December 3-4, 2016
Dec 03 03:29 Draining the swamp, Trump edition Dec 03 10:21 Tomah VA and drain the swamp Dec 03 11:18 The perfect Democrat Dec 03 19:28 Green Party drops recount bid Dec 04 03:11 Democrats' fundraising follies Dec 04 11:30 Jill Stein, Green Party nutjob
Prior Months: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov
Prior Years: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Draining the swamp, Trump edition
One of the things that Donald Trump campaigned on was draining the swamp in DC. Lots of people question President-Elect Trump's ability to do that. Former Minnesota State Sen. Ellen Anderson is the latest person to question Mr. Trump's ability to drain the swamp. I'd tell Sen. Anderson that it all depends on what you classify as swamp. While researching this post, I found this article that offers a definition for draining the swamp. The article says "At its bottom, drain the swamp is a metaphor: If you drain the swamp, you eliminate the mosquitoes (or snakes and alligators, in other iterations) that breed disease. But, ironically, the original disease the expression referred to was the very thing Trump has built his campaign on: big business. Etymologist Barry Popik has traced drain the swamp back to the socialist movement of the early 20th century. In a 1903 letter to the Daily Northwestern, Winfield R. Gaylord, state organizer of the Social Democratic Party, precursor to Eugene Debs' Socialist Party of America, wrote: 'Socialists are not satisfied with killing a few of the mosquitoes which come from the capittalist [sic] swamp; they want to drain the swamp.'"
I'd modify that definition because it omits too many things that are 'diseased'. What person with a heart thinks that the Veterans Administration isn't diseased and infected? I triple-dog dare anyone to read this article , then tell me the VA doesn't need a major overhaul. This article should turn people's stomachs.
As disgusting as the situation is within the VA, that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of draining the swamp in DC. This article highlights some of the corruption within the EPA:
Two EPA employees, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Susan Morris, will be taking EPA back to court to expose its treatment of whistleblowers and the impact on public health and civil rights. Senior former and current officials within EPA will be deposed, such as Ray Spears, former Deputy Chief of Staff to three EPA administrators; Rafael DeLeon, former Director of Civil Rights and Human Resources as well as legal advisor to EPA administrators; and Karen Higginbotham, former Civil Rights Director now a special assistant in the Office of the Administrator. The depositions will cover decades of allegations of corruption at the highest levels of the EPA. Corruption that has, no doubt, placed the public and EPA employees in jeopardy.
The cases, scheduled for trial in the spring will demonstrate how EPA senior officials in key positions used their authority to retaliate against employees who raised prohibited personnel practices and warned of dangers to public health. Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo won a significant jury award in her case against EPA a decade ago that resulted in the passage of the 2002 No FEAR Act by Congress. She returned to the agency after her successful case only to face more retaliation and eventual termination of her career.
Progressives have pushed the notion that only big business is corrupt. That's BS. The truth is that the government is every bit as corrupt.
Here's hoping that Trump cleans out the corruption in DC. It's a tall task but it's something that needs to be finished.
Posted Saturday, December 3, 2016 3:29 AM
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Tomah VA and drain the swamp
When I wrote this post about President-Elect Trump's drain-the-swamp initiative, one of the things I wrote about was the Tomah VA hospital. This article provides more detail on the things that allegedly happened there.
The biggest thing that the Wisconsin Watchdog article talks about is the dentist that infected people with HIV and hepatitis C. What specifically caught my attention is the part where it says "the dentist in question knowingly did not follow VA standards for a year, between October 2015 and this October. A dental assistant blew the whistle on the misconduct. 'He had a replacement dental assistant, and she noted this particular piece of instrument being used : He brought in his own burs and cleaned them with Virex solution, salt and a wipe, which is nothing we endorse,' Brahm told the news site. 'She reported it the next day, Oct. 20, to the dental chief who reported it to senior leadership. We took action Oct. 21.'"
Actually, it isn't just that the Tomah VA doesn't endorse what this dentist did. This article gives a more detailed account:
Earlier this week, officials said a dentist at the Tomah VA Medical Center improperly re-used his own dental equipment instead of using the sterilized, disposable tools as VA rules require.
"It was purposeful that he was violating VA regulations," said Victoria Brahm, acting medical director at the Tomah VA Center in a press briefing earlier this week.
