As a lifelong Loony Tunes fan, I’m a firm believer that there’s no issue that hasn’t already been commented upon by Bugs Bunny and friends.  This week, Elon Musk’s outrageous tendency to believe that he and others should be free to use Twitter to voice opinions that don’t agree with Leftist orthodoxy, sparked yet another public furor.  The spark for the fire came from Musk’s seemingly innocuous tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” which caused those on the lockdown Left to lose what’s left of their minds.  This strife reminded me of the 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rabbit Seasoning, in which Bugs’ careful use of language results in Daffy Duck being repeatedly shot by hunter Elmer Fudd.  They just don’t make children’s entertainment like that anymore.

Anyhow, Daffy ascribes his predicament to a simple cause – “Pronoun trouble.”  And now, 70 years after Loony Tunes framed the issue, pronoun trouble unfortunately is still with us.  The Left demands that we all bow down and accept the notion that there are an unlimited number of genders, which may be adopted or discarded at will.  Because of this, Woke imbeciles are quick to attack any real or imagined dissenting opinion, which might interfere with their plans to, you should pardon the expression, shove their position down our throats.  The Musk tweet was no exception.  Astronaut Scott Kelly, who may have spent too much time in the vacuum of outer space, quickly hit back, “Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community.  They are real people with real feelings.  Furthermore, Dr. Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives.”  For my part, I didn’t view the Musk tweet as any type of attack on or even comment on LGBT people, but simply as a comment on Fauci.  To my way of thinking, the notion that any reference to the word “pronouns” must be limited to a celebration of LGBT-whatever values is an insult to the English language.  However, the gauntlet having been thrown down, Musk was quick to respond.  “I strongly disagree.  Forcing your pronouns on others when they don’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.  As for Dr. Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain of function research that killed millions of people.  Not awesome IMO.”  The Musk tweet garnered more than 1 million “likes,” but it set the medical community on Twitter afire, with some educational institutions threatening to leave the platform unless Musk renounces his post.  Dr. Peter Hotez,  of Texas Children’s Hospital tweeted, “Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong.  200,000 Americans needlessly lost their lives from Covid due to this kind of anti-science rhetoric and disinformation.”  Apparently, no one should be permitted to call for accountability from the medical community, which wants both the power to impose ruinous mandates, and immunity from its mistakes.  Personally, I don’t favor prosecuting Fauci, but expecting him to give honest answers to Congressional committees is the least Americans can expect from someone who poses as the foremost authority on all things medical.  And I don’t understand Dr. Hotez’s statistic.  If 200,000 died because they were not vaccinated, then what about the 800,000 Americans who died despite the fact that they listened to Fauci?  Someone needs to answer for that.   Comments from political sources were predictable.  From Senator Amy Klobuchar, “Courting vaccine deniers is not a sound business strategy.”  And all this from five little words posted by Musk, none of which mentioned vaccines or deniers thereof.  The Hill called it, “the latest attack” on Dr. Fauci.  ABC News, not to be outdone, said the tweet attacked Fauci and mocked the LGBT community.  The White House went even further, as spokes-idiot Karine Jean-Pierre proclaimed the tweet, “dangerous on Dr. Fauci and other public health professionals, disgusting and divorced from reality.”  Wow!  Anyone who works for Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden should be careful about commenting on reality.  And is this where we’ve come to?  Leftists should be careful about  condemning of Elon Musk’s words as hate speech that may subject others to violence, lest they be held to their own standard.  For about 7 years now, Democrats and their fellow-travelers in the lapdog media have been calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of President Trump, and anyone in any way connected to President Trump.  By the Left’s bogus standard, does this not condemn them as purveyors of hate speech (a form of speech that does not exist in the law) and inciters to violence?  Thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk, we now know that Twitter, and I’m sure every other social media and internet platform, cancelled accounts and banned messages that challenged Democrat policies, or were likely to damage Biden’s chance for election.  And they did this, not based on “hacked-materials” policies or based on some actual threat of violence, but simply because agencies such as the FBI and people the likes of Michele Obama directed them to do so.  Musk is about to release Twitter documents that prove that the site banned medical opinions from responsible medical professionals that contradicted the Fauci policies.  The uproar from the medical community over the Musk tweet proves only that the last thing these “experts” want is to be held accountable for their actions.  Furthermore, turning what was no more than a comment on Fauci into an attack on the LGBT community is the vilest form of hyperbole. Expecting the highest paid federal official to provide honest testimony before a Congressional committee isn’t really a case of pronoun trouble, it’s a case of governmental accountability trouble, from privileged bastards who have grown to believe they can get away with anything without consequences.

