Tag: Politics

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SCOTUS Ruling

It’s interesting to me that the SCOTUS ruled against the OSHA Vaccine Mandate but upheld the CMS version.

From what I’ve read thus far, members of the court had concerns about the vague language used in the OSHA version. In the CMS version, it appears they upheld it based on who was providing the money. CMS appears mostly Medicare related and therefore is using public funds.

There’s a lot more to read and I’m waiting for text of the actual ruling.

I suspect that the vague language issue leaves open the possibility for the Biden Administration to tighten up the language and the try to re-implement the OSHA rule.

I also find myself wondering if the SCOTUS ruling opens an entirely different can of worms.

What about those employees who did not want to get the vaccination but who felt the had no choice. Do they now have legal standing to sue their employers? Can they invoke the Nuremberg Code and demand compensation? Will they be able to sue the Biden Administration?

They, by definition were being coerced/threatened into accepting a medical procedure against their will. That’s a pretty clear violation of Nuremberg.

There will be some slimy lawyer that says they don’t have a case because they could submit to weekly testing, wear a mask, maintain social distance, etc. That is more or less true although some companies were saying everyone had to be vaccinated because it was too much work to keep track of testing schedules and results.

It should be interesting to see how that plays out.

I’m waiting to see the rulings before rushing to judgement. However many of the initial news pieces don’t mention any constitutional infringement that the court was concerned about. That concerns me.

If the SCOTUS found nothing constitutionally wrong with the OSHA mandate, then we can be sure that a revised mandate will rear its ugly head once more. I worry that without a constitutional “Stake” to the heart this OSHA mandate will rise from the grave and introduce more chaos into the job market. Companies don’t want to hire if they’re unable to predict which way the wind is blowing.

Year One of Biden has been a study in unintended consequences.

It’s funny. I just realized I’ve seen this before.

I’ve worked for companies that while owned by the founder were profitable and produced good reliable products. Typically, the founder has a clear vision of what products are needed and sticks to that vision. A lot of the founders I’ve known were essentially good folks, but they tended to be plain spoken, to the point of being “mean”. They weren’t mean, they simply had little time or concern for hurt feelings.

I’ve observed what happens to a company when they go public and suddenly you’ve got a board of directors, a bunch of executives given their positions by the board regardless of qualifications, and a bunch of legal red tape designed to protect the investors.

What seems to happen is the company loses focus. You start having “design by committee,” instead of a clear vision of the products. There’s usually a substantial loss of quality and often the executives will take one successful product and modify it iteratively, bolting on a new button or changing the color. They’ll call it “new” and improved. But it’s the same machine or software just with different lipstick.

It’s not uncommon for the founder to quietly bail and then there’s a lot of churn in the executive wing. For employees that’ve been through this process once, they also start looking for the exits.

I’ve been in companies where the new management is so unfamiliar with product or the company that they start hemorrhaging money on things that don’t add value to the actual work being done on the product. (Custom woven carpets for premium office space in an Irvine high-rise come to mind.)

As the company goes further into the red more committees get formed to investigate why the company is showing a loss. The management starts flogging the employees and demanding longer hours, restricting vacations, and of course cheapening the medical plan for the employees. But the executive wing is still getting raises, going on vacations, and getting bonuses. They also have awesome medical coverage.

There’s a point where the brain drain from employees bailing to greener pastures reaches a tipping point. That’s when a high level “Cleaner” executive comes in. This person’s job is to ready the company for immediate sale. The company itself will be shut down and all the patents and intellectual property will be sold to competitors.

Think of it as organ harvesting in the corporate world. It happens all the time! If I was a betting man, Now that Jack Dorsey is out of Twitter, and Jeff Bezos is out of Amazon… We might see either or both cannibalized over the next 10 years. I’d bet that Twitter will go first.

The Biden Administration reminds me a lot of the corporate process. There’s a lack of focus. The administration is trying to address too many pet issues and not considering the consequences. Many of the issues are low level, but because they’re being treated with equal weight to every other issue, nothing is being done well.

Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to suffer through it. It is my sincere hope that America will learn the bitter lesson this time around and choose better candidates for the 2024 Presidential election.

I’m not holding my breath but I have a smidgen of hope nonetheless.

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Another missed opportunity…

Joe Biden took office and said he was about unity.

Kamala Harris echoed that sentiment.

Today on the anniversary of the Jan 6th riot, both missed another opportunity to instill unity.

I’not not a fan of either Biden or Harris. Nonetheless, they are the President and Vice President.

I’m a big fan of our country regardless of who occupies the oval office.

I think the entire world realizes that Biden is fading out. It’s sad that Biden is being forced to expose his decline to the whole world.

