the the Washington Post, he declared, “I do not believe it is accurate,” though he could not or would not provide any specific numbers himself.
His testimony was classic political spin and obfuscation. Another example: “Enforcement is not a quantitative issue; it is a qualitative one. The question is as to whom are we dedicating our resources and what will deliver the greatest public-safety results for the American public, and that is what I am focused on.”
Mayorkas’s obvious intent was to dispel the reality of the current border crisis by pushing the false narrative that the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration has effectively “closed the border.” But Republicans weren’t having any of it. Representative Steven Palazzo insisted, “It looks like you rolled out a big welcome mat that says ‘send us your kids,’ and that is criminal. Because as long as they know if they get to our border we’re going to take them and turn them into American citizens and let them roam free [in] our country, people desperate in those countries are going to continue to take the risk.”
Meanwhile, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s border czar, Kamala Harris, has gone some 65 days without yet visiting the U.S. southern border, though she did famously find the suggestion that she do so quite hilarious. It appears that this strategy is because the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration doesn’t want any media focus on the border crisis. Thus, Team Biden can play the game of blaming the massive illegal immigration problem not on lack of border enforcement but rather on the lack of funding for the Central American nations known as the Northern Triangle. Hence lowlife/liar-Harris’s announcement of a big “investment” to ostensibly address the problem at its source.
As lowlife/liar-Harris expressed to a group of Guatemalan leaders earlier this month, “I don’t need to tell you this — injustice is a root cause of migration. It is causing the people of the region to leave their homes involuntarily, meaning they don’t want to leave but they are fleeing. Women, Indigenous people, Afro-descendants, LGBTQ people are facing discrimination and persecution; families are living in fear of trafficking and gangs.”
The irony: They’re being trafficked into the U.S. by gangs.
If there is any clear message on the problem of illegal immigration coming from the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration, it’s that it’s America’s fault people are illegally crossing the border in droves, because we haven’t “invested” enough in corrupt Central American countries. “Blame America First” is a particularly pernicious facet of Biden’s big border lie. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/80228?mailing_id=5863&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5863&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
Moderate socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe’s $6 Trillion Tax-and-Spend Plan
The Six Trillion Dollar Man is at it again. After pitching $6 trillion in new spending already in his short presidency, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden released his budget today and it’s — you guessed it — also $6 trillion. And you’re going to pay for it.
Now, first of all, presidential budgets are largely meaningless. Congress does its own thing, while the president merely gets to hold up a sign signifying his priorities. Yet socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s budget, which incorporates much of his already-proposed big spending projects in the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, is hugely significant because it shows yet again that while voters thought they were electing a moderate, they instead got a less coherent version of socialist/commie-Bernie Sanders.
We hate to say we told you so.
Let’s start with how socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s budget will be “paid for.” We put that in scare quotes for good reason, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Naturally, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden calls for major tax increases. First, he wants to raise income taxes on households earning more than $400,000, which technically violates his campaign pledge to not raise taxes on individuals earning less than $400,000. Neither threshold sounds very “middle class” to most Americans, and “fair share” taxation polls well, so Democrats figure they can get away with it. Just remember that the initial income tax in 1917 was never supposed to hit the middle class either.
Moreover, Democrats intend for the 2017 Republican rates for everyone to expire in 2025. As even the New York Times admits, that means tax hikes for everyone.
Meanwhile, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and his progressive pal dinky/liar-Elizabeth Warren want to boost IRS enforcement, hoping to generate $70 billion more annual revenue through catching tax cheats and closing loopholes. A bigger, more powerful IRS? What could go wrong?
Yet where socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden really wants to pick the pockets of Americans already faced with the Carter-esque malaise of rampant inflation is a hefty hike in the corporate income tax rate, from 21% to 28%. Anyone who doesn’t think businesses will raise prices to pay for that tax bill doesn’t know anything about economics.
As far as “paying for” anything, even assuming the unlikely event that these tax hikes will actually generate the projected revenue, deficits will explode.
When scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton infamously declared in his 1996 State of the Union Address that the “era of big government is over,” he then submitted to Congress his FY1997 budget, which totaled $1.6 trillion. socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s deficit will be $1.8 trillion, and it will remain above $1.3 trillion each year for a decade.
“Total debt held by the public would more than exceed the annual value of economic output, rising to 117 percent of the size of the economy in 2031,” the Times also reports. “By 2024, debt as a share of the economy would rise to its highest level in American history, eclipsing a World War II-era record.”
Former President Donald Trump was no fiscal hawk. Spending grew yugely on his watch, and we criticized him for it. But socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and the Democrats are doing what they always do — exploiting a crisis to raise the spending floor for their “investments” that greatly expand the welfare state and make the government increasingly bigger every year.
No wonder socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden warned Republicans not to “get in the way” of his spending initiatives. Presumably he means to dismiss the GOP’s still-absurd $928 billion infrastructure counteroffer. Biden’s plan has come down a bit from $2.3 trillion to a mere $1.7 trillion, and Republicans made their pitch on Thursday to finally do something bipartisan.
Don’t hold your breath, because $6 Trillion Joe is no moderate bringing unity. ~The Patriot Post
Lockheed Martin and the Woke Industrial Complex
It’s perhaps just a sad sign of the times that a company called White Men as Full Diversity Partners (WMFDP) is not some satirical sendup by the Babylon Bee but rather an actual American business with dozens of employees — headquartered, just as antifa is, in the scenic cesspool of Portland, Oregon.
And if so, it’s an even sadder sign of the times that Lockheed Martin, our nation’s largest defense contractor, was suckered into spending good money with WMFDP. Indeed, as City Journal’s Christopher Rufo reports, Lockheed Martin sent its white male executives to what was labeled as a “white men’s caucus” — “a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their ‘white male culture’ and encouraging them to atone for their ‘white male privilege.’”