I recently finished the book Double Cross about the life of Chicago gangster, Sam “Mooney” Giancana.  The book tells the story through the memories of its author, Sam’s brother Chuck, and it paints an ugly picture of the corruption of every aspect of American government by organized crime figures, whose reach extended even into the Vatican.  I was familiar with Sam Giancana’s criminal exploits, but some of the revelations were frankly hard to swallow.  According to the book, starting in the 1920’s, Sam Giancana corrupted local police, elected officials, judges, governors, FBI agents, congressmen and even presidents.  Federal law enforcement largely was kept at bay by Giancana’s work with the CIA, which included running guns and other weapons to revolutionaries, assassinations of foreign officials, narcotics distribution (in which the CIA participated), not to mention the well publicized attempts to kill Fidel Castro.  If the book is to be believed, Giancana was intimately involved in securing JFK’s 1960 victory, the bay of Pigs invasion, the JFK assassination, and even the Watergate scandal.  If true, Sam Giancana was the Forrest Gump of the underworld.  In a nutshell, the basic message of the book validates Frank’s First Rule of Life – “The world runs on bullshit, and it never runs out.”  Essentially, everything the public is told by “honest politicians,” law enforcement, the media, and even the Church is a fraud, hiding the fact that a very few corrupt bastards are pulling the strings behind the scenes.  All that said, the book’s revelations were hard even for me to accept, until last weekend, when new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, began to release Twitter internal documents to reporter Matt Taibi about the extent of FBI involvement in the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.  Let’s recap.  In April 2019, computer repair store owner Mac Isaac received a laptop from Hunter Biden, which Biden never returned to retrieve.  The computer contained, in addition to pornographic photographs featuring Hunter smoking crack with a variety of hookers, thousands of emails indicating payments to the Biden family from foreign nations, including Ukraine.  Mac Isaac correctly suspected that the evidence raised national security concerns and called the FBI.  The FBI took the laptop in December 2019, but not before Isaac had given a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani.  Giuliani gave a copy to the New York Post, which, along with Rudy, verified the authenticity of the material.  When the Post published the bombshell information in October 2020, Twitter, which already had banned President Trump from its site, Facebook, Google, and the rest of the lapdog media censored the reports as “hacked materials,” preventing any publication of or comment on the story.  As a result, Americans went to the polls in November 2020 blissfully unaware that irrefutable evidence exists proving that candidate Joe Biden is a crook who’s been selling his office for more than 40 years.  You know what happened.  The Twitter documents provide the previously missing explanation of why nearly all the social media, mainstream media, and print media outlets so quickly censored the laptop story.  Enter the FBI, now known in some circles as the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation.  It turns out that the same FBI officials who participated in the 2015-2020 spying on President Trump, the Russian collusion hoax, and the Crossfire-Hurricane attempted coup de etat, were behind the censorship of the Hunter laptop story.  For years, we’ve been listening to crap from Woke social media billionaires about how First Amendment freedom of speech doesn’t apply to them because they’re private companies.  We now know that that’s just part of the bullshit which makes the world go round.  Here’s the legal principle.  The Bill of Rights applies to the government, but not to private entities.  Thus, in criminal law, we have something known as “the silver platter doctrine,” which means that if a landlord, or other private citizen, independently uncovers evidence of a crime and turns it over to law enforcement, the evidence can be used against the defendant regardless of how it was seized.  But, if the cops “suggest” that the landlord go look for the evidence, that’s government action, and constitutional protections apply.  What the Twitter documents reveal is that the government, namely the FBI, directed the companies to censor the laptop story.  Social media, and presumably other media executives met weekly with FBI agents, led by one Elvis Chan, an agent whose post-graduate thesis argued that the Russians had gotten Trump elected in 2016 (don’t you just love a fair trial?) repeatedly warned Twitter and the others to expect “hack and leak” operations from “State actors” before the election.  