"During all of the orientation, he used our equipment. He used it appropriately, so it was very purposeful from what we found in our investigation that he knew exactly what he was doing, and preferred to use his own equipment against procedure."
It's clear that the VA hospital system is one of the biggest swamps of corruption that needs to be drained. Then there's this:
A current employee who asked not be identified said Brahm 'puts on a good face,' but the hospital is "still bad and full of drug abuse and employee abuse."
"I have even spoken with the director about this and how veterans are harassed in Tomah due to the VA. All that has been said is, 'There's still work to be done.' The same tag line that is always used,' the source said.
Hopefully, the Trump administration takes the VA corruption seriously. This needs to stop ASAP.
Posted Saturday, December 3, 2016 10:21 AM
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The perfect Democrat
The perfect Democrat is a toothless Democrat. These days, there's lots of toothless Democrats in DC. House Democrats have been toothless since January, 2011. Now it's the Senate Democrats' turn to feel impotent. They're feeling impotent because outgoing Democrat Leader Harry Reid went nuclear in 2013. Now that there's a Republican administration forming, Democrats are finding out that they can complain a lot and little else.
For instance, Sen. Joe Donnelly, (D-IN), said "Tom Price has led the charge to privatize Medicare, and for this reason, I cannot support his nomination" this past week. His statement sounds tough but Price's confirmation is all but official. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would love to stop Jeff Sessions' confirmation as Attorney General because Sen. Sessions will shut down illegal immigration. Thanks to Sen. Reid invoking the nuclear option, he's toothless.
The best Sen. Schumer, (D-NY), can do is say that Sen. Sessions will get lots of touch questions during his confirmation hearing. It's impossible to picture Sen. Sessions worrying much about the hearings. It's difficult to picture any of Trump's nominees worrying about the Democrats' toothless trio:
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., seemed to acknowledge that the only real weapon for Democrats is to try to make a good public case against Sessions, and hope the public starts calling for a new nominee. "We'll be as persuasive as possible in what we say about it, hoping to reach and arouse as many people as possible."
Good luck with that.
Posted Saturday, December 3, 2016 11:18 AM
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Green Party drops recount bid
When Jill Stein announced her intentions for a recount of the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, most pundits wrote it off as a PR stunt. Tonight, Stein is dropping part of her PR stunt. She's announced that she's dropping her lawsuit in Pennsylvania.
According to the article, "The Green Party is dropping its court case seeking a statewide recount of Pennsylvania's Nov. 8 presidential election. It had wanted to explore whether voting machines and systems had been hacked and the election result manipulated. The decision came Saturday, two days before a court hearing in the case. Lawyers for the Green Party-backed voters who filed the case say they can't afford the $1 million bond ordered by the court by 5 p.m. Monday. However, Green Party-backed efforts to analyze election software in scattered precincts are continuing."
The point of this PR stunt was to a) raise money for the Green Party and b) elevate the Green Party's profile. They momentarily looked like they were able to raise enough for the recounts. That illusion disappeared when the Pennsylvania judge ordered them to pay a $1,000,000 bond for the recount.
Hans von Spakovsky explains how difficult it would be for hackers to manipulate the election results in this video:
Let's be clear about this. It's virtually impossible to manipulate the optical scanners. Why would I think that Ms. Stein's lawsuit isn't frivolous?
Posted Saturday, December 3, 2016 7:28 PM
Comment 1 by shoebox at 03-Dec-16 07:35 PM
A reasonable likely scenario is that after flushing $3.5M down the toilet in WI, somebody that made decisions without all the feeeeeelz, decided another $1M wasn't a smart move.
Comment 2 by Chad Q at 04-Dec-16 09:19 AM
The report this morning is the she is now going to sue to get the recount done in Pennsylvania.
Why is anyone taking this woman seriously when all she is doing is Clinton's bidding?
Response 2.1 by Gary Gross at 04-Dec-16 11:48 AM
Check out my latest post: Jill Stein, Green Party nutjob. That woman makes Bernie Sanders look as 'moderate' as Susan Collins.
Democrats' fundraising follies
It's indisputable that 2 of the 3 biggest losers this election were Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. The DNC picked Mrs. Clinton essentially before their primaries or debates, mostly because they fell in love with her name ID and her fundraising ability. They also picked her out of fear of the Clintons' retribution.