This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this comically named outfit. Last year, Rufo reported on its white male training program for employees of the somewhat consequential Sandia National Laboratories, whose mission is to provide engineering and science support for our nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. As Rufo writes, “That began a series of reports leading to President Trump’s Executive Order 13950, banning racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and discrimination in federal diversity programs. The Trump ban, however, was temporary; President socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden rescinded the order on his first day in office.” Thanks, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe.
The Lockheed Martin program begins, as Rufo reports, with some Freudian free association, where corporate trainers rattle off terms related to “white men” — terms such as “founding fathers,” “guns,” “old,” “angry,” “racist,” “Aryan Nation,” and the like. You know — the run-of-the-mill things we usually associate with white men. Then the consultants ply the participants with promises of improving the Lockheed Martin brand and the reputation of the company’s white men, and they introduce a little fear by assuring them that a full-on embrace of wokeness might keep them from being replaced by a “full diversity partner.”
Finally, the execs are told to reflect on a series of “I’m tired” statements — “tired of you making more money than me,” “tired of black boys being murdered,” “tired of Black Lives Matter being disparaged,” and “tired of hearing how we need a wall on our southern border but not our northern one.” Nothing like a little infusion of white guilt dressed up as empathy training.
We wonder, though: Wouldn’t Lockheed Martin — and the Department of Defense — have been better served by convening a three-day summit of its entire leadership team (not just the white guys) to, say, tackle the colossal cost overruns of its $1.7 trillion F-35 II Lightning fighter program? (Asking for a taxpayer.)
Last week, we reported on Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier, who was relieved of his command for having spoken out against Critical Race Theory and other Marxist indoctrination taking place throughout the U.S. military. And in February, we analyzed the Pentagon’s plan to investigate extremism in the ranks, by which military brass essentially meant “Trump voters.” Our military has been set dangerously adrift, and the saboteurs are the ardent leftists in socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s White House and Pentagon. And with Rufo’s revelation about Lockheed Martin, we now know that the woke virus has jumped from the DOD to our nation’s defense contractors.
Why does all this matter? Because the more time our warfighters and their defense contractors spend listening to “diversity and inclusion” consultants and navel-gazing about how concepts such as hard work, rugged individualism, and striving for success are “the roots of white male culture” and are thus “devastating” to women and minorities, the less time they spend training for war and building better war-fighting gear.
Our military’s core mission is to deter or win wars and ensure our nation’s security. To this point, that mission has served us pretty well. But any activity that distracts or deviates from it only serves our nation’s enemies.
~The Patriot Post
Zuckerberg’s Outsized Election Interference
During the 2020 election cycle, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, spent hundreds of millions in electioneering efforts backing Democrat candidates. The Zuckerbergs donated an eye-popping $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a leftist organization that in turn gave the money in grants to some 2,500 municipalities in 49 states.
Investigative journalist Steve Miller reports, “In exchange for the money, elections divisions agreed to conduct their elections according to conditions set out by the CTCL, which is led by former members of the New Organizing Institute, a training center for progressive groups and Democratic campaigns.”
Not only did Zuckerberg give money, he also used his social media platform to provide support for his favored leftist political agenda.
“Facebook, with the CTCL, was also part of the effort, providing a guide and webinar for election officials on how to engage voters,” Miller notes. “Included were directions to report ‘voter interference’ to Facebook authorities. The company also provided designated employees in six regions of the U.S. to handle questions. Together, the groups strategically targeted voters and waged a voter assistance campaign aimed at low-income and minority residents who typically shun election participation, helping Democratic candidates win key spots all over the U.S.”
As Hayden Dublois, a researcher at the Foundation of Government Accountability, observed, “This private funding has never been done before. We hear about dark money and corporations buying ads, but never have we seen hundreds of millions of private dollars going into the conduct of elections. And states didn’t have any laws on the books to stop it.”
One of CTCL’s biggest successes was pushing for municipalities to adopt the Democrats’ bulk-mail ballot scheme. One example Miller notes was that “the Zuckerberg-funded CTCL allowed elections departments to use grant money to buy vehicles to transport ‘voter navigators.’” He adds, “The election department in Green Bay, Wis., promised as part of its CTCL grant of $1 million that it would employ the vote navigators to ‘assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions … and witnessing absentee ballot signatures.’”
Some of these “voter navigators” engaged in a process known as “curing absentee ballots.” This apparently entailed “fixing” ballots that had been incorrectly filled out. Many states allow for voters to fix such ballots, though it is not mandatory that voters are contacted if their ballots need fixing, due to lack of time and manpower. CTCL took the opportunity to fund and operate the “ballot curing” endeavors, which focused on boosting Democrat voting demographics.
“In Georgia,” Miller found, “the grants were used to expand curbside voting and conduct ‘the necessary voter outreach … to promote absentee voting and encourage higher percentages of our electors to vote absentee,’ according to a grant application.”
The CTCL also focused on boosting Democrat voter turnout in Democrat-friendly areas in an effort to overcome Republican margins. For example, Miller points out, “President Trump took the reliably Republican state of Missouri in 2020, but socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden increased the Democratic presidential vote and won Boone County by 7,000 votes.scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton had a 5,000-vote margin in 2016.” Similarly, “In Webb County, Texas, which received $2.8 million from CTCL, voter registrations increased by 10,000 over 2016. The new recruits in the South Texas county voted for Biden by a two to one margin.”
The great irony in this is that Democrats have long decried private and “dark” money in politics. Yet somehow it’s no surprise to find that they are the party most guilty of engaging in the practice. ~The Patriot Post
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