The FBI knew the Post story was coming because it was monitoring Rudy Giuliani’s communications with the Post.  Twitter officials expressed concern that what they were being told didn’t meet the “hacked material” standard for censorship, but they were overruled by Vijaya Godde, Twitter’s head of Legal Policy and Trust (Orwell couldn’t have thought of a better title), who already had banned President Trump from the site, and General Counsel James Baker.  Is that name familiar?  Yes, the same James Baker who was Counsel for the FBI till 2018, when he left after disclosures that he had directed spying on candidate Trump, and the coup attempt on President Trump.  Simply put, the FBI knew the Russian collusion story was a lie made up by Hillary Clinton, but used it to frame Trump.  Likewise, the FBI knew the Hunter laptop was genuine, and that its contents were not Russian propaganda, but they used their position to affect the outcome of a presidential election.  In a sense, the FBI warning about interference by a “State actor” was the truth.  The State actor was the U.S. government, tampering to benefit its candidate of choice.  Both Baker and Godde were fired by Musk this week, but the damage is done, and I’m sad to say it makes the Sam Giancana book more believable.  According to Chuck Giancana, his brother got JFK elected on the promise of being left alone by law enforcement.  The Kennedys broke their promise and both JFK and RFK died at the hands of Mob and CIA operatives.  The Twitter documents prove that nothing has changed.  First Amendment freedom of the press has become Freedom of Suppress, and the government’s hidden puppeteers now decide what you may and may not hear.  Elon Musk and Matt Taibi are being castigated in the media, which somehow considers confirmation of the truth the equivalent of misinformation.  When the truth is what the government tells you it is, we’re done.  The White House reaction to the revelations?  “This is not healthy.”  Not healthy for whom?  Sam Giancana knew too much, so they whacked him.  I hope Elon Musk has good bodyguards.

Before November, it was hoped that Lee Zeldin could defeat Governor Kathy Hochel.  That didn’t happen.  The hope had been that with Zeldin as Governor, something might be done about the conditions that have caused an exodus of industrious, higher income residents from that State for locales such as Florida, the Carolinas and western States.  The exodus was prompted by several factors, chief among them the crime in New York, the New York taxes, and the impediments to doing business in New York caused by oppressive regulations.  In 2021, some 3.57 million people moved out of New York.  The people leaving had incomes averaging $140,000.  Some 3.5 million of these people were replaced by lower income people.  Some of the 4 or 5 million illegal aliens let into the country by Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden come readily to mind.  In a nutshell, what’s happening in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and in other high-tax, high-crime Blue States is that hard-working, industrious residents are fleeing, to be replaced by less industrious, lower educated residents who are needier, and who require more financial support than their predecessors.  The exodus resulted in New York’s losing a seat in the House of Representatives.  While, on one level, that may be regarded as a positive development, it bodes ill for the future of New York State in general and New York City in particular.  It’s easy to blame the Wuhan plague for this problem, and that, of course, has contributed to the problem, but it’s not the sole cause.  It’s never been easy to live in this area.  The cost of living has always been higher in New York than in most other places in the country.  Add to that the constant traffic getting to and from the City, and it wouldn’t take much for many people to decide that life would be more pleasant elsewhere.  The attraction always was the fact that so many large corporations were based in New York, and the added attraction of the cultural advantages of Broadway, the restaurants, museums, etc.  The pandemic changed all that.  Many corporations which were paying exorbitant rents for office space discovered that they could do business with many employees working at home.  Why pay that overhead if you don’t have to?  Even with the pandemic behind us, many employees are reluctant to return to offices.  Some of them have grown too accustomed to working from home and don’t want to return to the daily grind.  But many of the companies have simply up and left the City for States that make it a lot easier to do business.  What this means is that the future for the commercial real estate market in New York, a market which thrived and provided so much of the City’s tax base looks bleak.  