Incompetent Elected Officials

Wow…Not For the First Time, President Trump Doesn’t Know What the Hell He’s Talking About…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The topic, fortunately, is baseball, not the economy, foreign policy, or making America great again. Still, it is not a good sign when the leader of the free world spouts off like an ignorant fool professing absolute certainty without any genuine expertise whatsoever. If he does this about baseball…well, you can complete that sentence.

President Trump now demands that Roger Clemens be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame despite enough evidence that he used banned steroids late in his career to put him in the Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Sammy Sosa et al. Rogues Gallery of cheaters with great stats who fail the Hall’s character requirements. In a post on Truth Social today, Trump said that he had just played golf with the 11-time All-Star pitcher, and apparently this makes him an authority on The Rocket’s dubious past.

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Observations on the Cincinnati Beatdown

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

While languishing in the hospital, this was the story that I felt most frustrated about not being able to post. Not that I could get a single, clear, spin-free account of what happened. In the aftermath of some Cincinnati event or festival or something, a black man and a white one got into a verbal altercation. The white guy seems to have uttered a racial slur, precipitating a brawl that was quickly joined by a mob of black youths who beat up the white guy and then turned their anger on a white woman who tried to intervene, knocking her unconscious and kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground. An estimated hundred bystanders, most or all of them black, stood by taking videos, laughing, and cheering the mob violence on. There was only one call to 911.

1. Almost all of the national coverage of this incident has been on Fox News. The New York Times, interestingly, hasn’t reported the story at all. The natural question has been raised: If a black man and woman had been attacked and beaten by a mob of young whites as 100 white bystanders cheered them on, there would be protests in the streets and calls for “justice.” Why the double standard?

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Ethics Hero: Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Perez, a 37-year-old auto shop owner, second-term congresswoman and co-chair of the center-leaning Blue Dog Coalition, horrified colleagues on both sides of the aisle by offering an amendment to the “Legislative Appropriations Act”, H.R. 4249. Her addition would have required Congress to create basic guidelines in Congress to ensure that members were able to serve the public “unimpeded by significant irreversible cognitive impairment.” The amendment was unanimously rejected, but she is not giving up. In a poll of the 230,000 people who subscribe to her newsletter, more than 90% supported the proposal. Perez says her constituents raise the issue frequently, and their belief that elected officials are frequently too impaired by age to be effective is causing spreading distrust of our government.

Gee, I can’t imagine why they would feel that way…

…but I digress.

Rep. Perez noted that she found it disturbing that among the oil paintings of the past chairs of the powerful Appropriations Committee is a large portrait of Kay Granger, the former Republican congresswoman from Texas who suffered from mental decline for years when a conservative news outlet found her, at the age of 81, living in an assisted living facility that included a memory care unit while she still held office.

There are now more members of Congress age 70 and above than ever before, while the second oldest President ever to serve is in the White House. Perez insists that there should be standards that prevent members from serving past the point where they no longer have the capacity to cast votes and do business on behalf of their constituents.“It’s a question of whether the elected member is making the decisions,” Rep. Perez said. “It’s really not about a single member; it’s about a systemic failure.”

Bingo.

The Gabbard Files

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The big news in last ten days—I mean other than the allegation that Donald Trump wrote a raunchy birthday card (maybe) to Jeffrey Epstein once—was a newly declassified report released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that fingers former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey among others in the Obama Administration, and later in the Trump Administration, as having deliberately “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public in order to advance the hoax that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with the collusion of Donald Trump.

Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve…No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.” She said she was releasing information that showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials, including Obama.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

Into the “It Isn’t What It Is” Hall of Fame Goes L.A. Mayor Karen Bass

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Video has “surfaced”—where do these surfaced videos go to, before they surface?—of Los Angeles’s incompetent, smug, ridiculous mayor Karen Bass answering a question about her city’s ICE riots by replying that “they never happened.” See?

The response on social media has been swift and terrible…

I just don’t understand.

How do politicians like Bass keep getting away with this? Democrats during the Biden Administration set new records for “It isn’t what it is” gaslighting. The border was secure. Inflation wasn’t really excessive. Men who declared themselves women while keeping all their junk were…POOF!…women. Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack.” War is Peace. Oops, sorry, that last one was Big Brother. How does Bass and her party live with themselves? How can they look themselves in the mirror? Why do Democrats tolerate it?

Have they no sense of decency, at long last? Have they left no sense of decency?

Apparently not, or they would be hiding their heads under paper bags.

[Of course, it helps that virtually no Axis news sources have reported on the video. But we know that journalists have no sense of decency…]

One More Bit of Evidence That The Government Is Too Incompetent To Be Trusted With So Much Power And Money

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

 The Transportation Security Administration has started to phase out its rule requiring travelers to take off their shoes before going through airport security.  The New York Times writes that “the agency has not officially announced this change and did not confirm the new policy” but it “appears to be taking effect at airports across the country.” Caleb Harmon-Marshall, a former TSA officer, first reported the soft launch of this policy via his travel newsletter. It appears to be happening first at major airports, then trickling down to all of them.

The requirement was one of the best examples of what Ethics Alarms calls The Barn Door Fallacy: a rare or preventable incident occurs attracting lots of media attention, and lawmakers or regulators react hysterically with draconian measures that are expensive, obtrusive, ineffective and unnecessary to ensure that what had never happened before won’t happen again.