After another stinging defeat, House Democrats picked Nancy Pelosi to be their leader. Einstein's cliche said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing again and again but expecting different results. Based on that definition, 134 House Democrats are insane. Salena Zito didn't mince words in her latest column , saying "One-hundred and thirty-four House Democrats collectively lost their minds last week. That is how many of Nancy Pelosi's colleagues it took to vote her back into power despite having lost her third consecutive chance at winning back the majority from the Republicans."
Mrs. Pelosi is referred to as "a prodigious fundraiser." Apparently, Democrats think that fundraising still win elections. Apparently, Democrats haven't figured it out that fundraising isn't the only thing that's important to campaigns. Mrs. Clinton outspent Donald Trump in Florida by an obscene amount of money. She lost the state by 125,000 votes.
There's a connection between Mrs. Clinton's and Mrs. Pelosi's fundraising abilities and their unflinching support for the environmental activists' agenda. While it doesn't make that connection, Holman Jenkins' article highlights the futility of President Obama's agenda:
Mr. Obama came in saying fossil fuels were running out and prices were destined to rise, and instead got the fracking revolution, whose related employment boost was arguably a factor in his re-election victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Yet he couldn't stop looking this gift horse in the mouth.
Unshrewdly, in the name of satisfying his climate-change constituents, he needlessly launched a regulatory war against coal as cheap natural gas was already doing the job for him. Result: Democrats became the enemy in coal country.
He pandered to his green friends on the Keystone XL pipeline. Result: Mr. Trump is inheriting a rebound in natural gas fracking and an associated infrastructure boom that is just now heating up again in time for an incoming administration to get credit.
Then-candidate Obama insisted that he'd push a cap and trade plan that would make electricity prices "necessarily skyrocket":
Eight years later, Mrs. Clinton openly said that she was going to put lots of coal companies out of business:
At this point, I'm not certain that Democrats displayed insanity in being loyal to the environmental activists in their party. It's possible they just displayed stupidity. Either way, Democrats won't connect with the Heartland anytime soon if they don't disappoint the environmental activists from time to time.
Democrats might lose some of their fundraising ability. Then again, it's also possible that they might gain an appealing message to campaign on.
Posted Sunday, December 4, 2016 3:11 AM
Comment 1 by JerryE9 at 04-Dec-16 10:52 AM
Liberals and Democrats, to the degree it is the same set, are going to continue in their collective delusion that everybody either does or should agree with them. It is in their nature to believe they are smarter than the rest of us so when they lose an election it is because the rest of us are either fools or idiots. And when they say so publicly, some of us take offense and vote against them. Keep it up, Democrats. Please!
Jill Stein, Green Party nutjob
This morning, Chris Wallace interviewed Jill Stein, the Green Party's presidential candidate. Saying that Ms. Stein is eccentric is being kind. I'd rather characterize her as a nutjob. During the interview, she insisted repeatedly that there were 75,000 ballots in Detroit alone where voters filled out all of the races except the presidential races.
That's a wild, unsubstantiated accusation. According to the Michigan Secretary of State's website , Detroit voters cast 247,369 votes in the presidential election and 243,019 votes in Detroit's congressional elections. That's a difference of 4,350 votes, which is a far cry from 75,000 ballots that weren't fully filled out.
After hearing an unsubstantiated accusation like that, it isn't surprising that people think she isn't credible. And yes, she said 75,000 ballots in Detroit. I DVRed FNS so I rewound the video to make sure that I hadn't misunderstood what Ms. Stein said.
It's worth noting that Ms. Stein said "Well, I can tell you, for example, that in Toledo in 2004, there were 90,000 votes that were marked blank, which were discovered not to be blank." Ms. Stein then said that those votes would've been enough to change the outcome of the election.
According to the Ohio Secretary of State's statistics , just 220,000 votes were cast in Lucas County. (Toledo is the county seat of Lucas County.)
Here's the video of Chris Wallace's interview of Jill Stein:
Reasonable people can disagree on who should've won the election. There's no disputing, though, the fact that Ms. Stein's accusations aren't substantiated. The simple truth is that she went on national TV and got her credibility demolished in less than 10 minutes.
Posted Sunday, December 4, 2016 11:30 AM
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