He should be at his home, his dogs at his side, with his comfortable slippers on. The rigors of the Presidency are too much for him at his age. The man deserves some peace, let him enjoy photo albums and home movies of the happier times in his life.

That’s the nature of coming to the end of your life. A person should be allowed to put down their burdens and enjoy their time left in the garden appreciating the little things. That’s how I’d like to go out anyway.

President Biden continued banging the drum against former President Trump. That’s his right, but in the end, most of his words are just words. I think few people take them seriously.

After 6 years of Trump bashing from the Democratic Party and media, is anyone listening anymore? It’s all become the same old song. How many of us hear Trump did… and think, “There they go again should I bother to listen, or tune them out like a bad commercial on TV?”

It’s become just like the whole “Birther” bullshit about Obama.

Even if someone had produced “The Smoking Gun” proving that Obama was not born in this country after the first year, what would have been done? If we were a young and vibrant country he’d have been impeached, the VP would have become President and we’d have proven that our system and laws work.

But we’re not a young and vibrant country. We’re more like Grandpa who’s clearly lost driving to the grocery store but who can’t bring himself to admit it then ask for directions.

I think we’re in the same position with the 2020 election. It’s completely pointless to keep banging the drum about a stolen election. Even if all the irregularities Trump claims happened were to prove true, what then?

I can’t even imagine all the chaos surrounding the removal of Biden / Harris and their administration. Just imagine what that would look like after a year.

Pelosi as The President Pro temp, while the Supreme Court scrambled to undo executive orders, rolling things back to Trump? I can’t even imagine the constitutional complexities of installing Trump at this point. I don’t believe there’s any precedent for such a thing and what do you do with the fact that The Presidential term is four years? How do you resolve that disparity?

The economy and in fact the nation probably couldn’t take the strain. God only knows what the Nation would look like after everything was said and done.

We’ve got to come together, work through the problems and do better in the next election cycle.

Therein is the missed opportunity.

Kamala Harris’s speech where she spoke of dates that live in our collected memories was not incorrect.

There are dates that live in our national memory. April 19, 1775, April 12, 1861, Dec 7, 1941, and Sept 11, 2001 do have significance.

I disagree with her that the Jan 6th riot is on par with those particular dates. (I added the start of the revolutionary and civil wars.) I think her speech writers attempt to conflate a riot with actual wars is disingenuous. I also think that it adds fuel to the fire and does a dis-service to Vice President Harris.

The left media is nodding their approval and parroting the same talking points about a riot being an insurrection. The right media is using the conflation as a bludgeon.

Were I one of her speech writers I’d have suggested that The Vice President take the opportunity to attempt to unify the nation.

My thinking is along these lines. Instead of conflating the Jan 6th riot with attacks on the United States from without as was done. I’d have gone with Vietnam Protests, and The Watts Riots, the Civil rights movement, and even the BLM Protests.

Bear with me here. I know there are a lot of people who’re clenching their jaws and thinking, “fuck you!” I ask that you be patient.

The reason I’d have gone this particular direction is because the Vice President could have at that point said that these events were example of American citizens acting out because they believed their government wasn’t listening.

In the cases cited above, the leadership in Washington had to listen. These events caused change. While initially the government resisted the change, eventually the leadership conceded to the will of the people. We got out of Vietnam, the Civil rights movement saw the disparity addressed, imperfectly, but at least disparity wasn’t being ignored anymore. BLM has brought attention to abusive policing.

Vice President Harris could have used this opportunity to reach out to the people who apparently felt so disenfranchised that they stormed the capital, to express their displeasure. Her message could have been, “We’re listening, your leaders have heard you.”

The Vice President would at that point have been in a position to begin at least binding the wounds. To begin that unification promised on inauguration day. She’d have reaffirmed that the first amendment was alive and well, and that she as a leader, (We know she’s going to be President,) would honor the clause in the First Amendment regarding the citizens seeking redress of their grievances.

Whether she actually meant it or not is irrelevant. Every single politician will lie to their own mother to retain office.

She would have appeared for a moment as a moderate, competent leader and it would have played well with large swaths of Americans. She’d also have added fuel to the scattered reports that she and President Biden don’t see eye to eye. That would probably have played even better for her polling, since it’s been said that The President is restraining her, limiting her effectiveness, and cutting her out of governing processes.

I don’t know if I’d have believed her any more than I do normally.

I do believe she missed an opportunity to put a lovely banana peel under President Biden and it would have smoothed her inevitable transition into the Presidency.

In any case, I for one am tired of the divisive rhetoric and hyperbole coming from both sides of our leadership and press.

I don’t care if Trump was elected. I don’t care if Biden was elected. I do care that we put a stop to the claims after every election that come from the losers. This bullshit has been going on since Gore and the hanging chads.