Richard Reid (above) is an incompetent British terrorist who tried to bring down a passenger plane in 2001 by igniting a plastique bomb in his shoe. (The fuse was wet, and he couldn’t get it to light.) This coming being so soon after the September 11 bombings and everyone being freaked out over the failure of airport security that allowed that tragedy, the TSA decided to make all commercial airline passengers remove their shoes and have them x-rayed forever. Morons. (My mother observed that we should regard ourselves as lucky that a female terrorist hadn’t tied to set off a bomb in her brassiere.) And it has taken 24 years for someone in charge to decide, “You know, this is kind of stupid.”

“Why now?” Harmon-Marshall asked in his newsletter. “I think it’s politics, not security. A handful of lawmakers have recently ramped up criticism of the TSA, with some even floating the idea of dismantling the agency altogether. From complaints about long lines to inconsistent screening experiences, the pressure has been mounting. And this shoe change? It feels like a direct response to that pressure.”

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A Perfect Example of a “Trump Lie”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On both MSNBC and CNN today, a big deal was made over the fact that President Trump said that “no other country” confers automatic citizenship on those born within its borders. They were both sneering so hard that I bet they needed a lip massage afterwards, “Of course, 33 nations have birthright citizenship,” said one, with the other making a similar statement.

No question about it, they are right and Trump was wrong. What he meant, however, was “No nations anywhere but the Americas have birthright citizenship, and we are the only major power in the world that does.” Or, “Almost no nations that know what the fuck they are doing have birthright citizenship.” Presidents shouldn’t be that careless, but Trump is, he refuses to change, he’s not going to, and nobody should pretend that they are shocked when he does.

Here’s the list, as represented in the chart above: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Gambia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files….[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s one of the anti-Musk “exhibits” displayed by Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM). Yes, she’s an Incompetent Elected Official. (I can’t wait for her to scream “Those budget figured don’t add up!”) Yes, she’s an embarrassment. Yes, she’s an idiot. [Special thanks to long, LONG-time commenter Neil Dorr, who informed me who the math genius was.]

Before I proceed, HIT IT, L’il Abner and Marryin’ Sam!

Rueful observations…

1 And they wonder why American trust in our government institutions is falling…

2. If Democrats can’t find a legitimate poll to justify their positions, they just make one up. That is proof right there…

3. Even if that chart were not completely incompetent, dishonest and absurd, how is a poll on what DOGE is doing and has done relevant to anything? All it shows is that the public’s inattentive and gullible consumption of partisan propaganda from news organizations causes it to believe one thing or another. A poll has no bearing on whether a government program or action is wise, effective or necessary.

4. Consider how many government employees had to be lazy, ignorant or stupid (or all three) for that chart to get into the hearing and on TV. We begin with the Congresswoman, of course, then all of her staff and the drones who made the chart.

5. As usual, this is one more indictment of the public school system.

6. The Democrats are doing their damnedest to snatch away the GOP’s longtime title as “The Stupid Party.”

7. The social media wags are having a ball with this one. Example: “I agree with that poll 110%!”

8. Democracy Dies in Cretinism.

Open Forum, “I Wasn’t Going To Have One But Then My Head Exploded” Edition….

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

We just had an open forum a few days ago, so I was going to skip the Friday Forum. Then I read this, my head exploded, I already was struggling because I didn’t sleep at all last night, so I need some time to mop up and repack my head:

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Minnesota Wednesday for its laws that provide free and reduced tuition rates to illegal aliens. The laws, a DOJ press release contends, unconstitutionally discriminate against out-of-state U.S. citizens, who are not afforded the same privileges at Minnesota’s public colleges and universities….According to the lawsuit [“…which names Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Minnesota Office of Higher Education as defendants”], federal law prohibits states from providing illegal aliens with any post secondary education benefit that is denied to U.S. citizens….The lawsuit explains how a 2013 state law allows illegal aliens who establish residency in Minnesota to benefit from reduced, in-state tuition rates….Additionally, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature established in 2023 a free tuition program for students whose families make less than $80,000 annually. Illegal aliens are eligible for the program. The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court to declare the laws unconstitutional and prohibit their enforcement.

“We are reviewing the lawsuit and will vigorously defend the state’s prerogative to offer affordable tuition to both citizen and non-citizen state residents,” a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said.”

KABOOM!

A few rueful points, and then you write about whatever you want…

  • Why are we just hearing about this now, when the knuckleheaded governor of Minnesota was running from August 2024 to November to be a heartbeat from the Presidency? Why didn’t Trump confront Harris with that insanity? Why did no one in the news media, Axis or not, report on it?
  • These laws are the equivalents of “Welcome, illegal immigrants!” invitations to break the law, with Minnesota being a “sanctuary state.” Minnesota citizens are that stupid, or in the alternative, that clown car crazy? How did they get that way? Can they be treated? 
  • What logic can possibly justify this?
  • Note that the Minnesota AG is still obfuscating, not having the honesty of integrity to call a metaphorical spade a spade. “Non-citizen state residents”! The state lies, cheats and steals under Walz, but this is what the Democratic Party now stands for. No wonder he thinks he has a shot at the Presidential nomination in 2028.

Back to brain clean-up…