Not gonna lie: the latest developments in Israel's war against the Hamas Nazis has me rethinking pretty much everything that I thought I believed about the election. How can anything else even possibly be worse than a political party that is actually split on this question? Sure, there are people on the far right who are as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel as the Hamas Nazi protestors. But they are not splitting the GOP or even its MAGA faction, who are all on the right side here. They don't drive or even significantly influence GOP policy.

I'm gonna say something that many of you are not gonna like.

(1) In my judgment, a second Trump term would be at least as bad as a second Biden term (albeit in different ways) and could be potentially even worse. [A second Biden term could likewise be potentially even worse.] (2) How would a second Trump term be as bad as a second Biden term? Several ways. He won't fix excessive spending, which keeps interest rates higher. He threatens trade wars, which might cause another recession or depression. He won't support NATO, which might land us in WWIII.

I’m going to make one other point in hopefully a short thread about vaccines that I think is right and what I think is confusing a lot of people. Even people who admit that they don’t stop infections point out that they slow down spread. Let’s briefly examine this claim. (1/9) Assume two people, one vaccinated and one unvaccinated, get Covid at the same time. In the early days, neither one may even realize it except maybe headaches or a runny nose. They go about in public and spread the virus at about the same rate. Vaccines don’t slow that down. (2/9)

Can I blurt out something out loud that some of you might not like? If you look at Trump in isolation, philosophically and without regard to political party or the current political situation, he is unfit to lead a great nation in every way that matters. He does not have a good moral character. He has zero understanding of history, the constitution, or any philosophical grasp of proper government. He is not even a good administrator, neither in business nor in government. He has no concept of justice, legal or natural.

Basically, the Democratic Party wants to remove every constitutional and institutional restraint — the Electoral College, equal state representation in the Senate, the filibuster, the 9 seat limit on the Supreme Court, etc. — that is a restraint upon unlimited political power. Today, most of the country does not want to be ruled by the cultural and political preferences of people who live in California or New York. We had the same situation in 1787, except substitute Virginia and one or two other states for California.

Can I blurt out something? I suspect that there are a lot of people who don’t follow politics or current events closely, worry greatly about keeping their job or getting their next paycheck, and are going to work or in public while feeling sick. Especially younger people. Personally, I believe that the notion that there are millions of people out there who feel just fine but have the virus and don’t know it is a load of crap. I suspect that a lot people who don’t feel well talk themselves into saying they’ll be careful or it’s not the virus.

Has our national media really been any different? During the 1930s, they shilled for Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, even treating them as rock stars. And they were always reliable apologists for the USSR, especially during the Reagan years. Now they are shilling for China. During the 1940s-50s, shilling for communist governments in our culture was so bad that we had Congressional hearings about it. This isn’t a new problem. The Soviets were engaged in active propaganda and spying operations . Screaming "McCarthyism!" doesn’t change the history.

I’m old enough to remember a few months ago when House Democrats and their media allies were fighting off attempts by Republicans to introduce additional evidence and open proceedings to the public during the impeachment inquiry and related committee hearings. Senators can do whatever they want. If Senate Republicans decide to treat their Democratic members as well as House Democrats treated their Republican colleagues, Democrats will get no sympathy from me. They were repeatedly warned to be more fair and they didn’t listen.

Dem buffoonery aside, I am pretty much satisfied that Trump did inappropriate things. I am not seeing any evidence that more than a small percentage of people outside media, Dems and the left thinks that it comes close to justifying impeachment and removal. It just isn’t there. People seem to think, probably correctly, that what Trump allegedly did is not totally outside the norms of what politicians of both parties, including his current accusers and opponents, have done for decades. And “Orange Man Bad” alone doesn’t justify the double standards.

Yep. We can fix this. This situation is a disgrace and everyone knows it.

https://twitter.com/jason_howerton/status/1159660024349810689

Related: no American should ever have to worry about the immigration status of a person that he employs. We should all be free to hire anyone who will work for us on mutually agreeable terms without government guns being pointed at US because of someone’s immigration status.

Instead of some appeal to feels, I’m going to lay out the facts explaining WHY these family separations are occurring. The first point to understand is that an Administration can choose to treat illegal immigration as either a misdemeanor (crime) or a civil wrong. If an Administration treats illegal immigration as a civil wrong, it works pretty much like a traffic ticket. The immigrant is given a deportation hearing date and is then released. But if it is treated as a crime, he can be detained along with his family (if with him).

This is a good summary. It’s clear that many of the same immigration activists who are now complaining about family separations have been litigating in federal court to force the government to separate children from adults who were caught here illegally after only 20 days.

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It actually seems to be a strategy. Force the separations in court, and then point to their harshness or even cruelty to get the detained adults released. Many of them then disappear into the woodwork. And all this is an incentive for other families to try to come here illegally.