There’s always a BIG LIE! The only difference is who’s telling it.

Both major parties have participated in election disputes for decades it’s not strictly one side or the other. That fact should be remembered as well.

Don’t we as a nation have the right, or the will, to put an end to this chaos? Don’t we have the right to be secure in the knowledge that the elected officials are really the choice of the majority of the people? We don’t have to agree with, or like the officials. We should however be able to move on with our lives within a month after an election and turn our attention to other matters of importance.

Think how difficult it must be for leaders of other nations to deal with this chaos. They can’t in good faith negotiate with a President that may at any moment be found to be illegitimate or impeached for the 20th time. I’d submit that it is the duty of the United States to clean up our voting issues for the benefit of, not only ourselves, but the world.

Alas, all administrations for the past 30 years or so have gotten lazy and in the habit of blaming the other guy for the problems in front of them.

It doesn’t matter, New Mr President, who actually spilled the milk. You’re the one standing over it, so go get a mop!

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I wouldn’t want to be Mark Meadows

In a predictable move. After all we all knew it was coming. The Jan 6th commission has referred Meadows to the DOJ for Contempt of congress.

It doesn’t matter where you come down on the whole Jan 6th inquiry, you have to admit this guy is between a rock and a hard place.

He had been cooperating with the commission but then apparently felt he had to stop because the information they were requesting was coming up against executive privilege issues that Trump retains.

Trump has filed a lawsuit to protect executive privilege. That puts Meadows in a bind. If he continues to cooperate with the Jan 6th commission providing all the requested information and then Trumps executive privilege is upheld. Meadows could find that he’s violated the law on that side.

On the other hand by defying the Subpoena he’s pissing off congress.

The NPR article makes reference to the text messages Meadows received, calling them “Explosive”. Meh, I’d call them circumstantial.

Yeah, if you wanted to infer that Trump was at the heart of the Jan 6th event at the capital you could read them as the smoking gun. But if, as Trump maintains, he wasn’t coordinating and directing the Jan 6th event at the capital, that he’d only told folks to go and protest…

Then the text messages are nothing more than people sending texts without thinking about parsing out the language so that it could pass future legal tests. In fact the messages could be read as simply, informational and requests that Trump speak to the crowds to calm them down.

With the exception of the one talking about needing “aggressive strategy” most of the other messages could be taken to say, “Hey, Trump needs to remind the crowd about the rule of law. Protests are fine as long as they do not result in violence, destruction, fires, or looting.”

In fact if Trump had said something to that effect from the steps of the capital surrounded by security and police establishing crowd control, he would have thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated Pelosi again.

That being said, Pelosi and her cronies would have pointed to Trump being a leader as proof that he was at the bottom of the event in the first place and congress would have gone all rabid about it too. Either way, we’d probably be in the same situation. That’s the problem when abject hatred taints your world view.

I’m not saying the Trump didn’t incite the crowd. To what extent, will be determined by the courts. I think it’s pretty clear that he had a hand in what happened. I think that it spiraled out of control, and once the monster of a mob is let loose it’s really tough to control what the monster does.

We as a nation knew what mobs looked like, we’d seen it in Portland and Seattle for months. Trump, and everyone else should have known better.

As an aside, I thought about going to DC.

I could have, and I certainly had the time to do it. My reason for not going was that I’d paid attention to the lessons of Portland and Seattle. My other reason was that it was all becoming too about Trump.

I was then, and still am angry, not about the election results, but about the dismissal of the various voting irregularities that were reported in states across the country.

There was, in my opinion, enough circumstantial evidence to warrant investigations and hearings about those irregularities. I wasn’t particularly interested in overturning the election, I am far more interested in making sure that such irregularities never happen again.

It’s my opinion, that “The Big Lie” could have been easily deflated if the Supreme Court had publicly and with due seriousness addressed the issues raised and then made recommendations based on their findings.

For four solid and interminable years our nation was subjected to investigation after investigation of what turned out to be largely circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Trump. Yep, there were some things that weren’t circumstantial, they were fact. Trump is supposed to answer for those things and the cases are winding their way through the legal system now.

I had expectation that on issues of voter fraud or irregularities, the same level of investigatory diligence would be applied. Hopefully not four long years worth, but at least some public display of diligence.

It frankly appeared that since folks got what they wanted in Biden, they were willing to ignore, and allow the courts to ignore, circumstantial evidence. Why was it okay to pursue circumstantial evidence on the one hand and ignore the same kind of evidence on the other? What it seemed was happening was that since Trump said it, it was inconsequential. He was just being a sore loser.

Yeah, did you expect anything less? Regardless, you have to take these allegations seriously, isn’t that the lesson Congress taught us over the preceding four years?

For me personally, the quick and apparently casual dismissals of concerns, is what made me angry.