Add to this the exodus of makers, only to be replaced by more takers, and it’s hard to imagine where New York is going to get the revenue to keep the government going in the future.  New York’s budget is twice that of Florida, which has more residents.  This problem would be daunting enough if the powers that be in New York weren’t doing everything in their power to make conditions worse.  Crime is out of control.  People do not feel safe on the streets, even in neighborhoods once considered “safe.”  And it’s not, as New York Democrats have claimed, simply a Republican talking point, or merely an unfounded impression of danger.  Crime is up in almost every category.  And crime is up in almost every category principally because New York Democrats have decided that they won’t do anything to get crime under control.  The police are being prevented from doing their jobs, and are constantly hounded as extremists.  Even when they make an arrest, New York Democrats have instituted a “no cash bail” law that puts them right back on the street.  And Democrat prosecutors have decided not to enforce the laws on the books.  When people learn that they can rob, steal and commit violence without serious consequences, then what you get is more theft, robbery and violence.  Democrats who are actively trying to take guns from the hands of law-abiding citizens, but who will do nothing to take them away from criminals are simply compounding the problem.  And like the national Democrats, the New York Democrats are doing everything they can think of to make conditions even worse.  People don’t want to come into the City, and subway ridership is down 40%?  No problem, the Democrat “solution” is to impose commuter fess of $23 a day or more on cars coming into Manhattan, and raising the subway fares.  It’s madness.  If they would clean up the crime on the subways and elsewhere in the City, there would be more ridership.  If they would apprehend the fare-beaters (it’s been estimated that as many as 40% of those on the trains don’t pay the fares) then they wouldn’t have to raise them in the first place.  Moreover, since New York Democrats will need more and more revenue to feed their burgeoning welfare state, the last thing they intend to do is to reduce taxes and regulations to spur economic growth.  In short, they are headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.  The newly arrived poorly educated residents are best suited to work in the service economy.  However, with fewer workers in the City, and fewer companies to service, there are fewer service jobs to be done.  Hundreds of restaurants in the City have closed, never to be reopened.  In the event that the financial center based in New York ever moves off to someplace like Texas, New York City will collapse under its own weight, as the Wall Street people are paying the bulk of the taxes.  We had hoped that a Zeldin Administration might forestall this result, but to no avail.  And when the inevitable day arrives when the City is unable to support itself, the condition of the federal government will make it impossible for them to rely on money from Washington to bail them out.  The escape from New York will continue until New York officials smarten up and give people a reason to stay.

We are a nation of some 332 million people, 360 million if we count the illegals.  Given that mass of humanity, it’s remarkable to contemplate just how much one person has been able to affect the nation.  That person, of course, is Donald Trump.  Never has there been such a threat to the system.  No, not a threat to “our democracy,” whatever that means.  Not a threat to our national security, to law and order, or to any minority group, real or imagined.  Not a threat to democracy, but a threat to political orthodoxy, the corrupt system run by the elites of the deep State – the people who will permit us to have elections, just so long as we keep electing candidates who are willing to play their crooked game.  Candidates are allowed to promise big changes: for example, FDR’s New Deal; JFK’s New Frontier; LBJ’s Great Society; Il Duce Obama’s Hope and Change.  You can have all the catchy phrases you like to get elected, so long as, once you are elected you don’t change the status quo.  Translation – you don’t threaten to upset the plans of the elected crooks and the rich pricks who put the elected crooks in office.  The Deep State consists of the elected crooks, the formerly elected crooks who now are lobbyists making sure that the rich pricks get richer, and the insidious bureaucracy that infests every department of the government.  These are the people who run the government, regardless of what the current occupant of the White House says he wants.  The State Department is a perfect example.  Before Trump ran for president, he met with Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger’s advice was, “don’t listen to the State Department.”  It’s always been that way.  Harry Truman recognized the State of Israel after the State Department told him “you can’t do that.”  Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem over the objection of the State Department.  Every time Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden says he’s going to defend Taiwan, the State Department says, “No we’re not.”  The thing is, presidents come and go, but the Deep State is forever.  Then along came Trump in 2016.  At first, the Deep State wasn’t concerned.  Candidates make a lot of promises, and anyway, Trump was considered a joke.  Hillary would make quick work of Trump, then they could let the good times roll.  Only she didn’t.  And one man who actually did the things he had promised set the Establishment on fire, and caused it to show its ugly hand.  If Trump would have just played ball they might have left him alone, but he didn’t, and they couldn’t permit “an outsider” to beat them at their own game.  The “outsider” moniker is a bit misleading.  Donald Trump wasn’t an outsider, meaning someone not involved in the system.  He was one of the rich guys that the elected crooks, including Hillary, relied upon for finance.  That’s the main reason they hate him.  Think of it this way.  Ben Carson was an outsider, a true innocent, who tried to crack into the system, and you saw what happened to him.  But Trump was part of the system, or so they all assumed.  When it became clear to the Deep State that Trump actually intended to do what he promised to do, he had to be stopped.  And in order to stop Trump, the Deep State was willing to blatantly disregard the law, the Constitution, and any semblance of honesty or integrity.  Think about it.  The Democrats are willing to destroy the law, and the Constitution in order to stop Trump.  The CIA and the FBI spied on Trump before the election, and undermined him after he was elected.  The State Department released private phone calls Trump had with world leaders to embarrass him.  The military defied his orders.  The public relations staff of the Deep State, also known as the media, discarded any notion of impartial  journalism in order to hound Trump day and night.  More than 95% of media coverage of Trump was negative.  Democrats impeached Trump twice, over nothing, to try to stop him.  He faced a phony special counsel investigation for nearly two years over fake Russian collusion allegations that we now know (anyone who reads these pages knew it five years ago) were lies bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton.  And his own Party was even worse.  Republican leaders fought Trump every step of the way.  They blocked his proposals and fought his policies.  Yet despite being opposed by both Parties and the media, Trump lowered taxes, grew jobs, fixed the military, closed the border, pacified North Korea, Iran and China, fixed trade agreements, and had the economy soaring.  It took the Wuhan plague and two impeachments to slow him down, and they finally beat him in 2020.  But now, with the prospect of a Trump return, the Deep State is again in a panic.  Democrats have enlisted a new special counsel to try to indict and jail him.  Republicans are willing to lose the next presidential election if they can stop Trump.  Democrats are even willing to throw away their best hope of winning in 2024.  Everything Democrats have done for seven years has been designed to damage Donald Trump.  Because of seven years of bad press, mostly consisting of lies, the Trump name has been damaged beyond repair.  It’s not fair, but it’s done.  They have convinced half the electorate never to vote for Trump.  The only hope Democrats have in 2024 is to run against a crippled Donald Trump.  Yet they still consider him such a threat that they still want to destroy him so he can’t run again.  Such is the fear that their entire corrupt money-making machine may be disrupted by perhaps the one honest man who ever has been our president in recent times.  Even the Murdoch Fox, NY Post, Wall Street Journal machine is against him now.  This week, a Journal columnist actually wrote an article comparing Trump to FTX crypto-currency crook Sam Bankman.  Trump is a patriot who increased the wealth of the nation and every person in it.  Bankman is a thief who bankrupted his company, absconded with billions in clients’ funds, and is hiding out in the Bahamas.  The fact that the Justice Department has appointed a Special Counsel to go after Trump, while Bankman basks in the sun, is all you have to know about the system.  Personally, I think too much damage has been done, and that Trump’s time has passed.  I’m afraid we can’t afford a candidate in 2024 who starts with both hands tied behind his back.  It’s not fair, but it happens to be the reality.