I accepted that Biden was President, I didn’t think it was a good idea, but it was expected. Trump had caused a severe polarization in the electorate. In virtually every similar historic situation the response has always been the same. The electorate chooses the opposite pole.

Had I gone to DC, I would have been standing on the steps of The Supreme Court exercising my Constitutionally guaranteed right to demand redress. I’d have been holding a sign that simply said, “Justices, I respectfully ask you to do your job.”

I wouldn’t have entered or forced my way into any building. I’d have complied with law enforcement to move or remain in a particular area. I would never have threatened anyone, that’s just not appropriate. I’m a law abiding citizen, and you cannot demand investigations or that the law be upheld if you’re going to turn around and violate the law.

After Jan 6th, I was very glad I wasn’t in Washington that day.

See I’m a moron, I could see myself being invited into a building or following a crowd that appeared to be invited in and in total innocence, I’d have found myself in all kinds of trouble.

I’ve been to Washington DC once in my life. Most of the buildings were closed for the holidays, (we were there over a Christmas trip). But I got to walk around the monuments. I stood in front of The White House and was in awe. I stood in the Lincoln Memorial and I took the time to read the inscriptions. I walked the length of the reflecting pool and everywhere else we were allowed to walk. It was a magical and great experience. My only regret was that The Smithsonian wasn’t open. I’d have loved being lost there for as long as they’d have me.

As I was considering making the trip to Washington DC prior to the Jan 6th event. I was also planning to revisit those sites, and see the Vietnam Memorial.

Here’s the thing some people apparently have problems with.

I could have gone there, expressed my opinion by protesting, and then duty discharged, taken pride in being an American wandering the monuments and reading the words written by our forefathers.

I would have been super excited to go read with my own eyes, the actual Constitution of the United States. And yes, The Smithsonian would have had to ask me to leave at closing time.

So you see, after the Jan 6th event… I shuddered to think how my patriotism and innocence could have gotten me into a lot of trouble.

Perhaps it’s my belief in the law and The Constitution that makes me feel sorry for Meadows. He’s in a tough spot. Just because he worked for Trump doesn’t mean he’s inherently a bad person, nor does it mean he’s a good person. It just means that he in fact, worked for Trump.

If Meadows broke the law then he should suffer the consequences. Right now, I don’t think he’s breaking the law by restricting access to material he believes to be protected under executive privilege. He’s trying to honor the requirements of two laws that are in conflict. That’s a tough position to be in.

Meadows Attorney says it well;

“He has fully cooperated as to documents in his possession that are not privileged and has sought various means to provide other information while continuing to honor the former president’s privilege claims,” Terwillger said in a statement.

Until Trumps suit is decided, (a lower court ruled Trumps claim invalid and Trump unsurprisingly, is taking it to The Supreme Court,) Meadows is at an impasse. One that cannot be resolved until The Supreme Court makes its decision.

I think it’s unfair that Congress is dropping the hammer on Meadows when essentially he’s bound by law. Yes, Biden has said that executive privilege doesn’t apply. But is that legal? I ask honestly because there’s supposed to be a separation between the Executive and Legislative branches of the government. Isn’t the Supreme Court the arbiter of these issues?

I also feel for all the people who may have been caught up in the events of Jan 6th.

I could so easily see myself in their shoes. No, I wouldn’t have been climbing over walls, crawling through windows, or forcing doors open. But I wouldn’t have thought for an instant walking through an open door to The Capital Rotunda with guards standing on either side.

Hell, I’d have stayed in the roped areas and as long as I didn’t see or hear yelling or breaking glass I’d have been blithely ignorant that I was breaking the law. I would have been overjoyed to be standing in the rotunda looking at the pictures and art and feeling so privileged to be there in that place. If I was asked to leave, my response would have been, “Yes officer, which exit should I take?”

That’s one of the reasons that I think the whole congressional committee is wrong and that they’re being very heavy handed. Sure, there were people who clearly broke the law and they should suffer the consequences. But the Jan 6th committee has cast a very wide net, and I’m sure that many of the people they’ve terrorized, were people just like me.

Make no mistake, having Federal Marshalls banging on your door when you believe you’ve done nothing wrong would be a terrifying thing. Especially if the media reports labeled you as a white supremacist who was involved in an insurrection, or treason. Those are really serious charges! One of them, I believe, still carries the death penalty.

The Marshalls drag you off to prison. You and by extension, your family are labeled white supremacists, or terrorists, and there’s nothing you can do to defend your reputation or your family from the vengeance of the mob…

That would absolutely break me. Especially, given that I’d have had no malice, no guilt, and I’d have been sharing pictures of those hallowed halls describing my presence there as a joy and privilege.

Heavy handed justice often is not justice.