A post mortem is something that’s dome after a death, so the title seemed appropriate. Well, my pared back expectations from last week were pared back some more by the interminable vote counting systems out West.  The electoral system roller coaster reached the top of the hill and hurtled down again, and what liked like a tolerable outcome went South, or was that West?  The Nevada Senate win became a loss, as they just kept finding more ballots in Clarke County.  Never saw that one before, right?  Then, in Arizona, they had to stop counting, shut off the video cameras, and wait for new ballots to be printed.  I guess Amazon finally delivered the printer toner that kept thousands of Arizonans from voting on election day.  But, nothing to see there.  Don’t want to be called an election denier.  As this is written, Republicans have reached 218 seats in the House, and will control that chamber.  I expected about 230 seats last week.  The final number now looks more like 222.  Somehow, there are California House districts where they still have been able to count only 60% of the votes.  How could this fiasco happen again after 2020?  H.L. Mencken once said, “The people get the government they deserve, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”  Well, we got it.  And we got it because, apparently, elected officials are content to let business as usual continue to be business as usual.  And if any of you had doubts whether the Deep State actually exists, this mess finally has put all doubts to rest.  We managed to believe all the Red Wave bullshit, and you can’t blame us, because we don’t know any better.  The alleged professionals in our Party, however, either did know better, or are so criminally inept that they just stood there and watched it happen.  It’s a given that Democrats clean up on early and mail ballots.  I say ballots instead of votes because it appears that Republicans only count votes, while Democrats count ballots.  So we knew from experience that a complete imbecilic non-entity like John Fetterman would wake up on election day already some 750,000 votes ahead of his opponent.  What did we do about this known fact?  Nothing.  And don’t give me the “Republicans are just an election day get out the vote Party” bullshit.  Clearly, that doesn’t work, so how many times do you need to get screwed before you try something else?  I am first among those who don’t like or want no-reason mail ballots or early voting, but it’s here, courtesy of the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan virus, and we either adapt or we go the way of all the other dinosaurs.  And speaking of dinosaurs, what’s the fallout in the Republican Party after it got caught with its pants down again?  Mitch McConnell was reelected Senate Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy will be the new Speaker, and Ronna McDaniel (daughter of Mitt Romney –  is it any wonder we’re in the shape we’re in?) apparently will continue as the Chair of the Party.  This trio, sometimes known as “the Mc Leaders,” is as ineffective a bunch of alleged leaders as I’ve ever seen.  Of the three, McConnell is the worst.  Mitch McConnell had a large fund of campaign money to be doled out, supposedly where it would do the most good for Republicans.  But that’s a joke.  Mitch doles it out only to the candidates he knows will continue him in power.  And what power?  The Minority Leader.  McConnell had a great chance to become Majority Leader this year, but instead, we will continue with the Detestable Chuck Schumer in that role.  And Mitch is just fine with that.  Mitch badmouthed the Senate candidates in August, not because they weren’t good candidates, but because some of them would not vote for him as Leader.  Mitch could have pumped money into the Arizona race to help Blake Masters, and could have sent more money to Adam Laxalt in Nevada, but he didn’t.  Instead, Mitch sent money to Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.  Murkowski, for the second time in six years, failed to win her own primary, but Mitch wouldn’t support the Republican who did win, in a State where, no matter what, one of the Republicans was going to be elected.  Mitch withheld money from General Bolduc in New Hampshire, then teased him with some, and finally cut him off in the final weeks.  Now, Mitch and the other Mc Leaders are busy trying to stamp out all traces of Republican populism (a/k/a Trumpism – more about that next week).  The reason is simple to understand.  The Party is not designed to give the people what they want, it’s designed to foster the status quo, so that deserving political hacks, who never held, and don’t want a real job can line their pockets.  Sure, they’ll make all the right sounds before election day, but the reality is, it really doesn’t matter how the elections come out.  You’re going to get the the government that the elites say you deserve, and you’re going to get it good and hard.  You may think the disaster at the border, fuel costs, inflation, and national security are important, but they don’t.  They’ve shown us what they think is important.  This week Republicans in the Senate joined Democrats to pass a bill protecting same-sex marriage, as unneeded and irrelevant a piece of legislation as there possibly can be.  Like it or not, The Supreme Court ruled it a right six years ago, so what are they protecting?  If this is all we’re going to get from these Mc Screwups, then it’s time for them to go.  Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”  These Mc bastards somehow manage to screw us all of the time.  They don’t oppose bad candidates, they oppose populists who will throw them out.  We better wake up.